Akonting - Missing Link To The Banjo?

Missing Link To The Banjo?

Of all the myriad variety of West African plucked lutes, the Jola akonting stands out as the one instrument today that bears the strongest resemblance to early North American gourd banjos. This is seen not just in its physiology but also in the traditional technique used to play the akonting, called o'teck (literally, "to stroke"), which is basically the same as the stroke, or frailing style, considered to be the oldest extant technique for playing the banjo.

Both the akonting o'teck and the banjo stroke style are forms of down-picking, a technique in which the fingernail of a single finger – either the index or middle finger – is used to strike the individual melody strings in a downward motion, like a plectrum. This action is immediately followed by the player's thumb catching on the top short "thumb string" to create a rhythmic back-beat accompaniment.

It was the stroke style of banjo that European American performers, who came to be known as blackface minstrels (see minstrel show), initially learned from African American musicians in the early 19th century. (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. The stroke style of down-picking has survived to this very day in the folk traditions of both the black and white communities of the rural South, where it's commonly referred to as frailing, clawhammer, thumping, among other terms.

Remarkably, the Jola o'teck technique of playing the akonting is the only extant down-picking style of lute playing found in all of West Africa thus far. Even more pertinent to the ongoing search for the banjo's ancestors, it's the only West African lute with a banjo-like short "thumb string" which is played in this manner.

In addition to the Jola akonting, the Manjago buchundu, the Papel busunde, the Balanta kisinta, and all the various kinds of wooden-bodied lutes that are exclusive to the griots (for example, the Mande ngoni, the Wolof xalam, the Fula hoddu, and the Soninke gambare) have a short "thumb string" drone. The "thumb string" seems to be a feature unique to lutes of Senegambian origin which have three or more strings and are played with the fingers, regardless of playing style. Conversely, 1-string lutes (e.g. the gourd-bodied gambra of the Haratin of Mauritania) and 2-string lutes (e.g. the gourd-bodied koliko of the Frafra of Ghana and the wooden-bodied garaya of the Hausa of Nigeria, Niger, and Ghana) are played with flat-pick type plectrums, so a drone string is useless on these instruments.

The standard griot playing technique is a 2-finger up-picking pattern: the player's index finger plucks up on a melody string, followed by the thumb plucking the short drone string, and culminating with the index finger brushing down all the strings. While the griot technique is strikingly similar to some styles of old-time 2-finger up-picking found in various regions of rural southern United States, it is distinctly different from down-picking and not related to the early "stroke style" of playing the 5-string banjo or its descendants, the various old-time Southern down-picking styles.