The five-string banjo pictured below is a custom, presentation-grade Electric model produced by the A. C. Fairbanks factory in Boston around 1895. Although they possessed great beauty of tone, presentation-grade banjos were works of art designed to be appreciated visually more than aurally. This one has an ebony fingerboard set on a carved oak neck inlaid with mother-of-pearl urns, leaves, flowers, birds, and dolphins. The pearl itself is of exceptional quality, with highlights of green and pink. Both the peghead and fingerboard are bound with ivorylike celluloid to match the real ivory used for the tuning pegs, tailpiece, and nut (the grooved bar holding the strings in place above the fingerboard). The metal fittings of the body—rim, tension hoop, and brackets—are nickel-plated brass. Fairbanks built very few presentation banjos, and those that survive are highly prized by collectors.

Born in Massachusetts in 1852, Albert Conant Fairbanks began making banjos in Boston in the late 1870s. In 1880 he entered into partnership with William A. Cole, and as Fairbanks & Cole the two produced high-quality instruments until 1890, when the partnership dissolved and each formed his own company. Fairbanks called his best banjos Electric, a patent name that had nothing to do with electrification but rather was intended to make the instruments seem modern (in the 1890s “electric” sold everything from corsets and medicine to rat poison and soap).

The five-string banjo has been called the only truly indigenous “American” instrument, a designation that ignores the superior claim of the tom-tom, the bone flute, and the medicine rattle. Still, as an import from the Old World that evolved in the New, the banjo serves as a paradigm of the American experience. Developed from ancient Arab prototypes, the West African gourd banjo ( banza ) arrived in the American colonies by way of the slave trade in the late seventeenth century. Slave banjos typically had four strings, three long and one short. The short string was the instrument’s most unusual feature and the main source of its distinctive sound, a sound that white colonists described as “droll,” “discordant,” and “weird.” Plucked by the thumb on the offbeat, this string creates a rhythmic and harmonic drone, a repeated note of constant pitch that alternately blends and clashes with the notes of the melody strings.

The banjo entered the mainstream of American popular culture in the early nineteenth century, when it was appropriated by minstrels, white entertainers in blackface who took its exuberant thump and twang across the country and around the world. As they experimented with ways to improve and amplify its sound, the minstrels radically transformed the plantation instrument and in the process “invented” the American banjo. Joel Walker (“Joe”) Sweeney, an early blackface performer, is said to have produced the first five-string banjo around 1830 by adding another long string to the existing four. When he retired from the stage in 1845, Sweeney entered into partnership with the Baltimore drum