Historian Kristina Gaddy spotlights women’s long, overlooked role in banjo history

Kristina Gaddy, author and a PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham, told an audience at the East Tennessee History Center that the banjo’s first recorded sighting appears in 1688 in Jamaica and that women have been prominent — though often uncredited — participants in the instrument’s history.

Gaddy framed her talk around the exhibit at the center and said she focused this session on women’s participation across centuries: “The first sighting that we have of a banjo is 1688 in Jamaica,” she said, and then traced changing contexts from creolized New World instruments to 19th- and early-20th-century stage and recording careers.

Why it matters: Gaddy argued that conventional narratives have minimized women’s musical labor by focusing on male performers, commercial genres and racialized record-label practices. She told listeners that manufacturers and critics worked to “elevate” the banjo into classical-style…