A Darker Shade of Green: The Twisted Roots of the Irish Banjo

Abstract

Traversing the intervening period between Hans Sloane’s documentation of early banjos in Jamaica in 1688 and the introduction of a later version of the same instrument to the blackface minstrel show by Irish American blackface minstrel entertainers in the 1830s and 1840s, A Darker Shade of Green: The Twisted Roots of the Irish Banjo investigates the profound, and often troubling, transformation of performance practices and associated sociopolitical discourses connected with the early banjo through the instrument’s intersection with Irishness in the Atlantic world. Combining extensive archival research in America, England, Ireland, and in repositories online, with a rich historicisation of banjo performance repertoire and practices in the colonial West Indies and in antebellum America, critical biographical case studies of individuals and communities connected with the banjo during these periods are complemented with a parallel analysis of the creolized roots of the early blackface minstrel performance repertoire in eighteenth century Anglo-American musical theatre and in African American banjo/fiddle tunes. Against the rather white-washed treatment both men have received up to now, in the study I identify blackface minstrel banjo-players Joel Walker Sweeney and Dan Emmett to have both played important roles in aligning the banjo with a new–and profoundly influential–kind of overt racial mockery in antebellum print media and popular culture. Setting the historical trajectory of the study within a wider frame of reference that begins in the seventeenth century period in which the African and Irish diaspora first came into extensive contact with one another in the Americas I argue that a retracing of the Irish ancestry of blackface minstrel performers in antebellum America, and Irish slave owners and planters in the colonial West Indies can serve as a decolonial praxis that that acknowledges the role that these and other members of the Irish diaspora played in the history of settler colonialism and plantation slavery in this region. Key research questions animating the study include: what the banjo’s history can tell us about race, music and power in American history and what the story of historical banjo performance can tell us about the creation of identity for the African and Irish diaspora in Atlantic world