Becky in Tucson,

1. Banjo has been in Taj's performance repertoire for quite a while.

2. More and more scholars have come to believe that Appalacian music derives from a blending of Celtic and Afro-American music. So maybe Taj was not all that inappropriate.

3. Just up from the Mississippi delta, is the hill country. Field recordings in the hill country reveal Appalacian music played by African-American string bands. There is more common groundl than we may have at first supposed between the Celtic (mainly white) and the blues (mainly black) traditions.

Roger in Baltimore