That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture

by Karen Linn

Book Overview

Long a symbol of American culture, the banjo actually originated in Africa before European-Americans adopted it. Karen Linn shows how the banjo--despite design innovations and several modernizing agendas--has failed to escape its image as a "half-barbaric" instrument symbolic of antimodernism and sentimentalism.

Caught in the morass of American racial attitudes and often used to express ambivalence toward modern industrial society, the banjo...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 025206433X
• ISBN13: 9780252064333
• Release Date: May 1994
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Book one on the Banjo, Great book on American Culture

This is one of the best books on the nature of cultural perception and the wars between reality and the stereotypes of the dominant culture, as well as the relationship between capitalism and culture, race and capitalism in America, as well of class race and style. This book belongs in every home. Linn deals with the social image of the banjo from its African and African American origins, to minstrelry's role in popularizing this instrument as well as the conflicts between the racism of minstrelry and the explosion of an instrument suited to popularize African American music. She continues by charting the now-forgetten age of the classic banjo from post civil war period until the first decade of this century, when manufacturers and teachers tried to elavate the five string instrument from its working class and African American roots, to becoming a polite and priviledged possession for the rich. She then charts the evolyution of the instrument and its image into the jazz age with the various 4 string banjos. Finally she deals with the images in the culture created by the persistence of the instrument in appalachia and its revival in the folk scene of the 1950s through today. This is a gross summary of a subtle, well written book, that provides pictures about how stereotypes and misinformation based on the racial and class conflicts of society both cloud our knowledge of the real culture and constitutes part of it. This is a fascinating book about American history and culture and race under capitalism, even if the reader is not interested in the banjo. If one is interested in the banjo in any way, you Need this book!