Being the primarily hand drumming community
of the diaspora of the original Djembe-L and Beyond.Djembe-L was begun in the mid nineties as an unmoderated listserv by a student of Eric Charry at the University of Washington (UW). When that student moved on Eric took over the administration of it. Subsequently he passed the torch to Steve Tierra with HappyShel Weisman soon taking the job as webmaster to the FAQ. This is about the point I joined.
Then some folks with dull axes to grind of a political nature found that they were unable to correspond without venom laced with racial and gender bashing vitriol aimed at the mostly male and white folks that were affluent enough to own computers, into drumming and corresponding about same. Not a huge subset of the drumming community, I'll bet. Stereotypically, musicians and other artists are very sensitive and a volatile bunch, so things got pretty messy.
This lengthy harangue had folks bailing out enmasse as it wasn't much fun or educational, anymore. All this furor plus the need to move Djembe-L from the server at UW and I believe Steve's resultant disenchantment (he continues to post over on the Latin Percussion list, Bless his heart) led to Happy picking up the ball and moving the list over to ONEList.com (which then merged with egroups subsequently swallowed by Yahoo!) moderating it with the help of Bob Feuer (who has since retired) and Yours Truly.
Personalities continued to be disruptive to a smooth flow of information even in this new setting and a sister list was created by some of the disgruntled academic members that felt that their vision of Djembe-L was not being fulfilled. These truly fine scholarly folks named this new unmoderated list "Jembe" as this is a perhaps more accurate way of spelling the French word "Djembe" in English.
In an attempt to, at some level, rejoin the People of these and other spin-off lists I created the Djembe-L WebRing, where I make every effort to keep track of and provide subscription consoles (when available, see below) for the wide variety of hand drumming lists that have sprung up following this split. Many of us subscribe to a number of these lists and cross posting amongst them is quite common.
The Djembe-L WebRing has over 75 participants and is composed of list members from across the spectrum of the more than 93 hand drumming lists (as of 6AUG2K6, listed below) in the international hand drumming community with an additonal 19 or more listservs related to hand drumming. To see a list of the sights presently included on the WebRing you may visit here.
If you know of additional listservs that I need to include, please inform me.
- Djembe-L
Alternate Djembe-L Browse ARCHIVE at groups.google.com
- Bata Drums
- The Bongo Group
- DjembeL
(inactive)- Djembe List
- Drum-AD
- Drum Cats
(The international listserv for
"Ruarto's Rhythms,"
a commercial websight.)
- Drum-Circle
- Drum Circle Music ™