Blackface Minstrelsy & The Collision of Cultures
In-Lesson Reading SelectionAlthough those of us who have seen the film Ghostbusters know the dangers of “crossing the streams,” in popular music many of the most vital and exciting developments arise from the collision of different musical cultures. Indeed, most American popular music is the result of this process in one way or another. Even genres that we think of as being closely identified with a particular racial or cultural segment of American society show the influence of these collisions (For example, remember the polka beat of conjunto norteño). As we will see here, this has been the case for as long as we’ve had popular music.
The Beginnings of American Popular Music: Blackface Minstrelsy.
In the last few units, we have been looking at particular cultural threads within American popular music. We’ve been treating these threads in isolation, but the beginnings of the popular music industry are also wrapped up in the fact that the American populace has always been made up of ethnically diverse populations. Our popular music reflects this diversity, and in some ways is defined by it, although sometimes this fascination with ethnic difference manifests itself in ways that we find quite offensive today.
The archetypal case study of this fascination is the tradition of blackface minstrelsy in the 19th and early 20th century. The blackface minstrel show involved performers (both white and black) who covered their faces in burnt cork and performed music and comedy routines that parodied African-American culture. It is also perhaps worth noting that the American stage in the 19th century was practically awash in nasty ethnic and geographic stereotypes, including drunken Irishmen, violent American Indians, miserly Jews, witless country bumpkins, and various Asian caricatures. The minstrel show was only one of many, but its influence is most widely felt. Initially, the minstrel show was a vehicle for social satire, because the use of a mask and costume allowed the performer to skewer social elites and broach topics that might otherwise have been taboo. In his 1998 book Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, the scholar Michael Rogin described minstrelsy as a form of cross-dressing not unlike a modern drag show, in that it allowed performers to explore the edges of social acceptability because they were literally not acting as themselves.
The potential for social satire sometimes exists on multiple levels in minstrelsy, as with the example of the cakewalk, a dance initially performed by slaves. In the cakewalk, slaves dressed in hand-me-down fashionable clothes and mimicked the aristocratic dances and pretensions of the slave owners, who evidently often enjoyed the spectacle without fully understanding that they were being lampooned. The cakewalk became a popular dance and a fixture within the minstrel show, where one is faced with white performers imitating black people who were satirizing white people!*
Even if the blackface minstrel was initially a satirical practice, it quickly became a tool for spreading racist caricatures and stereotypes, and thereby perpetuating the social and economic oppression of the African-American population after the Civil War. Many minstrel songs express nostalgia for the days of slavery, with the minstrel characters claiming that life was much easier “back on the plantation.” The best known example of this was the wildly popular 1859 song “Dixie,” in which a freed slave expresses homesickness for the plantation where he was born. Of course songs like this tried to put a positive spin on slavery as a way to counter both growing abolitionist sentiment in the years prior to the Civil War and demands for civil rights in the decades following it. In other minstrel songs, male characters were typically portrayed as dim-witted, mindlessly happy, and ultimately untrustworthy, while female characters (usually performed by men in drag) were either “mannish,” provocative and sexual, or cast in the “mammy” role. Minstrelsy also relied heavily on stock characters such as “Zip Coon,” a flashy man-about-town who wears expensive clothes, and “Jim Crow,” a slow-witted country bumpkin. It is also no coincidence that the name “Jim Crow” became shorthand for the system of late 19th and 20th century laws designed specifically to prevent blacks from voting or improving their economic situation.
Although blackface minstrelsy bears significant responsibility for perpetuating some incredibly harmful stereotypes, many of its aspects have become a vital part of American popular culture. It is an important seed for American theatrical traditions, and comedians and sketch comedies in particular. The quick comedic banter in Marx Brothers routines or Bugs Bunny cartoons (“Who was that lady I saw you out with last night?” “That was no lady, that was my wife!” etc.) is descended from blackface minstrelsy routines. Minstrelsy also gave rise to, and was eventually largely replaced by, the vaudeville variety show, an important antecedent to the American musical. Even if the musical and cultural depictions of African-Americans and their music were not always particularly accurate or well-intentioned, the stage was set for further combinations of the African-American and Anglo-American musical threads.
We can note that the uglier side of blackface minstrelsy persisted as well, from, among other examples, the blatantly nasty characterizations of African-Americans (and Asians and American Indians) in Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1940s and 50s. In this clip from 1950, more than half a century after the genre’s peak in popularity, two performers enact the process of dressing up in blackface and do a few minstrel-style comedic routines. Although we can look to this as representing outdated views on race, some scholars and commentators argue that minstrelsy has never really left, citing current popular culture’s stereotyped (and frequently negative) depictions of African-Americans in movies, television shows, and music videos.
The Music of Minstrelsy
Musically, minstrelsy represents one of the first attempts to combine European traditions with instrumental and rhythmic traditions from the African-American experience, even if the results are not particularly authentic or sensitive. The legacy of minstrelsy is highly charged and problematic, but we can appreciate its combination of European and African-American musical styles as a seed for many other styles of popular music (ragtime, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, etc.), even as we recognize that it represents a tool of oppression and white privilege.
The minstrel stage created a significant opportunity for songwriters, and a number of our most popular songs from the 19th century had their genesis in the minstrel show. In particular, minstrel songs by Stephen Foster, including “O Susanna,” “De Camptown Races,” and “Old Folks at Home,” have remained a part of our national consciousness over the years. These particular tunes have little of the blunt racism of some minstrel songs, which likely helped them transcend their origins and maintain popularity.
The standard minstrel ensemble consisted of a fiddle player, a banjo player, a tambourine player, and a “bones” player (using a pair of bones as percussion instruments). The musical style was heavily indebted to Anglo-American folk music, particularly Scotch-Irish fiddle traditions, although it was always advertised as being “authentic” in its depictions of African-Americans. On the other hand, the dance styles were closely modeled on African-American dances, and minstrel shows eventually adopted the black spiritual as well. This song, “De Boatman’s Dance,” provides an example of how minstrel songs might have sounded.