Steve: I have heard many claims about the "invention" of the banjo, including one Sweeney who added the fifth string to provide a bagpipe-like drone!!!??? Indeed, it would seem more likely that East Africans may have been more likely to have had musical instruments influenced by Arabs, Persians, etc, but I am no authority on those cultures. There are a number of instruments with re-entrant tuning besides the cittern. The saz and other Middle Eastern long necked lutes. Some had skin tops as well. Indian isntruments like the sitar and sarod have short nonfretted strings. Is there a connection there, ideas that the slaves knew and brought back with them? Brad
Steve Schaper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: If I'm not mistaken, the banjo was invented by a Presbyterian minister in early America. However, apart from its use of the cittern-derived reentrant tuning, it is very clearly based upon several central Asian instruments of the Turk and Turkmen people, and something similar may well have existed in East Africa due to Muslim slave-trading contacts along that coast. If I'm not mistaken, African slaves kidnapped to America came from -West- Africa, from different ethnic groups than lived in East Africa. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html --------------------------------- Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com --
