Afropop: The Black History of the Banjo
Specials | Feb 9, 2023
Afropop traces the history of this most American of instruments from its ancestors in West Africa through the Caribbean and American South and into the present, as a new generation of Black women artists reclaim the banjo as their own. Rhiannon Giddens, Bassekou Kouyate, Bela Fleck and more talk claw-hammers, trad jazz, Appalachian folk, African ancestors, and the on-going story of American music, which would be woefully incomplete without a Black history of the banjo.
Airs Friday, Feb. 17, 2023 at 8 p.m. on 93.9-FM and AM 820 WNYC.
