In 1678 the sovereign council of Martinique banned enslaved Africans from gathering to dance to an instrument they called the banza. That decree opens a sweeping history of the banjo, an instrument descended from West and Central African lutes like the akonting, rebuilt in the Americas from gourds, animal skin and plant-fiber strings, and named through a transatlantic game of telephone that produced banza, banjo, bangy and bonjah.

The episode follows the instrument through the blackface minstrel era and the disputed Joel Walker Sweeney invention myth, the explosion from a handful of banjos in New York in 1844 to an estimated 10,000 by 1866, the Gilded Age gentrification campaign that added tone rings, frets and banjo orchestras, the jazz-age amputation of the fifth string to create the tenor banjo, and the mid-century revival driven by Pete ...