American Banjo Museum

About

The American Banjo Museum in Oklahoma City is dedicated to the history of the banjo. The museum's exhibits document the rise of the banjo from its arrival in North America via the Atlantic slave trade to modern times. The museum was founded in 1988 in Guthrie, Oklahoma, by Jack Canine and moved to Oklahoma City in 2009.

The museum originated as a collaboration between Oklahoma attorney Brady Hunt and Indiana businessman Jack Canine, who founded the National Four-String Banjo Hall of Fame Museum in Guthrie, Oklahoma, in 1998. Canine donated more than 60 "ornately decorated four-string tenor and plectrum banjos" to the museum. In a 2007 expansion, the museum acquired a European collection of 182 "jazz-age" instruments, making it one of the largest collections of banjos in the world. With the acquisition, the museum had "representation of every model from every major manufacturer of the jazz age, which ran from 1920 to 1940". The museum was originally oriented towards four-string banjos but by 2013 its focus was widened to include five-string banjos. By 2018 the museum possessed more than 400 instruments and was able to exhibit more than 300 of them on two floors of galleries covering 21,000 sq ft (2,000 m2). The museum's collections also contain historical recordings, film, video, printed music, instructional materials, and banjo-related ephemera and memorabilia.

The museum covers approximately 370 years worth of banjo history in the United States from the mid-1600s through the present. Its first permanent exhibit focuses on the banjo's African-American origins and showcases the earliest American banjos that were used to accompany singing or dancing, which remained exclusive to Black culture for nearly 200 years. The display includes a three-dimensional recreation of the painting The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner, in which an elderly African-American man teaches a young boy to play the banjo. A second exhibit covers the transition of the banjo from African-American culture to mainstream American culture through the blackface-minstrel movement, popular compositions, and the standardization of banjos and their repertoire. Examples of Joel Walker Sweeney, Christy's Minstrels and the Ethiopian Serenaders, who performed in blackface, are included. The classical movement after the Civil War is also covered, when the instrument "found acceptance in the parlors of middle upper-class America." Alfred A. Farland, Vess Ossman, Frederick Bacon and Fred Van Eps are held up as an example, of someone who took the banjo into the concert hall, playing the music of "master composers" in fingerstyle, taken from the European classical guitar's fingerstyle. The instrument became a tool of social interaction, as college students formed banjo clubs and it was acceptable now for women to play the instrument. A third multimedia display talks about the 1920s, ragtime and the era's dance-music culture, in which the banjo took on a central role comparable to that of the electric guitar in today's music, with banjo-playing stars such as Eddie Peabody, Harry Reser, and Roy Smeck. Ragtime set the stage for jazz and its dances, such as the Black Bottom, Charleston and the Lindy Hop. These dances could be accompanied by the four-string banjo played with a pick, which helped to provide a "rhythmic pulse" for the music. The Tango was also sometimes accompanied on the banjo. A final display shows places in popular culture where the banjo survived through a resurgence in the post-World War II years, when it was played by musicians Earl Scruggs (bluegrass), Bela Fleck (jazz, rock, world music), Gerry O'Connor (Celtic and Irish music), Perry Bechtel (jazz, big band), Pete Seeger (folk), and Otis Taylor (African-American roots, blues, jazz).

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.