The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy covers three broad topics, but often wanders away from those, as the author fancies. There's a short history of the banjo, although it is mainly concerned with its appearance in the United States. The author identifies Sweeney as probably being the first banjo performer in the US, but as with other areas in the book, the documentary evidence is incredibly scarce (both for and against any other contender). However, other banjo players -- including some of Sweeney's brothers and students -- get many paragraphs of their own. The "early minstrelsy" section was, for me, the most fascinating, as it covered the birth of blackface performances, while ending with the earliest proto-jazz bands following the Civil War, and somehow covering PT Barnum's years along the way.

It's odd that the author only notes in the eleventh chapter that some of the language in the book "may offend our modern sensibilities." Indeed, songs called "Come Darkies Sing" and others with known lyrics probably wouldn't be sung today. But rather surprisingly, these performances were popular around the world in the early 1800s -- there's a chapter on minstrelsy in Great Britain, and one chapter detailing what is known about these shows in Australia.

Perhaps the strangest fact I learned was that several bands purposefully duplicated predecessor band names (or at least intentionally picked something substantially similar). There may have been dozens of "Virginia Minstrels" bands, which must have made researching these groups a nightmare. (The author confesses that it's often impossible to tell the composition of a group unless some primary documentation like a newspaper report or broadsheet is found.) Then these bands would often "steal" each other's songs. No wonder music law is as complicated as it is now.

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LT Haiku:

Long story about
the best banjo hits of the
mid-eighteen-hundreds. ( )

Bob Carlin's book on the beginnings of the banjo not only covers the instrument's history, but also how it was influenced and proliferated by minstrelsy. The book gives details about Sweeney's actual role in the five-string banjo's development and whether or not other versions of the string instrument predated Sweeney. In fact, there is good information here about how the banjo's origins are in Africa. Plenty of documents and illustrations from Sweeney's area dot the work, giving a nice frame for the larger story of the banjo. Anyone interested in the instrument so tied to folk music and the Appalachian region and in the bizarre yet popular performance of minstrelsy should certainly check out Carlin's book. ( )