In the mid-nineteenth century a new kind of music arose unlike anything ever heard in North America or any other continent. This is the music I play--music made of sounds and rhythms brought here by enslaved Africans, married to Anglo-Irish musical forms, and played on a new instrument, the banjo. The child of this marriage is the first true American popular music.


When I first came upon pre-Civil War pop music I thought, "Why have I never heard this before?" It was so fresh to me. Some of the songs were familiar, but I'd not heard their original versions. Though published and sold through the nascent music publishing industry of the day, the music of that era is now consigned to children's piano lessons and old Warner Brothers cartoons.

But this should not be. These songs express America, an adolescent America--callow, awkward, and uneducated--a nation approaching the terrible moment that wrenched her toward maturity: the Civil War.

"Camptown Races," "Blue Tail Fly," "Buffalo Gals," and dozens of other songs help us understand our history. When Poe published "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1842) and William Henry Harrison was President, Dan Emmett was singing "Old Dan Tucker." Two years later the song swept the nation.

In 1846 the New York Knickerbockers lost the first baseball game on record. The next year the US Army captured Mexico City, Irish refugees flooded New York fleeing the Potato Famine, and Stephen Foster and his friends first performed "Oh! Susanna" at an ice cream saloon in Pittsburgh.

In 1853 Samuel Colt modernized the manufacture of small firearms. Soon the Republican Party was formed and Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass (1855). Four years later Bryant's Minstrels sang the song that set the beat for two armies going to war. It is now known as "Dixie."

Suppose that the music of the Great Depression and World War II was lost--the music of Armstrong, Ellington, and the King of Swing. Imagine that Little Richard's whoops and yelps were not recorded; that the 1950s were remembered, but not the skip in Buddy Holly's voice, the riffs and rhythms of Chuck Berry's guitar, or the incendiary Jerry Lee Lewis. What a loss.

And what would memories of the 1960s and the Vietnam War be without its soundtrack, which was recorded by the bands of the British Invasion, the soul singers of Motown, and numerous psychedelic troubadours? We would recollect turmoil and tragedy.

The personality of a generation is encountered in its music. You will better know the people who lived before the Civil War, and be greatly entertained, when you hear me sing their songs as I play the minstrel banjo!