Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy

Ideas of Race in Early America

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Already, by the s, the music hall was the dominant form of live musical entertainment, along with the pantomime a sort of topical musical show produced in the Christmas season and the much more expensively-ticketed musical comedy. But there was also a very particular form of evening show, a format which was built around racist caricaturing. This type of show was imported from the United States in the s, but subsequently followed a separate development in Britain than on the American continent.

By the s in Britain, the minstrel show was very much stylized and structured. In the first part, a semi-circle of minstrels sang and played, and two clown minstrels, named Bones and Tambo, mocked the master of ceremonies, who perorated in pretentious and incorrectly used intellectual language.

In the second part, a variety of circus-type acts and dancing acts were produced. A walk-around song completed the show.

Representing African Americans in transatlantic abolitionism and blackface minstrelsy

More and more concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies with large amounts of capital, it experienced a veritable boom after As one commentator writes:. It caught the fancy of an amusement-starved public and was almost the only alternative to the doubtful humour of the music hall of the period. Minstrelsy was a form of family entertainment where husband and wife could take their children without fear of being asked embarrassing questions afterwards. Gradually, the shows became more sophisticated and the costumes and sets more elaborate.

What is blackface?

Although racism was at the centre of the concept of the blackface minstrel show, it should not be assumed to be its only or even its principal attraction for the millions who flocked to buy tickets. The music and dancing was often of high quality, and the entertainment offered other pleasures. The minstrel was a clown figure who, at the same time as reinforcing negative stereotypes of black people, gave delight to the audience by mimicking and making ridiculous established elite figures, such as the politician or headmaster.

Minstrelsy also developed a number of forms and structures which lived on in popular entertainment long after the minstrel show had died. In the USA, minstrelsy was one of many weapons to help keep down a large local minority population, and to cement white fellowship in the public mocking of the denigrated Other. The audience of the US minstrel show had everyday dealings with Black people and the show gave them images which had a practical effect in everyday living. For a long period, the US audience was made up essentially of working-class white men, whereas, as we have noted, the UK audience would include large numbers of middle-class professionals and their families.

The racist stereotypes remained functional as a way of reinforcing popular imperialism, but impinged little on everyday living. A number of albums entirely made up of these songs were published, and many other albums would include a song of this type. All with music in sol-fa and staff notations, etc. In each issue were a dozen or so songs. The rest of the magazine was made up of other types of song: love songs, jealousy songs, songs of joie de vivre , cute children, sick children dying, and dancing songs.

It is difficult to identify precisely the reasons for this. Certainly the rise of musical comedy as a more versatile evening of respectable entertainment was one factor: musical comedy aimed at the same market sector. Pretty dancers, sumptuous costumes and decor, the staged threat of loose morals and a spectacular wedding finale were the key attractions of this genre.

We have found no examples at all of denunciations of blackface minstrelsy in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. This is despite the fact that we know of severe criticism of minstrelsy in the US context from many decades earlier.

It does seem that the most violent racist content became considerably more muted as the genre moved into the twentieth century. The blackface minstrel continued for some decades to be widespread in many other forms, which developed in parallel with the theatre show.

In town fairs or village fetes, the amateur minstrel troupe was omnipresent before the First World War. Dozens of greater and lesser artists tried their hand at it. Eugene Stratton, who died in , G. Chirgwin, who died in , and G. Elliott, who died in , were the biggest stars. Chirgwin starred in the very first Royal Variety Command Performance in , a show organized for the King, and an important milestone in the long campaign of music-hall proprietors to be accepted as respectable entertainment.

The music hall chose, after , to portray one particular version of the Black stereotype, one suited to the one-man turn generally presented. As Pickering explains:.

Minstrel show

The coon was a particular extension of an earlier blackface stereotype, the uppity, socially pretentious, outlandishly attired nigger buck of countless songs. This urban dandy Jim figure contrasted with the plantation sambo. Bessie Wentworth, who died in , was one of the most successful, and May Henderson did blackface on the music-hall stage at least as late as Chirgwin played in blackface make-up, but with a diamond over one eye which was made-up white.

This adaptation, apparently of accidental origin, allowed him to make his stage persona more complex; one had the impression of the artist peering from behind the mask, therefore identified as artificial. These songs idealized a past in the South of the United States, in times supposed to be nobler and simpler. For the artists and their audiences, Dixie stood for a lost paradise which could just as easily have been located elsewhere. We found at least twenty-five different ones sung in the music halls of the war years.

They included titles such as the following:. That Virginian Tune. In the twenty-first century, some aspects of racism are widely understood; in the period we are studying, this was not the case. It is thus a rather different phenomenon from twenty-first century racism in Britain. Or it may be part of the programme of a minority, militant organization such as the British National Party or the English Defence League.

The first element to consider is the supposed physical characteristics of the black Other. The audience immediately recognized the type and associated it with other characteristics they had read of or heard of, since racial stereotyping was widespread. As the American Indians became intoxicated, they grew more and more antagonistic, and the army ultimately had to intervene to prevent the massacre of the whites. Even favorably presented American Indian characters usually died tragically.

Minstrels caricatured them by their strange language "ching chang chung" , odd eating habits dogs and cats , and propensity for wearing pigtails. Parodies of Japanese became popular when a Japanese acrobat troupe toured the U. A run of Gilbert and Sullivan 's The Mikado in the mids inspired another wave of Asian characterizations. The few white characters in minstrelsy were stereotypes of immigrant groups like the Irish and Germans. Irish characters first appeared in the s, portrayed as hotheaded, odious drunkards who spoke in a thick brogue.

However, beginning in the s, many Irishmen joined minstrelsy, and Irish theatergoers probably came to represent a significant part of the audience, so this negative image was muted. Germans, on the other hand, were portrayed favorably from their introduction to minstrelsy in the s.

They were responsible and sensible, though still portrayed as humorous for their large size, hearty appetites, and heavy "Dutch" accents. Around the time of the s there was a lot of national conflict as to how people viewed African Americans. Because of that interest in the Negro people, these songs granted the listener new knowledge about African Americans, who were different from themselves, even if the information was prejudiced.

Troupes took advantage of this interest and marketed sheet music of the songs they featured so that viewers could enjoy them at home and other minstrels could adopt them for their act. How much influence black music had on minstrel performance remains a debated topic.

Minstrel music certainly contained some element of black culture, added onto a base of European tradition with distinct Irish and Scottish folk music influences. Musicologist Dale Cockrell argues that early minstrel music mixed both African and European traditions and that distinguishing black and white urban music during the s is impossible.

The inauthenticity of the music and the Irish and Scottish elements in it are explained by the fact that slaves were rarely allowed to play native African music and therefore had to adopt and adapt elements of European folk music. Early blackface songs often consisted of unrelated verses strung together by a common chorus. In this pre-Emmett minstrelsy, the music "jangled the nerves of those who believed in music that was proper, respectable, polished, and harmonic, with recognizable melodies.

The minstrel show texts sometimes even mixed black lore, such as stories about talking animals or slave tricksters, with humor from the region southwest of the Appalachians, itself a mixture of traditions from different races and cultures. In the late s, a decidedly European structure and high-brow style became popular in minstrel music.

The banjo , played with "scientific touches of perfection" [] and popularized by Joel Sweeney , became the heart of the minstrel band. Songs like the Virginia Minstrels' hit " Old Dan Tucker " have a catchy tune and energetic rhythm, melody and harmony; [] minstrel music was now for singing as well as dancing.

The Spirit of the Times even described the music as vulgar because it was "entirely too elegant" and that the "excellence" of the singing "[was] an objection to it. Despite the elements of ridicule contained in blackface performance, midth century white audiences, by and large, believed the songs and dances to be authentically black. For their part, the minstrels always billed themselves and their music as such. The songs were called "plantation melodies" or "Ethiopian choruses", among other names.

By using the black caricatures and so-called black music, the minstrels added a touch of the unknown to the evening's entertainment, which was enough to fool audiences into accepting the whole performance as authentic. The minstrels' dance styles, on the other hand, were much truer to their alleged source.

The success of "Jump Jim Crow" is indicative: It was an old English tune with fairly standard lyrics, which leaves only Rice's dance—wild upper-body movements with little movement below the waist—to explain its popularity. One performance by Lane in was described as consisting of "sliding steps, like a shuffle , and not the high steps of an Irish jig.

The walk around, a common feature of the minstrel show's first act, was ultimately of West African origin and featured a competition between individuals hemmed in by the other minstrels. Elements of white tradition remained, of course, such as the fast-paced breakdown that formed part of the repertoire beginning with Rice.

Minstrel dance was generally not held to the same mockery as other parts, although contemporaries such as Fanny Kemble argued that minstrel dances were merely a "faint, feeble, impotent—in a word, pale Northern reproductions of that ineffable black conception.

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These songs remained relatively authentic in nature, antiphonal with a repetitive structure that relied heavily on call and response. The black troupes sang the most authentic jubilees, while white companies inserted humorous verses and replaced religious themes with plantation imagery, often starring the old darky. Jubilee eventually became synonymous with plantation. The minstrel show played a powerful role in shaping assumptions about black people.

However, unlike vehemently anti-black propaganda from the time, minstrelsy made this attitude palatable to a wide audience by couching it in the guise of well-intentioned paternalism. Popular entertainment perpetuated the racist stereotype of the uneducated, ever-cheerful, and highly musical black person well into the s. Even as the minstrel show was dying out in all but amateur theater, blackface performers became common acts on vaudeville stages and in legitimate drama.

These entertainers kept the familiar songs, dances, and pseudo-black dialect, often in nostalgic looks back at the old minstrel show. The most famous of these performers is probably Al Jolson , who took blackface to the big screen in the s in films such as The Jazz Singer His film Mammy uses the setting of a traveling minstrel show, giving an on-screen presentation of a performance. Likewise, when the sound era of cartoons began in the late s, early animators such as Walt Disney gave characters such as Mickey Mouse who already resembled blackface performers a minstrel-show personality; the early Mickey is constantly singing and dancing and smiling.

Radio shows got into the act, a fact perhaps best exemplified by the popular radio shows Two Black Crows , Sam 'n' Henry , and Amos 'n' Andy , [] A transcription survives from of The Blue Coal Minstrels , which uses many of the standard forms of the minstrel show, including Tambo, Bones and the interlocutor.

The National Broadcasting Company , in a pamphlet, used the minstrel show as a point of reference in selling its services.

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