Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
List of African musical instruments. Add languages. ... The following is a list of musical instruments from the Africa continent as well as their countries or regions ...
Lutes are stringed musical instruments that include a body and "a neck which serves both as a handle and as a means of stretching the strings beyond the body". [1]The lute family includes not only short-necked plucked lutes such as the lute, oud, pipa, guitar, citole, gittern, mandore, rubab, and gambus and long-necked plucked lutes such as banjo, tanbura, bağlama, bouzouki, veena, theorbo ...
Banjo-like instruments seem to have been independently invented in several different places, in addition to the many African instruments mentioned above, since instruments similar to the banjo are known from a diverse array of distant countries. For example, the Chinese sanxian, the Japanese shamisen, the Persian tar, and the Moroccan sintir. [19]
"The banjo had its first big site of growth in this country among the enslaved population in the Chesapeake Bay region, who were my ancestors," Blount says. Meet the musician teaching the banjo's ...
The ngoni (also written ngɔni, n'goni, or nkoni) is a traditional West African string instrument. Its body is made of wood or calabash with dried animal (often goat) skin head stretched over it. The ngoni, which can produce fast melodies, appears to be closely related to the akonting and the xalam .
(The blackface minstrels popularized the banjo in the 1830s and 40s. Prior to that the banjo was a folk instrument exclusive to African American and African Caribbean musicians.) This was the prevalent form of playing the 5-string banjo until the advent of the guitar style of up-picking in the late 1860s, also referred to as finger-picking.
Where the molo has a boat shaped body, a round neck that only goes through the body at one end, and 2-3 strings tied to slip rings around the instrument's neck, the African-American banjo in the painting has a round gourd body, flat neck that goes through 2 sides of the body, and four strings attached to tuning pegs on the instrument's neck. [4]
The banjo, of African origin, became a popular instrument, and its African-derived rhythms were incorporated into popular songs by Stephen Foster and other songwriters. Over time the banjo's construction adopted some European traditions such as a flat fingerboard. Some banjos had five strings, in contrast to the West African three-string version.