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J. A. Sloan
John Augustus Omar Sloan is an English-American banjo player, luthier and inventor born August 15, 1923 in Preston, Lancashire, England. Sloan inherited a love of banjos from his father, a steam engineer in Lancashire’s cotton mills, who made and renovated banjos in his spare time. As a child in England, Sloan saw many movies, and the minstrel show type tunes in the old American westerns captured his imagination. At age 11, he began to study banjo with Angelo "Angy" Palumbo, an Italian master then living in London. The playing style Sloan eventually developed was an unusual classical finger style played on gut or nylon strings, these being the closest thing to the original gut strings used on the mbanza, an early predecessor to the banjo carried to England and the Americas by native Africans in the holds of slave ships.[1]

John Sloan’s first exercise in banjo making was in 1935 at the age of 12. It was after he moved to the United States, however, that he began to tackle his banjo playing and building hobbies seriously. Sloan, along with his wife and two children, arrived in New York City on November 13, 1955, having traveled from England aboard the Greek-registered ocean liner New York. Shortly after arriving in the United States he secured a spot on the original Morris B. Sachs Amateur Hour on which he played banjo while his wife Elizabeth accompanied him on piano. The couple's appearance on the program resulted in a spontaneous telephone offer to join a band that was preparing to tour the Midwestern United States.

Eventually settling in South Chicago Heights, Sloan began accumulating the wood and metal working machinery essential to the luthiers' craft and started producing instruments on a regular basis. During the years 1961 to 1971 he produced five-string, tenor, plectrum and Pete Seeger style long-neck folk banjos under the name John A. Sloan and also under the company name Omar Manufacturing. He aggressively experimented with banjo acoustics and invented several tone enhancing devices for the banjo, most notably the Stainless Steel Arch-Top Tone Ring. Some of Sloan’s original blueprints for banjo hardware can still be seen in the popular coffee table book The Tsumura Collection.[1][2]

During these early years he produced instruments in the basement workshop of his home at 273 Maple Avenue, South Chicago Heights, Illinois. Instruments dated from 1971 to 1998 were produced in the basement of his later residence located at 1348 Campbell Avenue, Chicago Heights. Those instruments stamped with his 273 Maple Avenue address are the earliest ones made by him while living in the United States. These amount to probably no more than 100 instruments.

John Sloan’s ability as a banjo player can be attested to by the following letter to him from banjo great Walter Kaye Bauer.

Fold a Jo
Among Sloan's unique contributions during these early years was his invention of a lightweight travel banjo called Fold a Jo. Only about 35 of these were ever produced.

Texas
In 1998 and at the age of 75, Mr. Sloan moved to Texas, taking his tools and equipment with him and setting up shop in a metal building located in the town of Magnolia. Experimentation with banjo tone continued at this location, and a unique new banjo tone ring called the Banshee was introduced in 2004.

In 2007 Sloan's luthier shop was relocated again to a new buiding in New Waverly, Texas.