Jack Dappa Blues Podcast

The Banjo is a very popular instrument, and it's popularity is currently growing rapidly. However, there's a convoluted and misconstrued history of this instrument. On today's episode of Jack Dappa Blues Podcast, I speak with Tony Thomas,  African American Banjo Scholar, about the history, origins and commercial explosion of the Banjo. Along with Sule Greg Wilson and Cece Conway, Tony Thomas organized the 2005 Black Banjo Gathering that launched the contemporary Black Banjo revival.   In 2013, “Why African Americans Put the Banjo Down,” Thomas’s contribution to Duke University Press’s Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music became the first scholarly essay on the banjo by an African America to be published.  In 2018 his chapter, "Gus Cannon--'The Colored Champion Banjo Pugilist of the World' and the Big World of the Banjo," appeared in Banjo Roots and Branches, published by Duke University Press, the first scholarly anthology on the banjo.  Tony Thomas’s “The Banj