Joel Walker Sweeney was born ‘to Irish-American parents’ sometime around 1810 and along with his three younger siblings, played music from an early age (Smith 2013:72). It is clear that from the earliest stages of his life Sweeney would have been immersed in black culture and custom as ‘between the time of Sweeney’s birth and his first ventures into the wider world,’ his native Appomatox County, Virginia had a fairly stable population with blacks outnumbering whites by ‘10,000 to 7,400’ (Carlin 2007:19). Before the 1830s Sweeney’s musical career comprised of ‘wandering through central Virginia, playing and singing for crowds during country court sessions’ sing ‘the doggerel [sic] he had learned from Negroes or had improvised from their tunes, dancing, reciting, and crowing, braying and roaring in imitations of animals’ (qtd. in Carlin 2007:20). It was around this time that Sweeney ‘began blacking his face for the performances’ (ibid).
Sweeney’s virtuosic and distinctively Afro-American style of banjo playing would establish him as a mythical figure within the minstrel banjo tradition; a tradition which he himself largely invented, and his ‘riveting performances helped transform the banjo from a relative stranger and anomaly on the stage to a near-necessity’ for all of the subsequent blackface acts of the period, acts which relied upon the instrument as a compelling racial signifier and which substantiated their claims as authentic portrayers of black culture (Dubois 2016:196).
Along with Sweeney, the other white man to be documented as playing the banjo around the same time was an itinerant ‘Irish banjo player’ named ‘Archibald Ferguson,’ whom the renowned minstrel composer Dan Emmett discovered while touring with a circus in Southwest Virginia in the Spring of 1840 (Smith 2013:75; Carlin 2007:58). Ferguson was described by one of Emmett’s company at that time, as ‘a very ignorant person, and “neggar all over” except in color,’ but testifying to the notable appeal of the banjo at this moment in time, after ‘the mythical banjoist’ Ferguson subsequently joined up with the acclaimed dancer Frank Brower he became the ‘greatest drawing card the circus had’ and the duo soon became ‘the talk of the town’ (Carlin 2007:59).
An ‘invented’ banjo tradition
While biographical information on this mysterious ‘Irish’ banjoist remains scant, what information there is indicates that Ferguson like Sweeney had almost certainly been instructed to play the banjo by directly apprenticing himself to Afro-American musicians. These two first documented white banjoists would go on instruct other white minstrels to play in what was a distinctively Afro-American style and initiated a tradition of white banjo playing.
Conway notes the importance of apprenticeship for white minstrel performers in the early days of the minstrel show as ‘unfamiliar African-American materials were initially not written but available only through oral traditions from blacks’ as ‘apprentices to an alien tradition’ (Conway 1995:87). However, it was again their Irish backgrounds which enabled the early white purveyors of black music, to absorb this orally transmitted music in the manner in which they did, as both ‘the Celtic-American transmission of of fiddle tunes and songs’ and ‘the acquisition of materials specifically from blacks’ relied upon an enculturated aural ‘folk process for “catching” materials’ (Conway 1995:87).
Bibliography:
Carlin, Bob. 2007. The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.
Conway, Cecelia. 1999. African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: a Study of Folk Traditions. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press.
Smith, Christopher J. 2013. The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy. University of Illinois Press.
One thought on “The first white banjoists in America”