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Look closely at a banjo and you will see a drum . The round body has a thin , tight head stretched across it , and on most banjos one string is shorter than the others . Players pluck it with the thumb , so it sounds the same note again and again . That design comes from West Africa , where people have made gourd lutes for centuries . They stretch an animal skin over a large gourd and push a wooden neck through the body . In 1621 an English traveller , Richard Jobson , described a gourd instrument with a neck in the Gambia . Scholars name several possible relatives , such as the xalam of Senegal and the ngoni of Mali . Daniel Jatta , a music scholar from the Gambia , argues that the akonting is one of the closest . Its long neck runs through a gourd body , and a wooden bridge holds the strings over a skin head . Its short string is played by the thumb , as on early banjos . From the 1600s , slave traders carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic by force , almost 300,000 to Suriname alone . Enslaved people could take almost nothing , but they kept their knowledge of music . With gourds , skin and wood , they made instruments again , in the Caribbean and in North America . One of the first records of a banjo comes from Jamaica , around 1687 . The oldest banjo that still exists was made by an enslaved person in Suriname , then a Dutch colony , before 1777 . It has a calabash body , an animal - skin head , a wooden neck , three long strings and one short one . It is now in the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam , a museum in the Netherlands . In the 1800s , factories produced banjos with wooden bodies , and white performers used them in racist blackface shows . The banjo 's Black origins were often hidden . Yet on the five - string banjo , the drum - like body and the short thumb string survived every change , and they still point back to West Africa . 
