The Merry Wang: A Refutation

I read a website called the Banjo Hangout.  It’s an interesting place where banjo players (mostly of the bluegrass and old timey persuasion) come together and talk about all things banjo.   One discussion that’s happening at the moment is about the etymology of the word “banjo.” In the thread, one poster provided a chronological list of published variants of the word “banjo,” to which another poster replied that “Merrywang” had been lost from the list.  (I imagine that the list was in part based on Appendix II, “Table of sources for the Banjo, Chronologically Arranged” in Dena Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and Spirituals.) This got me thinking: I had, of course, come across the term “merry wang” in banjo histories and in histories of Jamaican music fairly regularly.  However, no Jamaican banjo player I ever met while doing my PhD research in Jamaica ever mentioned it or seemed to know anything about it.   While I didn’t really follow the etymology of the word banjo in any rigorous way as I scoured archival sources, I did notice the ones that did use the term (including those from the eighteenth century) felt repetitive and felt poorly researched to me.  So, this morning I revisited some of what I’d noticed, and based on this I want to suggest that the historical use of “merry wang” as a word for banjo is either an unreliable etymological outlier, or a red herring all together.  I just don’t think that the word was as commonly used as historians think and can likely be attributed to a single eighteenth source–the Long family.

Most familiar with the term “merry-wang” will know it through Edward Long’s  History of Jamaica (1774). Here’s the relevant passage:

Their merry-wang is a favourite instrument, a rustic guitar, of four strings.  It is made with a calibash, a slice of which being taken off, a dried bladder, or skin, is spread across the largest section; and this is fastened to a handle, which they take great pains in ornamenting witha sort of rude carved work, and ribbands.

Long’s book wasn’t the merry wang’s first appearance in print, however; the term is found in an anonymous poem called “The Pleasures of Jamaica,” written from “an Epistle from a Gentleman to his friend in London” and published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, 1738:

With joy his lord the faithful Negro sees
And in his way endeavours how to please;
Greets his return with his best country song,
The lively dance, and tuneful merry-wang.

Unfortunately, we don’t know who wrote this poem.  While it appears to be written as a heroic couplet, we also don’t know what the “merry-wang” is — in this context, the term’s meaning is not obvious.  However, this source and Long hyphenate it–others don’t, really–which makes me think they’re related.  The community that would have sent a poem like this from Jamaica was fairly small.  Since the published record suggests that the merry wang was not a widely-known or widely-used a term, I suggest that the poem’s author was likely a member of, or someone closely related to, the Long family.  A British colonial administrator and historian, Edward Long wasn’t born until 1734.  However, Long’s family had been in Jamaica since 1655.  His great-great grandfather was in the British army and established the family as part of the planter elite.  They owned slaves and perhaps had some familiarity with their activities.  Could “merry wang” have been the name someone in the family gave to the instrument or perhaps the name a slave gave them to make it intelligible to colonials?  Or is it a name a slave provided to keep it’s African name a secret?

We can’t know.  While I admit the suggestion is based on pretty flimsy circumstantial evidence, it is really no more flimsy than claims that (as Gura and Bollman suggest) “these terms were so common [by the late eighteenth century] that upon visiting Sierra Leone Thomas Winterbottom described a native instrument as like “the banja or merrywang, as it is called in the West Indies” (emphasis mine).  Based on this evidence, I not only think merry wang was not a common name in the West Indies, it wasn’t a common name in Jamaica, and further, it may not have been used at all.  In fact, I think that the only people with whom this term had any currency were those familiar with Edward Long’s (and later, Bryan Edwards and T. M. Winterbottom’s) work. How might we test this notion?

First off, if the term was so common, we might expect to find it mentioned elsewhere.  And we do…sort of (keep reading).  It’s not used everywhere and one place we don’t find it is in William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790), an account of Jamaica fairly contemporaneous with that of Long (and others):

…their musical instruments, if such they may be called, consist of a bonjour, originally taken, perhaps, from a French word, as many have found their way by corruption among the negroes; a kind of Spanish guitar; a cotter, upon which they beat with sticks, a gomba, which they strike with their hands; a drum; a box filled with pebbbles, which they shake with their writst; and, to close the account, the jaw-bone of an animal, from which is produced a harsh and disagreeable sound…

No merry wang.  The citation in Gura and Bollman I mentioned above led me to the hilariously named Thomas Masterman Winterbottom, who mentioned it his An account of the native Africans in the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone (1803).  I’ll include the relevant passage again:

Besides the above, they have the banja or merrywang, as it is called in the West Indies…

This mention is important because Winterbottom’s cited source was Bryan Edwards’s 1793 History of the West Indies.  Turns out, Winterbottom had no firsthand encounter with a merry wang and relied on someone else’s work. And what did Edwards have to say on the subject?

In general they [Africans] prefer a loud and long-continued noise to the finest harmony, and frequently consume the whole night in beating on a board with a stick.  This is in fact one of their chief musical instruments; besides which, they have the Banja or Merriwang, the Dundo, and the Goombay; all of African origin.  The first is an imperfect kind of violincello; except that it is played on by the finger like the guitar; producing a dismal monotony of four notes.

Edwards was a Jamaican planter and politician.  His book was translated into several languages, went in five editions “and became the standard history of the british West Indies and a starting point for other works.“  In compiling his book, he borrowed elements of Long’s work (and others), including, I think, this bit on the merry-wang.  A quick note on spelling:  unlike the orthographic similarity between the 1738 and 1774 sources, I don’t think the spelling difference between these two later sources is important.  Winterbottom, who cited Edwards spelled it merriwang; Edwards himself had it as merrywang.  I think the earlier orthographic consistency is more telling than this and later discrepancies.  (BTW, Long and Edwards were a couple peas in a pod in that both was an extreme racist.  The niceties of slave culture were not high on either’s list and I think it’s fair to suggest that the amount of primary research either did on the music was negligible.  What’s clear [to me, at least] is that each conveyed only easy-to-procure information: Long, as I suggest above, got his from a family member; Edwards took his from Long.)

SO, these sources lead me to a spate of later sources that helped legitimate the existence of the merry wang as an unobserved but still “real” thing in the 19th century.  Some of these sources cite the original sources, some don’t.  You find it in the midst of blatant plagiarism, as in Robert Renny’s An history of Jamaica: with observations… (1807).

Their music is rather simple and noisy than harharmonious; and ideed they seem to prefer a long and loud continued noise to the finest harmony, as they often pass the whole night in beating on a board with a stick. This is one of their musical instruments, besides which, they have the banja, or merriwang, the dundo, and the goombay, all of them African origin.  The banja is an imperfect kind of violincello, which is played by the fingers, and produces only a simple monotony of four notes.

The astute among you will recognize that Renny lifted this passage almost directly from Edwards.  Mary Elizabeth Capp, on the other hand, mentions her source in The African princess: and other poems (1813):

Flutes of white-elephant breate through the wind,
Some tread the measure hand in hand combined;
Some with quick finger strike the Dundo’s strings,
The Merrywang it’s laughing changes rings,
Sharp the Triangle sounds, the Cymbals shine,
And round a dancer twirls his Tambourine.

In the “Notes” section, she cites Winterbottom:

Note XXVII.
The Merrywang.–p. 16
This is the same with the banja of the West Indies.  For a particular account of African dances and music, I must refer the reader to the frequently-quoted Dr. Winterbottom.

Other sources offer no citation, but in context it’s usually pretty obvious that a source is being used.  For example, in Canto V, verse XV of Edwin Lawrence’s Xamayca, a romantic poem (1847) he writes:

Which a group of blacks are grotesquely performing
To amuse her, while another cluster seated
Beside the tent, with dexterous hands are playing
of the Goombah and the Merrywang.  Their heated
Looks tell how the sport excites.

The footnote to the verse, obviously paraphrases Long:

The Merry-wang is a rudely fashioned guitar, constructed from a calabash, severed lengthways, and covered with parchment, a handle and strings being affixed in the usual manner.  The tone is by no means unpleasing.

The inclusion of the goombeh, by the way, is interesting because Long describes it in the paragraph following the one in which he describes the merry wang.

We find Long’s telltale influence in Theodora Elizabeth Lynch’s Years ago: a tale of West Indian domestic life of the eighteenth century (1865), where she wrote:

The simple procession had to pass our house on the way to the burying ground.  The mother of the deceased and her aunts and sisters, wept very loudly, or, rather groaned, as they walked by the coffin.  I didn’t no observe that they shed any tears.  Then, all of a sudden, the bearers turned from their course, and approached our house, one or two among them striking up, as they did so, a lively tune on the “merrywang,” a kind of rustic guitar of about four strings.

This instrument is simply a calabash cut open, with a dried bladder spread tightly across it, and it is fastened to a stick, which is adorned with many-colored ribbons.

Her description of the merry wang is basically that of Long’s.  Then we have A history of Jamaica from its discovery by William James Gardner (1873):

The merry wang was a variety of banjo or rude guitar, capable of producing four notes.

Gardner was writing in retrospect (he says “was,” not “is”) and seems again to have been borrowing from Long (“rude”).

When people started to “discover” Jamaican culture in the twentieth century, the merry wang had become an accepted Jamaican musical instrument and no one questioned its existence.  For example, in an account of the musical instruments of Jamaica in her 1929 book Black Roadways, anthropologist Martha Beckwith talks about it.  Her sources?  The “eyewitness” accounts of Beckford (who didn’t mention it), Edwards and Long.  She never claims to have seen one.

And this is the problem, because this sort of thing happened in other published sources.  Early writers became de facto trusted sources and nobody ever thought to (or maybe just never bothered to) question their veracity or reliability.  Variations of the word “banjo” throughout the new world are, I think, probably often explainable by differences in transliteration.  But “merry wang” is a weird one.  Given this pattern of repetition and unsubstantiated citation I’ve outlined here, I can’t see it now as anything other than illegitimate and an a etymological distraction in the banjo’s history.