Welcome, everyone to the mini Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My.

Welcome to the Penny Stamps distinguished speaker series.

My name is Christina Hamilton, the series director.

Today we are delighted to bring you Grammy Award winnin musician and composer, author, and the inaugural Artist in Residence for the University of Michigan Arts Initiative.

Rhiannon Giddens is in the House.

So a very big thank you to our series partners, for their invaluable support and collaboration.

The University of Michigan Arts initiate, of course, and Detroit PBS, PBS books, and Michigan Public.

The arts initiative is transforming the University of Michigan by energizing and amplifying our creative ecosystem and connecting students, the campus, and the local, broader community.

They're sparking innovation, and their work is moving toward a more vibran and just world through the arts.

Perhaps one of the mos important things about the arts is the power to bring people together, to convene a community, just as we all are right here today.

So today is also the kickoff for the opening of the Arts Initiatives Michigan Arts Festival.

This is running from today through October 26th.

It's a month long celebration to mobilize the communit to experience the university's vibrant creativity.

And, for your own personal exploration and social connection.

So the festival is going to offer more than 100 events across campus this next month, including exhibits at the Stamps Gallery.

UM's has their opening night tomorrow night with Verdi's Requiem.

So this is an opportunity t discover new artistic pathways you might not know about so definitely check it all out.

You can also, keep up with what's going on by tuning in to the, Creative Currents podcast.

They have special festival coverage that you can find all this information and more at Arts Dot.

You mesh.edu.

A few highlights for students in the house.

This university here boasts more arts based student organizations than any other university in the country.

Yeah, how about that?

So do not miss the student arts organization fair, which is happening tomorrow at 2 p.m.

near the flagpole on the diag.

So drop by, explore, connect, and get involved.

You can also join the Michigan Arts Festival's scavenger hunt, which is on an app called Goose Chase.

And you can earn points and win prizes throughout the month.

And most importantly, the arts initiative is here to help you make the arts meaningful and, and experience them in as many ways as possible.

So keep up with the programs, by following them on Instagram.

And you should also sign u for the student Arts newsletter.

They also give funding.

So another festival feature event, which opens this weekend, which I want to point out to you, is Stacy L Kirby's Bureau of Personal Belonging, which opens at the stamp Gallery on Saturday.

This is a powerful, interactive installation and performance series that has been create in collaboration with the artist in Residence, Stacy, Kirby, and students and faculty, and it's activated by viewer participation.

The performance invites all of us to engage with questions of identity civic engagement, and highlight the power of art in building mutual respect.

That performance, that opening performance is on Saturday between 1 p.m.

and 5 p.m.

at the Stamps Gallery, around the corner, Horne Division.

You don't have to go for five hours.

It's just 45 minute increments and it's open for five hours.

And looking ahead, just a reminder if you didn't know about Rihanna until today, UMS has a performance with her on April 21st, so get your tickets.

Yeah.

Please do remember to silence your cell phones.

We will have a Q&A here today.

I don't know how much time we're going to have for it.

You're going to see there's microphones at the ends of the aisles here.

So when that moment comes, Rihanna will invite you to line up at these mics and we'll see how much time we have for questions.

And now for a proper introduction of our guest.

Pleas welcome the executive director of the University of Michigan Arts Initiative, Mark Clegg.

Hello there.

Thank you so much, Christina.

I'm so grateful to you in the Stamped Speaker Series for helping us kick off the Michigan Arts Festival in such grand style.

And it's really my pleasur and honor to introduce to you.

Rhiannon Giddens Rhianno is a vocalist, instrumentalist, composer, author, educato who defies easy categorization.

Her music is not folk music, or classical or jazz or pop or blues.

It's really all of those combine and is simply beyond category.

Rhiannon work lives in a kind of sweet spot, if you will, where music i an expression of joy and wonder.

While at the same time serving as a vehicle of social awareness, lifting up the people whose contributions to our musical story in the Americas has been overlooked, erased, ignored and denied.

She's both an artist and a scholar, and because of that combination, her music making doesn't fit our typical labels.

Instead, it offers a more accurate, more human, and more artistically vibrant understanding of what American music is, what it has been, and what it should be in the future.

Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Rhiannon Giddens is a founding member of the multiple Grammy Award winning roots music string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Yeah, winner of a MacArthur Genius Award and a Pulitzer Prize honoree for her opera Omaha.

This opera is based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Sayeed, a muslim scholar who in 1807 was captured in West Africa and sold into slaver in Charleston, South Carolina.

As you can imagine, Rihanna's award winning artistry is beautiful, transcendent an hopeful, while at the same time it quickly becomes very real and very human.

This wee marks her third and final visit to Ann Arbor in her role as the University of Michigan's inaugural artist in residence.

Fortunately, as Christina said, she'll be back in Hell Auditorium in April, so get those tickets.

As she said, Rihanna's work with us on campus has been to serve as a kind of shining example of what an artist can be to share her imaginative, imaginative process with us, one that combines artistry and scholarship, creativity and historical research.

It may surprise you that much of her time here in Ann Arbor has not been spent in the rehearsal studio, but rather in a library, specifically the William Al Clements Library.

Our incredible archive of American history, where she's been working on a new book project that I'm sure she's about to tell us a lot more about in a few moments.

I'm so grateful, personally, and for the university that ran and accepted our invitatio to join us on campus this year.

She is a warm and generous person, and it's been simply a pleasure to have her in our community.

Yet the gift she has given us is not simply one of personal connection and musical artistry.

It is a profound example of creativit without mental categorization.

Her artist journey is one of organic curiosity that ignores the little boxes that define style or genre or clas or race or academic discipline.

If you are a student in the audience today especially, I urge you to listen with that same curiosity.

What you're about to hear offers one pathway to discover your own voice, your own pathway as a person and as an artist.

To grapple with tradition and history, to discover your own unique way forward.

Her work is deeply connected with the past.

It speaks to us urgently about the world we live in today.

But what she really has to say is about the future.

Please join me in welcoming to the stage Rhiannon Giddens.

And.

Alabam girls want to come out tonight.

Come out tonight.

Come out tonight.

Alabama girls want to come out tonight.

Dance by the light in the movie.

Want you want to want.

You want to come out tonight.

Come out tonight, come out tonight I want you want, you want.

You want to come out tonight.

Dance by the light of the moon.

And.

The.

Night.

Thank you so much.

Now, this is a new variation of material that I've been working on for for years.

Actually, so I'm hoping I stay in tim and that I don't have to speed through some slides, but, I'm going to do the best that I can, because this is a story that's big.

It's complicated.

There's new research coming out every day, as well as kind of old wisdom that keeps coming back.

And so when I first started as a musician in this world, as a professional musician, when I found the banjo, I realized that I couldn't play this deep American music without knowing more about our own history.

And it started with the banjo, but it didn't end there.

And we're going to get to the banjo, and we're going to get to the fiddle, because that's how I tell stories is through our music.

But I got to a certain poin where I was like, you know what?

I still need to know more.

I need to know where this music is coming from.

Even before America.

So I started thinking about music is not a racial thing, but as a class thing, because really, that's where it's at.

Race i used as a tool to enforce class.

Ultimately.

And so you have to start there first.

And so I went back to Europe talking about the underclass, because as we know, America is a nation of immigrants, in addition to indigenous people who are still here.

And you've had to put up with an awful lo over the last few centuries, but everybody else is an immigrant, either forced or forced.

And you'll find out why I say that.

So you can go from the German Peasants War of 1524, the cat's rebellion in Britain in 1549.

That's when they wanted to enclose common lands and make it all about capitalism.

And people didn't like it.

You have religious, you have religious issues.

You have the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, where so many Huguenots, Protestant Huguenots were were killed.

In France.

You have periodic genocidal persecution of Jewish people all throughout Europe for centuries upon centuries, you have the Irish famine because more food was being exported for other places than to feed its own populace.

You have the Highland Clearances, where people were being cleared off of their lan in order to make room for sheep, as they were more bang for the buck fo the people who owned the land.

And you have empires within Africa who are fueling the slave trade and doing what empires do.

So this is some of the violence, the agitation, the despair that people are dealing wit before they even come on a boat, whether they have the choice or not across the ocean.

And it really made me think about the commonality of the experience of these people, because this is where our music comes from, you know, it comes from people who are just trying to live.

It comes from peopl who are just trying to survive, trying to make a life in an impossible situation.

And we tend to kind of collect that into one group or another but actually poverty is poverty.

Being poor is being poor and being oppressed is being oppressed, no matter who or what or where you are.

So I wanted to look at a little bi more of what goes into our DNA, and to think about how we have decided to place ourselves.

Well, we didn't decide that, right?

It's the people who are in charge.

You said, well, I want to maintain my hold on power.

So how do I create a permanent underclass?

So the idea of race, the idea of essentialism.

Essentialism is I got to put my glasses on to read this.

Well, I can read it from here.

The practice of regarding something such as a presumed human trait is having innate existence or universal validity rather than as being a social, ideological, or intellectual construct.

Thinking that because I look the way I look means that it has something to do with who I am rather than the life that I'm living.

And so we have things like this, which was published in Harper's Weekly.

And, I'll just read this because it's very hard.

The Iberians are believed to have been originally an African race who thousands of years ago spread themselves through Spain over Western Europe.

The remains are found in burrows or burying places in sundry parts of these countries.

The skulls are of low prognosis.

This type.

They came to Ireland and mixed with natives of the South and West, who themselves are supposed to have been of low type, and descendants of savages of the Stone age, who, in consequence of isolation from the rest of the world, had never been out, competed in the healthy struggle for life, and thus made way according to the laws of nature, for superior races.

So this is setting up a dichotomy, right?

England didn't just come up with racism on the fly.

You know, it's a part of a larger system of racism that was coming into being as it as we had the beginning of the American experiment.

And the English had lots of practice on Gaelic speakers in Scotland and in Ireland because they wanted to take the land.

So how do you do that?

How do you take somebody's stuff?

Well, you dehumanize them.

And so what we've been doing for a long time, but what you see, it results in this kind of eugenic talk where they're comparing the Irishman and the black me and saying that they're the same because of these pseudo, these these pseudo scientific terms.

And of course, the Anglo Teutonic, the British German person in the middle is perfect with the high brow.

And I had to look up prognosis charts.

I was like, what is that?

You know, it say having a protruding lower jaw.

So that is seen as uncivilized, that is seen as savage.

Right.

That is see as this is not up to standard.

Well, okay.

I might agree with it on this instance.

Maybe this is of course generations of inbreeding produced the Hapsburg jaw.

Again thinking about how we use terminology.

And you know what is essentialism right.

So the idea is to create a permanent underclass.

So we have the underclass of the world is people who are oppressed, right?

People who have no recourse to the same resources as the folks at the very top.

But in America, we wanted to make sure we had a permanent underclass, i.e.

you couldn't climb up out of it.

And to do that, you have to create division and you have to create colors.

You have to create black and white.

And to do that, yo have to make up a lot of stuff, you know.

So this is also from Harper's Weekly.

It's a lovely magazine.

But this was talking about the vote.

This is in the 1870s, I think, when reconstruction is being deconstructed and the idea of the southern black voter and the Northern Irish voter, they're putting them on the same par and sayin they're both equally ignorant.

The Irish in America, you know, in the beginning, in the beginning decades, you know, it was a pretty, pretty rough road.

You know, the idea of no Irish supply actually was the, you know, people would publish these advertisements.

So the idea is that you have t you first, you start with this and then you realize tha actually you don't want them to be friends, because if they start being friends, then that means tha they're going to outnumber you.

So you start to play them against each other, and then you star to tell the folks on the right, well, you know, actually, if you do these things and, and fight those guys, you can get you can be white to you two can be white.

So what it does is that it makes you you know it.

It knocks out everything in the middle, all the brown shades in the middle.

You have to go one way or the other.

And it creates a very false and fake idea of who you are, because who you ar is your culture, not your color.

But then that starts to to play in how you are treated in the world.

So you then start to absorb that into your own self.

I know you didn't come to my lecture thinking it was going to be roses and butterflies.

I hope.

So the idea of dividing and conquering, and I just wanted to talk about while the folks who are in charge are doing this politically and they're doing this historically, you have the folks who are just trying to live and they're trying to live wit each other, and they're trading things that you trade wit each other, like music and food.

So I just like wanted to get to this definition of, of syncretism when two cultures come into close contact or one is superimposed on the other.

Syncretism is the cultural sorting process, whereby cultural traits found in both cultures are selected for survival or heightened emphasis.

So basically you find something that you hear an echo in, right?

And you go that, that, that sounds familiar to me.

Now, it's not the way that I have done it before, but I want to do it like that because that's really cool.

And that happens over and over and over again.

And you think about this picture here.

You've got black, white, brown.

You know, you've got all sorts of stuff going on in here.

And what I wouldn't give to hear what this sounds like.

Right.

But you have to consider that, you know, that every day of every year, of every decade, of every century that people have bee coming here from all over Europe and Africa.

There are these moments of sharing.

And it's all of these people who have, you know, barely anything between them are sharing parts of their culture with each other.

And part of that is instruments and music.

So we're going to start with the fiddle.

I played the fiddle in the beginning.

Played a couple of tunes, and it's probably on of the most famous instruments in the world, the fiddle.

And what's really interestin is that it's got a long history in some ways, and it's shorter than you might think, and others, you know, because we we're going to get into talking about the creation of tradition.

But, this is, a painting by William Sidney Mount, who was a musician who lived in, the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States and was an amazing observer of, of local musicians.

And he painted these really accurate and beautiful paintings.

So I'm going to use quite a few of them.

But to start, I didn't know this, but there used to be a medieval fiddle and it was called the fiddle.

It's kind of crazy.

And you had things like the fiddle, the wheel, the things that come from like the ninth century, you know, coming from the lyre.

You know, all of these instruments have long historie and long families, and you have they're used in courts an they're used in religious music, and they're used by jugglers like Sterling Minstrels.

Right.

And then it becomes the violin in the 1600s in Italy, what we would think of as th violin, this is when it happens, and then it goes back to being a fiddle.

You know, in the 17th, 16 and 1700s is the explosion of fiddle music.

But it's all over Europe.

It's not.

We have this idea of the fiddle, you know, was in Ireland and Scotland and Wales for the last 2000 years, and they're playing these old, super, super old musi and then it's spread everywhere.

Well, it was actually everywhere.

There was a boom in the idea of what the fiddle was, and the average person could pick up a fiddle and start playing it, rather than just in just the strolling minstrels or the court musicians.

And so that really changed the music that was being played for it.

And then it became, you know, it was all bets are off.

There's like a million tunes being, you know, being traded and written.

And this is what's happening is people are coming over to the States.

So here's a moment to talk about Appalachia.

Appalachia.

Yes.

By the way.

Please spread the word.

So Appalachia is it's kind of like Ireland in that it's a mystical land that has a lot put on it.

Appalachia is a regio that surrounds a mountain range, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, and is an area that a lot of different people went to over a lot of different years.

What we tend to hear of is it was a bastion of the Scotch-Irish, and that's it.

And that's just one small part of the story.

And Appalachia is actually the range of Appalachia, actually very close to where I'm from.

I wouldn't my mind space of the Piedmont is at the foot of the hill, so it's right next, we're kissin cousins.

And it is one o those really interesting areas.

It's also quite a long range that I would know mostly about southern Appalachians.

Right.

And where you have, you know, West Virginia, Kentucky and western North Carolina in particular because I'm from North Carolina.

And, you know, you kind of you hear that it's full of these backwards people who are I mean, it's just the the stories are legion.

And I'm not I have a lot of other things to say, but I just wanted to take a minute just to say the Appalachia actually was settled by a lot of different people, of different colors and different backgrounds, and it was actually one of the hotbeds of resistance during the Civil War in western North Carolina.

And North Carolina was the las state to secede from the Union.

And the western part of the state was full of folks who were just like, that's not our fight.

Like, this is, you know, so it's got it.

It's got a really interesting history.

And there were a lot of black people, and Appalachia, you know, there were a lot of brown people in Appalachia.

So it is a much more complicated history than is given.

And the thing is, there's a lot of resources in Appalachia.

And so the people the government has been after those resources for a long time.

And now we're dealing with mountaintop removal, and it's a big issue.

So one of the ways to disempower somebody is to make fun of them.

And the quote unquote hillbilly culture that's been kind of placed upon Appalachia has, has, has served that purpose for a long time.

I wanted to sing a song for you, that is from western North Carolina, tha I learned from Sheila K Adams.

And it's a song of immigration, and I thought this would be a good moment to sing it.

No reason.

It's called Pretty Sorrow.

When I first come to this country in 18 and 49, I saw many fair lovers.

But I never saw my.

Have you had all around me.

So that I was quite alone.

And me up for stranger in a long ways.

From home.

Well, it's not this long journey, draining for to go.

You know, the country that I'm leaving.

Nor the decks that I. There's only one thing that troubles my mind.

And that's leaving my darling pretty simple behind.

Fare thee well too, old father.

Fare thee well to mother.

To.

I'm going far to ramble.

There's a wide world all through.

And when men get weary us sit here.

Men cried.

And I'll think of my darling.

Pretty soon my breath.

Well, I wish I was a turtledove.

Had wings and could fly right now.

To my lover's lodgings to night.

Drummer hen there in Hollywood are, lie there all night.

And watch them little windows for the coming.

Of day.

Thank you so much.

I learned that from Sheila T Adams.

And, I think it says it all, doesn't it?

You know how empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes.

But you have to want to do that, you know, and to think, oh, if you're feeling some of the same stuff I'm feeling, you know, that's what these songs are about.

It's that we are more alike than we are different.

And that' why I've started thinking about this music in this way of of a place of solidarity.

I've been trying to tell the black story of country music and old time music, because it has.

It had been depressed and erased and forgotten about by a lot of people.

So I've been holding that up, and I will continue to hold that up.

But it's really important to remember that we can only do this together, because that's the way we've created everything culturally in this country, is that it's been a cultural conversation for decades and centuries between people who didn't have much, but they had that, you know, so.

So I can't talk about the fiddle without talking about something that a lot of people don't know about, which is the black Fiddler.

The black fiddler had a particular, you know, the fiddle was brought by people, from different parts of Europe, not just the British Isles, but from different parts of Europe.

And the fiddle there are fiddle traditions.

There were happening all over Europe and also America at the same time, you know, because the fiddle was actually a young instrument.

The music was young.

And in the United States, the idea of being a danc musician, a musician that serves the community, was often taken by enslaved people.

It was it was it was relegated to enslaved people.

And also, even back then, black people were thought to have natural rhythm.

It's true.

So the black fiddler had an actually a very unique place in American culture.

And yo we get these little tiny bits, you know, of his this is another William Sidney Mount.

So these runaway slave ads are, we'd like to say, runaway ads for immense self emancipated people.

So a lot of these ads mention that the, the runaway or the sel emancipated person has a fiddle.

And one of the reasons is why you could make a living as a fiddler if you were escaping as an, as an enslaved person.

So I like to put these in here, because that also complicates our narrative of what peopl sounded like, who owned people.

Right.

So it says runaway from Joseph Harris, a mulatto fellow named Tom, about five feet, eight inches high, is thick and well said.

Can talk good Dutch and English, and can play very well upon the fiddle.

Mink, of Ulster County.

He plays on the violin, and when he went away he had one with him.

He is of Dutc origin and speaks that language considerably better than English.

There were Highlanders who immigrated to the eastern part of North Carolina and one of the largest settlements of Scottish Highlanders outside of Scotland i the 1700s was in North Carolina, and they were Gaelic speakers, Scots Gaelic speakers, and they owned people.

They had small plantations.

It was more like 4 or 5 people rather than 100 people.

And that meant there was actually much more cultural.

Exchange was the same in the Dutch households.

And so you had black people who spoke Gaelic, who played Scottish fiddle tunes, you know.

So this is repeated all over the country.

And so black fiddlers, specifically black musicians start becoming, I think of the as the jukeboxes of old America.

They're having to bring in all of this European music that they're being requested to play, and then it's mixing with their own African traditions, which we'll get to in a minute.

So we're going to get to the banjo now, because the fiddle and the banjo are two of the most important pillars of, of, of American music and everything that follows.

And the banjo of course, is now known to be, an instrument of, of African origin, but not African origin, but specifically Afro-Caribbean origin.

So before we get there, I would like to go back a little bit to the ancestors of the banjo.

It's kind of hard to imagine now, but once upon a time they said that the banjo was invented in Appalachia or in Ireland, and that Joel Sweeney invented the fifth string.

All of these thing have been said fairly recently, but as you see, all of these instruments have aspects that the banjo has inherited the short strings.

There's the spike, especially the spike loops there.

The spike lute is one where the the the neck goes all the way through the instrument.

And I went to the Gambia t study one of these instruments, and it was just remarkable.

So that's the area we're talking about.

There's loads of folk being taken from this, this area and Senegal and Gambia over there.

And that's one of the homes of the accounting.

Yeah.

It was a while ago.

Okay.

And that was my teacher, one of the Jada family.

And it was a really incredible experience because I found that the right hand technique that I've been learning o the banjo was exactly the same, and it was one of my moments of what I, I don't have an accounting with me.

So I'm going to have a little video here of this lovely, this lovely player.

Who plays in the traditional style.

Judy Garland is someone.

In the world.

And this woman.

Said in the world.

The neck is on the left.

Is, Middle man.

The neck is you.

You would never know.

Read about the neck.

Is is, Pretty near what the name is.

So.

And you're.

You met.

The neck is in the cream of the neck is the root.

The word.

The neck is on the left.

The of whenever the neck.

And there's a. Vanilla.

And there's a. Left.

There's a. Sherry, baby.

You never know.

And usually the neck is.

But you never know.

You don't get never.

And you never know.

You never know.

There's a girl that I've never met.

Never, never.

Never.

When the never.

Been.

Identity.

It didn't finish.

And it never.

Yo, there's no proof.

When finishing an infinitive.

Somebody denies any name and the way.

No.

Hi, guys.

Always playing cards.

Always party.

People don't know.

Ever have time to say hi?

Does it seem like everybody is in a rush?

But at least I have some friends that can say hi to me.

Every day.

You know.

I hate to do it.

I know.

Could have gone on forever.

And I let it run, you know?

Because, number one, we rush too much.

Number two, there's chance.

You know, anybody who's ever been to an old time jam where the people sink into it?

That's what that is, right?

And this is what we're missing in our everyday life.

We've extracted it and we've commodified it, and we've technology ized it.

And so part of my journe with the banjo and the fiddle is to find my way back to that tim before we made it an industry, and it was just part of our lives, you know, when you weren't necessarily a professional musician.

But music was an everyday.

And I'm not saying tha I necessarily want to go back to hoe in the fields or dying of dysentery, but what I'm saying is that there are some things that we've left behind that we can find again.

So thinking about the banjo, also as a spiritual instrument, but I know you notice that right hand.

And.

Right.

Same thing I just got.

I just got a couple extra strings.

But the important one the important ones are the same.

So there's been a lot of really amazing work done, you know, thinking about the banjo, because the banjo, as we all know, has been made into a figure of fun.

It's been mad into an instrument that people, you know, think is is very light.

And it has that.

It can have that, you know, that feeling sometimes that every instrument can, you know, but the banjo actually starts off pretty serious.

This is a painting by was attributed to John Ross, the old plantation from South Carolina.

And peopl look at this and they think, oh, they're dancing, they're having a good time.

But actually, recent scholarship, particularly by Christina Gatti, who literally wrote the book, about the banjo as a spiritual instrument, stuff that I felt instinctually, she's gone into the archives and found and it's kind of amazing.

But this painting, she was able to compare to some dioramas, folk dioramas that had been done by free artists of color in Surinam, which was a Dutch colony.

And and found lots of similarities and figured out that this is a ritual that has that that has survived, you know, that we have this is a picture of something that's going on that was actually, a ritual ceremony that had survived among, enslaved populations in the Caribbean area.

And South Carolina was basically the North Caribbean because a lot of planters left the Caribbean and and started plantations in South Carolina.

So the slavery in South Carolina was very tied to the Caribbean.

And so this idea of the banjo being something that held people together, because when you think about all the different places from Europe, that people are coming right from England, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, France and then within that you've got Catholics, you've got Protestants, within Protestants, you've got Presbyterians, you've got Calvinists, you've got, Quakers, you have, all those terrible people that, the whatever, Cromwell, you know, those folks.

Sorry.

He was horrible.

But anyway, you have all these divisions, you know, already, and then you have people brought from all over Africa under heart, just like unbelievable situations, the crucibl of which I cannot even imagine.

Right.

You're shackled next to somebody who doesn't speak your language, doesn't, you know, doesn't practice your religion, doesn't have your same cultural practices, and then you're dumped into a swam and made to to farm sugar cane, which is if you've never trie to stand in a sugar cane field, I can't even imagine.

And I just had to stand in one for five minutes, let alone work for ten hours a day.

So the banjo became what it what you think of it as a banjo in the Caribbean as all of these different is a syncretic, syncretic, synchronizing, instrument.

All of these different African ethnicities and groups and cultures drew together around the banjo.

It became a very powerful instrument, so powerful that Europeans started to notice it and write about it and ban it and break it and try to get rid of it, you know, but what it was not going to be gotten rid of, and so what happens i that you have lots of Africans brought to the Caribbean and then they then end up going all over the United States.

And then you have internal movement.

So you have people are moving all the time, and they bring their instruments with them and they bring their music with them.

And the banjo starts to spread all over the United States, not just the South.

Some of the earliest sightings of the banj are actually in the Mid-Atlantic and in Rhode Island.

Right.

So it was everywhere, and it was known as a black instrument everywhere.

And then you start getting folk transmission.

All right.

So after a while, the banjo moves from being a ceremonial instrument and it becomes more of a dance band instrumen or an accompanying instrument.

It changes function as it starts to come out of the African diaspora that created it.

So you have, you know, all of these moments of folk transmission between all the different cultures that are spending time together.

There's a lot of black Irish mixing because of where they were working, you know, on the riverine environments.

In Five Points in New York, on the railroad, there were all these places where they were cheek by jowl because they were considered at the same caste, you know.

And so this music and this dance and these cultures start to, you know, you start hearing things and you start want I want to try that or I want one of those, you know, can I, I want a banjo.

How do you make it?

You know, s you have all of this just normal human excitement about music.

And that guy is really good.

I want to learn that tune.

You have that within these fake racial categories that we have created to divide people.

And all of this violence of our history surrounding all of these little moments of, would you teach me that to write?

And then the banjo gets adopted by Cherokee people.

It gets adopted by people who are becoming white in Appalachia, even though they're not, you know, but then they become white, over the years, and it becomes this instrument of, of, of survival.

It becomes something that means something to a lot of people.

And so it becomes an American instrument, which is a beautiful thing.

This is another William Sidney Mount, painting.

So then what happens?

What's a good thing?

So in the early 1800s, you start to see minstrelsy.

I know there's always that pregnant pause after I say that word.

Because it's ugly, you know?

But the important thing to remember about minstrelsy is that it's several things happening at once.

So you think about what these guys are playing.

You have the banjo, the fiddle, the tambo and the bones.

That's the first, that's the first quote unquote minstrel band.

Before this it was just single performers.

And so what minstrelsy really is, is a combination of folk music that's been create by cross-cultural collaboration and exposure between all these different groups of of the new Americans.

Right.

And then you combine that with blackface, which goe all the way back to the 1600s.

And before actually, you know, Othello is a blackface play, right?

The Mask of Blackness by Ben Johnson.

I mean, there's loads of them because Africans were in Europe for a long time, right?

Is history.

You know, I don't have time for that.

But, but it's it comes together and becomes this theatrical event that then takes over American culture for decades.

People are like, this is freaking amazing.

You know, white people putting on blackface, acting like black people, which all of that's pretty terrible.

But then the music that they're playing is actually coming from something real.

So this develops over the 1800s into quite the industry.

So a lot of times people would put their actual face on just to make sure people knew they weren't actually black.

This is some crazy stuff.

Like you just you get used to the crazies stuff when you do this research.

This is part of what I was doing here.

I was going into the archives and looking at sheet music, and there's only so much of these that you can take.

I had to leave, like one day.

I was just like I can't, I can't do it anymore, you know, because there's just so many of these and I could have done many slides based on these, but I just didn't want to because I, you know I've talked about this before, but I can't talk about American musi without talking about minstrelsy at least a little bit.

And let's not forget that eve as the minstrel show went down in popularity and vaudeville kind of took over, right?

Let's not forget that it didn't disappear as Judy Garland.

It was in our movies.

It's the creation of some of our most beloved cartoons.

Why do cartoon characters, why wear white gloves?

That's a whole nother lecture.

So this is the ugly side of it, you know?

But what I've been trying to do is if you just kind of go, this is terrible.

Let's just sweep it all away.

Right?

Then we lose.

Actually, the DNA of of some of the earliest cross-cultural collaboration that we have notated, because that's the hard thing.

What did this music sound like?

Right.

What did we don't have any recordings from 1789.

We have some sheet music.

And so there are these banjo tutors from 1855 and they're from minstrels, you know, they're meant to be on this.

This is a replica of a banjo from 1858.

And s I've been studying these tutors, because the nice thing about a banjo tutor is that there's no words.

It's just tunes.

Because all of these songs are offensive beyond belief, and we don't know it because the ones that we sing as folk songs like oh, Susanna have been cleaned up.

I know, I know people who kno a lot of stuff, who don't know that verse that got taken out of oh, Susanna with the N-word in it, you know, they all had it.

It's very common, you know.

So I was going to play a couple of tunes from that book, becaus in that book I found salvation.

I went, I can hear so many things.

I can hear my people, all of them, you know, white, black, brown.

I can hear all of them in this music.

But I'm going to do them honor and tune.

I have no idea what time it is or how much time I have left.

Oh, I have five minutes.

Really?

Oh, no.

15.

Okay.

I'll make this quick.

So that's just one of so many.

And it's not quite this.

And it's not quite that.

And there's so many of those tunes.

So that's where I'm finding joy is in this music and in the peopl who can help me with this music, you know?

So that's how you do it.

I feel that' how I've been dealing with this, that people ask me all the time, how do you deal with this?

You know, is that I find the thing that brings me joy, and then I just do that a lot.

So I play those tunes a lot.

So sidebar square dance.

Okay, so this is what is and it's called.

Right.

There's a lot of maybe someone stopping here.

It's very cute but that's what that's a square dance is a beautiful example of a square dance.

And a lot of us studied square dancing in middle school as a part of a whole other racist campaign.

Anyway, there's a lot of storie I don't have time to tell you.

But what I've discovered i that everybody used to do this.

It wasn't a provenance of white people or anybody in particular.

It was just what you did, particularly in rural areas.

But then people took that an you would do it in cities, too.

So some people called it frolics, some people called the square dancing.

My mentor, Joe Thompson, who was a black fiddler from North Carolina, that was his function in his community, was playing the music for frolics, and he played for the white dances and the black dances.

And I used to go, Joe, what's the difference?

And he would never say so.

There's one record.

There's one video out there that captures maybe a sense of what it could be like elsewhere as well.

And this is a jewel that I am so glad exists, but there's no sound to it.

You have to imagine it.

So they are square dancing.

I've done all of these moves.

The collars up there at the top, you can see them.

Watch them.

He's saying what?

And then they do it because the collars used to dance before microphones.

Before podiums.

So he's dancing.

Look, he's looking at everyone.

That's called.

That's called in the book.

That's what Joe Thompson would call cut in the book where you're doing individual steps, which self is connected to lots of different African dance styles.

The idea of when you're in place and that's wh he's he's got style.

That dude.

Look at that dude.

He loves it.

And it's a it's like proto jazz band.

They have army instruments, you know.

Or would have been army instruments.

So brass, you've got drums and but they are doing a square dance.

And if this didn't exist, I don't know what I would do with my life.

I'm so happy that it's here, because it's kind of like a missing link, you know, it's proof and it's joyous.

You know?

It really, really is.

So this is available online if you want to like get a little copy for yourself, just put a little link to it whenever you want to feel some happiness.

Oh, and then these people are amazing now.

So you see where a couple dancing is coming in, but they all stil know how to do the square dance.

Yeah.

So borders in dance and music are porous and permeable, and these things existed together, you know.

And there was there wasn't this idea this time was this, and then it's this, and you know what I mean?

And the same with music genres.

So I hate to leave you guys.

So this is we're getting to the end now.

I'm almost finished.

So no panicking.

Because I'm stopping at the recording industry.

So all of this is happenin before the recording industry.

It's incredibly porous back and forth.

This idea of black people are feeling, white people are feeling, you know, the blues is kind of coming out of thi interesting mixture of things.

And then I haven't even really talked about, you know, vernacular music, folk music and then commercial music, professional music.

And it's just a constant back and forth, you know.

So it's a back and forth between songwriters and folk transmission.

It's back and forth between different races and different cultures.

And it's all of this, this combination.

And then comes the money makers.

So you have record companies who want to sell.

So they make a box to sell it.

So this is Mamie Smith, Crazy Blues, the first blues sung by a, a black woman and also just considered the first sort of blues recording in 1920.

And that's Perry Bradford, who wrote it.

She was from Cincinnati.

He was from Alabama.

He had to convince okay!

Records to record her because they were like, no market for this.

And she starts the craze for the black woman singer Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith proving that there indeed was a market for that.

And then you have Vernon Dalhart with the record deal 97, the first million selling record in the United States and the first hit country record.

And you have you start having a creation of what these genres are.

And that's a whole nother multiple sets of lectures.

But Vernon Dalhar was a classically trained singer who recorded lots of things before he hit it big with a country song.

Classical music, dance band music, Hawaiian music.

America is all about opportunity and trying to make a book.

And he made it.

And so is that a country record?

What do we consider country music?

What do we consider blues?

She was a vaudeville singer, right?

This is a composed song.

So the idea, even our vision, was that we know change.

So you have race records, you have hillbilly records, and then that's a whole that's a whole nother lecture, like I said.

So I wanted to leave you on one of my favorite recordings, videos.

This is Louis Blue.

Howard Armstrong, who's a fiddler born in Tennessee, and he his first band was the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, which is where the Carolina Chocolate Drops got our name in homage to hi because he was one of the OGs, and he talks about the fact that he played everything because that's what you did.

That's one of the thing that the Black String Band did was that they played everything because they got hired to do things and they just learned how to play.

He's like, you go to a Chinese party, you learn a Chinese song like jukeboxes, right?

But he was from Tennessee.

And, you know, he went to the city and he played jazz.

And he, you know, he hit it big.

This is this is from, a documentary about him.

Now.

Many people in know, especially those in the 70s, you know, all that black people, you know, black musicians, string band whatnot, clean country music to at least play hold and all that sort of music.

Like I read John Henry and, Cagney and that's really a hard nothing to do.

And.

We did.

But you.

So.

You have a black man playing the fiddle.

White woman playing stride piano.

And they're playing a Ole, Ole, Ole time tune.

If that's not America, I don't know what is.

So this is this is the vision that I'm carried forward, is that we draw strength from each other.

We find similarities with each other.

And as always, the powers that be that separate us, whether it's the aristocracy in the beginning, whether it's corporations whether it's the music industry, because ultimately it's all about money and power and who has it.

So that's why this, I think is really important for today, because obviously these ar narratives that are being used.

Who gets to play country music, who gets to say that their country who gets to be a blues person?

These are being used to divide us.

I see it right now.

So if we know our history, we can go.

You know what?

Yeah, she can sing that.

Yeah, he can play tha ultimately because they want to.

But it's also all of our music.

The banjo is ours, the fiddle is ours, and so is the music and the culture.

And we need we need to know that so that we all own it.

And I also would like to see you all pick up the fiddle and the banjo in the next couple of years.

That's okay.

So I was going to sing something at the end, but I don't know how much time we have for Q&A.

I would rather do the Q&A.

How much time do we have?

You.

Just so I know, nobody's telling me.

Okay.

I'll do a little.

I'll do this because this is part of what I've been doing.

And if you all got to go, I know y'all students can stampede out of here.

That's fine.

Thanks for coming.

This is a tune.

This is kind of part of the work that I've been doing is connecting.

And so this is a tune from the 1780s.

It was published as a Virginia I sorry, a Negro Virginia jig and a boo full of Scottish tunes published in Scotland in the 1780s and 1780s and 90s, called Pompeii.

Runaway Pompeii was a ver common name for an enslaved man.

And so I played this song, play this tune for my friend Nile, who's from Congo, and he said, oh, that sounds like a song I grew up with.

And he sang me the song and he told me what it meant, and I bought that.

Mom told me not to go outside.

For now, my friends have sold me to strangers because I'm strong, because I am beautiful.

So now for me, they go together.

These experiences.

Repeat and I repeat I got my my loa I get BP than not BP than I BP.

Thank God my my love I get BP, thank God I mean I be my dad BP thank God I'm gonna get BP thank God.

But I can sing I BP I'm gonna my backup I by a BP thank God for nice I could go BP thing up.

Oh nice I'm like I see BP down the.

BP.

Doc, the BP Ganga.

My mama.

Love.

I can't be beat under BP.

Donna.

BP.

Donna.

Mama love.

I can't be beat.

Thank God I ain't I be my bad BP.

Thank God I see now BP, thank God but I guessing I BP thank God above I'll go by I BP thank God but nice I keep the go B going up on as I like I see BP down.

Oh.

Thank you so much.