Remembering the Roots
Repairing the Ruptures:
Bringing the Banjo & Fiddle Home
introducing the 2023 Inaugural Black Banjo & Fiddle Fellows
Read Full Press Release Here
Darcy Ford-James (she/her) is a violinist and educator with more than two decades as a public school strings teacher. Darcey is co-founder of Stockton Soul, a nonprofit Soul Orchestra dedicated to educating, empowering, and inspiring audiences through the performance of Black Music.
Joe Zavaan Johnson (he/him) is a multi-instrumentalist, arts educator, and Black music researcher currently pursuing a Ph.D.in Ethnomusicology at Indiana University-Bloomington. His research puts the Black banjo reclamation movement into conversation with critical constructions of race, place, belonging, gender, and sexuality.
Patrice Strahan (she/her) is a lifelong musician who cultivated her love for music singing in church choirs and playing in bands. Her music practice is driven by her passion for communal music at the intersection of land stewardship/kinship and engaged spiritual social justice. Patrice is dedicated to ensuring that Black Old Time Music is learned and passed on to future generations.
The Faculty
Earl White, a renowned fiddler, has been performing and preserving Appalachian music and dance for over 50 years. Jake Blount is an award-winning musician and banjo player who has performed at the Kennedy Center, Newport Folk Festival, and NPR’s Tiny Desk. A leading historian of the banjo origins and American banjo playing Tony Thomas, will facilitate the program’s History seminar.
About the Black Banjo & Fiddle Fellowship
The Black Banjo & Fiddle Fellowship (BBFF) is a collaboration between the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music and the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention. The BBFF project aims to repatriate old-time music in African American communities and illuminate the Black experience in creating old-time music. BBFF is a two-year paid fellowship program that trains Black musicians in old-time music and its rich history. To repair the historical and cultural ruptures that erased the Black origins of banjo and fiddle music and to ensure that the tradition is sustained in Black communities, the BBFF is also a teacher-training program. It will train apprentices to teach the music, ensuring that it can be passed down from generation to generation.
Objectives
Through the guidance and support of Teaching Artist mentors, fellows will become proficient in old-time banjo and fiddle playing and deepen their knowledge of African American banjo and fiddle playing in the evolution of old-time music. They will cultivate skills in teaching, performing old-time banjo and fiddle music, and leading jam sessions.
Goals
Fellows will:
· Learn to play banjo & fiddle tunes and styles in the old-time music tradition
· Cultivate a critical historical context of the Black banjo and fiddle origins and their contributions to old-time music.
· Develop cultural sensibility regarding these instruments' African and African American origins.
· Create educational content for teaching banjo and fiddle music.
· Teach at the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music
· Curate and lead old-time jam sessions
“The Black Banjo and Fiddle Fellowship is a missing link in the propagation of the influence of the African American role in the development of American music. The African American experience touches every genre of music created in America . . . and it is important that the knowledge of this fact be cultivated in the African American musical community. ”
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Thank you to our funding partners!
