…with Wayne Osgood.

The banjo is a uniquely American instrument, developed by enslaved people from Africa, who had played similar instruments in their homelands. Yet in the 1890s almost every college campus featured a well-dressed banjo orchestra, and today the banjo mainly appears in bluegrass, country, and folk music played by White Americans. The banjo’s strange evolution is a lesson in race relations in America that we will follow in music and pictures.