The Banjo Project is a digital museum for the history of America’s quintessential instrument, from its African roots to the present day. Combining interactive narratives, online archives, and museum browsing experiences, it features a wealth of curated media and primary source content on the banjo’s colorful and contested history. Hosted by Emerson College and built on over 300 hours of original footage produced by Marc Fields, The Banjo Project will also serve as the hub for a consortium of cultural and educational institutions, providing them with portals to showcase related content and digital collections. Brought to the New World by enslaved Africans, the banjo is the product of three centuries of cultural exchanges, appropriations, and face-to-face interactions, traveling between the margins and the mainstream. It has shaped most American musical forms: the minstrel show, ragtime, and early jazz, Tin Pan Alley, old-time folk and the folk revival, as well as blues, bluegrass, country, and the new hybrids known as world’s music. “The banjo is at the root of American roots music,” observed folklorist Joe Wilson.”It goes to the bone.” The Banjo Project’s digital museum puts the diverse styles and purveyors of banjo music in their historical context so that users will discover a rich cultural heritage while finding common ground as a community of storytellers. Our unique media archive provides the basic elements for building “story-paths” or narratives through interactive features such as biographical profiles, timelines, maps, and 3D scans of historic instruments, or they may be searched like a more traditional archive. The themes that generate the narratives in The Banjo Project are issues still at the heart of American culture today: race, class, gender, regionalism, folk vs. pop culture. The site is currently in beta prototype.
Emerson College
120 Boylston Street
Boston MA 02116