From Frank's posting above:

Joel Sweeney's original five string banjo can be found in the Los Angeles County Museum. I think it's still there. However, there are pictures of the five strings that predate his supposed invention. He is reputed to have invented the fifth peg, however.

[How'd he do that if there are precursors with five strings? There was an old banjo player in the classical tradition whose name I can't remember. used to come to Fox Hollow. He said that most of his contemporaries, including Fred Van Eps, late-19th century virtuoso, all agreed that the "fifth" string Sweeney added was most likely the low string, increasing the range of the instrument. ]

The North Carolina approach to banjo playing is exemplified by Snuffy Jenkins, a precursor to Scruggs and also by Obray Ramsay, an early eountry folk singer.

[Obray Ramsey was discovered by a folklorist who said, "You should learn to play banjo to accompany your singing," so Ramsay learned Earl Scruggs' style off of a record, and adapted it to his ballad singing. This happened in the 50s, well after Scruggs style was established. Jenkins, however, did influence Scruggs considerably.]

Scruggs synthesized his style from earlier folk forms.

The earliest banjos were plantation built, light-weight and often strung with gut strings.

[Actually, even commercial banjos were gut-strung till the 1890s, and frets were an option on 1970s banjos but standard by 1880 or so.]

The mountain banjos came in much later as gourd instruments [Hmmm... I haven't seen many mountain-made gourd banjos. The very earliest plantation-made banjos were gourd banjos, until the slaves adapted the bent-band drum of the whites. ] and adapted to the changing technology in instrument making to become wire or steel strung with frets added. [See above -- many mountaineers liked the fretless sound, and would even pull frets out or file 'em down to suit their idea of how the instrument should be set up.]

The early banjos were without resonators. They were added later probably to enhance the recording or the jazz banjos in the twenties. The early gramophone recordings featured the banjo because it could cut through the primitive recording process. Later, when recording became more sophisticated, the guitar under such players as Eddy Lang changed the instrumentation and the banjo was replaced.

[True, and popular song styles also had a hand in this, as swing's 4/4 began to replace the older 2/4 we think of as "dixieland."]

There are other examples of the five-string banjo tuned in the gCGBD tuning found in slaveic Russian guitar tunings and Hungarian as well. [But they wouldn't have had the high-pitched thumb string, would they?]

[By the way, the American Banjo Fraternity, the august body setting standards for "classical" banjo music, didn't adopt C as the tuning standard till 1896. Prior to that, banjo music was written in C but tuned to and sounding in A, three frets lower.]

Bob Clayton