Afropop: The Black History of the Banjo

Afropop traces the history of this most American of instruments from its ancestors in West Africa through the Caribbean and American South and into the present, as a new generation of Black women artists reclaim the banjo as their own. Rhiannon Giddens, Bassekou Kouyate, Bela Fleck and more talk claw-hammers, trad jazz, Appalachian folk, African ancestors, and the on-going story of American music, which would be woefully incomplete without a Black history of the banjo.

Airs Friday, Feb. 17, 2023 at 8 p.m. on 93.9-FM and AM 820 WNYC.