Banjo Roots

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The Old Plantation . Anonymous folk painting, South Carolina, c.1777-1794. ( The Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum , Colonial Williamsburg , VA)

The oldest and most detailed depiction of an early 4-string gourd banjo in North America. The 4-string configuration-- three long strings and one top short 'thumb string'-- was the most commonly documented on early gourd banjos throughout the New World. The earliest descriptions of the 4-string configuration come down to us from the French Antilles in the 1690s. The 4-string gourd-bodied instrument was the principal form of the early banjo until the emergence of the wood-rim 5-string banjo in the United States in the early 1840s.

For more information on this wonderful painting and what it can tells us as the earliest visual chronicle of African American music and dance in North America, please see Shlomo Pestcoe 's blog on this site: The Old Plantation: A Banjo Roots Perspective .

Illustration Plate 69, Musical Instruments of the African Negroes [of Suriname ]. From Captain John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, from 1772 to 1777 (1796). Depicted in the upper right corner is an early 4-string gourd banjo, the Creole Bania: "This instrument has but four strings, three long and one short." When he returned to Holland in 1777, Stedman brought back an actual Creole Bania (see the left hand column on this page). It's currently in the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, Holland) making it the world's oldest banjo. ( The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record , Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and The University of Virginia Library )

Banjo Beginnings: The Early Gourd Banjo

An African American Instrument of West African Heritage

"This instrument is the invention of, and was brought here by the African Negroes...."

-- John Luffman, A Brief Account of the Island of Antigua (1789)

The story of the banjo begins in the Caribbean in the late 17th century. This is when the first documentation appears in the historical record of enslaved Africans and African Americans making and playing unique plucked spike lutes with drum-like gourd bodies and fretless necks.

The instruments were strikingly similar to the many different traditional plucked spike lutes with gourd or calabash bodies still found throughout West Africa today. This is especially true of those which, like the early African Caribbean plucked spike lutes, have full-spike necks-- that is, the given lute's stick neck extends the full length of its body to either pass over or pierce through the body's tail end. Another feature shared by both the early African Caribbean instruments and West African full-spike plucked lutes is a 'floating' (movable) string bridge that rests on the given instrument's skin 'head' (soundtable).In terms of extant West African traditional instruments that have all of these features, let's start off with a group of six very similar 3-string gourd-bodied folk lutes. Constituting a unique subgroup within the West African plucked spike lute family, they come from the Upper Guinea Coast region of Greater Senegambia (the eminent West African historian Boubacar Barry 's appellation for the historic lands that include present-day Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali, and Mauritania):

The ekonting (akonting) of the Jola ( Casamance [southern Senegal], Gambia, Guinea-Bissau)The bunchundo of the Manjak (Guinea-Bissau, Gambia, Senegal)The n’gopata of the Bujogo (Bijago Islands [Guinea-Bissau])The busunde of the Papel (Guinea-Bissau)The kisinta and kusunde of the Balanta (Guinea-Bissau).

The Jola (also known as Joola, Diola, and Floup), Manjak (Manjaco, Manjago), Bujogo (Bijago), Papel, and Balanta are neighboring rice-farming peoples with similar cultures and social systems. Their traditional village-based agrarian societies are non-hierarchical, without the rigid tripartite caste system of their Mande, Wolof, and Fulbe (Fula, Fulani, Peul) neighbors. Consequently, these peoples have no griot* tradition nor do they have traditions of professional music-making and praise-singing. Amongst the Jola, Manjak, Bujogo, Papel, and Balanta, playing the lute-- like all other forms of music-making-- is a vernacular social activity open to all, rather than being the exclusive domain of specialist music/word artisans.

This being the case, the plucked spike lutes of these peoples are classified as folk lutes; that is, lutes played by vernacular 'folk' musicians for whom music-making is not a vocation. This is in sharp contrast to the music cultures of many other West African peoples in which playing plucked lutes is the purview of music/word artisans, be they griots* or non-griot professional/semi-professional musicians and praise-singers.

* The word griot (originally spelled guiriot, pronounced gree-oh) made its first appearance in the travelogue Relation du voyage du Cap-Verd (1637) by French missionary Alexis de Saint-Lô, recounting his travels in Senegal two years earlier. Ever since, griot has been used as a generic reference to a hereditary male music/word artisan. However, the term is only appropriate when referring specifically to male members of the middle artisan caste of the type of tripartite caste system shared by certain West African ethnic groups, such as the various Mande peoples (e.g. the Mandinka, Maninka, Bamana [Bambara], etc.) as well as the Wolof, Soninke, Songhai, Fulbe, and so on. Female members of griot families are called griottes; in terms of griot music, griottes are primarily vocalists rather than instrumentalists.

In the context of jeliya (griot tradition), plucked lutes are played exclusively by specialist male musicians from certain families. As a distinctive class of instruments, typical griot lutes are distinguished by having a narrow wooden body (either oblong or figure-8 shaped), a semi-spike neck (the lute's neck does not extend the full length of its body), and a fan-shaped bridge, inserted into the instrument's soundhole to slip unto the pointy end of its semi-spike neck. Here are just few examples of griot lutes: the 5-string xalam of the Wolof gewel (griot; a griot lutenist is called a xalamkat), the 4-string n'goni of the Bamana and Maninka jeli (plural, jeliw), the 4-string gambare of the Soninke gesere (plural, geserun) and the hoddu of the Fulbe bambaado (plural, wambaabe), which may have three to five strings.

Other examples of West African plucked spike lutes with full-spike necks and floating bridges include:

The 5-string xalam gesere of the Mandinka jali (plural, jalolu; griot. Gambia). Like all griot lutes, the xalam gesere is played exclusively by jalolu (griots), employing the same typical techniques common to all griot lutenists (see below). It has the same string configuration as other 5-string griot lutes (e.g. the Wolof xalam of Senegal and Gambia): two longer melody strings of varying lengths (the 4th and 3rd strings) and three unstopped drone strings-- a long one (the 2nd string) and two short ones, the top 5th 'thumb string' (closest to the player's chest) and the 1st string (closest to the player's lap), the shortest of the three drones. American ethnomusicologist Michael T. Coolen , who did field work in Senegambia in the 1970s, reported a 4-string version of this instrument belonging to the Diawara of Mali called a kola-lemme. The popular 4-string configuration on many griot lutes is the same as the aforementioned 5-string configuration, minus the long drone string (the 2nd string in the 5-string configuration). However, it should be noted that both the xalam gesere and the kola-lemme are extremely rare instruments. While they're strung and played in typical griot fashion, they also have features not associated with standard griot lutes: i.e. a round gourd body, a full-spike neck, and a floating bridge that sits on the body's skin head.The 3-string calabash-bodied gullum of the Kilba (Nigeria)The 2-string gourd-bodied gurmi of the Hausa (Nigeria)The 2-string calabash-bodied gurumi of the Toubou (Niger)

At this point, it must be stressed that all of the above instruments are mentioned here only as examples of the type of plucked spike lute currently found in West Africa that must have inspired and informed the creation of the early gourd banjo in the West Indies back in the 17th century.

There are more than 50 different 'living' traditions of plucked spike lutes found throughout West Africa today. And that's just the ones we currently know of. Since 2000, ongoing research has revealed and continues to reveal previously unknown West African plucked lute traditions, as well as new information and perspectives on known traditions.

We cannot and will not assert that any one of these extant instruments is the West African ancestor of the banjo. There's simply not enough concrete information in the historical record to make that kind of call.

This being the case, modern research into the banjo’s roots must necessarily support and study all extant plucked spike lute traditions throughout West Africa as vital 'living links' that connect the New World instrument to its West African heritage.

Book illustration, African Caribbean string instruments in Jamaica, c. 1687. Sir Hans Sloane 's A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christopher and Jamaica (1707). This is the first depiction of early gourd banjos, designated here as Strum-strumps. The bridges on both instruments are missing and they're only strung with two strings. However, each instrument has two holes on the upper portion of the fingerboard, perhaps to receive two additional pegs for strings. The instrument behind the strum-strump lutes is a harp-lute (also known as bridge-harp), a form of harp that's unique to West Africa. The wood-bodied harp-lute seen here is very similar to the seperewa of the Ashanti of Ghana. ( The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record , Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and The University of Virginia Library )

-- Dena Epstein, The Folk Banjo: A Documentary History (Ethnomusicology, Volume 19, Number 3, September 1975)

Note: As Epstein makes clear in her seminal work Sinful Tunes & Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War ( University of Illinois Press , 1977 / 2003), first published two years after her 1975 article excerpted above, the earliest contemporary report of the banza in the Antilles actually comes down to us from 1698. Jean Baptiste Labat (1663-1738), a French Dominican monk who served as a missionary in France's Caribbean colonies from 1694 to 1709, noted in his journal that the slaves played a 4-string "espece de guitarre" ("kind of guitar") with a body made from half a calabash topped with a piece of animal skin. An entry by the mysterious 'le Romain' in the 1765 edition of the Encyclopédie identified these 4-string "guitars" of the slaves by using the term banza, marking the first time this designation appeared in print.

The first contemporary documentation of an early form of the gourd banjo was in Jamaica in September, 1687, by the British physician Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). See the above illustration of the two 'Strum-strumps'.

Banza was the preferred term for the early gourd lute in the French and Spanish colonies. Yet, it certainly wasn't the only name for the instrument of the African Diaspora. Here is just a sampling:

Strum-strump (Jamaica, 1687)Bangil (Barbados, 1708; Jamaica, 1739)Bangar (New York City, 1737, the earliest report of the banjo in North America)Strum-strum (Jamaica, 1740)Bonja (Maryland, 1748)Bangio (South Carolina, 1749)Banjo (Pennsylvania, 1749; Maryland and Virginia, 1774; North Carolina, 1787)Banshaw (St. Kitts, 1763)Creole Bania (Suriname, 1773-77)Banjar (Virginia, 1781; Antigua, 1788; Barbados, 1796)Bonjaw (Jamaica, 1823)

Though they differed in what they were called, these plucked spike lutes all shared certain structural characteristics:

A drum-like gourd body (either round, oval, or teardrop-shaped) topped with a skin head (soundtable).It should be pointed out that there were instances when the given instrument's body was made from calabash ( Crescentia cujete ) rather than the more typical gourd( Lagenaria siceraria ). Case in point would be Stedman's Creole Bania (Suriname, c. 1773-1777), the world's oldest extant banjo (see the left column of this page).Wood-rim banjos-- that is, banjos with a 'pot' (body) made from thin wooden staves bent to form a hoop, sometimes made out of cheese boxes and grain measures-- were first documented in the United States in the early 1840s.A full-spike neck which ran under the head for the length of the gourd body to transcend over or pierce its tail end.The playing surface of the neck was a smooth flat fingerboard without frets.The tuning mechanisms to which the instrument's strings were affixed were usually wooden pegs.This is in sharp contrast to the New World banjo's West African ancestors. On West African lute-family string instruments-- such as plucked spike lutes and harp-lutes (bridge-harps)-- the given instrument's strings are tied to sliding tuning rings (made of either leather, cloth, or knotted cord) that are slid into place on the instrument's neck and held there by friction. On most of the many different single-string bowed spike lutes [fiddles] found throughout West Africa, the string may be affixed to the neck by means of a loop, but it's tuned by inserting a wedge underneath the lower end of the string.The early banjo's wooden tuning pegs reflect the influence of European lute-family string instruments, in particular those of Portugal and Spain.A floating (movable) string bridge—typically, bipedal-- which sat upright on the body’s skin head.

The Stedman Creole Bania. Suriname, South America, c.1773-1777.
( Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde [National Museum of Ethnology], Leiden, Holland)

The Early 4-String Gourd Banjo

From the 1690s on through the emergence of the wood-rim 5-string banjo in the early 1840s, the most commonly documented form of the early gourd banjo throughout the New World was an instrument with a 4-string configuration: three long strings of equal length with a short ‘thumb string’ as the top fourth string. While there were a few reports of early gourd banjos with three strings, most period descriptions refer to 4-string instruments.

We find all the aforementioned common design elements present in the only known extant 4-string early banjos: the Stedman Creole Bania (see above photo; for more information, see the Influences section of the left column on this page) and the Schoelcher Banza (see the photo below). The Creole Bania-- considered to be the oldest example of an early banjo and the only one known to have had a body made of calabash, rather than gourd -- was collected in the northeastern South American country Suriname (also formerly known as Dutch Guiana) by Captain John Gabriel Stedman (1744-1797), sometime between 1773 and 1777. French abolitionist writer Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893) acquired the Banza in Haiti during his 1840-41 sojourn through the Caribbean. Likewise, these features are evident in the instrument depicted in the The Old Plantation (anonymous folk painting, South Carolina, c.1777-1794), the oldest and most detailed depiction of an early 4-string gourd banjo in North America (see illustration above).

The short 'thumb string', in particular, is a feature that connects the banjo to its West African heritage. It's also found on West African plucked spike lutes like the Jola ekonting (akonting), the Bujogo ngopata , and the Manjak bunchundo as well as those lutes that are exclusive to specialist griot music artisans, such as the Bamana (Bambara)/ Maninka n'goni , the Wolof xalam, the Fulbe hoddu, and the Soninke gambare, to name but a few.

The Schoelcher Banza. Haiti, c. 1840-1841.
(Musée de la Musique, Cité de la Musique , Paris, France)

African American Construct: The Fusion of African & European Elements

Like all other manifestations of African Diasporic culture, the early gourd banjo did not come across the Atlantic from Africa 'as-is' and unadulterated. On the contrary, it was the product of a synthesis of African and European influences and admixtures. And that fusion of all the disparate elements that resulted in the emergence of the first banjos happened in the Caribbean, not Africa.

This being the case, the early gourd banjo was not an African import. Rather, it was an indigenous African American creation with deep West African roots.

As we've shown the early gourd banjo was specifically based on West African models. We see this in its drum-like body (typically made of gourd, but, occasionally, out of calabash), its fretless full-spike neck, and the short top 'thumb string'.

Yet, the early gourd banjo also incorporated several European-derived design features: namely, a flat fingerboard, wooden tuning pegs-- fitted into a distinct peghead-- and string nut (situated at the top of the fingerboard to facilitate the strings passing over to the peghead). The sources of inspiration for the adoption of these elements were, no doubt, the plucked lute/guitar-family instruments of Spain and Portugal that were brought to the New World, begiinning in the early 16th century.

By way of example, let's look at the vihuela (also biguela [Spanish] and viola or viola da mano [Portuguese, Italian]), a guitar-like instrument with a figure-8-shaped body. It had either ten strings arranged in five courses (pairs of strings), twelve strings in six courses, or fourteen strings in seven courses. The vihuela was documented throughout the Spanish and Portuguese colonies from the early 1500s on. Perhaps the earliest report of a European string instrument in the New World is that of a Spanish conquistadore playing the vihuela on horseback as part of the expedition that seized the island of Hispaniola in 1503. Nine years later, Alfonso Buenaño brought a vihuela with him to Spain's burgeoning colony of Puerto Rico. Around 1583, the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Fernão Cardim (1549-1625) reported that in Christianized villages in Brazil, Amerindians were being taught to play the viola (vihuela) in Jesuit-run 'singing schools'.

Other European and Iberian instruments to consider, to name but a few, include: the Western lute of the Renaissance Period (c. 14th - 17th centuries) and Baroque Period (c. 17th - early 18th centuries), the 4-course Renaissance guitar , the 5-course Baroque guitar , the Portuguese cavaquinho (also machete and braguinha) and the related tiple (literally, "treble;" also timple and guitarillo) of Spain and the Canary Islands with four or five strings. All of these, among others, contributed to the birth of the incredible variety of indigenous plucked lute and guitar family instruments found throughout Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean.

Looking over the various accounts of the early gourd banjo in the historical record, we can see that during the 18th century it had spread from the Caribbean to the Dutch colony of Suriname in northeastern South America and to the British colonies in North America that would eventually become the United States.

To the best of our research, the earliest evidence of the early gourd banjo in North America comes from New York City in 1737. In March of that year, a piece in John Peter Zenger 's New-York Weekly Journal described Africans and African Americans dancing to the music of the bangar and drums during a Pinkster celebration in the "Commons" fields just outside of the city limits of New York in southern Manhattan . Eleven years later, a runaway slave advertisement in the Annapolis Maryland Gazette for "a Negro Fellow called Toby" stated that Toby took with him when he ran "a new fiddle" and a "a Bonja, on both which he at times plays."

In Latrobe's description of the "stringed instrument... which no doubt was imported from Africa" he had observed, Latrobe specified that "on the top of the finger board was the rude figure of a Man in a sitting posture, and two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened." This would seem to imply that it was a 2-string instrument. However, in Latrobe's sketch of the lute, on the same journal page as the excerpt quoted above, he clearly shows the instrument as having three long strings of equal length.

Banjo Evolution

From the Gourd-Bodied 4-String Banjo to the Wood-Rim 5-String Banjo

As we've shown, the early gourd banjo was documented in the Caribbean, Suriname, and the aforementioned North American colonies. We have to marvel and wonder at how the instrument-- more specifically, the 4-string form of it-- was disseminated so extensively to such far-flung places in the 18th century.

It seems most likely that the principal means of dissemination was the slave trade between the colonies. There were instances in which slaves 'seasoned' in the Caribbean were preferable to those 'fresh off the boat' from Africa. As the early gourd banjo originated and evolved in the Caribbean, it stands to reason that the instrument spread throughout the colonial New World on ships which sailed from West Indian ports, rather than those coming straight from West Africa.

Up until the early 19th century, the early gourd banjo had been an African American folk instrument, made and played exclusively by black vernacular musicians. This began to change in the 1830s when white popular stage and circus performers in the United States began to adopt the 4-string gourd banjo and the stroke style down-picking playing technique, learned from African American banjoists. As they typically donned blackface makeup in crude parody of their 'Ethiopian' sources, these European American performers became known as blackface minstrels.

The 1840s marked a major watershed in the evolution of the banjo. In the first years of the decade, the 4-string gourd-bodied instrument gave way to a new form, the 5-string banjo with a wood-rim 'pot' (body). And it was the 5-string banjo that was thrust unto the world stage on February 6, 1843 with the first public performance of The Virginia Minstrels at New York City's famed Bowery Amphitheatre. Their debut marked the transition of the minstrels from being minor side acts in traveling circuses to commanding top billing in popular theaters as troupes performing full-blown variety shows. It also established the combination of fiddle, 5-string banjo, tambourine, and bones (clappers) as the standard instrumentation of the 'minstrel line'.

In May of 1843, the troupe arrived in England to debut their unique minstrel show format at London's prestigious Adelphi Theatre on June 19. This marked the arrival of minstrelsy as America's first homegrown pop music form to become a global craze. As a result, the banjo was embraced overseas and became a world-class instrument. This was especially true in Britain, where the banjo became a central fixture of early British pop from the 1840s on through the early 20th century.

An anonymous folk painting from the early 19th century depicting a gourd banjo player accompanying a jig dancer. (Collection of Roddy & Sally Moore)

The banjo player seen here is clearly down-picking, the oldest documented technique for playing the banjo.

Another interesting thing to note here is the fact that the dancer is depicted as dancing on a board called a 'shingle'. Thomas F. DeVoe, in The Market Book: A History of the Public Markets of the City of New York (1862), described slaves from Long Island using 'shingles' when they danced in Lower Manhattan at Catherine Market on Catherine Slip, prior to the abolition of slavery in New York State in 1827: "Being several together in parties, each had his particular 'shingle' brought with him as part of his stock and trade. This board was usually about five or six feet long, of large width, with its particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end."

Down-Picking The Banjo: A West African Legacy

The banjo's West African heritage is also evident in the traditional playing techniques that have come down to us from the instrument's early days. This is especially true of down-picking, the earliest documented banjo playing style.

Down-picking is the playing technique that the first European American banjo players initially learned from African American musicians in the early 19th century. Referred to as stroke style, it was the most prevalent form of playing the 5-string banjo until the advent of the guitar style of up-picking in the late 1860s. (In some period banjo literature, up-picking was also called finger-picking, the term we use nowadays.) Nineteenth century stroke style has survived to this very day in the folk traditions of both the black and white communities of the rural South, where it's commonly referred to as frailing, clawhammer, thumping, and so on.

In down-picking (also referred to as down-stroking), the melody is played by the fingernail of a single finger (either the index or middle finger) striking one of the given instrument's long strings in a downward motion, like a plectrum. The 'down-picked' string is a melody string that's noted by the fingers of the player's other hand 'stopping' the string at various points along its length to produce different notes. This action is immediately followed by the player's thumb catching on the top short 'thumb string' to create a rhythmic back-beat accompaniment. In some forms of down-picking, the thumb also comes down to pluck one of the longer strings in a technique Pete Seeger dubbed drop-thumbing.

Gambian Jola folklorist/musician Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta playing his people's folk lute, the ekonting (akonting), Stockholm, Sweden, 1999. Behind him is a print of The Banjo Player (1856) by America's first noted genre painter William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) of Setauket, Long Island (New York). Here we can see that both Daniel and the banjo player depicted in the painting are down-picking their instruments. Daniel is using oo'teck , the traditional Jola technique for playing the ekonting, while the banjo player employs stroke style , the earliest documented form of playing the 5-string banjo. For a comparative analysis of these two forms of down-picking, please check out Greg C. Adams ' blog: Starting A Conversation-- Early Banjo & West African Ekonting Playing Techniques . (Photo by Ulf Jägfors )

The latest findings of recent field research indicate that the down-picking playing technique probably originated in West Africa. It's the primary playing style for several West African plucked lutes such as the Jola ekonting (also akonting. Casamance [southern Senegal], Gambia, Burkina Faso), the Bujogo ngopata (Guinea-Bissau), and the Dogon konou (Mali). In Senegal and Gambia, some Wolof griot lute players, known as xalamkats, also use down-picking in place of or in addition to the standard griot 2-finger up-picking technique for playing their xalam lutes. Likewise, single-string griot lutes (e.g. the Mande/Tukulor molo, the Songhai jurkel [Burkina Faso] and n'jurkel [Mali]) are generally down-picked.

Down-picking is also used to play theguinbri (also known as the sintir or hajhuj), the 3-string plucked lute of the Gnawa of North Africa, primarily Morocco and Algeria. The Gnawa are a North African Muslim brotherhood-- as well as a distinct ethnic group with its own language-- made up of descendants of slaves and soldiers brought across the Sahara from West Africa. Tradition has it that the guinbri-- the principal instrument in Gnawa music-- is West African in origin. Similarly, descendants of the Sudan Tunis (West African slaves and mercenaries brought across the Sahara to Tunisia) also play a 3-string plucked lute of West African heritage called the gombri . It's distinguished by having a very large round cylindrical body literally made from an old drum. Like the Gnawa guinbri, the gombri is down-picked.

A Wolof griot xalamkat (literally, "lute player). Dakar, Senegal, c.1905.
(Collection of Shlomo Pestcoe )

2-Finger Up-Picking: Another West African-Rooted Banjo Technique

Up-picking (more commonly referred to as finger-picking) is any technique in which the fingers of the playing hand pluck upwards. The thumb is the one exception to this rule as it invariably plucks in downward motion.

(Note: In some up-picking styles, one or all the playing fingers may also brush down all the strings in a downward strum as an immediate follow-up to the up-picking action. This downward brushing strum should not be confused with down-picking, the very different technique described above.)

In the context of 5-string banjo playing, there are distinct traditions of 2-finger (thumb and index finger) and 3-finger (thumb, index, and middle finger) up-picking. Originally referred to as 'guitar-style', 3-finger up-picking eventually supplanted 'stroke-style' down-picking as the most prevalent technique for playing the 5-string banjo from the late 1860s on. With the emergence of the 5-string banjo's Classic Era (c. 1880 -1920) and the classical music-oriented 'artistic' or 'concert' banjo style, 3-finger up-picking predominated among banjo players the world over.

Sometimes maligned as a 'bastardization' of its more illustrious 3-finger sibling, 2-finger banjo up-picking is actually a traditional folk technique. Since at least the late 19th century, it has been found primarily in the rural South in a diversity of distinctive regional traditions and idiosyncratic approaches, the same as 3-finger up-picking and down-picking.

Across the Atlantic ocean in West Africa, 2-finger up-picking, in various forms, is perhaps the most common technique for finger-playing plucked lutes. Examples of different ethnic traditions that employ 2-finger up-picking include the 3-string gourd-bodied bunchundo of the Manjak (Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Gambia); the 2-string calabash-bodied gurumi of the Toubou (Niger); and the 2-string gourd-bodied gurmi and the 3-string wooden-bodied molo (also tafashe) of the Hausa (Nigeria).

2-finger up-picking is also the principal technique for playing griot lutes , a unique subgroup within the West African lute family. Exclusive to specialist griot musicians, examples include the Bamana (Bambara) ngoni , the Wolof xalam, the Fulbe hoddu, and the Soninke gambare, among others.

It's important to note that in the context of griot 2-finger up-picking this technique is primarily used on instruments with three or more strings. The most typical string configurations on griot lutes are 3-string (two long stopped melody strings and a short open drone string), 4-string (two long melody strings and two short drone strings-- the top fourth 'thumb string' and the first string [closest to the player's lap], which is the shortest of the two), and 5-string (the same as the 4-string configuration but with the addition of an additional unstopped long drone as its second string). There are also single-string variants, on the one hand, an versions with seven or more strings (typically, variations on the 4-string and 5-string configurations that incorporate the doubling up of the principal strings in courses [pairs]), on the other. Single-string griot lutes like the Mande and Tukulor molo and the Songhai jurkel are usually down-picked.

The standard griot approach to 2-finger up-picking is the index finger leading off by plucking upwards on a long melody string, immediately followed by the thumb catching the top string. The index finger usually completes this sequence by brushing up-and-down the strings in a flicking motion. As griot lute players are specialist music artisans by definition, naturally, each musician adapts and enhances the basic standard picking pattern with variations and flourishes to create his own 'signature' style. Typical griot 'tricks-of-the-trade' include percussively tapping the instrument's skin 'head' to punctuate musical phrases and augmenting the fundamental thumb and index finger picking pattern with the third finger brought in on occasion to pluck the first string. Sometimes down-picking is also incorporated into the standard 2-finger up-picking pattern. Typically, it's used intermittently to emphasize certain melodic passages.

Non-griot styles of 2-finger up-picking are pretty much similar to the basic griot approach described. In all likelihood, the popular West African 2-finger up-picking palmwine style of playing the guitar-- first introduced in the early 1900s, disseminated by Kru sailors from Liberia up-and-down the West African coast-- was inspired and informed by these traditional lute techniques. This is suggested by the fact that in Nigeria the immediate forebear of the later guitar-based pop forms of palmwine, juju and highlife music was sakara, an Yoruba urban pop style of the early 20th century, founded on traditional instrumentation, with the 3-string wooden-bodied duru (sometimes referred to by the term molo, the appellation of the similar Hausa plucked lute) as the lead instrument. Like the Hausa molo, the Yoruba duru is also played by 2-finger up-picking.

An African American banjoist employing 2-finger up-picking, c. 1865. (Collection of James F. Bollman ) From America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (1999) by Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman .

The striking similarities between traditional West African 2-finger up-picking styles and those found in American old-time 5-string banjo traditions-- especially those 2-finger up-picking styles with an index finger lead-- indicate a strong connection. Evidence in the historical record suggests that early African American banjoists were employing 2-finger up-picking as well as the more prevalent down-picking technique that the first European American banjo players picked up from them in the 1830s and '40s and popularized as 'stroke style'.

Frank Converse (1837-1903)-- a leading early 5-string banjoist whose New & Complete Method for the Banjo With or Without a Master (1865) heralded the transition from 'stroke style' down-picking to 'guitar-style' 3-finger up-picking-- offers us a tantalizing eyewitness account of African American 2-finger banjo up-picking prior to 1850. As a boy growing up in the Upstate New York town of Elmira, Converse's first exposure to the banjo was provided by an itinerant black banjoist who frequently 'busked' on Elmira's streets. As Converse later recalled, the street performer's playing technique was "limited to the thumb and first finger-- pulling or 'picking' the strings with both." 'Pulling' was Converse's term for up-picking. Clearly what he was describing was 2-finger up-picking.

At the turn of the 20th century, as the guitar was making inroads into African American communities throughout the South, the various local 2-finger up-picking styles used to play the 5-string banjo were most likely transferred to the new instrument. This may account for the prevalence of 2-finger up-picking among African American ragtime and blues guitarists from the early 1900s on.