How much influence did African Americans have in the creation of country music?

The fraught history of the "race/hillbilly" divide has been covered several times on this sub, though /u/hillsonghoods will probably be better equipped to point to answers than I am. But suffice it to say that there are several overlapping features connecting music made by black and white musicians in the beginning of the 20th century (Nick Stoia has a great article in Music Theory Spectrum on the "common stock of [chord and mealodic] schemes" that crossed the race/hillbilly record divide that is worth checking out), and at least part of the story involves this complex and overlapping set of practices was cleaved into two segmented domains: a black one that we might now call the blues, and a white one we now call country music. In many ways, it is a divide that was constructed, not just by the recording industry, but also by the activity of folklorists like Cecil Sharp, who went hunting for English Ballads in the Appalachian Mountains explicitly to establish a white, anglo-saxon foundation for "real" American folk music. Because of this long process, the complexities of country music's origins are not super obvious to most of us. But to get just one sense of it, you might check out Alan Lomax's classic documentary film Appalachian Journey, which, though far from perfect, does give a pretty good sense of some of the racial cross-currents that run through Appalachian music, and hence, a good chunk of what we think about as Country Music (in particular, the fiddlers at 26:24 launches a pretty decent discussion of black contributions to Appalachian music)

What I will focus on today is perhaps the most tangible trace of "blackness" that remains in country music: the banjo. The banjo is quite interesting as a racial signifier, because today, its connections to country music and bluegrass tie it to "white trash" (think about the opening scene of the movie Deliverance), but it is also clear that the instrument traces its roots to slaves brought over from West Africa, and is similar in structure and design to native instruments from that region like the kora. Thus, the banjo simultaneously seems to be a quintessentially "black" and a quintessentially "white" instrument. What gives? How did the instrument so radically "change hands" so to speak?

In a story that echoes many other aspects of black-white musical exchange, minstrelsy has a large role to play here. But the story is more complicated than it first appears. The most familiar narrative, thoroughly argued by Winans in the 1970s - has reconstruction-era minstrelsy adopting the banjo as a racist prop, as a symbol of blackness accompanying other racist blackface depictions in the show. This narrative takes the minstrel show as the primary way that a black instrument entered white hands - indirectly by exposing white audiences to and directly by giving white musicians an incentive to learn it as part of blackface routine - and, once in those hands, it stayed and developed an independent life. In short, the narrative goes black banjo -> minstrelsy -> white banjo.

Research by Cecilia Conway has challenged this simple narrative. Conway shows that reports of white banjo players in mountain regions predates the spread of minstrel shows into the region, and hence the tradition of white mountain banjo playing cannot have its roots solely in those shows. Instead - relying on ethnographic and historical data from the “Sugar Grove” region at the intersection of North Carolina, Tennesse, and Virginia - Conway argues that the banjo entered white hands through mutual exchange between white and free black musicians beginning around 1830. Thus, the banjo became one of several instruments (also the guitar and the violin) to cross between white and black hands in a region that, due to the predominantly poor and landless status of individuals of all races, was less racially charged in the era preceding Reconstruction. Extending Conway’s argument, Farmello recasts the effect of minstrelsy on the banjo as follows: by wedding the banjo to ungainly stereotypes, black communities began to view the instrument as a racist prop, thus driving such communities away from the instrument. Minstrelsy thus did not introduce banjo playing to white musicians, but rather affected a removal of the black community from an ongoing black/white banjo tradition. Such a process of segregation was amplified by Reconstructionist politics and eventually inscribed in the “race/hillbilly” divide of record labels, thus affecting a collective amnesia as to the Banjo’s origins and cementing the idea of the banjo as a quintessentaially white instrument.

The story of the banjo is a story that echoes many of the trends in black/white musical exchange from the end of the civil war until the early recording boom of the 1920s. Perhaps the earliest country music solo icon - Jimmie Rodgers - is deeply, deeply engaged with many of the same ways of making music that the blues musicians who fell on the "race" side of the spectrum utilized as well (see Jocelyn Neal's great book on Rodgers for more on this). There have always been musicians of all races, especially in the poor or working class strata of society, who learn from each other. But various cultural processes have gradually separated out this sort of raw primordial soup of musical material into distinct genres that, once separated, acquired ever more distinctive audiences with distinctive listening attitudes and desires and, thence, ever more distinctive musical features that distance the once closely-relayed phenomena. The banjo, like country music itself, emerged from a complex network of cultural exchange that has become submerged, "whitewashed" if you will. The banjo, like country music itself, seems to us like a "white" instrument, but that identity masks a far more complex historical picture!