Thank you for this!! I'm an ethnomusicology blogger who often writes about early American folk and Black contributions are terribly overlooked or poorly understood. The banjo is a perfect example; even those few people who know its Black heritage think it was invented by West African slaves on 1600s West Indies sugar plantations, when it was actually documented in the Gambia over 100 years earlier. Africa and the Middle East both had stringed instruments thousands of years before Europe.