1880s African American Musician, With Period Banjo, Young Girl, At One With Her Music... Large Print To Be Framed

Treasures from THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COLLECTION at The Willing Mind. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 24 x 16, and consciously formatted to work with a 16 x 24 size frame, or custom framed as you see fit.



This is a delightful image that was printed on a small commercial flyer, in the style though not the proportions of a Victorian trade card.

There is so much to say about the banjo and its place in American culture that, like with all our prints, I started the research process and came across several excellent articles in an instant.

Here are the opening paragraphs from a good solid history by Steve Meier. There are more and certainly newer articles on line about the African American community starting to reclaim the importance of the banjo to America as the African instrument it originally was. All this is exciting to me, because the history is so huge and simply not given its due until we begin to tell the tales beyond just that of modern players, mostly white country and bluegrass players. This is not to lessen the importance of the latter, but 200 plus years of the banjo being nearly exclusively a Black instrument is simply not on anybody's radar.

Here is a portion of Steve's article...

All That Twang, What is That Thang?: A Brief History of the Banjo and It's Major Changes Through Time by Steve Meier
Page 1 2

Though many people think that the banjo is the all-American instrument, born and developed in the good ol' U. S. of A., they're only telling you a partial truth and a very small part of the whole story. What they are thinking of is the 5-string banjo donned by such greats as Earl Scruggs and Bela Fleck. It's the most prevalent type of banjo in many popular styles of American music such as Bluegrass, Dixieland, and Country, so naturally, being exposed to no other types of banjos, one would assume that the 5-string IS the banjo.

In reality the banjo originated hundreds of years ago somewhere on the African continent. These instruments were quite simple and rough - an animal skin tacked on to a hollowed half of a gourd with three or four strings stretched over a planed stick (keep in mind, too, that there were no such things as frets back then). The strings were often made from waxed horsehair or gut. One name for this instrument was the banjar. (Isn't it interesting that the pronunciation of this native-African word from ages ago is still being used by the back-woodsy American folk of today?) … continued on line....................

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

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Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

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