The Colymba

What instruments do you play 18th century music on?

First! I am coming back to the US tomorrow for events! I’m making my posts over the next couple of weeks related to these events. :)

Wednesday, April 15 - 5:30pm - East Tennessee History Center, Knoxville, TN — Presentation on Women and the Banjo to coincide with the “I’ve Endured: Women in Old Time Music” exhibit.

Friday, April 17 - 8:30pm Baltimore Old Time Music Festival, Baltimore, MD — Friday book talk with Rhiannon Giddens

Saturday, April 18 - 2:15pm Baltimore Old Time Music Festival, Baltimore, MD — Panel on the Caribbean roots of Old Time

Sunday, April 26 - 3:00pm Biscuits & Banjos Free Programming Day, Durham, NC — Book talk with Rhiannon Giddens

I hope to see you there! Ok, on to the good stuff.

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At the end of Well of Souls, I have a call to action:

I wrote this book because I came across new information I thought needed to be shared, but my real hope is that you, reader, find a mystery that needs to be solved, or realize you can provide an insight that I haven’t and that this work and research continues.

I am so pleased that a few people (including some graduate students who have contacted me) are doing this research. Because honestly, I wanted to be done with banjos. I had other projects I was working on and wanted to work on.

Then Rhiannon asked about collaborating on Go Back and Fetch It, and I couldn’t say no. This was a way that she could provide her musical insight to the conversation and research.

But lest ye be disappointed, we also included a call to action in that introduction:

We hope that by containing as much of this music as we can in one place, patterns of tunings, rhythms, melodies, and lyrics will emerge and that these may be able to shed light on what we know and still have to learn about early Black music in the Americas and how it was foundational to American music.

I did not realize that I would continue working with the pieces in this book, but it turns out that having them all in one place is really helpful for my PhD research (and let me reaffirm that the PhD wasn’t even in my head at all when we finished and published Go Back and Fetch It). But now I am turning up more 18th century Caribbean tunes, and really starting to think about what these pieces can tell us.

One of the pieces that I’ve revisited is “The Colymba,” which is one of the so-called Jamaican Airs from between 1770-1776, written down by an anonymous very likely white British man. Devin Leigh does a great job explaining the context of the tunes on this website and in an article he wrote, but it wasn’t until I started playing Rhiannon’s tab of “The Colymba” on my gourd banjo that I realized something really important.