Musician Rhiannon Giddens, host of the new Wondrous docuseries The Banjo: Music, History, and … [+]
In today’s era, the internet is awash with visual content that is vying for viewers’ diminished attention spans, and it’s all too easy to get drawn in by low-brow entertainment and short-form productions. However, there is still a place for in-depth, intelligent, well-researched content that can captivate and educate its audience.
One company that is known for creating educational content that fits this bill is Wondrium. Recently, the platform unveiled a docuseries called The Banjo: Music, History, and Heritage with Rhiannon Giddens. The series explores the story of the instrument, and on board as host is Grammy winner Rhiannon Giddens, who is not only an expert when it comes to the banjo, but someone who knows everyone in that small industry.
Giddens believed that her main asset in creating this docuseries was in knowing who to pull in for the project. “My strength is really knowing who it is that I pull in for this?,” she explained during a recent interview. “Who has the details and the facts and the knowledge? Who has the degrees and who’s done all of this work?” For The Banjo: Music, History, and Heritage with Rhiannon Giddens, she did just that. The program is filled with musicians, writers, and historians, many of them holding all three of those job titles at once.
More than anything, the series is a wealth of information, all corralled intelligently. Most of what is presented has been published or spoken about before, but only piecemeal, and only for those already in love with the banjo. As Giddens stated, “It’s a path that’s not very well documented in and of itself,” referring to the history of the instrument. With this series, viewers are taken on a journey that delves deeply into the banjo’s complicated and troubled history and its cultural significance throughout the centuries.
While there is much to learn in the series, the most shocking revelations are those that involve the role slavery and racism played in the development and popularization of the banjo. Giddens views the show as less of a “correction of history” and more as an alternative perspective on the instrument. “When I talk about the banjo, the first thing I say is, the banjo is how I look at America,” Giddens revealed. “And the second thing I say is, we can’t look at the banjo without looking at the world that it came out of, which is the world of slavery, which is the world of a young America built on this thing.”
The docuseries sheds light on the stories of musicians who pioneered the instrument, only to have laws keep them from achieving great success. It also addresses how the banjo became forever associated with white people of Appalachia, instead of its earliest proponents. Giddens said that in her work, she aims to change the story from “the history that I received about the banjo,” which she calls “factually untrue” and which has its own agenda.
The Banjo: Music, History, and Heritage with Rhiannon Giddens took years to make, and COVID-19 also delayed shoots in different states and countries. The series is surprisingly more than two hours long in total, but it’s certainly welcome for those interested. When discussing this new offering, Wondrium SVP of Content Development Jason Smigel commented that whenever the company is working on something new, “We want to make sure that it is in-depth, that it’s rigorous.”
So, pretty much exactly the opposite of what many visual content providers are doing. The company started discussing potential programs focusing on songwriting and music history with Giddens years ago, which ultimately turned into the ultimate deep dive into the banjo. Even experts on the instrument will learn a lot from this docuseries, which is presented in easily digestible episodes less than 30 minutes long.
Giddens explained that her goal was not to completely rewrite history or go from one false narrative to another. If the current prevailing idea is that white people invented the banjo, she doesn’t want to immediately say they played no role. Throughout the show and the interview, Giddens repeatedly underlines how the banjo came to be what it is now because of the work of both black and white people. “In collaboration there is power,” she said, adding, “And we need more narratives of where we have collaborated to counteract the divisive rhetoric.”
This collaboration she speaks of often took place under horrible conditions and was unfair to one group, but that doesn’t mean it’s not how things happened. “I’m interested in the truth because it’s always more interesting.” Giddens stated. History is often messy and complicated, and it’s all about the gray area.
While the series may feature 10 episodes about one instrument, Giddens insists there’s so much more to talk about. She explained that in the end, they cut quite a bit, and tried not to spend too much time going down any one rabbit hole, an exercise she easily could have indulged in. “It’s not really intended to be an endpoint, it’s really intended to be a beginning,” the banjo expert commented about The Banjo: Music, History, and Heritage with Rhiannon Giddens, adding, “It’s intended to provoke questions.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2023/03/30/grammy-winner-rhiannon-giddens-new-docuseries-shows-the-dark-and-complicated-past-of-the-banjo/