Hlootoo's Art

threadedsafetypin:

inkdemonapologist:

I can tell you no!! I will!!!!!! 

Well, I mean obv you can interpret Sammy’s childhood however you like, but the banjo is his fav instrument….. in the JAZZ ERA, WHERE IT WAS AN EXTREMELY POPULAR JAZZ INSTRUMENT. I can’t stress enough to you how startled I was to discover that banjo has this whole history as a Cool Mainstream Popular Instrument that has somehow completely disappeared from pop culture knowledge. 

Talking with @threadedsafetypin was when I learned that the banjo didn’t get its current reputation as a bluegrass instrument until after the late 1940s, just after Sammy transformed (see also: this post from Thread), which came with pretty huge changes to both the instrument itself and how it’s played — in ink hell, he has no idea what the banjo has become. (Incidentally, I don’t know if Thread is looking for banjo asks but if so I would highly recommend; her love of the banjo is delightful and infectious)

“Sammy grew up on a farm” headcanons can absolutely work, but since Sammy’s job as a teen is playing piano ridiculously well rather than like, working on the farm, I feel like something would’ve had to change pretty early on. (He seems comfortable with a variety of instruments so I tend to interpret him as having a family who could (barely) afford to give him formal training as a child). 

Anyway his sheep obsession strikes me as pseudo-religious, rather than affection for or familiarity with the actual animal (we never hear him use other farming jargon or sheep-herding jargon, and he’s usually not using “sheep” positively…). Which is interesting since, speaking as a religious person myself, I think it would be a lot harder for Sammy to embrace the ink demon the way he does if he were already personally religious, so I’ve always imagined he was either atheist or agnostic – which TIOL seems to support, if we take his response about what god he might worship at face value – and headcanon his parents as deeply religious. That would give him a familiarity with the language even when he doesn’t ascribe to it, and I really enjoy the idea of faith as something he grew up with, fully rejected as a young man, then fell back on in the worst way when his whole world fell apart. 

I can definitely tell you no!! I absolutely will!!!!!!

Lol but for real. Anon, you get to headcanon whatever you want and if you wanna headcanon Sammy as a bitchy-banjo-boy who grew up on a sheep farm, you do you and have fun with it. But like, that Sammy’s favorite instrument is the banjo made you think “stereotype farm-related instrument” caused me physical damage to read.

The Jazz Era was the GOLDEN AGE OF BANJOS. THEY WERE WORKS OF ART AND AMAZING FEATS OF MUSICAL ENGINEERING. AND PEOPLE KNEW THIS. Banjos being a purely stereotype instrument might have been the case in the 1800s (and being blunt, banjos were a heavily featured part of minstrelsy and associated with that, specifically, rather than vague ‘farm-related’ connotations) but by the time you get to BATIM-related events, the banjo was already very solidly part of the mainstream music scene with a place in just about every genre of music. And whereas now banjos are associated with bluegrass, folk, and country; essentially regarded as music of niche demographics, banjos then would have been associated with ragtime, swing, and jazz; popular music that everybody listened to.

It is also very important to understand that at the time, a banjo with a resonator was the loudest string instrument. It was valued for its ability to be heard in band music and hold its own without being entirely drowned out. The death of the banjo in mainstream popularity is very solidly linked to the rise of the electric guitar, which surpassed the banjo in terms of volume and did the same job much better.

In any case, my point here is that there are many historical layers to the banjo as an instrument. It absolutely occupies a rich and important history in the context of rural life and communities, no question. But it also had much wider appeal and use than people generally know about, and like, it’s by no means necessary to give Sammy a farm-related family background for his affinity for the banjo to make sense. If you’re someone who wants to because you just think it’s a heckin’ fun concept, by all means. But it does already make perfect sense in of itself for Sammy, living and composing music in the 1920s-1940s, to regard the banjo as his favorite instrument.

(Thank you for the mention, Shazz. And, incidentally, I would love to receive banjos asks from people lol.)  

Just tossing in my two cents about this fascinating instrument. What’s really interesting was that the banjo actually started out as an instrument from West Africa and has been around as we’ve known it since, at least, the 17th century in the Caribbean.

So it’s roots run DEEP. I like to headcannon that Sammy had a friend from the South who he loved to play it for in a non jazz context.

More to come…. 😉