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Excerpt from the 1897 writings of Fred Mather, a contemporary of Joe and Sam Sweeney (JEB Stewart's banjo player). A Minstrel banjoist himself, he comments on Civil War era banjo players:
“ I do not read music but can spell it out painfully, note by note. In the long ago, when I was a fair manipulator of the ‘gourd shell,’ I remember only three banjoists who read notes. They were Dan Emmett, G. Swayne Buckley and Frank B. Converse, who, by the way, was on the stage but a short time. Joe Sweeney didn’t know a note, nor did most of the banjoists of 40 or 50 years ago. In fact, when I was a boy, I often heard it said: ‘There are no notes to banjo, you just play it.”
Dan Wykes
(reference: “Joel Sweeney and The First Banjo”, Arthur Woodward, in Los Angeles County Museum Quarterly Spring 1949, vols. 3, 7, 8)
“ I do not read music but can spell it out painfully, note by note. In the long ago, when I was a fair manipulator of the ‘gourd shell,’ I remember only three banjoists who read notes. They were Dan Emmett, G. Swayne Buckley and Frank B. Converse, who, by the way, was on the stage but a short time. Joe Sweeney didn’t know a note, nor did most of the banjoists of 40 or 50 years ago. In fact, when I was a boy, I often heard it said: ‘There are no notes to banjo, you just play it.”
Dan Wykes
(reference: “Joel Sweeney and The First Banjo”, Arthur Woodward, in Los Angeles County Museum Quarterly Spring 1949, vols. 3, 7, 8)