Well of Souls is a deep-dive into slavery’s inextricable links to the banjo’s history. Gaddy extensively researched primary sources to uncover the origin, spread, and influence of the banjo from the 18th century to the present, including travel accounts, letters & diaries, and depictions of slave music gatherings in paintings. As someone who grew up with banjo music as part of southern Appalachian culture, this book was an eye-opening corrective to the instrument’s cultural origins.

Chante McCormick’s audiobook narration was magnificent, every syllable perfectly clear and spoken without hesitation on foreign-language terms. My only caveat for the audiobook is that, at times, I found it difficult to translate instrument descriptions into mental images. Some readers may prefer the print version for this reason.

A well researched and utterly fascinating life story of the banjo. For something that has been called many things, simple among them, this book shows the complexity, power, and secret history of the instrument, but does so in a way that is quite entertaining, too.

There is very little information in existence about the origins of the banjo, yet with her novel 'Well of Souls' Kristina Gaddy manages to comb through centuries of historical documentation both in the written word, and the drawn art and create the in-between for those stories, ultimately weaving a masterful tale and exploration of what we know as the Banjo, and the cultural impact on our current and past society.

Well of Souls is set to be published on October 4, 2022. Thank you to W.W. Norton & Company, NetGalley and the author for the ARC.

Having known multiple banjo players over the years, this caught my eye when scrolling through new history books on Netgalley - thanks to them for making this available to me. When I opened it and found that the author is a fiddle player based in Baltimore, it was obvious I was meant to read it.

A weakness of the Netgalley format is that you can't easily read footnotes while you're reading the text - you have to scroll all the way to the back of the however-many-hundred pages are in the document and then find your way back. I mention this because this book is filled with information about African and African American culture and I'd have liked to see where it all came from as I went along.

There is little information in existence about the origins of the banjo - as far as most white people know, it burst upon the scene with the origin of blackface minstrel shows in the 1800s, and maybe they vaguely think it's African in origin.

Gaddy seeks out all possible references to the instrument in historical documents and, importantly, in art. They are few and far between, so to amplify each small bit she creates stories around them, discussing the lives of those who wrote about or painted these long necked plucked instruments made of gourds, and the societies in which they found them in the Caribbean or the US. In this way her book also becomes almost a series of interlinked stories of enslaved people in these areas as well.

Her conclusion is that the banjo was created in the Americas by people of African descent, rather than being actually an African instrument. This is based on physical and design differences between the few known instruments from Africa and the ones collected or represented on this side of the Atlantic. The banjo as we know it today, made from a ring of wood with a head tensioned with mechanisms similar to those on snare drums, appears to have originated in the shop of a Baltimore maker in the first heyday of minstrel shows - every gourd is different, but rings of wood can be made to a standard, allowing the same parts and process to be repeated over and over to meet the sudden demand for these instruments.

Look at a banjo with a clear head, and you'll see the bar that extends from the neck down to the base of the ring - this makes the banjo different from mandolins and other stringed instruments, and is a characteristic inherited from the original instruments home-made with gourds. This arrangement of a bar bisecting a ring has a spiritual significance in early African American religious practice as well, and survives in today's instruments.

While I'm most familiar with the four string banjo, her focus is the five string banjo and she never even refers to the existence of four string banjos - I wish I had some idea how they come into this picture. And occasionally I got lost in the details of instrument comparisons. I'm grateful there were pictures, but it would have been nice to have more to elucidate some of these details.

I tend to become impatient with the style of history writing that does a lot of "September 1755 - Joe Doe stood on the deck of a sloop sailing into the harbor of ..." because I don't need fake personal stories to be interested in history. But I suppose many people do and if this is what it takes to get their attention and/or to build up a tiny bit of actual evidence into a full book, then so be it. The unfortunate side effect of this is that because it's white people who were actually able to leave written records, the story of a black instrument can only be told through the words of white people. This is not Gaddy's fault, it's the way it is. And despite the fact that these people did not always have interest in the well-being of the black people around them, the few instruments available to be seen today exist because they were 'collected,' described, and represented by white people.

The last chapter of the book leaps suddenly from the appearance in the 19th century of something like the modern banjo, to a gathering of African American banjo players in the 21st century, and considers the halting and gradual reclaiming of the banjo by contemporary African Americans like Rhiannon Giddens. Despite the instrument having become mostly associated with white musicians playing pseudo-black music in blackface, its deeper origins lie among enslaved people, as Gaddy clearly shows. It seems that for the banjo, the best is yet to come.