| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century. By Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xvi, 303 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2484-4.)

Let others speculate about history. Philip F. Gura, erstwhile literary historian, and James F. Bollman, banjo collector and entrepreneur, hug the ground. America's Instrument reviews extant banjo history firmly, without antagonism. They prune from their own new research all but the banjo's technical progress. They watch the banjo change from an African gourd with a neck attached to a twentieth-century machine-made tool able to bounce its yawp off the back of the largest halls. 1

Gura did the writing; Bollman opened his collections and checked the facts. They have written an obsessive book for banjo fanatics, rich in living banjo culture. They document the vernacular merger of African and European modes, black and white styles, and the rise of noise unto the music of the middle-class parlor. The authors halt their story at the turn into the twentieth century when banjo workshops anticipated Fordism, manufacturers published books that taught banjo methods to musical illiterates, and the instrument retreated from virtuoso melody to jazz rhythm. Gura and Bollman's banjo renders a past before technology enforced separate parts, when everything and everyone might mingle—despite slavery, despite segregation. . . .

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