In einer eMail vom 24.10.2006 15:08:39 Westeurop=E4ische Sommerzeit schreibt [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> 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. > Hallo, sschaper, It could just be that you ARE mistaken on a couple of points! Forgetting the Presbyterian minister for a moment, I would point out that the banjo does not have a "cittern-derived reentrant tuning". It has a straight-up tuning plus a short, unstopped string on the thumb-side of the neck, a feature common in African lutes. In reentrant tuning ala cittern or ukulele, the thumb-side string is full length and fretted, just tuned higher than the one next to it. I grant you that one variant of the banjo tuning, the typical bluegrass gDGBD, looks a bit like a transposed Waldzither tuning (if you take the 5th string down two octaves) but the classic banjo tuning was, and still is, gCGBD. Of course there are skin-headed plucked instruments all over Asia and Africa. No need to get "invasionist" about that, though. There are very few materials that are suitable for the top of a lute-type instrument. The best material in Europe is spruce, which is almost universally used, but the Gobi desert and the African Savannah don't produce much of that. But they do support plenty of skin-supplying animals, and snakeskin or vellum is a pretty obvious choice of resonant material, and a more or less round hoop to tension it is somehow logical. Could have occurred to different people in different places independently. North America, on the other hand, has spruce and also cedar, which is equally suitable, and the European-Americans had a tradition of wood instrument-building - so skin-covered lutes appear somewhat extraneous there. The most obvious path for the idea to reach America is the West African slave trade. Turkmenians are a bit ... well ... unconnected, if I may say so! As a matter of fact, there are banjo-like, skin-covered lutes of various types in West Africa (where the American slaves came from) to the present day. Cheers, John D. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
