Karen Abramowitz

February 7, 2007

Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford, 1974) Chapter 2, Chapter 3.

In “The Evolution of the Minstrel Show, “ Robert Toll discusses the beginning of minstrel shows and the ways they changed over the roughly three decades in which they enjoyed great popularity. Minstrel shows in the 1830s and ‘40s, which featured white men in black faces, were “unabashedly popular in appeal, housed in its own show places, performed by middling Americans, focused on humble characters, and dominated by earthy, vital, song, dance, and humor” (25). Although they were originally very loosely organized, the close interplay between the entertainers and the audience created a format that ultimately became the minstrel’s structure. Toll contends minstrelsy was “a national institution.”

During the 1820s, performers in black face were only one part of the minstrel show, but as they toured the country, they concentrated on becoming more “authentically” Afro-American. The status of minstrels grew during the ‘30s, but it was in 1843 with the formation of the Virginia Minstrels that minstrelsy captured the imagination of the public. Responding to audience demand, numerous troupes formed and traveled as far west as California, down through the South and across the Northeast. The shows were particularly successful in New York.

Toll suggests that the success of the minstrel shows was due not only to the variety of the entertainment offered, but because minstrelsy was responsive to the interests of its audiences and was very much like them. This was not “high brow” entertainment. Further, the minstrels allowed people to satisfy their curiosity about slavery in part because the minstrels provided a version that was acceptable to those audiences. Some minstrels based their acts on what purported to be Negro dialect, song, and humor, while others based their appeal on emotional and sentimental material, especially the songs of Stephen Foster. Most eventually incorporated both aspects into their performances. Toll asserts that Foster’s songs offered audiences an escape from their everyday life and fostered a sense of nostalgia for days and values gone by.

For all their success imitating Negroes, black faced performers took pains to reassure audiences that they were white; sheet music of minstrel songs showed the entertainers in costume but also as themselves. Nor were their representations necessarily completely authentic, but, according to Toll, at the outset drew heavily from the folklore of the frontier and tall tales. Eventually, the songs, dances, and particularly the rhythms did reflect more succinctly black culture, and minstrels incorporated elements of Afro-American folklore and beliefs into their shows, frequently focusing on animal fables. Thus, minstrelsy’s contribution to American popular culture was the fusion of black and white influences and it was a harbinger of the importance that black culture would have on the arts in America. However, at the same time, because of the stereotypes the minstrel performers created, minstrelsy became one of the first examples of the way in which “American popular culture would exploit and manipulate Afro-Americans and their culture to please and benefit white Americans” (51).

Toll goes on to describe the format that minstrel shows took in the 1850s. Basic minstrel performances were divided into three acts. In the first, the entire group participated in songs and dances of both a comic and serious nature. The interlocutor was the master of ceremonies who orchestrated the acts on stage and bantered with the audiences. In addition to the interlocutor, a musical star (usually a tenor) also performed; his repertoire generally included the sentimental songs previously mentioned. At both ends of the semi-circle of the troupe were the most famous of the blackface comedians, who entertained with riddles, puns, stories, and so forth. The second act was the variety section, whose most distinctive facture was the “stump speech,” which featured an array of malapropisms. Finally, the last segment was a one-act skit that was usually set on a Southern Plantation.

Exploring the subject further in chapter three, Toll maintains that because the minstrels were so acutely attuned to the pulse of the public, they provide the clearest picture of the evolution of racial stereotypes in America. From the beginning Negroes, even those most sympathetically portrayed, were depicted as foolish and stupid, with features that were odd; therefore, they were assumed to be both culturally and physically inferior to whites. At the same time, minstrels used these characters as vehicles to lampoon intellectual or aristocratic whites. Thus, Northern white audiences could feel superior to the black population and yet because they did not take them seriously, the blackface entertainers could also include social criticism of “frivolous whites who wasted their lives in unproductive dilettantism” (69). Creating the stereotypes of “dark dandies,” for example, allowed the minstrels to satirize the pretentious white upper class much to the amusement of the lower class audience.

Toll argues that before the Civil War, slavery was a distant abstraction to many Americans who did not live in the South. As “egalitarians,” most Northerners “abhorred” slavery from a conceptual standpoint, but were worried about the impact industrialization, modernization, the flux in society would have on their lives. One way to offset this fear was to idealize the family. At the same time, the public had compassion for those slaves who were badly treated by cruel masters. Minstrel shows provided a means of defining slavery in a way that was acceptable to the North. They created and reified the image of the happy-go-lucky, childish slave and his family playing jokes on his kind master thereby assuaging the concerns of the audience. At the same time, minstrel shows offered scenes of families torn apart and older slaves sold because they could no longer do as much work. Such moments provided the audiences a cathartic emotional release.

Racial stereotypes derived from the minstrels’ creation of stock characters and situations including the sly black who could outfox his master, the childlike black who deferred to his “parental” master, the happy couple and their idealized romance, “Old Darky” and Mammy. In contrast to these images, the very same characters were also used to illustrate the evils of slavery, especially breaking up the family, and the problems of runaway slaves. For a decade then, slavery in the North was “little more than part of the minstrel show” (87).

When the Civil War loomed, many in the North wanted to save the Union and the minstrel shows then eliminated all mention of mistreated slaves, concentrating instead on the contented slave who “needed” the plantation. In response to the tremendous success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the minstrel shows adapted the material but either lampooned, eviscerated, or totally re-worked the novel, all in all diluting the anti-slavery message, and ultimately showing audiences that there was no need for to go to war over slavery.

John W. Finson, The Voices That Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century Popular Song, Chapter 5.

Finson identifies three major themes of blackface minstrelsy: evocation of the racially exotic and African primitivism, manifestation of the carnivalesque, and a pervasive sense of longing. He defines carnival as an “anti-holiday… a populist activity, which celebrates an inversion between the rulers and the ruled.” It also depicts a world turned upside down, the fox chasing the hounds for example, which then allows for a critique of social and political culture. The use of masks furthers this revolt against authority: assuming the clothing of the aristocracy or that of the lowest class is a form of transvesting or taking on the identity of someone else. Because the individual is masked or in costume – not who he really is, like the Fool in literature–he is protected from punishment. Blackface is a form of mummery that enabled the white entertainers to “assume the mask of the folkloric.” The music of the minstrels did the same by presenting characters in absurd situations steeped in rustic folklore, as illustrated by the character Jim Crow and the song of the same name. In addition to the lyrics, the songs of the minstrels were the antithesis of the genteel, long Italianate line of opera or classical songs, and with the emphasis on uneven rhythms, frequently repeated notes, became another form of inversion

The ridiculous character singing in dialect can criticize or satirize under the guise of innocence and through the medium of comedy: According to Finson, “Carnivalesque inversion reigns when the lowest member of society from a group completely disenfranchised ridicules and rules the powerful, fulfilling the fantasies of any listener oppressed by authority” (167).

Finson next discusses the rise of the minstrels, emphasizing the Christie Minstrels who popularized a number of songs including Stephen Foster’s “Oh Susanna” and “Gwine to Run All Night or De Camptown Races” (1848). He also analyzes the elements in the lyrics that characterize the carnivalesque and folkloric and reviews the tri-partite structure of the minstrel acts, much as did Toll. Finson concurs with Toll that the mixture of themes from solo blackface songs in conjunction with other traditions in American song was an important contribution to the nation’s culture. As the years passed, the songs of the minstrel programs placed greater emphasis on nostalgia, longing for lost lands, and became both more serious in nature and more refined. This is seen in Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home” which, Finson suggests, appealed to audiences’ empathy for slaves and their melancholy for a romanticized notion of a lost land.

Ken Emerson, Doo~Dah: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture.

In his discussion of Stephen Foster, Emerson argues that his songs appealed to all kinds of Americans of disparate backgrounds and beliefs, both during his lifetime and thereafter. He paved the way for Tin Pan Alley, influenced the work of classical composers Antonin Dvorak and Charles Ives as well as George Gershwin, the big bands of the ‘40s, and even artists of the present day. Foster was one of the first white musicians to mimic and incorporate black music as a “means of escape and a form of rebellion,” so termed because it represented “a certain freedom…from bourgeois conventions” (16).

Foster was, himself, influenced by two different individuals. One, Henry Kleber, was a classically trained musician, Foster’s teacher, and a man who “epitomized the genteel tradition and exploited it to the fullest with entrepreneurial energy” (101). The other, Daddy Rice, was the blackface performer who created the character of Jim Crow. Foster vacillated between the two, wrote both types of songs and ultimately synthesized each type of music into one. The balance of the chapter is devoted to Foster’s early “blackface” songs, whose popularity was due, in part, to the freedom that middle-class culture did not allow. ‘Old Ned,” however, written in 1844, already evidences sympathy towards African American slaves.

“Hog Heaven” recounts Foster’s move to Cincinnati where he was more exposed to genuine black music that made its way via the travelers on the Ohio River, which divided the North and the South. Foster incorporated the songs he heard into his own music, including “Oh! Susanna,” which Emerson refers to as an American anthem. Emerson deconstructs the lyrics, pointing out the different European and African American influences as well as Foster’s focus on the future in terms of new inventions and technology. “Oh! Susanna” was a big hit, but Foster in writing subsequent songs was reluctant to admit he was the author until he realized that he could earn a living through his music. With “Nelly Was a Lady,” Foster succeeded in fusing a “minstrel ditty with the parlor ballad,” eliminated some of the overt racism found in other minstrel tunes, and secured his place in history as a major songwriter.

In the following chapter, Emerson depicts the historical situation that is the background of “De Camptown Races” one of the last blackface songs Foster would write. Moving to 1851, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as previously noted, caused an enormous sensation, which influenced Foster’s writing of “My Old Kentucky Home.” He did away with the black dialect and made the lyrics universal by “evoking…nearly timeless emotions about losing one’s family, home, and childhood” (195). Foster’s songs were featured in the many bowdlerized theatre productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which ultimately furthered Foster’s renown.

Justin Driver, “The Mirth of a Nation: Black Comedy’s Reactionary Hipness,” New Republic 224 (June 11, 2001): 29-33.

Driver argues that the comedic acts of Chris Rock and Chris Tucker are nothing more than modern day versions of minstrelsy. Through the use of “The Voice,” bulging eyes, big grins, and references to blacks as “niggas,” they are black entertainers imitating white performers who imitated blacks, which Driver finds not only not funny but reprehensible. Driver provides readers with a brief history of minstrelsy, black entertainers of the time, the career of Stepin Fechit, and accuses Rock and Tucker of continuing in the vein of “coon humor,” perpetuating stereotypes, and undermining the “subversive and transformative potential of comedy.”