Don’t Mumford me on this. I realize there are plenty of banjo players out there today. It’s an incredibly fun instrument to play that makes a pretty good racket even without an amp. That being said, its popularity is nowhere near what it once was. With that in mind, let’s look at the fall of the banjo and rise of the guitar.
You see, guitar wasn’t always the dominant force in the music of North America it is today. There was a time, in the late 1800s through to the very early 1900s where you were much more likely to meet a banjo player than a guitar player. Was it because things were just more country back then? Nope. The music we look at as ‘country’ or ‘blues’ now wasn’t really invented, let alone something like ‘bluegrass’. That is to say that some of the music was there, but it was all really just a form of folk music. Songs would pass back and forth between races and in many early recordings you can find both country and blues versions of a particular track.
With the blues being tied so strongly to the guitar in our consciousness, it can be pretty surprising to hear something like Papa Charlie Jackson’s Shake That Thing being played on the banjo. This was in the middle of the 1920s where guitar was really taking over banjo’s terrain. There are all the earmarks of ragtime developing into the blues that was happening then, and even a hint of the rock and roll that will grow out of it, but his six-string banjo sounds really out of place at first. You have to bear in mind that the banjo is actually of African descent and musicians like Charlie Jackson would have often played it in minstrel shows during early parts of their careers.
So how did the banjo end up being so deeply associated with white country music today? They were just easier for poor people to build from the wood out back. If you spent the day plowing or harvesting then you weren’t very likely to have the time, tools or money to build or buy a guitar.
There are a couple of possible progenitors for the banjo. Some lean toward the kora as it’s the most common skin and string instrument from Africa. As you can hear from this clip though, the sound is much more like a harp. The mentality approaching it seems very different from early banjo music. A more likely forefather is the Akonting (sometimes Ekonting). You can find a pretty good forty-five minute field recording of it on this page and make your own call.
Of course, this assumes the banjo was derived from just one instrument. It’s likely that many different versions got mixed together as it oscillated between different numbers of strings, losing and regaining the drone string, borrowing the fingerboard and tuning peg ideas from other instruments, until gradually morphed into the instrument we know today. It rattled around the Caribbean through the 1600s and 1700s before hitting the shores of the United States in the 1800s.
In the US its relatively easy construction, loud volume and portability made it a sensible choice for people who didn’t have much money or access to the specific tools needed to build a good guitar, accordion, piano, etc. Guitars were still in the hands of the luthiers while the banjo appeared in the traveling minstrel shows among the African American troupes and then their white parody counterparts whose offensive ‘blackface’ makeup still pops up to rankle today, long after the content of the minstrel show is forgotten.
The guitar, as you may know, is evolved from the European lute and very similar oud. Guitar builders today are still called luthiers in reference to this history. Plus it sounds cooler than guitarier.
Like the banjo, the guitar has gone through some mammoth changes to get to anything we know or recognize. Most of those early changes happened in Spain where the Moorish occupation collided with the indigenous population to produce rapid variations on the old lute and oud designs. As a general idea, picture the strings of a mariachi band in your head. Like the banjo, the number of strings tended to shift. The jump from four to five strings occurred somewhere in the 1500s and around 1700 a sixth string was added.
The major European manufacturers of the 1800s such as Fabricatore or Lacôte are hardly household names today. Guitar only started to hit North America in a serious way when C. F. Marin moved to New York in the 1830s. Though that wasn’t the beginning of any massive boom either. In 1900 his company was still producing well under 200 instruments a year. Martin developed the new technology of steel strings that would ring out more than gut. The small curvy bodies with the extremely narrow waist continued widening out until Martin’s development of the powerful Dreadnought body-style that would come to dominate acoustics. First they were produced on contract for a local retailer in 1916, then in mass production under the Martin name in 1931. The new body type was part of that eternal quest of the guitarist: volume.
The banjo was inherently a pretty loud instrument. Its amplification came from a very flexible skin membrane whereas the wood that made the guitar’s soundboard was much harder to make vibrate. These changes were a good start but more would have to be done for guitar to be able to compete against banjos let alone the rest of a large jazz ensemble.
The biggest win for the guitar in that sense was its victory in the race for electrification. The early 1900s were lousy with patent applications for instrument electrification systems that were also lousy via mics in the body or on the bridge. Stromberg Guitars had moved from banjos and mandolins to building guitars and in 1928 the cumbersome Stromberg Electro system almost hit the mark. Ads of the time promise it “enables the banjoist to play either tenor guitar or guitar, and have that instrument stand out above others in the orchestra.” This was by no means going to bring us to rock and roll levels, mind you. It was simply a matter of being heard at all. The damaging weight of the pickup system as well as the economic weight of the depression meant neither guitars with these early pickups installed nor the company in general would do well through the depression years, unfortunately. As such, its innovations were eclipsed by other manufacturers such as the Rickenbacker Electro A-22 or “frying pan” guitar, aluminum lap steel developed by George Beauchamp and manufactured by Rickenbacker, which became the first electric guitar of any consequence. By 1934 we had the first solid body electric from Vivi-Tone (made from plywood for all you purists out there) and Rickenbacker back again in ’35 with a solid body made of Bakelite (solid plastic, again for the purists). Though the guitar had solidly overtaken the banjo by this time as the primary singer’s instrument, electrification solidified guitar’s place moving forward. It was an easy instrument to be able to strum a few chords on and have them blend in sweetly, it was easier to play with a wide dynamic and mass production had brought it down to a more affordable range for the average person. Still, it’s hard not to think there has to be more to the change than that. If you’ve got any theories or more background information, let us know in the comments below.
