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
Civil War,
black people in blackface.
Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted,[1]
lazy,[1]
buffoonish,[2][1]
superstitious, happy-go-lucky,[1]
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. In 1848, blackface minstrel shows were the national art
of the time, translating formal art such as opera into popular terms for
a general audience.[3]
By the turn of the 20th 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 1960s in high schools,
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 afforded white Americans a singular and broad
awareness of what some whites considered significant aspects of
black-American culture to be.[4][5]
Although the minstrel shows were extremely popular, being
"consistently packed with families from all walks of life and every
ethnic group",[6]
they were also controversial. Racial integrationists decried them as
falsely showing happy slaves while at the same time making fun of them;
segregationists thought such shows were "disrespectful" of social norms,
portrayed
runaway slaves with sympathy and would undermine the southerners' "peculiar
institution".[7]
Detail from cover of The Celebrated Negro
Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels,
1843
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Contents
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History
Early development
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,[8]
the minstrel show as such has later origins. By the late 17th century,
blackface characters began appearing on the American stage, usually
as "servant"
types whose roles did little more than provide some element of
comic relief.[9]
Eventually, similar performers appeared in
entr'actes in
New York theaters and other venues such as taverns and circuses. As
a result, the blackface "Sambo"
character came to supplant the "tall-tale-telling
Yankee"
and "frontiersman"
character-types in popularity,[10]
and white actors such as
Charles Mathews,
George Washington Dixon, and
Edwin Forrest began to build reputations as blackface performers.
Author
Constance Rourke even claimed that Forrest's impression was so good
he could fool blacks when he mingled with them in the streets.[11]
Thomas Dartmouth Rice's successful 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 [Queen]
Victoria and
Jim Crow."[12]
As early as the 1820s, blackface performers called themselves "Ethiopian
delineators";[13]
from then into the early 1840s, unlike the later heyday of minstrelsy,
they performed either solo or in small teams.[14]
Blackface soon found a home in the taverns of New York's less
respectable precincts of Lower
Broadway, the
Bowery, and
Chatham Street.[15]
It also appeared on more respectable stages, most often as an
entr'acte.[15]
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. Theater was a
participatory activity, and the lower classes came to dominate the
playhouse. They threw things at actors or orchestras who performed
unpopular material,[16]
and rowdy audiences eventually prevented the
Bowery Theatre from staging high drama at all.[17]
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".[18]
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,[19]
and musicians played what they claimed to be "Negro
music" on so-called black instruments like the
banjo.[citation
needed] 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".[20]
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 theater, founded and operated by free blacks in 1821,
with a repertoire drawing heavily on Shakespeare. A rival theater
company paid people to "riot" and cause disturbances at the theater, and
it was shut down by the police when neighbors complained of the
commotion.[21]
White, working-class Northerners could identify with the characters
portrayed in early blackface performances.[22]
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.[23]
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" versus "unproductive" elements
of society.[24]
On the other hand, views on slavery were fairly evenly presented in
minstrelsy,[25]
and some songs even suggested the creation of a coalition of working
blacks and whites to end the institution.[26]
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.[27]
Meanwhile, the more respectable could view the vulgar audience itself as
a spectacle.
Height
With the
Panic of 1837, theater attendance suffered, and concerts were one of
the few attractions that could still make money.[citation
needed] 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.[28]
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.[29]
The Herald wrote that the production was "entirely exempt from
the vulgarities and other objectionable features, which have hitherto
characterized negro
extravaganzas."[30]
In 1845, the
Ethiopian Serenaders purged their show of low humor and surpassed
the Virginia Minstrels in popularity.[31]
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 theater owners to enforce new rules to make playhouses calmer
and quieter.[citation
needed]
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, in poor
housing subject to fires, in empty rooms that they had to convert into
theaters, arrest on trumped up charges, exposed to deadly diseases, and
managers and agents who skipped out with all the troupe's money."[32]
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.[citation
needed] As its popularity increased, theaters
sprang up specifically for minstrel performance, often with names such
as the Ethiopian Opera House and the like.[33]
Many amateur troupes performed only a few local shows before disbanding.
Meanwhile, celebrities like Emmett continued to perform solo.[citation
needed]
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.[34]
However, in the 1850s minstrelsy became decidedly mean-spirited and
pro-slavery as race replaced class as its main focus.[35]
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.)[36]
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.[37]
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.[38]
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.[39]
Minstrelsy's
racism
(and sexism)
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.[40]
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.[41]
Despite these pro-plantation attitudes, minstrelsy was banned in many
Southern cities.[42]
Its association with the North was such that as secessionist attitudes
grew stronger, minstrels on Southern tours became convenient targets of
anti-Yankee sentiment.[43]
Non-race-related humor came from lampoons of other subjects,
including aristocratic whites such as politicians, doctors, and lawyers.
Women's rights was another serious subject that appeared with some
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."[44]
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."[45]
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. "When
this cruel war is over" became the hit of the period, selling over a
million copies of sheet music.[46]
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.[47]
Decline
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.[citation
needed]
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.[48][49]
Scenery grew lavish and expensive, and specialty acts like Japanese
acrobats or
circus freaks sometimes appeared.[citation
needed] These changes made minstrelsy unprofitable
for smaller troupes.[50]
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.[51]
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 Mastodons 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.[52]
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.[53]
African American members of Congress were one example, pictured as
pawns of the
Radical Republicans.[54]
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
(although community amateur blackface minstrel shows persisted in
northern New York State into the 1960s
[1]), 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.[55]
Black minstrels
In the 1840s and 50s,
William Henry Lane and
Thomas Dilward became the first African Americans to perform on the
minstrel stage.[56]
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."[57]
White curiosity proved a powerful motivator, and the shows were
patronized by people who wanted to see blacks acting "spontaneously" and
"naturally."[58]
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."[59]
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."[60]
The minstrels themselves promoted their performing abilities, quoting
reviews that favorably compared them to popular white troupes. These
black companies often featured female 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.[61]
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.[62]
Individual black performers like
Billy Kersands,
James A. Bland,
Sam
Lucas, and
Wallace King grew famous as any featured white performer.[63]
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.[64]
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.[65]
Unsurprisingly, most black troupes did not last long.[66]
In content, early black minstrelsy differed little from its white
counterpart. As the 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.[67]
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".[68]
In plantation material, aged black characters were rarely reunited with
long-lost masters like they were in white minstrelsy.[69]
African Americans formed a large part of the black minstrels'
audience, especially for smaller troupes. In fact, their numbers were so
great that many theater owners had to relax rules relegating black
patrons to certain areas.[70]
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".[71]
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.[72]
They certainly got many jokes that flew over whites' heads or registered
as only quaint distractions.[73]
Another draw for black audiences was simply seeing fellow African
Americans on stage;[72]
black minstrels were largely viewed as celebrities.[74]
Formally educated African Americans, on the other hand, either
disregarded black minstrelsy or openly disdained it.[75]
Still, black minstrelsy was the first large-scale opportunity for
African Americans to enter American show business.[76]
Structure
The Christy Minstrels established the basic structure of the minstrel
show in the 1840s.[77]
A crowd-gathering parade to the theater often preceded the performance.[78]
The show itself was divided into three major sections. During the first,
the entire troupe danced onto stage singing a popular song.[79]
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
acted as a master of ceremonies and as a dignified, if pompous, straight
man while the endmen exchanged jokes and performed a variety of humorous
songs.[80][81]
Over time, the first act 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.[82]
Initially, an upbeat plantation song and dance ended the act;[citation
needed] later it was more common for the first act
to end with a
walkaround, including dances in the style of a
cakewalk.[79]
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,[83]
although the focus was usually on sending up unpopular issues and making
fun of blacks' ability to make sense of them.[84]
Many troupes employed a stump specialist with a trademark style and
material.
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.[37]
A few stories highlighted black
trickster figures who managed to get the better of their masters.[85]
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.[86]
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
This reproduction of a 1900 minstrel show poster, originally
published by the Strobridge
Litho Co., shows the
blackface transformation from white to "black".
Jim Crow, the archetypal slave character as created by Rice
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".[87]
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.[88]
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".[89]
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 color" 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.[90]
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 or
bones. 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.[91]
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,[92]
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.[93]
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.[45]
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.[80]
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.[94]
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.[36]
In contrast, the trickster, often called
Jasper Jack, appeared less frequently. By outsmarting his white
master, he exemplified antislavery sentiment.[95]
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 theater 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.[96]
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.[97]
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."[98]
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.[99]
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.[100]
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.[101]
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.[102]
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.[103]
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 Catholicism of the Irish and
their willingness to work for cheap wages, which frightened non-Irish
workers.[104]
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. Germans, on the other hand,
were portrayed favorably from their introduction to minstrelsy in the
1860s. They were responsible and sensible, though still portrayed as
humorous for their large size, hardy appetites, and heavy "Dutch"
accents.[105]
Part of this positive portrayal no doubt came about because some of the
actors portraying German characters were German themselves.[106]
Music and dance
Music and dance were the heart of the minstrel show and a large
reason for its popularity. Around the time of the 1830s there was a lot
of national conflict as to how people viewed African Americans. Because
of that interest in the Negro people, these songs granted the listener
new knowledge about African Americans who were different from
themselves, even if the information was prejudiced. Troupes took
advantage of this interest and marketed sheet music of the songs they
featured so that viewers could enjoy them at home and other minstrels
could adopt them for their act.
How much influence black music had on minstrel performance remains a
debated topic. Minstrel music certainly contained some element of black
culture, added onto a base of European tradition with distinct
Irish and
Scottish
folk music influences. Musicologist Dale Cockrell argues that early
minstrel music mixed both African and European traditions and that
distinguishing black and white urban music during the 1830s is
impossible.[107]
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.[108]
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.[109]
Nevertheless, many troupes claimed to have carried out more serious
"fieldwork".[110]Similar
to American people who come from all over the world creating one big
‘melting pot,’ it is only fitting that some of the first forms of truly
American music and drama are composed of elements from many different
places
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."[111]
It was thus a juxtaposition of "vigorous earth-slapping footwork of
black dances … with the Irish lineaments of blackface jigs and reels."[112]
Similar to the look of a blackface performer, the lyrics in the songs
that were sung have a tone of mockery and a spirit of laughing at black
Americans rather than with them. 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 and tambourine with European
fiddle
and
bones[113]
In short, early minstrel music and dance was not true black culture; it
was a white reaction to it.[114]
This was the first large-scale
appropriation and commercial exploitation of black culture by
American whites.[115]
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"[116]
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;[117]
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."[118]
Others complained that the minstrels had foregone their black roots.[119]
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.[120]
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.[121]
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."[122]
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 dances were merely a "faint,
feeble, impotent—in a word, pale Northern reproductions of that
ineffable black conception."[123]
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.[124]
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.[125]
Blacks were in turn expected to uphold these stereotypes or else risk
white retaliation.[126]
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 theater,
blackface performers became common acts on vaudeville stages and in
legitimate drama. These entertainers kept the familiar songs, dances,
and pseudo-black dialect, often in nostalgic looks back at the old
minstrel show. The most famous of these performers is probably
Al
Jolson, who took blackface to the big screen in the 1920s in films
such as
The Jazz Singer (1927). His 1930 film
Mammy uses the setting of a traveling minstrel show, giving an
on-screen presentation of a performance. Likewise, when the sound era of
cartoons began in the late 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.[127]
The face of
Raggedy Ann is a color-reversed minstrel mask, and Raggedy Ann's
creator,
Johnny Gruelle, designed the doll in part with the antics of
blackface star
Fred Stone in mind.[128]
As late as 1942, in the Warner Bros. cartoon "Fresh Hare", minstrel
shows could be used as a gag (in this case, featuring Elmer Fudd and
Bugs Bunny leading a chorus of "Camptown Races") with the expectation,
presumably, that audiences would get the reference. Radio shows got into
the act, a fact perhaps best exemplified by the popular radio shows Two
Black Crows, Sam and Henry, and
Amos 'n' Andy,[129]
A transcription survives from 1931 of The Blue Coal Minstrels ,
which uses many of the standard forms of the minstrel show, including
Tambo, Bones and the interlocutor. The
National
Broadcasting Company, in a 1930 pamphlet, used the minstrel show as
a point of reference in selling its services.[130]
1930
NBC promotional pamphlet utilizing minstrel show
references. Collection of E.O. Costello
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.[131]
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.[132]
Many famous singers and actors gained their start in black minstrelsy,
including
W. C. Handy,
Ida Cox,
Ma
Rainey,
Bessie Smith,
Ethel Waters, and
Butterbeans and Susie.
The Rabbit's Foot Company was a variety troupe, originally founded
in 1900 by an African American, Pat Chappelle,[133]
which drew on and developed the minstrel tradition while updating it and
helping to develop and spread black musical styles. Besides Ma Rainey
and Bessie Smith, later musicians working for "the Foots" included
Louis Jordan,
Brownie McGhee and
Rufus Thomas, and the company was still touring as late as 1950. Its
success was rivalled by other touring variety troupes, such as "Silas
Green from New Orleans".[134]
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, "hokum"
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 Color.[135][136][137]
Jokes once delivered by endmen are still told today: "Why did the
chicken cross the road?" "Why does a fireman wear red suspenders?"[138]
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!"[84]
The stump speech is an important precursor to modern
stand-up comedy.[139]
Another important legacy of minstrelsy is its music. The
hokum
blues genre carried over the
dandy,
the wench, the simple-minded slave characters (sometimes rendered as the
rustic white "rube") and even the
interlocutor into early
blues and
country music incarnations through the medium of "race music" and
"hillbilly" recordings. 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.[140]
"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, minstrels opened the nation to black cultural forms for the first
time on a large scale.[141]
Motion pictures with Minstrel Show routines
A small number of films available today contain authentic recreations
of Minstrel Show numbers and routines. Due to their content they are
rarely (if ever) broadcast on television today, but are available on
home video.
-
I Dream of Jeanie (1952) aka I Dream of Jeanie (with the
Light Brown Hair), a completely fictional film biography of
Stephen Foster. Veteran performer Glen Turnbull makes a guest
appearance as a blackface minstrel performer in Christy's Minstrels.
-
The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length motion
picture with synchronized dialogue sequences. Based on a play by
Samson Raphaelson, the story tells of Jakie Rabinowitz (Al
Jolson), the son of a devout Jewish family, who runs away from
home to become a jazz singer.
-
Mammy (1930), another Al Jolson film, this relives Jolson's
early years as a minstrel man. With songs by
Irving Berlin, who is also credited with the original story
titled Mr. Bones.
-
Minstrel Man (1944), a fictional film about the rise, fall,
and revival of a Minstrel performer's career. It was nominated for
two
Academy Awards (Best Original Song and Best Original Score).
-
A Plantation Act (1926), a
Vitaphone
sound-on-disc short film starring Al Jolson. Long thought to
have been lost, a copy of the film and sound disc were located and
the restored version has been issued as a bonus feature on the DVD
release of The Jazz Singer.
-
Swanee River (1940), another fictionalized biographical film
on Stephen Foster. It was nominated for the
Academy Award for Best Musical Scoring and was the last
on-screen appearance of
Al Jolson.
- Yes Sir, Mr. Bones (1951), is based around a young child
who finds a rest home for retired Minstrel performers. In
"flashback" sequences, a number of actual Minstrel veterans,
including
Scatman Crothers,
Freeman Davis (aka "Brother Bones"), Ned Haverly,
Phil Arnold, "endmen" Cotton Watts and Slim Williams, the
dancing team of Boyce and Evans, and the comic duo Ches Davis and
Emmett Miller, perform in the roles they popularized in Minstrel
shows.