Week 3—October 21, 2002
By Mark Simos
The main instruments used in classic bluegrass music are the fiddle, the banjo, the mandolin, the guitar, the stand-up bass and, more recently, the dobro. Before we look at each instrument in turn, we should first ask: what do all these instruments have in common? First and foremost, they are all stringed instruments. They sound different from each other because of their size, the types of strings used, and the way the strings are sounded (e.g., bowed, plucked or picked), but the sounds of the instruments blend together in a wonderful way, partly because they are all stringed instruments. Also, the majority of instruments in bluegrass music are acoustic. That doesn’t mean they are quiet, though! The instruments used in bluegrass, unlike those used for the older string bands, were chosen to be loud and exciting in sound. The instruments are acoustic, but they pack a punch! When bluegrass first evolved, it was considered just a fairly traditional part of country music. But after the rise of rock and roll in the 1950s, the country music industry began to add more electric instruments and develop a “slicker” sound, while bluegrass preserved its acoustic, stringed instrument sound. What’s most remarkable is how bluegrass music took so many instruments that had been used in early country and string band music and created such a different sound. Almost every instrument used in bluegrass today changed to fit the overall style and feeling of the music. In many cases, the actual construction of the instruments changed. Some of these changes were part of the natural evolution of the instrument (to be louder, project farther, etc.) and bluegrass musicians just took advantage of the new designs. In other cases, the particular needs of bluegrass musicians directly influenced the instrument makers. Click on the instrument links at the top of this page to learn about the changes that took place in each instrument in the classic bluegrass band.  |
The Different Instruments (Click buttons below to learn more!)       |
By Paul Sedgwick
The banjo is at once a symbol of the best and the worst of what we call America. As a stage prop for white actors with blackened faces in the early 1800s, the banjo was ultimately an embarrassment and a failure; but, as an icon of sophisticated society in music halls across America by the turn of the century, it was a gleaming success. Had it not been for the Ivory Coast slave trade and the colonizing of the Americas and West Indies by European nations, and for the impassioned dedication of banjo players and banjo builders to continually reinvent banjo machinery and the instrument’s popular image, there never would have been an “American” banjo.
The earliest written reports of African slaves playing banjo-like instruments date as far back as the early 1600s. By the mid-1600s, instruments called “banza” or “bangil” were common in places like Jamaica, Barbados and Martinique, and were most commonly described as having a body made from a gourd with skin stretched over it. An advertisement in the Maryland Gazette, July 25, 1754, cites slaves playing the “banjer.” In 1781, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote about a four-stringed instrument called the “Banjar” which was “the instrument proper” to the slaves and “which they brought hither from Africa.”
By the early 1800s, white performers in blackface make-up had began using the banjo in a kind of standup comedy routine, impersonating the “typical” slave, represented as a simple-minded, content and wildly funny buffoon. This circus sideshow soon grew in popularity and in scope and became what is now called the American minstrel show, the predecessor to American vaudeville. These blackface minstrels played the banjo using a technique directly related to African stringed instruments, plucking the odd short drone string with the thumb (
). They introduced the banjo to countless
Americans who were eager to bask in the
nation’s first indigenous form of
popular entertainment. The gourd body was replaced by a simple maple hoop, a bass string
was added (creating the five-string banjo) and standard scale lengths and tunings arose.In the decades after the Civil War, interest in the minstrel show waned, and professional banjo players actively sought to distance themselves from the “lowly origins” of the banjo. By the turn of the century, several banjo builders had refined banjo building and were producing instruments of such high quality that many sold for hundreds of dollars—a tremendous sum for a musical instrument. A more “proper” finger-picking style in imitation of classical guitar playing became popular (
).In the 1930s, the African drone string was dropped (creating the tenor banjo and plectrum banjo) to accommodate the wild percussive strumming style common to Dixieland jazz. During this period some southern banjo players continued to develop the original minstrel (African) technique of playing the five-string banjo into what is now called “old-time” music (
). Others, such as Earl Scruggs, integrated the
newer three-finger “classic” style of banjo playing into rural southern music,
creating bluegrass-style banjo playing ().Today, all of these styles and more are still being played, and the world of banjo music continues to evolve and to defy popular stereotypes.