Resonant Technologies: The Banjo and Black Sonic Memory

Introduction

The banjo is often misheard. Its bright twang, widely associated with folk or rural white traditions, echoes through popular memory as a symbol of Americana. But listen closely. Beneath its pluck is a buzz, a hum, a low vibration that tells another story. Before bluegrass, before minstrelsy, before the instrument was claimed as “American,” the banjo was a diasporic technology—a drum with strings, a resonant container for memory and healing, that had the power to disrupt time. It was, and remains, an instrument of Black sonic memory.

In a world where drums were banned and gatherings restricted, the banjo emerged as the perfect adaptive form, a stringed talking drum that spoke new sonic languages while preserving ancestral ones. Through these resonant chambers, communities sustained lines of communication, facilitated healing, and nurtured solidarity across imposed distances.

Even the metadata used to describe these objects in museums and other archives calls for revision. Banjos should be classified, not as folk instruments or primitive lute instruments, but as sophisticated technologies of cultural memory. This shift is more than corrective. It is restorative. It returns complexity to the hands that built these instruments and recognizes the archive as a place where sound, resistance, and memory continue to vibrate.

That memory, encoded in resonance, is where we begin.

Focusing on two early gourd banjos—one housed at the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam, the other at the Musée de la Musique in Paris—these instruments appear not as folk relics, but as technologies of sonic intelligence. Crafted by enslaved Africans and their descendants with ecological precision and spiritual intent, they were not simple musical toys, but finely tuned devices that responded to their environments and shaped them in return. The gourd’s resonant body was chosen with care, and while it carried sound, the banjo’s form was also crafted to embody ancestral knowledge and transmit it across time.

What follows is a reframing: Gourd banjos were not primitive. They were speculative machines, encoding cosmology, resistance, and survival into sound.

Ritual Maps and Resonant Bodies

Often referred to in early sources as the banza, banjar, or panja, the gourd banjo has gone by many names across the Atlantic world, but its form and function maintain a deeper continuity. If we begin by listening closely, the form itself begins to speak—not just sonically, but cosmologically. Early gourd banjos, made from dried gourds, animal skin heads, fretless wooden necks, and gut or horsehair strings, were not assembled from scraps. Each component carried meaning, chosen not just for resonance but for what that resonance could carry.

Yet the catchall term “gourd banjo” hides a deeper truth. Many early instruments were made not from bottle gourds, but from calabash—a fruit with sacred associations across West and Central Africa. As anthropologist Sally Price observes, calabashes were used in ritual and spiritual contexts, while gourds were reserved for practical, everyday use. But calabash trees don’t grow in North America, so later makers adapted out of necessity, not preference. The shift in materials was not neutral—and naming them all “gourd banjos” obscures both the ecological rupture and the instrument’s spiritual lineage.¹

As luthier and historian Pete Ross shows, these instruments preserved African string-lute principles while adapting to the conditions of enslavement.² They were far more than hybrids. In her study of diasporic ritual, historian and author Kristina Gaddy connects the gourd banjo to the banya prei of Suriname, a ceremonial practice that unified music, dance, storytelling, and spirit.³ Together, their research shows how the banjo’s physical form echoes the Kongo cosmogram, a sacred diagram used across West Central Africa and the diaspora to map the cycle of life, death, and spiritual rebirth.

In African cosmologies, the cosmogram is a circle bisected by a cross: The horizontal line represents the earthly realm, while the vertical line marks the path between the physical world and the spirit world. This is not just a symbol but a map to guide the soul, marking life transitions like birth and death and maintaining connection between the living and the ancestral.⁴ The gourd banjo mimics this structure. Its circular body becomes the world, and the wooden neck piercing through it mirrors the poteau mitan—the vertical axis through which spirits pass. It is vital to note that adhering to the cosmogram’s shape made these instruments harder to play: the steep string angle created by the gourd’s geometry forced the player’s hand into an awkward position, with strings far above the neck past the first position, limiting mobility and ease of fingering near the gourd. Gaddy writes, “This symbolism was more important than the ease of playing the banza,” suggesting that the gourd banjo’s primary function was not musical aesthetics, but metaphysical resonance.⁵

Reframing the Image

Visual records illuminate the banjo’s diasporic function and layered meaning, but only when we learn to read them through a different lens. In The Old Plantation (ca. 1785–1795), a white Southern artist depicts enslaved people gathered in music, dance, and communion. Near the center is a gourd banjo, long interpreted by scholars as a symbol of leisure or festivity. But, as Gaddy argues, this scene likely captures a ritual moment: an enactment of spiritual continuity, with a jug beside the musician that may function as a minkisi vessel, an object used to channel ancestral force.

More explicitly ritualistic are the early 19th-century dioramas by Gerrit Schouten, held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, some of which depict the banya prei ceremony and its surrounding communal life. In another such diorama, a gourd banjo player is shown near a waterfront gathering—suggesting the instrument’s role within the broader ritual landscape and the communal performance practices that accompanied banya prei. As Gaddy notes, while the banjo’s use within the formal ceremonial space is not directly shown, its presence in these related communal settings affirms its significance in the spiritual and social life that surrounded the ritual.⁶

Across these geographies, Haitian and Surinamese banza and panja lutes confirm a lineage not of imitation, but of encoded continuity. As Gaddy affirms, “The banza wasn’t just an imitation of an African instrument, but part of an ongoing tradition of instruments called banjos in the Americas.”⁷ These instruments did not merely survive; they remembered—carrying sonic architectures of solidarity and ancestral time. In the carved hollows of gourds and the tension of skin and string, a different kind of knowledge was being transmitted. Not just a melody, but a hum that held the past and helped sustain the present.

The Drone as Temporal Technology

If the banjo’s circular body embodied the world, its short string held time. Among early diasporic banjos like the Haitian banza, this string, set partway up the neck, too short to change pitch through fingering, was not decorative. It created a constant, buzzing tone that pulsed beneath every melody. Better known as the drone string, it was a sonic tether, a resonant loop.

Ross documents how this short drone string was a standard feature in early Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American instruments. Its function was not to move the song forward but to hold it in place. Fixed in pitch, always sounding, the drone string ignored Western notions of linear time and melody. It embedded a different temporal logic—one rooted in repetition, return, and resonance.⁸

This wasn't just a cultural or spiritual intuition. In a 2021 study, researchers found that listening to a tanpura drone increased brain synchronization over time. The longer the drone persisted, the more brain regions harmonized. The drone’s repetition altered cognition. It created coherence across hemispheres. It restructured internal time.⁹

Under slavery, where time was brutally enforced through bells and schedules, this mattered. The drone string’s hum opened an alternate temporal space. It allowed players and listeners to step out of imposed time and into remembered or ancestral time. It made room for breath. For trance. For endurance. The banjo’s drone was a vibrational refusal: a way to feel beyond the plantation’s clock.

Sonic Improvisation as Infrastructure

If the drone string warped time, it also held space. Its continuous vibration laid a sonic ground for something even more dynamic: call and response. In African and African diasporic music, call and response is not simply a musical form—it is a structure for social coordination, spiritual invocation, and communal resilience. The banjo enabled this structure to persist even in conditions where communication was surveilled or restricted.

As ethnomusicologist David Evans documents, early blues descended from field hollers, ring shouts, and work songs. It relied on repeated patterns, simple melodic loops rooted in African tuning systems, and drones to undergird vocal improvisation. These sonic beds allowed singers to move freely across time and emotion while remaining anchored in shared rhythms. Evans notes that unorthodox guitar tunings were often used to replicate drone effects derived from African stringed instruments, and that singers would leave space in their phrases for the instrument to “answer,” a formalized call and response that mirrored African musical logic.¹⁰

The banjo, carried onto plantations across the Diaspora, made this structure portable. Its short drone string offered a stable tonal base, allowing players to layer spontaneous melodic phrases. This was not just musical, it was infrastructural. Under slavery, when collective gatherings were dangerous and language was policed, sound became code.¹¹ Repetition and variation became strategy. A single player could perform both caller and responder, or call could emerge from one player, response from another. In this way, improvisation functioned as a distributed system—not just for expression, but for encoding feeling, memory, and intent. Through layered sound, players could signal grief, share resolve, and register resistance. In spirituals and work songs, as aboard slave ships where captives sang lamentations despite brutal punishment, grief was not private lament but a collective act of survival and defiance.¹²

Samuel A. Floyd Jr., founding director of the Center for Black Music Research, describes this clearly: “Improvisation is understood as an elaborative extension of the call-and-response principle,” which itself is “the most widely occurring and most fundamental structure in Black music.” Rather than mere embellishment, improvisation was a cultural logic: “a conceptual system, a worldview” embedded in sound. It enabled enslaved communities to communicate across space and time, adapting in the moment while holding to ancestral forms. The banjo’s architecture didn’t just support this, it insisted on it.¹³

Metadata and the Meaning of Description

“Beloved banjar.” That’s how a late 18th-century American slave ship captain described the instrument played by African captives aboard his vessel. As historian Katrina Dyonne Thompson recounts, enslaved people were “made to exercise” to its sound, but it was the banjar, not just the whip, that compelled movement.¹⁴ This small, circular object was not simply tolerated, it was used. For those captives, it was not folk art. It was code.

Today, museum metadata systems often fail to capture this resonance. In major collections, gourd- and calabash-bodied banjos are typically cataloged by surface descriptors—wood, gourd, calabash, skin—and filed under general terms like “chordophone” or “American.” But what’s missing is the function. These instruments were not passive artifacts. They were resonant technologies: tools for bending time, for encoding memory, for transmitting grief and solidarity under surveillance.

Consider the 1770s Surinamese bania held by the Wereldmuseum, believed to be the oldest known banjo from the Americas.¹⁵ Made by an enslaved person in Suriname and collected by John Gabriel Stedman, this instrument embodies a diasporic technology of Black sonic intelligence.

While the current metadata documents its materials and basic cultural context more fully than in many North American collections, it still contains a silence. The instrument is described as offering recreation or entertainment for the enslaved, but no mention is made of its spiritual architecture or cosmological design.¹⁶ To frame this instrument as mere entertainment is not neutral—it erases the metaphysical labor it performed under conditions of enslavement. A revised framework would surface the deeper functions encoded in its form:

Object Function: Resonant spiritual technology; mnemonic device; sonic vessel for communal healing, ritual coherence, and temporal disruption.

Temporal Encoding: Drone string sustains cyclical, nonlinear time, facilitating trance states, altering perception of linear time, and maintaining ancestral connection.

Ecological Intelligence: Constructed from a carefully selected gourd resonator, animal skin membrane, and gut strings—materials chosen for acoustic resonance, spiritual potency, and cosmological symbolism.

Cosmological Design: Neck piercing the gourd body vertically enacts the Kongo cosmogram (poteau mitan), encoding spiritual pathways and ancestral presence in its physical structure.

Social Function: Used in ritual gatherings and communal spaces among enslaved Africans and their descendants throughout the Diaspora—providing sonic infrastructure for healing, remembrance, and resistance under conditions of surveillance and oppression.

Incorporating these dimensions into metadata practice restores both the sonic and spiritual intelligence embedded in the bania’s design. It enables the archive to function not merely as a repository of objects, but as a living interface with Black sonic memory.

This banjo from 1840, now in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection and the Curationist database, presents a more complex case. It features a gourd body joined to a mass-produced Boucher neck—an unusual pairing. While the gourd may have been added later, its cut and the placement of the neck reflect knowledge of earlier banjo traditions. Yet the neck enters through the gourd’s side, not its stem, breaking with every known surviving example of early gourd banjos. In addition, Boucher’s signature scroll headstock and metal tensioning system marked a shift toward commercial standardization, aligning the instrument with emerging minstrel aesthetics. As a result, while the Met banjo holds important cultural and transitional value, it does not fully enact the metaphysical or cosmological design principles embodied in earlier gourd banjos crafted by enslaved makers. Mentioning the Met banjo helps draw the line: this framework is not meant to apply retroactively to all gourd-bodied instruments, but specifically to those that continue to carry diasporic spiritual and sonic architectures.

To describe a gourd banjo simply as an object is to flatten its intelligence. Archives must begin to acknowledge not only what these instruments were made from, but what they were made for. That includes describing their drone as a temporal device; their short string as a sonic axis of resistance; and their role in sustaining communal governance through improvisation and call-and-response. These are not romantic readings, they are evidenced histories.

This re-description is not merely academic. It is epistemic. It asks us to hear differently, to catalog not just with eyes but with ears attuned to survival. It asks archives to reflect Black sonic knowledge systems, where resonance is not noise, but meaning—buzzing, recursive, and alive.