At least two African-Americans who play bluegrass and string music – Tennessee picker Carl Johnson and Carolina Chocolate Drops member Hubby Jenkins – will perform at this week’s World of Bluegrass festivities in Raleigh. And acoustic-music giant Bela Fleck and banjoist/wife Abigail Washburn will likely explore the banjo’s African roots during their duet appearance Friday.
Johnson, 59, a powerful five-string banjo player and singer, grew up in the Virginia mountains. In the segregated South of the 1950s, he came to bluegrass through a family affection for gospel music, a style in which black and white traditions often merge.
“I’ve been listening to it all my life,” Johnson said during a recent interview, referencing the bluegrass stars he heard near Roanoke, Va. “We were lucky because we had Don Reno and Red Smiley on TV in the morning and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs in the evening.”
Jenkins, 28, a New York-based musician in his fourth year with the wildly popular, Grammy-winning Chocolate Drops, also tours the United States and Europe with his solo mixture of old-time string music, blues and ragtime.
“Definitely in the band, and as a personal mission, I want to bring this music forward,” Jenkins said. “We’re trying to spark more interest in the African-American community, not just as museum music, but as music for the people.”
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8 comments:
Wild music, bones in their noses, plates in their lips, all kids of strange things in their culture.
And so it begins.
Yup, blacks INVENTED music. They invented the fiddle and banjo too!
Revisionist history.
"Wild music, bones in their noses, plates in their lips, all kids of strange things in their culture..."
And what about you, Ace?
Your butt is plainly showing here.
Love it....
too bad 3:05 has a small brain....Must be a Obama voter = SMALL BRAIN
Now they'll want us to pay them for music we have obviously stolen from them.
Makes it sound like stringed instruments were somehow of African origin, or that it's some sort of black accomplishment that whites have somehow co-opted.
It's great that they have adopted the instruments to make music. But string music is far more deeply rooted in modern white/European tradition. When was the last time an article has been written, praising European/white people for THEIR tradition?
The media needs to keep the people divided by race to keep themselves in power.
Music is music, does it really mater who plays it? Don't let the inner city thugs color your view of other races. All lives matter.
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