Dan Wikes As I am so to speak one-sided in this research I think it could be interesting to read how one of the attendants to the meeting in Gambia this summer describes it.

Here is what Greg Adams wrote; As a formally trained musician, I did have some trouble reconciling the fact that this music should really be "experienced" and learned through repebreastion as part of its transmission from person to person. But since we were there only for a short time, I felt cornered into doing what typical Western musicians do-- record it, write it out, and try to analyze it. This, of course, didn't always work as the African sense of pulse is sometimes quite different from Western music.

As a melodic clawhammer player, and having spent the last 4 years studying stroke style, I felt comfortable with the akonting o'teck technique. Stroke style, in particular, with its melodic nature, playing multiple notes without alternating between the finger and thumb, leading phrases with the thumb, and the frequent use of triplet figures, helped to make playing the akonting more accessible.

(Note: The terms clawhammer and stroke style are references to down-picking techniques used for playing the 5-string banjo which are remarkably similar to the Jola down-picking technique of playing the akonting, called o'teck literally, "to stroke". Stroke style is considered to be the oldest banjo technique. It was style which the first European American minstrels learned from African American banjo players and subsequently popularized in the 1830s and 1840s along with the banjo itself. Stroke remained the principal banjo style until the advent of the up-picking "guitar style" of finger-picking in the late 1860s. The stroke style survived in the folk traditions of the white and black communities of the rural South where it's called clawhammer, frailing, thumping, and so on. Melodic clawhammer is a modern take on this traditional style which first emerged in the 1970s and continues to be quite popular. End Quote

I have meet a large number stroke style or clawhammer banjo players who have had the opurtunity to play an Akonting. None of them have had any problem to play the Akonting by using the stroke style or clawhammer skill they already have. Well, the high action of the strings has sometimes been awkward for them. Some of them have also learned to play a few of the Jola tunes that of-course by no means are at all exactly the same as the minstrel tunes we play to day. A few Jola tunes we have recorded have similar riffs but I do not claim they are the origin of the minstrel tunes.( Campdown Races and Sourwood Mountain). They just underline the similarites between the Old and New World music.

And as I have said before, the Akonting is not a banjo. The Akonting is an West African spike gourd lute with three strings of unequal length. One upper short string is a thumb drone string. The other two are melody strings. All strings have the same gauge. Most of the melodies are played on the longest string. Basically they always play the songs in a melodic stroke style. The scale is pentatonic. They use drop thumb, pull offs and sometimes execute triplets but no slides. The first minstrel banjo players did not use slides either and rarely the new added fifth bas string.

The banjo with a gourd, skin head, flatted neck, tuning pegs and strings of equal lenght plus one drone string was something that came out of the merge of African and Europen instrument traditions. Between the Akonting and many simular gourd instruments in West Africa that were brought to the New world we have at least one hundred years of development of the banjo, playing styles and tunes in the New World. But the banjo stroke style playing came out of the African traditions by the African-Americans and not by any Europen traditions and it was not a white invention.Taking that hundred years into concideration it is remarkable that so much of the old West African stroke style playing technique have been preserved and transfered into the minstrel banjo playing in the mid 19th century.

Read; - Sinful Tunes and Spirituals by Dena J.Epstein, 1977. ISBN: 0-252-00520-1

- With a Banjo on my Knee, A musical journey from slavery to freedom by Rex Ellis, 2001. ISBN: 0-531-11747-2.

Dan, I know that you try to elevate the minstrel frame Banjo to be largely a white invention by playing down influences from the black people. That mistake has already been made once before. Let us try to avoid what a Boston Newspaper wrote 150 years ago.

" The Dobson Brothers (early minstrel banjo makers) have now elevated the banjo from being a stupid negro invention to be an instrument that can be played in the society of highest fashion and even by a women."

At least they recognized the banjo to be a "negro" invention. However I believe we can agree on one thing. I am pretty sure that if the white people had not taking up the banjo from the blacks around 1830-40 and later enhanced the playing and construction it had most probably gone the same way as it did in the Caribbean region, died out. But because of that historical fact any denial that the basic banjo construction and stroke style playing technique did not came out from one hundred years of black musical traditions is wrong according to my opinion.

We can not even be sure that it was Joe Sweeny who together with Boucher made the first frame minstrel banjos. It could have been something they took from the blacks making tack head cheese box banjos! And who knows how much of the European folk music traditions that was incorporated in the Black music tradition and already existed before the start of the minstrel period. We do not have a clue. But we know that African-American played a lot of European fiddle music already in the 18th century for the slave master«s dancing parties. We also know that the underclbutt white and black had very close contacts in the early settlements in North America. That there were no interchange of musical traditions is hard not to believe. When you try to reveal the history it all ends up in striking circumstances and personal notions. The Akonting o«teck and the minstrel stroke style is just one of these striking circumstances that can not be overlooked. You have your opinion made up but most of the banjo community who are interested in this topic have probably another view. Luckily it does not mean they always agree with everything I say.

Dan, You have to excuse me if I will have some problem to answer all your statements but it take so much time to write these answers for me as English is not my first language. I have to consider the fact that whatever I say or try to explain you will probably require harder evidence than ever exists in this type of research with so little written historical information. I actually do not have the time to spend hours in front of the PC and at the same time try to enter my writings into an upcoming WEB site and my blog site, editing 50 hours of video recordings etc. I propose we leave this discussion for now.

Ulf Jagfors www.myspace.com-banjoulf