Many people at my solo banjo performances have asked for reference material for further study of banjo history and entertainment. This short list provides additional information.

Joel Sweeney

• “The Banjo Entertainers – Roots to Ragtime”
  A Banjo History
  Lowell H. Schreyer
  Minnesota Heritage Publishing

History of Banjo Development

• “Ring the Banjar!” The Banjo in America from Folklore to Factory
  Robert Lloyd Webb
  MIT Museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 
  That Half-Barbaric Twang
  The Banjo in American Popular Culture
  Karen Linn
  University of Illinois Press

Famous Banjo Players

• The Eddie Peabody Story
  Lowell H. Schreyer
  Mankato, Minnesota
  Self Published, May be still available through the Schreyer Family
  (Check the internet).


• The Great Harry Reser
  W. W. Triggs
  Henry G. Waker Ltd., Publisher
  London

Banjo Music CDs Recommended

• Pickin’ & Strummin’ yOUR Favorites
  The Banjo Barons Ragtime Band


• Ragtime To Broadway – “Banjo Style”
  Mike Woitowicz, Banjoist


• CD: The Stephen Foster Songbook
  Robert Shaw Chorale

Background Material on Music of the 19th & 20th Century

• Instructional Course on CD: “Elements of Jazz from Cakewalks to Fusion”
• Instructional Course on CD: “Great American Music – Broadway Musicals.”
  
• Both by Professor Bill Messenger, Peabody Conservatory of Music Published by “The Teaching Company”
  Chantilly,VA 20151-1232
  1-800-832-2412

One of my favorite quotes regarding banjos:

The piano may do for lovesick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles, and slate pencils. But give me the banjo... When you want genuine music—music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whiskey…ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose—when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!
Mark Twain, Early Tales & Sketches, Vol. 2, (1864-65).