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Minstrel show

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Television

   Detail from cover of The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the
   Virginia Minstrels, 1843
   Enlarge
   Detail from cover of The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the
   Virginia Minstrels, 1843

   The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment
   consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed
   by white people in blackface or, especially after the American Civil
   War, African Americans in blackface. Minstrel shows portrayed and
   lampooned blacks in stereotypical and often disparaging ways: as
   ignorant, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, joyous, and musical. The
   minstrel show began with brief burlesques and comic entr'actes in the
   early 1830s and emerged as a full-fledged form in the next decade. By
   the turn of the century, the minstrel show enjoyed but a shadow of its
   former popularity, having been replaced for the most part by
   vaudeville. It survived as professional entertainment until about 1910;
   amateur performances continued until the 1950s in high schools,
   fraternities, and local theaters. As African Americans began to score
   legal and social victories against racism and to successfully assert
   political power, minstrelsy lost popularity.

   The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The
   troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang
   songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including
   the pun-filled stump speech. The final act consisted of a slapstick
   musical plantation skit or a send-up of a popular play. Minstrel songs
   and sketches featured several stock characters, most popularly the
   slave and the dandy. These were further divided into sub-archetypes
   such as the mammy, her counterpart the old darky, the provocative
   mulatto wench, and the black soldier. Minstrels claimed that their
   songs and dances were authentically black, although the extent of the
   black influence remains debated. Spirituals (known as jubilees) entered
   the repertoire in the 1870s, marking the first undeniably black music
   to be used in minstrelsy.

   Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form.
   In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American
   music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through
   which white America saw black America. On the one hand, it had strong
   racist aspects; on the other, it resulted in the first broad awareness
   by white Americans of aspects of black folk culture.

History

Early development

   Thomas D. Rice from sheet music cover of "Sich a Getting Up Stairs",
   1830s
   Enlarge
   Thomas D. Rice from sheet music cover of "Sich a Getting Up Stairs",
   1830s

   Although white theatrical portrayals of black characters date back to
   as early as 1604, the minstrel show as such has later origins.
   Blackface characters began appearing on the American stage by the late
   17th century, usually as servant types with little role but to provide
   some element of comic relief. Eventually, similar performers appeared
   in entr'actes in New York theaters and in less respectable venues like
   taverns and circuses. As a result, the blackface Sambo came to supplant
   the tall tale Yankee and Frontiersman characters in popularity. Charles
   Mathews, George Washington Dixon, and Edwin Forrest built reputations
   as blackface performers. Constance Rourke even claimed that Forrest's
   impression was so good he could fool blacks when he mingled with them
   in the streets. Thomas Dartmouth Rice's song and dance number " Jump
   Jim Crow" brought blackface performance to a new level of prominence in
   the early 1830s. At the height of Rice's success, The Boston Post
   wrote, "The two most popular characters in the world at the present are
   Victoria and Jim Crow." By the 1840s, blackface performers took to
   calling themselves "Ethiopian delineators" and performed solo and in
   small teams.

   Blackface soon found a home in the taverns of New York's less
   respectable precincts of Lower Broadway, the Bowery, and Chatham
   Street. It also invaded the more respectable stage as part of the era's
   general stratification of theaters. These upper-class houses at first
   limited the number of such acts they would show, but beginning in 1841,
   blackface performers frequently took to the stage at even the classy
   Park Theatre, much to the dismay of some patrons. Theatre was a
   participatory activity, and the lower classes came to dominate the
   playhouse. They threw things at actors or orchestras who performed
   unpopular material, and rowdy audiences eventually prevented the Bowery
   Theatre from staging high drama at all. Typical blackface acts of the
   period were short burlesques, often with mock Shakespearean titles like
   "Hamlet the Dainty", "Bad Breath, the Crane of Chowder", "Julius
   Sneezer", or "Dars-de-Money".

   Meanwhile, at least some whites were interested in black song and dance
   by actual black performers. Nineteenth century New York slaves shingle
   danced for spare change on their days off, and musicians played what
   they claimed to be " Negro music" on so-called black instruments like
   the banjo. The New Orleans Picayune wrote that a singing New Orleans
   street vendor called Old Corn Meal would bring "a fortune to any man
   who would start on a professional tour with him". Rice responded by
   adding a "Corn Meal" skit to his act. Meanwhile, there had been several
   attempts at legitimate black stage performance, the most ambitious
   probably being New York's African Grove theatre, founded and operated
   by free blacks in 1821, with a repertoire drawing heavily on
   Shakespeare. It was harassed out of existence by authorities unwilling
   to tolerate its mostly black audiences behaving in the same boisterous
   manner typical of all New York theatergoers of the time.

   White, working-class Northerners could identify with the characters
   portrayed in early blackface performances. This coincided with the rise
   of groups struggling for workingman's nativism and pro-Southern causes,
   and faux black performances came to confirm pre-existing racist
   concepts and to establish new ones. Following a pattern that had been
   pioneered by Rice, minstrelsy united workers and "class superiors"
   against a common black enemy, symbolized especially by the character of
   the black dandy. In this same period, the class-conscious but racially
   inclusive rhetoric of " wage slavery" was largely supplanted by a
   racist one of "white slavery". This suggested that the abuses against
   northern factory workers were a graver ill than the treatment of black
   slaves—or by a less class-conscious rhetoric of "productive" vs.
   "unproductive" elements of society. On the other hand, views on slavery
   were fairly evenly presented in minstrelsy, and some songs even
   suggested the creation of a coalition of working blacks and whites to
   end the institution.

   Among the appeals and racial stereotypes of early blackface performance
   were the pleasure of the grotesque and its infantilization of blacks.
   These allowed—by proxy, and without full identification—childish fun
   and other low pleasures in an industrializing world where workers were
   increasingly expected to abandon such things. Meanwhile, the more
   respectable could view the vulgar audience itself as a spectacle.

Height

   Sheet music cover for "Dandy Jim from Caroline", featuring Dan Emmett
   (center) and the other Virginia Minstrels, c. 1844
   Enlarge
   Sheet music cover for "Dandy Jim from Caroline", featuring Dan Emmett
   (centre) and the other Virginia Minstrels, c. 1844

   With the Panic of 1837, theatre attendance suffered, and concerts were
   one of the few attractions that could still make money. In 1843, four
   blackface performers led by Dan Emmett combined to stage just such a
   concert at the New York Bowery Amphitheatre, calling themselves the
   Virginia Minstrels. The minstrel show as a complete evening's
   entertainment was born. The show had little structure. The four sat in
   a semicircle, played songs, and traded wisecracks. One gave a stump
   speech in dialect, and they ended with a lively plantation song. The
   term minstrel had previously been reserved for traveling white singing
   groups, but Emmett and company made it synonymous with blackface
   performance, and by using it, signalled that they were reaching out to
   a new, middle-class audience. The Herald wrote that the production was
   "entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features,
   which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas." In 1845, the
   Ethiopian Serenaders purged their show of low humor and surpassed the
   Virginia Minstrels in popularity. Shortly thereafter, Edwin Pearce
   Christy founded Christy's Minstrels, combining the refined singing of
   the Ethiopian Serenaders (epitomized by the work of Christy's composer
   Stephen Foster) with the Virginia Minstrels' bawdy schtick. Christy's
   company established the three-act template into which minstrel shows
   would fall for the next few decades. This change to respectability
   prompted theatre owners to enforce new rules to make playhouses calmer
   and quieter.

   Minstrels toured the same circuits as opera companies, circuses, and
   European itinerant entertainers, with venues ranging from lavish opera
   houses to makeshift tavern stages. Life on the road entailed "endless
   series of one-nighters, travel on accident-prone railroads, [living] in
   poor housing subject to fires, [playing] in empty rooms that they had
   to convert into theaters, [facing] arrest on trumped up charges,
   [being] exposed to deadly diseases, and [enduring] managers and agents
   who skipped out with all the troupe's money." The more popular groups
   stuck to the main circuit that ran through the Northeast; some even
   went to Europe, which allowed their competitors to establish themselves
   in their absence. By the late 1840s, a southern tour had opened from
   Baltimore to New Orleans. Circuits through the Midwest and as far as
   California followed by the 1860s. As its popularity increased, theaters
   sprang up specifically for minstrel performance, often with names such
   as the Ethiopian Opera House and the like. Many amateur troupes
   performed only a few local shows before disbanding. Meanwhile,
   celebrities like Emmett continued to perform solo.

   The rise of the minstrel show coincided with the growth of the
   abolitionist movement. Many Northerners were concerned for the
   oppressed blacks of the South, but most had no idea how these slaves
   lived day-to-day. Blackface performance had been inconsistent on this
   subject; some slaves were happy, others victims of a cruel and inhuman
   institution. However, in the 1850s minstrelsy became decidedly
   mean-spirited and pro-slavery as race replaced class as its main focus.
   Most minstrels projected a greatly romanticized and exaggerated image
   of black life with cheerful, simple slaves always ready to sing and
   dance and to please their masters. (Less frequently, the masters
   cruelly split up black lovers or sexually assaulted black women.) The
   lyrics and dialogue were generally racist, satiric, and largely white
   in origin. Songs about slaves yearning to return to their masters were
   plentiful. The message was clear: do not worry about the slaves; they
   are happy with their lot in life. Figures like the Northern dandy and
   the homesick ex-slave reinforced the idea that blacks did not belong,
   nor did they want to belong, in Northern society.

   Minstrelsy's reaction to Uncle Tom's Cabin is indicative of plantation
   content at the time. Tom acts largely came to replace other plantation
   narratives, particularly in the third act. These sketches sometimes
   supported Stowe's novel, but just as often they turned it on its head
   or attacked the author. Whatever the intended message, it was usually
   lost in the joyous, slapstick atmosphere of the piece. Characters such
   as Simon Legree sometimes disappeared, and the title was frequently
   changed to something more cheerful like "Happy Uncle Tom" or "Uncle
   Dad's Cabin". Uncle Tom himself was frequently portrayed as a harmless
   bootlicker to be ridiculed. Troupes known as Tommer companies
   specialized in such burlesques, and theatrical Tom shows integrated
   elements of the minstrel show and competed with it for a time.

   Minstrelsy's racism (and misogyny) could be rather vicious. There were
   comic songs in which blacks were "roasted, fished for, smoked like
   tobacco, peeled like potatoes, planted in the soil, or dried up and
   hung as advertisements", and there were multiple songs in which a black
   man accidentally put out a black woman's eyes. On the other hand, the
   fact that the minstrel show broached the subjects of slavery and race
   at all is perhaps more significant than the racist manner in which it
   did so. Despite these pro-plantation attitudes, minstrelsy was banned
   in many Southern cities. Its association with the North was such that
   as secessionist attitudes grew stronger, minstrels on Southern tours
   became convenient targets of anti-Yankee sentiment.

   Non-race-related humor came from lampoons of other subjects, including
   aristocratic whites such as politicians, doctors, and lawyers. Women's
   rights was the only other serious subject to appear with any regularity
   in antebellum minstrelsy, almost always to ridicule the notion. The
   women's rights lecture became common in stump speeches. When one
   character joked, "Jim, I tink de ladies oughter vote," another replied,
   "No, Mr. Johnson, ladies am supposed to care berry little about
   polytick, and yet de majority ob em am strongly tached to parties."
   Minstrel humor was simple and relied heavily on slapstick and wordplay.
   Performers told nonsense riddles: "The difference between a
   schoolmaster and an engineer is that one trains the mind and the other
   minds the train."

   With the outbreak of the American Civil War, minstrels remained mostly
   neutral and satirized both sides. However, as the war reached Northern
   soil, troupes turned their loyalties to the Union. Sad songs and
   sketches came to dominate in reflection of the mood of a bereaved
   nation. Troupes performed skits about dying soldiers and their weeping
   widows, and about mourning white mothers. " Weeping, Sad, and Lonely"
   became the hit of the period, selling over a million copies of sheet
   music. To balance the somber mood, minstrels put on patriotic numbers
   like "The Star Spangled Banner", accompanied by depictions of scenes
   from American history that lionized figures like George Washington and
   Andrew Jackson. Social commentary grew increasingly important to the
   show. Performers criticized Northern society and those they felt
   responsible for the breakup of the country, who opposed reunification,
   or who profited from a nation at war. Emancipation was either opposed
   through happy plantation material or mildy supported with pieces that
   depicted slavery in a negative light. Eventually, direct criticism of
   the South became more biting.

Decline

   Poster for Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels
   Enlarge
   Poster for Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels

   Minstrelsy lost popularity during the war. New entertainments such as
   variety shows, musical comedies, and vaudeville appeared in the North,
   backed by master promoters like P. T. Barnum who wooed audiences away.
   Blackface troupes responded by traveling farther and farther afield,
   with their primary base now in the South and Midwest.

   Those minstrels who stayed in New York and similar cities followed
   Barnum's lead by advertising relentlessly and emphasizing the spectacle
   of minstrelsy. Troupes ballooned; as many as 19 performers could be on
   stage at once, and J. H. Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels had over
   100 members. Scenery grew lavish and expensive, and specialty acts like
   Japanese acrobats or circus freaks sometimes appeared. These changes
   made minstrelsy unprofitable for smaller troupes.

   Other minstrel troupes tried to satisfy outlying tastes. Female acts
   had made a stir in variety shows, and Madame Rentz's Female Minstrels
   ran with the idea, first performing in 1870 in skimpy costumes and
   tights. Their success gave rise to at least 11 all-female troupes by
   1871, one of which did away with blackface altogether. Ultimately, the
   girlie show emerged as a form in its own right. Mainstream minstrelsy
   continued to emphasize its propriety, but traditional troupes adopted
   some of these elements in the guise of the female impersonator. A
   well-played wench character became critical to success in the postwar
   period.
   Many later minstrel troupes, such as this one in 1910, tried to project
   an image of refinement. Note that only the endmen are in blackface.
   Enlarge
   Many later minstrel troupes, such as this one in 1910, tried to project
   an image of refinement. Note that only the endmen are in blackface.

   This new minstrelsy maintained an emphasis on refined music. Most
   troupes added jubilees, or spirituals, to their repertoire in the
   1870s. These were fairly authentic religious slave songs borrowed from
   traveling black singing groups. Other troupes drifted further from
   minstrelsy's roots. When George Primrose and Billy West broke with
   Haverly's Mastadons in 1877, they did away with blackface for all but
   the endmen and dressed themselves in lavish finery and powdered wigs.
   They decorated the stage with elaborate backdrops and performed no
   slapstick whatsoever. Their brand of minstrelsy differed from other
   entertainments only in name.

   Social commentary continued to dominate most performances, with
   plantation material constituting only a small part of the repertoire.
   This effect was amplified as minstrelsy featuring black performers took
   off in its own right and stressed its connection to the old
   plantations. The main target of criticism was the moral decay of the
   urbanized North. Cities were painted as corrupt, as homes to unjust
   poverty, and as dens of " city slickers" who lay in wait to prey upon
   new arrivals. Minstrels stressed traditional family life; stories told
   of reunification between mothers and sons thought dead in the war.
   Women's rights, disrespectful children, low church attendance, and
   sexual promiscuity became symptoms of decline in family values and of
   moral decay. Of course, Northern black characters carried these vices
   even further. African American members of Congress were one example,
   pictured as pawns of the Radical Republicans.

   By the 1890s, minstrelsy formed only a small part of American
   entertainment, and by 1919 a mere three troupes dominated the scene.
   Small companies and amateurs carried the traditional minstrel show into
   the 20th century, now with an audience mostly in the rural South, while
   black-owned troupes continued traveling to more outlying areas like the
   West. These black troupes were one of minstrelsy's last bastions, as
   more white actors moved into vaudeville.

Black minstrelsy

   In the 1840s and 50s, William Henry Lane and Thomas Dilward became the
   first African Americans to perform on the minstrel stage. All-black
   troupes followed as early as 1855. These companies emphasized that
   their ethnicity made them the only true delineators of black song and
   dance, with one advertisement describing a troupe as "SEVEN SLAVES just
   from Alabama, who are EARNING THEIR FREEDOM by giving concerts under
   the guidance of their Northern friends." White curiosity proved a
   powerful motivator, and the shows were patronized by people who wanted
   to see blacks acting "spontaneously" and "naturally", as if on exhibit.
   Promoters seized on this, one billing his troupe as "THE DARKY AS HE IS
   AT HOME, DARKY LIFE IN THE CORNFIELD, CANEBRAKE, BARNYARD, AND ON THE
   LEVEE AND FLATBOAT." Keeping with convention, black minstrels still
   corked the faces of at least the endmen. One commentator described a
   mostly uncorked black troupe as "mulattoes of a medium shade except
   two, who were light. . . . The end men were each rendered thoroughly
   black by burnt cork." The minstrels themselves promoted their
   performing abilities, quoting reviews that favorably compared them to
   popular white troupes. These black companies often featured female
   minstrels.
   Plantation scenarios were common in black minstrelsy, as shown here in
   this post-1875 poster for Callender's Colored Minstrels
   Enlarge
   Plantation scenarios were common in black minstrelsy, as shown here in
   this post-1875 poster for Callender's Colored Minstrels

   One or two African American troupes dominated the scene for much of the
   late 1860s and 1870s. The first of these was Brooker and Clayton's
   Georgia Minstrels, who played the Northeast around 1865. Sam Hague's
   Slave Troupe of Georgia Minstrels formed shortly thereafter and toured
   England to great success beginning in 1866. In the 1870s, white
   entrepreneurs bought most of the successful black companies. Charles
   Callender obtained Sam Hague's troupe in 1872 and renamed it
   Callender's Georgia Minstrels. They became the most popular black
   troupe in America, and the words Callender and Georgia came to be
   synonymous with the institution of black minstrelsy. J. H. Haverly in
   turn purchased Callender's troupe in 1878 and applied his strategy of
   enlarging troupe size and embellishing sets. When this company went to
   Europe, Gustave and Charles Frohman took the opportunity to promote
   their Callender's Consolidated Colored Minstrels. Their success was
   such that the Frohmans bought Haverly's group and merged it with
   theirs, creating a virtual monopoly on the market. The company split in
   three to better canvas the nation and dominated black minstrelsy
   throughout the 1880s. Individual black performers like Billy Kersands,
   James A. Bland, Sam Lucas, and Wallace King grew famous as any featured
   white performer.

   Racism made black minstrelsy a difficult profession. When playing
   Southern towns, performers had to stay in character even off stage,
   dressed in ragged "slave clothes" and perpetually smiling. Troupes left
   town quickly after each performance, and some had so much trouble
   securing lodging that they hired out whole trains or had cars custom
   built to sleep in, complete with hidden compartments in which to hide
   should things turn ugly. Even these were no haven, as whites sometimes
   used the cars for target practice. Their salaries, though higher than
   those of most blacks of the period, failed to reach levels earned by
   white performers; even superstars like Kersands earned slightly less
   than featured white minstrels. Unsurprisingly, most black troupes did
   not last long.

   In content, early black minstrelsy differed little from its white
   counterpart. As white troupes drifted from plantation subjects in the
   mid-1870s however, black troupes placed a new emphasis on it. The
   addition of jubilee singing gave black minstrelsy a popularity boost as
   the black troupes were rightly believed to be the most authentic
   performers of such material. Other significant differences were that
   the black minstrels added religious themes to their shows while whites
   shied from them, and that the black companies commonly ended the first
   act of the show with a military high-stepping, brass band burlesque, a
   practice adopted after Callender's Minstrels used it in 1875 or 1876.
   Although black minstrelsy lent credence to racist ideals of blackness,
   many African American minstrels worked to subtly alter these
   stereotypes and to poke fun at white society. One jubilee described
   heaven as a place "where de white folks must let the darkeys be" and
   they could not be "bought and sold". In plantation material, aged black
   characters were rarely reunited with long-lost masters like they were
   in white minstrelsy.

   African Americans formed a large part of the black minstrels' audience,
   especially for smaller troupes. In fact, their numbers were so great
   that many theatre owners had to relax rules relegating black patrons to
   certain areas. Theories as to why blacks would look favorably upon
   negative images of themselves vary. Perhaps they felt in on the joke,
   laughing at the over-the-top characters from a sense of "in-group
   recognition". Maybe they even implicitly endorsed the racist antics, or
   they felt some connection to elements of an African culture that had
   been suppressed but was visible, albeit in racist, exaggerated form, in
   minstrel personages. They certainly got many jokes that flew over
   whites' heads or registered as only quaint distractions. Another draw
   for black audiences was simply seeing fellow African Americans on
   stage; black minstrels were largely viewed as celebrities. Formally
   educated African Americans, on the other hand, either disregarded black
   minstrelsy or openly disdained it. Still, black minstrelsy was the
   first large-scale opportunity for African Americans to enter American
   show business.

Structure

   The Christy Minstrels established the basic structure of the minstrel
   show in the 1840s. A crowd-gathering parade to the theatre often
   preceded the performance. The show itself was divided into three major
   sections. During the first, the entire troupe danced onto stage singing
   a popular song and doing a dance called the walkaround. Upon the
   instruction of the interlocutor, a sort of host, they sat in a
   semicircle. Various stock characters always took the same positions:
   the genteel interlocutor in the middle, flanked by Tambo and Bones, who
   served as the endmen or cornermen. The interlocutor and the endmen
   exchanged jokes and performed a variety of humorous songs. Over time,
   these came to include maudlin numbers not always in dialect. One
   minstrel, usually a tenor, came to specialize in this part; such
   singers often became celebrities, especially with women. An upbeat
   plantation song and dance ended the act.

   The second portion of the show, called the olio, was historically the
   last to evolve, as its real purpose was to allow for the setting of the
   stage for act three behind the curtain. It had more of a variety show
   structure. Performers danced, played instruments, did acrobatics, and
   demonstrated other amusing talents. Troupes offered parodies of
   European-style entertainments, and European troupes themselves
   sometimes performed. The highlight was when one actor, typically one of
   the endmen, delivered a faux-black-dialect stump speech, a long oration
   about anything from nonsense to science, society, or politics, during
   which the dim-witted character tried to speak eloquently, only to
   deliver countless malapropisms, jokes, and unintentional puns. All the
   while, the speaker moved about like a clown, standing on his head and
   almost always falling off his stump at some point. With blackface
   makeup serving as fool's mask, these stump speakers could deliver
   biting social criticism without offending the audience, although the
   focus was usually on sending up unpopular issues and making fun of
   blacks' ability to make sense of them. Many troupes employed a stump
   specialist with a trademark style and material.
     * "A Meeting of the Limkiln Club" —
          + A blackface stump speech by the American Quartet, 1902
          +

   The afterpiece rounded out the production. In the early days of the
   minstrel show, this was often a skit set on a Southern plantation that
   usually included song-and-dance numbers and featured Sambo- and
   Mammy-type characters in slapstick situations. The emphasis lay on an
   idealized plantation life and the happy slaves who lived there.
   Nevertheless, antislavery viewpoints sometimes surfaced in the guise of
   family members separated by slavery, runaways, or even slave uprisings.
   A few stories highlighted black trickster figures who managed to get
   the better of their masters. Beginning in the mid-1850s, performers did
   burlesque renditions of other plays; both Shakespeare and contemporary
   playwrights were common targets. The humor of these came from the inept
   black characters trying to perform some element of high white culture.
   Slapstick humor pervaded the afterpiece, including cream pies to the
   face, inflated bladders, and on-stage fireworks. Material from Uncle
   Tom's Cabin dominated beginning in 1853. The afterpiece allowed the
   minstrels to introduce new characters, some of whom became quite
   popular and spread from troupe to troupe.

Characters

   The earliest minstrel characters took as their base popular white stage
   archetypes—frontiersmen, fishermen, hunters, and riverboatsmen whose
   depictions drew heavily from the tall tale—and added exaggerated
   blackface speech and makeup. These Jim Crows and Gumbo Chaffs fought
   and boasted that they could "wip [their] weight in wildcats" or "eat an
   alligator". As public opinion toward blacks changed, however, so did
   the minstrel stereotypes. Eventually, several stock characters emerged.
   Chief among these were the slave, who often maintained the earlier name
   Jim Crow, and the dandy, known frequently as Zip Coon. The two formed a
   dichotomy of blackness, both equally ludicrous.

   The white actors who portrayed these characters spoke an ersatz,
   exaggerated form of Black Vernacular English. These characters were
   stupid and silly at best, grotesque and alien at worst. The blackface
   makeup and illustrations on programs and sheet music depicted them with
   huge eyeballs, overly wide noses, and thick-lipped mouths that hung
   open or grinned foolishly; one character expressed his love for a woman
   with "lips so large a lover could not kiss them all at once". They had
   huge feet and preferred "possum" and "coon" to more civilized fare.
   Minstrel characters were often described in animalistic terms, with
   "wool" instead of hair, "bleating" like sheep, and having "darky cubs"
   instead of children. Other ludicrous claims were that blacks had to
   drink ink when they got sick "to restore their colour" and that they
   had to file their hair rather than cut it. They were inherently
   musical, dancing and frolicking through the night with no need for
   sleep.
   Jim Crow, the archetypal slave character as created by Rice
   Enlarge
   Jim Crow, the archetypal slave character as created by Rice

   Thomas "Daddy" Rice introduced the earliest slave archetype with his
   song " Jump Jim Crow" and its accompanying dance. He claimed to have
   learned the number by watching an old, limping black stable hand
   dancing and singing, "Wheel about and turn about and do jus' so/Eb'ry
   time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow." Other early minstrel performers
   quickly adopted Rice's character.

   Slave characters in general came to be low-comedy types with names that
   matched the instruments they played: Brudder Tambo (or simply Tambo)
   for the tambourine and Brudder Bones (or Bones) for the bone castanets.
   These endmen (for their position in the minstrel semicircle) were
   ignorant and poorly spoken, being conned, electrocuted, or run over in
   various sketches. They happily shared their stupidity; one slave
   character said that to get to China, one had only to go up in a balloon
   and wait for the world to rotate below. Highly musical and unable to
   sit still, they constantly contorted their bodies wildly while singing.

   Tambo and Bones's simple-mindedness and lack of sophistication were
   highlighted by pairing them with a straight man master of ceremonies
   called the interlocutor. This character, although usually in blackface,
   spoke in aristocratic English and used a much larger vocabulary. The
   humor of these exchanges came from the misunderstandings on the part of
   the endmen when talking to the interlocutor:

          Interlocutor: I'm astonished at you, Why, the idea of a man of
          your mental calibre talking about such sordid matters, right
          after listening to such a beautiful song! Have you no sentiment
          left?

          Tambo: No, I haven't got a cent left.

   Tambo and Bones were favorites of the audience, and their repartee with
   the interlocutor was for many the best part of the show. There was an
   element of laughing with them for the audience, as they frequently made
   light of the interlocutor's grandiose ways.

   The interlocutor was responsible for beginning and ending each segment
   of the show. To this end, he had to be able to gauge the mood of the
   audience and know when it was time to move on. Accordingly, the actor
   who played the role was paid very well in comparison to other
   non-featured performers.

   There were many variants on the slave archetype. The old darky or old
   uncle formed the head of the idyllic black family. Like other slave
   characters, he was highly musical and none-too-bright, but he had
   favorable aspects like his loving nature and the sentiments he raised
   regarding love for the aged, ideas of old friendships, and the
   cohesiveness of the family. His death and the pain it caused his master
   was a common theme in sentimental songs. Alternatively, the master
   could die, leaving the old darky to mourn. Stephen Foster's " Old Uncle
   Ned" was the most popular song on this subject. Less frequently, the
   old darky might be cast out by a cruel master when he grew too old to
   work. After the Civil War, this character became the most common figure
   in plantation sketches. He frequently cried about the loss of his home
   during the war, only to meet up with someone from the past such as the
   child of his former master. In contrast, the trickster, often called
   Jasper Jack, appeared less frequently. By outsmarting his white master,
   he exemplified antislavery sentiment.

   Female characters ranged from the sexually provocative to the
   laughable. These roles were almost always played by men in drag (most
   famously George Christy, Francis Leon, and Barney Williams), even
   though American theatre outside minstrelsy was filled with actresses at
   this time. Mammy or the old auntie was the old darky's counterpart. She
   often went by the name of Aunt Dinah Roh after the song of that title.
   Mammy was lovable to both blacks and whites, matronly, but hearkening
   to European peasant woman sensibilities. Her main role was to be the
   devoted mother figure in scenarios about the perfect plantation family.
   Minstrel show performers Rollin Howard (in wench costume) and George
   Griffin, c. 1855
   Enlarge
   Minstrel show performers Rollin Howard (in wench costume) and George
   Griffin, c. 1855

   The wench, yaller gal, or prima donna was a mulatto who combined the
   light skin and facial features of a white woman with the perceived
   sexual promiscuity and exoticism of a black woman. Her beauty and
   flirtatiousness made her a common target for male characters, although
   she usually proved capricious and elusive. After the Civil War, the
   wench emerged as the most important specialist role in the minstrel
   troupe; men could alternately be titillated and disgusted, while women
   could admire the illusion and high fashion. The role was most strongly
   associated with the song " Miss Lucy Long", so the character many times
   bore that name. Actress Olive Logan commented that some actors were
   "marvelously well fitted by nature for it, having well-defined soprano
   voices, plump shoulders, beardless faces, and tiny hands and feet."
   Many of these actors were teen-aged boys. In contrast was the funny old
   gal, a slapstick role played by a large man in motley clothing and
   large, flapping shoes. The humor she invoked often turned on the male
   characters' desire for a woman whom the audience would perceive as
   unattractive.
   1906 postcard advertisement featuring dandy-type characters
   Enlarge
   1906 postcard advertisement featuring dandy-type characters

   The counterpart to the slave was the dandy, a common character in the
   afterpiece. He was a northern urban black man trying to live above his
   station by mimicking white, upper-class speech and dress—usually to no
   good effect. Dandy characters often went by Zip Coon, after the song
   popularized by George Washington Dixon, although others had pretentious
   names like Count Julius Caesar Mars Napoleon Sinclair Brown. Their
   clothing was a ludicrous parody of upper-class dress: coats with tails
   and padded shoulders, white gloves, monocles, fake mustaches, and gaudy
   watch chains. They spent their time primping and preening, going to
   parties, dancing and strutting, and wooing women. Like other urban
   black characters, the dandies' pretentiousness showed that they had no
   place in white society while sending up social changes like
   nouveau-riche white culture.

   The black soldier became another stock type during the Civil War and
   merged qualities of the slave and the dandy. He was acknowledged for
   playing some role in the war, but he was more frequently lampooned for
   bumbling through his drills or for thinking his uniform made him the
   equal of his white counterparts. He was usually better at retreating
   than fighting, and, like the dandy, he preferred partying to serious
   pursuits. Still, his introduction allowed for some return to themes of
   the breakup of the plantation family.

   Non-black stereotypes played a significant role in minstrelsy, and
   although still performed in blackface, were distinguished by their lack
   of black dialect. American Indians before the Civil War were usually
   depicted as innocent symbols of the pre-industrial world or as pitiable
   victims whose peaceful existence had been shattered by the encroachment
   of the white man. However, as the United States turned its attentions
   West, American Indians became savage, pagan obstacles to progress.
   These characters were formidable scalpers to be feared, not ridiculed;
   any humor in such scenarios usually derived from a black character
   trying to act like one of the frightful savages. One sketch began with
   white men and American Indians enjoying a communal meal in a frontier
   setting. 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. The message conveyed was that such
   people had no place in American society.

   Depictions of East Asians began during the California Gold Rush when
   minstrels encountered Chinese out West. 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.S. beginning
   in 1865. A run of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado in the mid-1880s
   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 1840s, portrayed as hotheaded, odious drunkards who spoke in a
   thick brogue. This portrayal was a reaction to both the Irish's
   Catholicness and their willingness to work for cheap wages, which
   frightened non-Irish workers. However, beginning in the 1850s, many
   Irishmen joined minstrelsy, and Irish theatergoers probably came to
   represent a significant part of the audience, so this negative image
   was muted. By the 1870s, the Irish were still ready to fight and drink
   but were otherwise like any other white audience member. Germans, on
   the other hand, were portrayed favorably from their introduction to
   minstrelsy in the 1860s. They were responsible and sensible, though
   still humorous for their large size, hardy appetites, and heavy "Dutch"
   accents. Part of this positive portrayal no doubt came about because
   some of the actors portraying German characters were German themselves.

Music and dance

   Music and dance were the heart of the minstrel show and a large reason
   for its popularity. Troupes 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 1830s is
   impossible. Insofar as the minstrels had authentic contact with black
   culture, it was via neighborhoods, taverns, theaters, and waterfronts
   where blacks and whites could mingle freely. 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.
   Compounding the problem is the difficulty in ascertaining how much
   minstrel music was written by black composers, as the custom at the
   time was to sell all rights to a song to publishers or other
   performers. Nevertheless, many troupes claimed to have carried out more
   serious "fieldwork".

   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." It
   was thus a juxtaposition of "vigorous earth-slapping footwork of black
   dances . . . with the Irish lineaments of blackface jigs and reels."
   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. Minstrel instruments were also a
   mélange: African banjo, bones, and tambourine with European fiddle. In
   short, early minstrel music and dance was not true black culture; it
   was a white reaction to it. This was the first large-scale
   appropriation and commercial exploitation of black culture by American
   whites.

   In the late 1830s, 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, energetic rhythm, and 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." Others complained that the minstrels had foregone
   their black roots. In short, the Virginia Minstrels and their imitators
   wanted to please a new audience of predominantly white, middle-class
   Northerners, by playing music the spectators would find familiar and
   pleasant.

   Despite the elements of ridicule contained in blackface performance,
   mid-19th 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.
   Detail from an 1859 playbill of Bryant's Minstrels depicting the final
   part of the walkaround
   Enlarge
   Detail from an 1859 playbill of Bryant's Minstrels depicting the final
   part of the walkaround

   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. Dances like the Turkey Trot, the
   Buzzard Lope, and the Juba dance all had their origins in the
   plantations of the South, and some were popularized by black performers
   such as William Henry Lane, Signor Cornmeali ("Old Corn Meal"), and
   John "Picayune" Butler. One performance by Lane in 1842 was described
   as consisting of "sliding steps, like a shuffle, and not the high steps
   of an Irish jig." Lane and the white men who mimicked him moved about
   the stage with no obvious foot movement. The walkaround, 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 dance was merely a "faint, feeble,
   impotent—in a word, pale Northern reproductions of that ineffable black
   conception."

   The introduction of the jubilee, or spiritual, marked the minstrels'
   first undeniable adoption of black music. 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.

Legacy

   The minstrel show played a powerful role in shaping assumptions about
   blacks. 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. Blacks were in turn
   expected to uphold these stereotypes or else risk white retaliation.

   Popular entertainment perpetuated the racist stereotype of the
   uneducated, ever-cheerful, and highly musical black well into the
   1950s. Even as the minstrel show was dying out in all but amateur
   theatre, 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 1920s in films such
   as The Jazz Singer (1927). Likewise, when the sound era of cartoons
   began in the late 1920s, early animators such as Walt Disney gave
   characters like 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 Amos 'n' Andy program. As
   recently as the mid-1970s the BBC screened The Black and White Minstrel
   Show on television, starring the George Mitchell Minstrels. The racist
   archetypes that blackface minstrelsy helped to create persist to this
   day; some argue that this is even true in hip hop culture and movies.
   The 2000 Spike Lee movie Bamboozled alleges that modern black
   entertainment exploits African American culture much as the minstrel
   shows did a century ago, for example.

   Meanwhile, African American actors were limited to the same old
   minstrel-defined roles for years to come and by playing them, made them
   more believable to white audiences. On the other hand, these parts
   opened the entertainment industry to African American performers and
   gave them their first opportunity to alter those stereotypes. Many
   famous singers and actors gained their start in black minstrelsy,
   including Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and
   Butterbeans and Susie.

   The very structure of American entertainment bears minstrelsy's
   imprint. The endless barrage of gags and puns appears in the work of
   the Marx Brothers and David and Jerry Zucker. The varied structure of
   songs, gags, and dramatic pieces continued into vaudeville, variety
   shows, and to modern sketch comedy shows like Hee Haw or, more
   distantly, Saturday Night Live and In Living Colour. Jokes once
   delivered by endmen are still told today: "Why did the chicken cross
   the road?" "Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?" Other jokes form
   part of the repertoire of modern comedians: "Who was that lady I saw
   you with last night? That was no lady—that was my wife!" The stump
   speech is an important precursor to modern stand-up comedy.

   Another important legacy of minstrelsy is its music. Many minstrel
   tunes are now popular folk songs. Most have been expunged of the
   exaggerated black dialect and the overt references to blacks. " Dixie",
   for example, was adopted by the Confederacy as its unofficial national
   anthem and is still popular, and " Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" was
   sanitized and made the state song of Virginia until 1997. " My Old
   Kentucky Home" remains the state song of Kentucky. The instruments of
   the minstrel show were largely kept on, especially in the South.
   Minstrel performers from the last days of the shows, such as Uncle Dave
   Macon, helped popularize the banjo and fiddle in modern country music.
   And by introducing America to black dance and musical style, minstrelsy
   opened the nation to black cultural forms for the first time on a large
   scale.

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