March 13, 2024 • 34 mins
…as in, stringed instruments! Brace yourselves for a high-strung episode connecting your favorite pet to three distinct stringed instruments in this episode of 6 Degrees of Cats, the world’s #1 (and only) cat-themed culture, science and history podcast.
What is "cat gut" – and is it truly derived from feline materials, as rumored? Join Amanda “Captain Kitty” B. in this culturally informed and historically resonant investigation into the history of the banjo with Hannah Mayree, co-founder of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, and gain a sense of appreciation for the past, present, and future of this very American instrument. And learn about another instrument it often accompanies, the violin, from Canadian-Romanian musical polymath and documentarian Joenne Dumitrascu, a lifelong violinist who helps clarify what is, and isn’t, making those strings sing. Then, we revisit Japan to speak to an expert on the shamisen, a three-stringed lute-like instrument that carries with it over 600 years of Japanese history and an ongoing message from the past. By the end of the episode, which of these instruments, if any, is embodied by cats? Listen and find out!
Please note: While vivid imagery of deceased animals is not - and will never - be included, listeners who are more sensitive to the topics of animal death may wish to check out other 6 Degrees of Cats episodes, as referenced below.
Join us on this historical trip through time across three continents to gain a deeper sense of appreciation, nuance, and context for the banjo, the violin, and the shamisen – and their connection to cats!
Support the podcast, sign up for The Captain’s Log, the companion podcast newsletter and learn about way$ to help keep this ship afloat for our next season here: linktr.ee/6degreesofcats.
Referenced episodes:
- Cool Cat: How Cats Are the Soul of Rock 'n' Roll
- The Purr-fect Life: Cats, Kantian Ethics and Karma!
Referenced materials:
About the experts:
- Hannah Mayree is a California-born banjoist, singer, songwriter and music educator. They are the co-founder of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project (BBRP), which is a creative eco-system that curates musical, cultural and land-based opportunities for Black, Afro-Diasporic communities around the world to work with the banjo as a tool for reclaiming ancestral wisdom & creating Afro-futures. You can find Hannah at http://hannahmayree.com and BBRP at https://blackbanjoreclamationproject.org.
- Joenne Dumitrascu, M.M., is a Canadian-Romanian musician and filmmaker. She has composed and performed works on major feature films and tours internationally as a concert violinist and pianist. Joenne can be found at https://www.joennedumitrascu.com and followed on Instagram @joenne_dumitrascu
- Keisuke Yamada, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. He is interested in sound studies. He has been working on a book entitled Ecologies of Sound. The book offers a sound-centered analysis of the logic and interplay of global capitalism, militarism, and industrialization that have shaped the soundscapes and sound-politics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Japan.
Special thanks to the Willie Mae Rock Camp community, Mr. Tony Thomas and Camille Pajor and Rebecca Stein.
Producer, writer, editor, sound designer, host, basically everything*
- Amanda B. (Instagram @catsuitband)
* with co-executive producers Binky & Snuggles
Animal voices include:
- Binky & Snuggles _^..^_
Music
- Captain Kitty: all music supervision, mixes and arrangements unless otherwise noted
- Leathered: "Look Alive" © 2022
- Samples licensed via Loopcloud
- Additional sound effects from Pixabay.com
Logo design:
- Edward Anthony © 2024 (Instagram: @itsmyunzii)
Research used:
- Allen, G. (2011, August 23). The banjo’s roots, reconsidered. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139880625/the-banjos-roots-reconsidered
- Bogoian-Mullen, W. (2020, February 27)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Okay, practice makes perfect.
(00:03):
Wanna try the banjo?
[music]
It's okay, we'll just let you sing.
Welcome back, cool cats and cat allies alike, two 6 Degrees of Cats, the world's best,
and only cat themed culture, history, and science podcast.
Hello, hello, this is your captain speaking.
(00:25):
Wow, I cannot believe we're an episode away from the end of the season.
And...
[music]
The time has come.
A time I've been semi-dreading, to be honest.
It's true, we'll be talking about banjos, violins, and shamisons.
(00:46):
Now the connection to cats, that's what I'm a little bit worried about.
I've been wanting to take care of y'all, my listeners.
But some 20 odd years ago, someone, I can't remember who, told me that early stringed instruments
used cat gut.
(01:06):
Sorry guys.
And that's haunted me ever since.
[music]
How?
Why?
I just refused to believe that these adorable, living, purring, hot water bottles for the
soul were ever seen as raw materials.
I mean, who does that?
(01:28):
Ugh, it just can't be true.
Look, I get the hypocrisy.
I know there are so many things that I consume that use animal byproducts.
It's complicated.
And you know, as I say in my sign-off, everything is connected.
So...
In this episode of "6 Degrees of Cats," I'm finally ready to compassionately and, humanely,
(01:56):
investigate that rumor that cat but was used for stringed instruments.
We'll be hearing from experts on these three stringed instruments.
So if discussion of our beloved posthumous remains is too much, I totally get it.
Do feel free to opt out.
Just know that I am bringing to this discussion, as always, much respect.
(02:20):
Both for the cultures that we're going to be talking about, and of course, the kiddies
involved.
Okay, here we go.
So yeah, cat gut
I'm sorry.
This is going to come up a lot.
I think you need to leave the room.
(02:41):
Someone, (definitely my dad) put that image in my mind.
I tried really hard just to shelve it away.
But about 10 years later, as a college student, my curiosity got the best of me.
When I picked up a part-time sales job at my local music store, the store was known for
guitars, but it also sold basses and didgeradoos.
(03:05):
There was also a violin, you know, and I actually think there were several ashiekos and
djembes.
But for some reason, a bunch of dulcimers, which we never sold.
And banjos.
So I think it was one slow weekend morning.
I broached the topic, cat gut with a few colleagues who were hanging out before the lessons
(03:29):
they taught.
Starting with the classical guitarist, Ellen.
Cat gut?
You mean for strings?
I don't know.
Classical strings are nylon.
You have something in your teeth, Amanda.
You, that's fucked up.
Where'd you hear that?
That was Roy, who moonlit as a touring guitarist for a very outre act that wrapped about decapitation
(03:54):
in horror costumes on stage.
You ever heard of that, Chip?
Huh, I think I've heard of that with Asian instruments, but I don't know.
Hello, Bud!
Hey, brother.
Oh yeah, and banjos.
Hey, Bud.
Amanda's asking about cat gut.
Huh, cat gut.
Do banjos use it?
(04:14):
The banjo does have skin and strings.
I've never played a banjo with cat gut, but yeah, baby.
Thanks, Bud and gang.
This slightly fabricated but spiritually truthful recollection takes us to our first instrument
of inquiry.
With all great respect to bud and all the amazing players who came in over those couple
(04:37):
of years, outside of a few folk in country western tunes that I appreciated from a distance,
it didn't really factor into the music I listened to at the time.
Further, having seen Bud demo songs in between lessons, man, the technical skills to make that
thing sing take a shocking level of dexterity and coordination.
(05:00):
You can't fake a claw hammer.
And it had a pretty strong association with rural folks in the south, specifically in the
Appalachian regions.
Who, I imagined, spent a lot of time outdoors and issued footwear, education, contraceptives,
(05:22):
dentists, bank accounts, grammar or etiquette, who were "backwards."
So this image of cat gut and the banjo, you know, it kind of played into my stereotypes
about the instrument and the people who play it.
Thanks to the mainstream American media.
(05:43):
I mean, take the Beverly Hillbillies.
A popular American sitcom from the post-modern 20th century that lamp-boomed a newly-welcy
Appalachian family transplanted into Beverly Hills, you know, the old fish out of water thing.
The theme song, the "Ballad of Jed Clampett", featured a banjo.
(06:04):
I'd say though that the most prominent stereotype came from the hit 1972 motion picture based
on a book called "Deliverance."
[BELL RINGING]
Oh, you know that riff.
Deliverance is a taught thriller starring Burt Reynolds' chest hair in which three men from
(06:28):
out of town are stalked and in one really awful case, violently and intimately assaulted
in a very isolated rural setting by its denizens.
You know, the old fish out of water thing.
Near the Southern Appalachian Mountain Range in Georgia.
It's a pleasant family film.
Just kidding.
(06:48):
But it is a major work in the canon of a genre of gory horror films that, unfortunately, are
called "Hillbilly Horror."
So yeah, I'm kind of pleased to dispel one of the stereotypes right off the bat.
As far as the record shows, banjos were not and are not traditionally constructed of cat
(07:14):
gut, skin or fur.
I have not really thought about the connection between cats and banjos.
Goat skin has typically been used and there's calf skin as well.
That was a musician leading the education and reclamation of the banjo by its original
(07:34):
players.
I'm Hannah Mayree.
My pronouns are they them.
I am a musician, a creative facilitator with Hannah Mayree Productions and all the work I do with
my music.
I also am a founder of Black Banjo Reclamation Project.
(07:54):
Han as expertise on the banjo is specific to both its history and its construction.
I'm curious to know how smaller animals for a banjo skin affects the quality of sound.
Essentially, the skin is what creates the tension for the instrument to kind of stay
(08:16):
at place altogether because the bridge is attached to the skin.
It's actually being held on by the tension and strings against the skin.
And as for the strings, you actually cut the small intestines of the goat and you clean them
out, they would be made into strips and then they would be stretched and spun at the same
time.
(08:38):
I think a lot of people have seen banjo but in case you haven't, they do come in all shapes
and sizes.
You're typically going to have a neck that's about as long as your arm but probably shorter
than your entire arm span.
A neck would be something that could fit inside of your hand and then it's coming together
(08:58):
with a circular shape which is usually a rim of something.
You might be wondering why and how was cat gut ever associated with banjos in the first
place?
Let's keep looking into the banjo's history.
Looking at how it got that round shape.
I feel like the banjo harkens back to the earliest of stringed instruments.
(09:24):
Tradition like that was like a gourd and you know these gourds were not a perfect circle.
In today's world, especially with like manufacturing, it's just a little easier to create something
that like more of a perfect circle.
A lot of those have metal rims, wooden rims but our modern anjo has really retained several
(09:47):
aspects of the traditional instruments and one of those is specifically like having skin
of an animal on the instrument.
Up until the late 20th century, ethnomusicologists and historians had attributed the banjo's
parentage to instruments played by griot musicians who were key community historians, storytellers
(10:10):
and musicians that held court during the great Mande Empire of the 13th century in Mali.
However, thanks to Daniel Jatta and his colleagues' scholarship and advocacy, it seems that the
banjo may have actually descended from a different instrument and tradition.
The akonting of Gambia, we pay homage to the lineage of Daniel Jatta who is in the Sene-Gambia
(10:35):
area of West Africa.
The legacy of the banjo distinct from other stringed instruments hailing from West Africa
and neighboring regions is coming into clearer focus.
But how did the banjo make its way from West Africa to North America?
How did that get from Africa to here?
(11:00):
How did this transform?
There's a lot of research to support that the banjo is here and really in the hands of
a lot of white people because of slavery and oppression colonization.
According to expert and historian Tony Thomas, banjos first emerged from the work of enslaved
(11:23):
folks who were brought to the Caribbean.
There's evidence that this instrument was brought to North America in the 17th century,
which would follow the path of the enslaved Africans brought up from those islands who
then were trafficked from there to North America.
And from there, the banjo evolved.
(11:43):
It's a diasporic instrument.
It'd be derived from an African instrument that, then, as people were displaced, people
were relocating to different places.
There's a traveling legacy of the banjo.
There's early accounts of the banjo, all over Turtle Island, from New York, down into
(12:04):
the Carolinas.
Some early banjo builders were located in Harlem, Macannis and Shaw.
I'm also shouting out to them as well in their legacy.
And I'm really also just shouting out all of the unnamed and unknown banjo players.
(12:29):
The banjo is so obviously by and for the Black diaspora.
But, well, right now, almost all the major banjo players and fans seem to be white.
And then there's that stereotype we talked about earlier.
There's a lot of propaganda in America that has used the banjo to sort of promote that
(12:52):
this is something that is created by white people, erasing the history of where this
comes from.
How did that happen?
Well, first, Jim Crow.
Now synonymous with the laws that allowed for segregation.
This name was originally for the grotesque and indescribably racist persona, assumed by
(13:15):
a white man in the 19th century who entertained white audiences by darkening his skin into
blackface.
Don't do that.
And dancing, performing comedy, singing, and playing the banjo.
I could not find sources to attest to when and how poor white, Appalachian residents first
(13:36):
came to be connected to the banjo.
My educated guess is that the banjo's association with black culture at the time was used to
mock poor white people, many of whom were located in rural and southern regions near and
by black people.
But this is all an educated guess, as I said.
(14:01):
And as for why and how cat skin became associated with this demeaning stereotype, I have a guess,
and it might be connected to the fact that scraps and nontraditional materials, though not
cats, were used to make the first banjos.
(14:22):
The black banjo reformation project were pretty big about experimenting because we know that
that's what our ancestors had to do.
If they were in the situation, they weren't looking up in a book, they weren't researching,
oh, has anybody done this before?
They either knew about it or they didn't.
But they knew they used that to get more information and there's so much to be grateful for in terms
(14:48):
of knowing what people had to go through and even after being forcibly mean to worth the
fact that they had endured so much trauma of being separated in the first place, this
was still something that was super paramount and super important.
This banjo was getting life in a way.
I don't know about you, but I'm definitely seeing the banjo in a whole new light.
(15:13):
What an instrument.
It's transcendent race and class to have a very prominent place in American culture.
Now hopefully with more education and reclamation by the black community that Hannah and her colleagues
are doing, the banjo will gain broader recognition and appreciation alongside its other stringed
brethren.
(15:35):
All of which do not use literal cat gut.
Actually, do some of them?
I guess we still haven't quite closed the book on cat gut.
So, let's continue this inquiry after the break.
[MUSIC]
(16:06):
Before the break, we looked into the rumor that cat gut was used for banjos.
And thanks to black banjo reclamation projects, Hannah Mayree, I feel pretty confident that
we can cut the banjo cat connection loose, at least for now.
So here we are.
Back to square one, the truth behind cat gut.
(16:30):
What an ineloquent word.
I mean, this really just, and as it turns out, unnecessarily so.
We used to joke around in undergrads.
We would tell younger players that their gut strings or cat gut strings because they used
cat intestines, but they really don't.
(16:50):
From what I know, a kit is a Welsh term for fiddle.
So I think that's where they came from, but it has nothing to do with cats.
Ah, Welsh as in, Wales.
Where vowels are scarce, but they, like we, 6 Degrees of Cats people, love the super
(17:11):
furry animals.
The band, there's a band called Super Furry Animals as well.
Anyway, this is what brings us to Europe, the continent of origin, but not nationality,
of our next expert.
My name is Joenne Dumitrascu.
I'm Canadian.
I live in New York now.
I was born in Romania.
(17:33):
I'm a professional musician.
My training focus was violin performance as well as piano as a secondary instrument.
I studied field as well.
Joenne plays an instrument that is from a very cat lovin' place.
I mean, remember the Romans?
Yep, we're talking about Italy.
(17:53):
Historically, they're saying that what we now call the modern day violins started in
16th century northern Italy, and that's in the Lombardi region, that to this day, it's
really maintained that violin making tradition.
The most notable city is Cremona, and that's where the Amadi family, they make violins and
(18:13):
the violas, and between the 16th and 18th centuries, there were several generations of the
Amadi family who were violom makers, further on they taught the Borneri and Strativary.
So that's basically where all of these amazing instruments come from.
Let's talk about those strings.
(18:34):
So basically, catch got or got core strings, which is what we call them today, make the way
they were made in the Baroque period.
They're prepared by using the natural fiber found in like the walls of animal intestines.
It's usually sheep or goat, but also other cattle, hogs, horses, donkeys, and that's basically
(19:02):
what was used in gut core strings.
They are very fragile, they don't last very long, they do break very easily, and they also
don't stay too very long, so they require a lot of tune.
They do have a beautiful sound, it's much warmer, they sit better, can still core, but they're
extremely difficult to play on.
(19:24):
And what are those strings made of now?
We hear of Baroque specialists in particular, they played Baroque instruments, and they
do use gut core strings.
For professional modern players, and that includes jazz players or acquisitions, they're usually
still core, and then they have various metals wrapped around it.
(19:46):
The synthetic core started being used around the 1970s or so, and they have a very quick
response.
They're also not very high maintenance, so they're mostly used by beginner players.
Thanks for clearing that up, Joenne.
It sounds like cats just randomly got tied up to this gut string situation, thanks to a
(20:08):
simple mistranslation from Welsh or German or whatever to English.
Is it now safe to say that there are no instruments that use cat materials?
Are we done here?
No.
Sorry, y'all.
We have one more stop on this morbid quest.
(20:30):
So let's head on over to a place we've been before.
Japan.
Yours truly lived in Japan a lifetime ago.
And for a while, I worked in a school that hosted an after-school shamisen class a few
rooms down the hall from where I was set up.
And sometimes I could even hear them practice.
(20:52):
Harp-like scales resonating from this unique, very Japanese instrument, which, for a foreigner
like me, really felt special, you know?
Until the day, Ando Sensei rocked up to chat about the next day's lessons.
After exchanging the usual pleasantries, the conversation naturally seared toward cats.
(21:17):
I love cats.
And I think I mentioned something about finding them very magical.
Cats.
A soul.
Ando Sensei processed this and then paused to also admire the shamisen music wafting
in through the paper thin walls.
Oh, they are preparing for school festival, you know?
(21:40):
I hear the instrument is made of cat, maybe for magical properties.
But I don't know.
Maybe you should ask Tanaka Sensei, Shamisen club instructor.
Also, Amanda Sensei, you have something in your teeth.
Unfortunately, by the time I got my teeth cleaned up, Tanaka Sensei and her students had left
(22:01):
school and I never worked up the nerve to ask again.
Thankfully, here we are, friends, twenty years later.
And we're going to find out if cats were instrumental in the making of the shami-sen.
So I'd like to thank our next expert, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Japanese Studies
(22:22):
at the University of Michigan. (Go Blue!)
My name is Keisuke Yamada.
I'm originally from Japan.
I came to the US for my ethnomusicology study in Japanese music, particularly musical instruments.
I studied the shamisen, the instrument itself rather than Japanese traditional music.
(22:45):
I obviously got the right guy for the job here.
For those who haven't seen or heard one before, let's briefly describe the shamisen.
I'll include a link in the show notes to a playlist with some video examples that you
can check out after.
The shamisen, which is a three-stringed lute, there many different types.
(23:09):
They use the shamisen to play Nagata, which is a music performed by Kabuki theater.
Nowadays they play some improvisation and popular music with Tsugaru Shamsen, from Tsugaru
region, Aomori, northeast part of Japan.
(23:29):
The shamisen sounds like, well...it has a long, fretless neck and three peg tuners to tighten
or loosen the strings.
The body is composed of a rounded square shape wooden frame, which is covered by an animal
skin.
Players position the instrument similarly to Banjo, but instead of playing with a pick
(23:54):
or your fingers, players will pluck the strings with a large, kind of paint scraper-looking
thing called a bachi.
But also similarly to Banjo, the shamisen too has traveled.
The shamisen pass originally grew from China by the end of 14th century to Ryukyu Island,
(24:19):
(Okinawa, colonized by Japan in the early 19th century), then from Ryukyu Island to the
main island by mid 16th century.
Which is where we get the cat connection.
So our cats truly used as materials for the shamisen?
(24:40):
Well, take it away, Dr. Yamada.
Even though illustrations from this period shows someone is playing the shamisen, it's very
difficult to find historical information as to what skin was used exactly.
(25:02):
The Ryukyu instrument called sanshin, the body is covered with snake skin.
When this instrument was brought to the main island of Japan, they changed to another skin,
because they couldn't find snake skin to cover the large body.
But then at some point, today's Japanese music scholars are saying that cats got used.
(25:33):
And there it is folks, we found the smoking gun.
Cats have shown up in Japanese culture for a long time.
They began to appear in documents and legends around the 12th century.
It surmised that cats were first brought to Japan as gifts, or were employed to keep rodents
(25:55):
away from Buddhist scripts.
So this may explain a bit why cat skin was used specifically in Japan, and how an industry
of the skin trade was apparently a thing.
I looked at newspapers from late 19th century.
There were cat traders to sell them to shamisen skin makeres
(26:19):
There's a rumor I found about a cat ghost curse on shamisen makers.
I'm still researching its origins.
And in fact, there's actually a much more real curse on those shami-sen skin traders
that we need to talk about.
Dr. Yamada's work focuses on this
(26:41):
This is new information, I think, at least through the ethnomusicology literature.
In pre-modern period of Japan, around 1600, there was a caste system, those who are social
outcasts, excluded from the mainstream society, but then called the "buraku min"
(27:04):
People at the time being that those two touched dead bodies of considered contaminated,
spiritual contamination.
Killing animals means that people are getting contaminated, so people let those social outcasts
make these materials.
One note is that the body of the shamisen, neck and the head of the shamisen are separate.
(27:30):
Shamisen makers are not considered buraku min, while the shamisen skin makers are considered
buraku min.
In the mid-19th century, I think 1870, the caste system was abolished, however, this kind
of discrimination continued.
Wow.
(27:51):
From what I understand about caste systems, there's a lot of really serious and severe discrimination
that can go on for generations.
Here we thought we were talking about cats, but this is a human welfare issue.
I had no idea before talking to Dr. Yamada that it was so entangled with the shamisen.
(28:12):
I'll let him continue.
This is a human rights issue and also animal rights issue today.
I wrote an article about these historical changes.
How moral and ethical perspectives on life have changed throughout time, then how these
(28:33):
transformations affected the making of the shamisen.
Shamisen skin makers are located in Kansai Regions
Human right activists in the city of Osaka (a major city in the Kansai region) they
investigated the labor of buraku min, then they wrote about a contemporary shamisen's
(28:59):
skin-maker.
Japan established animal protection laws in 1973, after that
I think only a few shamisen skin makers in Japan.
So today they are mostly outsourcing from China.
Nowadays from 80 to 90% of shamisen's are dog skin, and the remaining 10 to 20 the cat skin.
(29:29):
So it's not even just cats, but dogs too.
That said, the shamisen you might come across online or in any type of folk instrument catalog,
at least outside of China and Japan.
That's not going to be made of animal skin.
I think many shamisen's nowadays not only in Japan, but also across the world.
(29:54):
Mostly used synthetic skin.
So that's a win for cats and dogs and snakes it might seem.
But what about the buraku min?
While I'm grateful to the animal rights movement for making sure that animals, ah, welfare isn't
lost in the mix, I'm kind of concerned that this activism might have exploited or further
(30:20):
the marginalization of the buraku min.
The reason why the Japanese government established that was pressure from animal rights activists
mostly in 1960s to 1970s.
Many of them consisted of cat lovers.
They were fighting particularly against the traders - the cat traders.
(30:45):
The buraku min.
Now don't get me wrong, come on.
It's me, Captain Kitty here.
I'm definitely not calling for the revival of this cat trade.
But it's kind of not great that the advocacy for the cats and dogs seemed to preclude consideration
for the buraku min.
Those folks being vilified and stigmatized for, well, that trade.
(31:11):
Do I love the idea of cats being used for anything but worship?
No.
Do I think that cultures who have used cats' bodies for stuff are intrinsically terrible
or backwards?
I used to say "yes", but, well, now it's a bit more complicated.
I'm going to just leave you with Hannah's really good points.
(31:35):
I think it's a way to honor them.
Each animal is so special and they carry their life with them.
And so whatever animal is used for that is not only like giving their life, but giving
us a new opportunity to actually create something in this world that's connected to Earth.
(31:58):
So I'm super grateful for the banjo and being able to just bring in the concept of the animals
because they are literally responsible for the banjo and for all these instruments being
able to exist.
That, I can agree with.
Well my dear listeners, I guess we can look at it this way.
(32:20):
Cats and dogs now join snakes, horses, goats, cows, donkeys and pigs, among other animals,
as those deemed worthy of music.
We're done for now, at least, talking about cat gut.
In the next episode, which is our season finale, we are going to redirect our attention to
the living little gods in our homes that we have adopted into our families and speaking
(32:46):
of family, what that actually means.
For now, I want to thank my wonderful experts - Hannah Mayree, Joenne Dumitrascu and…
Keisuke Yamada.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs.
If you'd like to learn more about them, please check out our show notes, which also include
(33:07):
the references and research that went into this episode.
If you…
I don't know if you could love this episode, but if you at least learn from it, please do
spread the word to anybody who would appreciate the culture, history and sometimes the scientific
aspects of what we explore.
I appreciate you all so much for sticking around.
Thank you for sharing, caring and hanging out.
(33:30):
Stay beautiful.
And remember, everything is connected.
6 Degrees of Cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours truly, Captain Kitty,
aka Amanda B. Please subscribe to our mailing list by going to linktr.ee/6degreesofcats,
(33:53):
or look us up on all those social media platforms.
You'll be first in line for the extra audio and more treats that can connect with us
there.
These episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient and the
weird, and of course all the cats we've loved and lost.
I'm sorry, I know this was a pretty morbid topic for you too.
(34:24):
You get extra treats for enduring this.
And you know I'd never let anyone lay a hand on your hide?
Although I think we should make use of your cat wool, maybe those Norse folks were onto
something.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Okay, practice makes perfect.
(00:03):
Wanna try the banjo?
[music]
It's okay, we'll just let you sing.
Welcome back, cool cats and cat allies alike, two 6 Degrees of Cats, the world's best,
and only cat themed culture, history, and science podcast.
Hello, hello, this is your captain speaking.
(00:25):
Wow, I cannot believe we're an episode away from the end of the season.
And...
[music]
The time has come.
A time I've been semi-dreading, to be honest.
It's true, we'll be talking about banjos, violins, and shamisons.
(00:46):
Now the connection to cats, that's what I'm a little bit worried about.
I've been wanting to take care of y'all, my listeners.
But some 20 odd years ago, someone, I can't remember who, told me that early stringed instruments
used cat gut.
(01:06):
Sorry guys.
And that's haunted me ever since.
[music]
How?
Why?
I just refused to believe that these adorable, living, purring, hot water bottles for the
soul were ever seen as raw materials.
I mean, who does that?
(01:28):
Ugh, it just can't be true.
Look, I get the hypocrisy.
I know there are so many things that I consume that use animal byproducts.
It's complicated.
And you know, as I say in my sign-off, everything is connected.
So...
In this episode of "6 Degrees of Cats," I'm finally ready to compassionately and, humanely,
(01:56):
investigate that rumor that cat but was used for stringed instruments.
We'll be hearing from experts on these three stringed instruments.
So if discussion of our beloved posthumous remains is too much, I totally get it.
Do feel free to opt out.
Just know that I am bringing to this discussion, as always, much respect.
(02:20):
Both for the cultures that we're going to be talking about, and of course, the kiddies
involved.
Okay, here we go.
So yeah, cat gut
I'm sorry.
This is going to come up a lot.
I think you need to leave the room.
(02:41):
Someone, (definitely my dad) put that image in my mind.
I tried really hard just to shelve it away.
But about 10 years later, as a college student, my curiosity got the best of me.
When I picked up a part-time sales job at my local music store, the store was known for
guitars, but it also sold basses and didgeradoos.
(03:05):
There was also a violin, you know, and I actually think there were several ashiekos and
djembes.
But for some reason, a bunch of dulcimers, which we never sold.
And banjos.
So I think it was one slow weekend morning.
I broached the topic, cat gut with a few colleagues who were hanging out before the lessons
(03:29):
they taught.
Starting with the classical guitarist, Ellen.
Cat gut?
You mean for strings?
I don't know.
Classical strings are nylon.
You have something in your teeth, Amanda.
You, that's fucked up.
Where'd you hear that?
That was Roy, who moonlit as a touring guitarist for a very outre act that wrapped about decapitation
(03:54):
in horror costumes on stage.
You ever heard of that, Chip?
Huh, I think I've heard of that with Asian instruments, but I don't know.
Hello, Bud!
Hey, brother.
Oh yeah, and banjos.
Hey, Bud.
Amanda's asking about cat gut.
Huh, cat gut.
Do banjos use it?
(04:14):
The banjo does have skin and strings.
I've never played a banjo with cat gut, but yeah, baby.
Thanks, Bud and gang.
This slightly fabricated but spiritually truthful recollection takes us to our first instrument
of inquiry.
With all great respect to bud and all the amazing players who came in over those couple
(04:37):
of years, outside of a few folk in country western tunes that I appreciated from a distance,
it didn't really factor into the music I listened to at the time.
Further, having seen Bud demo songs in between lessons, man, the technical skills to make that
thing sing take a shocking level of dexterity and coordination.
(05:00):
You can't fake a claw hammer.
And it had a pretty strong association with rural folks in the south, specifically in the
Appalachian regions.
Who, I imagined, spent a lot of time outdoors and issued footwear, education, contraceptives,
(05:22):
dentists, bank accounts, grammar or etiquette, who were "backwards."
So this image of cat gut and the banjo, you know, it kind of played into my stereotypes
about the instrument and the people who play it.
Thanks to the mainstream American media.
(05:43):
I mean, take the Beverly Hillbillies.
A popular American sitcom from the post-modern 20th century that lamp-boomed a newly-welcy
Appalachian family transplanted into Beverly Hills, you know, the old fish out of water thing.
The theme song, the "Ballad of Jed Clampett", featured a banjo.
(06:04):
I'd say though that the most prominent stereotype came from the hit 1972 motion picture based
on a book called "Deliverance."
[BELL RINGING]
Oh, you know that riff.
Deliverance is a taught thriller starring Burt Reynolds' chest hair in which three men from
(06:28):
out of town are stalked and in one really awful case, violently and intimately assaulted
in a very isolated rural setting by its denizens.
You know, the old fish out of water thing.
Near the Southern Appalachian Mountain Range in Georgia.
It's a pleasant family film.
Just kidding.
(06:48):
But it is a major work in the canon of a genre of gory horror films that, unfortunately, are
called "Hillbilly Horror."
So yeah, I'm kind of pleased to dispel one of the stereotypes right off the bat.
As far as the record shows, banjos were not and are not traditionally constructed of cat
(07:14):
gut, skin or fur.
I have not really thought about the connection between cats and banjos.
Goat skin has typically been used and there's calf skin as well.
That was a musician leading the education and reclamation of the banjo by its original
(07:34):
players.
I'm Hannah Mayree.
My pronouns are they them.
I am a musician, a creative facilitator with Hannah Mayree Productions and all the work I do with
my music.
I also am a founder of Black Banjo Reclamation Project.
(07:54):
Han as expertise on the banjo is specific to both its history and its construction.
I'm curious to know how smaller animals for a banjo skin affects the quality of sound.
Essentially, the skin is what creates the tension for the instrument to kind of stay
(08:16):
at place altogether because the bridge is attached to the skin.
It's actually being held on by the tension and strings against the skin.
And as for the strings, you actually cut the small intestines of the goat and you clean them
out, they would be made into strips and then they would be stretched and spun at the same
time.
(08:38):
I think a lot of people have seen banjo but in case you haven't, they do come in all shapes
and sizes.
You're typically going to have a neck that's about as long as your arm but probably shorter
than your entire arm span.
A neck would be something that could fit inside of your hand and then it's coming together
(08:58):
with a circular shape which is usually a rim of something.
You might be wondering why and how was cat gut ever associated with banjos in the first
place?
Let's keep looking into the banjo's history.
Looking at how it got that round shape.
I feel like the banjo harkens back to the earliest of stringed instruments.
(09:24):
Tradition like that was like a gourd and you know these gourds were not a perfect circle.
In today's world, especially with like manufacturing, it's just a little easier to create something
that like more of a perfect circle.
A lot of those have metal rims, wooden rims but our modern anjo has really retained several
(09:47):
aspects of the traditional instruments and one of those is specifically like having skin
of an animal on the instrument.
Up until the late 20th century, ethnomusicologists and historians had attributed the banjo's
parentage to instruments played by griot musicians who were key community historians, storytellers
(10:10):
and musicians that held court during the great Mande Empire of the 13th century in Mali.
However, thanks to Daniel Jatta and his colleagues' scholarship and advocacy, it seems that the
banjo may have actually descended from a different instrument and tradition.
The akonting of Gambia, we pay homage to the lineage of Daniel Jatta who is in the Sene-Gambia
(10:35):
area of West Africa.
The legacy of the banjo distinct from other stringed instruments hailing from West Africa
and neighboring regions is coming into clearer focus.
But how did the banjo make its way from West Africa to North America?
How did that get from Africa to here?
(11:00):
How did this transform?
There's a lot of research to support that the banjo is here and really in the hands of
a lot of white people because of slavery and oppression colonization.
According to expert and historian Tony Thomas, banjos first emerged from the work of enslaved
(11:23):
folks who were brought to the Caribbean.
There's evidence that this instrument was brought to North America in the 17th century,
which would follow the path of the enslaved Africans brought up from those islands who
then were trafficked from there to North America.
And from there, the banjo evolved.
(11:43):
It's a diasporic instrument.
It'd be derived from an African instrument that, then, as people were displaced, people
were relocating to different places.
There's a traveling legacy of the banjo.
There's early accounts of the banjo, all over Turtle Island, from New York, down into
(12:04):
the Carolinas.
Some early banjo builders were located in Harlem, Macannis and Shaw.
I'm also shouting out to them as well in their legacy.
And I'm really also just shouting out all of the unnamed and unknown banjo players.
(12:29):
The banjo is so obviously by and for the Black diaspora.
But, well, right now, almost all the major banjo players and fans seem to be white.
And then there's that stereotype we talked about earlier.
There's a lot of propaganda in America that has used the banjo to sort of promote that
(12:52):
this is something that is created by white people, erasing the history of where this
comes from.
How did that happen?
Well, first, Jim Crow.
Now synonymous with the laws that allowed for segregation.
This name was originally for the grotesque and indescribably racist persona, assumed by
(13:15):
a white man in the 19th century who entertained white audiences by darkening his skin into
blackface.
Don't do that.
And dancing, performing comedy, singing, and playing the banjo.
I could not find sources to attest to when and how poor white, Appalachian residents first
(13:36):
came to be connected to the banjo.
My educated guess is that the banjo's association with black culture at the time was used to
mock poor white people, many of whom were located in rural and southern regions near and
by black people.
But this is all an educated guess, as I said.
(14:01):
And as for why and how cat skin became associated with this demeaning stereotype, I have a guess,
and it might be connected to the fact that scraps and nontraditional materials, though not
cats, were used to make the first banjos.
(14:22):
The black banjo reformation project were pretty big about experimenting because we know that
that's what our ancestors had to do.
If they were in the situation, they weren't looking up in a book, they weren't researching,
oh, has anybody done this before?
They either knew about it or they didn't.
But they knew they used that to get more information and there's so much to be grateful for in terms
(14:48):
of knowing what people had to go through and even after being forcibly mean to worth the
fact that they had endured so much trauma of being separated in the first place, this
was still something that was super paramount and super important.
This banjo was getting life in a way.
I don't know about you, but I'm definitely seeing the banjo in a whole new light.
(15:13):
What an instrument.
It's transcendent race and class to have a very prominent place in American culture.
Now hopefully with more education and reclamation by the black community that Hannah and her colleagues
are doing, the banjo will gain broader recognition and appreciation alongside its other stringed
brethren.
(15:35):
All of which do not use literal cat gut.
Actually, do some of them?
I guess we still haven't quite closed the book on cat gut.
So, let's continue this inquiry after the break.
[MUSIC]
(16:06):
Before the break, we looked into the rumor that cat gut was used for banjos.
And thanks to black banjo reclamation projects, Hannah Mayree, I feel pretty confident that
we can cut the banjo cat connection loose, at least for now.
So here we are.
Back to square one, the truth behind cat gut.
(16:30):
What an ineloquent word.
I mean, this really just, and as it turns out, unnecessarily so.
We used to joke around in undergrads.
We would tell younger players that their gut strings or cat gut strings because they used
cat intestines, but they really don't.
(16:50):
From what I know, a kit is a Welsh term for fiddle.
So I think that's where they came from, but it has nothing to do with cats.
Ah, Welsh as in, Wales.
Where vowels are scarce, but they, like we, 6 Degrees of Cats people, love the super
(17:11):
furry animals.
The band, there's a band called Super Furry Animals as well.
Anyway, this is what brings us to Europe, the continent of origin, but not nationality,
of our next expert.
My name is Joenne Dumitrascu.
I'm Canadian.
I live in New York now.
I was born in Romania.
(17:33):
I'm a professional musician.
My training focus was violin performance as well as piano as a secondary instrument.
I studied field as well.
Joenne plays an instrument that is from a very cat lovin' place.
I mean, remember the Romans?
Yep, we're talking about Italy.
(17:53):
Historically, they're saying that what we now call the modern day violins started in
16th century northern Italy, and that's in the Lombardi region, that to this day, it's
really maintained that violin making tradition.
The most notable city is Cremona, and that's where the Amadi family, they make violins and
(18:13):
the violas, and between the 16th and 18th centuries, there were several generations of the
Amadi family who were violom makers, further on they taught the Borneri and Strativary.
So that's basically where all of these amazing instruments come from.
Let's talk about those strings.
(18:34):
So basically, catch got or got core strings, which is what we call them today, make the way
they were made in the Baroque period.
They're prepared by using the natural fiber found in like the walls of animal intestines.
It's usually sheep or goat, but also other cattle, hogs, horses, donkeys, and that's basically
(19:02):
what was used in gut core strings.
They are very fragile, they don't last very long, they do break very easily, and they also
don't stay too very long, so they require a lot of tune.
They do have a beautiful sound, it's much warmer, they sit better, can still core, but they're
extremely difficult to play on.
(19:24):
And what are those strings made of now?
We hear of Baroque specialists in particular, they played Baroque instruments, and they
do use gut core strings.
For professional modern players, and that includes jazz players or acquisitions, they're usually
still core, and then they have various metals wrapped around it.
(19:46):
The synthetic core started being used around the 1970s or so, and they have a very quick
response.
They're also not very high maintenance, so they're mostly used by beginner players.
Thanks for clearing that up, Joenne.
It sounds like cats just randomly got tied up to this gut string situation, thanks to a
(20:08):
simple mistranslation from Welsh or German or whatever to English.
Is it now safe to say that there are no instruments that use cat materials?
Are we done here?
No.
Sorry, y'all.
We have one more stop on this morbid quest.
(20:30):
So let's head on over to a place we've been before.
Japan.
Yours truly lived in Japan a lifetime ago.
And for a while, I worked in a school that hosted an after-school shamisen class a few
rooms down the hall from where I was set up.
And sometimes I could even hear them practice.
(20:52):
Harp-like scales resonating from this unique, very Japanese instrument, which, for a foreigner
like me, really felt special, you know?
Until the day, Ando Sensei rocked up to chat about the next day's lessons.
After exchanging the usual pleasantries, the conversation naturally seared toward cats.
(21:17):
I love cats.
And I think I mentioned something about finding them very magical.
Cats.
A soul.
Ando Sensei processed this and then paused to also admire the shamisen music wafting
in through the paper thin walls.
Oh, they are preparing for school festival, you know?
(21:40):
I hear the instrument is made of cat, maybe for magical properties.
But I don't know.
Maybe you should ask Tanaka Sensei, Shamisen club instructor.
Also, Amanda Sensei, you have something in your teeth.
Unfortunately, by the time I got my teeth cleaned up, Tanaka Sensei and her students had left
(22:01):
school and I never worked up the nerve to ask again.
Thankfully, here we are, friends, twenty years later.
And we're going to find out if cats were instrumental in the making of the shami-sen.
So I'd like to thank our next expert, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Japanese Studies
(22:22):
at the University of Michigan. (Go Blue!)
My name is Keisuke Yamada.
I'm originally from Japan.
I came to the US for my ethnomusicology study in Japanese music, particularly musical instruments.
I studied the shamisen, the instrument itself rather than Japanese traditional music.
(22:45):
I obviously got the right guy for the job here.
For those who haven't seen or heard one before, let's briefly describe the shamisen.
I'll include a link in the show notes to a playlist with some video examples that you
can check out after.
The shamisen, which is a three-stringed lute, there many different types.
(23:09):
They use the shamisen to play Nagata, which is a music performed by Kabuki theater.
Nowadays they play some improvisation and popular music with Tsugaru Shamsen, from Tsugaru
region, Aomori, northeast part of Japan.
(23:29):
The shamisen sounds like, well...it has a long, fretless neck and three peg tuners to tighten
or loosen the strings.
The body is composed of a rounded square shape wooden frame, which is covered by an animal
skin.
Players position the instrument similarly to Banjo, but instead of playing with a pick
(23:54):
or your fingers, players will pluck the strings with a large, kind of paint scraper-looking
thing called a bachi.
But also similarly to Banjo, the shamisen too has traveled.
The shamisen pass originally grew from China by the end of 14th century to Ryukyu Island,
(24:19):
(Okinawa, colonized by Japan in the early 19th century), then from Ryukyu Island to the
main island by mid 16th century.
Which is where we get the cat connection.
So our cats truly used as materials for the shamisen?
(24:40):
Well, take it away, Dr. Yamada.
Even though illustrations from this period shows someone is playing the shamisen, it's very
difficult to find historical information as to what skin was used exactly.
(25:02):
The Ryukyu instrument called sanshin, the body is covered with snake skin.
When this instrument was brought to the main island of Japan, they changed to another skin,
because they couldn't find snake skin to cover the large body.
But then at some point, today's Japanese music scholars are saying that cats got used.
(25:33):
And there it is folks, we found the smoking gun.
Cats have shown up in Japanese culture for a long time.
They began to appear in documents and legends around the 12th century.
It surmised that cats were first brought to Japan as gifts, or were employed to keep rodents
(25:55):
away from Buddhist scripts.
So this may explain a bit why cat skin was used specifically in Japan, and how an industry
of the skin trade was apparently a thing.
I looked at newspapers from late 19th century.
There were cat traders to sell them to shamisen skin makeres
(26:19):
There's a rumor I found about a cat ghost curse on shamisen makers.
I'm still researching its origins.
And in fact, there's actually a much more real curse on those shami-sen skin traders
that we need to talk about.
Dr. Yamada's work focuses on this
(26:41):
This is new information, I think, at least through the ethnomusicology literature.
In pre-modern period of Japan, around 1600, there was a caste system, those who are social
outcasts, excluded from the mainstream society, but then called the "buraku min"
(27:04):
People at the time being that those two touched dead bodies of considered contaminated,
spiritual contamination.
Killing animals means that people are getting contaminated, so people let those social outcasts
make these materials.
One note is that the body of the shamisen, neck and the head of the shamisen are separate.
(27:30):
Shamisen makers are not considered buraku min, while the shamisen skin makers are considered
buraku min.
In the mid-19th century, I think 1870, the caste system was abolished, however, this kind
of discrimination continued.
Wow.
(27:51):
From what I understand about caste systems, there's a lot of really serious and severe discrimination
that can go on for generations.
Here we thought we were talking about cats, but this is a human welfare issue.
I had no idea before talking to Dr. Yamada that it was so entangled with the shamisen.
(28:12):
I'll let him continue.
This is a human rights issue and also animal rights issue today.
I wrote an article about these historical changes.
How moral and ethical perspectives on life have changed throughout time, then how these
(28:33):
transformations affected the making of the shamisen.
Shamisen skin makers are located in Kansai Regions
Human right activists in the city of Osaka (a major city in the Kansai region) they
investigated the labor of buraku min, then they wrote about a contemporary shamisen's
(28:59):
skin-maker.
Japan established animal protection laws in 1973, after that
I think only a few shamisen skin makers in Japan.
So today they are mostly outsourcing from China.
Nowadays from 80 to 90% of shamisen's are dog skin, and the remaining 10 to 20 the cat skin.
(29:29):
So it's not even just cats, but dogs too.
That said, the shamisen you might come across online or in any type of folk instrument catalog,
at least outside of China and Japan.
That's not going to be made of animal skin.
I think many shamisen's nowadays not only in Japan, but also across the world.
(29:54):
Mostly used synthetic skin.
So that's a win for cats and dogs and snakes it might seem.
But what about the buraku min?
While I'm grateful to the animal rights movement for making sure that animals, ah, welfare isn't
lost in the mix, I'm kind of concerned that this activism might have exploited or further
(30:20):
the marginalization of the buraku min.
The reason why the Japanese government established that was pressure from animal rights activists
mostly in 1960s to 1970s.
Many of them consisted of cat lovers.
They were fighting particularly against the traders - the cat traders.
(30:45):
The buraku min.
Now don't get me wrong, come on.
It's me, Captain Kitty here.
I'm definitely not calling for the revival of this cat trade.
But it's kind of not great that the advocacy for the cats and dogs seemed to preclude consideration
for the buraku min.
Those folks being vilified and stigmatized for, well, that trade.
(31:11):
Do I love the idea of cats being used for anything but worship?
No.
Do I think that cultures who have used cats' bodies for stuff are intrinsically terrible
or backwards?
I used to say "yes", but, well, now it's a bit more complicated.
I'm going to just leave you with Hannah's really good points.
(31:35):
I think it's a way to honor them.
Each animal is so special and they carry their life with them.
And so whatever animal is used for that is not only like giving their life, but giving
us a new opportunity to actually create something in this world that's connected to Earth.
(31:58):
So I'm super grateful for the banjo and being able to just bring in the concept of the animals
because they are literally responsible for the banjo and for all these instruments being
able to exist.
That, I can agree with.
Well my dear listeners, I guess we can look at it this way.
(32:20):
Cats and dogs now join snakes, horses, goats, cows, donkeys and pigs, among other animals,
as those deemed worthy of music.
We're done for now, at least, talking about cat gut.
In the next episode, which is our season finale, we are going to redirect our attention to
the living little gods in our homes that we have adopted into our families and speaking
(32:46):
of family, what that actually means.
For now, I want to thank my wonderful experts - Hannah Mayree, Joenne Dumitrascu and…
Keisuke Yamada.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs.
If you'd like to learn more about them, please check out our show notes, which also include
(33:07):
the references and research that went into this episode.
If you…
I don't know if you could love this episode, but if you at least learn from it, please do
spread the word to anybody who would appreciate the culture, history and sometimes the scientific
aspects of what we explore.
I appreciate you all so much for sticking around.
Thank you for sharing, caring and hanging out.
(33:30):
Stay beautiful.
And remember, everything is connected.
6 Degrees of Cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours truly, Captain Kitty,
aka Amanda B. Please subscribe to our mailing list by going to linktr.ee/6degreesofcats,
(33:53):
or look us up on all those social media platforms.
You'll be first in line for the extra audio and more treats that can connect with us
there.
These episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient and the
weird, and of course all the cats we've loved and lost.
I'm sorry, I know this was a pretty morbid topic for you too.
(34:24):
You get extra treats for enduring this.
And you know I'd never let anyone lay a hand on your hide?
Although I think we should make use of your cat wool, maybe those Norse folks were onto
something.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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