Broadcast: Janaury 30, 2022 at 4:00 p.m.
This episode traces the history of this most American of instruments from its ancestors in West Africa through the Caribbean and American South and into the present, as a new generation of Black women artists reclaim the banjo as their own.
Rhiannon Giddens, Bassekou Kouyate, Bela Fleck and more talk claw-hammers, trad jazz, Appalachian folk, African ancestors and the on-going story of American music, which would be woefully incomplete without a Black history of the banjo.
Produced by Ben Richmond.
Listen to this episode: Click here.