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In Search of Jim Crow:
Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter
In 1828 or 1829, so the story is told, in free Cincinnati or down
the river in slave Louisville, or maybe in Pittsburgh (or was it
Baltimore?), an obscure actor named Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice came
across a crippled black stablehand doing a grotesquely gimpy
dance. "Every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow," the stablehand would
sing, illustrating his words with an almost literally syncopated dance
("syncope": "a partial or complete temporary suspension of
respiration and circulation due to cerebral ischemia"). The effect was
comical, all accounts agree; it was also rhythmically compelling or
exciting, though how this effect is achieved through a discontinuity
in which one half of the body is acrobatic and the other immobilized
is apparently too self-evident to be addressed. Rice was so impressed
that he bought the black man's clothes and made off with his song and
dance. "Jump Jim Crow" became a major smash--in Gilbert Chase's words,
"the first big international song hit of American popular
music."
Like many European-American entertainers in the 1820s and a few
going back some 50 years, Rice was already appearing regularly in
blackface. Not until 1843 would the Virginia Minstrels, the first
(professional) (white) ("white") fiddle-banjo-tambourine-bones music
group, kick off a craze that would soon accommodate interlocutors and
endmen and skits and variety acts and pianos and what-have-you. In
expansive mutations of fluctuating grotesquery and brilliance, the
craze would dominate American show business until the end of the 19th
century. And after a long period of shame-faced obscurity cemented by
the civil rights movement, its daunting tangle of race and class and
pop culture and American music would render it a hot topic of
historical debate at the end of the 20th century. Nevertheless, Rice's
strange cultural appropriation continues to stand at the headwaters of
what we now call minstrelsy--its foundation myth. As a myth, the
incident retains explanatory and illustrative power even though
there's no way we can ascertain whether any version of it
occurred.
Since the kind of reporter who would go hunting for the stablehand
is rare enough in these racially sensitive times, we might expect that
the sole witness on record would be Rice himself--building a colorful
reputation in interviews with the press, most likely. Yet in the
dozens of retellings I've checked, Rice isn't cited either; the
commonest source by far--and also, remarkably, just about the
earliest--is "Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy," an article by
Robert P. Nevin that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867,
nearly 40 years after the "fact," and several years as well after a
by-then crippled Rice (and Foster too) had died in poverty. Even so
the appropriation could have taken place--although one would like to
know more about Robert P. Nevin (whose other published writings focus
on Pittsburgh, Foster's hometown), the story was apparently an
uncontroversial commonplace by the time it got to the Atlantic,
and it has a ring, doesn't it? In fact, it's such a hell of metaphor
that one understands why few historians of minstrelsy have resisted
it, and why it shows up frequently in less specialized accounts of
race relations and popular music. All one would expect, especially of
modern scholars attuned to the ideological baggage concealed beneath
the surface of such undocumented tales, is a touch of skepticism. It's
kind of amazing how rarely one gets it.
OK, it figures that old-time pop historians David Ewen and Sigmund
Spaeth (for whom minstrelsy was "a black snowball which kept on
rolling") would swallow the story whole. But one
appreciates Gilbert Chase's simple "tradition has it,"
Eileen Southern's relaxed "as the story goes," and wishes
recent chroniclers Christopher Small, Russell Sanjek, and Donald
Clarke had exercised more caution. One knows better than to seek
scholarly decorum in Carl Wittke's chatty (and useful) 1930 Tambo
and Bones. One admires Hans Nathan's 1962 Dan Emmett and the
Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy for analyzing the artistic content
of Rice's song-and-dance and appending its supposed origin as an "it
is reported" afterthought. And one is rather shocked
that Robert C. Toll, whose 1974 Blacking Up kicked off modern
minstrelsy studies; Robert Cantwell, whose 1984 Bluegrass
Breakdown linked Bill Monroe to minstrelsy and jazz when such
lineages were all but unthinkable; and Roger D. Abrahams, whose 1994
Singing the Master traces the minstrel-show walk-around to
planatation corn-shucking festivities, buy the tale so
unquestioningly.
And then there's Lawrence W. Levine, whose seminal 1977 Black
Culture and Black Consciousness repeats the story, unfootnoted, to
launch the argument that white minstrels often served as conduits from
one African-American (the stablehand, "an old Louisville Negro, Jim
Crow") to another (the "North Carolina Negroes shucking corn" whose
virtually identical 1915 song was recorded in Newman I. White's 1928
American Negro Folk-Songs). One wonders what Levine
would make of musicologist Charles Hamm, who in 1979 reprinted most of
Nevin's Atlantic version in Yesterdays: Popular Song in
America, the most thorough and thoughtful history of American pop
we have. After noting the racist relish of Nevin's "colorful" style
(which upon reflection evokes a minstrel stump speech), Hamm
acknowledges that Rice "may have been telling the truth" before making
what ought to be an obvious point: "It is equally likely that the
story of the tune's origin was invented to give authenticity to a
white man's portrayal of a black." Hamm believes Rice needed the
help. He can discern no African elements in "Jim Crow," which
suggested "both an Irish folk tune and an English stage song," had
small success as sheet music, and failed to enter oral tradition
(unlike its counterpart, George Washington Dixon's "Zip Coon,"
transformed by Dan Emmett into "Turkey in the Straw"). Hamm
conjectures that if Rice did indeed copy it from a black man, the
black man might well have copied it earlier from a
white. Conduits have a way of connecting to other
conduits.
This is a reassuringly sane take on the legend. But one reason it's
so sane is that it recognizes the legend's power. By quoting Nevin in
all his condescending glory, Hamm implicitly recognizes why Eric Lott,
whose obsessively researched 1993 Love and Theft kicked off
postmodern minstrelsy studies, calls the Atlantic article,
which he also quotes at length, "probably the least trustworthy and
most accurate account of American minstrelsy's appropriation of black
cultural practices." "According to legend--the closest we
are going to get to truth in the matter--" is how Lott
sources the Rice story. Never mind that in her own contribution to the
essay collection Inside the Minstrel Mask, co-editor Annemarie
Bean attributes a considerably more credulous version of the story to
Lott himself, because facts, likely or unlikely, have nothing on the
inexorable, poetic, legendary truth. And so, completing his sentence
by summing up without comment the Atlantic article he
reproduced 30 pages before--"T.D. Rice used an old black stableman's
song and dance in his first 'Jim Crow' act"--Lott launches one of his
more tendentious disquisitions on, to cite jargon that has dated
revealingly, "the production of the minstrel show out of gendered
commodity exchange," replete with permissive definitions of
bohemia, imaginative inferences of the homoerotic, century-hopping
cultural generalizations, and shards of evidence that don't nearly
prove what he claims they do.
Now, Love and Theft is a remarkable book, the most purely
brilliant in minstrelsy studies. Its insistence on respecting and
understanding the much-disparaged white working-class minstrel
audience was long overdue. But it's too bad brilliance is the closest
Lott can get to truth in the matter. I know it's only a fantasy, but
let me say right here that I personally would love to know whether
Rice ever actually met such a stablehand, and--if he did, which by now
I doubt--exactly what cultural commodities he borrowed, arrogated, or
stole.
The reason the myth remains so redolent, after all, is that it
tells a story about the white-from-black "appropriation" of not just
minstrelsy but all American popular music. Afro-America makes,
Euro-America takes--seldom is it put so baldly, but at some level
that's what many of us feel. In one line of thought, it follows that
the stablehand's "Jump Jim Crow" was intrinsically irresistible, so
much so that a straight imitation made Rice a star; it follows that
all that stood between the stablehand and a career in show business
was the refusal of middlemen like Rice to help a black originator
overcome troublesome initial audience resistance, with all projections
through the next two centuries self-evident. There's an alternate
possibility, however. What if Rice's "Jump Jim Crow" was a syncretic
creation, sparked by components of one or more individual black
performances that might even include the song itself, but
incorporating as well stray elements of other songs and dances black
and/or white--and also, crucially, skills, mannerisms, attitudes, and
values Rice was born with, or absorbed during his long stage and
idiosyncratic life experience?
This is not only what Hamm suspects, it's probably what Lott thinks
too; the syncretic is as much a cultural studies trope as the trope
itself. Once when discussing Rice, in fact, Lott identifies and
counterposes the two models. Imitation, which he calls "theft," he
links credibly to anxiety about slavery, while syncretism,
"expropriation," he links dubiously to anxiety about
miscegenation. Lott's reluctance to choose explicitly
between them reflects not so much his scholarly modesty as his
scholarly method--he'd rather explore metaphors than establish
facts. But for sure the theft model dominates the other accounts I've
described, and that's because Lott is surely right to align it with
slavery. In whites who resist racism, the anxiety slavery provokes is
rarely distinguishable anymore from guilt, in part because the rage
slavery provokes in blacks is rarely masked anymore in
let-bygones-be-bygones noblesse oblige. This compels whites to either
share that rage or defend themselves against it. And even more than
the Confederate flag (although perhaps not the burnt cross or the KKK
hood), nothing symbolizes the outrageous dehumanization of slavery as
vividly for most African-Americans as "the big-lipped, bug-eyed,
broad-nosed buffoons" of blackface stereotype.
The quote is from "a 26-year-old African-American who just finished
reading Ted Gioia's" 2000 New York Times defense of Al Jolson,
which was illustrated with a poster from The Jazz Singer.
Fumed another letter writer: "Does it matter to me that [Jolson] opted
for blackface to enhance the theatrical qualities of his performance
and not to degrade blacks? No. What matters to me as an
African-American woman is how it makes African-American people feel."
Both voice an indignation that dates, in print, to Frederick Douglass,
who in 1848, Lott reminds us early on, branded blackface minstrels
"the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a
complexion denied to them by nature." For uplifters of
the race like Douglass, minstrelsy's burnt cork has always seemed
nothing less than a theft of identity all too precisely analagous to
slavery's theft of freedom. So ever since black pride became a formula
for self-actualization in the 1960s, ex-minstrel W.C. Handy's
assertion that minstrelsy produced black show business has been swept under the rug. The pleasure much of the Negro
audience once took in, to choose the obvious example, Amos 'n'
Andy--in 1930, for instance, Duke Ellington's orchestra played its
theme song at a Chicago Defender parade--is
recalled as a tragic anomaly of benighted times when it's acknowledged
at all.
In this context, the slavery model of minstrel appropriation
obviously has an insuperable advantage among African-Americans. Even
when they strain to be fair, as Mel Watkins does in On the Real
Side: A History of African American Comedy, black critics and
historians are so appalled by blackface they find it hard to work up
any respect or sympathy for the white men who exploited it. The sole
exception I'm aware of is Wesley Brown's 1994 novel Darktown
Strutters, which begins with a fictionalization of the Jim Crow
legend. Brown's protagonist is Jim Too, the adopted son of the
crippled stablehand Jim Crow. Jim Too remakes himself as a
professional dancer who also calls himself Jim Crow, but he performs
without makeup, initially in Daddy Rice's troupe. Renowned and
sometimes imperiled for his refusal to don the blackface that is the
coin of American entertainment, he pursues a 19th-century
African-American picaresque that makes no pretense of chronological or
historical precision. Brown depicts Rice as a tortured grotesque and
compulsive performer, incapable of living inside his own skin, yet
"several cuts above most men I've known who do a lotta damage tryin
too hard to be white."
The quote is from another white blackface artist in the historical
record, dancer Jack Diamond, in Brown's storg a staunch antiracist
who's literally cut off at the waist at the Battle of Chancellorsville
(I think--typically, Brown muddles the year). His name is found pinned
to the pants that clothe his known remains, an image that soon feeds
"the legend of the greatest jig dancer ever to heist his legs! And
every time Jim heard another version of the story, the loss of Jack
Diamond didn't weigh on him so heavily." When Afro-America
makes and Euro-America takes, Brown wants us to know, sympathy is a
luxury for any black person set on getting some back.
"The story I propose here veers awry from the usual accounts of the
origin of Jim Crow. That usual story, reiterated from the earliest
middle-class articles on working-class performance right up through
the latest scholarly accounts of minstrelsy, has it that Rice nicked
`Jump Jim Crow' from a real man, usually specified as a crippled black
hostler named Jim Crow. A corollary story, equally dubious, specifies
a source in an individual named Cuff, who it is supposed wrestled
luggage along the Pittsburgh levee.
"These stories are false in fact and spirit. There was no such
hostler, no such baggage man. What's more, the way these stories tell
it is simply not the way cultural gestures come into
being." W.T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain
So much for legend being the closest we are going to get to truth
in the matter, at least as far as W.T. Lhamon Jr. is concerned.
Lhamon is the author of two of the four major pieces of minstrelsy
scholarship to follow Love and Theft, all almost as obsessive
as Lott about secondary sources and, in the standard
history-versus-theory pattern, rather more obsessive about primary
sources. William J. Mahar's Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early
Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture
(1999) enlists a profusion of playbills, plays, and songs to bolster a
solid if flat-footed argument that minstrelsy is better understood as
birthplace of showbiz than engine of racism. Dale Cockrell's Demons
of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (1997)
mines court records and newspapers to connect minstrelsy to the
carnivalesque class hostility of charivari and callithumpianism.
Lhamon's new Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of
the First Atlantic Popular Culture is a monumental labor of
textual reconstruction matched by a long and extraordinary
introduction. His earlier entry, Raising Cain: Blackface
Performance From Jim Crow to Hip Hop (1998), is more fanciful and
theory-happy. Lhamon centers its well-documented vision of New York's
Catherine Street Market as mixed-race cultural exchange on an 1820
folk drawing depicting three black performers "Dancing for Eels," and
somewhat shakily credits George Christy with staging the first true
minstrel show in Buffalo in 1842, well before the Manhattan debut of
Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels cited by everyone else. Raising
Cain also revealed the existence of a pamphlet called The Life
of Jim Crow that's reprinted in Jump Jim Crow. Rice
probably didn't write it, but he sold it at shows. It makes no mention
of hostlers or baggage men.
Scornful of speculation, the text-based Mahar is one of the few
historians of minstrelsy to ignore the Jim Crow legend. Cockrell
assumes the legend is true because no one bothered to deny it at the
time, although he wishes he could prove the stablehand was actually a
performer at one of the black festivals he's studied. He finds its
"outlines" in an 1837 Rice profile by New York Herald editor
James Gordon Bennett, convincingly dates the song itself to
1830 rather than 1828, and refutes the truism that it was an instant
hit.
Like Cockrell, Lhamon means to begin where Lott leaves off by
celebrating rather than just respecting minstrelsy's audience--the
counter-nobility Lhamon, following Thomas Pynchon, dubs "the
mobility." But the two scholars have different agendas,
and these correspond to their distinct versions of the legend. In an
autobiographical epilogue, Cockrell identifies himself as a white
working-class Southerner who resents Northerners' assumptions about
his racism; Lhamon is cagier about personal details, putting his
cultural capital on the table with stray references to Eliot,
Wittgenstein, Ginsberg, Dylan, etc. Cockrell the good old boy takes
for granted the kind of "borrowing" the Jim Crow legend is about and
doesn't think that ends the story, citing as proof Southern musicians
from Jimmie Rodgers to the Everly Brothers and "on and on, up to many
of the current crop of stars." Lhamon the postmodernist
emphasizes how the legend served the ideological needs of those
positioned to construct and promulgate it--rival actors jealous of the
popularity of this cheap craze, and privileged pundits fearful of the
cross-racial class solidarity that Lhamon demonstrates coexisted with
white racism, especially before the minstrel show proper.
As noted, the minstrel show proper, whether in the form of Dan
Emmett's Virginia Minstrels or George Christy's much longer-lived
troupe, begins in 1843, perhaps 1842. That's also the starting point
for Mahar, who defines his subject as antebellum minstrelsy. In
contrast, both Lhamon and Cockrell focus on the pre-1843 period; both,
in fact, devote considerable attention to pre-1828 intimations. The
first section of Lhamon's book teases out the 1820 drawing, while
Cockrell outlines the history of "Lord of Misrule
festivities." These include mumming plays, Morris dancing,
slave Christmases, West Indian John Canoe celebrations, the black
elections that were quickly banned in 18th-century New England,
Pinkster days, the German belsnickel wassails imported to Mobile by a
Pennsylvania Dutch cotton broker, and callithumpian bands--soot-faced
working-class youths who would roam the streets of Philadelphia, New
York, and Boston around New Year's, banging drums and anything else
that would make a noise until they were bought off with food and
drink.
Cockrell downplays the racial significance of preminstrel
blackface. Well before Rabelais, he tells us, black makeup was a way
of announcing disguise and signifying Otherness, and it retained those
meanings even when its overt content became racial, which onstage has
been dated to 1769. He seeks out black Lord of Misrule action, and
finds evidence of its influence on whites (and vice versa). But with
the separate-but-equal exception of the New Orleans carnival, the
actors in (as opposed to spectators at) black festivals were all
black, while charivari and such excluded blacks--the belsnickels were
all white, as were the callithumpians, who picked fights with black
freemen as well as the ruling-class whites they were out to harass. In
contrast, the Manhattan of early minstrelsy (and early Jacksonian
democracy) was a hotbed of miscegenation. According to health records
Lhamon unearths, the Five Points environs of Catherine Street Market
were 25 percent black, with intermarriage common, and many other
blacks visited the market as workers, servants, slaves, vendors,
and/or, in a few cases, entertainers; Cockrell quotes heartrending
court records in which cross-racial couples of the lower classes were
separated by the state's Amalagamation Law.
Lhamon also connects Manhattan to George Christy's Buffalo via the
Erie Canal, in whose construction he discerns a "mudsill
mutuality" of black and white workers--slave, indentured,
contracted, or just deeply oppressed--who constitute a key element of
the lumpenproletariat Marx would conceive so contemptuously in The
18th Brumaire, long after the rationalization of blackface on the
burgeoning minstrel circuit was getting this ruffian ragtag under
control. What did Jim Crow's syncope signify? Among other things,
Lhamon says, stoop labor--not the upright autonomy of Sean Wilentz's
artisans, but the forced contortions of Lionel Wyld's "hoggees": "The
whole stooped posture of the hoggee, permanently bent by the shovel
and the barrow, and still evident in laborers today, is caught in Jim
Crow's gimp."
We can't know how deeply romanticism and wishful projection distort
Lhamon's and Cockrell's histories any more than we can know who really
wrote "Jim Crow." Cockrell himself is careful to stress the
coexistence of integration and racism. Mahar, who shares the
middle-class positivism associated with the Institute of Popular
Culture Studies at Bowling Green (he notes with a straight face the
lack of "gentlemanly refinement or common decency" in minstrel
scripts) but whose main agenda is downplaying
minstrelsy's racism, assumes its patrons disliked blacks and the rich
"equally" and is more troubled by their offenses against
women. This is wrongheaded. Nonetheless, when Lhamon observes that the
"racism and vulgarity" of wealthier whites was even more pernicious,
"if only because these people had far greater power to elaborate their
inclinations," his argument resonates. Which racism does more
harm today, after all? The working-class racism of exacerbated
competition for limited resources--a competition that according to
Raising Cain grows directly out of the bourgeois response to
early minstrelsy's cross-racial threat? Or is the big hurt the
ruling-class racism that still denies so many African-Americans jobs,
education, housing, health care, and anything else they need?
Both Lhamon and Cockrell, moreover, take their celebration of
minstrelsy's white audience a step further--they extend it to
minstrelsy's white artists. Nathan's Dan Emmett book excepted, earlier
minstrelsy studies can lull the most alert reader into the retrograde
condescension of classic mass culture theory, in which individual
producers are assumed to be hacks, schemers, cogs in a machine--and
which traces back to the same class-bound notions of respectability
discernible in Douglass's talented-tenth talk of "the filthy scum of
white society." Lott is especially prone to this fallacy, which
dovetails with cultural studies' emphasis on the social and consequent
reluctance to valorize the art hero. So much else is at stake that
it's easy to forget that every minstrel song and skit was created by
men whose need for display and self-expression drew them to the
theatre, which isn't many people's idea of a rational career
choice. Not only does Lhamon's work on Rice's plays counteract such
lazy thinking--so does Cockrell's long biographical sketch of George
Washington Dixon. Both make a special point of the artists' creative
personal connection to the new urban culture of rootless, single young
men who have been a prime pop market ever since.
The Dixon Cockrell describes was "one of the most complex,
eccentric, and enigmatic men ever to have crossed the American musical
stage": a skilled singer and proven songwriter, a scandal-sheet
proprietor who was in jail occasionally and in court often, a
hypnotist and clairvoyant and distance walker, a sometime proponent of
labor abolitionism who wasn't above using music "to remold himself
into an idol of the white middle class." Before he last
performed in early 1843, just when the Virginia Minstrels were
creating their sensation, his Ethiopian delineations had inspired
many, most prominently Rice himself. In Raising Cain, Lhamon
asserts the enduring literary value of Rice's raucous lumpen
burlesques, particularly Bone Squash Diavolo, which the ship
rigger's son who jumped Jim Crow first mounted in 1835. Jump Jim
Crow pursues the argument by exhuming prompt manuscripts of nine
plays written by or for Rice (four of each, with a ninth in doubt).
Rice was obviously no Melville or Dickinson, no Whitman or Twain, no
Douglass, and Lhamon avoids grand claims. But Jump Jim Crow
opens the possibility that a blackface minstrel may yet be remembered
as the most original 19th-century playwright of a nation whose first
major dramatist was Eugene O'Neill. That would be a good joke.
Tickled though the pop advocate in me is by any transformation of
hack into auteur, this one weakens a pet theory of mine. So do Mahar's
dogged readings of the printed record, which establish that both
cornball comedy and skirmishes in an undeclared class war are as
endemic to minstrel wordplay as racist stereotypes. The theory is that
logocentrism does the story of minstrelsy even less justice than it
does most history--that we must somehow make the imaginative leap from
the published scripts and songs to performed music, dance, and
slapstick, but especially music, which constituted two-thirds of most
playbills. Because African-derived usages are barely hinted by
notation, minstrel music is even further beyond our ken than the rest
of pre-gramophone pop. And few historians of minstrelsy are inclined
to help much--Toll, Lott, Cockrell, and Lhamon are word men all,
explicators of culture and ideology without much to say about how
minstrel music altered the surrounding soundscape.
A welcome corrective is David Wondrich's groundbreaking new
Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924, which puts
minstrelsy first in an argument that the special heat of US music (as
opposed in particular to the Afro-Latin musics further south) derives
from its fusion of Celtic stomp and African swerve--a perfect account
of "Jump Jim Crow." After the appropriate apologies, however, Wondrich
relies on Nathan for descriptive detail. The dance focus of Raising
Cain adds something new, and in Jump Jim Crow Lhamon
unveils a revealing Irish description of Rice's hit: "The song from
which he derives his name and celebrity is paltry and vulgar--the air
brief and pretty; but it has a feature that belongs to few songs--it
is mostly made up of dancing. Half of each verse is chorus, and then
all the chorus motion--so that it is of compound and really complex
character." Lott's abstruse discussion of European versus African
canons of repetition also bears pondering. In minstrel songs, he says,
poetic refrain meets catch-phrase beat, ego reinforcement meets ego
loss, plaisir meets jouissance, and then everyone
changes partners, so complexly that even the talent and vision of
individual creators may inflect how particular interactions play out
and what they mean.
There's more meat in Mahar, who teaches music at Penn State
Harrisburg. Mahar interlards many useful points through his lengthy
demonstrations that--gloriosky!--sexist stereotypes pervaded a
theatrical form directed at young, unmarried, working-class urban
males. Although most of these were known or inferred--and despite
Mahar's deep reluctance to attribute distinction to Africa's rhythmic
heritage or, for that matter, chattel slavery's economic one--it's
still good to have them substantiated. He rides the sheet music hard,
never once addressing the great unnotatables grain and groove and
barely mentioning tempo. But he is aware of the "vocal inflections or
gestures" sheet music misses. In explicit contradistinction to
Charles Hamm, he believes (correctly, the evidence suggests) that
certain minstrels--he names Joel Sweeney, Dan Emmett, and Cool
White--learned a lot from black musicians, distinguishing sharply
between Emmett's "limited melodic compass, modal pitch structure when
performed with the banjo-fiddle instrumentation, and frequent
interruption of the vocal line by instrumental breaks" and the
ornately quasiclassical British product of the time. And he
points out that the structure in which a single singer was accompanied
by a single instrumentalist whose brief interludes accompanied dancing
was "unique to blackface entertainment and the slave behavior on which
it may have been based." Indeed, scandalized tales of young
whites dancing to such slave behavior go back to the 1690s.
Nevertheless, our most searching investigation of minstrel music
remains a few late-'70s and early-'80s articles by banjo-playing
ethnomusicologist Robert B. Winans, the most important of which,
"Early Minstrel-Show Music, 1843-1852," is collected in Inside the
Minstrel Mask. To my knowledge, Winans was first to suggest the
debt owed minstrelsy by white-identified styles like bluegrass and its
predecessors. But Winans resists equating minstrel music with the
old-timey string bands recorded in the 1920s. For one thing, he points
out, the instruments were different. The drumlike minstrel tambourine
made a much louder and deeper sound than the flapjack-sized versions
we know today, and the bones were far less delicate than the castanets
that are their closest modern equivalent. Crucially, the banjo was
bigger and deeper too, and not yet played in the chordal, "classical"
style developed to accommodate the rise of the guitar in the late 19th
century. Instead it was "frailed," struck rather than plucked, with a
rhythmic emphasis that can be traced back to Africa and forward to
Appalachia, where Winans believes the new beat was transported (along
with many pop songs) by both traveling minstrel shows and prodigal
sons who brought their city lore on home (to which Robert Cantwell
would add local blacks, since no part of the South was totally
white). Like Mahar, Winans--who has criticized Lott's habit of
extrapolating theory from isolated songs of minimal currency in
actually performed minstrelsy--cares about what songs were popular.
Surviving programs reveal that at the dawn of minstrelsy proper,
between 1843 and 1847, comic songs greatly predominate, only to recede
between 1848 and 1852, when the standard-issue heart-tuggers of
19th-century pop reasserted themselves, with operatic parody
accounting for much of the new comic material and nonsense songs like
"Old Dan Tucker" and the passe "Jump Jim Crow" a vanishing fad.
Imagine an America in which stage singing was accompanied, if at
all, by piano (the English-born songwriter Henry Russell), chamber
trio (the protest-singing, abolitionist Hutchinson Family, a favorite
blackface butt), or small opera orchestra (the run of matinee
idols). Tempos and sonics suit a restless but slow-moving world in
which machines are rarely heard. In the 1830s there appear performers
like Rice and Dixon, Joel Sweeney and Dan Emmett--sometimes solo,
sometimes along with or in front of traditional orchestras. Cutting
impolite lyrics with fancy steps, showing off on the fiddle or banjo,
all are perceived as a welcome affront to the prevailing gentility by
an emergent audience of rowdy young men with a few coins to throw
away. But they don't break out until Emmett constructs a laff-a-minute
show around a bunch of them, at which point they change everything. As
Winans sums up: "they were new and different, earthy and `exotic' at
the same time, and comic and antisentimental." Toll's tribute to the Virginia Minstrels fleshes out this
basic and too easily lost point: "Once on stage, they could not sit
still for an instant. . . . Whether singing, dancing, or joking,
whether in a featured role, accompanying a comrade, or just listening,
their wild hollering and their bobbing, seemingly compulsive movements
charged their entire performance with excitement. . . . From beginning
to end, their shows provided an emotional outlet. Most of all, the
performers seemed to have fun and succeeded in involving the
foot-stomping, shouting, whistling audiences in the festivities."
Rhythmic and angular where the genteel competition was harmonic and
mellifluous, hyperactive and uproarious in rhetoric and principle,
minstrel music was only one part of the class drama postmodern
minstrelsy studies can't get enough of. But it was the most momentous
part, and the most honorable. The democratization of culture
identified with the minstrel show would have happened sooner or
later--P.T. Barnum didn't need minstrelsy, and neither did Hollywood
(which did, however, make the most of it). But though minstrel music
may have been inevitable too, putting it together required something
like genius. "Jump Jim Crow" and the thousands of songs that followed
established an African tendency in American pop that has waxed and
waned and waxed some more ever since, with worldwide
repercussions. It's hard to grasp this music's reality, as in Winans's
underwhelming attempt to re-create it on an album called The Early
Minstrel Show--the ensemble precision recalls the neat simulacra
of jazz repertory, and you can hear the singers wince whenever they
pronounce the word "nigger." But for all we can really know, Winans's
band of ethnomusicologists on a spree may have every inflection just
right. It's impossible to be sure from this side of the divide that
minstrel music opened up--impossible to adjust our ears back to before
blue notes, gospel melismas, ragtime, bebop, railroad trains,
gramophone records, saxophones, electric guitars, Chick Webb, James
Brown, punk, hip hop, the sandpaper musicality of uncounted rough
baritones, and the omnipresence of more noise than can be comprehended
by a Monday morning or a Saturday night.
What we can know is this: the rise of minstrelsy in the 1840s (or
maybe, following Lhamon, we should say the 1830s and 1840s,
privileging neither) constituted a cultural upheaval remarkably
similar to the rise of rock and roll in the 1950s. Right--minstrel
music was only a part of the minstrel show, which proved the
foundation of the entire American entertainment industry. Right--rock
and roll was only one in a series of modern musical mongrelizations,
from coon song to jazz age to swing era. Nevertheless, both were
benchmarks. Minstrelsy transformed blackface from a theatrical to a
musical trope. It established that in a Euro-America obsessed with
African retentions (the violence of the blood, the puissance of the
penis, the docility of the grin), music was the star attraction,
especially for the young riffraff who gave American cities their
bustle. Like minstrelsy, rock and roll posed not just a racial danger,
but a class danger. Although it arted itself up soon enough, a good
thing as often as a bad one, it delivered pop music from status
anxieties and polite facades. It made a role model of the unkempt
rebel. And by finding simple tunes in the three-chord storehouse of
folk modality, it cleared a space for unencumbered beat. Got it? Now
ask yourself how much of the rock and roll description can be applied
to minstrelsy and vice versa. Most of each for sure.
This is one reason minstrelsy's various historicizations are
fascinating, and amusing, for anyone who has read many histories of
rock and roll. The patterning is so similar, with specifics that go
well beyond cultural reminiscence's usual golden-ageism. In both we
find parallel visions of unspoiled, unpretentious white youth
transcending racism in simple musical expressions soon bedizened by
crass impresarios and under assistant promo men. Rock and roll has
generated many golden ages--the halcyon '60s, punk in its CBGB and/or
Sex Pistols clothes, and "real hip hop," to name just three. But
absent romanticizations of sweet Stax music, only its original '50s
version has the proper cross-racial charge, which always seems to
fade. Nor is this, initially, a scholarly construction: Nick Tosches's
2001 biography of 20th-century minstrel Emmett Miller, Where Dead
Voices Gather, unearths the wondrous 1854 headline "Obituary, Not
Eulogistic: Negro Minstrelsy Is Dead" and tells how in 1858
George Christy's Ethiopian Joke Book, No. 3 "bemoan[ed] the
departures from genuine negrisimilitude that had begun to degrade
minstrelsy." By 1930, when Duke published Tambo and
Bones, Carl Wittke's regrets over the increasing paucity of
"genuine Negro characterizations" were standard among the few
who still gave thought to minstrelsy--which Tosches shows survived as
a residual entertainment, especially in the South, well past its
presumed death at the turn of the century and in fact past World War
II.
Where Dead Voices Gather is typical Tosches cup-half-empty:
killer prose and genius archive-digging stunk up with dull contempt
for academics more soulful than he is and the racial philosophy of Joe
Colombo. But give it credit for insisting, early and often, that no
concept is as corrupt as purity: "Blackface, white face, false
face. 'Originality is but high-born stealth.' These may be the only
words written by Edward Dahlberg that are worth remembering; and who
knows where he got them." Originality, purity, their toney cousin
authenticity--as rhetorical tools, all are made to order for a
conservative agenda. If, as Charles Hamm says, the Jim Crow legend
meant "to give authenticity to a white man's portrayal of a black,"
was the intention to fend off objections from Afro-American
intellectuals? Of course not. As Lhamon argues, powerful Americans
feared the race-defying underclass impulses minstrelsy's aesthetic
made manifest. Whether those impulses were genuinely African-American
matters less than that they scared gatekeepers, who often responded
with the belittling claim, a shrewd fusion of cooptation and
condemnation, that they were inauthentic--and still do, sometimes.
In Jump Jim Crow, Lhamon shows how supposedly sympathetic
middle-class observers attacked Rice's credibility with invidious
comparisons--to "the veritable James" discovered by actress-diarist
Fanny Kemble among the slaves on her husband's Georgia sea islands
plantation, or to black New Orleans songster and acknowledged Rice
influence Old Corn Meal. Inevitably, incongruent details were
ignored. How veritable did Kemble find her black servants when she
censured their "transparent plagiarism" of "Scotch or Irish airs"?
Was Old Corn Meal still the real thing when he performed Rice's "Sich
a Gittin' Up Stairs"? Certainly some impresario could have
made a few bucks putting Old Corn Meal on tour, as soon happened with
freeborn black tap pioneer William Henry "Juba" Lane, the toast of
London in the 1840s who died there broke before he reached 30. As with
millions of other racist injustices, that it didn't happen is a
disgrace--it should have happened a hundred times over. But it's also
racist to assume that, if it had happened a hundred times over, the
flood of pure African-American art would have been the undoing of
Daddy Rice and all his kind. Somewhere in that cross-racial nexus
lurked a uniquely American sensibility whose decisive attraction was
that it was no respecter of propriety. And though it proved far less
dangerous than the powers feared, they fear it still.
It's misguided to overload this sensibility with political meaning,
or declare it irrelevant after that potential plays itself
out. Inconsequentiality was one of its attractions. The signal term is
an elusive one: "fun," which starts picking up O.E.D. citations
just as minstrelsy gets going in the 1830s. The Christy Minstrels
invited audiences "to see the fun, to hear the songs, and help to
right the `niggers'' wrongs"; circus press agent Charles
H. Day published an 1874 history of minstrelsy called Fun in
Black. By Emmett Miller's time, the trades and
dailies were using "fun-makers" and "the fun contingent" as ready
synonyms for blackface performers. Struck by "the
regularity with which observers resorted to the word `fun' to describe
their enjoyment of blacks and of blackface," Lott calls a whole
chapter "`Genuine Negro Fun'"--and turns out to care at least as much
about the "Fun" part, which is hard to parse, as the "Genuine Negro"
part, too patent to merit unpacking.
To his credit, Lott emphasizes that what he takes for minstrelsy's
attempts to "tame the `black' threat" always risk leaving
something untoward in the woodpile. But it should go without saying
that he executes his analysis from on high. All this fun, he is
certain, has the function of mitigating a "roiling jumble of need,
guilt, and disgust." The less said the better about his Freudian
readings of blackface usage--although I'm certain he overdoes them,
I'm probably too skeptical. Let me merely cite his tendency to assume
the worst about the minstrel audience of the 1840s, when he believes
working-class consciousness, disemboldened by the Panic of 1837, was
fleeing politics at every turn and with no exception. Of more moment
is his disapproval of the Christy-style minstrel show's presumably
parallel flight into spectacle from narrative, meaning plays like
Rice's. And crucial is his search for the meaning of fun in jokes,
costumes, and business, ignoring the music that was foregrounded
during precisely the same period. We've been here before, but let's
ratchet up our objections by emphasizing that--where Rice, for
instance, worked solo-with-backup--the Virginia Minstrels and their
progeny were bands. Rock and rollers know the difference, which
is usually fun in a way that barely suggests race or class while
saying much that's otherwise inexpressible about human
interaction.
And now for Freud. At a crucial juncture, Lott cites the patriarch
himself, unmasking fun as "lost moments of childish pleasure evoked by
the antics of children, or of 'inferior' people who resemble
them": "constant repetition," "supreme disorderly
conduct," "oversized clothes," "performative irruption," "the gorging
and mucus-mongering of early life." Perhaps
Lott would be less discomfited by this structure of feeling if he
tried harder to distinguish between children and infants, but either
way it can be explicated sans Freud. The idealization of childhood is
a well-known tenet of romanticism and hence our era, throughout which
it has been disparaged to no avail by pundits and cynics of every
stripe. And admittedly, returning to childhood is a lousy way to pass
laws or get the laundry done, a journey that's always doomed in the
end. But in a system where the same can be said of many other things
worth doing in themselves, an idealized youth is it's a hell of a good
place for low-level ungovernables with dirty drawers to spend Saturday
night, a site of worldly transcendence in which egoisms needn't always
get in the way of other egoisms. It's a satisfaction, a recourse, damn
right an escape--a feat of imagination. We should be grateful that it
no longer involves big-lipped buffoons with their feets too big. But
we should be proud that it's been a special destination of American
popular music since more or less the time of "Jump Jim Crow."
Jump Jim Crow's collected narratives are unlikely to leave
Rice our first important playwright. Literary arbiters are literary
arbiters, after all, and anyway, the plays aren't good enough. Not
only are several by English actors with ties to drawing-room farce
who'd rather Jim were a prince from the Congo than a ne'er-do-well
from the Five Points, but only two of Rice's much impress. The stunner
is Bone Squash, a dizzying one-act "burletta" full of nonsense,
deviltry, and love sweet love that ends with the Jim figure ascending
heavenward in a balloon--an image of orgasm, Lhamon ventures, far more
convincingly than Lott finding phallic symbols whenever he turns over
a lithograph. Yet equally remarkable is Rice's burlesque of
Otello, first mounted in 1844, perhaps as a rebuke to the
mobility after the Christys bigged up his act. Lhamon relates much
worth reading about Othello in pre-Civil War culture, with two of
Rice's strokes crying out for special mention. First, Othello and
Desdemona have a baby--not one of the high yallers blackface poked
fearful fun at, but a chiaroscuro pied piper in potentia, his face
half black and half white. Before too long, you just know, he'll be
strumming on the old banjo. Second, Othello isn't reassuringly
tragic. He doesn't die. At the end of the play he and his issue are
triumphantly alive.
But rather than exit on that encouraging note, let me cite another
idea Lhamon lets slip. Unlike the transparently racist construction
Sambo, Lhamon argues proudly, Jim Crow is not docile: "his lyrics show
him fighting `white dandies,' Jersey blacks, and Philadelphia Sambos."
Lhamon goes on: "This transgressive power of Jim Crow is what the
political regime of Jim Crow laws in the South projected on all
African Americans, of every class, and then used to contain them as a
category after the North's betrayal of Reconstruction."
What he doesn't add is this: To hell with art. To hell with
Saturday night. Why shouldn't African Americans hate Jim Crow?
This is a damning indictment. If "Jump Jim Crow" lay behind the
machinery of state-mandated racial segregation, what can mitigate
that? But if segregation was inevitable anyway, then perhaps its
naming only represents a setback for a people's culture we must
struggle to reclaim. So permit me one final story.
Abraham Lincoln loved a joke, loved music, and loved minstrel
music. He was an instant fan of the infernally catchy "Dixie,"
composed by Dan Emmett in 1859--though it has also been attributed to
the black Snowden family, sometime professional musicians from Ohio
who shared music with Emmett--and soon expropriated as the Confederate
anthem. Right after Appomattox, Lincoln asked an attendant band to
strike up "one of the best tunes I ever heard." "Dixie" was our
"lawful property" now, he joshed. Would it were that simple.
By then Lincoln's musical tastes had gotten him in trouble. Two
weeks after the battle of Antietam--23,000 dead and wounded on
September 17, 1862, the bloodiest day in American history--Lincoln met
nearby with General George McClellan, soon to be relieved of his
command for excessive caution. In the president's party was his former
law partner Ward Lamon, who served as a bodyguard and wielded a mean
hand on the banjo. Dispirited by the shadow of death and his distrust
of McClellan, Lincoln asked Lamon for a lost weeper by one W. Willing
called "Twenty Years Ago," but that just made him bluer. So Lamon
tried the cheerful minstrel standard "Picayune Butler," named for a
black New Orleans colleague of Old Corn Meal. When Lincoln remained
despondent, Lamon gave up. At no point did McClellan object.
Within months the story was out in the opposition press. Lincoln,
always archly characterized as a clown or jester, had insulted the
dead of Antietam "before the corpses had been buried" by calling for
"a negro melody"--identified first as "Jim Along Josey," then
"Picayune Butler," and eventually, what else, "Jump Jim Crow." During
the 1864 campaign, with McClellan his opponent, the lies and
vilification intensified. Always at issue was the crass, low, common,
unserious vulgarity that disqualified this smutmonger turned
abolitionist from pursuing the peace as sixteenth magistrate of the
United States. Always the proof was not just his insensitive choice of
occasion, but his attraction to what was always called a "negro"
song--not "nigger," thank you very much, but never "minstrel"
either. This at a time when the
blackface brethren of the Northern stage were pumping McClellan for
all they were worth, which by then, Lhamon and the others have it
right, wasn't much--not culturally, anyway.
We may feel that Lincoln was also too cautious--that he should have
freed the slaves sooner, that as with almost every white American of
the 19th century, his racial attitudes were lamentable. We may also
feel that minstrel music did the freed slaves more harm than good. But
this incident suggests a kinder interpretation. Full-bore racists of
the gatekeeping classes didn't care how authentic "Picayune Butler"
was. It was close enough to colored to alarm them just because it
evoked a world in which bastard spawn like Abraham Lincoln could get
past the gatekeepers. Not only that, some voters thought such songs
fun, and fun worth pursuing. That alarmed them too. Daddy Rice and Dan
Emmett must have been doing something right.
The Believer, Feb. 2004
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