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The banjo was never a hillbilly instrument
An instrument built from memory, not brought on a ship -- carried in the heads of enslaved Africans who couldn't bring the object itself, then rebuilt in the Americas from whatever materials were on hand. It became the sound of White Appalachian music not because it started there, but because a minstrel performer learned it from the Black people who built it, and got credited with inventing it instead.
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