The banjo is a star of Beyoncé's new album. Turns out it has African roots

Pop superstar Beyoncé released "Texas Hold 'Em" a few weeks ago and it features an instrument that she had never emphasized before. This hit song, on her new (and hugely popular) Cowboy Carter album, is both an invitation to dance and an assertion of African American cultural identity.

And the banjo, an instrument often associated with American Appalachian bluegrass music, has an overlooked cultural identity of its own — rooted in Africa, where a traditional instrument with a long neck and a body fashioned from a calabash gourd is clearly a banjo ancestor.

The banjoist on Beyoncé's album is the Black American musician (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Rhiannon Giddens. She's part of a group of musicians and musicologists who have been looking into the African origins of the banjo as well