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Article: America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century.(Review)
- Article from:
- The Mississippi Quarterly
- Article date:
- June 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Mississippi State University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century, by Philip F. Gura and James F. Bollman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xvi, 303 pp. $45.00 cloth.
I FIRST HEARD THE SOUND OF THE BANJO WHEN I was a small boy. It was Earl Scruggs on the Beverly Hillbillies theme and it rocked my world. Thirty-five years later I still find it hard to explain to people why a New York City kid fell in love with the banjo. Something about the sound spoke to me. Everyone's impression in New York was that banjo was something white people from the South (like the folks in the movie Deliverance) played at Ku Klux Klan rallies. Despite the stereotypes I ...