Book Review - The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy, by Bob Carlin

This is one of those books I'm glad I read, but wouldn't recommend. It's got some interesting information, but is deadly dull. The author is Bob Carlin, best known (to me at any rate) as a banjo player, instructor, and performer. Before I go on, I should also say that he is an amazing banjo player! I listen to his music every single day (though only the instrumental tunes - I find his voice not to my taste). He does a medley of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood with Waiting for Nancy that is absolutely great. His playing with other musicians is understated and perfect, letting the fiddle shine while pushing the sound forward. But as a historian, he has too much in common with someone making a grocery list.

Joel Walker Sweeney was a white man from Appomattox County, Virginia who, in the 1830s, brought the banjo (formerly an exclusively folk instrument played mostly by blacks and perhaps a few southern whites) onto the American stage. He didn't invent the instrument, and he probably did nothing to technically innovate its construction, but he did introduce it to the world. He did so by blacking his face with burnt cork and ham grease and pretending to be a black man. There is a LOT to say about the phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy, and many historians have done so. Carlin says almost nothing. We get little analysis regarding why white Americans - and people in Britain and Australia - thought it was a good idea to black up and play Negroes for broad humor. Instead, we get excruciating detail regarding Joe Sweeney's itinerary; the cities he played in, the theaters and their addresses, what the newspapers said about his shows, the night he took his "benefit" (apparently the night upon which he got all the gate receipts).

In Carlin's defense, Joe Sweeney died in 1860 at only fifty years of age, and before anyone thought it worthwhile to ask him about his life. He left few documents - such as letters, diaries, etc. - that would give historians a window into his mind. So all Carlin had to go on for Sweeney specifically were those newspaper accounts and handbills for shows. But the result is deadly dull, and left me unsatisfied as to how and why this whole blackface minstrelsy thing got started.

The one good chapter in the book discusses Sweeney and the "invention" of the five-string banjo. For a long time, those who wanted to claim the banjo as an "American" - read, white - instrument claimed that Sweeney took a crude slave instrument, and added the short fifth, or drone, string. This claim is patently false. There are numerous African ancestors/cousins of the banjo that have drone strings (often more than one), and the idea that an Anglo-American would take a folk instrument and add a drone string - which is almost unheard of in other Anglo-American musical instruments - makes no sense. Carlin discusses this, as well as the likely construction of Sweeney's banjos, who might have made them (probably not Sweeney) and the construction and sale of banjos before and after Sweeney popularized the instrument. It's a great chapter. If you get the book, skip the rest and read that one only.