Justin Robinson

Partial Transcript: My name is Justin Robinson. I’ve been playing music since I was a kid, seven or eight years old. I started off playing violin. I grew up in a very musical household. My sister and mother both are musicians. We grew up playing mostly classical music, some religious music, somewhat. And we grew up listening to like ‘60s top forty and hip-hop. That’s kind of the blend of what we listened to. And we listened to a lot of country—like ‘90s—late ‘80s country, country male singers.

Partial Transcript: What led me to explore the African American string band tradition was just an interest. I’m curious about what things—what people did before right this second. And—yeah. I’m a musician and so it was music that I wasn’t super familiar with growing up. Besides like bluegrass and the public access stuff growing up. And I got interested apart from any—excuse me, apart from any racialized lens and I just thought the music sounded interesting. I later found out more information about its history.

Partial Transcript: That’s a good question. Okay, first we have to talk about how the Southern Appalachians were settled. So it was settled by a combination of people coming from—people always came over land. And so there was no way to get from the sea to what is west of North Carolina or eastern Tennessee or eastern Kentucky by other than walking or taking some sort of hoofed conveyance. So people landed on the coast and then they moved inward. There’s no other way to do that. And so people were—all along the way—were meeting with people. They may have stayed a particular place for a particular time in the East and then they continually moved west. Some came down from Pennsylvania, came in through Pennsylvania, and then traveled the—I can’t even say it—the great wagon road down. Or nations—they, yeah. That road still exists by the way. I’ve driven on it nearly my entire life. In Charlotte, it’s called Nations Ford.

And so folks came over land. And so they had—there’s this myth that somehow British people were dropped from an airplane and landed in what is currently Knoxville. They didn’t. It took a long time for them to get from one place to the next. And so they were interacting the entire time. They didn’t go there and just get stuff. They were picking up stuff the entire thing. It’s kind of like a lint ball. They were just picking up things the entire time. When they got there they also didn’t stay isolated. People were always moving back and forth through there.

Partial Transcript: Well, it meant immediately that you had a blended culture. People loved to keep things very neatly and discreet boxes. So this idea of a blended culture is kind of just how humans are. It’s really more of a study of humanity. Everything—if you back far enough is fusion, right? The Scots-Irish, whatever that title is, is a mixture of folks in and of themselves—people who would have considered themselves English, by the way. Let me clarify that. Those people would not have called themselves Scots-Irish. That’s a term that is almost only used in the United States. I have been to the area where those people come from. Those people are called Ulster Scots or Northern Irish. And they are loyal to the Queen. They use British money, they were loyal when they left, and this is one of the reasons why they were settled there in the first place.

So these ancient tensions between Ireland—Northern Ireland and the Republic have these implications in the quote-unquote New World. So those people would have considered themselves British, okay? Though they were of this sort of—of this, you know, Irish-ish kind of stock—Irish, Scottish stock. And so—well, you already have the blended culture. You have these folks who were Scottish origin, who were loyal to the British crown—who were then moved to Ireland. So they were stuck inside—they were like a colony within a colony. And then they moved all the way across the sea where they met with all these other Europeans—lots of Germans, French people, Dutch people, depending on where you were, the Swiss. And then you meet all these Native American groups everywhere from the coast of—the East Coast into the frontier, which there are many groups. The Catawba, the Chowan, the Tuscarora, the Yamasee, the—all those folks.

And then you have all those people coming into contact with enslaved Africans who are from all over the eastern—all over the western Africa and some in deeper parts of Central Africa. So you have this sort of cauldron of people all meeting together at this one spot sort of thinking about—well, maybe unwittingly—thinking about and not thinking about how their cultures are interacting with each other. Yeah, so it’s a whole bunch of stuff is happening.

Partial Transcript: What did Cecil Sharp leave out of the story? Well, he left out all kinds of stuff. He was leaving out, of course, all of the African contributions, all the Native American contributions and was focused on a really particular thing that he wanted to highlight. That’s called white supremacy. And so I don’t know if he would call himself that—maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t—but that’s what that is. That is taking sort of—whitewashing all of this stuff to make it look like as if—these Elizabethans got stranded in Boon, North Carolina. That’s not what happened.

Also, this is from—partially—this is partially ignorant. Had he gone to other places in North Carolina—let’s say, the Sand Hills—he would have encountered those same songs sung by the same—people of a different stock, right? These people were not necessarily Scots-Irish. It was firmly folks who draw their ethnic heritage from the Anglo-Saxon tradition and some from the Highland Scots, which is a totally different set of folks—would have been singing very similar songs. There’s all kinds of publications about it. I found myself—like I heard you sang this, that you were talking about now. And I just started to do some digging because I’m a curious person. And some of the stuff—some of the songs recorded by North Carolinian folklores have these same ballads that are in their mountains all the way on the coast.

And so what you’re looking at is, you’re looking at a British—you’re looking at British traditions transplanted to the United States. And folks thought that the romantic idea of them not being tainted by Indian blood or tainted by being around a bunch of enslaved Africans is an attractive one if you have—if that is your agenda. Because they could have gone to Rockingham, North Carolina. They could have gone to Edenton, they could have gone to Charlotte, they could have gone to any of those places—and other people did—and found those same songs.

Partial Transcript: Oh, there were—I mean, banjo playing, fiddle playing, all the dancing. The—what is now known as buck dancing or clogging or whatever, which had its roots in—it’s so intermingled that we actually don’t—we can’t tell you the roots of that kind of dancing. Who knows? It’s got Indian roots, it’s got African roots, it’s got British roots in the British Isles as well. It’s not any one thing and that stuff is harder to categorize I would say. He left that out because he wanted to paint a particular picture and you could paint that picture if you focused on the ballad solely, yes.

Partial Transcript: The role of music in communal life—I think it was a couple things. One, folks didn’t have CD players. They didn’t have iPods and whatall, MP3s, and Spotify and all that other stuff. And people like music. I mean, it’s kind of fairly simple. So what I think about it is that everywhere you hear music now—in grocery stores, in airplanes, in wherever—at a point, there had to be a human live person playing it in cars, all that stuff. And so people have always wanted that. They didn’t have a good way to not have a human to be in all those spaces. And so music was a part of what—just part of their everyday lives.

After they were done working they would have just sat around and played because people like music. And if you didn’t play it, there would have been no other way to hear it. It’s just really—it seems so simple. There was no other way to hear it. There was no other way to enjoy music unless somebody was playing it. And so it would have been a really big part of folk’s lives. But of some communities—because music is not important in every community. And some communities it would have flourished more than others for whatever reason and it usually had to do with families. So usually you’d have a community that had—really, all you needed was one musical family—one or two musical families and that would be your entertainment for—that could supply the community.

This is true all over the world by the way, not just in ancient America. And by ancient, I mean a hundred years ago. These musical gifts and musical proclivities or whatever of the community usually came out of family lines. And rarely was it just like a bunch of old people sitting around drinking to—it was that too, but it was also connected through familial connections.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, and so the way that it’s—the role that it played in work would have been the way that I think people still use music today—is that if you’re working and it’s something sort of mindless enough that you don’t have to—can be distracted enough to listen to music, then you want to hear music. And so after corn shuckings or after some large agricultural labor that required the entire community’s support, the person who’s doing it may reward the folk with a dance or with white liquor or with pies or with kisses or whatever, whatever it was, which would have been a good incentive at the end of the whole, long bit of work for you to continue.

You knew that something fun was going to happen at the end. And like I said, if nobody was playing music, you did not hear it. It just would have been impossible and so it would have been a great treat to be able to do that. I think it’s actually a beautiful balance between all of this hard work and then all of this fun at the end. It’s kind of—it balances those two things out in this weird kind of a way.

Partial Transcript: Well, I don’t know about that. But I think people have always sort of treated musicians as—it depends on the community. But musicians back then had a—could have a bad reputation because there was also very much the religious element who said that secular music should not have been played if it’s not going to praise the Lord then it’s sort of—the music of Beelzebub. So there’s that and that would have been a large thing that kept a lot of people from playing or going to dances or whatever because of that sort of—the immorality of it in some people’s eyes. So it depended where you were, as to what role those people had in the community. Now, those same people that were often railing against it could be seen tapping their toes probably unwittingly or unwillingly.

Partial Transcript: Okay. So the transmission of the banjo instrument and its music to what is largely seen as a—as white folk’s music at this point. So the banjo comes from what is now Senegal and Gambia and parts north. I always called the instrument Senegalese instrument because it basically is. People still play. It’s antecedent today. If you do a couple modern things or Western things to their instrument, the akonting because lots of the names in different communities. You get the sound that sounds exactly like Clawhammer banjo. I mean, it really does. It’s sort of frightening. You can go look on YouTube at how close—there is no other instrument that has surfaced as closer to that sound now.

And so until we have different evidence, I would say that that’s a pretty darn good bet. At the same time, when this country was being—the United States was being founded, folks were being brought over to do skilled labor. Despite what folks—the other narrative is that folks were just coming over to hoe cotton fields and whatever. That was much later. In the beginning, folks were coming over as skilled labor. They were bringing blacksmiths and they were bringing horsemen and they were bringing rice growers and they were bringing all kinds of other things. Metal workers, dyers, and people who knew how to work with indigo. All that stuff people were doing in Africa beforehand.

So this rice cultivation—rice was cultivated and domesticated—the West African rice. There are two species of rice. The West African one was domesticated in what is currently Senegal, Gambia, that region. So—and the banjos and the akonting is a farmer’s instrument. It is the worker day instrument. It’s not a classical music instrument like the N’goni or the kora or anything. So these people were brought over because of their rice farming expertise and with them would have come this instrument. The instrument comes from that region, so does the rice, so do the people. It’s pretty—the package is actually quite nice. So you have this folk instrument. An instrument of the—a farmer’s instrument back there, becomes the farmer’s instrument here, becomes associated strictly with black people clearly, right. Even though you have now a whole bunch of black people coming from other places that are not Senegalers. You’ve got folks coming from what is now Ghana and Mali and Angola and Nigeria and Karun. It’s people who have not seen these instruments but have seen something maybe similar to them.

So it starts to evolve into this black instrument. White slave owners and white folks who were not slave owners but who were familiar some sort of slave societies—find this music interesting. If not good interesting—at least, they began to mimic it, learn the songs, co-opt it, blacken their faces, take it to Europe, play for a bunch of white audiences in Britain and Australia and all over the place, do the same thing here in the United States. It starts to become associated slowly, slowly, slowly with white folks. So this is—it starts off as pure cultural appropriation. Nothing more than that. And then later the appropriation and transformation is so complete that it seems as if black folks have never had anything to do with the instrument. It just seems like an instrument that has always been in the hands of white people forever and ever amen, okay.

This—the banjo is the example to me, of America’s first successful attempt at completely co-opting black people’s art. Maybe it’s not the first one. It may actually be something else. It might be indigo dyeing, it might be rice growing, it might be anything. But those are sort of more worker day—I guess, I’m speaking for art. This is the best and first example, I would say, and this continues on today, right. You have people—white people getting famous all over the place for playing black music. This is not any different than it is today. This, I would say, set the stage for our current system.

Partial Transcript: I mean, I don’t know. It’s hard to say—the history of minstrelsy, it’s hard to say the reasons why. Was it a critique of slavery? Was it not? Was it—people just thinking it was fun or interesting or sensational? Or I don’t know. I would imagine it’s probably some combination of all of those things. Yeah, it’s hard to say. We don’t really have enough information—enough evidence to say one thing or another. What I do know is that people go extremely famous and extremely rich from—

So people got extremely famous and extremely rich by doing this. And after that happens all bets are off for the reasonings, right. The context goes out the window, the original social part of it goes out of the window, and then what you just have is commerce. That happens all the time. And so what—despite its origins, it is quickly—despite of, or because of, depending on how you look at it—it quickly just became a money-making endeavor, so much so that black people started doing it. I mean, because it made money. It’s because what people wanted to see. People liked it. For whatever racist reasons those are, people liked it. And so it then became a thing that people just started doing as a matter of course.

Partial Transcript: Well, so the way that it opened the door for black folks to get into the—let’s be clear—for black folks get into the white entertainment field, was to do this thing that white people had then made popular by—the meta-ness of this is intense, right. So you have white folks imitating black folks for whatever reason, and then you have black folks imitating white folks imitating black folks. It gets crazy real fast. And so it did give folks an opportunity, right, to be able to express themselves? I’m using that—there’s a question mark in there. It allowed them to make money doing— (phone buzzes) I’m sorry. It allowed black folks to make money doing something other than chopping cotton or cutting down trees or whatever. So in that sense, it’s a little bit more liberating. From the soul-crushing aspect of having to do that every night—I don’t know about the term liberation.

But it allowed them to make much more money doing less—much less hard physical, manual labor. And so, was that good? Well, I don’t know. Maybe. They would probably say that it would be. The opportunity cost of that may have been kind of high. But what you have also—this also sets the stage, that because this is breaking through across and over, right—as people call into a white audience—you had to do the things that white audiences enjoy. And so some of the songs written in the later 1800s sort of after slavery is over or just as it’s starting to end and black folks can actually get things like copyrights and be—have their work published. They wrote some of the worst songs. The era of the coon song, right. Some of the worst minstrel type songs actually written by black people. Horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. I can’t say that word enough times. Just awful stuff. The stuff that make your eyelashes curl were written by black people.

So they were taking this art form again, of which they were submerged in and really just going to the max. Like just taking it and making it as racist and as crazy and as stereotypical as possible. And people still liked it. So I don’t know what that says about the audiences, but—

Partial Transcript: Yeah. So in tandem while this stuff with minstrelsy is happening and mostly white folks and some black folks are making some money by playing for audiences and playing professionally as professional musicians, what is happening on the majority of the time is that people are just playing this music that is indigenous to them. Excuse me. Just playing music that is indigenous to them, just in their households or for their own local communities. And so—at least I know from Joe Thompson, who was my mentor, he grew up and was born in the 1920s sometime, maybe the 1930s. For his community here in central North Carolina where I am now, he was playing for dances and his young manhood. For white dances and for black dances. Everybody knew the same music. The tunes weren’t really that different. It was a small community. You couldn’t have known that many things.

And I don’t mean that to disparage him but he sort of stayed in his own community. It’s not like he was sort of traveling around as a professional musician. He worked on a farm. And so your sphere of travel was pretty limited. And so everybody would’ve known more or less the same songs. And so people were just sort of plunking along as they had been. But they weren’t getting recorded very often. And that’s the difference between that and say, folks in the mountains. Because the folks in the mountains had a real—a marketable story, right, that is beneficial if you racialize it. The record companies figured this out very quickly and they marketed all these different records to different ethnic groups.

Now, most of these people were playing mostly the same stuff. A lot of the stuff was very similar, which is why a lot of the string band musicians really didn’t get recorded. They played them a couple times and people were like, oh, this is either too rough or it’s too similar to what we’re already recording for these quote-unquote hillbilly artists. So nobody was paying them much mind. And so once the community outgrew it and just moved on to other things—blues and whatever else, that was the end of it. It sort of vanished without much of a fight. Because there was no commercial market for it or it wasn’t marketed commercially.

Partial Transcript: We don’t know much about the music that predates blues and jazz. One, this is also a period when nothing that black people were doing for themselves was recognized, right. It just didn’t matter. Nobody was paying attention to any of that stuff, other than the occasional traveler who was moving through the South and happened to write it down. People just didn’t care. And so—and especially if it sounded anything like what their white counterparts were doing. That wasn’t interesting. This was about making things seem distinct, not about highlighting the sameness. And so jazz sounds—there’s nothing else that sounded like jazz. In the 1900s—in the early 1900s and 1920s there was no white people playing anything like that unless you were deeply embedded in the community in New Orleans. And so that sounded— that would have sounded so different to that years of a New Yorker, to the ears of somebody who lives in Peoria, somebody who lived in New Mexico. It would have been so different sounding.

But hearing a bunch of fiddles and banjos would not of been that different sounding to them. And especially on the record. You can’t tell what race anybody is. So why would you bother? You bet all the sounds already taken up by this market—this white hillbilly market. You wouldn’t—it’s not that exciting from a marketing standpoint. And so if your marketing is based on ethnicities and races, then you need to make them seem different, not similar.

Partial Transcript: So the record companies, they asked to record—especially a lot of black players. They recorded them playing lots of stuff. If you hear enough of this sides of some—they played all kinds of stuff. String band tunes, old country tunes. What they released to the general public was the weirder sounding stuff to them. Blues, whatever. On the flipside, white folks were also recording blues and all that stuff. They did not release that either, right. So this is very much a concerted effort by these record companies—and remember, record companies were just starting. They were furniture companies before, or some of them were. The recording industry was brand new. And so they were just figuring out—and what they figured out was that this ethnicity thing really worked well. And so it wasn’t just black and white folks they were doing this to.

Greek records got sold to Greek people, Italian records got sold to Italian people, Irish records to Irish people. This was a thing about ethnicity. And so those singers could have been singing other things anyway. Also, they would have recorded the things they thought were going to sell the best to their own community. Not reflective of the musical landscape, just reflective of commerce.

Partial Transcript: I don’t know what you mean by luminaries other than just you mean, practitioners. Because I don’t think too many people know about these people. Okay. Yeah, so most of the folks who were recorded playing fiddle and banjo music, black folk—there was just a smattering of them during that big recording phase in the ‘20s and ‘30s. So Lesley Riddle, who taught and traveled with the Carter family, A.P. specifically—wasn’t recorded until later. Though he was certainly a part of that whole scene. But his name is left out mostly. It’s stuck in there occasionally now. But the people know the Carter Family but nobody knows Lesley Riddle.

Lesley Riddle—there was Etta Baker and her family. Etta Baker’s in Morganton sort of Gamewell area of—in Caldwell County. And her along with her father’s family and some of her in-laws were all musicians or a lot of them were. I don’t remember all of their names. So she had a cousin named Bebe Reed. I think her father’s name was Boone, Boone Reed. I think there was somebody—a Theofilis in there somewhere, which is a great name. These are banjo players, guitar players. And then you have lots of people here in the Piedmont. There was Dink Roberts, who was a banjo player, erroneously called black in many sources.

Partial Transcript: Dink Roberts was—so that was his adopted name. He was born an Enik 00:38:45 (???) (inaudible) Enik is a prominent name or common name among Occaneechi community in Pleasant Grove, North Carolina. The people who originally sort of quote-unquote discovered him—he was not living in that community at the time but those are his people. And so he was sort of misidentified as black I would say. But he’s a part of the Occaneechi—what is now the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. At that time, they were not that. Though, this is who these people are. They were not that officially and they are now. They’ve gotten their North Carolina recognition.

So he was here in the Piedmont. John Snipes, banjo player. Who else? Jamie Alston. So many folks. People who—as we talk to people more, you get to the, oh, my father played banjo, my grandfather played banjo, my uncle played the banjo. There are many more people whose names I don’t know. Sid Hemphill in Mississippi. Some of the recordings are recording put out by Smithsonian called Black Appalachia. It’s got some great stuff on it. Some beautiful music. So there aren’t many, but the ones that are there are often kind of amazing. Because in fact, they do sound quite different than their white counterparts. What people saw as the same before, now actually looks kind of different or sounds different rather. So, yeah.

Partial Transcript: So Joe and Odell Thompson were cousins. They’re both passed on now. But they both grew up playing music in that same little farming community outside of Melville, North Carolina. They grew up playing some with each other, some not. Both their fathers played, their fathers were brothers. Joe’s father played and his grandfather played. And so it was a musical family. The boys ended up playing a lot of music. And Odell and Joe really didn’t play too much together until they were older. Folklores encouraged them to both play together. And they hadn’t been playing together that much before.

They had both—I don’t know if they both go into the World War II or not. I know Joe did. And they raised their families and so during that time people just stopped playing music. And then they came back to it after they were done working—their working lives were over and they started playing music again. Yeah, great musicians. I had the pleasure and honor of being able to study with Joe in the last maybe five, six years of his life. Odell was—had already gone before I got to meet him. So it was a great privilege to be able to study with somebody who—for whom—he felt a lot of affinity for this music, but who was not a professional musician. This is something he did because he just liked it and it was part of his life growing up. That gave the music a real context that somebody who plays music professionally can’t quite give you.

Partial Transcript: Oh, absolutely. I think that so many more people know about Joe Thompson now, after the Chocolate Drops success, fans would have never known about him before. Like there would have been no reason to know about Joe. I mean, other than pure historical curiosity. And so I was—again, I feel honored to have been able to be a part of that legacy. I have my own musical students now who I teach music to, whose Joe’s music gets to live on and change through them, which feels like the ultimate—it feels like the ultimate gift to be able to give to Joe and to Joe’s father and Joe’s grandfather. Because their musical legacy lives on. The chain is unbroken, which feels amazing.

Partial Transcript: So Black Banjo Conference—I don’t know how it came together because I was just a participant. I mean, I’ve heard the stories, the afterward stories. I’m assuming that people who were interested in academic and sort of sonic landscape of what Black banjo sounded like got together. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. That’s what happened at the conference certainly. At least, the time that I was there. And the fruits of that were people got to meet each other, got to talk to each other, who thought they were in their individual silos. And also, it was where the Chocolate Drops met each other. And so folks got affirmed and—it’s like any little group of nerdy like whoever’s who think they’re alone and are in their basement where nobody else cares about what they’re doing. When they find each other they get excited.

That’s true for anything. People who are into ham radios or flying helicopters—flying, remote-controlled helicopters or entomologists or whoever, right. They kind of get excited when they get together and this was the banjo—the Black banjo’s version of this.

Partial Transcript: So what did nonwhites contribute to folk dancing—what we think of as square dancing and clogging? I’m not sure. It’s quite difficult to—and my unsureness is not to say that there was nothing. That’s not what I mean by that. I mean just that—that I’m not sure. The human bodies can only move a certain set of ways, right. So you’ve got to get the same thing replicated all over the place. You’re going to see that happening lots. Like the human body—you know, there’s no people on earth who’s like necks can turn around 360 degrees. So you’re not going to see that dance anywhere. Everybody mostly has the same physical limitations. So what I would suspect happens is that all these folks came together and they saw the things that were familiar to them, which is what people do anyway, right. You’re like, oh, I know that. It’s kind of like this thing that I used to do or whatever.

And so what you have is these people meeting each other seeing things that were familiar to them, to each other and those things sort of blending together. Now, what I will say is that there is also—we also have to remember that white culture is dominant in this time—excuse me—in all aspects of life pretty much. And so there would have been pieces of that that like—the fact that clogging and these buck dances, these folk dances don’t really bend at the waist that much. So we have to attribute a lot of that to—at least from African dances—we have to attribute that to, you know. Because that’s seen as like to erotic or erogenous or something like that, right. And so parts of that seems like certainly a very British thing. But maybe a Cherokee had, or Catawba or whoever had similar ways of thinking about it. We don’t know.

I mean certainly, there’s nothing to say that African folks wouldn’t have had various groups who thought the same thing. Like bending at the waist is erotic. Stop doing it. So we don’t know. This is the thing. It’s really difficult to know. And because there are no videos of what people were doing in 1612 in Somerset, England to compare that to what folks who are later doing in Appalachia. It would be—I suspect it would be real different though.

Partial Transcript: Well, what happens when we lose the cultural context? Something different happens. You get a new context. A new context will be put on top of it. Yeah, the context is always shifting. And so I actually think that for folks who are playing traditional music in western North Carolina right now our out of time, right. Those folks are not playing it in the same context in which it originated. It is always shifting. I actually had a problem with that when I was on the road, is because the context was so different than the context that I have learned and appreciated that I really couldn’t handle it. That doesn’t mean that it’s inappropriate. I didn’t want to do it.

I can’t speak to anybody else’s appropriateness. So what happens when somebody from Slovenia listens to a ballad from Western North Carolina, they will form their own context around it. It may be totally wrong and I don’t know that I care so much. That’s how new musical genres are born. If you ever heard Ska music, right, from Jamaica—I think it’s Jamaica. The history of that is interesting. They were listening to R&B records on the radio from the United States but the radio was not so great. The signal was not very strong. It was weak. And so what they heard was like these sort of distorted versions of American R&B music. And if you listen to early Ska music you’re like, well, this kind of sounds like something I know. But it’s off somehow.

And so not only were they listening to distorted versions of American music, they had their own music through which they put that—their own musical lens through which they put that through. And you come up with something totally different that has a totally different cultural context now that I had when those people originally encountered it. That sounds fine. I think I’m less concerned about context and more about appropriation. Appropriation in the sense of being able to make a whole bunch of money and then claiming that the context is either the same or close enough. That’s the problem I would say. Context is a moving target. Yeah, that’s what I would say.

Partial Transcript: It’s important to remember all the contributions because it keeps—I think it can keep folks engaged, right. Different folks in different sectors. Like why would a black kid who is living in Knoxville be in any way concerned about banjo music? There is no good reason for them to be concerned about that unless they know something about the history. Now, I would say that the history is important as it gives you a place to start if you want to find out more information. The history alone is not enough. It needs to be living and walking around. Or that somebody can put those legs and voice and breath to it. It also is an anti-white supremacy tool in the sense that if we were to believe all the narratives that we hear—I’m speaking to you now as a black person—as a black person who grew up in the South. Black people would have done exactly nothing.

And so I know that that’s not true. But without some historical records to back it up other people may not believe me. I mean, I don’t care so much me. But some other black kid who was twelve right now and needs this, right. And needs to do a report or is interested in this for his own or her own reasons, needs a—I don’t know, something to hitch their wagon to.

Partial Transcript: I say what folks would lose and that—like I don’t expect people to run out and go grab a banjo just because they learn the history. That would be silly. I think what you would lose though if you didn’t know that or if this is somehow kept from you, is that the breath of history first of all, is long and wide. And that folks of colors, and I don’t speak specifically of black folks in this moment—and even to take that one step further and say, folks who were brought here to be enslaved, their contributions were many and varied and are splattered all over what we now know as America. That is also true for indigenous folks too as I know it. And what we need is counter-narratives. And history is sometimes a counter-narrative, but it’s not always the most convincing one. But it gives you a place to hang your hat, hitch your wagon to get started, I would say, to be able to have some alternative facts, if you will.

Partial Transcript: Oh, mostly what I learned was obviously there was music before there was anything called the Appalachian Mountains. And they’ve been playing it for 13,000 years and dancing for 13,000 years. It’s not quite clear what the influence was. But what’s really fascinating is this parallel tradition, is that musical people tend to adapt to whatever music is around. And so they would play their ceremonial songs around the fire or what have you and then they would pick up the banjo and—or the fiddle and some of the most outstanding musicians of the quote unquote Scots-Irish traditions were Cherokee performers. And so there wasn’t—they didn’t distinguish it. Obviously, they would segregate out which things you do when. You don’t do in a sacred ceremonial Cherokee activity—you don’t pull out the banjo, just like you wouldn’t in church. So that was part of what I learned.

There’s some folks who think the Cherokee stomp dance and the square dance—there’s some influence there. Although, there’s a lot of people who dispute that. But certainly, as you said, we all influence each other. We can’t not. And so there’s an evolution. But what’s always fascinating of course is that, we can’t possibly imagine a cultural legacy lasting 13,000 years. I mean, we live in this country today where we knocked down McDonalds to put up Burger Kings. We don’t have any concern for history and what was there before. And so it’s hard to even wrap your mind around something that’s been around for tens of thousands of generations and it’s still here. Without—even with all that was thrown at them from disease to decimation and maybe the worst of all—acculturation—is still there. So it’s fascinating. I could spend the entire film there but I can’t. So maybe one day.

Partial Transcript: The only thing I would say is that these traditions are in fact, unbroken, right. The fact that I can play this Senegalese instrument that has been played for God know how long and is original and its form has changed so little over that time—is not totally different than saying this 13,000-year on uninterrupted piece. That’s not different than that. And that’s powerful. I mean, because these things stretch under the ocean and under the mountains and everywhere even though all this stuff has been heaped upon them. Their roots are much deeper than that. And so, yeah. These things are unbroken and it’s important to save that as a—I mean, certainly a change but the change is not the thing. The thing is that these things continue to exist and that folks continue to interact with them in a way that makes sense for them today

Partial Transcript: I think it has some personal things. I think I enjoy knowing that. I think it’s important for me as a—I don’t know if it’s the banjo in particular or any of the stuff. Just knowing that first of all, black people have been fly for so long and have been doing amazing stuff for so long and that people are enthralled by this music and have been enthralled by our musical contributions for so long, is kind of awesome. Like I’m an adult. But for kids to know this from your whole life means that your cultural lens may be different. And there are kids now who because of the Chocolate Drops, have known this their entire lives.

People who were like twelve and younger don’t have any questions about this. Some of it. And so that’s amazing. And so what it does—it may not be the single thing or the thing that people care about—it just builds this body of knowledge of how creative folks are and have been in the past. Creativity is not something new or that we’ve cultivated in the twentieth century somehow.