-Wiggins Lecture- Philip Gura, Robert Gross (University of Connecticut), and David Hall (Harvard), Wiggins Lecturers, American Antiquarian Society

Professor Gura has been named Visiting Scholar at James Madison University and will deliver several lectures there this fall. He also will be lecturing at the Harvard Divinity School, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Old South Meetinghouse in Boston, all on aspects of his recent work on Transcendentalism.

His new book, American Transcendentalism: A History, will be published by Hill & Wang in November 2007.

In April 2007 Professor Gura was a featured speaker at the symposium, "American Transcendentalism: Regional, National, Transnational," at Harvard University.

In 2006-07 Professor Gura was the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he worked on his new project, American Transcendentalism: A History. Annually, the AAS, one of the largest private research libraries in the world, invites a senior scholar to do research and writing on a major project, to engage fully in the collegial life of the Society, and to serve as an anchor for the AAS fellowship program as a whole, and as a mentor to the younger scholars in residence..

In March 2005 Hill & Wang published Professor Gura's Jonathan Edwards: America's Evangelical in its new "American Portraits' series. On March 29 he was featured on WUNC's "The State of Things" see (http://www.ibiblio.org/wunc_archives/sot/index.php?p=200).

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has awarded Professor Gura the 2004 Distinguished Teaching Award in Post-Baccalaureate Education.

The American Antiquarian Society has invited Professor Gura to give the 22nd annual James Russell Wiggins  Lecture in the History of the Book in America, in November 2004. The series is named in honor of the late editor of the Washington Post, U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, and president of AAS. Wiggins Lecturers are scholars from a variety of disciplines touching the history of the book. Their lectures are statements on important, broad methodological and interpretive issues in the field.

In June 2004 Professor Gura led  the American Antiquarian Society's week-long summer seminar in the history of the book. The topic of this year's offering is "Enriching American Studies Scholarship through the History of the Book." He will be assisted by guest faculty and AAS staff.

Professor Gura's lecture, "How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson," now is available in the on-line journal Common-place  (http://www.common-place.org). 

The University of North Carolina Press has published Professor Gura's latest book, C. F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796-1873, the first in-depth study of the founder of the world's most famous guitar company. For this project C. F. Martin & Company made available its archive of C. F. Martin's journals and correspondence, perhaps the most complete in existence for the history of American stringed instruments. Gura was featured on WUNC radio's "The State of Things" on September 18th from noon to 1 p.m.in a show devoted to the Martin guitar.

On May 1, 2003, at the American Antiquarian Society, Professor Gura lectured on "How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson," in which he detailed the process he went through to try to authenticate what may be the second known photograph of Dickinson (see below). In conjunction with the lecture, he was featured on WBUR (Boston) "Morning Edition."

n the spring of 2003 the College of William and Mary sponsored a lecture and performance series called "Virginia's Music: Tidewater to Appalachia," to coincide with Mike Seeger's tenure as Artist-in Residence." On February 6th, to start the series, Professor Gura lectured on "Mike Seeger, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Folk Revival." 

 Professor Gura spoke at the National Symposium on Jonathan Edwards, at the Library of Conference in October 2003 to celebrate the three-hundredth anniversary of Edwards's birth.  The title of Gura's presentation was "Lost and Found: Recovering Edwards for American Literature." Professor Gura currently is preparing an interpretive biography of Edwards, to be  published by Hill & Wang. 

In the fall of 2002 the Association of Graduate English Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill awarded presented Professor Gura with its Ph.D. mentoring award. Two years earlier he was honored with a similar award for his work with M.A. students. 

On November 30, 2001, Professor Gura was featured on the the nationally syndicated NPR talk show, The Connection, hosted by Dick Gordon.  The show's topic was "Celebrating the Banjo." The guests included six-time Grammy Award winner Bela Fleck, banjoist Tony Trischka, and James Bollman, co-author with Gura of America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century. 

At its biennial meeting in Norfolk, VA, in early March 2001, the Society of Early Americanists presented Philip F. Gura their "Award of Merit" for "his contributions to early American studies as a scholar, teacher, and journal editor." 

America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century has been awarded one of the  Deems Taylor Special Citations by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). These awards are presented annually to American authors whose books, articles, and liner notes on the subject of music are deemed particularly praiseworthy. The citations will be awarded at a reception at Lincoln Center Plaza on December 6th, 2000. 

CHAPEL HILL -- Philip Gura, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill English professor, is used to writing for a pretty narrow audience. After all, there just isn't a mass market for scholarly tomes on Puritan radicalism and New England Renaissance literature.  But these days, finger-picking musicians such as Ricky Skaggs and Vince Gill are clamoring for Gura's latest work, an encyclopedic look at the 19th century American origins of the oft-maligned banjo. 

"The stereotypes are of an instrument that represents something about slave culture ... or is identified with white 'hillbilly' music," Gura said.  "This instrument has a history as complicated as that of a piano or a violin or any other high-art instrument." 

The project took root more than 25 years ago in Boston, where Gura started playing banjo after attending contra dances as a Harvard undergraduate and doctoral student in American history and literature. 

His hobby quickly became an obsession when the Massachusetts native moved to North Carolina -- a hotbed of bluegrass and string-band music -- 12 years ago. 

"I had one banjo in Boulder," said Gura, referring to his previous faculty job at the University of Colorado. "When I hit this area and realized how many people were interested in this music and how many places were so close by, it began to really take off." 

Gura now owns 16 antique banjos, some more than 150 years old. There are banjos with rosewood necks, mountain-style banjos lined with Prince Albert tobacco tins, banjos made from cigar boxes, banjos with ornate brackets and tuning pegs. There are even banjos made out of dried gourds covered with taut calf skin, models of the instruments first shaped by African slaves. 

Gura's passion for finding antique instruments led him to Lexington, Mass., where music store owner James Bollman boasts a mind-numbing collection of old banjos, photographs, instruction manuals, advertisements, toys and other five-string memorabilia. 

Bollman kept talking about turning his collection into a museum. Gura wanted to write a reference book. From there a partnership was born. In November, the University of North Carolina Press published "America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century" by Gura and Bollman. 

The historians trace the banjo's origins to the 17th century gourd instruments brought from West Africa. By the mid-1800s, the gourds, which had a tendency to become waterlogged, had been replaced by sturdier instruments held in place with metal brackets and hooks. 

Traveling minstrel acts spread the banjo's popularity to the northern United States. By the 1880s and 1890s, banjos were ubiquitous in the middle-class parlors and living rooms of white society, Gura said. It was a time well before television and other electronic diversions, when music was the primary entertainment outlet. 

"If you had people over, you didn't put in a video," Gura said. "It really was part of a popular entertainment in a very different way." 

Populists such as Mark Twain embraced the banjo as an instrument without pretense -- unlike the haughty, classically inspired piano. 

"The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils. ut give me the banjo....When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the
pin-feather pimples on a pickled goose -- when you want all of this, just smash your piano and invoke the glory-beaming banjo." 

Gura and Bollman also examine the economics of the banjo, with much of the book devoted to manufacturers who mass-produced the instrument.  In the case of Samuel Stewart, that meant employing a historical revisionism that removed any claim to the banjo's creation by black people. 

"The banjo offers another example of what happened often in American music history: White entrepreneurs used African-American instruments or music for different agendas," Gura said. "Jazz and rock 'n' roll also emerged in that way." 

The authors purposely confined their study to the 19th century, the heyday for an instrument that declined in popularity with the turn of the century and the rise of jazz and ragtime. That would change in the 1950s, when Earl Scruggs and other bluegrass pioneers introduced their rapid-fire picking wizardry to a wide audience. 

Unlike those players, Gura and other adherents of early banjo forms are "down-pickers" who use their thumbs to strum the strings while the other fingers are stroked down. 

Gura's scholarship is earning high marks from both musicians and academicians. Or in Bland Simpson's case, both. 

"It's just a remarkable presentation and evocation of the instrument and its history," said Simpson, a creative-writing professor at UNC-CH who also plays piano for The Red Clay Ramblers string band. "There's nothing like that around."

Simpson credits his English department colleague with displaying the instrument's ample history long before the days of "Hee Haw" and "Deliverance." 

"Most people in America, if you said 'banjo' would say, 'country music,'" Simpson said. "They would probably think it was invented with hoop cheese cartons up in Stokes County." 

Gura has passed on his love of the banjo. His son David, 15, plays fiddle, while 12-year-old Katherine followed Dad's cue as a banjo player.   Daniel, Katherine's twin brother, is also a fiddler. 

The Guras spend summers performing at festivals in Mount Airy, Union Grove and elsewhere. Without television in their Chapel Hill home, they play together most nights -- just like their forerunners a century ago. 
 
 

Philip Gura grew up in western Massachusetts, far away from the southern Appalachian Mountains and rural South that many think of when they hear musicians plucking the strings of a banjo. 

But what the professor of English and American studies found out several decades into his adult life was that banjos -- the five-stringed instruments whose roots can be traced back to Africa -- were very much a part of white middle-class society in the 19th-century, urban North. 

"It's really an instrument that's sort of tangled up with a lot of things like race, music history and American culture," Gura says. 

With the help of co-author James F. Bollman, a collector in Lexington, Mass., Gura attempts to unravel some of those tangles in "America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century," a scholarly work published and recently released by UNC Press. 

The authors plot the development of the banjo from its primitive African origins to its pinnacle of popularity at the turn of the 20th century only to be displaced by the ragtime and jazz instruments that grabbed the spotlight in the 1920s. 

For Gura, a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the four-year project offered a chance to combine hobby and work. Ever since he was a student at Harvard in the 1960s, he's had more than a passing interest in the banjo. 

His first real introduction to the sound was at contra dances, where he heard the instrument blended with guitars and fiddles. He liked what he heard and decided he would learn to play the banjo. 

But he couldn't read music. So he picked up songbooks filled with tablature drawings that showed him where to put his fingers on the strings. He got the hang of it and has been playing ever since. 

Katherine, his 12-year-old daughter, plays with him now. Daniel, her twin brother, and David, their older brother, play fiddle, rounding out a Gura family ensemble that competes regularly at old-time music festivals. 

In addition to his playing, Gura also collects banjos, prized possessions he hangs on the walls of his Chapel Hill home. 

"I didn't begin collecting until about 10 years ago," he said. 

That was when he became acquainted with Bollman, who provided the bulk of research material for the book. Every place Gura went to look for 18th-century banjos, Bollman, it seemed, had been there first. The Chapel Hill professor would ask about this vintage instrument or that, and more often than not Bollman had beaten him to it. 

"They'd just say, 'The guy in Boston,' " Gura recalled recently. "I don't have the disease. He has the disease. He is a collector above all." 

And it's because of his immersion in collecting that Gura doubted Bollman ever would get around to writing the banjo history the two had talked about so often in their meetings. 

"He's the kind of person whose knowledge is immense, but he's never going to write it down," Gura said. 

So one day, Gura decided to pose a different tack. He summoned the nerve to suggest that they work on it together. 

Since few books have been written about the banjo, Gura had to rely largely on the instruments, trade magazines, photographs, clippings and bric-a-brac in Bollman's collection to piece together their history of the instrument. 

"I'd written several books on historical topics, and I realized this was a great story that had not been told," Gura said. 

"America's instrument," as many call the banjo, is most likely a descendant of West Africa's gourd instruments, although 20th-century musicologists still debate the precise point of the instrument's origins, Gura says. 

Physicians and historians wrote of "strum-strums," "merry-wangs" and "banzas" in the West Indies, he tells us in his book. 

Newspaper advertisements, articles and artwork note the presence of "banjoes" or "bangioes" in this country by the mid-1700s. 

There are several notices in the Philadelphia Gazette from 1749 to 1757 about Scipio, a slave who kept fleeing different owners, one in Prince George's County, Maryland, another in Philadelphia and yet another in Kent County, Maryland. In each of the notices about his escape, there was mention that "he plays well on the banjoe" and "can sing," Gura points out. 

Scipio "wears a blue broad cloth coat, or a black ditto," a 1749 report noted, "old shoes, and stockings, (is) short of stature," "plays on the banjou, and sings with it," though he could only speak "indifferent English." 

From the plantations, the banjo found its way onto the stage in the minstrel shows, a phenomenon that began in the urban Northeast as underground theater, of sorts, for the working class and immigrant men. 

"It became the popular fad," Gura says. "It's really almost like rock and roll; it's the rock and roll of its age." 

When researching that segment of history, Gura also relied heavily on Peter Szego, whose minstrel-era banjo collection is the envy of many. 

One of the broadsides in the book is an advertisement for the Virginia Minstrels -- with J.W. Sweeny "(Leader) the Original Banjo Player" -- as the headliners of a show at the Royal Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, that includes the Irish Ambassador's two-act comedy and Nervous Man's rendition of "The Sprig of Shillelagh." 

Because of the traveling minstrel shows, the banjo soon enjoyed popularity throughout the United States and Great Britain, as well. 

The Civil War also contributed to further transport the banjo across a cultural divide and into the mainstream of white, middle-class America. The collectors have photographs of northern infantry units with banjo players in their midst. 

By the end of the war, the banjo was a common sight in Victorian parlors, the author says, and lessons were offered for the well-heeled children and adults. 

All the while, Gura said, the instrument evolved to better suit its new venues. The banjo became sturdier and more ornate. Manufacturing businesses sprang up around their creation. 

Gura pulls a banjo from the 1840s off his wall and compares it to an instrument built 10 years later to show the evolution in one decade. Then he contrasts those instruments with others in his collection to highlight the further changes. 

Frets appear and disappear. Backs are added on for better resonance. Necks are lengthened and shortened. The shorter fifth string, which made a banjo a banjo way back when, is moved up and down the neck. Clamps are added for rollicking minstrel shows and removed for parlor play so a woman's dress won't be caught on them. 

Once-crude devices evolved into very ornate, instruments, some of which were inlaid with intricate designs. 

Gura and Bollman devote many pages to the banjo-makers of the 19th century, artisans and businessmen who found their trade blossoming in the 1860s, '70s and '80s, then teetering as ragtime began to emerge from the African-American culture shortly after the dawning of the 1900s. 

With jazz and ragtime, the banjo faded from the mainstream, Gura wrote, until Earl Scruggs exploded onto the scene with his bluegrass style of picking and grinning, a phenomenon and era the authors intentionally left for others to explain. 

"It's a very different type of music," Gura says. "Bluegrass is really so demanding, whereas old-time music, you're really playing ensemble. This is really kind of an easy and social music." 

Gura picks up a banjo in his collection and fingers a tune, his left hand sliding up and down the neck of his instrument while he thumbs the strings with his right hand and strokes down with his other fingers -- old-time method. 

"We feel almost like we're preservationists," Gura said of his fellow old-time musicians. 

In addition to keeping the art form alive, Gura and Bollman have done their best to preserve the history of the banjo for anyone who chooses to thumb through their book. They offer a scholarly look at the instrument that has been a symbol of American culture for many years. 

"It isn't fluff," Gura says. "We didn't want a coffee table book."