One of the most indelible moments in banjo history took place in the 1972 movie "Deliverance," when an odd-looking teen played the instrument from an old wooden porch. The song he played ("Dueling Banjos") and the movie itself (which depicted white Americans in the rural South as dumb, violent, inbred hillbillies) cemented the idea that banjo music is backward music born from the recesses of Appalachian culture.
Bela Fleck, a New Yorker by birth and a banjo player by choice, has always been aware of the stereotypes. It's one reason he adapted the banjo to almost every musical genre imaginable, including classical, jazz, bluegrass, pop, country and folk. Fleck has won 10 Grammys (and been nominated in more Grammy categories than any other musician in history), so he's the ideal person to make a documentary about the history of the instrument -- a history that leads to slavery and Africa, where Fleck traveled for five weeks with a film and recording crew.
"Throw Down Your Heart" is an eye-opener. Fleck plays with musicians in Uganda, Tanzania, Gambia and Mali, often performing in public squares where children gather to witness the strange and beautiful instrument he's brought from America. In turn, Fleck is awestruck by their presence and the acoustic instruments he gets to accompany, including a 12-foot xylophone, a three-string lute called the akonting (which is a likely antecedent of the banjo) and palm-size pianos called mbiras.
"It's the coolest thing I've ever gotten to do," Fleck says in a phone interview. "It was the greatest adventure of my life."
The adventure wasn't without hitches -- the biggest occurring when Fleck's record company pulled its sponsorship just weeks before Fleck and his crew were set to depart from the United States. Fleck ended up funding the trip himself, spending $100,000 for the cost of flying to and around Africa, filming, recording the performances for an album, and paying the singers and musicians he played with.
"It was a leap of faith," says the documentary's director and producer, Sascha Paladino, who is Fleck's half-brother. "There was definitely some panic there."
When Paladino and Fleck returned to the United States, they tried to get broadcasters interested in sponsoring the project, but the potential funders "tried to impose a more traditional structure on the film -- a three-act narrative that ends with 'Bela's transformation,' " Paladino says. "They wanted (us to answer the question), 'What does Bela come back as?' But you see so many films about a white guy who goes to a country and comes back a different person. That's not the story (in "Throw Down Your Heart"). Bela's not a different person, but he's had some great experiences. It's not a film about him. He brings you along on his adventure."
That adventure features a kind of "welcome home" to the banjo in Gambia, the West African country where Fleck meets akonting players who recognize the historic similarities between their three-string lute and Fleck's instrument of choice. Fleck visits a forest where a woman -- retelling events of the slave trade -- says Gambians would be playing the akonting in these lush forests when "suddenly they would disappear. And (their families) would not see them again. So they would say, 'Ah, the white man captured the slaves.' " Another Gambian tells Fleck that the akonting's beautiful music helped captured slaves endure their trip to the United States -- that it gave them the strength to carry on in hellish conditions.
During slavery, the banjo was called different names, including banjer. In his book "Africa and the Blues," Gerhard Kubik spotlights a 200-year-old testimonial from a white observer in the South, who's quoted as saying, "I well remember that in Virginia and Maryland the favorite and almost only instrument in use among the slaves was a bandore; or, as they pronounced the word, banjer. Its body was a large hollow gourd, with a long handle attached to it, strung with catgut and played on with the finger."
Post-slavery, the banjo was popularized in the United States by minstrel shows, when white actors in blackface would play the instrument for laughs and entertainment. Because of this association -- and that of "Deliverance" and old TV shows like "Hee Haw" that featured the banjo -- many people still consider the instrument an artifact of a time that's gladly over.
"Throw Down Your Heart" is Fleck's way of tweaking the past and updating it for modern times. The music he makes in Africa brings joy to everyone he meets on the continent and to himself. He hopes that same sense of wonder is conveyed to the people who see his film.
(E-mail Jonathan Curiel at jcuriel(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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