The instrument became increasingly available commercially from around the second quarter of the 19th century due to minstrel performances. Its earliest recorded use was in 1678 in the Caribbean by enslaved Africans. Early, African-influenced banjos were built around a gourd body and a wooden stick neck. These instruments had varying numbers of strings, though often including some form of drone. In the antebellum South, many enslaved Africans played the banjo, spreading it to the rest of the population. In his memoir With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon, the Confederate veteran and surgeon John Allan Wyeth recalls learning to play the banjo as a child from an enslaved person on his family plantation. Another man who learned to play from African-Americans, probably in the 1820s, was Joel Walker Sweeney, a minstrel performer from Appomattox Court House, Virginia.