Scott Underwood - Music, Race, and Culture
Scott’s American Studies degree capped a forty-year career in technology and design. He is now exploring retirement by playing bass in bluegrass and rock bands in the East Bay, reading widely, and visiting his grandchildren.
Area of Concentration Courses
American Studies 102: Music and the Landscapes of the American West
American Studies 110: American Media & Culture since WWII
Music 170: 19th-Century Music and Domestic Space
Music 170: The LP
Englsh 174: The Seventies
Thesis
From Jim Crow to Hee Haw: The Changing Presentation of the Banjo in the American Imagination
Scott’s honors thesis uses media from the 18th to the 20th centuries to explore the history of the banjo as an American cultural symbol. For centuries, the banjo was a homemade, African-derived instrument that accompanied the traditions of enslaved Black people. In the mid-19th century, touring minstrel shows made the banjo popular among white audiences and musicians. By the 1880s, white American banjo makers promoted their ornate factory banjos to genteel society as equal to any European violin, mandolin, or piano, whitewashing the instrument’s Black roots. After World War II, the banjo found a new home among white folk and country musicians, and it transformed into a symbol of rural white culture in Appalachia and the South. This image has dominated until recent years, when new generations of Black musicians are rediscovering and restoring the banjo’s proper musical and cultural history.
