Ancient Banjo Is Treasure of Ab Weaver
Most treasured possession of Abner (Leon) Weaver, senior member of Weaver Brothers, and Elviry, the original hillbillies and big time vaudeville headliners for a quarter of a century, is the battered and ancient banjo once used by his father, the late John Elisha Weaver.
../Abner cut his teeth on the banjo Tim, which still shows the scars made by his first sturdy bites. The senior Weaver was a talented banjo player, bjut not a professional musician, Abner revealed at Warner Bros, studio where lie,-, his brothers, Cicero and Elviry, filming “Swing Your Lady.” Abner worked on his father’s farm •during his youth, but at the age of 20 “decided to become an actor and joined a medicine show. For several years he did a blackface act and toured with the show, before he teamed with wGicero to go into vaudeville as the original hillbillies.
■/‘Some people think medicine shows .were,,all fakes,” says Abner, “but it is really amazing some of the cures effected and the good done by the show proprietor who had no license to practise medicine.”
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NA19391216.2.127
Bibliographic details
Northern Advocate, 16 December 1939, Page 14
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185Ancient Banjo Is Treasure of Ab Weaver Northern Advocate, 16 December 1939, Page 14
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