In 2017, the Sousa Archives acquired the Old Town School of Folk Music Banjo Exhibition Records and Samuel Swaim Stewart Banjos. This collection documents the unique legacy of the 19th-century American banjo, featuring Samuel S. Stewart (1855-1898), a builder of fine-art banjos, and Horace Weston (1825-1890), one of America’s most accomplished Black banjo artists between the 1870s and ’90s.
Joel Walker Sweeney (1810-1860), the country’s first “pop minstrel show artist,” introduced the five-string banjo to America’s stage, but was not its first inventor. The instrument that became the standardized five-string banjo was frequently played by enslaved West African musicians. According to Old Town School of Folk Music’s Paul Tyler, the five-string banjo sprang from early plucked string instruments that were made from gourds and called bandora, banza, banjah and akonting.
The three-stringed akonting, an instrument made with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd, is still used today by the Jola people of West Africa’s The Gambia. Most banjo playing styles associated with these earlier traditions can be traced with some reasonable accuracy. The dating and location of the earliest five-string addition to the banjo family remains inconclusive.
According to Jay Bailey’s 1972 article “Historical Origin and Stylistic Developments of the Five String Banjo,” the origin of these instruments is lost in a maze of folklore. While the definitive origin of the fi.
