The banjo was the premier instrument of the minstrel stage. Nearly all the music written for performance there was composed to be played on this instrument, and references to the banjo are sown throughout the lyrics of these songs. The banjo of the pre-Civil War era is different from modern instruments because the power and inventiveness of industrial America had not yet been applied to it. It was tuned lower and played in the way of enslaved musicians. Though it was successfully used in the business of popular music, the antebellum banjo is closer to its African American folk origins than the modern instrument.

Thomas Jefferson once said this about his plantation slaves: "The instrument proper to them is the Banjer, which they brought hither from Africa." Such an instrument was reported by European travelers to exist in Africa as early as 1621 and in Martinique (West Indies) by 1678. A man named Reverend Cradock of Maryland made the first report of a banjer in North America (1744). In subsequent years the instrument's presence in Maryland and Virginia was noted a few more times. It wasn't long until the banjo had migrated to the North Carolina Piedmont (1780s). It appears in a South Carolina painting before 1800. Around then the banjar was also in the hands of black musicians in Knoxville, Tennessee (1798) and Wheeling, in present day West Virginia (1806).

It is not surprising to find that the spread of the banjo conforms to the settlement of this country. Accounts of Louisiana after the war of 1812 mention it and after 1833 it appeared in remote areas of the Deep South like Clarksdale, Mississippi and St. Simon's Island, Georgia. Each time the banjo is in the hands of an African American player.

Almost no banjos survive from before the middle of the nineteenth century. The earliest descriptions of the banjo is of an instrument made of a large round gourd halved and covered with thin animal skin, a neck of wood, and strings of animal gut, hair, or plant fiber stretched across a bridge. By 1850 the gourd had disappeared from the instrument, being replaced by a rim of wood, often made of a discarded cheese box or a modified drum. The skin head was either tacked to this rim or stretched by means of six or eight metal brackets and a metal hoop. Tuning pegs were friction-style. The neck was fretless until the 1880s. Early banjos had four strings, one of which was the shorter thumb string. By the early 1840s a fifth string, tuned low and placed in the fourth position was added to the instrument. Thus the five-string, fretless, wooden rim banjo was standardized by the time the Civil War broke out.

White performers had long been imitating black dance steps when, in about 1832, "Jim Crow" burst on the scene. This was a song and dance that Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808-1860) picked up from a stable keeper's slave. Rice performed as Jim Crow between the acts of theatrical productions and soon the act was wildly popular throughout the land. About the same time Joel Walker Sweeney (1810-1860), appeared in Virginia playing solo banjo. Sweeney was one of the first white banjo players, having learned from slaves around Appomattox, Virginia. Read the introduction to my “Bibliography on Early Banjo Technique” on this website to learn how the skill of playing the banjo was transmitted among the early white banjoists.

Fortunately the banjo-playing method of these musicians is documented in instruction books published before the Civil War. The one I’ve found most useful is Briggs’ Banjo Instructor (1855). This book is described in its introduction as “a scientific and practical method for an instrument which has been ever considered a mystery unlearnable, and for which music has never before been written.” Another early banjo instructor is Phil. Rice’s Correct Method for the Banjo: With or Without a Master (1858). In it Rice describes the banjo method that he had been using for fourteen years.

Since the early minstrels learned to play from African Americans, these books provide the most accurate documentation available for learning early banjo-playing technique, including that of the enslaved Africans to whom we should all be grateful for bringing the gift of the banjo to America.