A deep dive into the social history of the banjo.
Though the banjo has a uniquely jaunty sound, underneath the bluegrass playfulness is an often painful history.
Gaddy traces the instrument’s origin to the rituals of enslaved Blacks in the American South, the Caribbean, and South America. Regardless of its exact form, the instrument played a crucial role in religious and ceremonial dances, and Gaddy tracks its early history through Suriname and Haiti. Some slave owners sought to suppress it, while others tolerated it. In fact, one of the first depictions of a banjo is in a painting of a spiritual dance performed by enslaved people on an 18th-century North Carolina plantation. The author shows how the arrival of Christianity among enslaved people was a setback for the banjo. “For hundreds of years, drums, fiddles, banjos, and wind instruments were part of religious dances,” she writes. “Now, as a result of conversion to Christianity, there were none. The banjo and Christianity didn’t seem to mix.” The next step in the evolution of the banjo came from an odd place: a White musician named Joel Sweeney (1810-1860), who was taught to play by an enslaved man. Sweeney did much to popularize the sound, as did the minstrel shows popular at the time. In the 1840s, William Boucher, an instrument maker, began constructing and selling banjos, defining the pattern of construction along the way. Eventually, the banjo would return to Black communities, but it would take several decades. Though Gaddy weaves an undeniably interesting tale, the focus often remains on the history of slavery rather than the banjo. While she demonstrates how the two are intertwined, there are long sections of the book that do not connect to the instrument’s story. This is not a fatal flaw, but rigorous editorial streamlining would have resulted in a more focused, coherent book. Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens provides the foreword.
A deep dive into the social history of the banjo.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-86680-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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