What is the word origin of the word banjo?

Answer 1

The banjo is believed to have originated in the Middle East and Africa and been brought to America with the slaves.

The original banjos were really drums with strings pulled tightly across them, which were plated by either plucking or drawing a bow across them. The first actual record of a banjo seems to have been made by Richard Johnson in 1620. While exploring the Gambra River in Africa, he wrote in his diary of an instrument "made of a great gourd and a neck, thereunto was fastened strings."

The invention of the banjo was inspired by African stringed instruments that were made with dried gourds. The 5-string banjo developed out of these African instruments when slaves were brought to the American colonies. The Africans reconstructed instruments based on the ones indigenous to the areas from which they had come. They were made in imitation of stringed instruments found in their homeland of Africa, like the akonting.

The banjo was popularized in the 1830s by Joel Sweeney, and was taken to Britain in the 1840s.

Answer 2

The banjo may have begun as a stringed instrument in Africa using a skin or hide stretched over a gourd, as with a drum, and resonated by plucked strings. The stringboard may have been adopted from the lute, as early forms of the modern banjo appeared in the Caribbean in the 1600's.

The banjo was popularized by the white American minstrel band of Joel Sweeney in Virginia (1810-1860), who used but did not invent the 5-string banjo.

Similar to the banjo are the Japanese shamisen (3-string lute) and the earlier Chinese version known as the sanxian.

Answer 3

May have its origins in Africa, similar to the Bantu Mbanza and became known in the 16th Century as Bandore (or in Portuguese as Bandurra)

Answer 4

Africa

Answer 5

Africa!

Answer 6

china

Answer 7

bangolo