When Beyoncé incorporated the banjo in her song Texas Hold ’Em in 2024, fans and critics alike marveled at the innovative twist. The song opened with rapid string plucking by the Grammy-winning Black banjo player Rhiannon Giddens, and helped challenge the public image of an instrument commonly associated with Appalachian bluegrass. But it’s little known that the banjo is rooted in Black America.
The instrument’s origins harken back several centuries and across the Atlantic Ocean. The banjo’s precursor is the akonting, a gourd-bodied lute found in west Africa. Enslaved and free Africans in the Americas played the banjo for several centuries until the instrument largely disappeared from popular Black music during the Harlem Renaissance. But in recent decades, the banjo has seen a resurgence among Black American musicians who are reclaiming the narrative of the stringed instrument. The story of Black banjo music is a quintessentially American one: a tale tied to transatlantic enslavement, cross-cultural influence and ancestral memories of home.
