English: Born: Vermont, Illinois, United States 08 September 1868

Died: Place unknown December 1953 Activity/Profession: Banjoist, Guitarist, Music Educator, Composer / Arranger

Musician (mandolin, banjo, guitar), music teacher, composer, and bandleader was born in Vermont, Illinois. His father, an “elocutionist,” recognized his son's musical abilities and encouraged him to commence his musical studies at the age of seven, besides attending school. Seth Weeks started with the violin, but soon abandoned that instrument in favor of the guitar, and eventually the mandolin. After playing and practicing for some fifteen years, he conducted a Mandolin and Guitar Orchestra in Tacoma, Washington and became a music teacher with pupils in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City. From the 1890s most of his compositions were published by Shaeffer and Lyon & Healey (Chicago), a typical example being the “Grand Concert Polka” for Mandolin, Guitar/Piano (Shaeffer, 1900). Besides teaching he made concert tours throughout the United States and Canada.

He was in Boston on the Keith circuit in 1900 when he decided to participate in the 1900 annual “Cammeyer Festival of the Banjo, Mandoline & Guitar” in Britain, where he arrived with his wife Carrie (age thirty-three) and daughter Hazel (age seven) in September of that year. His international reputation as “America's Greatest Mandoline Virtuoso” was such that, a few days after arrival and even before he performed at the festival (in December), he made recordings for Edison cylinders and Berliner discs.

Weeks made London his permanent home (his compositions, mainly vocal music, now being published by Francis, Day & Hunter), and from this base toured the United Kingdom and the continent with repeated returns to the London recording studios in 1901 and 1902 (Berliner discs, Edison and Pioneer cylinders): “Mr. S. Seth Weeks will soon gain a vast international reputation as a mandolinist, thanks partly to the phonograph. On his way to Russia this month, he is to visit both Paris and Berlin to make phonograph records” (Banjo World, Vol. VIII, No.81, 8 Jan. 1901, p.160; no surviving copies of these recordings have been found). Weeks travelled both as a solo performer and in troupes of varying sizes. The Sunderland People's Palace saw the “Weeks & Jones Trio, In Their Original Rag Time Dance” (May 1902); a series of postcards captioned “Cake Walk” and postmarked 1904 show him playing the banjo in a group of four (two ladies, two gentlemen); in Budapest in 1909 he was billed as “Week's Neger-Quintett”; in Berlin in 1910 theatrical contracts were for Week's American Singing Band (with Thornton Buckley, born 12 November 1875 at Fayetteville, Tennessee; and Russell Jones, born 29 Oct. 1892 at Tacoma, Washington); in Frankfurt's Krystall-Palast in 1911 he was advertised as “Weeks, Negerkapelle”.

His first wife Carrie is believed to have died during 1904. On 23 December 1905 Seth Weeks, widower, married Eleanor Jones, age thirty-two, from London. In 1912 Seth Weeks and his daughter Hazel witnessed the wedding of their fellow countryman Victor Joyner, Musical Entertainer. When war broke out in Europe Hazel and Seth Weeks, once again widowed, returned to New York; by 1919 he played mandolin with Wilbur Sweatman's Kings of Jazz in that city.In January 1920 Weeks returned to Europe, this time directing his own jazz band to replace Mitchell's Jazz Kings at the Apollo, Paris. His musicians deserted him in August to reorganize as the “Red Devils” under the direction of pianist Eli Carpenter. Over the next few years Weeks played banjo as a sideman with bands led by drummers Hughes Pollard (1921) and Buddy Gilmore (1924), and the “International Six” (up to 1926).

His death was reported in the New York Amsterdam News (9 Jan. 1954, p.9). His daughter Hazel had also returned to Europe and became a well-known personality in Berlin's black community, working as a German-English-French correspondent for the Greek legation.

from the Oxford African American History Project website www.oxfordaasc.com/oa/article/opr/t0001/e4701?p=oamonthAA...