BLUES FESTIVAL: Otis Taylor brings back the banjo
If you only associate the banjo with bluegrass music or the movie “Deliverance,” Otis Taylor wants to have a few words with you.
“I just want people to know the banjo came from Africa,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Boulder, Colo. “I didn’t know that when I was young. I played it and didn’t even know it. It was originally a black instrument.”
Institutionalized racism, he said, is the reason more people don’t know about the instrument’s roots.
“It happens all the time,” he said. “The blacks moved away from the banjo. All these groups formed in New Orleans, but to them the banjo didn’t exist.”
It certainly will exist tonight, the opening night of the I H Mississippi Valley Blues Festival.
Taylor will close out tonight’s entertainment at the Adler Theatre, preceded by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group of young performers who re-create the sound of an African-American string band, with banjos.
In February, Taylor released the album “Recapturing the Banjo.” Although he has played the banjo on all nine of his albums, this is the first on which it’s taken the forefront.
Taylor included Guy Davis (a frequent visitor to the Quad-Cities who will also perform with him tonight), Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Heart, Keb Mo and Don Vappie on “Recapturing the Banjo.”
It’s a project he’s been considering since 1998, Taylor said, but it finally was set in motion during 2000 and recorded in ‘06.
Although he’ll quickly say, “I’m not a historian,” Taylor says blacks may have shied away from the banjo after it was used as part of the stereotypes in minstrel shows.
The album, and his show tonight, will include a variety of sounds coming from the banjo, including what Taylor proclaims a “psychedelic banjo.”
Although some consider the instrument more difficult to play than the guitar, Taylor said he hasn’t found it that difficult.
“I just play around on it,” he said with a laugh. “I play good enough for people to give me money.”