the fifth string of the banjo
drone, thumb, technique, the surprisingly fraught racial history of the fifth string specifically
The most commonly played banjo today is the five string banjo, but this hasn’t always been the case.
The fifth string is also called the drone string or the thumb string.
Rather than extending all the way to the headstock, the fifth string, the bottom string (the one closest to the players chest)1, begins at the fifth fret. This is unique among stringed instruments. On most stringed instrument the bottom string is also the lowest tuned one. However, the banjo uses reentrant tuning. Because the fifth string of the banjo begins at the fifth fret, it is the highest tuned string, which turns the instrument inside out. The fifth string is both the lowest, in placement, string and the highest, in tone. When coming to the banjo from another stringed instrument, the fifth string is one of the most difficult things to adjust to2.
Because the fifth string is tuned higher than the other strings, it can’t really be used in chord voicings in the same way, and it can’t really be used to play a melody. Instead, the string is primarily used as a high drone. This gives the banjo the ability to operate as a droning instrument in ways that other stringed instruments traditionally aren’t able to. The fifth string is struck with the thumb at usually consistent rhythm. It is essential for banjo rolls in both the clawhammer style and the Earl Scruggs three-finger-picking style.
In clawhammer style, strings are played with struck with fingernails alternating with the thumb; in three-finger-style, strings are plucked individually by the thumb, middle and index finger. The clawhammer technique is older, more traditional. It has its origins directly in Africa. It is generally slower. Three finger picking is generally credited to Earl Scruggs, pioneer of bluegrass. The technique is the most popular one today and allows players to play faster and louder. It also seems like the three finger technique allows for notes to ring out longer as the rolls are performed, which creates even more potential for a droning sound. 3
(A speculation: as the speed of modernization accelerates in the 20th century, the invention of bluegrass and the development of the Scruggs technique allows the banjo to be played much faster. Is this to keep up with the speed of modernization and development as the banjo leaves the mountains and plantations and enters the commercial world? Can’t just play a front porch lope anymore? Critical old timey banjo players have derisively called bluegrass “typewriter" music because of the perceived mechanical way of playing.)
The fifth string drone sometimes reminds me of a bagpipe. That’s just sort of my reference point for an instrument that plays both the drone and the melody. They exist somewhere close in register, and to me, the timbre is not dissimilar. (They are also both instruments that can draw very strong very negative reactions.) The thing is, it’s a surprisingly loaded comparison, to compare a banjo to a bagpipe. To make the comparison risks invoking a century and a half long campaign to whitewash the Black heritage of the banjo. The banjo has been, since at least the 19th century the site of intense racial tension and an instrument used in the performance of the construction racial identity in 19th century America. A lot of this has played out on the fifth, droning, string of the banjo, specifically.
The story of the banjo is one of cultural appropriation, of course, but to leave it at that neglects the opportunity to look into an even more tangled but productive cultural history. The instrument is of African origins, descending from West African instruments like the bandore and developed by enslaved West Africans in North America and the Caribbean Somewhere along the way4 it became entrenched in the popular imagination with white southern music, hillbilly music, hick music (the rapist hillbillies of Deliverance, the overalls and hay bales of “Hee-Haw”, maybe later the dust-bowl cosplay of Mumford and Sons, ect ect.)
Bagpipe music, of course, is the music of the Scottish highlands5. Not many types of music are as firmly associated with a national identity, and the creation of national identity, as bagpipe music is with Scotland. As Scottish immigrants came to America and settled Appalachia and the South, Scottish identity took the form of an ethnic identity, and that ethnic identity would serve as a crucial part of the construction of whiteness, especially in the South. Bagpipe music didn’t really make its way over to America, but other forms of British and Irish music did, and they would serve a key part of of what would become, for lack of a better word, American folk music. 6
The other origin source of American folk music, of course, is the music of enslaved Black people brought over from Africa and developed on slave plantations and later by freed slaves, often living in poverty.
There is an unresolved racial tension at the heart of American folk music. The banjo is a site where this racial tension at the heart of American folk music is played. That tension can be even more localized to the fifth string of the banjo.
The first banjos only had four strings. One of those strings was a drone string. The addition of the fifth string to the banjo is often credited to a man named Joel Sweeney, a white Irish-American from Virginia, sometime around the 1830s. Sweeney was, allegedly, the first white man to play the banjo, or at least the first white man to play a banjo on stage.
The string that Sweeney introduced was not the string that we today call the fifth string. That string, the drone/ thumb string, was already present. The string that Sweeney added was higher up the neck, and it reached all the way down to the headstock. Sweeney was “allegedly unhappy with the limited rhythm and melodic variation of the four-string banjos popularly in use.”7 Sweeney’s role in the addition of the fifth string to the banjo is disputed by some scholars. 8
Another innovation in the instrument that Sweeney played a role in was the transition from a resonating body made from a gourd to a resonating body made of a drum. This transition was the transition of the banjo as a homemade folk instrument to a mass produced commercial instrument, while moving away from its African origins.
Sweeney was a minstrel performer. As such, the first white man to play the banjo on stage did so in blackface. It was in blackface that he spread the (newly five stringed, newly mass produceable) banjo among white, middle class audiences. Sweeney made the banjo a central part of minstrel shows and minstrel shows a central showcase for the banjo. Because of this, the banjo is hard to divorce from its context in minstrelry9.
Sweeney began performing as the leader of a minstrel show in the South, but he soon took his show to New York, and eventually a European tour, introducing Northern, urban, middle class performers to the banjo. Sweeney was a fixture of early commercial advertisements for the instrument. 10These ads positioned the instrument as one palatable to the middle class.11
The traveling minstrel shows are one of the origin points of pop music and the transition from handmade folk instruments to mass produced commercial instruments is a key part of the formation of pop music. The fifth string was added to the banjo at this key moment of transition, so, in its way, the fifth string of the banjo is a point of origin for popular music, and contains in it the racial tension that animates continues to animate pop music.
(Some of what follows is speculative and as-of-yet unsubastantiated.) The fifth string expands the melodic possibilities of the banjo. In the 19th century, American musicians, Sweeney included, were concerned with creating a national American music to stand alongside European classical music. There is, in Eurocentric elevation of certain types of high music, an emphasis on melody. The addition of the fifth string to the banjo gave the banjo instrument more melodic possibilities, and with more melodic possibilities the instrument was better able to appeal to middle class listeners.
Often, white minstrel banjo players simply played traditional English melodies on the banjo, aided by the addition of the fifth string, while insisting to their audience that these melodies they were “authentically” Black, of African and slave plantation origins. So here, there were white performers in blackface playing white melodies on a black instrument, insisting that the melodies were more authentically Black they were, while divorcing the instrument from its Blackness. In the form of blackface, minstrel performers were performing (a racist caricature of) Blackness while performing whiteness through the performance of traditional English and Irish melodies.
Another complication. The Irish four string tenor banjo.
The instrument differs from the four string banjos of African origins. It has many of the features that have developed on the modern banjo: metal frets, metal rim, metal bridge; planetary gear tuning pegs; drum-like resonating chamber. Where it differs from both the modern five string banjo and the traditional four string banjo, is the lack of a drone string.
Because the tenor banjo has no drone string, its playing style is different than a five string banjo. Players do not use rolls nor play chords. It is played more like a mandolin, with single notes fingered individually and struck with a plectrum (picked with a pick).
This instrument, the Irish tenor banjo, came into use in the early 20th century, and Irish musicians used it to play the melodies of traditional jigs. So the cultural travel here to arrive at the Irish tenor: precursors to the banjo cross the Atlantic with enslaved Africans who develop the instrument into the banjo; an Irish-American in blackface adds a fifth string; the instrument then crosses back over the Atlantic to Ireland, the home of the ancestors of the alleged innovator of the fifth string. In Ireland, the fifth string is once again removed, but this time the string that is lost is the drone, changing the way the instrument is played to fit more closely with traditional Irish music.
Despite its African by way of American origins and the fact that it was only arrived in Ireland in the 20th century, the tenor banjo can now commonly be found in ensembles performing traditional Irish music. Though it is not of Irish origin, the changes made to the instrument (removal of the fifth, drone string) made the instrument a natural fit in these ensembles. The meeting of Irish and African music that led to the birth of American folk music has travelled even further back in time, and now the African banjo has taken a place in traditional Irish music.
Another difference: the banjo uses planetary gear tuning pegs, rather than the worm gear rather than the worm gear pegs used on a guitar.
If this is true, what is the significance that it is the 20th century white intervention that is more drone-like? There may not be any. This is mostly speculative at this point. Banjo drone is address in the following video by the banjoist Clifton Hicks, on his channel Banjo heritage. He describes the “trance state” that he can arrive at while performing certain rolling songs on the banjo and why he isn’t able to achieve that state while playing clawhammer. The difference between the techniques in relation to drone is evident— the clacking of the clawhammer is percussive, not rolling. ( In the video, Hicks also puts this trancelike drone in the context of other world musics, letting slip that he has a degree in anthropology. I will talk more about Hicks, his role in the banjo community, and his approach to the racial construction of the instrument, later.)
Starting with minstrel shows— I will get into some of that, but this essay is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the cultural appropriation of the banjo but rather how that racial history plays out on the fifth string.
Except cop funerals, but thats an essay for someone else to write.
Bailey, J: "Historical Origin and Stylistic Developments of the Five-String Banjo", p. 59, The Journal of American Folklore, 1972.
Outlandish claims have been made about Sweeney, from his being the "inventor" of the banjo to his being the first white man to play the banjo. These claims are part of an effort, beginning in the nineteenth century, to divorce the banjo from its African American origins.
Winans, Robert; Gibson, George (2018). "Black Banjo, Fiddle and Dance in Kentucky and the Amalgamation of African American and Anglo-American Folk Music". Banjo Roots and Branches. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. 246.
The “minstrel banjo” is still an extant form. One can purchase a minstrel banjo as an instrument distinct from contemporary banjos on the market and learn the techniques of minstrel banjo as a style and pedagogy distinct from other banjo methods.
Minstrel banjos are also fretless, which allows for a warmer, richer, sound and a greater ability to slide and perform glissando. The player, unconstrained by the frets, is able to play notes outside of the “western” scale.
The addition of metal frets to the banjo further modernized the instrument, removing it a little more from its African roots. The frets also lock the instrument into a 12 note scale, severely limiting the possibility of microtonal playing. As the banjo became a mass produced instrument, rather than a handmade folk instrument, more and more metal was added.
The first thing to note about minstrel banjos is that they tended to be wood-heavy constructions, from the tuning pegs down to the tailpiece. All wood, in fact, save for their brass brackets and tension hoop, skin head, and gut strings. The local craftsmen who received and developed the instrument from black slaves had few other materials to hand and were likely limited to this simple design.
On youtube (and presumably elsewhere, but this seems to be a community that has found its home on YouTube) one can find a scene or school of minstrel banjo players. They almost always play outside, with a backdrop of trees, and are almost always white. One of the most prominent practitioners of the minstrel banjo revival is Clifton Hicks, a genuinely talented musician and influential teacher. He has also wrote and recorded a song called the “Ballad of Kyle Rittenhouse”. The melody and traditional ballad structure of the song are straightforwardly of English folk origins and played on the minstrel banjo. The song is about Kyle Rittenhouse, a folk hero of the American right who shot three Black men, killing two, in Kenosha, WI during a protest of the police killing of a Black man named Jacob Blake. The song is not subtle in its lyrical content. Rittenhouse was attacked by “a group of thugs” and “he fought in self defense” (refrain: “he fought in self defense”). In the song he details each killing, explicitly. That is to say, banjo performances are a still a performance of active and violent racial tension.
Advertisements like one for a show in New York, which touted the “scientific touches of perfection” in Sweeney’s playing, appealing to the scientific racism of the 19th century. (18 March 1841. Playbill, Bowery Theatre. Quoted in Cockrell 148.)
Some considered Sweeney to be the best banjo player in the world. A playbill from the time proclaims "Only those who have heard Sweeny [sic] know what music there is in a banjo." 9 (December 1841. Boston Post. Quoted in Cockrell 148)— Erasing the Black performers of the instrument, most of whom had no opportunity to travel the world performing the instrument of stage.