26 July 2008

Popular Music: 19th and Early 20th Centuries

The minstrel show, the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment

 

Minstrel shows typically featured white people wearing blackface and unflatteringly depicting blacks.

Minstrel shows typically featured white people wearing blackface and unflatteringly depicting blacks.

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

Popular music both shaped and reflected American culture throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. This period saw the birth of minstrelsy, the first distinctively American form of popular culture, the rise of the modern music industry, and rapid audience expansion, not least because new technologies enabled the dissemination of music to a national audience. Some of the song and dance music styles that emerged would influence profoundly U.S. popular music throughout the 20th century.

The Minstrel Show

The minstrel show, the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment to be regarded by European audiences as distinctively American in character, featured mainly white performers who blackened their skin and carried out parodies of African-American music, dance, dress, and dialect. Today blackface minstrelsy is regarded with embarrassment or anger. Yet there is reason to believe that its common interpretation as an expression of racism oversimplifies the diverse meanings it represented. In any case, it would be difficult to understand American popular music without some knowledge of the minstrel show.

The minstrel show emerged from working-class neighborhoods where interracial interaction was common. Early blackface performers were the first expression of a distinctively American popular culture, in which working-class white youth expressed their sense of marginalization through an identification with African-American cultural forms. This does not mean that minstrelsy was not a projection of white racism, but its meanings were neither fixed nor unambiguous.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808-60), a white actor born into a poor family in New York City’s Seventh Ward, demonstrated the potential popularity of minstrelsy with the song “Jim Crow” (1829), the first international American song hit. Rice sang this song in blackface while imitating a dance step called the “cakewalk,” an Africanized version of the European quadrille.

Soon after Rice introduced “Jim Crow” to New York in 1832, there was a veritable explosion of blackface performance in venues ranging from theaters to saloons, the latter often patronized by a racially mixed audience. Black and mixed-race performers were on view in most of the local “dives” that featured minstrel performances. The musical and linguistic heritage of early minstrelsy was just as mixed as its audience and practitioners. The most likely inspiration for “Jim Crow” was not an African-American song but an Irish folk tune subsequently transformed into an English stage song.

“Daddy” Rice’s Jim Crow character spoke and sang in a dialect based on white rural characters (such as the Kentucky rifleman Davy Crockett) and partly on the variety of black and Creole dialects heard by Rice as a youngster growing up by the Seventh Ward docks.

Come, listen all you gals and
boys, I’se just from Tuckyhoe
I’m goin to sing a little song, My
name’s Jim Crow
Weel about and turn about and
do jis so
Eb’ry time I weel about I jump
Jim Crow

The Jim Crow character used this hybrid dialect – neither black nor white but something in between – to make fun of pretentious politicians and social elites, introducing a satirical subtext that Rice’s high- class targets found threatening.

From the 1840s through the 1880s blackface became the predominant genre of popular culture in the United States. As the genre was transformed into the more formally organized “minstrel show,” much of its original subversive quality was lost. The 19th-century minstrel show displayed many of the themes that will concern us throughout this survey. Minstrelsy arose during the 1830s as an expression of a predominantly white urban youth culture, which sought to express its independence by appropriating black style. As minstrelsy became a mass phenomenon in the decades just before and after the American Civil War, its form became routinized, and its portrayal of black characters more rigidly stereotyped. This basic pattern, in which a new genre of music arises within a marginalized community and then moves into the mainstream of mass popular culture, in the process losing much of its original rebellious energy, will be encountered many times in this book.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]