Two
Minstrelsy, and The War Between the
States
Americans of African descent began making
their mark very early in the nation’s cultural history. There was a
black playhouse in New York City in the 1820s: the African Grove Theatre
presented its own versions of hit shows, such as Pierce Egan’s Tom
and Jerry, or Life In London (1823), establishing the comic convention
of the city slicker and his visiting country cousin. The Drama of
King Shotaway was probably the first play by a black playwright
to be mounted. in America. The theatre’s director, Henry Brown, may
have based the drama of a slave insurrection in the island of St Vincent
on personal experience: he had emigrated from there.
The idea was to present entertainment
for blacks who wished to join the white mainstream of society, but audiences
of the time were unruly anyway, and white hoodlums liked to go to the
Grove to disrupt proceedings. The theatre also became a tourist attraction.
Its stars included James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge, both of whom toured
as far as England. Aldridge played Othello to Edmund Kean’s Iago; he
performed Shakespeare in Russia, and died in 1864 while on tour in Poland.
Regarded as one of the great actors of his day, he had also performed
the first American ‘slave song’ that we know of: ‘Opossum up a Gum Tree’.
Free blacks such as the bugle player
and bandleader Francis (Frank) Johnson, born in the West Indies, made
much history. Johnson was the first American black to publish music
(1818), to give formal band concerts, to tour the USA and to appear
in integrated concerts with white musicians. In 1824, when the French
General Lafayette toured the USA to wild acclaim, Johnson was engaged
for the Lafayette Ball in Philadelphia and played his ‘Lafayette March’,
which obtained its share of publicity. He seems to have been the first
American musician of any race to tour abroad, taking a band to London
in 1837, the year Victoria came to the throne; she gave him a silver
trumpet. On his return he introduced the promenade concert to the USA.
There were many other black bandleaders,
who were often popular with the upper classes for parties and dances,
and indeed talented black musicians in every category. Yet most of these
were pursuing success in the American musical world by playing the styles
and genres that were already popular in that world. Despite (or perhaps
because of) the severe handicap of slavery, it was the music of the
slaves that made the first of many profoundly important black contributions
to the American mainstream.
The tradition of ‘blacking up’ goes
back at least as far as Ben Jonson’s masque for James I’s Danish queen,
who expressed a desire to wear black make-up with a dazzling white costume.
Set-pieces requiring the performer to black up with burnt cork became
a staple in America: the New York Journal referred to a ‘Negro
dance, in character’ seen on stage in 1767. But the minstrel show suddenly
appeared in the 1840s, and was the first entirely American musical form
to become internationally popular.
Minstrelsy saw the introduction of patterns
still extant in American culture. First, minstrelsy was essentially
black music, while the most successful acts were white, so that songs
and dances of black origin were imitated by white performers and then
taken up by black performers, who thus to some extent ended up imitating
themselves. Secondly, more than a few people wondered how a nation could
be free which allowed the institution of slavery; but as the nation
became more wealthy, it also became more powerful. As the trauma of
the Revolutionary War receded, as the young nation won the War of 1812
against the British (but were soundly beaten by the Canadians when they
attempted to ‘liberate’ that country) and as the slaughter of the American
aboriginal tribes provided yet another manifestation of racism, Americans
established a pattern of resisting the loss of their innocence. The
affectionate, patronizing vision of plantation life conveyed by minstrelsy
was similar to the simplistic and idealized depiction of family life
in the television sitcoms of a hundred years later.
The phenomenon of black culture was
widely and often sympathetically discussed. Blacks sang the watered-down
songs of minstrelsy, as well as their own, and critics noticed the difference:
there was a flavour of sadness in their own songs that was absent from
the ‘Ethiopian’ songs that were all the rage. There is a famous quotation
from Knickerbocker Magazine (1845) on the subject of Negro poets:
Let one of them, in the swamps of
Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of
a white amateur, than it is written down, amended (that is, almost
spoilt), printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination,
to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps with
the world. Meanwhile, the poor author digs away with his hoe, utterly
ignorant of his greatness.
There were a few black minstrels, even
in the early years, especially in New Orleans, where Signor Cornmeali
(Mr Cornmeal, real name unknown) began as a street trader singing ‘Ethiopian’
songs, went on the stage and influenced white performers. William Henry
Lane, known as Master Juba, was probably the only black to tour with
early white companies; in England in 1849 he was praised by Charles
Dickens. He was born in Rhode Island, but began entertaining in New
York City, playing the banjo and the tambourine as well as dancing;
he had learned some of his jigs from his desperately poor Irish neighbours,
who lived on pennies they earned dancing in pubs, but then made them
his own. Both blacks and whites copied his dancing. He won a grand contest
(promoted by P. T. Barnum) in 1844, and historians of dance consider
him to be the virtual inventor of black dancing, including tap-dancing,
as we have known it ever since. He died in England; none of his fame
extended to allowing numbers of blacks to make a good living with their
own talent. The majority of minstrels were always white.
Much of minstrelsy’s material was copied
from the songs and dances of slavery and many minstrels visited plantations
in search of ideas. In 1829 Thomas Dartmouth ‘Daddy’ Rice struck it
rich with his ‘Jim Crow’ song and dance, copied from a crippled stable-hand
named Jim who worked for a white Crow family. He ‘jumped’ his ‘Jim Crow’
between the acts of whatever shows he could get billed on, but the jump
was mostly a shuffle, and the tune was borrowed from an Irish jig. ‘Jim
Crow’ later became the stock plantation slave, while ‘Zip Coon’, first
a song by George Washington Dixon, became the city dandy: the ‘Tom and
Jerry’ routine reduced to racist farce.
The earliest full-length minstrel shows
were organized by quartets. The Virginia Minstrels first met to rehearse
in a rooming house in New York early in 1843, during an economic depression
which resulted in one of the worst seasons in theatrical history. Daniel
Emmett Decatur was a printer who played banjo and fiddle, working with
a circus during the summer, and then began writing songs: ‘Old Dan Tucker’,
‘Turkey in the Straw’ (which used part of ‘Zip Coon’) and ‘I Wish I
Was in Dixie’s Land’, written for Bryant’s Minstrels in 1859, were all
his (but like many songwriters, he died poor). Billy Whitlock, also
a printer, had learned to play banjo from Jim Sweeney, a virtuoso who
is credited with adding the fifth ‘thumb’ string to the instrument.
Dick Pelham and Frank Brower were both dancers and singers; Brower also
played the bones, a set of 12-inch-long dried horse bones which were
clacked together to make a rhythm instrument. Brower became one of the
best vocalists in minstrelsy.
Black-face performers had been known
as ‘Ethiopian delineators’. The word ‘minstrel’ had applied to any professional
entertainer since the twelfth century in Europe, but the Virginia Minstrels,
who toured for only a few months before breaking up, tied the word for
ever to black-face. Immediately successful, they played at record-breaking
engagements in New York and Boston, and sailed for England in April.
The English already loved black-face entertainment; Sweeney was touring
Britain playing the banjo, and the Virginia Minstrels were a hit, but
box office receipts mysteriously evaporated, so they could not support
themselves and broke up.
The equally famous Christy Minstrels
were formed in 1844 by Edwin P. Christy, who wrote ‘Goodnight Ladies’
and other songs. Born in Philadelphia, he studied black rhythms in Congo
Square in New Orleans, where he was a factory foreman. First he toured
as one of many imitators of Daddy Rice; he formed a group in Buffalo,
New York, and borrowed the name of the Virginia Minstrels for a while,
but he always billed his group as the ‘oldest’ and the ‘first’. When
he was ready, he booked a theatre in New York in 1846, and developed
a family show which ran for over 2,700 performances; he also toured
England. He committed suicide by jumping out of a hotel window in New
York City, depressed by the outbreak of the Civil War.
The first minstrel companies made history
and permanently changed show business by inventing ‘black’ entertainment
for families, and by creating a show rather than just a series of comic
turns and dances. The shows were in three parts. For the songs and jokes
in the first part the performers stood in a semicircle; the comic endmen
‘Tambo’ and ‘Bones’ were distinguished by their tambourine and bone
clackers, with which they would register noisy approval of a joke. (This
was a signal that the audience too was supposed to laugh, a precursor
of canned laughter on radio and television.) An interlocutor or master
of ceremonies presided in the centre and represented the boss, so that
when Tambo or Bones made a joke at his expense, there was an extra dimension
to the glee. Another principal was a singer of sentimental ballads.
The similar but less formal second part was made up of a string of speciality
acts and novelties, called the olio. This term was already in use in
white show business and survived in later vaudeville; it is probably
from the Spanish olla, meaning ‘pot-pourri’. Last came a walk-around
finale, with dances, which became more and more of a spectacle.
The ‘Ethiopian’ dances (for example,
breakdowns, double-shuffles and heel-and-toe) and instrumentation (especially
the banjo) were more or less authentic, and profoundly influential.
The ancestors of the banjo are thought to have been the stringed instruments
of the Wolof, of what are now Senegal and Gambia in west Africa, and
may be as ancient as Mesopotamia. Minstrel banjo players included Sweeney,
Tom Briggs (who joined Christy’s Minstrels and published Briggs'
Banjo Instructor) and Frank Converse, who preserved the first piece
he had heard played by a black musician. All of them freely admitted
that they had learned from blacks, and the music they played included
accents and additive rhythms that came partly from the playing style
and were not obvious from the notation, like African drumming in the
past and ragtime in the future.
A later element in the show was the
cakewalk, in which members of the audience were invited to invent the
most ridiculous strutting march, for which the prize was a cake. Interestingly,
Master Juba reversed the procedure, in that some of his dances are said
to have resembled Irish jigs. But minstrelsy was laden with ironies:
the supposed ability of the blacks to invent outlandish dances (though
it was whites who were doing most of the dancing) turned the word ‘jig’
into an offensive euphemism.
As the spectacle in the last act became
more elaborate, playlets were mounted that included lampoons of current
events and spoofs of popular plays. In one version of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin Uncle Tom was not sold down the river, Simon Legree did not
appear and the author’s subtitle ‘Life among the Lowly’ became a song
called ‘Life among the Happy’.
Some of minstrelsy’s songs were sympathetic,
such as ‘The Negro Boy’ (‘I Sold a Guiltless Negro Boy’) and ‘A Negro
Song’ (or ‘The Negro’s Humanity’); the latter’s words were adapted from
an African song which had been transcribed by trader Mungo Park in the
eighteenth century. But in general the genre had little room for abolitionist
sentiment, and became more overtly racist after the Civil War: the image
of the ‘darky’ as a comic buffoon insulated whites from the reality
of free black Americans, and survived in films and television until
well into the 1950s. Minstrelsy’s jokes seem to have been among the
oldest in show business, some with double meanings: ‘Why am I like a
young widow?’ a white comedian in burnt cork would ask. ‘Because I do
not stay long in black.’
Many ‘Negro’ songs were published. One
of the best was ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’, about a ‘darky’ longing for
his girlfriend. First published in 1858, it became a Civil War campfire
song and remained popular for decades. But after the Civil War it was
no longer possible to pretend that everything was all right down on
the plantation. Charles A. White, whose minstrel songs were his most
famous, had a big hit in 1874 with ‘The Old Home Ain’t What It Used
To Be’, known to have been sung in the North by black minstrels.
The first successful black songwriter
in America was James Bland, whose father found a government job in Washington,
DC, just after the war, when the capital was full of ex-slaves. Bland’s
songs reflect the pentatonic scales of black folk music. His best known
are ‘Oh Dem Golden Slippers’ and ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny’ (and
he is still the only black to have written a State Song). Among his
more than seven hundred songs are celebrations of the end of slavery:
‘De Slavery Chains am Broke at Last’, ‘Keep Dem Golden Gates Wide Open’,
‘In the Morning by the Bright Light’. He went to England in 1880 with
the Haverly Colored Minstrels and organized his own troupe there; he
performed for the British royal family, and also became very popular
in Germany.
For decades minstrelsy was a staple
of white show business, a simple format for entertainment in the days
when all entertainment was necessarily live, and audiences may have
been easier to please. In Philadelphia, Carncross and Dixey’s Minstrels
enjoyed the unique feat of prospering for forty years as a permanent
organization in its own theatre. The interlocutor was J. L. Carncross,
whose light tenor voice was at its best in plaintive ballads, while
E. F. Dixey was the bone man, on the right-hand end of the semi-circle.
He played solos on his clackers - his big finale was an imitation of
a horse race - and he was also a singer. Hughey Dougherty, with the
tambourine at the other end, rasped and cackled his way through comic
songs, and had one of the biggest personal followings of anyone in minstrelsy.
In the same town, another famous Tambo
was Lew Simmons, who owned a baseball team. (There was little money
in sandlot baseball, so he sold it to Cornelius McGillicudy, who changed
his name to Connie Mack and made millions with the Philadelphia Athletics.)
Simmons was killed by a beer truck, which might have amused him; he
himself liked a drink, and was said to be able to see the humour in
almost any situation. Billy Sweatnum was the interlocutor and a man
named Slocum the bone end in Simmons and Slocum’s Minstrels. Charlie
Reynolds was a comic who could not sing or dance and was in fact tone-deaf;
he would bring down the house by making a shambles of his own act. Jimmy
Mackin and Francis Wilson were a touring song and dance team who had
a ‘rivals’ act, both after the same girl. Wilson helped found Actor’s
Equity in 1919.
During the long decline of minstrelsy,
as with the decline of many genres, it slowly exploded into the grandiose:
some of the troupes had more than a hundred members. Female impersonations
and ever fancier spectacles were included in the shows; among the stock
characters were uppity blacks and northern carpet-baggers. Soon minstrelsy
and ragtime combined in the ‘coon songs’ and ‘coon shouting’ of early
vaudeville, and by the early 1880s a minstrel show was becoming effectively
a black-face variety show. Lew Dockstader’s Minstrels still performed,
and George M. Cohan was a partner in a minstrel show, as late as 1908.
A white blacked-up minstrel show was popular on British television until
well into the 1960s.
To add to all the ironies, black as
well as white performers were required to ‘black up’. Minstrel shows
were popular among ordinary blacks, though conditions were terrible
for black performers and a full-time first-class black rninstrel troupe,
Brooker and Clayton’s Georgia Minstrels, was not organized until 1865.
Furthermore, the black companies that were formed were mostly owned
and managed by white businessmen. But minstrelsy established a demand
for black performers, and the origins of black as well as white vaudeville
are to be found in it.
We may see black-face minstrelsy as
racist nowadays, but America’s insistence on its innocence has often
been convincing, at least in cultural terms. Of the songs to come out
of minstrelsy, those of Stephen Foster survived the crude crucible of
racist comedy and made him easily the most successful nineteenth-century
composer of popular songs.
Stephen Collins Foster was born in Pittsburgh
on the Fourth of July in 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing
of the Declaration of Independence. He managed to die an alcoholic and
in poverty in 1864, having sold the rights to some of his most popular
songs, but he was one of the first American songwriters to sign contracts
for royalties and to support himself as a full-time songwriter (others
were also publishers, performers or teachers). Above all, he was the
first indubitably American composer whose songs are still sung more
than a century after his death.
Foster was of Irish descent, and was
steeped in music from childhood. He was educated in good private schools
and then worked in his brother’s mercantile business, but he never strayed
far from music. His first published song was ‘Open Thy Lattice, Love’
(1844); his early songs were simple, romantic and mediocre, based on
the models of Arne and the later example of Bishop, whose songs (except
for ‘Home, Sweet Home’) were already being forgotten.
Foster must have been familiar with
slave music from childhood, but it was not until around 1845, through
singing and playing them with friends, that he wrote some minstrel songs.
‘Lou’siana Belle’ was published in 1847, ‘Away Down South’, ‘Uncle Ned’
and ‘Oh! Susanna’ in 1848. The last especially was sung by minstrel
companies all over the country, and became a favourite during the California
gold rush, but Foster had sold it outright; only in 1849 did he sign
contracts with two publishers and become a full-time songwriter. Eight
more minstrel songs were published in 1850, including ‘Gwine to Run
All Night’ (also known as ‘Camptown Racetrack’); fifteen more in 1852
show him at his peak, among them ‘Old Folks At Home’ (or ‘Way Down Upon
the Swanee River’), ‘My Old Kentucky Home’, ‘Massa’s in the Cold Ground’
and ‘Old Dog Tray’.
He wrote a few more minstrel songs,
and other fine period songs based on Italian, German and Irish models.
His most famous later songs are ‘Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair’ (1854),
which could not have been written without the influence of Thomas Moore,
yet is immediately and convincingly Foster, and ‘Beautiful Dreamer’,
which has a fine Italianate melody and was written in the last months
of his life. He had a streak of melancholy, and his songs are often
nostalgic for a remembered past that is happier than the flawed present.
But the minstrel songs written around 1850 made him famous.
It is not true, as nineteenth-century
biographers claimed, that Foster had visited ‘negro camp meetings’ or
that he imitated ‘the melodic forms and tonal characteristics of the
songs of the colored slaves’. He did not need to steal his material,
having a natural sympathy for it, and his best songs can stand on their
own considerable merits. The melodies have proved to be deathless. More
interestingly, every one of the minstrel songs has a chorus, to be sung
in three- and four-part harmony, making them more complete and satisfying
compositions, while none of his earlier songs have choruses at all.
‘Oh! Susanna’ is simply a delightful nonsense song, and is not obviously
a ‘Plantation Melody’, as some of the later songs were called. Although
many of these were written in dialect, which was later rejected for
reasons of taste, they were a considerable advance on the songs of the
period.
Nostalgia for a half-remembered past
was not just a propensity of Foster’s, but the most popular sentiment
of the time; homesickness is another familiar emotion. ‘Massa’s in the
Cold Ground’ may seem to be a clear attempt to sentimentalize slavery,
but many slaves must have loved their masters, on whom they depended
for everything. ‘Uncle Ned’ emerges through the dialect as a kindly
human being who was loved; in ‘Nelly Was a Lady’ (1850) the black man
mourns the death of his own wife. The slaves experience, in all these
songs, ordinary human feelings; they are people as real as the characters
in Shakespeare. And because they were good songs, they must have had
a consciousness-raising effect, intended or not.
Slavery made a mockery of the Declaration
of Independence, and the issue came to centre on the right of individual
states to practise slavery as opposed to the right of the federal government
to contain it. Finally it had to be settled. Before 1860 the typical
American popular song was a sentimental ballad, expressing the virtues
of homeliness, fidelity and so forth. This type of song made a big comeback
in the 1880s, but in the meantime, the Civil War of 1861-5, or the War
between the States, brought about the end of the nation’s adolescence,
and should have ended its innocence. Americans were not - could not
be - as free as they thought they were; questions sometimes arise which
have to be resolved. So it was with the contradiction of states’ rights
versus federalism in the USA. Brother fought brother in one of the bloodiest
wars in history; more than 630,000 died, more Americans than were killed
in all other wars from the French and Indian to the Korean.
The Civil War produced a greater number
of songs than any other war in American history. Many soldiers carried
songbooks; one early book contained songs that were already popular,
such as Foster’s songs, ‘Yankee Doodle’, ‘Annie Laurie’ (from Moore’s
collection) and ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ (a traditional English tune with
words from 1858 about a London hatter pawning, or ‘popping’, his weasel,
the tool of his trade). Both sides sang many of the same songs, since
both included semi-literate recruits from the same tradition. On the
evening before the Battle of Murfreesboro rival army bands, camped within
earshot, took turns playing their patriotic songs, then joined together
to play ‘Home, Sweet Home’. The next day they slaughtered each other.
A camp-meeting song called ‘Brother,
Will You Meet Us?’, to a tune believed to be by William Steffe of North
Carolina, had new words bestowed on it by soldiers who sang it as they
marched to the front in 1861: ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in
the grave / but his soul goes marching on’ honoured a radical who had
been hanged in 1859 after an unsuccessful raid on the government arsenal
at Harper’s Ferry, intended to arm a slave revolt. Julia Ward Howe heard
it and wrote new words: ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming
of the Lord / And His truth goes marching on ...’ ‘The Battle Hymn of
the Republic’, published in 1862, is as well known to Americans as their
national anthem. ‘Tenting on the Old Camp Ground’, by Walter Kittredge,
was almost as popular.
Songs by George Frederick Root included
‘Battle Cry of Freedom’; it was later said of Root that he ought to
have been made a general. John Hill Hewitt wrote new patriotic words
to his own big hit ‘The Minstrel’s Return’d from the War’. Among his
many other songs were ‘The Picket Guard’, a setting of a poem that had
been published in Harper’s Weekly and told of the night a picket
had been shot; since he was only an enlisted man, the official report
was ‘All quiet along the Potomac tonight’. James Sloane Gibbons wrote
a poem called ‘We are Coming, Father Abra’am’ in response to Lincoln’s
call for volunteers. This was set to music by Luther O. Emerson and
was a great commercial success, but more people sang it than volunteered:
Lincoln resorted to the nation’s first conscription in 1863, and riots
ensued in many cities.
Dan Emmett’s ‘Dixie’ was first sung
in the South in 1860, and became wildly popular, with somewhat more
bellicose words than the original; one southern commentator wrote that
‘we shall be fortunate if it does not impose its very name on our country’.
There was a legend of a kindly slave-owner called Dixey, and Dixey’s
Land was heaven for a slave; surveyors named Mason and Dixon had settled
a boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and the ‘Mason-Dixon
line’ thus separated the slave states from the North. But there had
also been a ten-dollar note printed by a New Orleans bank with the word
‘dix’ on it - French for ‘ten’ - which may have been the origin of Dixie-land.
The South’s favourite songs included
‘Aura Lee or The Maid with the Golden Hair’, by W. W. Fosdick and George
R. Poulton, which later became (with different words) ‘Army Blue’, a
traditional West Point song. ‘Maryland! My Maryland!’ had words by James
Ryder Randall and was sung to the tune of the German ‘O Tannenbaum,
O Tannenbaum’; it was to become a favourite of dixieland jazz bands.
The Confederacy’s unofficial national anthem was ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’,
written by Harry B. Macarthy to a traditional tune, ‘The Irish Jaunting
Car’. Macarthy was an Englishman who left the South when the tide of
battle turned.
Many tunes were borrowed more than once.
‘Bonnie Blue Flag’ was used by Septimus Winner for the satirical ‘He’s
Gone to the Arms of Abraham’, while the Irish tune ‘The Wearing of the
Green’ was used for another setting of the poem ‘We are Coming, Father
Abra’am’, and also for ‘Wearing of the Gray!’ in the South. ‘Lorena’,
a song about parted lovers that was written by brothers called Webster
and first published in 1857 in Chicago, was a huge hit in the South.
As the slaughter dragged on with no end in sight, southern songs became
ever more sentimental and tragic. Music published in the South used
cheap inks and poor paper; the weak industrial base that defeated the
South encompassed publishing and paper-making.
In the end the federal republic survived,
at the expense of a purer political freedom which, paradoxically, had
meant enslavement for many: of nearly 4.5 million Americans of African
descent in 1860, fewer than half a million had been free. The great
southern families with their enormous plantations were the closest thing
America had to an aristocracy, and the War between the States destroyed
their way of life. Some said that the Civil War was an unnecessary tragedy,
because slavery was becoming an economic anachronism and could not have
survived much longer anyway, but that notion has been refuted by today’s
economists. Not only was slavery profitable, but it was cheap labour
that had made the comfort of the southern aristocracy possible. That
aristocracy would never have given up its primacy easily, and the aftermath
of the war was very badly handled. Americans had slaughtered each other
to get rid of slavery, but clung to their innocence; they did not want
to admit that slavery had been a mistake in the first place.
