Which came first?

[Austin]

Did stroke style, also known as minstrel style, and classic style come before clawhammer and thumb lead? I'm curious because there are conflicting stories. I don't know which one to believe...

[Ethan Schwartz]

I don't need to add anything to what Jody said regarding instruments. As far as photographs or other documentation goes, you should always be asking, "Why did someone feel this thing was (or wasn't) important to capture?" Photography back then was not easy or cheap, and people generally did not take photos of the mundane (from their perspective). It's not like people back then, even those seriously involved in documentation, were thinking, "I'm going to capture this because someone 200 years from now is going to find it important." And even if that documentation exists, it's subject to the same selective factors as other physical objects. Stuff gets thrown out, lost, repurposed. If something really old has survived until the present, it's either because generations of people agreed that it was important or just freak coincidence (like something being buried in a way that keeps it preserved AND someone manages to dig it up without destroying it AND they recognize what it is). 



Austin said:

I don't know if there was banjo music in the region before the civil war. Seems to me like there would be tons of surviving gourd banjos if that were the case. Kristina R Gaddy said that enslaved people in those regions weren't allowed instruments of course this is a generalization, I don't know. She also said that all surviving photographs are of commercially available banjos.

[Jody Stecher]

Yup.

Ethan Schwartz said:

I don't need to add anything to what Jody said regarding instruments. As far as photographs or other documentation goes, you should always be asking, "Why did someone feel this thing was (or wasn't) important to capture?" Photography back then was not easy or cheap, and people generally did not take photos of the mundane (from their perspective). It's not like people back then, even those seriously involved in documentation, were thinking, "I'm going to capture this because someone 200 years from now is going to find it important." And even if that documentation exists, it's subject to the same selective factors as other physical objects. Stuff gets thrown out, lost, repurposed. If something really old has survived until the present, it's either because generations of people agreed that it was important or just freak coincidence (like something being buried in a way that keeps it preserved AND someone manages to dig it up without destroying it AND they recognize what it is).