Early Life
Sweeney was born in about 1818 in the part of Buckingham County that later became Appomattox County. The son of John Sweeney, a farmer and wheelwright, and Tabitha Baugh Sweeney, he grew up along the Richmond-Lynchburg stage road that brought much business to his father’s shop. Although neither of his parents reportedly played music, it became clear in Sweeney’s youth that he was musically gifted. At the time of the 1820 census, more than 50 percent of the county’s population was enslaved, and the family’s household included five enslaved laborers. Sweeney had ample opportunity to hear the music of the African descendants, in particular the banjar or banjeau, a stringed instrument whose roots are found throughout Western Africa.
Although the names of the musicians Sweeney listened to and learned from are unknown, one legend holds that a local carriage driver, who had been a chief in his native Africa, taught Sweeney the banjar. Other stories relate how local enslaved persons near Lynchburg taught him to play the banjo. Neighbors recalled later how young Sweeney would “hang around” with African Americans and learned “their rude songs” and accompany them on a gourd banjo. After learning to play the banjo when he was young, Sweeney most likely began to fashion his own instrument to better fit his playing style and needs.
While he was not the inventor of the banjo as he was credited for years, Sweeney’s banjo exhibited substantial changes of his own making. He made the body or pot of his banjo out of wood, a natural and sturdier choice compared to the much more fragile gourd. Though banjos that predate Sweeney’s birth already had the short drone or chanterelle string (the fifth string), one contemporary remembered that Sweeney was the first “that used catgut strings, and was the author [of] the fifth string—the bass.” Whatever Sweeney’s level of involvement in the construction of the wood-bodied, five-string banjo, he thought his instrument unusual enough to be worthy of some secrecy. According to a musician who witnessed Sweeney play his banjo on stage early in the 1840s, following a performance, there would be a man “at the prompt entrance with the case” who would quickly entomb Sweeney’s banjo “in that case” and lock it.
Musical Career
Sweeney began to perform for local events, court days, and travelers at area taverns. By his twenties, he was traveling through the South with various circuses and troupes. He may have performed in North Carolina with P. T. Barnum’s traveling company in November 1836, but by early December Sweeney was on stage at Terpsichore Hall in Richmond. The advertisement for his appearance, which may be the first documented public banjo performance by a white musician in the United States, boasted that his “performances upon the Banjo have been much admired.” In April 1839, “Mr J W Sweeny,” advertised as “the celebrated Banjo player,” made his first appearance in New York at the National Theatre. In more than 150 circus, theater, and minstrel performances (in most of which he appeared in blackface) during the next three years in cities as far away as Boston and in western New York, “Old Joe Sweeney,” as he was often billed, played banjo tunes to audiences who had never before heard such music before performed on such an instrument.
One of the many songs of the period attributed to Sweeney, “Jonny Boker or De Broken Yoke in De Coaling Ground” (1840), tells the story of an oxcart driver with a broken wheel; a scenario Sweeney, the son of a wheelwright, would likely know all too well. In an April 1905 Lynchburg News article more than half a century later, an elderly man remembered Sweeney singing this song with his banjo at a show at the city’s racetrack.
In March 1842 Sweeney took his banjo across the Atlantic to play throughout the British Isles, where his fame and legend grew as he toured incessantly. At the height of his popularity, some English newspapers and then the New York Herald reported in August 1843 that Sweeney was dead. He was very much alive, however, as the Boston Daily Evening Transcript announced in October 1843. Sweeney reassured the public in a letter published in the Liverpool Chronicle on February 24, 1844, that he was still living. In fact, the “report of my death I find was only the prelude to a dramatic farce,” he wrote, “where shallow pretenders are exhibiting as Banjo players in my name, to neither of which they have the least pretensions.” After his reported death, Sweeney purportedly played a command performance for Queen Victoria. Although no official record of Sweeney’s performance exists, he was later described as having turned down an offer to be Her Majesty’s personal musician and leaving the country with gifts that included a money belt containing gold coins.
Sweeney returned to the United States in May 1845 to great fame and fanfare, performing at the New Bowery Theatre in New York City. He spent the next fifteen years playing with various other minstrel performers throughout the South, sometimes with his younger brothers joining him on the road. Sweeney and his brothers toured with several different minstrel groups under such names as the Sable Harmonists, Old Joe Sweeney and His Virginia Serenaders, and Sweeney’s Burlesque Opera Troupe.
Later Life
By the last months of 1859, though, Sweeney’s world and his fortunes began to change. From November until February 1860, when his brother Richard Sweeney died, Old Joe Sweeney’s Opera Troupe played at least seven engagements in venues from Norfolk to Baltimore. Afterwards, the number of Sweeney’s public performances dwindled to no more than a handful. As period descriptions of his faltering performance on the banjo may suggest, Sweeney’s health had begun to fail him. He never married or had children, and by 1860 he lived with his sister and her family in Appomattox County, where he declared his occupation as “bangerman” to the census taker that year.
Sweeney died, probably at his sister’s home, of edema late in October 1860. Newspapers in Richmond reported his death as occurring on “Saturday evening, the 27th inst.,” although his death was recorded in the county register as occurring on October 29, 1860. The Richmond Daily Whig described him as “The original banjoist” with the claim that he was “the first white man to introduce the banjo to the public,” and newspapers around the country reported his death. Sweeney was buried in the family cemetery in Appomattox, and his grave is marked by a stone placed there by admirers in 1954. A state historical marker was erected nearby in Appomattox County in 1997, memorializing Sweeney as the “Popularizer of the Banjo.”
