Below is a list of articles, essays, and books that are relevant to our understanding of early banjo culture.

"Reminiscences of a Banjo Player" S. S. Stewart's Banjo and Guitar Journal (February, 1893 and other issues...) 

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998)

Folk-Songs of the Southern United States (1967)

African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (1995)

The Banjo: America's African Instrument (2016)

Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977)

"The Folk Banjo: A Documentary History" Ethnomusicology19, no. 3 (1975)

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989)

"Black Banjo, Fiddle and Dance in Kentucky and the Amalgamation of African American and Anglo-American Folk Music" Banjo Roots and Banches edited by Robert Winans (2018)

"Learning to Play Banjo: Emulation vs. Imitation" (2002)

"Gourd Banjos: From Africa to the Appalachians" (2001)

America's Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (1999)

"Countering Cultural Strip-Mining in Eastern Kentucky: Music Making as Cultural Reconstruction" Western Folklore Magazine (Winter, 2016-2017)

Musical Instruments of the Southern Appalachian Mountains (1979)

That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture, Music in American Life (1991)

Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (2017)

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (1998)

Sang Branch Settlers: Folksongs and Tales of a Kentucky Mountain Family (1974)

Old-Time Mountain Banjo (1968)

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War Era South (2018)

"The Folk Banjo and Clawhammer Performance Practice in the Upper South: A Study of Origins" The Appalachian Experience edited by Barry M. Buxton Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium (1983)

Foxfire 6 (1980)

Foxfire 3 (1975)

Banjo Roots and Branches (2018)

https://youtu.be/WV3wY1GYgfw
This unmarked "Dobson" has an unusual 12-inch rim, new goatskin head, new Five Star tuners, reproduction No-Knot tailpiece, and a Clifford Essex bridge. All Dobson banjos (even the "Silver Bell" models) were probably produced by Buckbee in New York City from the early 1880s until his bankruptcy in 1901. By that time, Buckbee had been bought out by Rettberg & Lange.