The banjo is, according to the Oxford dictionary of musical instruments: "A plucked lute with a long guitar-like neck and a circular soundtable of tauntly stretched parchment or skin (now usually plastic), against which the bridge is pressed by the strings. The banjo and its variants have had long and widespread popularity as folk, parlour and professional entertainers instruments. The name of the instrument probably derives from the Portuguese or Spanish bandore". In order to examine the origins of the Irish tenor banjo we must first consider the development of the banjo and its other variants. The development of the modern banjo began in the second quarter of the 19th century as a largely commercial adaption of an instrument used by West African slaves in the new world as early as the 17th century. The earliest known illustration of the instrument is in Sir Hans Sloane's A Voyage to the Islands of Maderia, Barbados, Nieves, S.Christopher and Jamaica (London, 1707), written in 1688, which depicts two Jamaican negro 'strum-strums' with long flat necks and skin covered gourd bodies. In the French colonies, where the instrument was usually known as the banza, it was often associated with the calinda, a dance unsuccessfully suppressed by acts of the Martinique government as early as 1654 and as late as 1772. In the British colonies the instrument was usually known as banjer or banjar, pronunciations still commonly used in the southern USA. The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, describing life in Maryland and Virginia before he returned to England in 1775, wrote in Boucher's Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words (London 1832): "The favorite and almost only instrument in use among the slaves there was a bandore; or, as they pronounced the word, banjer. Its body was a large hollow gourd, with a long handle attached to it, strung with catgut, and played with the fingers". The invention of the short string banjo is often erroneously attributed to Joel Walker Sweeney (c1810-60); nevertheless, as the first well-known and widely travelled white banjoist, Sweeney played a role in bringing the banjo to the attention of urban audiences in the USA and England and presumably in popularizing the type of banjo that he played. Through theinfluence of Sweeney, Daniel Emmet and many other popular minstrel-show banjoists the banjo was rapidly introduced to white urban culture and by the 1840s and 1850s was being commercially produced by such early makers as William Boucher of Baltimore. After about 1870 the banjo was increasingly used in the USA as a genteel parlour instrument for the performance of popular music, and a separate style of 'classical' banjo playing developed. From about 1890 to 1930 there was a craze for banjo, mandolin and guitar clubs and orchestras. During the 1920s and 1930s the five string banjo was largly displaced among urban players by the four stringed tenor, but it regained its former popularity after World War II, largely because of the influence of the American banjoists Pete Seeger , who popularized traditional rural Southern styles, and Earl Scruggs, who became famous as the developer of the 'bluegrass' style of playing. The Irish Tenor During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of hybrid and specialized banjos were developed, including bass and picolo banjos (tuned an octave below and above the standard banjo); guitar, mandiloin and ukulele banjos (strung and tuned like their parent instruments); and plectrum banjos. The tenor banjo is identical with the standard banjo but has a shorter neck and no fith string. Like the plectrum banjo it was developed for use in jazz and dance orchestras and is played with a plectrum. The standard tenor banjo is tuned to c-g-d-a. In recent years a whole family of stringed instruments have been utilized in Irish traditional music: these include the mandoline, the mandocello, the bouziki, the cittern, the banjo-mandolin (a banjo with four double strings or a mandolin with a banjo-type head) and the tenor banjo. These are tuned like a fiddle, g-d-a-e, and played with a plectrum. They may be used for accompaniment or for melody. While somewhat inflexible in tone, they can generate and exciting rhythmical impact. Having said that, there is some suspicion in some quarters that handlers of these instruments are really failed fiddlers. It was during the Virgina Minstrels tour of England, Ireland and France (1843-1845) that the banjo was ,more than likely, first introduced to Ireland. The leader of the virginia Minstrels was Joel Walker Sweeney who was born in Buckingham County, Virginia, in 1810 and who has, wrongly or rightly, been accredited with introducing the fith string to the banjo. It was the fith string variety of the minstrals that was initially introduced to Ireland and a late 19th century sketch in Captain Francis O'Neill's 'Irish Minstrels and Musicians' of piper Dick Stephanson and banjoist John Dunne, clearly depicts a fifth string present on Dunne's banjo. The minstrel banjo lacked frets and as a result, playing above the fifth string peg posed a lot of severe problems. It wasn't until 1878 that Henry Dobson of New York, began commercially producing fretted banjos, so it appears that the original Irish banjos were definitely fretless. Up to the turn of the 19th century, banjos were plucked and strummed by the fingers. So the evidence would indicate that originally the banjo was used in Ireland for rudimentary accompaniment of songs and tunes, with perhaps the some of the simpler melodies being plucked out by the fingers. This all changed dramatically at the turn of the century when steel strings were invented. Influenced by the use of the plectrum in mandolin playing, banjo players started to experiment with different plectral playing styles. The idea of tuning the banjo in fiths, just like the mandolin, caught on around this time as well. Many players started to remove the short drone fith string from the banjo and before long manufacturers started making 4 string banjos, originally called plectrum banjos which were full sized,4 stringed, 22 fret banjos. Around 1915, the tenor banjo was invented, coinciding in America with the popularity of the tango dance form imported from Latin AMerica. The tenor had 17 or 19 frets, a shorter kneck tuned in fifths and was played with a plectrum. The plectrum and tenor banjos became the preferred instrument in Vaudeville, Music Hall, in Dixieland Jazz, Ragtime and Swing. The first Irish banjo player to record commercially was Mike Flanagan, born in county Waterford in 1898, who emigrated to the US at the age of 10. Like many of the Irish banjo players in this century, he started on the mandolin and taught himself to play the banjo. Other banjo players to record in the 1920s were Michael Gaffney from New York and Neil Nolan from Maine, who played in Dan Sullivan's Shamrock band in Boston. The banjo at this time was traditionally tuned higher than nowadays, still in fiths, but with the top string pitched at B or sometimes C. There are a few players in America who still favor this old tuning, most notably Jimmy Kelly in Boston. Most younger players, however, favor the GDAE tuning, which is now the standard for Irish music on the tenor banjo. Before 1960, a number of styles and instruments co-existed in the modest fraternity of banjo players in Ireland. Some players favored the 5 string banjo, some the banjo mandolin, while others favored the varieties of the four string instrument. Some players used a pick, while others used a thimble. In the Early 1960s the rise of the Dubliners in the Irish and English folk revival had a profound effect on the fortunes of the banjo in Irish music. Barney McKenna, tenor banjoist in the group, became a household name among traditional music fans. Barney's skill and visibility helped bring scores of new devotees to the instrument, almost all tuning their banjos as Barney did; GDAE, an octave below the fiddle.