The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy
by Bob Carlin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bob CarlinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-02-21
ISBN: 0786428740
Number of pages: 203
Publisher: McFarland & Company
Book Reviews of The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy
Book Review: Sweeney restored to his proper place, good serious work!
Summary: 5 Stars
Bob Carlin spent years and years researching, consulting, studying, documenting, and otherwise working on this book. To some of us who joked about how this book might never appear, Bob always responded, I've got to get everything right.
Bob did get everything right, at least as far as I know, here. In doing so he provides a strong practical basis not just for the life of Sweeney but for the nature of early Minstrelsy, the roots of the five string banjo, the spread of banjo playing and minstrelsy to Britain, and much about the nature of the entertainment business in the 1830s through the 1850s.
No one who wants to know about the five-string banjo, American cultural and musical history should be without this book, No one.
This book has the same strengths that Carlin's earlier book on Piedmont Carolina String Bands has. Bob's interest is not to create, validate, or invalidate this or that academic theory. Bob isn't an academic. He is one of the best banjo players, banjo item collectors, and instructors and students of the history of the old time banjo. He was one of the pioneers of the rediscovery of minstrel banjo playing, and accompanied old time music and bluegrass legend John Hartford as well as Joe Thompson, the last remaining traditional African American fiddler.
In this book, Bob Carlin has gathered a wealth of information which he presents clearly and in an orderly manner. He completely disposes of the legend that Sweeney invented the banjo or invented the fifth string of the banjo. Sweeney never claimed that, but claims of that nature were made about him after his death. Carlin tracts down the origins of those claims in a detailed and documented way.
This does not mean that this is a book of Sweeney bashing. Carlin's approach is respect for the great musical capacities this entertainer had and how as he says like Elvis, he energized the whole music world by combining African American and white musics in a new form of entertainment. We do get the sense of how Sweeney's banjo playing and his real background in African American music and his own skills made him widely popular in Britain and America. Yet, the book also showed how age and changing fashions in minstrelsy and entertainment in general meant that Sweeney's star eventually fell.
This book is good, hard, serious work, put forward in a clear manner and will be one of the bedrocks of study of the banjo, minstrelsy, and American popular culture.
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