Joel Walker Sweeney

Joel Walker Sweeney (1810 – October 29, 1860), also known as Joe Sweeney, was a musician and early blackface minstrel performer. He is known for popularizing the playing of the banjo, and was the first documented white banjo player.

Born to a farming family in the county of Appomattox, Virginia he claimed to have learned to play the banjo from local African-Americans and is the earliest documented white banjo player. In addition, he is the earliest known person to have played the banjo on stage. Aside from his important role in popularizing the instrument, he has often been credited with advancing the physical development of the modern five-string banjo. Whereas the instrument's resonating chamber had formerly been constructed from a gourd (like the banjo's African ancestors and cousins), Sweeney popularized the use of a drum-like resonating chamber (legend has it that he adapted a cheese box for this purpose). He has also been credited with adding the banjo's fifth string, which according to legend was for an instrument he created for his niece between 1831 and 1840. He supposedly added the fifth string because he was "allegedly unhappy with the limited rhythm and melodic variation of the four-string banjos popularly in use." In fact, there is no proof that Sweeney introduced either innovation. Many people assume Sweeney's "fifth string" is the drone string—the chanterelle—but if Sweeney did really add a fifth string, it would have been another, lower string. That would provide more melodic and harmonic expression, as the quote suggests. The high-pitched, thumb or drone string (the chanterelle, the fifth on a modern banjo) is seen on surviving 18th-century four-string banjos, and in banjo illustrations that long pre-date Sweeney's heyday. The fifth string gives the banjo a reentrant tuning, a feature that existed in instruments of the ancient Greeks.

Until the 1830s, the banjo was played solely by African Americans. A few musicians performed on stage in "the Louisiana Banjou style" by the middle of the decade, but the instrument used was the violin. Sweeney began performing with the banjo in the early 1830s. He first performed throughout central Virginia for county court sessions. A few years later he joined a circus and traveled throughout Virginia and North Carolina. By 1839, Sweeney was performing in various blackface venues in New York. His earliest documented use of the banjo on stage was in April 1839. That same month, he performed alongside James Sanford at the Broadway Circus in New York with a blackface burlesque of The Dying Moor's Defence of His Flag called "Novel Duetts, Songs, &c". This was accompanied by a "Comic Morris Dance by the whole company". According to Billy Whitlock of the Virginia Minstrels, Sweeney gave Whitlock a few banjo lessons around this time.

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