The "Elevation" of the Banjo in Late Nineteenth-Century America

At the soiree musicale in the spacious home of Mrs. Dundas Lippincott we find the banjo in the heart of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society. The various journals for banjo, guitar, and mandolin players such as S. S. Stewart's Banjo and Guitar Journal (Philadelphia), Gatcomb's Musical Gazette (Boston), and The Cadenza (Kansas City, Mo.) always filled several pages of each issue with short notices like this one, telling of various performances, recitals, or the formation of new clubs. These performance and social contexts were a great change from the typical contexts of earlier in the century: the morally suspect worlds of the theater, medicine show, and barroom. The banjo in American culture has always been a loaded symbol, perhaps more ideologically loaded than any other musical instrument in the United States; it has never been neutral. Its African roots, its African-American upbringing, and its continued association with the poor rural South all place the banjo symbolically within the emotional and political center of old national tensions, in the ambivalent core of American culture. Although the Northern bourgeois flirtation with the

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