Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Listen to this.

It's a banjo.

A really old banjo.

In fact, what you're listening to might be the oldest surviving banjo recording ever

from 1891.

In 2018, it, alongside three other songs we suspect haven't been heard in over a century,

was released to the public for the first time.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

For today's episode of Retropod, I've invited my colleague Jeff Edgers to share the incredible story of Charles Asbury and his banjo.

Charles Asbury was once a prolific artist.

You can hear it in his song, Hall the Wood Piled Down.

Just seven seconds in, he's off, plucking out dazzling runs and singing with confidence.

We don't know much about Asbury's life or how he became such an accomplished artist.

We do know that his parents came to the United States from Spain,

but it's not clear what happened to him.

Soon after Asbury was born, he was taken in by a Baptist preacher and his wife.

By the 1870s, he was performing. He played the role of Sambo in Harriet Beecher Stowe's

Uncle Tom's cabin and joined the cast in an all-black production of Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS

Pinafore. And he played the banjo really well.

Asbury died in relative obscurity in 1903, just a decade after recording Hall the Wood Pile Down.

Music all the wood pile down. And for a long time, his music faded away into obscurity with him.

...