Interviews

Join us as we sit down at the table with Kristina Gaddy and Pete Ross to discuss Kristina’s new book “Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History.” Named one of 2022’s Most Memorable Music Books by No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music, it’s an illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music. In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina uncovers the banjo’s key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo’s beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood- and how these slaves carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas and the Caribbean…