![]() ![]() ![]() While exploring the Gambra River in Africa in 1620 he described an instrument ".made of a great gourd and a neck, thereunto was fastened strings." Adrien Dessalles in his Histoire des Antilles published in 1678, records the use of a "banza" among the slave population of Martinique. Richard Jobson was the first to record the existence of such an instrument. The number and composition of strings varied, but three or four strings were the general rule. These writings document instruments in East Africa, North America, and the Caribbean that share common distinguishing characteristics: a gourd body topped with animal skin and with a fretless wooden neck. The earliest documentation of banjo-type instruments is found in writings of seventeenth-century travelers to Africa and the Americas.
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