A Reclaiming the Banjo — Joe Zavaan Johnson and the Work of Black Musical Recovery
The African American Folklorist is honored to spotlight Joe Zavaan Johnson in April. Dr. Johnson is a multi-instrumentalist, arts educator, and Black music researcher whose work is helping return the banjo to its rightful place inside Black history, Black memory, and Black cultural practice.
For many audiences, the banjo has been misframed as a white rural instrument, detached from the Black worlds that shaped it. But Joe’s work refuses that erasure. Through performance, teaching, and research, he helps listeners and learners understand a deeper truth: the banjo is part of the Black soundscape — braided into our stories of survival, creativity, labor, joy, and transformation.
Black Banjo Recovery as Cultural Repair
Joe’s research examines Black banjo recovery projects at the intersection of Black Studies, human geography, folklore, and ethnomusicology. That framing matters. Because “recovery” isn’t only about locating the banjo’s past, it’s about understanding how Black communities have been displaced from the narratives, spaces, and institutions that claim ownership of our cultural creations.
In Joe’s hands, recovery becomes a living practice: a way of tracing how Black banjo knowledge travels across places, how it lives in community memory, and how it re-emerges through people doing the work on the ground, players, teachers, organizers, tradition bearers, and everyday culture keepers.
And because Joe frequently collaborates with grassroots organizations working toward coalition building, community healing, and cultural reparations, his scholarship doesn’t stop at interpretation. It moves toward accountability: Who benefits from this knowledge? Who gets to tell the story? Who holds the instrument, and who holds the power?
A Scholar-Educator Rooted in Community
Joe brings the same grounded clarity to teaching. As an educator, he has taught workshops and presented lectures on Black banjo culture across the country — meeting learners where they are, while still telling the full story.
Joe earned a dual BM in Instrumental Music Performance and Ethnomusicology from Bowling Green State University, an MA in Ethnomusicology and Folklore, and is currently an Ethnomusicology PhD Candidate at Indiana University–Bloomington. He was also an inaugural Black Banjo Fellowship recipient with the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, where he now teaches banjo and music history classes.
That lineage matters, too: it reflects an artist-scholar who understands both the academy and the street-level work of cultural stewardship — and who insists the story of Black music must remain connected to Black people.
Performance as Public Education
Joe’s work also lives in public performance spaces, where the banjo’s history is often absent or misunderstood. Recently, Johnson was featured as an artist at Biscuits and Banjos, the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, the DeFord Bailey Legacy Festival, and the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival.
These stages aren’t just gigs. They’re teaching moments. They are interventions. They are opportunities to correct the record, not as a dry history lesson, but as sound, as presence, as Black creative authority.
Why Joe’s Work Matters to AAF
At AAF, we center Black agency, Black knowledge, and Black cultural ownership, especially where the broader world has tried to rewrite the story. Joe Zavaan Johnson’s work aligns deeply with our mission because it demonstrates what it looks like to practice cultural preservation without extraction; to teach history without watering it down; and to do research that remains answerable to communities.
In a time when Black culture is constantly borrowed, marketed, and repackaged, Joe’s work reminds us that recovery is not nostalgia. Recovery is a political act. It is a return to self. It is cultural repair. It is saying: We are still here, and this is still ours.
Learn More + Follow Joe
To learn more about Joe Zavaan Johnson and his work, visit his website:
You can also read more about Joe’s dissertation research project funded by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship through the fellowship’s public feature (linked in our episode/post materials).
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