The Blue Ridge Institute galleries are the only exhibit facilities in Virginia dedicated to the presentation of regional folkways. The Institute's changing exhibits reflect the rich quality and diversity of traditional life, and previous exhibits have focused upon old-time musical instrument making, early Virginia African American recording artists, folk canes and walking sticks, textile traditions, folk toys, Virginia ballads, heirloom apple traditions, and folk carvings. Along the way the instrument has grown from its African roots to become a primary symbol of Anglo-American rural culture. To tell this story, the exhibit features over 30 instruments as well as vintage photographs, sheet music, and advertisements for performances by all types of banjoists.
Audio clips offer examples of musical and playing styles.
Two reproduction gourd banjos illustrate the folk-made instruments Thomas Jefferson and others observed being played by slaves in the 1700s. You have an instrument brought here from Africa by slaves, adopted by white Virginians performing in blackface before international audiences, plucked by parlor musicians and banjo clubs, frailed by a host of old-time rural dance bands, and finally picked as a centerpiece of the bluegrass explosion.