Albert J. Weidt was born in Buffalo, New York on February 15, 1866 and died in Middletown, New Jersey, December 9, 1945. His childhood ambition was to become a drummer (reflected in the numerous marches among his oeuvre), as well as all the other established genre of the day - waltzes, reveries, gavottes, and rags. For many years Weidt lived in Newark, NJ, where he ran the “Weidt School of Music”, established in 1895. By the 1920s he had become a strong exponent of the tenor banjo. Weidt was an industrious composer and arranger of light music for the fretted string instruments beginning in the 1890s, and by 1927 Crescendo magazine could state had “almost 300 published numbers to his Credit”, at least 96 of which are guitar solos. (Peter Danner, Soundboard Vol.XXVII, no.2)