A Concise History of Ragtime
 

Although people generally think today of ragtime music as being started by Scott Joplin, it was not. Joplin became the King of the Ragtimers but he was not the inventor—at least if we go by publication dates. The earliest known published rag was by Ernest Hogan in 1895 called “La Pas Ma La” which put ragtime on the map and made Hogan quite famous.

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The New Sunshine Jazz Band - La Pas-Ma-La - YouTube

Hogan, of Bowling Green, Kentucky, was a well-educated composer as well as high-ranking Freemason. He would become the first black composer to get his own show on Broadway. He became one of the highest paid entertainers in his day.

The following year, Hogan published “All Coons Look Alike To Me.” This is the start of what would be called “coon songs” or “coon shouts.”

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Considered one of the most racist sheet covers of the ragtime era (although I think I’ve seen worse), the song itself is really not that bad.


All Coons Look Alike to Me - YouTube

There were quite a number of black coon songwriters such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook. These songs were quite popular in black vaudeville but whites also liked them and since they didn’t attend black vaudeville, white ragtime singers began to perform the coon songs. Onstage, they blackened their faces making ragtime a form of minstrelsy. We know that ragtime was in existence by 1893 when it played at the 1893 World’s Fair. We also know that some of the shapers of ragtime, such as Tom Turpin, were working on ragtime by 1892.

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So where did ragtime come from and what does the term mean? The earliest form of ragtime was played on the banjo and was born from black barnyard dance music that slaves and sharecroppers played after the workday was through to loosen up a bit. When this music left the barnyards and plantation farms, it journeyed to the cities and port towns along the Mississippi River where it combined with riverboat songs. Another evolution took place in the 1870s and 80s when Irish jig piano was all the rage. Black pianists took up jig piano but began performing rags on the piano as well. White pianists also took to this new form of piano-playing. Another element that was crucial to the formation of ragtime was the marching band. Marching bands were a huge part of the American musical landscape back then. Virtually every city, town and village had at least one (picture the Hooterville Fire Department playing “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”). The left hand played the straight 1-2-1-2 rhythm (with the accent on 1) while the right hand played the syncopated melody.


Johnny Collins - Hard on the Beach Oar (riverboat song) - YouTube
“Hard on the Beach Oar” riverboat song sung by Johnny Collins.

So what is syncopation? It is the key ingredient to ragtime (and, later on, jazz). It’s what makes ragtime ragtime. Ragtime is usually played in cut time, that is, 2/4 time. So there are only two beats per bar with a quarter note representing a beat. With the left hand keeping straight marching time, the right hand contrasting against the left by emphasizing the 2-beat without changing the accent being on the 1. This could be done a number of ways: A beat can be subdivided into four smaller beats—16th notes in this case. Now, imagine playing a 1 for the full four sub-beats, then play the 2 only on the last sub-beat. The count sounds like One…twoOne…twoOne…twoOne. That’s syncopation. The accent stays on 1 but the 2 is emphasized. As a result, the timing sounds jumpy or ragged and hence the term ragtime.

Some have pointed out that syncopation is not heard in West African tribal music but was not unknown to European composers. Liszt and Chopin used it, for example. That demonstrates that ragtime is primarily a white invention. This is not a bad supposition but the evidence shows that syncopation did not enter the American musical vocabulary until the contributions of black composers and musicians became significant. Syncopation may have been the black musicians’ way of constructing African poly-rhythms into a European framework but no one is certain. (For example, African-American church harmonies are not found in Africa but have a European basis and yet nothing like them existed in Europe either. Exactly how they formed is a mystery)

So there are our strands of the fabric of ragtime: black banjo dance music, riverboat songs, marching bands and syncopated rhythm. One other strand is minstrel. It is impossible to fully separate ragtime from minstrel music.

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In 1896, a white pianist and riverboat captain named William H. Krell published the first rag to use “Rag” in the title—“Mississippi Rag.” Krell was a competent musician who heard the ragtime being played at saloons and clubs all along the Mississippi and strung a bunch of strains together but no one is sure what parts he borrowed and which he wrote. Regardless, it’s a great piece and one of my personal favorite rags (although many ragtime scholars insist it is not a rag at all but a cakewalk, be that as it may):


William Krell - Mississipi Rag - YouTube
Played by the incomparable Claude Bolling.

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By 1897, Tom Turpin of St. Louis had his “Harlem Rag” published. He is sometimes credited with being the first African-American to have a rag published. But Ernest Hogan seems to hold that record. The huge 250 lb+ Turpin is the first African-American to publish a rag with “Rag” in the title but that seems to be the extent of it. That’s not to short-change Turpin, he was known to have been playing that rag by 1892 and he opened the Rosebud Café in St. Louis which showcased a spate of ragtime talent. It was an exceedingly important watering hole for ragtime. “Harlem Rag” is a sweet, little piece and seems to have a bit of the Old West in it. Although I am trying to be concise, I would be remiss not have mentioned either it or Turpin:


Tom Turpin, Harlem Rag - Two Step (1897) - YouTube

By 1897, Scott Joplin came on the ragtime scene. Born in northern Texas about 1867 or so, Joplin showed musical talent at an early age. His mother, Florence, offered to perform chores for free to a white woman in town if she would allow Scott to practice on her fine grand piano. The woman agreed and listened to the boy play. She told some of her friends about the child prodigy and eventually word to go Julius Weiss, a German music teacher in town. He took Joplin under his wing and taught him music theory, classical music and opera. Joplin in particular loved the operas of Wagner.

Joplin joined minstrel troupe around 1893 before leaving for St. Louis and Chicago. By 1894, he was playing cornet for the Queen City Cornet Band, an all-black marching band that was the first marching band to play rags. They also played the classics and opera pieces and it is believed Joplin studied these pieces to get ideas for his own compositions.

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The Queen City Cornet Band of Missouri. This photo was taken sometime around 1896. Some say the man on the far right clutching the cornet is Scott Joplin. My opinion is that the man does indeed appear to be him although he is believed to have left the band before 1896. Then again, the photo could be misdated or Joplin may have still been in the band and the historians are simply wrong or the man isn’t Joplin. Without an intense study of the original photo (if it still exists) no one can say.

Joplin’s first published piece was “Original Rags” from 1897:


Scott Joplin - Original Rags - YouTube

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Published by Carl Hoffman, Joplin didn’t get his due. He had to agree to let the house arranger, Charles N. Daniels, put his name on the piece as arranger despite having nothing to do with the arrangement. Some periodicals of the time that mentioned it also attributed the composition to Daniels and didn’t mention Joplin at all. The composition is clearly Joplin’s. His trademark style is all over it.

But Joplin’s big piece, the one he told friends would make him King of the Ragtimers, remained unpublished. He was turned away several times. Finally, a lawyer got Joplin in touch with the firm of John Stark & Sons of Sedalia, Missouri. Stark agreed to publish the piece as well as pay Joplin a royalty—an excellent deal which Joplin took. He had been working on this piece since at least 1894 when he first started playing parts of it for people. Now it was completed and published under the title “The Maple Leaf Rag.”

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Maple Leaf Rag Played by Scott Joplin - YouTube
“The Maple Leaf Rag” piano roll. This sounds a bit fast. Joplin wrote on the sheet music that this piece was to be played slow, adding that “it is never correct to play ragtime fast.”

“Maple Leaf” became a gigantic hit, an enormously popular hit. By far, the biggest of the ragtime era. Joplin made a small fortune as did Stark & Sons. The country now knew the name of Scott Joplin. Whenever he showed up at a club (segregated, of course), the house pianist would break into “Maple Leaf” playing it very fast and embellishing it with all kinds of flourishes. Joplin always hated when they did that believing that they were trying to show him up (and they might have been) although he should have just taken it in stride. Even Jelly Roll Morton, a talented but hopeless braggart, who was a contemporary reverently referred to Joplin’s piece as “the perfect rag”—a praise he usually reserved only for his own compositions.

Joplin was a quiet, reserved man of high intelligence and perfect pitch. He spoke quietly in perfect, precise English. He hated the stereotype of black barnyard dialect. Those who met him found him personable although his conversation seemed to center almost entirely around music to the point where many thought him obsessed by it (nothing wrong with that). He never wrote at the piano but instead rode trains through the Missouri countryside holding manuscript paper and pencil and would start jotting down ideas as they came to him. He detested coon songs and said so in print but he seemed to be a man of few letters. We have little personal correspondence of Joplin so his views and aspirations remain somewhat of a mystery to us although he appears to have been perfectly literate. He was married once but his first (and only) child died in infancy and his marriage fell apart.

But Joplin had a dream and that was to turn ragtime into an art form. He planned to do this by bringing large helpings of classical music into the genre. He was not alone in this endeavor. Many of the black ragtime musicians were writing complex rags—heavy rags as they are called. Whites often went for the more pratfall rags or light rags. The money was in light rags and there were many excellent light rags and black musicians wrote and played many but they were also determined to turn ragtime into serious music and Joplin spearheaded this drive. In fact, he came to refer to his rags as “American Negro Classical Music.”

Another ragtimer who doesn’t get a lot of mention in the histories is Arthur Collins. Arthur Francis Collins was born in Philadelphia in 1864, took singing lessons, toured with opera singer Francis Wilson, married in 1895 and retired from music. But he was still a young man and couldn’t stay away from music for long. He joined the De Wolf Hopper Company and then signed a contract with Edison in 1898. He recorded a couple of cylinders that year—“Zizzy Ze Zum Zum” and “Just As the Sun Went Down.” The following year, he cut “Hello Ma Baby” in a decidedly different light than Michigan J. Frog:


Hello! Ma Baby - Arthur Collins (1899) - YouTube

He sang baritone in the Peerless Quartet from 1909-1918, a highly successful act. He also had a long running collaboration with singer Byron G. Harlan (author of the now legendary jazz standard “The Darktown Strutter’s Ball”). Known as Collins & Harlan, they often billed themselves as “The Half-Ton Duo” since both men were somewhat portly in build. Although they sang in two-part harmony, many of their numbers were performed as a male-female duet with Harlan supplying the comical female voices.


Collins & Harlan, ''****** Loves His Possum'' (1906) - YouTube
This one was a big hit for the Half-Ton Duo.

In 1905, Collins cut “The Preacher and the Bear” on a cylinder for Blue Amberol (and re-cut it 1908 on a Victor disc). It was a huge hit selling two million copies (this was back when a few thousand was considered a major hit). It was, by far, the biggest selling recording of the ragtime era.


The Preacher and the Bear - Arthur Collins - YouTube
The 1905 cylinder version of “The Preacher and the Bear.”

His 1910 recording of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” with Byron Harlan was #1 for 10 weeks. Collins recorded all through the 1910s and even became the first artist to use a form of the word jazz in a song title with his 1917 release, “That funny Jas band from Dixieland.” On October 20, 1921, Collins was performing onstage for the Edison Company in which the audience was to guess whether he was really singing or whether they were hearing an Edison Diamond Disc machine. The stage went black and Collins turned to leave the stage and fell through a trapdoor some fool stagehand had left open and was seriously injured. The following year, he was well enough to record a number for the Gennett label and then resumed working with Byron Harlan for Edison but he developed heart ailments which were exacerbated by the effects of his fall in 1921 which he had never fully recovered from and, by 1926, Collins retired from music permanently. He moved to Florida where he spent the next seven years until his death on August 3, 1933 at age 69. He was a very prolific artist who recorded over 300 records (few, if any of them recorded electrically) in a career that spanned over a quarter of a century.

Because his material was often blatantly racist by today’s standards, Arthur Collins has been largely forgotten by the public, known only to a comparatively small circle of ragtimers and jass enthusiasts. But he was the most famous of the ragtime singers in his day and the biggest seller among them. He paved the way for jazz singing by opening a path for later artists as Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Cliff Edwards—not to mention Louis Armstrong. He was the first white artist to routinely record the songs of black songwriters.

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Another major ragtimer we need to touch on James S. Scott of Neosho, Missouri. For some reason, most of the great ragtimers and influential jazzmen either came from or made their homes in Missouri. Scott was born in 1886 of parents who came from North Carolina. His cousin was blues singer, Ada Brown, who recalled her cousin quite fondly.


Fats Waller & Ada Brown - That Ain't Right - Stormy Weather (1943) - YouTube
A beautiful clip of Fats Waller and Ada Brown. They don’t make em like this anymore.

Scott was a short man, about five-foot-four. He walked quickly with his head lowered as though lost in thought. He often walked past old friends and family members on the street without seeing them. If one of them called to him, he would suddenly look up and break into a smile. His family was not well-to-do even for a Black family in America at that time and he went to work from a young age shining shoes. That Scott was such a musical genius and excellent sight-reader on the piano is surprising considering the Scotts did not have a piano. James had to learn wherever he could find a keyboard to play on. Yet he became quite good just learning by ear. An excellent black pianist in town named John Coleman took an interest in young Scott and gave him about 30 lessons in technique and sight-reading after seeing how good the boy had become on his own. Scott seems to have taken it from there and began churning out amazing ragtime pieces of a quality unmatched even by older more experienced composers as Joplin whom he admired.

At 16, James got a job at Dumars Music Store in Carthage, Missouri doing menial labor and helping Mr. Dumars frame pictures—something Dumars specialized in. The store had a piano back in the stockroom and this gave James something he had so desperately lacked—steady access to a piano—and he never missed an opportunity to practice on it and work on his own pieces. Scott was such a modest young man, he never told Mr. Dumars what an ace-crackerjack pianist he was and Dumars only found when out he chanced upon hearing James practicing back in the stockroom. Dumars was startled to see his stockboy tearing it up and excitedly asked him, “Can you read?”

James said he could. Dumars immediately promoted Scott to head salesman plugging and demonstrating sheet music. When James played some of his own pieces for Dumars, the storeowner realized that he may have hit a jackpot! Dumars published Scott’s first rag when the boy was no more than 17.


Summer breeze James scott - YouTube
Scott’s first published rag. The influence of Joplin is there but Scott’s style is all his own.

Scott’s most famous rag was published by Dumars in 1906—“Frog Legs Rag”:

frog legs rag (1906) - YouTube

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The sheet music of “Frog Legs” is a Stark reissue.

Scott stayed with Dumars until 1914 when he left Carthage at the age of 28 and went to St. Louis to meet Scott Joplin, which he did. Joplin liked the young man and recommended him to John Stark & Sons. Stark signed anyone Joplin told them to trusting his ear. So Joplin functioned as something of an A&R man for the publishing house. Scott turned in stunning pieces to Stark showing all kinds of innovation with ragtime.

Pieces as “Climax Rag” and “Suffragette Waltz”—both from 1914—show an evolution in his style from the Dumars days even considering the brilliance of earlier pieces as “The Ragtime Betty” (1909) and “The Ragtime Oriole” (1911). After ragtime collapsed with the onslaught of the 20s, Scott supported himself by teaching piano, leading an eight-piece band and playing piano and organ in theatres to accompany movies which were silent then. The talkies came into vogue, Scott was thrown out of work like thousands of other musicians. Then his wife, Nora, died and Scott moved in with his cousin along with his dog. He continued composing even after coming down with dropsy. His rags were reaching a complexity likely achieved by no one else before or since. But in 1938 at the age of 52, James Scott died in the hospital. His sheet music is now lost and some believe was thrown away by a maid sent to clean up the dead man’s rooms.

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In 1902, Joplin turned a piece into Stark called “The Ragtime Dance” which seems to have been the start of Joplin’s quest to produce a more genteel rag. It was stately and lovely and John Stark refused to publish it. The problem was that he was convinced it wouldn’t sell. The public wanted light rags and Joplin was dropping this high-brow stuff on them that they didn’t want.

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The Ragtime Dance - SCOTT JOPLIN (1906) Ragtime Piano Legend - YouTube

Joplin tried to cajole Stark into changing his mind but Stark was adamant. They weren’t in business to lose money. Stark’s daughter, Nellie, was an accomplished classical pianist who had studied with the masters in Europe. Joplin also taught her ragtime. He was like a second father to her and she loved him as such. She pressured her father to publish the piece and Stark finally gave in. As he predicted, however, the piece flopped. But we owe Nellie a debt of gratitude for without her efforts, the piece would certainly be lost to us today (an unknown number of Joplin pieces have been lost with only one being recovered). “The Ragtime Dance” is both a work of genius and a historically important piece for it represents turning point in ragtime, a point that was too far ahead of its time. But great works often are. That’s what makes them great.

A lot of historians believe Joplin married twice but Edward Berlin proved Joplin married three times. Berlin found the marriage certificate. His second wife was named Freddie Alexander. She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas around 1884 and that is about all we know of her. She was quite a bit younger than Joplin, marrying him at the age of 19 while he was 36 or so. He dedicated his 1903 piece “Chrysanthemum” to her on the front cover of the sheet music. They tied the knot a year later. Unfortunately, only about two months into the marriage, Freddie fell gravely ill with either a flu or pneumonia (versions vary) and died September 10, 1904. Berlin found a newspaper article about Freddie and Joplin. She was mentioned by name and also as “Mrs. Scott Joplin.”

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The cemetery where Freddie is buried.

No one knows where Joplin went during this period of what must have been intense mourning. From all indications, Joplin was very much in love with his young bride. He simply vanished for a while. We have no accounts of anyone who saw him during that time and he appears to have written no letters to anyone expressing his grief or expressing anything at all. He suddenly reappeared in 1905 with a new piece published not by Stark but by the F. Bahnsen Piano Mfg. Co.—“Bethena – A Concert Waltz”:

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Scott Joplin Bethena, A Concert Waltz - YouTube

No one knows if Joplin wrote it for his dead wife but it’s hard to believe otherwise considering the circumstances. Whether he wrote it for Freddie or not, it is a stirring and lovely piece and not a rag at all. A romantic notion has arisen that Joplin called his wife Bethena because Freddie, obviously, wasn’t a terribly romantic name especially for a woman. The speculation goes further that the photograph of the woman on the cover of the sheet music is, in fact, Freddie Alexander. This could explain the mystery of why no one really knew what she looked like—she was white. Then again, she could be mixed race, we can’t really say. In all likelihood, the photo is stock and used by the publisher to help sell the sheet music and isn’t Freddie at all. But many people today believe that it is. If so, she was a very lovely woman.

In 1907, Joplin received word that his old friend and colleague, Louis Chauvin, was dying of syphilis in Chicago. Chauvin, who was both Black and Mexican, was superb pianist. He was also an expert singer and dancer. He could not, however, read music and so never wrote anything down. Today, only three of his songs survive—all of them collaborations with people who could write music, which is the only reason we still have these pieces.

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Louis Chauvin

Joplin caught a train to Chicago and located Chauvin in a sporting house. There was a piece of music that Chauvin used to play that Joplin loved. He did not want it to die with its creator. So they sat down together and worked on the piece. Chauvin played his bits for Joplin, who wrote them down. Joplin added his own themes to complement Chauvin’s. Afterward, Joplin arranged the piece into a rag which he sent untitled to Stark who promptly titled it “Heliotrope Bouquet.” Published in 1907, it remains one of the most ethereal and hauntingly beautiful rags to come out of the era.

The intro is Chauvin’s as is the first theme which repeats. Then Joplin added Chauvin’s intro again to segue into the next two repeating themes which are Joplin’s. It is an exceedingly beautiful piece of music:


Joshua Rifkin. Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin's Heliotrope Bouquet. - YouTube

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The following year, 1908, Louis Chauvin died at the age of 25.

This is fascinating. Where do you get your information from? I'm trying to find credible academic research material at the moment.

I was going to skip the proto-rag era but I've changed my mind--so here it is:

As far as can be determined, the term “ragtime” appeared in print for the first time about 1896. The term “rag” in relation to music first appeared in print in the Topeka Weekly Call of Topeka, Kansas August 16, 1891 which mentioned that “The Jordan hall ‘rags’” should be discontinued as a public nuisance. Jordan Hall was located in Tennesseetown, a community of African-Americans mainly from Tennessee and Mississippi that sprung on the edge of Topeka in the 1870s as conditions for blacks in the South had degenerated so badly that many had no choice but to flee. Even so, life in Tennesseetown was no picnic either. Comment was made in the 1890s concerning the badly substandard way of life in the little enclave.

The Topeka Weekly Call articles ran all through 1891 about the goings-on at Jordan Hall. By October, an article appeared in the paper complaining that “A certain class of girls in Tennesseetown sings a song called ‘Proctor Knok’ from sun rise until sun set.” In November, the paper reported that “Misses Electro P. and Minnie E. are very fond of singing ‘Proctor Knot.’ They sing it to the boys at festivals and entertainments.”

We assume that the dance done to accompany this song was called the rag. It must have appeared scandalous to whites in the area. But was this related to ragtime? It would appear so. In 1909, an article appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that read in part:

“A negro woman, whose name is unknown to fame, is declared to have invented ragtime in St. Louis in 1888, in a house, now fallen, at Broadway and Clark avenue… It was the day of Proctor Knott, a famous racehorse, and he was the theme of an epoch-making ballad which she sang. One stanza has been preserved:
‘I-za a-gwine tuh Little Rock, Tuh put mah money on Proctor Knott.’”

The song couldn’t have been too old since Proctor Knott was foaled in 1886. A 1913 article in the Journal of American Folk-Lore printed a version of “Proctor Knott” that the author states was collected in 1909 from the rural whites of Mississippi:

Bet your money on Proctor Knott!
He’s a horse of mine.
Done quit runnin’;
He’s gone to flyin’,
All the way from Little Rock.
Bet your money of Proctor Knott,
Proctor Knott run so fast
You couldn’t see nothing but the jockeys ass.

We can be fairly certain that this song was originally played on the banjo which is an instrument with roots in Africa. It is not European. There are several African instruments similar to a banjo—one even called an mbanza. There is no record of white people playing banjos until about the 1840s with the rise of minstrelsy. So the ties of minstrelsy to ragtime are not hard to see. Early ragtime more or less was a continuation of minstrelsy.

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An mbanza.

A very early proto-rag from 1890 was “The Darkie’s Dream by G. L. Lansing which was originally written for the banjo. It has genuine raggy elements in it indicating that some of what went into ragtime that gave it its character was already present in latter-day minstrelsy.


Early Rag 1890 - The Darkie's Dream by G.L. Lansing (Old banjo tune) - YouTube

Another early proto-ragtimer was Monroe H. Rosenfeld. His 1891 piece, “The Alabama Walk Around” sounds like it may have been written for a band. It doesn’t sound like something converted from banjo. The influence, in this case, was probably Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869):


Early Rag (1891) The Alabama Walk Around by Monroe H. Rosenfeld - YouTube
Charles Drumheller’s 1893 piece “Banjo Twang” has a definite Gottschalk influence and is close to a true rag or a cakewalk.


Early Rag 1893 - Banjo Twang by Charles Drumheller (Legacy of Louis Moreau Gottschalk) - YouTube

Gottschalk MUST be given credit as being a major influence on the later piano ragtime. I don’t think there can be any doubt about it. Born in New Orleans to a Jewish father and a Creole mother, Gottschalk was musically talented from an early age and recognized as a piano prodigy. At 13, he began traveling, going to Europe. He also spent great amounts of time in Cuba, Central and South America. In fact, he spent most of his musical career outside the United States. He absorbed and incorporated musical styles from every country and region he visited. During the Civil War, Gottschalk considered himself a New Orleans native but supported the Union cause. He detested slavery. He left the U.S. in 1865 and never returned, collapsing during a concert he was giving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1869. He never recovered and died at age 40.

Below is Gottschalk’s piece, “The Banjo” which definitely defied the norms of its time and lent itself more to the ragtime era which he never lived to see. Definitely a man ahead of his time:

Philip Martin Performs "The Banjo" by Gottschalk In Mexico - YouTube

Ben Harney (1872-1938) was another early ragtimer. No one is sure where he was born—either Kentucky or Tennessee. He began publishing rags in 1895, the same years as Ernest Hogan and some date him earlier than Hogan. Supposed by some to be a light-skinned black man, Harney was white. He may also be the originator of scat-singing which was also written out on the sheet music of his 1899 piece “Cake Walk in the Sky.” He often billed himself as the originator of ragtime but all ragtime scholars agree this cannot be the case. But he is an early one and definitely helped to shape the genre in a very fundamental way. His piece below, “You Been a Good Old Wagon But You Done Broke Down,” sounds like it may have been based on “Froggy Went A-Courtin’”.


Ben Harney, 1895 - You've Been a Good Old Wagon (First Ragtime song ever published) - YouTube
“You Been a Good Old Wagon” Ben Harney (first published in 1895)

Sylvester Louis Ossman (1868-1923), or Vess L. Ossman as he was known, hailed from Hudson, Hew York. He was quite prolific and recorded solo material as well as backing vocalists as Arthur Collins and Len Spencer with banjo accompaniment. He also toured and recorded in England. His popularity waned when a new ragtime banjoist appeared by 1910—Fred Van Eps. Ossman ceased recording in 1913 for two years before resuming his career. He made his final recordings in 1917 and thereafter went on the tour circuit. He died of a heart attack in 1923 after finishing a show.


Vess L. Ossman "A Bunch of Rags" rare visuals George Gaskin, Dan W. Quinn, Will F. Denny Phonoscope - YouTube
Bunch of Rags, Vess L. Ossman (1898 recording)

If one wants source material for ragtime, the bible is "They All Played Ragtime" by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis. This was the first book to deal with the history of ragtime. A couple of its contributors are friends of mine.

Another is Edward Berlin's "King of Ragtime" which is the definitive Joplin biography.

One nice source is "The Ragtime Ephemeral" by Chris Ware out of Chicago, another friend of mine. I don't think he publishes it anymore. I haven't communicated with him in a long time.

A fantastic source is "Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895" which is full of articles culled mainly from African-American newspaper articles of that period. It's put out by University Press of Mississippi/Jackson. I got it in a cool underground bookstore in the Detroit area but it's probably available online somewhere--Amazon maybe. Very highly recommended.

To study the blackface minstrel era, the definitive work is Professor Dale Cockrell's "Demons of Disorder." This comes very highly recommended. I'll try and touch on some of his themes as I think they are very important.

Another source is "One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race" by Scott Malcolmson which gives a nice treatment of the psychology of whites towards minstrelsy.

There are also several books I checked out of libraries that I can't remember the names of now. Also Gunther Schuller's "Early Jazz" is worth a look.

One good audio source is Reginald Robinson's "Euphonic Sounds" which I had to get by writing directly to him--I found him exceedingly polite--which contains not only all three of the Louis Chauvin's surviving songs (the only source to do so to my knowledge and Reginald's version of "Heliotrope" is by far my favorite) but also contains fragment of Joplin music unheard before. Reginald and Chris Ware noticed it in an old photo Joplin's last wife had taken of her deceased husband's piano with manuscripts on it. The top page was a hitherto unknown composition. They used a magnifying glass and studied the original photo housed at Fisk University in Tennessee and were able to transcribe it. It has lyrics but Reginald leaves them out in his 30-second recording of the fragment. Since Joplin didn't generally write lyrics to his pieces, I think it is something he wrote for his opera Treemonisha but then took it out for some reason.

Before we continue on with ragtime, lets go all the way back to minstrel music. We may as well cover it at this point and I know there aren't any other threads about it in this place. To understand minstrel, we must understand the banjo. The banjo is to minstrel what the electric guitar is the rock. I have to leave to do a bass gig right now but this tutorial will get things started:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shOgjCzPocY

The word “minstrel” shares the same root with minister—a servant, entertainer or imperial household officer. The word also meant a poet, a storyteller, a jester, a juggler, a workman. The French used the word to apply to musicians employed by the court to compose and play music for various events. But the word came to apply to itinerant musicians who traveled about seeking employment or what we call gigs. In the 18th century, the word came to mean essentially the same thing as a bard—a singer of heroic poetry accompanying himself on a lyre or other stringed instrument although this sense was limited to the medieval era. But starting in the 19th century in America, minstrel took on a whole new meaning.

Today, we tend to regard the American minstrel era as one of shameful racism where white people dressed in shabby clothes, smeared burnt cork on their faces, snatched up banjos and pranced around singing the way they thought blacks sang and danced. They mocked blacks and perpetuated stereotypes. As we will see, this is largely untrue. First, we should point out that whites performing in blackface preceded the minstrel era and that, while we generally say blackface minstrelsy started in America in the 1840s, the evidence shows that it had its beginnings in the 1820s. Like everything, minstrelsy evolved from something largely unrelated to what it eventually became.

To understand minstrelsy, we must first understand that the mind creates narratives to explain subconscious leanings and motivations too base to be seen or understood in the clear light of intellectual analysis. For example, a man can give you a million reasons why he prefers women with large breasts but the true reason is purely biological—large breasts indicate to him that she is good breeding material because she has plenty of milk to raise healthy offspring. This is regardless of whether the man even wants children. Women often claim to like a man with a compact, muscular buttocks because they find it “hot” or “sexy.” The truth is, his anatomical gift advertises to women that he possesses good thrusting power and therefore can impregnate women more easily and more often to produce healthy offspring. Again, this is regardless of whether the woman in question even desires to have children. Advertisers have known about this for years. They state that people who like to drive SUVs claim the vehicles are safer than ordinary cars (they are not) but the truth is, the people who like SUVs feel less intimidated encased in this bastion of metal than they feel in an ordinary car. They are careful, however, never to advertise their products to appeal to the subconscious desires.

When we are dealing race relations, the same subconscious motives present themselves and the mind must, once again, create a narrative to explain it that has nothing to do with the motive itself. In this case, we are dealing with the feelings of whites towards the color black. By studying the various roles of black characters in the theatre of the early 19th century in both Europe and America, we get an idea of what factors were at play (and many of them still play). Blackness we have always associated with fear and the unknown but also the low and the vulgar. A popular play in England called “The One Hundred-Pound Note” featured a bootblack named Billy Black whose face is always sooty. When the play came to America in 1827, Billy Black’s character was changed to black boy. The sootiness of his face and his occupation made the association natural to Americans.

Going back to the 18th century, the play “An Irishman in London—The Happy African,” was a farce written by William McCready that came to America in 1793. In it, a black maid named Cubba (played by a white woman, of course) and an Irishman named Murtoch are presented as outsiders to high white culture. Murtoch is brought low by McCready’s device of symbolically transferring Cubba’s blackness to Murtoch.

Then, of course, there is “Othello.” However Shakespeare intended the play to taken by the virtually all-white audiences that were the only ones to see it 300 years after it was written (1603), those whites took it to be a vindication of the moral wrongness of miscegenation—of course, by this, we mean specifically between black males and white females. White males took sexual relations with black female concubines as virtual birthright. No less a notable that John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, who stood opposed to slavery, decried the interracial relationship stating that “the passion of Desdemona for Othello is unnatural, solely and exclusively because of his color.” Adams was far from alone in his sentiment. He expressed the white male majority opinion.

So blackness as seen by white audiences in America as something “other” and something “low.” Black could never assimilate and so would always be on the outside. This, again, harks back to the subconscious idea that black represents the unknown, the unknowable, the shadow, the devil.

In Holland, they celebrate Christmas on December 6 as Saint Nicholas Day. The Dutch depict Nicholas as a bishop who ride a white horse. Running or walking alongside Nicholas is a fellow they call Zwarte Piet or Black Pete. He usually carries a sack of switches to beat the bad children with while Nicholas or Sinterklaas hands out the gifts to the good children. Pete is the shadow twin of Santa, his dark side. He’s lower than Sinterklaas and so runs alongside him instead on the horse with Nicholas.

The Dutch celebrate their Christmas as we do in America—with people dressing as Santa. The difference is that the Dutch also have people—often women—dress as Pete. They blacken their faces and don a Moorish costume. Here we see the difference between the subconscious motives and the narratives the conscious mind creates to explain them. Pete is black because he represents the “Other” or the “Outsider” but the Dutch decide to depict him as a Moor because consciously they cannot otherwise explain his blackness.

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Getting to the root of the Black Pete legend, Nicholas is frequently depicted with children as he is also their patron saint. He is shown with three young boys. This refers to a legend when a terrible famine struck the region (Myra in Turkey or Anatolia where Nicholas served as bishop). A butcher lured three young boys into his shop under some pretense and then butchered them and placed the body parts in a pickling tub and then put the flesh up for sale as ham. Nicholas saw through the man’s unspeakable crime and resurrected the three boys. In the iconography and statues the boys are often depicted still in the tub.

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What has that to do with Zwarte Piet? According to the French legend, after Nicholas resurrected the three murdered boys, their killer, Père Fouettard, becomes the servant of Nicholas and delivers punishments to bad children. Again, his evilness makes him a dark character and his name is a variation of Pierre or Peter and so he is Black Pete.

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A disturbing image of Père Fouettard devouring the three boys.

In other European countries, Nicholas’s helper is even more frightening. He is called Cert or Krampus (“Claw”):

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Krampus/Cert despite his horrific appearance (clearly he is the devil and notice he is black) only punished the bad children and rewarded the good. In this depiction, he gave the little girl apples while he takes her brother away (and she seems not the slightest bit upset about it). Below, we see Pete doing the same thing—taking away the bad children. Supposedly he sold them into slavery in Spain (Spain once conquered the Dutch and treated the people rather abominably). Pete and Krampus serve the same function because they are the same:

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In some cultures, Santa is not split into a good and bad side but rather was depicted as a not-so-jolly figure:

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He was known as ru Klas (“Rough Klaus”) or Knecht Ruprecht (note his horns). Ruprecht is the Germanic form of Rupert or Robert. He is sometimes called St. Rupert or St. Robert. The word “knecht” ties back to the word “minstrel” as it means “servant” or “farmhand.” In fact, Zwarte Piet is often referred to as “Knecht.”

There appears to be a connection between Zwarte Piet and blackface minstrelsy in the U.S. In Europe, mumming plays were popular for centuries and were put on in people’s kitchens for a small fee, the blackface character in the play was not an African but the evil character who slays the hero and takes his girl (played by a man in drag). A physician appears and heals the hero and resurrects him. The hero then revives and confronts the blackface character and, after a prolonged fight, would kill him and take his girl back. This play was an ancient reenactment of the sun/hero dying during the winter months when darkness prevails (the blackface villain) and then being reborn after Christmas Day and waxing stronger until his light banishes the dark. The play is actually never-ending and cyclical. Minstrelsy was probably descended from mumming plays since minstrel performances were originally put on in people’s kitchens and some of the players wore blackface. Eventually, blackface minstrelsy became its own genre. Even black minstrels wore blackface. Perhaps coincidentally, some old minstrel sheet music attributes authorship to “Santa Claus.”

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The mummers of St. Alban’s.

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An old mumming photo.

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A mumming book where the villain is identified as Beelzebub and depicted as a black man. In the woodcut below, a witches’ sabbat is depicted at Berwick. Notice Satan on the left is black. In fact, during this time, the Devil was very frequently referred to as “the Black Man”:
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Morris dancers in blackface. This also ties back to Black Pete who was depicted as Moorish as the word “Morris” as used here is widely believed to be a corruption of the word “Moorish.”

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Black has also symbolized death as a rebirth, a period of gestation before new life emerges. While depicted dualistically in the mumming play, the light and dark come together as one through the Black Madonna and Bambino statues. Here, they are representations of the new moon whose face is black but gives the eminent promise of the new light. The statues were never meant to be taken as a depiction of an African mother and child. In Ethiopia, the oldest Christian nation on earth, the Black Madonna is absent. They venerate only the white one.

Some may dispute that mumming plays have anything to do with American minstrelsy since the mumming play was never known to have come to the shores of the United States. The link is that mumming plays were put on by young bachelors who went from house to house in London and other English cities offering to act out the drama for tips. The plays were put on in the kitchen. The mummers carried brooms or besoms with them with which they would sweep out an area in the kitchen—a way of magically purifying the area. The play was said to be so convincing that when the Hero is stabbed and the fake blood spilled out, members of the audience often screamed or fainted believing that something had gone wrong and the person really had been stabbed.

In America, minstrel shows were often put on in the kitchen with the area being swept clean first. Cockrell tells us of dance contest in Boston between two prostitutes—Nancy Holmes and Susan Bryant—at the Long Wharf. A reporter who was present wrote that a company of women came down the wharf in a trot. Each lady carried a broom. The reporter wrote: “…at the word of command, they all commenced to sweeping Long Wharf for a clean spot which was soon done.” A “negro fiddler” provided the music. All the music was from the minstrel stage—“Miss Lucy Long,” “What Did You Come From? (Knock a N-igger Down),” “Jenny Get Your Hoe Cake Done” and the last one not mentioned but said by the reporter to be a favorite dance tune of James Sanford who danced in “negro extravaganzas.”

One of the most famous of the early blackface minstrel songs was “Clare de Kitchen” which has been done since at least 1832. Cockrell points out the verses show a very clear relationship to mumming:

In old Kentuck in de arternoon,
We sweep de floor wid a bran new broom,
And dis de song dat we do sing,
Oh! Clare de kitchen old folks young folks
Clare de kitchen old folks young folks
Old Virginny never tire.

I have found an even firmer connection through the song “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” While the song shows no evidence of being published before 1894, one verse is definitely from a much older song from England written in the 1830s or 40s by J. H. Cave:

Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah
Someone's in the kitchen I know
Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah
Strummin' on the old banjo!

Whether Cave wrote this verse with these exact words is not known but the blackface minstrel E. P. Christy used it in his act as part of the song “Farewell Ladies” in 1847. It clearly refers to a minstrel performance in the kitchen and may have been revised from a mumming play in the kitchen. One version of “Farewell Ladies” contains the line:

Goodnight, ladies! Goodnight, ladies! Goodnight, ladies! We're going to leave you now.

This indicates the act was intended mainly for the entertainment of the ladies. Once again, this has parallels to the mumming plays in England for these were put on by young bachelors whose purpose, at least in part, was to find young ladies to court and, by entering the houses of well-to-families, had a chance to scope out the females who might reside there. This carried over into rock and roll where the girls swooned over the guy up there with his ax playing that rockin’ song. If you doubt, listen to this 1925 recording of minstrel man Wendall Hall:


"Red Headed Music Maker " Sung by Wendall Hall playing a Ukelele Victor Record C 1925 - YouTube

The oldest folk festival in the United States is the Mummers Parade held every New Year’s Day in Philadelphia. The parade’s theme song is “O Dem Golden Slippers” by black minstrel singer and songwriter James A. Bland. They also perform the “Mummer’s Strut” which they do in the fashion of a 19th century cakewalk dance. The mummers here insist the mumming play did come to the United States and settled in Philadelphia.

So, we see that blackface has a long tradition in the West prior to the emergence of minstrelsy in the U.S. We see that its roots are embedded deeply into pagan notions of good and evil as represented in the stars and planets due to the need for a good planting and harvesting season. These ancient connections were so overgrown with more modern religious and racial detritus that the symbolism of blackness was transferred over to African slaves.

So the role of blackness in blackface is complex and simply cannot be chalked up solely as racism for it begs the question—what is racism? Do these ancient associations with the color black in themselves color how whites of the enlightened age regarded blackness? Even terms as “enlightened age” and opposed to the “Dark Ages” give us a clue. Whites also equated black with sickness, dirt and excrement. Can we simply assume these associations had nothing to do with the racism of the White world towards the colored races and Blacks in particular? So there were simply a lot of factors at play of which the hapless Africans of the Diaspora were often on the wrong end. The racism is itself a complex issue.

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As we see from the old soap ads, the equation of black with low standing and dirt is global. In the Indian caste system, the shudra caste were said to come from the feet of Indra. While the shudra do comprise many types of people, they are often the darkest people and the implication is that they are dark because they came from the dust on Indra’s feet. In Brazil, the lowest social class or caste are called preto. Preto means black even though many white Brazilians are preto and many black Brazilians are not. Saint Nicholas was often the patron saint of the underclass such as sailors, prostitutes, prisoners, pawnbrokers and thieves harking back his Black Pete/Knecht Ruprecht origins. The anarchist flag is also black because it stands in opposition to all other flags of nation:

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But sometimes the association of black is elevated. The name Krishna also means black and Christos was the name for Krishna in the Greek-speaking world. In fact, many Indians refer to Krishna as “Krista.”

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Although whitened in a lot of the art we see, Krishna is properly black.

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The Black Christ of Mexico City.

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Kali or Kalika is known by some cults as the Black Mother of all life. Her name means “black” but also “time” and “death.” She represents change which is envisioned as taking what it wants by force (after all, none of us want to grow old and feeble but fight change in order to retain our youth—we lose but we fight it). Notice her tongue hangs out like Krampus—strange ancient associations.

But Blacks were not the only people to face white racism during this era. The Chinese faced even worse treatment on the West Coast:

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In fact, the anti-Chinese racism borrowed familiar themes—they were lawless marauders without the White man’s civilizing influence and, of course, the very future of White womanhood was at stake. To rouse White male anger, nothing was more effective than to present the enemy as a threat to white women. The real threat, of course, was that white women, left to their own devices, might quite willingly marry Chinese men or a Black men unless prevented from doing so. Let us remember that Chinese and Black men were given the right to vote beginning in 1870 when the fifteenth amendment was adopted. No women of any race or color could vote in the U.S. before 1920. It simply boiled down to who had control of the system and the answer, quite obviously, was White males.

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The Yellow Peril racism was just as strong in Europe as in America and there is that angle about the safety of European (White) women implicit in the illustration.

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The Golden Spike ceremony held at Promontory, Utah on May 10, 1869. The Chinese workers, who laid on average about ten times more track than any other teams and who suffered far more casualties in far more dangerous terrains, were forcibly removed from the area before the photo was taken as though they had played no role at all in building the first medium to link the nation together. Robert Louis Stevenson noted that when he rode the American railroads, the Chinese were forced to stay in segregated cars. Stevenson thought it pathetic to see the “stupid” ill treatment of the Chinese whom Stevenson respected because “their forefathers watched the stars before mine began to keep pigs.”

So this was the milieu in which minstrelsy sprang up in the United States. The minstrel theme dealt with blackface characters being slaves on a Southern plantation. The lead blackface character was always trying to find ways to get out of work. When confronted by the Big Boss or the Mistress about his lack of being busy, he came up with ready excuses and was constantly outsmarting them (cartoons as Tom & Jerry and Pixie & Dixie were simply minstrel skits set to animation). On those occasions when the massa was not buying the stories or caught the slave red-handed in some deception, the slave character would be reprimanded in a gentle way—the way a parent reprimands a young child for doing wrong.

The true meaning behind these minstrel skits was not hard to figure out—the white audience was not really watching a slave slyly manipulating massa but rather they were watching themselves as children manipulating their parents. Most of the audience were white people who had grown up on farms where they had chores they were forever trying to get out of. If caught, the parents might discipline them but not too harshly. The white audience was simply reliving the carefree days of its agrarian upbringing. Those long, hot, sunny, summer days playing hide and seek in the tall corn, trying to steal a kiss from the girl or boy who lived on the next farm, sitting contentedly in the cool of the evening while the grown-ups talked or sang after a fine feast of a home-cooked meal carefully prepared by the ladies in residence. Once they left the farms and come to the cities with their overcrowding, crime, long factory workdays, isolation, drunkenness, corruption and a cramped, ugly skyline of sooty buildings and hovels—all the carefree innocence was gone forever. Minstrelsy brought it back to them—for a little while.

The blackface enabled whites to hide behind a shield of anonymity of sooty complexion living the happy-go-lucky, carefree existences that they somehow convinced themselves that slaves lived. With faces blackened and banjos in hand, whites could drop their socially responsible positions and shed all the burdens that respectability and propriety are heaped with and let the Lord of Misrule have reign for a while until the show was over and everyone went back home sated enough to be ready to start the grind all over again in the morning.

Consequently, minstrelsy was not nearly as popular down South as it was up North. In fact, blackface minstrelsy had its beginnings in New York and Boston and spread to such places as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Peoria, Milwaukee, etc. This is not to say that minstrelsy was not popular in the South but the Southern planters discouraged it because it caused audiences to pull for the slave in putting one over on the Boss and the Bosses did not like that message propagating. Even in areas up North and in the Midwest where whites had run all the free Blacks out of the town, they still enjoyed their blackface minstrel shows and crowded the theaters to watch them, to laugh, cry, clap along and sing while convincing themselves that they had a much tougher life than the dark ones they held in servitude, whose lives they held in their hands, lives they could (and not infrequently did) take on a whim without the slightest fear of consequence.

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Exactly who was the first man to don blackface and perform minstrel songs is open to question. We know it was being done by 1829 when George Washington Dixon began performing “Coal Black Rose” in blackface at the Bowery Theatre in New York. Today, if one looks for “Coal Black Rose” online, be careful to find the right one. There is a song called “Mammy’s Little Coal Black Rose” by Raymond Egan and Richard Whiting which is a completely different song. This is compounded because it is frequently titled simply as “Coal Black Rose” which is actually in error. Another version is a sailor shanty which seems to be derived from the minstrel song but still quite different. The version Dixon sang had the following lyrics:

COAL BLACK ROSE

LUBLY Rosa, Sambo cu-m,
Don't you hear de banjo—tum, tum, tum;
Lubly Rosa, Sambo cu-m,
Don't you hear de banjo—tum, tum, tum;

Oh, Rose, de coal black Rose,
I wish I may be corch'd if I don't lub Rose,
Oh, Rose, de coal blacka Rose.

Dat you, Sambo—yes I cu-m,
Don't you hear de banjo—tum, tum, tum;
Dat you, Sambo—yes I cu-m,
Don't you hear de banjo—tum, tum, tum;

Oh, Rose, &c.

Tay a little, Sambo, I come soon
As I make a fire in de back room,
Tay a little, Sambo, I come soon
As I make a fire in de back room.
Oh, Rose, de coal black Rose,
I wish I may be burnt if I don't lub Rose.

Oh, Rose, &c.

Make haste, Rose, lubly dear,
I froze tiff as a poker tandin here,
Make haste, Rose, lubly dear,
I almost froze a waitin here,

Oh, Rose, &c.

C-um in Sambo, don't tand dare shakin,
De fire is a burnin, and de hoe cake a bakin,
C-um in Sambo, top dat shakin,
De peas in de pot, and de hoe cake a bakin.

Oh, Rose, &c.

Sit down, Sambo, an warm your shin,
Lord bress you, honey, for what make you grin;
Sit down, Sambo, and toast you shin,
Lord bress you, honey, for what make you grin;

Oh, Rose, &c.

I laff to tink if you was mine, lubly Rose,
I'd gib you a plenty, the Lord above knows,
Ob possum fat, and homminy, and sometime rice,
Cow heel, an sugar cane, an ebery ting nice,
Oh, Rose, bress dat Rose,
I wish I may be shute if I don't lub Rose.

Oh, Rose, &c.

What dat, Rose, in de corner, dat I pi?
I know dat ni-gger Cuffee, by de white ob he eye;
Dat not Cuffee, 'tis a tick ob wood, sure,
A tick ob wood wid tocking on, you tell me dat, pshaw;
Oh, Rose, take care, Rose,
I wish I may be burnt if I don't hate Rose.
Oh, Rose, you black snake, Rose.

Let go my arm, Rose, let me at him rush,
I swella his two lips like a blacka balla brush;
Let go my arm, Rose, let me top his win,
Let go my arm, Rose, while I kick him on de shin,

Oh, Rose, &c.

Wat you want ob Sambo, to come back agin,
I spose you know de ni-gger by de crook ob de shin,
Wat you want ob Sambo, to come back agin,
I spose you know de ni-gger by de crook of de shin,

Oh, Rose, &c.

You Rose in the gall'ry, why don't you quiet sit,
And stop that throwing peanuts in the pit,
You Rose in the gall'ry, why don't you quiet sit,
And stop that throwing peanuts in the pit;
Oh, Rose, you cruel Rose,
You better come to Cuffee, you black Rose.

Oh, Rose, &c.

I challenge niggar Cuffee, a duel for to fight,
To meet me in de Park, in de morning by de light,
I challenge niggar Cuffee, a duel for to fight,
To meet me in de Park, in de morning by de light,
About Rose, coal black Rose,
I wish I may be burnt, if I don't lub Rose.

About Rose, &c.

We meet in de Park, from the Hall a little ways,
Up c-um a man, who they call massa Hays,
He ask wat de matter, but I stood quite mute,
Ni-gger Cuffee say he c-um to settle a bit of spute,

About Rose, &c.

He catch old Cuffee by de wool, he kick him on de shin,
Which laid him breathless on the ground, and made de ni-gger grin,
He jump up for sartin, he cut dirt and run,
And Sambo follow arter, with his tum, tum, tum;
Oh, Rose, you cruel Rose,
I wish I may be burnt, if I don't hate Rose.

Oh, Rose, &c.

The two black men fighting for the hand of the same woman was a staple minstrel theme.

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To understand how this blackface form of entertainment took root, we must understand the nature of theatre at this time. Ever since ancient times in Europe, public entertainments were always held, well, in public. This hasn’t changed much. We have all seen buskers and some of us are buskers ourselves. There are parks where plays are put on and so on. Mumming plays are often put on in public with someone passing the hat around. When people complained about loud entertainment in the streets, the city responded by passing ordinances to restrict or prohibit such performances. But the common people needed to have their outlets and so a theatre became necessary. Some towns had only one theatre while some had several. Regardless, the masses were not going to get more than one and even then not the entire theatre. So began the practice dividing the theatre into sections.

There was the pit for the commoners, workers, clerks, etcetera—a place in front of the stage where admission was general—and the boxes where the wealthier patrons sat. There was a middle section (service tier) for prostitutes because they often brought fairly wealthy clients—businessmen from out-of-town and the like—to the theatre. Way up in the balcony sat the poor and low class and even Blacks on occasion. This carried over well into the 20th century when Blacks in segregated areas had to sit up in the balcony when they were allowed in at all.

In the 1820s, some theatres did not take to minstrelsy at all, opera being preferred. Some theatres played opera on some nights and minstrelsy on others. Some theatres came to cater to lower class entertainments and dispensed with opera altogether. While other lighter forms of entertainment could share the same bill with opera, minstrelsy almost never did. On those rare occasions when minstrelsy did manage to get on the same bill with an opera, this was due to the performer having achieved a degree of fame that allowed it.

By 1830, this began to change. Minstrelsy had begun to be so popular that theatre-owners began to see the advantage of putting various entertainments on the same bill including opera and minstrelsy. While profit was the conscious motive, the underlying subconscious motive was the enforcement of communal codes of conduct. To deny the lower classes anywhere to enjoy their entertainments was courting disaster.

Minstrelsy itself has many roots in communal codes of conduct. We examined mumming plays earlier but another is the Callithumpians that were bands of young White men (usually bachelors) of low social status who marched through town, often in blackface, pounding pots and pans and making a lot of noise. They were popular from the 1820s through the 1840s and so it would seem many of them went over into minstrelsy itself.

One ritual of the Callithumpians that seems to have some tie to the mumming play is the charivari (pronounced “shiv-ar-ree”) where a person was singled out by the group for engaging in behavior considered counter to community standards to be visited at midnight by masked men who would harass and even rough up the person depending on the offense. This was accompanied by a great deal of noise specifically to attract attention in hopes of shaming said offender and warning any other potential offenders into toeing the community line or leaving. This carried over from a medieval German secret society known as the Holy Vehm who also issued warnings and midnight visits to people seen as not doing proper. The Ku Klux Klan also practiced the same thing and not by coincidence.

We also have yet another connection to Santa Claus in the form of Pelznickel. Pelznickel (loosely translated as Nicholas the Punisher) of German lore wore fur and carried both switches and gifts, usually candies and nuts. He wore bells that jingled loudly so that the children could hear him coming (similar to the Callithumpian pot-banging). When he arrived at the house, the parents would open the door and then back away in mock fright. Pelznickel would enter and entice the children to sample the candies and nuts. When the children approached, he would swing at them with the switches. He would seem to know which child was bad and what he or she had done. Then he would make each child promise to be good. At obtaining the promise, he would reward the child with the treats. Afterwards, the parents would offer him food or drink which he would accept before leaving. In this way, the children learn a lesson: be good (that is, adhere to community standards of behavior) and be rewarded and also reward those who enforced these standards for protecting the community (this still carries on today where policemen on duty often receive free food at restaurants or at greatly reduced prices).

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The Crossing-the-Line ceremony (or Shellback ceremony) carried on in the U. S. Navy is another ritualistic enforcement of community standards. A month or so before the ship is to cross the Equator, those who have not been initiated will have it reinforced that they are mere “polliwogs” as opposed to a full-fledged “shellback.” During this time, the heaviest shellback on the ship is designated the “Royal Baby” (a form of the Lord of Misrule). He will be surrounded by a cadre of stoutly built shellbacks. The rule is, any polliwog who can touch the Royal Baby is automatically a shellback. For this reason, he is surrounded by big guys who are not going to let any polliwog near him. During this time, the polliwog will be asked repeatedly through the day by shellbacks shouting the question, “What are you?” and he will answer, “I’m a polliwog.” As the ship crosses the Equator, the ceremony begins which involves the initiates donning their scrummiest dungarees (they’ll be thrown away afterwards) and being forced to crawl though garbage, getting hosed off by solid stream, being locked in a pillory and being forced to eat a ladle full of leftover food collected from meals and turned into a sickening stew of sorts, sucking a cherry out of the navel of the Royal Baby with his belly smeared with a thick coat of lard, etc. Finally, the initiate is dunked in water and held under then pulled up and asked (shouting), “What are you?” He will answer that he is a polliwog and will be dunked under again and this is repeated until he finally answers, “I’m a shellback.” At this point, the ceremony ends.

The Shellback ceremony is so important that the Navy records it in the sailor’s service record and he is issued a shellback certificate. A shellback is the envy of sailors who are still polliwogs (a sailor or officer may be in the Navy 15 years or more and still not be a shellback) and he who has this status is, in the vernacular, “a hotshot swingin’ dick.” There is a similar ritual when crossing the Arctic Circle known as the Bluenose ceremony. The object is to pass the hazing to obtain the status of bluenose. Again, this is entered into a sailor’s service record and he receives a certificate (neither female sailors nor officers are exempt from these ceremonies). Again, the purpose of these ceremonies is cohesion of the community. Two sailors who share this special status are seen as less likely to fight, steal from one another, or develop a bad attitude towards the Navy—any of which can destroy morale on a ship which could promote disaster.

Those who doubt that the Royal Baby is a form of the Lord of Misrule need only take a look at the figure below:

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This is a detail from Pieter Brueghel’s 1559 masterpiece, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Here, the Lord of the Carnival, a form of the Lord of Misrule, is a fat man surrounded by an entourage. Blacks in the West Indies and the United States are very steeped in these traditions. This is also carried on in America at Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) with one man being chosen as the King of the Mardi Gras as well as the ceremony known as John Canoe or John Kooner which was long celebrated in North Carolina and is still celebrated in the West Indies where it appears to have originated although it appears to have roots in both Africa and Europe. As with the mummers, those in the procession of the man chosen to be John Canoe were young bachelors. As with the mummers, some of these men dressed as women (strangely some of the early klansmen in North Carolina also dressed as women during their night-rides).

From these roots, particularly John Canoe, do we finally get to the birth of blackface minstrelsy. When George Washington Dixon performed onstage, he did so as a blackface character known as Zip Coon.

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Note that he carries a broom or besom as well as a sword as did the mummers. John Canoe (below) often dressed as a military officer.

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John Canoe.

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King Zulu Krewe. King of Mardi Gras.

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The Pinkster King of New York. In the slave days of New York in the 18th century, a festival started on the Monday after Whit-Sunday and lasted a week. An area was laid out in a rectangle where “dancing and merry-making” took place. A slave named Charley of Pinkster Hill was declared the king of the revelers. He dressed in a military uniform that was mismatched in color and size. After Charley’s death, the festival started to die with him and shut down completely around 1811. Today, it is resurrected for show. It could actually get very ribald. The Pinkster King bears a great resemblance to Zip Coon above.

Minstrelsy got started while Andrew Jackson was in office (1829-1837). During that time, there were a number of Northern Black men that were dandies—men who dressed to the nines and spoke the King’s English. They were mostly looked down upon in white society. Dixon’s Zip Coon was just such a character or rather a lampoon of a Black dandy. In the song called “Ole Zip Coon” he states:

OLE ZIP COON

(3x) O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
Sings possum up a gum tree an coony in a holler.
(3x) Possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
Den over dubble trubble, Zip coon will jump.

Chorus:
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden duden duden day.
O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.
Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day.

O ist old Suky blue skin, she is in lub wid me
I went the udder arter noon to take a dish ob tea;
What do you tink now, Suky hab for supper,
Why chicken foot an possum heel, widout any butter.

Chorus:

Did you eber see the wild goose, sailing on de ocean,
O de wild goose motion is a berry pretty notion;
Ebry time de wild goose, beckens to de swaller,
You hear him google google google google gollar.

Chorus:

I went down to Sandy Hollar t’other arternoon
And the first man I chanced to meet war ole Zip Coon;
Ole Zip Coon he is a natty scholar,
For he plays upon de Banjo “Coony in de hollar”.

Chorus:

My old Missus she’s mad wid me,
Kase I would’nt go wid her into Tennessee
Massa build him barn and put in de fodder
Twas dis ting and dat ting one ting or odder.

Chorus:

I pose you heard ob de battle New Orleans,
Whar ole Gineral Jackson gib de British beans;
Dare de Yankee boys do de job so slick, creek.
For dey cotch old Packenham an rowed him up de first.

Chorus:

I hab many tings to tork about, but dont know wich come
So here de toast to old Zip Coon before he gin to rust;
May he hab de pretty girls, like de King ob ole,
To sing dis song so many times, ’fore he turn to mole.

Chorus

The song starts off with the typical racist content of the time concerning how Black people in America talked and names as “Suky” who is described as being so black that she’s actually blue (or the other way around). The phrase “O Zip a duden duden duden zip a duden day” is, of course, the origin of the Walt Disney “Zippity doo dah zippity day” since the Disney song was a medley of old American folk tunes as one can hear the “Davy Crockett” melody in it as well.

The verse that starts off: “Did you eber see the wild goose, sailing on de ocean,
O de wild goose motion is a berry pretty notion” comes from a sailor shanty called “Wild Goose” or “The Wild Goose Shanty” which shanty man A. L. Lloyd sings:

Did you ever see a wild goose sailin’ on the ocean / Ranzo ranzo away away/
It’s just like them young girls when they take a notion / Ranzo ranzo away away

So one can see the various strands that came together to make blackface minstrelsy and it often comprised the lowest occupations and lifestyles—hunting raccoon and possum to eat and sailing whether it be a Navy ship, a merchant or a whaler—none were exactly prestigious—a sailor is a sailor.

Another version of “Zip Coon” that Dixon sang goes:

I tell you what will happen den, now bery soon
De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon
Dare General Jackson will him lampoon
An de bery nex president will be Zip Coon
An when Zip Coon our president shall be
He make all de little coon sing possum up a tree
O how de little coons will dance and sing
Wen he tie dere tails togedder, cross de limb dey swing
Now mind wat you arter, you tarnel critter Crocket
You shan’t go head widout ol’ Zip, he is de boy to block it
Zip shall be president, Crocket shall be vice
An dey two togedder will hab tings nice

In this version, the notions of honor at this period in American history are being mocked by the character of Zip Coon, the Northern freedman dandy. We can see that these verses equate Jackson with Zip Coon. “De bery nex president will be Zip Coon” who is dressed as a general in a mismatched uniform is compared to Jackson, himself a former general. Jackson had a great appeal to the masses after he termed the aristocracy as “undemocratic.” Yet Jackson was a part of the aristocracy since he was a slaveholder and had killed men in duels over honor—something the common people did not engage in.

“De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon” refers to Jackson’s dismantling of the Second Bank of the United States which was both constitutional and providing a solid and steady currency. The currency, however, was fiat currency meaning it had no real value on its own except what was assigned to it by law (the U. S. dollar today is fiat currency). Jackson favored “hard money” which meant a gold or silver standard where paper money was a promissory note representing that amount of precious metal. Jackson called the Second Bank corrupt and when the Bank needed its charter renewed by 1836, Jackson vetoed the charter causing the Bank to collapse. This “common” man also aggressively enforced Indian removal and reversed himself in his support of states’ rights when he refused to allow South Carolina to nullify federal law or secede from the Union.

The references to “Crocket” refer to Davy Crockett—the King of the Wild Frontier. Crockett had served in the Tennessee General Assembly and later in the U.S. House of Representatives. He championed the cause of impoverished farmers and settlers. Crockett also opposed Jackson on key issues, especially the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which he termed “a wicked and unjust measure” even though it cost him his reelection because most whites in Tennessee favored it.

What the song is doing is comparing the major players of Jacksonian Democracy (which historians assign a window of 1830-1850) and its opponents to the “Free Negro dandies.” These dandies were seen by society as pretentious, crude men who lack any real knowledge or taste. They are simply beneath the dignity of the class they aspire to and nothing can be done to remedy that. Hence the comedy of the phrase, “O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler” in the same sense as saying, “I’se a edjacated man, I is.” Dixon was pointing out the Jacksonian era politicians as being no better and no less comical but the song is also a criticism of how honor is denied to the common white citizen. Dixon was saying, “I’m Zip Coon, you’re Zip Coon, we are all Zip Coon in this day and age.”

And there are yet other versions of the song. This is partly because there was more than one Zip Coon. Besides Dixon, there was Bob Farrell who was probably singing “Ole Zip Coon” by 1833, a year before Dixon, George Nichols billed himself as Zip Coon and a “Mr. Palmer” is mentioned as singing it at Richmond Hill Theatre in New York in March of 1834—the same year and month that Dixon is first cited to have sang it. We are most interested in Dixon because of the socio-political commentary within his songs. Dixon was himself of low birth from Richmond in 1801. At 15, his singing abilities landed him in a traveling circus. He achieved stardom almost overnight with his blackface act at the Bowery Theatre in 1829.

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Dixon was not content to be merely “The American Melodist,” “The Buffo Singer” or “Zip Coon.” He had other aspirations and moved to Boston to start up a series of muck-raking scandal sheets, squarely on the side of the working class, that earned him a great many enemies. He then moved to New York and continued his writing career there and, again, gained many enemies and even did stints in jail. But he never gave up the stage either. He continued to perform as Zip Coon and even got into legitimate theatre. His muckraking efforts were squarely in the vein of charivari—accusing a person of some moral offense and inciting some type of retaliation among the readership against the offender. His opponents charged him with everything from petty theft to being a “ni-gger” or “mulatto.” His trials garnered a huge amount of attention and newspaper readers avidly kept up with the latest courtroom dramas.

Even Dixon’s own readership would be angered by some of the things he would print such as his antislavery stance and yet would turn up at his shows and listen to him as Zip Coon leveling the same charges from the stage and cheer him on wildly. This seems to have a shamanistic connection: a shaman was regarded by his or her fellow tribespeople as an ordinary person until they donned the mask of the god and danced into an ecstatic frenzy. Then this person’s utterances were regarded as the utterances of the god—not the person. Dixon’s audiences had the same reaction to him. As the editor of a scandal sheet they hated him, insulted him, reviled him but, in the mask of Zip Coon dancing ecstatically, he became the god whose utterances were received with good humor and applause.

Dixon later turned to long distance walking to raise money. He was known to walk long distances without rest or pause once even covering 30 miles in about five and a half hours. Everywhere he went, he was greeted by crowds. He was his own self-promotion machine and always managed to find a way to stay in the public eye. Yet, by 1861, he had so drifted out of the view of that eye that when he died that year, no major paper—remarkable considering his significant contributions to American culture—bothered to carry his obituary.


Zip Coon - YouTube

This is some amazing stuff and I can't wait to take some time to really dig into it. Nice job and thank you.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was born in New York in 1808 and worked as a carpenter’s apprentice as a lad. Rice, though, had a love for the theatre and began to perform in it on the side around the 1820s playing extraneous characters for which he received no billing and little pay. Later in the decade, Rice decided to go into show business full time and joined various theatre troupes. Rice showed a flare for comedy for which he began to get some amount of notice. During a three-year stint in Kentucky, Rice developed a liking for the music and dances of the Blacks in the area, most were likely slaves, and began to study them. Rice befriended them to the extent that he was able to observe their dances and talk and eat with them while studying everything about them. He thoroughly immersed himself in what it was to be Black to talk like them, perform their dance steps, sing their songs, joke like them, laugh like them. He was the Blackest White man in America.

Around mid-1830, Rice was performing in blackface as a character named Jim Crow. Exactly how he came up with his gig is not really known except apocryphally. One story is that Rice observed a Black, crippled stable hand dancing a strange, disjointed jig while singing a little song. Another, which may have more truth to it, is that Rice was taught or at least convinced to perform in blackface by a seven-year-old White boy named Sam Cowell. His father, Joe Cowell, was an Englishman performing in American theatre as a mainly comic actor. When Cowell and son heard “Coal Black Rose” being performed—perhaps by Dixon although others were doing it as well—young Sam decided he could perform that number in blackface. When he performed it onstage, claimed the elder Cowell, the audience rained the stage with money. Cowell also reported that Rice was a young and very unassuming man of rather a modest character and had no idea that the man had his own blackface act. This would indicate that Rice developed his character shortly after the Cowells departed the area and that the first city to see Rice perform as Jim Crow was, in fact, Louisville where it can be proven that he was living at the time and so this would put the emergence of Jim Crow at mid-1830. Certainly he was performing Jim Crow by September of that year because there is a handbill from that period still in existence advertising Rice as Jim Crow.

Rice, however, must have had an idea about performing as Jim Crow for some time because Rice did not invent Jim Crow. He must have learned about this character from the Blacks he had befriended. In the Yoruba culture of West Africa, their myths contain a crow that is something of a Trickster figure, that is, it accomplishes its ends by manipulating those around him. To haughty, highbrow types, he presented himself as an obsequious servant; to those with low self-esteem, he presented himself as an authority figure. Through skillful cunning and deceit, the Trickster figure gets what it wants from others by using their own natures against them. He is not always self-absorbed but might use his cunning to help others by tricking those who had no intentions of providing that help. The mythological figure that gives fire to man, for instance, is, in all cultures, the Trickster.

The Yoruban crow in their mythology is not only a Trickster but has the name of “Jim.” When West Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves, the Trickster crow named Jim simply became “Jim Crow.” These early slaves often consciously practiced Jim Crow by pretending to be dumb or lame to get out of work. Jim was both a popular slave name (think Huck Finn) as well as a popular minstrel name (Jim Crow, Dandy Jim, Jim Josey, etc.). When Whites banned certain forms of slave dance that involved crossing the feet or legs (seen as subversively anti-Christian), slaves developed dance steps that shuffled without crossing and called this dance “Jim Crow” possibly because it subverted the ban. It was this dance that Tom Rice observed and appropriated for his act. That would not likely happen on the sudden. So Rice must have had the idea of performing this dance onstage for some time and perhaps seeing Sam Cowell’s blackface routine and hearing of the rewards of the performance convinced him to try it out..

We can further deduce that Rice’s earliest performances were not particularly noteworthy. Nothing in the available evidence indicates that audiences were swept up by the song. It is not listed on any bills as a smash or a special feature but just as one song among several and neither as an opening nor closing number. So, we can deduce that Rice worked on it and probably got suggestions from other performers on how to spice it up.

We know, though, by 1831, that Jim Crow was garnering a lot of notice. Rice would “explode” onto the stage. As he pranced about, he would belt out his song, “Jump Jim Crow,” in his falsetto voice singing in slave dialect. Throughout his number, he would punctuate the song with explosive moves, twirls and twists. His limbs seemed to move independently of one another in this very odd but entertaining disjointed fashion as though his arms and legs has extra joints on them. However, it was all very carefully choreographed and required a unique skill to pull off. Clearly, no one else was doing anything like it nor could they hope to. To finish off the number, Rice would “explode” off the stage to a wild ovation. By 1832, Rice was set to tour the East Coast where audiences crowded the theatres eager to see the act they had read so much about. They were not disappointed.


Jump Jim Crow - YouTube

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When he performed Jim Crow at the Bowery Theatre in New York, Rice became something of a superstar. From there, Rice toured extensively all over the U.S. and then went to the U.K. where he was also a huge hit. He even married an English woman while in London and then returned to the U.S. with his new wife in tow in 1837. He would return to the U.K. in 1839 and again 1842 and returned each time to tour the U.S.

While “Jump Jim Crow” was a perennial favorite, he had other hits as “Clare de Kitchen” which we discussed earlier:


Clare De Kitchen.wmv - YouTube

The thing to keep in mind concerning “Jump Jim Crow” is that the song is, at its core, political and not just a dance tune. For example, one verse goes:

I’m for union to a girl
An dis is a stubborn fact,
But if I marry and don’t like it
I’ll nullify de act

References to union and nullification are code words and only thinly disguised. In some of the printed versions of “Jump Jim Crow,” we learn that he is against the U.S. Bank and its president, Nicholas Biddle who battled with Jackson over renewing the bank’s charter but lost. Crow refers to him as “Ole Nick,” a name for the Devil. Crow also criticizes Andrew Jackson’s opponents in Congress.

To further illustrate just how political “Jump Jim Crow” actually was, the burning of the Ursaline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in August 1834 during an anti-Irish/Catholic riot led by Callithumpians was headed by a man whose followers asked him to sing “Jim Crow” according to the courtroom testimony of Asa Barker, one of the firemen who arrived to battle the blaze, at the man’s trial. The prosecution later summarized the incident so: “When the convent is in flames, …Barker too at that time sees him by the engine; and then he was asked to sing Jim Crow, the Io Triumphe of the rioters…” So it can hardly be doubted that the song was primarily political and recognized as such by the Callithumpians and the attendees in the courtroom.

More importantly, we get a clue into who championed the song—working class, pro-Jackson, anti-Bank, anti-immigrant whites and primarily males. We remember too that George Washington Dixon used Callithumpian tactics and counted many friends and supporters among them. But wasn’t he anti-Jackson and pro-Bank? Yes, he was. Between Zip Coon and Jim Crow, we get two ends of a political spectrum. Both were working class and both were Callithumpian at the base but Dixon expressed what would become the radical Republican platform while Rice represented the Jacksonian Democracy. One blackface character was a Northern freedman dandy while the other was a shabby-dressed Southern slave. One was more about acting than music while the other cavorted in eye-popping dance steps of seeming infinite variety. One favored Northern Republicanism while the other favored Southern Democracy.

The Republican Party formed from the Whigs who began in 1832 as the Anti-Masonic Party after the murder of William Morgan in 1826 due to the way the Masons manipulated the justice system to favor the murderers. By 1833, the anti-Masonic issue was wearing thin and so the party banded with the National Republicans of John Quincy Adams (who called themselves “Anti-Jackson” and who were fracturing after Adams failed to get reelected in 1828) to form the Whig Party. They opposed Jacksonian Democracy and slavery (Jackson was everything they hated—a slave owner, a Mason and anti-Bank). To keep from losing the South, the Whigs nominated Zachary Taylor as their presidential candidate. He was a slave owner which infuriated the hardcore Whigs (among them, a chap named Abraham Lincoln) and they split from the party forming the Republicans with Lincoln running as their very first candidate. The radical republicans were a faction of the party led by Thaddeus Stevens who wanted slavery abolished, freedmen given the vote and, after the war, wanted harsh penalties against the Confederacy and opposed many of Lincoln’s more lenient, moderate policies of reconciliation. That Dixon voiced much of the radical republican agenda before it existed is remarkable.

Many of Jackson’s opponents referred to him as “Jackass” which he played along with until his democracy was represented as a jackass. In 1874, political cartoonist Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly used the jackass and the elephant as political symbols after a New York Herald hoax story about the animals in the Central Park Menagerie (a zoo) escaping and the images stuck.

I don’t mean to get too far ahead of the topic at hand but there is so much history attached to minstrelsy that it is inexcusable to neglect explaining it so the reader can place events in context. To explain minstrelsy without understanding the politics of the time would be a pointless endeavor. We must, for example, recognize that the word “Callithumpian” was a general term and not one that represented a united party or organization—there was no cohesion and many Callithumpian groups were very opposed to one another’s views.

Likewise, the same was true of minstrelsy. It appealed to the common man but the common folk were not united and so enjoyed minstrelsy for different reasons and interpreted it differently. To further confuse things, many whites opposed to what Jim Crow stood for nevertheless attended Rice’s performances for the sheer enjoyment of it and the same goes for Dixon. Then again, some of the verses of Jim Crow criticize whites and slavery. While “Zip Coon” and “Jim Crow” are political songs, they are not true social commentary but rather presented a loose assemblage of views found in the common people and verses were added to please the various factions of common folk rather than attempt to criticize or marginalize any. These songs, by their nature, are inclusive.

But what does the music itself tell us? If one listens to the clip of “Jump Jim Crow” that I posted earlier, one can hear that there isn’t much to it. It is rather simple. Rather anti-climactic to hear the music after reading about the fame and cheering crowds. In fact, a British journalist wrote: “America has sent us a filthy abortion of a song, with neither talent nor humor.” We would think the song must have been a catchy tune but instead hear something so simple that it is monotonous. What was it about the music that made audiences request encore after encore?

“Jump Jim Crow” is in the best tradition of the Callithumpians and mummers—a bunch of racket. There is some evidence that it derived from the Black slaves’ corn-husker songs. Two teams would compete shucking corn for a prize—usually a feast put on by the master of the plantation in which the winning team goes first. These festivities were also very loud and occasionally violent. Here again, the Lord of Misrule rules. I have not yet explained what the Lord of Misrule is—he governs the Christmas celebration as it used to be when it descended from the Roman Saturnalia (December 17-23). During this time, slaves became the masters and masters became the slaves. This societal inversion was known as “misrule.” In corn-husking, the master serves a fine dinner to the slaves and this often occurred on Christmas. Also, the each slave man was invited to the master’s house where the master greeted him cheerily, gave him gifts to give to his kids (usually firecrackers—again something noisy), poured him a big snifter full of his best bonded whiskey (whiskey aged in a barrel as least four years), a big cigar, wished him a Merry Christmas and then guided him to a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars and invited him to plunge his hands in and take as many as he could carry. This ritual tended to humanize slave to master and master to slave which resulted in a better working relationship (once again, the enforcing of “good” behavior).

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Christmas celebration in the U.K. as it once was. The jester-like fellow leading the celebrants is the Lord of Misrule. The connection to Callithumpian and mumming practices is quite apparent.

In blackface minstrelsy, the entire show was presided over by the Lord of Misrule. The blackface character onstage manipulates his master to peals of laughter from the audience. With Zip Coon he is a Black freedman who sings of being the “bery nex president” governing every White American. When the White performer dons blackface, he is not really imitating or mocking a Black man as we all too often assume today but rather he was making himself into the “Other” or the “Outsider” thumbing his nose at the upper class, the rulers, the authority that governed his life as completely as it governed those of the Blacks—one held in slavery, the other in wage slavery. He can no more belong to that class that he aspires to than the freedman dandy in his mismatched clothing of the landed aristocracy trying to speak the King’s English with a slave barnyard dialect.

In mythology, great rackets and boisterous laughter represent great change. The reason Christmas was once such a loud, bawdy affair was because the year was ending and a new one coming. We still tend to get loud and drunk to ring in the New Year and even the phrase “ring in” signifies noise—the clanging and banging of the Callithumpian procession as it wound its way down the street. We celebrate the Fourth of July with great fireworks not to symbolize the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air but simply that a new nation had emerged, a new epoch was dawning and we celebrate it annually as a promise of eternal renewal even if by that we may be overreaching a bit.

The minstrels and the Callithumpians were following this same mythology, their noise a way of putting the aristocrats on notice—that changes were going to be made. The minstrel music was this great racket played on banjos and fiddles. It was meant to the oppose the fine, cultured music of the aristocrats with their opera and their symphony orchestras reeling off extravagant, richly textured chords. Minstrel music was stripped down, clumsy, crude, discordant and meant to grate on the ears of those accustomed to fine arts. Minstrel was, as punk was a century and a half later, anti-music.

By 1840, Tom Rice, still riding high in his popularity, began to experience stiffness in his joints and even in his voice but he kept dancing and singing. By 1847, his wife passed away. By the time the 1850s arrived, the first wave of minstrelsy was drawing to a close and a new one arose to take the reigns with even more boisterous noise than its predecessor. Rice still wore his blackface onstage his stiffness had steadily increased until he could no longer dance although he still acted in legitimate theatre but even that became impossible eventually.

On September 19, 1860, Thomas Dartmouth Rice passed away. Although seven years junior to George Washington Dixon, Rice preceded him to the grave. He left behind no descendants, none of his children survived infancy. The exact cause of death was supposed by some to be liquor. Although Rice was a rich man at one point and wore extravagant clothing (making him a type of Zip Coon), a New York Times memorial piece stated that Rice spent his fortune away in the saloons. Be that as it may, Many mourned his death as the newspapers eulogized him. The exact opposite of how Dixon was treated. And yet, we remember “The Zip Coon Song” as “Turkey in the Straw” while “Jump Jim Crow” has faded completely from our memories. The only tribute to Rice’s character after his death occurred in a most unflattering way: the South’s brutal, dehumanizing segregation laws bore his name.

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But how did Blacks themselves regard minstrelsy? Were they offended, indifferent, favorable? I recently discussed minstrelsy with a young black man who found it horribly demeaning as pretty much everybody does today. He was similarly offended at many of the songs of the ragtime era because they threw the word “ni-gger” around so casually. He pronounced Arthur Collins “a redneck” which I’m sure Collins would have found baffling. What I found baffling was that this young man is a rap fan and saw nothing wrong with rap’s incessant use of “ni-gger” although rendered as “ni-gga.” He fell back on the old “it’s empowering when Blacks say it” although he couldn’t point to a single instance where any Black person was so empowered. He pointed out that many Blacks decried blackface and the coon songs back then. Sure and many decry rap’s use of the racist (and sexist) rhetoric today but does that mean it was the mood of the times?

My point was, was there any particular reason the average Black person in the age of blackface minstrelsy would have been particularly offended? The truth is, that in the North, when the fiddler played “Jump Jim Crow,” White and Black children would dance to it whether the fiddler was White or Black.

There is a case on record, Barbadoes v. Bolcolm, from March of 1840, in which a six-year-old “pretty little pickaniny” named Rebecca Barbadoes, had her dress, bonnet and cape splattered with green paint while dancing in a paint store on Southack Street in Boston. The paint store, in order to drum up business, had employed the services of a fiddler (race not given). When the owner, Mr. Bolcolm tried to shoo the children away, he claimed that they got “saucy” with him. Somehow or other, Mr. Bolcolm either accidentally or otherwise splattered Ms. Barbadoes’ clothing with green paint for which her parents demanded reimbursement of $20. A young boy named Thomas Brown (race not given) was called to the stand as a witness to the incident. He was asked what song the fiddler was playing that attracted all the children. He answered, “Jim Crow.”

So, here is a case that demonstrates that Blacks of that period had no innate dislike of blackface minstrelsy and enjoyed the songs as much as whites. In case the reader is wondering, the court decided that Bolcolm was responsible for attracting the children in the first place but that he also had a right to be angry with their disruptive actions and so was ordered that he reimburse the Barbadoes family in the amount of $5.25 plus court costs. He might have fared better had not his lawyer embarrassed himself by claiming that had the family (who were obviously not slaves) taken their place on an auction block, the entire lot of them couldn’t fetch $20 and that green went well with dark skin.

Among the Quakers in America in the 18th century, slavery was not only the peculiar institution but an intolerable one. They refused to stay silent and loudly condemned it. Because they ran the Yankee whale fishery in Nantucket and Massachusetts, they acquired great wealth (no one had learned how to drill for petroleum yet and so whales provided the only oil). Because of their money, the Quakers of New England turned New England into a bastion of antislavery practice. Region by region began to manumit its slaves resulting in a ballooning population of freedmen. New England was the vital link in the chain for the Underground Railroad which the Quakers financed with their whale money.

Some Quakers, still kept slaves and some moved out of New England to escape the stigma. Among these Quaker families were the Plummers who moved to Ohio in 1743. They brought their slaves with them, among them Thomas Snowden. When the head of the family, Samuel Plummer, died, the slaves were still not given their freedom until pressure was brought to bear upon them by the Society of Friends who ordered the Plummers to manumit their slaves or face expulsion from the Society. Thomas Snowden was given his freedom.

Thomas married a house servant named Ellen Cooper in Knox County, Ohio in 1834. He was 32 and she 17. They got a farm in Clinton, Ohio. Tom and Ellen were both illiterate but had seven children they sent to a local white school where they learned the three R’s. Their names were (and in order of age): Sophia, Ben, Phebe, Martha, Lew, Elsie and Annie. In 1856, Thomas died and Ellen was hard put to pay the mortgage. So the family put on musical shows and charged admission. In their handbills, they explained that they were trying to save their farm from repossession (they did but lost two acres of land to the bank).

The Snowden Musical Family, as they advertised themselves, was quite talented. The oldest child, Sophia, and the youngest, Annie, played fiddles. Annie was also billed as the “Infant Violinist” as she was no more than 5 by 1860. The Snowden girls also appear to be the only female fiddlers in America at this time of any renown. Ben also played fiddle, Lew played banjo. Phebe was the band’s dancer and may have played an instrument. The handbills also advertised the playing of guitar, dulcimer, flute, triangle and tambourine although we are not clear on which family members played these.

The Snowdens’ way of starting off a show was to start playing on the way to the venue (they were known to even play in graveyards) to attract attention and followers. Each show netted them about $12 which was decent money back in the 1850s and 60s. The Snowdens performed many covers of tunes popular in that day and were especially fond of Stephen Foster songs. The audience (mostly white) might shout out numbers that the band didn’t know and so they would improvise it showing a tentative connection to jazz.

The Snowdens were careful to keep things light and keep things clean. They advertised themselves as providing good, clean entertainment. They were abolitionists (after all, their father was a freedman) but downplayed their views while performing but they also avoided material that stereotyped Blacks. They garnered quite a reputation and name and so were often invited by whites of high social standing to spend the night in their homes while touring about.

The band had opportunities to hear, meet and play with other minstrel artists both black and white. Among them is Daniel Decatur Emmett. Besides living in the same area as the Snowdens, Emmett was multi-talented playing fiddle, fife & drum and banjo with equal proficiency. Emmett got his start in show business after leaving the army and joining the circus as a blackface minstrel.

In New York in 1843, Emmett performed in a group known as the Virginia Minstrels along with Billy Whitlock, Dick Pelham and Frank Bower at the Chatham Theatre in New York. This was a turning point minstrelsy which I will explain in a bit.

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The Virginia Minstrels. Emmett is on the banjo.

Emmett is most famous as the author and original performer of “Dixie” which he wrote in New York while a member of Bryant’s Minstrels in 1859. While Emmett also performed “Old Dan Tucker” some don’t believe he wrote it although the song is attributed to him as author.

There is some speculation that the Snowdens either wrote “Dixie” and gave it to Emmett or that they co-wrote it with him. This is not tenable for a number of reasons the main one being that “Dixie” clearly has antecedents among earlier Emmett songs written when the Snowden children were either very young or not even born yet. Secondly, the Snowdens avoided songs that used the slave dialect and so it is highly unlikely they would have written such a number. There is some speculation that Thomas Snowden may have actually co-wrote the song or one of its antecedents with Emmett and the evidence for this is not far-fetched. After all, Emmett lived close by the Snowdens in Knox County at Mt. Vernon and very likely came into contact with them even before their fame.

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Dan Emmett in blackface.

Some scholars pronounce “Dixie” as the most pro-slavery song in all of minstrelsy for it depicts a former-slave wistfully reminiscing about his youth on a Southern plantation:

O, I wish I was in de land ob cotton
Old time dere is not forgotten
Look away, look away, look away
Dixieland

The first thing to understand about the song is that it is the origin of the term “Dixie” as a synonym for the American South. No one is sure why although reference to the area below the Mason-Dixon line seems probable (some think it refers to a man named Dix known for his kindness to his slaves while others think it refers to Louisiana $10 bills called “Dix notes”). Regardless, the song became a huge hit in a very short time. Abraham Lincoln claimed it to be one of his favorite songs.

That Emmett would have written a pro-slavery song is hard to explain considering that he was anti-slavery. When the confederacy adopted his song as its anthem, he was infuriated and stated several times that he wished he had never written it. He joined the Union Army and wrote its fife & drum manual.

To understand why “Dixie” became an instant hit, we need to return to the point that 1843 was a turning point in minstrelsy. A new crop of minstrel artists, Emmett among them, rose up about this time and changed minstrelsy from a realist portrayal of blacks to a representational one that I touched on in earlier posts—that the blackface character was no longer meant to depict an actual Black man but rather the whites themselves as children. The white audience of minstrelsy mainly came from the farms—many of them down South—and missed those wonderful, warm, summer days of their youth tending the fields, feeding the animals, fishing in the creek, sleeping under a tree. In the city, they were lucky to even see a tree much less a creek. So, in “Dixie” we are really hearing a working class white man reminiscing of his childhood on the farm and this is why the song resonated so well among urban whites of the North as it did among rural whites in the South.

The Snowdens remained on the minstrel circuit for some time and, by 1900, Lew and Ben were the only surviving members of the band and were still performing. Dan Emmett died in 1903 an old man while Ben and Lew got involved in racehorse ventures but were ultimately still musicians and would put on shows from a gable of their Knox County home until Ben’s death in 1920. Neither left behind any children.

Found in the possession of Lew Snowden after his death in 1923 was a photograph of Dan Emmett along with the hand-written phrase: “Author of ‘Dixie!’” Lew also retained a newspaper clipping about Emmett being the author of the song. I find it strange that Lew Snowden would hang onto these items that he obviously cherished if Emmett were taking credit for writing a Snowden song. What it does indicate is that Emmett and the Snowdens knew each other and quite well.

Of the original songs of the Snowdens, only one is confirmed to have survived called “We Are Goin to Leave Knox County” and is believed to have been written sometime around the Civil War era and definitely based on Stephen Foster’s “Dear Lilly.”

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Union soldier with banjo.

When Emmett collected a song he liked that he did not write, he did not take credit for it although perhaps there might be songs attributed to him by others. One such song is one Emmett had published under the title “Genuine Negro Jig.” The title would indicate that Emmett did not write it but had encountered and published it in order to preserve it. In 2010, the Carolina Chocolate Drops recorded “Genuine Negro Jig” under the title “Snowden’s Jig” as it is their belief that Emmett likely heard them perform it and so it may be another song of the Snowdens that is still preserved. I think they are right.


Carolina Cocolate Drops: Snowden's Jig - YouTube

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Minstrel band—real Blacks this time.

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Dan Emmett late in life.

Sorry, meant to include these in the last post:

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Ben Snowden

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Lew Snowden

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By the 1870s, minstrelsy as it had been known was fading fast and entering yet a new phase: the cakewalk. Cakewalking was a dance that started on the Southern plantations in the days of slavery. It was also called chalkline-walking or a walk-around. On a certain day, usually Sundays, the slaves would dress up in their best finery—almost always hand-me-downs given to them by the master and his family—and form two columns. The columns were divided into male and female. On one end, a man from one column and a woman from the other would meet in the middle and strut down the between the lines of the dancers while everybody moved up and then the next couple came down the line and so on. This was done to the music of a fiddler, a banjoist or both. Other times, an ensemble would play on other instruments as cowbell, jug, bones, comb, harmonica, cigar-box guitar (or diddly-bow), kazoo, Jew’s harp, washtub bass and the like.

The music was of the type that helped to spawn ragtime—a spry, jumpy melody and rhythm. The music and dancing would attract the master or his family and they would be given the honor of picking the best dancing couple. The winners would win an enormous cake—usually with coconut topping—but it was so huge that everybody would help them eat it. These dances generally lasted all night long especially during the winter months while the fields lay fallow.

While many of the instruments used for the cakewalk can be traced back to Africa—bones, banjo, kazoo, diddly-bow, washtub bass—cakewalking itself has no African antecedent. When native Africans witnessed the dance, none recognized it as anything akin to the dances they knew of.

Some statements of cakewalking celebrants tell us why:

“Us slave watched white folks' parties where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march, with the ladies and gentlemen going different ways and then meeting again, arm in arm, and marching down the center together. Then we'd do it too, but we used to mock 'em every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn't dance any better.”

Ragtimer Shep Edmonds recalled in a 1950 interview:

“They did a take-off on the manners of the white folks in the ‘big house’, but their masters, who gathered around to watch the fun, missed the point. It’s supposed to be that the custom of a prize started with the master giving a cake to the couple that did the proudest movement.”

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The cakewalk dance became popular across the ocean as this European illustration shows. Whites did not seem to realize that they were lampooning their own dances but thought that they were doing some authentic African dance even though the cakewalk has no African roots.

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This is perhaps the first published cakewalk from 1877—Harrigan’s & Hart’s “Walking for Dat Cake.” It shows its ties to early minstrelsy as the celebrants are dancing in the kitchen (note the cupboards and chairs). The cakewalk is the origin of the phrase “take the cake.”

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Cakewalker Doc Brown who danced on the streets for tips became famous after rag composer Charles L. Johnson saw him perform and composed a piece for him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BoPB9uciJo
The very talented old-time pianist Morgan Siever, shown here performing “Doc Brown’s Cakewalk” at age 11.

The joining of the cakewalk dance and the musical form also called cakewalk has been the source of some debate. Purists insist that cakewalks are not rags and yet some of the pieces pronounced cakewalks by some purists are pronounced rags by other purists and vice-versa. I really don’t know the difference myself because I often classify some pieces as cakewalks only to find some music scholar classifying them as definite rags.

According to some sources, though, cakewalk pieces are more march oriented and, in fact, were often used by John Philip Sousa and also by his former sideman, Arthur Pryor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaINuigGTGg
“Frozen Bill Cakewalk” by the Arthur Pryor marching band.

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Bert Williams and George Walker of the very famous Williams & Walker vaudeville comedy song and dance team made cakewalking a huge phenomenon. Bert Williams became one of the three highest paid performers in the country. If he was refused admission to a bar for his color, he’d offer to buy everybody in the place a drink if they’d let him in and they usually did. When Williams & Walker learned that Teddy Roosevelt was even practicing cakewalking in the White House, they sent him a telegram challenging him to a face-off as a publicity stunt. The White House never responded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcFQjG3TiBw
1903 cakewalk clip featuring real African-Americans rather than Whites in blackface. The cakewalk dance never died but was cannibalized by such dances as the foxtrot and the lindy-hop.

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Joplin’s 1902 piece “The Ragtime Dance” depicts a cakewalking couple on the cover. The clothing of cakewalking couples was deliberately ostentatious and gaudy and often mismatched showing a clear connection to Zip Coon from decades before. What was different about Joplin’s piece was that it had aspirations of turning rags and cakewalking into legitimate art forms rather than a folk expression at the mercy of the racist mood of the times. Unfortunately, most of the country was not onboard with him.

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This Christy’s Minstrels handbill shows what appears to a cakewalking couple at the bottom decades before cakewalking became a fad. The woman is, of course, played by a man in drag (once again reinforcing the idea that minstrelsy descended from mumming plays). In fact, women did not get involved with onstage cakewalk productions until after the turn of the century. Before then, all female roles were played by men in drag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUIXq-taPhg
“At a Georgia Camp Meeting,” a cakewalk by Frederick Allen Mills (who went by the name Kerry Mills) from about 1897 recording on an Edison brown wax cylinder said to be the best recording wax.

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Cakewalks were almost entirely a White phenomenon and some White composers specialized in them. The three tops cakewalk writers were Kerry Mills, Abe Holzmann and J. Bodewalt Lampe. Not all cakewalks were written by White composers however. The first piece Joplin released after “Maple Leaf Rag” was a cakewalk he co-wrote with Arthur Marshall called “Swipsey Cakewalk” (although, predictably, some say it is a rag) published in 1901.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQnCT9HnMNA
What we can be certain of is that the term “cakewalk” preceded the term “ragtime” (believed by some to have been coined by Ernest Hogan whom we covered earlier). So we can conclude that the early rags as “Mississippi Rag” would have been cakewalks because the Missouri style of rag that became classic simply did not yet exist or at least it was not very well known until 1899 when Joplin put it on the map followed by James Scott. The cakewalk began to decline after 1904 when classic ragtime became the rage.

Part of the problem over the confusion of rags and cakewalks is likely because of the publisher. If cakewalks were big sellers, he might buy a rag from a composer but title it a cakewalk in order to maximize sales. We know this is true in Joplin’s case because John Stark actually titled the piece “Swipsey Cakewalk” as he titled virtually everything Joplin turned into him. Because of this kind of thing going on, the debate over what constitutes a rag or cakewalk will likely never fully be resolved.

Blackface minstrelsy moved from ragtime into jazz. Even Fred Astaire danced in blackface once as a tribute to Bill Robinson whom he greatly admired. Not until the 1940s did blackface start to fall out of favor by which time even the most premier blackface performer, Al Jolson, dropped it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6dXrm1YjBE
Ned Haverly’s blackface act. In spite of all politically correct sentiments over this kind of thing, he was quite a good performer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybf9s-gVnjg
Emmett Miller was one of the greatest blackface artists forgotten by history. Although he was jazz (his band, the Georgia Crackers, contained the Dorsey brothers and guitarist extraordinaire Eddie Lang), he was the primary inspiration of Hank Williams (who lifted “Lovesick Blues” from him) and Bob Wills not to mention David Lee Roth (who lifted “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Big Bad Bill Is Just Sweet William Now”). Jimmie Rodgers was a contemporary but borrowed a lot of Miller’s vocal techniques for which Miller hated him referring to him as “that damned hillbilly.” This was recorded about 1928 or 9.

The cakewalk carried on the tradition of the minstrel show in that noise was the raison d’etre. From the New York Age May 11, 1889 we read: “Prof. Banks’ prize cane and cake walk caught the crowd that was looking for fun ‘off the Bristol.’ The walkers were numerous and the din was equal to an indoor cyclone. The lucky walkers were carried off their feet, so great was the din.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkjsN-J27aU
Michigan J. Frog doing “Hello Ma Baby” and “The Michigan Rag.” The high-stepping dance he does with top hat and cane descended from the cakewalk which was just how the men dressed and moved.

Minstrelsy gave the world some of its best-known songs: Dixie, Camptown Races, Oh Susanna, My Old Kentucky Home, Old Folks at Home, Ring Ring de Banjo, The Arkansas Traveler, Blue Tail Fly (Jimmy Crack Corn), Carry Me Back to Old Virginny (Virginia’s state song), Golden Slippers, Turkey in the Straw (The Zip Coon song), Jenny Get Your Hoe Cake Done, Old Dan Tucker, Miss Lucy Long, The Old Grey Goose, Possum Up the Gum-Tree, Darling Nelly Gray, Little Brown Jug, Nelly Bly, Jingle Bells, Buffalo Gals, etc. Even some songs that weren't written for the minstrel stage came to the American consciousness (and ultimately the world) via minstrelsy such as "Comin' ‘Round the Mountain" which was originally a hymn sung in various African-American churches that the minstrel men picked up on--anything to get the audience clapping and singing along.

The minstrel tradition has not died but was simply so deeply absorbed into American culture that we take it for granted. Rock and roll, for example, is an outgrowth of minstrelsy. In fact, the parallels are startling. The white minstrel man onstage singing and dancing like a black man was updated in the form of Elvis Presley—a white man who went onstage to sing and dance like a black man. Or what was the difference between Dan Emmett singing, “I wish I wuz in de land ob cotton” and Wild Cherry singing, “Play dat funky music, white boy”? Did minstrelsy engender the same reaction among parents of young, white children that rock and roll did? Although I have no evidence that this was the case, we would have to assume this would have happened to some degree. Like rock and roll, minstrelsy was a loud, noisy music meant as a form of rebellion against authority. Many of the strands of rock and roll were directly influenced by minstrelsy—blues, jazz, country and folk. If the reader could be transported back in time to a real minstrel show, he or she would likely be surprised at the amount of audience participation reminiscent of a rock show as well as periodic violence breaking out.

Bluegrass, for example, is really modern day minstrelsy. The song structures, lyrics and instrumentation used in bluegrass is pure minstrelsy. I have argued with people online who try to insist that bluegrass came out of the Celtic tradition. This is sentiment echoed all over the internet and often by people who should know better. Bluegrass sounds NOTHING like Celtic music. When I asked these people for a single example of true Celtic music that resembled bluegrass, I never received a response. I know they checked but, obviously, none found anything because there isn’t anything. Bill Munroe basically invented bluegrass (which is actually younger than Western swing) and many of his original sidemen were former minstrel musicians. While bluegrass does have some roots in old time mountain music which is largely English and Scottish, bluegrass is more firmly rooted in rags, blues and jazz. That “built-in” bluegrass beat is certainly like nothing ever produced in native European music. Some proto-bluegrass musicians as Uncle Dave Macon were also former minstrel musicians whose music has strains of the bluegrass that was to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8b-Pbr2GVQ
Uncle Dave Macon doing a Dan Emmett song in the traditional style. As one can hear, minstrelsy had a tremendous influence on bluegrass which is not derived from Celtic music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZuREMOLxAk
Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver do a song that is pure bluegrass but has no resemblance to the indigenous music of the U.K. This song could have been performed at a 19th century minstrel show without anyone finding it particularly odd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50_iRIcxsz0
Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans” is not bluegrass but it is still PURE minstrel fare. Someone could have performed this on the minstrel stage in the 1840 and had a huge hit overnight.

The point is that there was no stylistic difference between what whites played and what blacks played in America. Although we might think of whites and blacks as keeping segregated prior to the Civil War, this was not any kind of rule. The New York newspapers were full of stories and notices of blacks playing for white dances, black and white marriages and even blacks and whites teaming up as con artists (think of the beginning of the movie “The Sting”—that was not all that rare). Black and white musicians knew each, respected each other’s talents and taught each other songs and techniques.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Elu4YHm-e0
A. C. “Eck” Robertson is one of the founders of country music who made his first recordings in the early 1920s. This song is called “There’s a Brown-Skinned Girl Down the Road Somewhere” which strongly indicates that it derives from black fiddlers. All the available evidence shows however that there was no difference in the way black fiddlers and white fiddlers played. Robertson’s partner, Henry Gilliland, even fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and believed in the “Lost Cause” ideology but still drew musical inspiration from the black musicians around him rather than from European music.

Perhaps white men as Robertson and Gilliland understood at least implicitly the importance of the Africa-American influence in the forging of a purely American style of music. Indeed many European composers understood this explicitly. One was Claude Debussy who wrote “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” in 1913:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JURdxCs2Uls
10-year-old Umi Garrett plays “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.” Since ragtime has a child-like quality to it, then perhaps we can best capture its spirit listening to children play it. Indeed Debussy wrote the piece for his own daughter, Emma-Claude (whom he called “Chouchou”) as one of six pieces that comprised his work “Children’s Corner” and a separate work, “La Boîte à joujoux” (The Toy Box).

Hsin-Yin Ko writes in his doctoral thesis, Evocations from Childhood: Stylistic Influences and Musical Quotations in Claude Debussy’s Children’s Corner and La Boîte à Joujoux:

It was John Phillip Sousa [whom Debussy referred to as “The king of American music] who brought ragtime to Europe at the Paris Exposition in 1900 and his influences would soon reveal in Debussy’s music. Although Debussy had first heard music from the “New World” in the 1890’s, artistic representations and historic portrayals of American culture and its Negro heritage began surfacing in Europe around 1900. The earliest documented manifestations of such exposés appeared in fairs and boardwalks in the French resort of Deauville. One of the main characteristics of minstrel groups was their use of the cakewalk. As a musical form, this 19th century dance of African-American origin incorporated syncopation and a habanera-like rhythm into the regular march rhythm…

The composer Antonin Dvorak came to America to study its folk traditions and afterwards states that “the future American school will be based upon the music of the Negro.” This was considered radical for its time but he has been indisputably correct. When Dvorak was appointed director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, his assistant was a young African-American named Harry T. Burleigh. Burleigh said he often sang the plantation songs he learned as a boy from his grandfather (a slave who bought his freedom) to Dvorak. The music Dvorak heard inspired his composition “New World Symphony”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETNoPqYAIPI

Concerning the piece, Burleigh stated that Dvorak based it quite consciously on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” He wrote: “Part of this old ‘spiritual’ will be found in the second theme of the first movement ... given out by the flute. Dvorak saturated himself with the spirit of these old tunes and then invented his own themes. There is a subsidiary theme in G minor in the first movement with a flatted seventh [a blue note] and I feel sure the composer caught this peculiarity of most of the slave songs from some that I sang to him; for he used to stop me and ask if that was the way the slaves sang.”

When Burleigh sang “Go Down Moses” for Dvorak, he said, “Burleigh, that is as great as a Beethoven theme.” This was no off-the-cuff remark for Dvorak who so idolized Beethoven that he had his students develop themes and then apply them to a Beethoven sonata as a skeleton and follow it measure for measure to teach them about key relationships and modulation in composition.

Burleigh belonged to the free African Church of St. Philip’s in New York in the Tenderloin district. Dvorak was very impressed by the skill of the St. Philip’s musicians and choir. Two other musicians from St. Philip’s were recruited to study under Dvorak at the conservatory, Edward B. Kinney and Charles Bolin (who later changed the spelling to “Bohlen”). Before Dvorak’s tenure as director was over (1895), over 150 African-Americans were enrolled at a conservatory with a student body of 600 seats. Kinney and Dvorak would conduct the St. Philip’s choir at Madison Square Garden in 1894 while Bohlen would go on to work with James Reese Europe at Carnegie Hall in the 1910s.

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Antonin Dvorak.

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Harry Thacker Burleigh spent much of the rest of his long musical career making artistic expressions of African-American folk music as he learned to do from his esteemed mentor, Dvorak. When Joplin moved New York, he lived in the Tenderloin district where he certainly would have heard about the efforts of Dvorak and Burleigh and so the work of these two men played a large role in the eventual transformation of jazz into art music.

Blackface Minstrel Show Sand Dance - YouTube

Ned Haverly was the grandson of J.H. Haverly who ran Haverly's United Mastodon Minstrels. He learned his craft from the best of the best.

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What's interesting are the words to the song he sings:

I want you to know that I’m ragged but right
Hopin’ like I'm livin’ like you people that’s white
Hoedown steak everyday for my board
That’s more than all you rounders in ‘is town afford

I’m a mighty good man to have hang around
I’m tailor-made I’m not a hand-me-down
I’m a Eagle, I’m a Mason, I’m a Elk, I’m a Knight
I’m ragged but right
You hear me talkin’
I’m ragged but right

On the surface, Haverly is a black man telling white people that despite his hand-me-down clothes and 2nd hand belongings, he's as good as they are. He's "right" (as in "righteous") because he is there to do the things that need doing that white people don't want to do for themselves and so hire him to do them, i.e. their dirty work. He is saying, "You think you don't need me until you suddenly realize how much you need me. I cook for you, clean for you, I repair your appliances and fix your yards. I know all your family's dirty, little secrets and I keep them secret. Where would you be without me? And that's not all--I also belong to all the same high-falutin' secret societies that you do. So maybe you're rich but I'm righteous, you hear me? You're rich but I'm righteous!"

But underneath that black veneer is a working white man delivering that same message to the nobility of American society. "Maybe you rich folk have it all, but who manufactures all those goods you own? And who fixes them when you break them? Why, that would be me! I know all about you because I work in your house and I maintain your car and trim your trees. And what do you know about me? Nothing. You wouldn't be caught dead visiting my house or riding in my car and you wouldn't know the first thing about how to fix it. You're so dependent on me, it's ridiculous. AND I belong to all the same secret societies you do. So maybe you're rich but I'm righteous, you hear me? You're rich but I'm righteous!"

It's the same message that minstrelsy has delivered since the days of the United Mastodons--today, rich folks, we put you on notice: changes are coming. There's going to be some changes made around here. Jazz, that latter-day minstrelsy, expressed the same, identical sentiment (in fact, you can even sing it to the same tune as Ned Haverly's song):

For there's a change in the weather, there's a change in the sea,
So from now on there'll be a change in me.
My walk will be different, my talk and my name,
Nothing about me is going to be the same.
I'm going to change my way of living if that ain't enough,
Then I'll change the way I strut my stuff
Cause nobody wants you when you're old and gray.
There'll be some changes made today, there'll be some changes made.
For there's a change in the fashions, ask the feminine folks,
Even Jack Benny has been changing jokes,
I must make some changes from old to the new,
I must do things just the same as others do.
I'm going to change my long tall Mama for a little short fat,
Going to change the number where I live at.
I must have some loving or I'll fade away.
There'll be some changes made today, there'll be some changes made

Okay--lets recap what we've learned thus far about minstrelsy and the early ragtime era:

So how then did whites in America see the blackface minstrel? Did the burnt cork on the face mean only that this person represented a black slave or freedman or did it signify something else? Seeing the close ties between mummers, Morris-dancers and Zwarte Piet to blackface minstrelsy, we see something else at play than simple crude racism—although there is plenty of that too. In many areas where minstrelsy was quite popular, blacks had been all but run out and kept out. Why would whites do that only to crowd into the theaters to watch a minstrel performance of whites with blackened faces? Because they did not wish to see real blacks. What they wanted to see was themselves from a past they viewed as idyllic. Minstrelsy was popular in the urban areas and in large cities, northern cities in particular—New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and on into California. The whites that populated these cities had left the farms and rural existences of their childhoods were vicariously returning to it through the watching of minstrel performances.

In the minstrel show, blacks were not worked from sunrise to sunset, were not whipped or punished to any significant degree and had an inordinate amount of leisure time on their hands—much of it spent on finding ways to get out of work than actually working. Even then the work was nothing more than sweeping up, polishing the silverware, cleaning up after supper, etc. In other words, the blackface slaves, who rarely if ever called themselves slaves, were really children with their daily chores around the house. In the minstrel shows, massa and missy were rarely seen and, when they were, they were there to be deceived by a slave trying to get out of work. Sometimes, they delivered a light scolding or rebuke for the slave's deception or laziness but there was always easy forgiveness and security in the form of love, food and clothing. In turn, the slaves loved their masters in spite of constantly deceiving them. The slaves were happy but knew that their happiness depended upon the moods of their masters and even outright lying to them was acceptable if it kept them happy. Again, this was nothing more than the family relationship of parent-to-child and child-to-parent. The slaves thought of the masters as their parents and the masters treated the slaves as though the latter were children.

Minstrelsy then provided an outlet for the white city-dweller to relive his or her idyllic childhood back on the farm. As earlier stated, the country was in the grip of tremendous changes—physically, socially, technologically, demographically, economically, politically, culturally, etc. Many white Americans suffered a culture shock. Instead of living off the land as their own bosses, they now worked in factories for meager earnings and a boss who didn't care about them and thought nothing of overworking them or throwing them out on the street. They were largely wage slaves not particularly better off than the black slaves in the South. Those slaves at least had a roof over their heads and some amount of food in their bellies and no fear of being fired or laid off. The wealthier whites had social respectability to maintain and upon them fell the white man's burden. They were expected to lead the way and pay for it.

So what was the meaning of the blackened face? Even many black minstrel singers donned the burnt cork residue. Why would they have to? We must remember that the concept of "white" as a race was new. What did it really mean to be white? White Americans were not sure. As hard as they looked into it, the concept of being white meant nothing without differentiating it from being non-white. In the modern age, we are used to white supremacists counting every technological innovation to come out of Europe as proof of the superiority of the white race, but in the 19th century such a device was rarely resorted to for the simple reason that most Americans today termed as white did not think of each other as white. Americans of English descent, for example, often did not regard those of German descent as white and vice-versa.

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Although a black man, Bert Williams frequently performed in black face. While whites in black face were imitating blacks, Williams was imitating whites imitating blacks.

After all, the English had a global empire, why should they include anyone else as being on their level who was not part of building it? Neither English nor Germans regarded Italians as white and so on. The Irish and the Dutch (who once dominated the extremely lucrative spice trade via the Dutch East India Company or VOC as it was known before the British took over) were often excluded from the white race in the American mentality as were Jews, Poles, Slavs, Spaniards, Portuguese, Danes, Greeks, Gypsies and others. Basically, white Americans were just starting to embrace the idea of being "white" as a globally dominant race rather than as disparate cultures rooted in Europe.

The idea that all these various European nations—England, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, etcetera could or should be combined into one and whose innovations, inventions and cultures were the expression of a single great race was only just tentatively taking hold in the 1830s. It ascended in the national consciousness along with minstrelsy and progressed in step along with it until the culmination of Theosophy and Aryanism in the late 19th century that seemed to fill in the missing pieces (even if in a pseudo-scientific, non-verifiable fashion) at which point minstrelsy began a slow decline.

Perhaps the earliest expression of white supremacy in the American conscious was the concept of Manifest Destiny. Not surprisingly, it too arose with minstrelsy starting in 1845 when John L. O'Sullivan coined the term in an article entitled Annexation that appeared in the July/August issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review. In the article, O'Sullivan urged to the annexation of the Republic of Texas because, he wrote, the United States had a "manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

O'Sullivan again used the term later that same year in another article to advocate the annexation of the territory of Oregon. However, what needs be noted is that Manifest Destiny was not explicitly based on the idea of a type of lebensraum, i.e. expanding white race taking up new lands as living space, but rather it championed the spread of democracy across North America as something divinely ordained. That this expansion would present extremely serious problems for the Native Indians and possibly expand the practice of slavery into these new lands became part of the struggle for white Americans to understand who they were and what they were doing and whether or not their actions were morally correct by the laws of God or man. Minstrelsy was one of the attempts they made to find an answer.

White supremacy was implicit in Manifest Destiny because if democracy, "liberty and federated self-government" were divinely ordained to spread over the American continent, the ones doing the spreading were not going to be black slaves, Native Indians or Chinese railroad slaves. To look at the plight of these people and reconcile that with American Exceptionalism may have caused Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun and Lincoln to oppose further expansion but the idea of a white super race chosen by God to hold dominion over the earth was not explicitly expressed in Manifest Destiny and the original conception died by the time of Lincoln's election in 1860 when he switched it over to foreign policy where it remains a dominant theme to this day.

Manifest Destiny planted the seeds of white racial consciousness in America that slowly shifted ideological superiority over to racial superiority. But the steps required to accomplish this shift were not a clear path but many tentative paths, most of them abandoned and incomplete. As far as minstrelsy was concerned in this shift, whites tried to understand who and what they were by ironically re-imagining themselves as black. Having done so, they then drew themselves a picture of racial harmony and indemnity by depicting the slaves as errant, mischievous but lovable children—themselves in "idyllic" times (i.e. back on the farms of their childhoods). These slaves were best off in the employ of white people because they cannot care for themselves. Since the idea of liberty was not inherent in their nature, they will basically make the best of any situation and be perfectly content with it. In 1895, a black minstrel extravaganza called "Black America" received a write up in The Illustrated American that read in part:

Note the yard-wide laugh of "God's image in ebony" over the card game and the eager interest displayed by the bystanders, and you seize the essence of the character of this easily-pleased, happy-go-lucky people!

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"American Progress" by John Gast circa 1872 depicts Columbia (a 19th century representation of the U.S. who is also depicted in the Statue of Liberty and on the dome of the Capitol) walking westward stringing telegraph wire as she goes. In her hand is a schoolbook, i.e. education is the key to enacting and fulfilling manifest destiny. Before her are settlers and explorers blazing her trail and behind her follow the railroads and ships. the Indians are in the shadows, i.e. the sun has set on them, who are eschew her approach by fleeing into futility.

As stated earlier, in areas where minstrelsy was most popular they had kept blacks out but, having done so, found themselves in a white America that could not determine its own nature, could not figure itself out. If to be white was to be privileged or free, then who does the manual labor and menial jobs in an all-white America? White Americans realized that they could not define themselves without comparisons to the non-whites around them. Without these non-whites present, white Americans were like a single finger trying to touch itself. In this way, they found themselves as much owned by blacks as owning them.

Minstrelsy offered them a way to find themselves and on their own terms. The blackened face then was an attempt to erase their race in an effort to see themselves through fresh eyes. They were saying to themselves, "If we are superior because we are white, there must be something there that accounts for it other than simple skin pigmentation. It must be something in our character and not magically bestowed upon us by dint of our lightness otherwise we are superior by complete accident or by a totally random choice of God (who could have as easily chosen someone else) rather than chosen by Him because He made us better or because He recognizes our superior character and talents. To be superior means we must conquer other lesser peoples and employ them doing what is necessary work but beneath our important station but for which they are perfectly suited."

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So the audience at the minstrel show was as much a part of the performance as the act onstage. The blackface performer showed the audience a mythical black man who was innocent, child-like and at least likable if not lovable—the white people themselves before their fall into urbanization. The audience was white people in whiteface watching the antics onstage of whites in blackface with a pang of nostalgia for their lost childhoods. Here, they could set aside all their social responsibilities for a while and re-live their fun, innocent days by imagining themselves as black people living the way they thought black people lived, namely as easily-pleased and happy-go-lucky. All was well with the world after all. After the show, shouldering the white man's burden seemed a bit lighter and more purposeful. Their mission as white people seemed a bit clearer to them and they were able to make some sense of themselves as a race of white people. They could stop worrying if they were doing the right thing. It had to be right because there was no other way.

The other important thing about presenting blacks as children in the minstrel show was to always make the black man sexually non-threatening. In minstrelsy, the adult black male is a man-child whose goal is to please massa and missy while doing as little as possible to achieve it. From this, we can see that there had to be an underlying feeling of insecurity in general on the part of white males even if only mildly. The psychology behind this fear was that light-hued people tend to regard dark-hued people as sexually superior to themselves.

In the South, the idea of the sexually threatening black man was so great that preserving the purity of white Southern womanhood became a battle cry revealing both the sexual insecurity of the Southern white male as well as the moral and intellectual vacuum that was really white superiority. The idea that black men must be stopped from raping white women by any means necessary is too ridiculous to entertain seriously. Obviously, no one should be allowed to rape anyone else under any circumstances. A black man raping a white woman is certainly no worse than a white man who does the same. They may as well have demanded that black men must not be allowed to burn down apartment buildings with white women in them or be allowed to run into the streets firing shotguns and throwing firebombs indiscriminately where it might possibly injure or kill a white woman. The white supremacist argument is completely ridiculous and insulting to anyone who can think with any clarity. If this was the superior white Southern culture, it was a pitiful thing indeed worthy of nothing but contempt.

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Minstrelsy as a comedy designed to point out and therefore avoid certain social pitfalls was a failure. Minstrelsy was originally driven by anti-slavery sentiments expressed by people as George Washington Dixon and Stephen Foster. But as the Civil War raged, whites wanted theater to take them away from the turmoil, to show them joy and wholeness. So they were treated to the sight of a white man, dressed up as a black man singing, "Oh, I wish I was in de lan' ob cotton…" at a time when hundreds of real blacks were fleeing North. That the South would adopt the song as an unofficial anthem was a bit ridiculous and apparently the irony was not lost on the song's author, Dan Emmett, who was furious when he heard what the Confederacy had done.

The song was intended as racial harmony and happiness and to have the slaveholders adopt it was galling to him. But the song also demonstrated the failure of minstrelsy for depicting what could not be true: that blacks were happy down South, so much so that those up North longed to return to it. And since whites could not apparently be happy without convincing themselves that blacks were happy, the fact that blacks were really not happy meant that whites were really not happy either. Minstrelsy simply sold a blatant illusion that could not be maintained once the war ended and the slaves freed because white=free, black=chattel was simply not true anymore and so all such associations in minstrelsy had to be redefined.

New innovations in minstrelsy occurred such as clogging, female impersonation, redface (Native Indian) minstrelsy and cakewalking. Although the Yellow Peril hysteria was strong, there was little of yellowface minstrelsy to be seen. Shortly after the war, there was a minstrel troupe known as The Flying Black Japs but they soon disbanded. Most of America had no experience of the Chinese who were enslaved on the railroads or running tiny businesses on the West Coast in hopes of eking out an existence. Even on the West Coast where the hatred of the Chinese was strong, whites seemed not to notice them except to segregate themselves from them.

Robert Louis Stevenson traveled from his native Scotland to ride the rails of the Union Pacific Railroad across the plains to California in 1879 and noted that Chinese passengers, many of them men who had slaved sunup to sundown to lay the tracks their train was riding on, were forced to ride in a segregated car. Stevenson noticed that the whites took these Chinese railroad builders for granted, totally ignoring them except to occasionally vent "the stupid ill-feeling" as he called it. By 1897, Dan W. Quinn sang "Mr. Jappy Jap Jappy" and James T. Powers followed this in 1898 with "Chin Chin Chinaman" but yellowface minstrelsy never seemed to click. These Asians came from a foreign land and could not represent an idyllic pre-Fall life for the white audiences. There was no relating. Asians are, after all, "inscrutable."

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Yellow Peril fear was just as strong in Europe as in America as this German depiction makes clear.


Dan W. Quinn "Chin Chin Chinaman" The Geisha -- from 1898, Berliner disc 525 - YouTube
Dan W. Quinn's version of "Chin Chin Chinaman" from an 1898 disc is full of pidgin English stereotypes not to mention that "Chinaman" is considered a slur among Asian-Americans. It is part of a larger work called "The Geisha" betraying the Westerner's usual careless confusing of Japanese and Chinese. A Chinese person who didn't know the difference between the English and the Germans would be considered a complete idiot in the West.

No but Scott was excellent!!

I recently got a cassette of pieces he made on a piano roll and they are goregous! (The pieces were recorded from the actual rolls)

I havent ever heard such beautiful piano playing!