Hmmm

Those two probes, Spirit and Opportunity, are apparently still ambling around Mars, months after they were supposed to conk out.

Banjo Boya's History of the Banjo

Translated by Google, arranged and illustrated by Banjo Banjar.

As for the roots of the string instrument which stretches the skin on the torso
thousands years there is Egypt before.
Naturally it can think the thing which is in Africa before Egypt.



The musical instrument which has the torso
which even presently stretches the skin on the skull of the animal
exists in Africa.



Those which cross to America from Egypt
are the banjo,



those which Middle and Near East
- India - China - Okinawa - Japan
are the samisen.

In the American new world the African black
who is accompanied as the slave
made the musical instrument which has been repelled at the home
in the new world.



And the musical instrument of the European white
the guitar and the mandolin
with it fuses delicately
and prototype of the present banjo is completed.



It has meant that the white, Joel Walker Sweeney
made the first modern musical instrument complete in 1831.
That musical instrument is retained in the Los Angeles historical museum.



(Presently, the musical instrument of Sweeney
is the first modern banjo,
it is assumed.
it is the mistake)

Michael Ray Charles

In his acknowledgements, W.T. Lhamon cites the work of African American artist Michael Ray Charles for "upend[ing] hateful imagery."



I wrote to Lhamon to say that the only reason I hold misgivings about his theories is because of a distinctly unscholarly discomfort in the face of the offence the subject causes in so many people (the film Bamboozled springs to mind.) I noted that he had acknowledged the work of Michael Ray Charles and asked what kind of response his work had garnered in the African American community.



He wrote back, "The one negative response to JJC came from a black playwright, reviewing in a theatre journal, who didn't think there was any point in remembering these painful images. She makes a living in re-writing politically incorrect texts, removing the N-words and housebreaking them for schools. It is a difficult problem, but most people have been positive."

I looked for it online but alas did not find. Here's one positive from the African American Review.

Lhamon's Argument

image by David Heatley.

In Jump Jim Crow, Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture, W.T. Lhamon makes an argument that I want to believe, though it feels a bit of a myth: that the early plays by Daddy Rice, the "Jump Jim Crow" Plays of the 1830's (Oh Hush, Virginia Mummy, Bone Squash, Flight to America, The Peacock and the Crow, Jim Crow and His New Place, The Foreign Prince, Yankee Notes for English Circulation), featuring characters called Gumbo Cuff and Gumbo Chaff and Bone Squash and Pirhouette and Juliette, were being produced for a kind of creolized American culture, that they were abolitionist in argument ("enter Jim Crow on a white horse") and revolutionary in spirit.

Their harshest critics were white upperclassmen (and John Quincy Adams, who claimed to be more flattered by the attentions paid to his stupid theories than by being elected President of the United States.) These types all approved of Shakespeare's Othello as a cautionary tale against mixed-race marriages and could not see similar moral content in the popular performances of Daddy Rice.

Such men went so far, in fact, as to counsel the "Desdemonas" of NYC to stay away from such entertainments as those provided by Thomas D. Rice, fearing that they might like the inconveniently living Jim Crow even more than the dead by the end Othello.

Rice matched this upperclass disdain with what Lhamon calls 'updain'. When he finally staged his Five Points retelling of "Otello," he revived Desdemona at the end, so she could live and love another day with her husband.

Oh, look here; Oh, look there!
Desdemona's come to life:
See her rise and ope her eyes.
Otello's once more got his wife.
Then dance and sing
'Till the whole house ring,
and never more his wife he'll smother.
And, if all right tomorrow night,
We'll have this wedding over.

Basically, Lhamon is arguing that Rice's methods might be unsanctionable from a modern standpoint, and are difficult to gauge since they were later coarsened into the blackface minstrel tradition, but what he was doing at the time was making an effort - the first in American Culture - to bring a free, eloquent and unselfconscious, spirited black character onto the American stage, a character that offered no apologies for wooing and winning all the Desdemonas of American life.

Lhamon makes no mention of him, but to me this sounds more like the great subversive Arlequino of the Italian Commedia Dell Arte (below) than any garish antecedents of Al Jolson.



Some quotes:

"Rice's Crow is a free agent, proudly black, sometimes childlike but never childish, and certainly not pitiful. He outwits the powerful whites around him in order to create a blackened version of working-class melodrama, streamlined as comic burletta, seductive with songs. His audience will not identify with a white character. They will identify instead with a white man's embodied desire for blackness."

"Jim Crow moved like a free man, crowed like a dandy cock, enjoyed the liberty of every public conveyance from steamship to bus to train, sitting where he wished. He took occupation of the public sphere. Jim Crow addressed, even challenged, men of every rank and colour."

"This transgressive power of Jim Crow is what the political regime of Jim Crow laws in the South projected on all African Americans, of every class, and thus used to contain them as a category following the North's betrayal of Reconstruction."

"Picayune Butler and a street songster called Old Corn Meal were blacks performing Jim Crow in New Orleans in those years... Certainly this vernacular nexus documents a mutual swapping back and forth among these white and black performers of an already-growing blackface repertoire. Looking back from the vantage point of his documented theatrical appearances in New Orleans, in 1835, 1836, and 1838, it is evident that T.D. Rice also modeled himself on Old Corn Meal. When he performed a skit titled 'Corn Meal' in New Orleans in 1836, he made the homage clear."

"Old Corn Meal's singing drew customers to his vendor's pushcart. There are dozens of references to him in the city papers beginning 12 May 1837 and continuing until the obituaries on 22 and 23 May 1842."

So he died a year before the alleged invention of the Minstrel Show, in NYC in 1843. Perhaps what was actually being invented was a brand more acceptable to the status quo, wherein the African Americans stayed in the cotton fields, or, if they didn't, longed to return there, way down south in Dixie.

And one more:

"His song 'Fresh Corn Meal' must have been a variant on the calls for 'Fresh Stroh Bare' with which black vendors thrilled me still in Baltimore during the early 1960's."

p.s. I first heard of this book here.

A Closer Look

My user profile uses a painting by William Sydney Mount, one of two he made called 'The Banjo Player' (the second one is here.) I imagined when I saw it small that this feller looked like me a little bit. But I guess I don't have a hat like that. I do approve of the setting. And the fretless. And the jacket. And I think he's playing some moveable variant of D. That hay looks good for a nap. But I don't have a hat like that. Whenever I get brimmed hats, they're always light brown, and I always realize eventually that I look like a wanker in them. Maybe next time I'll try a darker colour, like this guy.

Another Beecher

for the jar...

And then...

(image by Ross Palmer Beecher)

...there is Austin Steward's nemesis, a fellow named Israel Lewis, whom I posted about yesterday but said post disappeared, possibly because I linked it with an old image of "Zip Coon" and perhaps that angered the gods of banjos (and good taste.)

Israel Lewis was the Wilberforce Colony's first founder and ostensible fundraiser. But he got things off to a bad start by failing to pay the Canada Company the agreed upon fee for the land despite the fact that he had raised the funds to do so. As a result of this soured deal (exacerbated of course by a strong dose of subtle Ontario-style racism) none of the settlers were permitted to expand their properties, nor were their achievements in clearing and building properly recognized on their deeds.

Still, Lewis was a charismatic politician and managed to transcend these initial difficulties to get himself sent by the colony to the US un order to raise funds for a church and public houses. He then began to spend the lion's share of his time in New York, courting the society of wealth and influence, failing to ever send a penny back to Wilberforce.

Steward's efforts to thwart Lewis' grift were met with an equal measure of slander and litigation. In his memoir, Steward sites Lewis as the single strongest force of damage to the reputation and legitimacy of the Wilberforce Settlement. Stronger even in his mind than incidents of racism, which Steward views only as an indicator of ignorance and poor character on the part of certain individuals (alongside a vast portion of the American South.)

Nothing however raises Steward's ire more than the fact of Lewis, having achieved his borrowed (and temporary) prosperity, turning his back on the wife who had stuck by him as they'd fled from slavery and made their way up through the Ohio difficulties to a final settlement in the brutal Ontario landscape. In the NY circles of wealth and power, Lewis became too embarrassed by her company.

I imagine a story told one evening in Austin Steward's Wilberforce hotel, by the host to the young white guest who carries an instrument case with a round bottom and has just let his tin of burnt cork slip out of the haversack and roll noisily, endlessly, across the floorboards. I imagine Steward picking it up and considering it; finally choosing to say something along the lines of "So you want to be a black man. Let me tell you how it is." If Steward were to demand a zip coon style performance from his guest (sans cork, thank you very much, but let's see what you can do by the light of the moon on your face), it would be with the desire of bandying with it and bending the performance to the hotelier's will, displaying how a caracature like the Zip Coon does not do justice to the brilliant, damaging villainy of a greedy social climber like Israel Lewis.

Two further notes on this: Although Steward reports that Lewis died penniless, loveless and friendless in Montreal in 1839 (and in fact devotes an entire chapter in the closing section of the book to the dissolute character of the man), there are reports in the Canadian Archives of a "children's book" published in Kingston in 1844 by a certain "Israel Lewis (C.M.)" that is, "Coloured Man," leading us to wonder, did Israel escape his debts and live to grift another day? And didn't somebody once say that children's lit is the final refuge of a scoundrel? Or was that something else that got said like that?
And the second note. Wilberforce (and Austin Steward) had the terrible luck of appointing a deadbeat (from their point of view) fundraiser to be sent to England as well - a man by the name of Rev. Nathaniel Paul. This emmissary *also* squandered his colony funds and wandered the social circles of London, for months and years, getting caught up in the cause of British Abolitionism, but leaving his wife and children back in Wilberforce to be cared for by Steward and others.

And then, when the fathers of Wilberforce sent an emmisary after the emmisary, the second ran into the first boarding a ship back to Canada (with a cultivated British wife who was about to be shocked by the rude Ontario landscape) and so, having fulfilled his duty, went and disappeared himself into London Society, never to be heard from in Canada again. Still, apparently Rev. Paul had made powerful abolitionist speeches during his time overseas, so Austin Steward forgives him in his memoir as he does not forgive Israel Lewis.

But it makes one wonder: The landscape of Ontario must have been so brutal. Arriving in London, England, must have been, by comparision, so much like dying and going to heaven that you'd sell your own mother for a chance to stay, even for another day, and another, and then another and then another and then another.

Guns vs. Music

From this Arizona website, where they seem to love both with equal furvor, in that blunt American way. "Gun control works; just ask the experts," runs an ad on the site, below photos of Stalin, Saddam and Hitler. Bust a gut. Guess they posted this pic b/c they thought it was funny, the feller pointing his pistol at the woman at the edge of the frame and all. Me, I like the banjer player. And he's the tallest of the lot. Like the woman at his right elbow too. That's some kind of coat she's got.

Austin Steward, Notes

I'm reading Austin Steward's autobiography, 22 Years a Slave, and 40 Years a Freeman, originally published in 1857 and available on the Internet. There's no reference to the banjo anywhere in this account, other than this description of the beginnings of a surreptitious party from p 29,

The shades of night soon closed over the plantation, and then could be heard the rude music and loud laugh of the unpolished slave...

but I became interested in this man even before I discovered his autobiography because of his connection to the short-lived settlement of Wilberforce, near London, Ontario. He was barred from buying enough land to establish a profitable farm, so among his other tasks (notably a courier service), he opted to open a small hotel. I'm writing a dramatic account of an evening, sometime in the early 1830's spent in Steward's hotel, by a pair Ethiopian Delineator types, who stop for the nacht en route from London to Goderich.

Steward, it turns out, is quite a principled man. The settlement at Wilberforce was mostly comprised of transplanted Ohioans who were fleeing the 500 dollar fee that a Black man had to pay in that state for the right to work. Steward himself had a profitable business going in Rochester NY, and joined the settlement in a gesture of altruism and solidarity.

Beech, maple, ash, elm, oak, whitewood, bass, balm of gilead, etc. The soil was good for corn, wheat, rye, oats, and most kinds of the grain and vegetables raised in New York, and was a superior grazing country, about fifteen miles from London. This was a village containing perhaps 30 dwellings, and 200 inhabitants; a court-house and jail all under one roof, built of stone and plastered; small doors and windows in the style of some of the old English castles. London was built in the forks, or between the east and west branches of the river Thames; hence, you would hear people speak of "going to the forks," instead of the village; it is about 200 miles from Buffalo, and the nearest port between the two is Port Stanley, 30 miles from London.

I returned from Canada, where I had seen an oppressed people struggling with the hardships and privations of a new settlement; I had seen wretchedness in some places, but by no means sufficient to justify the report made by Mr. Lewis, and I determined I would remove there with my family, and do all in my power to assist the colored people of Canada.

Just before his departure for Canada, however, he had a dream. It's interesting because the only other dream he relates in the book turns out to be the foreshadowing of real events. This one, however, is more surreal:

During the hours of slumber I was continually being startled by frightful dreams, - sometimes I thought I saw a monstrous serpent as large as a log stretched across the road between Rochester and the Genesee River; at another I thought myself in the air so high that I could have a full view of the shores of Lake Ontario, and they were alive with snakes; and then I saw a large bird like an eagle, rise up out of the water and fly toward the south.

Why toward the south, one wonders? I thought hope lay toward the north.

Notwithstanding these omens, I turned my steps toward Wilberforce. In May, 1831, we bid adieu to our friends in Rochester, and taking passage to Buffalo on a canal boat, we arrived in due time...

The Grass Behind Is Nearly Green!

And so, of course, are the trees, since the photo (which I snatched from the Net) was clearly not taken recently. Not in the last five month I'd wager anyway. Be that as it is, the following is a POSTING for an EVENT that falls somewhere between ST. PATRICK'S DAY and the arrival of SPRING. That is to say (!) next weekend.

And so we give it pride of place here in the pages of BANJO BANJAR.

Hi Folks
I just wanted to send a brief reminder that Pat Simmonds (fiddle/accordion), Kelly)  Hood (Uilleann Pipes/whistle), Declan O’Doherty (piano), Erynn Marshall (fiddle/vocals) and myself (banjo/guitar/vocals) will be presenting our “Shore to Shore” concert this Sunday at The Flying Cloud Folk Club. The concert features Irish music played along side Appalachian music. The idea is to highlight the sounds of traditional music on both sides of the ocean – where it came from, where it went and what happens when you mix it all together. We always have a great time when we do these shows and we hope you can make it out to this one.
All the best
Chris Coole

Shore to Shore, Sunday March 20/2005 – 8:00pm
The Flying Cloud Folk Club @ The Tranzac
292 Brunswick Ave (just south of Bloor) Toronto
$10 with club membership/$12
For reservations call (416) 410-FOLK

Ear Drum

(all images by the blind Turkish painter Esref Armagan.)

If blind people can paint (and they can), then does it follow that deaf people can play music? Can the seeing voices be singing voices too? Can the children of a lesser god lay hands on the simple pulse of nature from which music was first born and hum along with the chorus? Gary Oldman's Beethoven puts his head on the piano to feel the notes; the deaf kid in Holland's Opus sits on the speakers, absorbing rock&roll's polyunsaturates through his sitbones (though one can't help thinking that this is not a daring movie: Richard Dreyfuss never kisses the pretty student and his son never lays his speakers down on their backs to drape his body over.)

Evelyn Glennie plays percussion (and, it appears, was separated at birth from Kate Bush.) She is apparently the most famous deaf musician since Beethoven and owns over 1600 instruments. But the 1600-dollar question is: does she own a banjo? (Later question: Apparently she's played with Bela Fleck, but does that count?)


(They say the resonance of the violin against a player's jaw is so intense it will
eventually make one go mad. Like Paganini as played by Kinski. I told that to Anne Lederman and she just rolled her eyes.)

My blogos-friend Patrick Costello is only partly deaf, but his hearing isn't strong enough to mess with his priorities. He says his music is more about the tao than the wow and he seems to possess the special gift for teaching those who think they cannot play. Apparently his great instrumental joy in life is the guitar rather than the banjo ("I started playing the banjo to win a bet," he says. "I started playing the guitar because the instrument almost drove me out of my mind with desire.") But BANJO BANJAR won't hold that against him. He does love and serve the great strung drum, and I trust my publication of the former quote will not send the stock of his popular instruction book tumbling.

But perhaps he loves the guitar more because it was harder. Tougher to master, though master it he did. (Um, "Learning the banjo was fun. Learning the guitar was like trying to free climb a sheer rock face with a bag of anvils chained to my testicles.")

Not that the banjo is easy, but the banjo is a body-buzzer non-pareil. Before they installed resonators on banjos, a good portion of that open-back sound just thrumbed straight back into the player's gut. Imagine a guitar that's wrapped around your body; you're coming through the box (like a body, or a Salinger, through the Rye.) Or a stand-up bass that you're stood up inside. I saw a bass-player once in Montreal who was tall and narrow and vibrated over his instrument like a fifth string. He looked like a character in an old jazz cartoon, right down (or up) to his tuning-peg of a nose.

Playing the open-back banjo is like that. It's one of the reasons why clawhammer sounds so soft, so subtle, so NICE. The music is travelling through the player's body. This comes as a revelation to anyone who believes the banjo is all key-cutting twang. Don't get me wrong, I love the sound of bluegrass (though I didn't in the beginning, rather came to it through a developing appreciation of the instrument's myriad of qualities.) But the bluegrass banjo's resonator takes the introverted side of that sound, forces it around the inside curve of the bowl and hurls it back out the edges of the drum towards the audience. That's why I think some people are so scared of it, and others annoyed. Cats hate it, but it makes the mice dance; they hear their scurrying lives in it. I've played on evening verandas and seen them come out and whirl their bodies for a moment or two under the porch light.

Though I think they like the open-back sound more: it brings them inside to what's dark and safe in their home below the floorboards or deep beneath the straw.

The upshot is, if you ever have a deaf child and you want to give him an instrument, I recommend the banjo. But take off the resonator first, and put the back of the pot right up against his belly. And replace the steel strings with nylon, to complete the transformation of twang into thump. "Plunkthump", to be more precise about the onomatopoeia of it all. Or "bum-titty" as that sex-crazed pervert Pete Seeger has it.

Just kidding Pete.

Speaking of American Presidents

Is this who I think it is?


I think it is. And the below is for sure.

Bluegrass life

The latest from Banjo Boya, translated by Google, arranged by Banjo Banjar.

When it is the person who knows the Bluegrass,
you think the Bluegrass life
how it is outrageous,
don't you think? probably will be.
Why it is outrageous?
please try trying such life in the Bluegrass.

It probably is to designate such life as the diary
BLOG Bluegrass discovered the fact that life is released stealthily.
When work is spare time,
saying,
it increased,
but it probably is to be spare time truly...?

March 10, 2005 12:17 AM

OH, and there were comments:
One from Kato:

You are not wrong and it is spare time?
Yesterday tried going work the kana.
It was useless.

And one with a link to another bluegrass blog out of Japan.

One of the very best

This one's called 'The Banjo Lesson'. It's by Henry Ossawa Tanner, who is considered "the most distinguished African-American artist of the 19th Century." He painted it in 1893. here he is:

And here's another painting by him: Interior with Woman Spinning and GW Bush looking over her shoulder. It's quite the fantasy of the powerless president contentedly watching as time goes spinning by...

Evolution of an idea

Or is it an obfuscation? From this text:

to this one:

A closer look:

And with this question (and the completion of - or the attainment of a plateau in – another project), BANJO BANJAR embraces its stated purpose; that is a jar to collect images, links, research and ideas related to a theatre project about the history of the banjo.

Is it a lesson or a sale?

I'd like to think it's a lesson, but the white man's so holding that banjo like it's a commodity. And he's looking at the player's mouth instead of his fingers, suggesting that he's waiting for him to say "I'll take it" rather than trying to memorize the fingering so that he can emulate it. And he's wearing a pin-stripe suit. and that must be the check-out at his elbow there. The black man's better dressed (in my opinion), and his boots suggest he came on horseback. But you can tell by his face that he's been through a lot.
No, there are no depictions of THE LESSON in art. Not across that particular divide. Not that I've seen. But it must have happened. It wasn't all theft. It wasn't all corking up. Some of it was musical emulation and desire for continuity and musical community. No?

A Good Air Loom

Just heard the title track of LIFE ON A STRING on CBC's Northern Lights out of Winnipeg. If you were listening just after eleven, and there was suddenly a solo banjo piece there, as delicate as anything you'd ever heard (and that goes for people who don't like the banjo, yes I'm talking to you, you heard it too and you liked it, you said "What's that? that can't be the banjo, I don't like the banjo so it can't be that, what IS that?"), music that moved swift as grasshoppers displaced when you're running through a field of long yellow grass, working their little grasshopper-hindquarters, and then stopping dead on a sun dime in the middle of the sky, just long enough to notice the sky's still blue and then starting again, displacing the grasshoppers again...

(Forgive my adjectival reach, I'm trying to report on the images that form when I hear this music, always a dubious activity)

BUT If you heard, suddenly, three minutes of summer (no, it was shorter than that, it's too short, mercilessly short) TWO minutes of summer - CANADIAN summer... if you heard the sound of a light storm approaching across the prairies though it's sunny overhead, or the sound of that valley in the middle of Saskatchewan that's all hills and green until you climb to the top of the highest hill and find that you're actually in the middle of the prairie, far as the eye can see, and again it's sunny, but the sun is never oppressive, it's so dry that you barely break a sweat...

If you heard something so quiet that you even had to pause in your READING to hear it all and hear it right, and then you had to get right up out of bed to come and write this post, well, what you heard was the best clawhammerer in Canada, maybe the best in the world, master of a sound that can only be called CANADIAN BANJO, swifter and lighter and - well - DIFFERENT than its southern neighbour, holding more secrets than its southern neighbour. And I mean no disrespect towards its southern neighbour. Nor to the fine Canadian Clawhammerers I've heard. But DANIEL KOULACK is the best.

He's out of Winnipeg too, just like Northern Lights. Perhaps one of their best-kept secrets, though he should be renowned. Part of the general weirdness with which the banjo is received. He plays without a nail on his frailing finger, because he plays so much the nail gets worn down. And he plays a Neufeld, with a resonator. At least that's one of the banjos he plays.



And I have more to report on the CANADIAN BANJO, you'll see.

The Taste of The Bosom Oak

New Posting from Banjo Boya out of Japan, translated by Google, edited and laid out by Banjo Banjar.

メンチ was eaten for the first time 9 years ago.
When walking immediately the alleyway
by where the spouse has lived,
exactly at the time of the lunch was,
the Western food house,
The Stone God,
entering the eye, the usual way
ordered the メンチ fixed food.
First, the cutlet is large, the homemade ドミグラ
+ tomato based source being fully applied,
the exquisite sense of taste occupied tongue.
it was the grille of the full house.

Not be able to forget the taste,
after living in the Nakamura bridge of the same area
along the railroad line,
but we have always closed,
we did the thinking which is sad.

However, when last year,
seeking the taste of the メンチ, went in.
The inside of the store same as the 8 was years ago,
but the form of the master is not visible.

IF YOU HEAR,
to fall ill,
you closed the store,
but it meant that finally you died.

As for that taste
the madam taking over,
that time the madam was cooked.
Somewhat,
the kana is hard, you thought,
but in the range of error,
the bosom oak it was and remembered taste.

Also the source is according to former times.

Some days ago, after one year,
went to the Stone God with the intention of taking lunch.
Because the store cannot be found,
thinking, whether you make a mistake in the road many degrees
and many degrees verified the road,
but how, in the place where it has become construction
actual place of the apartment.

Already, it became impossible to eat that メンチ.

Is the inside as for the madam probably to go to somewhere?
Somewhere it probably is to trade at the other place?
no one knows

To tell the truth, the grandfather of my mothers (Osaka)
being to be the cook, but prior to WWII
using the mayonnaise and the dressing of handmade,
provided cooking to the store.

That grandfather loves the grandchild,
matter and mind,
it seems that makes the Western food eat.
I do, being not to have remembered at all,
but when
matter and mind
the time where it is,
the paternal parents' home Tokyo
here the eating-house,
as for the favorite food?

The ハンバーグ you answered
The ハンバーグ around of 1962

probably is not to be cooking the populace.
mother points to the luxury
which is called to the mother-in-law,
something!
With it was scolded,
so is.

But, even now
taste of the オジイチャン
is taste of the Western food
of the fly
and the salad
and the ハンバーグ
for me.
Also the オジイチャン dying,
it is 3 years.

This way,
already is taste of vision.
If you can record taste,
retaining,
it occurred,
you applied....

March 2, 2005 02:46 AM

(This is the first of a regular series.)

Octave

Incidentally, on my Deering long-neck (I still have to tell the last part of my Banjo Story - the FAITHFUL READER would be forgiven for thinking I didn't have a banjo anymore, though stories with happy endings are somewhat trickier to tell), B-flat tuning becomes dGdAB, essentially an octave under standard G tuning. This demonstrates in a nutshell why I like the long-neck so much.