This article was written by Jon Hartley Fox and sourced from the California Bluegrass Association's Bluegrass Breakdown. Photos by Kristina Gaddy
Kentucky musician Arnold Shultz is just the tip of the iceberg.
Known as a major formative influence on Bill Monroe, Shultz is often cited as one of a very few Black musicians to have a place in the bluegrass cosmos. But he was far from being unique in that regard.
Back in the days before radio and record companies, there weren’t really stylistic genres in American vernacular music. There was just music, and it was played by Black and white musicians alike. They played the same instruments and mostly the same repertoire at similar kinds of events, often in integrated ensembles.
This history was distorted and largely forgotten beginning in the 1920s, when record companies began to sort their releases into different catalogs based on the race of the musicians—and their presumed audiences. But the fact is that Black musicians have been playing what has come to be called bluegrass and old-time country music as long as the music has been played.
Roots Revival: Black Stringband Symposium was presented by The Banjo Gathering and IBMA as part of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s 2024 World of Bluegrass, held the last week of September in Raleigh, North Carolina. The two-day event was sponsored in part by an Arnold Shultz Fund grant from the IBMA Foundation. All six of the seminar sessions were livestreamed and will soon be available online.
Photo: Hubby Jenkins at the Roots Revival Symposium
In a statement announcing Roots Revival: Black Stringband Symposium, IBMA business development director, Anna Kline, said the gathering was presented “in a spirit of celebration and to increase emphasis on inclusion in our roots music community.” The symposium “honors a foundational story of our bluegrass music roots beginning with the Black stringband traditions and the ways in which our musical communities are historically intertwined. Black stringband music continues to shape how we listen, play, and write music.”
The inspiration for Roots Revival the “Avoiding Tokenism in Trad Music,” seminar moderated by Brandi Waller-Pace at the 2023 IBMA World of Bluegrass conference. Roots Revival meant to look deeper into the tradition, into its past, its present and maybe its future.
Roots Revival was conceived and curated by Lillian Werbin, owner of Elderly Instruments, co-planner of The Banjo Gathering, and IBMA Foundation board member; and Kristina Gaddy, co-planner of The Banjo Gathering and author of Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History.
Photo: (L-R) Nelson Williams, Darcy Ford-James, and Art Bouman.
The symposium, which took place on September 26-27, consisted of six 75-minute sessions. The sessions included six panel discussions: “Navigating Narratives: Being a Black Woman in Folk Music,” “Alive in the Archives,” “Making Instruments: Construction as History,” “Journey of a Song,” “Beyond Bluegrass,” and “Black Music in Appalachia Showcase.”
The last two sessions featured brief performances by Art Bouman, Nelson Williams, Dena Ross Jennings, Kelle Jolly, Darcy Ford-James, and Tray Wellington, one of two winners of the 2024 Steve Martin Banjo Prize. Other musicians who served as panelists during the sessions included Hubby Jenkins, a former member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops; Jake Blount and Kaia Kater of the band New Dangerfield; and Justin Golden.
Other participants in the Roots Revival symposium included Brandi Waller-Pace, educator and organizer of the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival; scholar Maya Brown-Boateng, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; banjo builder Dena Ross Jennings; violin maker Amanda Ewing; instrument repairer Moriah Robeson; cultural historians Valerie Díaz Leroy and Jen Larson; Patrick Sawyer of Pisgah Banjos; and Dr. Lee Bidgood, professor and director of the Institute for Appalachian Music and Culture at East Tennessee State University.
Roots Revival Poster. Illustration by Breakdown Art Director Gina Dilg.
Two of the session participants share an affiliation with the Black Banjo & Fiddle Fellowship, an innovative collaboration between the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music and the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention. Darcy Ford-James, a Stockton-based fiddler and educator, is a fiddle fellow at BBFF and the founder of the Stockton Soul Orchestra. Joe Z. Johnson is a banjo fellow at BBFF and doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology and folklore at Indiana University.
“The symposium honors a foundational story of our bluegrass music roots beginning with the Black stringband traditions and the ways in which our musical communities are historically intertwined”
- Anna Kline, IBMA
“One thing I’d like people to know,” says Joe Johnson, “is that ‘Black stringband music’ is not a genre. It’s not one specific thing, with a specific lineage. There are multiple styles of Black stringband music. Some of them are old time, some of them are bluegrass, and some of them are in other genres and styles. You can’t lump them all together into one big thing.” “Roots Revival: Black Stringband Symposium was meant to bring Black voices to the forefront in bluegrass and old-time music,” says Werbin, “and to kind of re-establish the contributions [of Black musicians] that have gone on over the decades. We also wanted to explain how it feels to be Black in roots music.”
Kristina Gaddy adds that it was important to “bring these musicians, scholars and artists together in one place to allow them to be in community together. It was a time and space to learn music from each other and talk about projects, touring and collaborations in the future. It served as a base for them to hang out together and a safe space away from the frenzy of the trade-show floor and showcase stages.”
Photo: Mariah Roberson discusses instrument repair.
“My favorite part of the event,” says Johnson, “was getting to have a space where most of the people doing the workshops could be in the same place. Lillian and Kristina had engaged two large B&Bs where most of the workshop participants stayed. That was very considerate and mindful of them. More often than not, we’re ships passing in the night, so I really appreciated that we all got to spend time together.”
Now that the first Roots Revival: Black Stringband Symposium is in the books, there has been time to think about how to build upon the initial event. If there was one thing the organizers could change, it would be the relatively low attendance at the individual sessions. Though, attendance at virtually all of the educational seminars at IBMA have been historically light over the years.
Photo: (L-R) Kaia Kater, Lillian Werbin, Brandi Waller-Pace, Maya Brown Boateng
As Lillian Werbin points out, “IBMA is a packed week, with a million different things going on at all times. People come to pick and to have fun; people don’t really want to sit and listen to someone talk— especially someone talking about difficult topics.”
“We got a lot of really positive feedback about the event,” notes Gaddy. “I know that many of the IBMA board members were excited to see that it was happening. There were so many people in the room who were saying how happy and excited they were that these conversations are finally happening. Having some of the vendors and bookers in the trade show be excited to meet our participants was also really great to see.”
A couple of the participants made the point that of the people who did attend the symposium sessions, it was mostly familiar faces, folks who were already allies. “We all felt a bit of ‘preaching to the choir,’” Gaddy says, “but a woman in one of the discussions said she felt that was all right because each of these ‘choir members’ could go back home to their respective homes and become ‘preachers’ to their own choirs.”
IBMA’s leaders have expressed the desire that the organization be more inclusive and diverse in its membership. That’s a noble goal in that Black musicians have long been a part of the music’s history and an increasing part of its present and future. That part of history deserves to be more fully understood and embraced.
Change comes slowly— and incrementally—in an organization as big and varied as the IBMA. It’s also not clear that the membership of IBMA is as ready and willing to accept these change as is the leadership.
“Honestly, I think there’s been a lot of progress made,” says Werbin, “but change doesn’t look like change while it’s happening. There wouldn’t have been a ‘Roots Revival’ five years ago. So, that says a lot, that we were able to put this program together and bring 20 people together from all across the nation and amplify those voices.”
Photo: Justin Golden plays a gourd banjo made by Dena Ross Jennings.
“I think progress is being made,” adds Ford-James, “but very, very slowly. People have their beliefs about the way things are, and you can’t change belief. You can change hearts through music, and that is the power of it. You change hearts and minds through interacting. That makes it difficult for those of us who aren’t represented, but it’s worth it, if you want change.” “It’s an uphill battle,” admits Lillian Werbin. “We knew we were definitely going against the grain. I think that’s why I’m optimistic about the way the whole thing turned out. It wasn’t perfect or exactly what we’d expected, but we did it. Which means it can be done again.”
All of the Roots Revival sessions were presented by the Banjo Gathering and IBMA, with financial support from our sponsors including Elderly Instruments and the IBMA Foundation, with in-kind support from IBMA World of Bluegrass.