Men in blackface (Story)
U.S. News & World Report, 07/08/2002-07/15/2002

Highlight: The minstrel craze was reprehensible but influential
Section: Music & America

Full Text: Legend has it that Jim Crow was born in a Louisville, Ky., stable. In the early 1830s, Thomas Rice, an itinerant white musician, watched a black stable hand singing to himself as he worked. Rice quickly set the man's shuffling movements to music--and took it on the road with the chorus "Weel about an' turn about / an' do jis so / Eb'ry time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow." The crude lyrics and clumsy mimicry won him 20 encores the first time he performed it, setting off a national craze for "minstrel music" that lasted almost a century.

Appearing in theaters and bars around the country in black burnt-cork makeup and oversize, tattered clothes, white men performed comic (and often bawdy) sketches and songs in exaggerated dialect. The standard lineup included a fiddler, a "tambo," or tambourine, a banjo, and bone castanets. In addition to mixing the African-derived banjo and the European fiddle, the music incorporated African musical elements, like call-and-response singing and syncopation.

Minstrelsy's overt racism is painful to consider today, but it was the caperings of "Ethiopian" troupes that introduced African-American music to white audiences for the first time--and created a new American music style in the process. "Minstrelsy [is] one of the things that made American culture distinctly American," says Ken Emerson, author of Doo-Dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture. "It took over the world."

Minstrel troupes like the Ethiopian Serenaders, Christy and Wood's Minstrels, the Sable Harmonists, and others performed "Ethiopian music" for sold-out crowds in big cities and small towns alike. The young nation took up the tunes as the music moved west, carrying hits like composer Foster's "Oh! Susanna"--a 1848 ballad about two separated black lovers--from southern plantations to Gold Rush prospectors in California.

Foster's publishers sold over 100,000 copies of "Oh! Susanna" at a time when most sheet music sold 5,000 copies, tops. "The minstrel show launched the culture industry," says Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. But Foster saw none of the profits; the "Songwriter of America" died a drunkard and broke in a New York flophouse. He was 37.

White lines. Minstrelsy's inherent message of white superiority appealed to both (white) Americans--who were growing into a sense of imperial destiny in the first part of the 19th century--and to existing empires elsewhere. American minstrel troupes were wildly popular in Britain. Minstrel music "reinforced their ideas of racial subjugation," Emerson says. Its popularity with whites didn't stop it from crossing other cultural boundaries; a British traveler reported Hindus in India singing "Oh! Susanna." But the form never really caught on in the American South: "However perverse, it was a sort of shadow fantasy of black people free on stage," Lott says. "The South was scared of it."

Though abolitionists adopted some of Foster's tunes, few blacks benefited from the appropriation and crude exploitation of their image. Frederick Douglass called blackface performers "the filthy scum of white society." Minstrelsy's popularity was eventually eclipsed, but its influence remained. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith started out with minstrel shows, and Irving Berlin and George Gershwin debuted with songs from that tradition--though often with toned-down lyrics. Blackface was also a mainstay of early cinema, from Al Jolson's turn as a blackface entertainer in The Jazz Singer--the first talkie--to Walt Disney's 1946 Song of the South. But as America's racial consciousness grew, in the '50s and '60s, blackface traditions became less acceptable. Which is why Song of the South, for example, has never been released here on home video.