Drums with strings stretched over them can be traced throughout the Far East, the Middle East and Africa, almost from the beginning. They can be played like the banjo, bowed, or plucked like a harp, depending on their development. The banjo, as we can begin to recognize it, was made by African slaves, based on instruments that were indigenous to their parts of Africa. The first mention of these instruments in the Western Hemisphere is from Martinique, in a document dated 1678.
Further mentions are fairly frequent and documented.
The banjo became a prop for these entertainers, either individually or in groups. By the early part of the 19th century, minstrelsy became a very popular form of entertainment. Joel Walker Sweeney and his Sweeney Minstrels were already popular by the 1830s. By 1843 the Virginia Minstrels began to do an entire show of this blackface entertainment, and this is usually the date used to mark the beginning of the minstrel era. The Virginia Minstrels had two banjo players, Dan Emmett and Billy Whitlock, a pupil of Sweeney.