Page 10 - Demo

“The Sweeneys are indeed a wonder!!”
The banjo from Africa to Appomattox
BY DAVID D. WOOLDRIDGE
The scene is a theater stage in one
of England’s booming industrial cities of the 1840s. The entertainment is a minstrel show, a raucous delineation of some culture and much caricature. The gaslights flicker. The smells overpower. The crowd roars, calling for an encore from a man not quite forty years old
yet already mantled with the superlative “originator of the banjo.”1 He obliges, performing the last of many songs in- spired by his homeland in the Piedmont Aof Virginia.
s the “Celebrated Virginny Banjo Player” steps off the stage into the wings, a shadowy figure awaits him. The banjoist hands his instrument over to the man who quickly secures it, lock- ing it away in its case, away from prying eyes that might steal the secrets of its manufacture.
Indeed, the banjoist has cause to be protective. There has been quite a demanding market for an instrument copied from his very own banjo. This “genius of the banjo” has declared to
the troupe of his fellow performers that should one of them be found “having one of the copies of (my) invention—that party should quit or (I) would leave (myself ).” 2 This “Paga- nini” of the banjo, playing 4,000 miles away from his home along the banks of the Appomattox River, is none other than Joel Walker Sweeney.
30 LYNCH’S FERRY
The Bridge Between
Appomattox Court House National Historical Park is known far and wide as the site of the beginning of the end of the American Civil War. Largely unknown is the fact that within the park is the birth and burial place of Joel Sweeney—the first documented white banjo player. Even among his many musical kith and kin, Joel figures most prominently in the earliest evolution of the American five-string banjo.
Top: Joel Walker Sweeney. This is the only known image of the first documented white banjo player. ACHNHP
Above: The cabin of Charles Sweeney (Joel’s cousin) circa 1930 gives an impression of the landscape that Joel Sweeney was born into. ACHNHP