Quote:
Originally Posted by wcap
This is fascinating stuff. For some time now I have found it odd that such a quintessentially American instrument as a banjo would have become established in Irish music. I was aware, of course, of the influence of Irish music on traditional American music. What I had not considered was the possibility that the links between Ireland and America via Irish immigrants might have resulted in the musical transfer between Ireland and the U.S. being two-way.
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Oh, the exchange has always been two-way, whether it's banjos or anything else.
But banjos were explosively popular across the world long before the 20th Century: minstrel shows captivated audiences in Europe well before the American Civil War. You can think of minstrel show-era banjos as being the electric guitars of their day: manufacturers in England (especially) and France (to a lesser extent) started cranking them out for export and for their own domestic markets.
There are a few mentions of banjos being owned and used in British-ruled India in some of Rudyard Kipling's short stories, usually being played by young officers in their off-duty hours. I've also seen references to banjos being present at the gold mining camps during Australia's gold rush in the mid-19th Century.
John Pearse once told me that the single largest category of inventions granted patents in the US Patent Office records is for banjo parts, designs and accessories.
Banjos have always mutated rapidly and changed with the changing musical trends of the day, at least until the preferences and prejudices of bluegrass banjo players stopped most banjo-related innovations dead in their tracks with an overwhelming preference for the late 1920's Gibson Mastertone design.
This preference didn't start totally dominating the banjo market until the 1960's, so we have an ironic state of affairs where - despite the vast changes in materials science and instrument construction technology in that time - the last fifty years have been the most static and least innovative in all the banjo's generally feverish history.
That's not true in every particular, but it's most definitely true when considering the overall picture.
whm