Fall 1999 Volume XXIX, No. 1

Copland's Hope for American Music by Howard Pollack spectral frequencies by Martha Mockus Demythologizing the Blues by David Evans New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja Behind the Beat with Mark Tucker ISAM Matters Reviews Rethinking Race in 19th-Century Blackface Minstrelsy by Maya Gibson Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian by Laurie Blunsom ISAM Home

Rethinking Race in 19th-Century Minstrelsy Review by Maya Gibson A recent spate of scholarship in American minstrelsy argues that for too long the shame of white racism has impeded research in blackface. While early work in minstrelsy concentrated solely on race and racial stereotypes, several current scholars have sought to nuance this situation by suggesting that minstrelsy not only signified an entrenched marker of African American derision and difference, but also held multiple and complex meanings for nineteenth-century American audiences. Two books arguing for a more flexible interpretation of minstrelsy are Dale Cockrell’s Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge University Press, 1997; $19.95) and William J. Mahar’s Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1999; $24.95). Both attempt to revise minstrelsy’s history by de-centering race and challenging readers to reconsider contemporary assumptions about race and minstrelsy in nineteenth-century American life. Cockrell’s Demons of Disorder examines how music transformed a blackface tradition in American folk and theater history from the Jacksonian era through the first “concert” conceived by the Virginia Minstrels in 1843. Cockrell differentiates between blackface minstrelsy in “legitimate” stage theater and a more nebulous tradition used on the streets in “folk theatricals”—primarily European folk rituals like callithumpian performances, Carnival, mumming plays and morris dancing. Studying the “music made by common Jacksonians,” Cockrell contends that “music’s antonym—noise—[was] a legitimate form of cultural expression.” Once a racially ambiguous and raucous ritual of noise-making, minstrelsy became, by 1843, an established musical genre that pitted lower class “common white people” against elite white males who patronized the urban theaters. The meanings inherent in blackface minstrelsy thus reflected not only an historical change but also the contingent influence of class and race. Because nineteenth-century working class audiences left behind little information concerning how they felt about minstrelsy, Cockrell had to piece together court reports, symbolic artifacts, and anecdotal evidence buttressed by minstrel texts to tease out an insightful view of minstrelsy’s Jacksonian folk contexts. The focal personae of Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Old Dan Tucker resonate as symbolic and contested figures whose meanings are predicated upon the viewer’s proximity to folk theatrics. Cockrell traces the mythical “Jump Jim Crow” figure not to the stereotypical plantation “darky” but to highly politicized social events that foregrounded class conflict within earlier folk traditions of noise-making. Zip Coon, his signature melody and his impersonator, George Washington Dixon, all come to represent not a mockery of the northern black dandy but a parody of elitist middle class pretense. By 1843, when the Virginia Minstrels presented Dan Emmett’s “Old Dan Tucker” in what is typically billed as the first minstrel show, blackface minstrelsy had become more about impersonating racial stereotypes for profit and less about common white American identity. Mahar’s Behind the Burnt Cork Mask presents blackface minstrelsy as multifocal and central to the formation of American popular culture. For Mahar, blackface minstrelsy becomes a means of social critique expressed through humor, rather than masquerades and senseless depictions of racial stereotypes. Hidden behind blackened faces, the minstrels used their concealment as an opportunity to speak freely and poke fun at issues of class, European cultural elitism, and gender, in addition to race. As a flexible and derivative performance practice that parodied the likes of foreign opera, political speeches, and artistic virtuosity, blackface minstrelsy is best conceived of as a pastiche of burlesqued genres suited to fit the changing needs of its diverse nineteenth-century audience. Mahar divides the history of minstrelsy into three progressive phases, each supported with evidence gleaned from playbills which are, helpfully, appended. The first phase, 1843-1848, is characterized as amorphous, consisting primarily of parodic popular song and aria renditions. The second phase, 1849-1854, explains how blackface minstrel shows incorporated longer burlesques of Italian and French opera, Ethiopian sketches, and afterpieces. The third phase, 1855-1860, reveals a bifurcation in the conception of the minstrel show, as managers sought either to provide a nostalgic (though not necessarily old) depiction of minstrelsy or to compile a series of variety skits similar to vaudeville. Moreover, Mahar examines the implications of minstrelsy as a male-dominated construct that constricted women’s rights while it simultaneously reified masculinity through its songs and images. Most impressive is Mahar’s use of primary evidence; his arguments are well supported by a thoughtful examination of minstrel playbills, songs, and song texts. Copious musical examples are integrated throughout. Mahar’s appendices include minstrel companies and their personnel (retrieved from playbills and newspaper advertisements), concluding numbers from selected minstrel shows, and a listing of the frequency of song texts published in antebellum songsters. Cockrell and Mahar aptly rail against scholarship that projects minstrelsy solely as a pillar of race, pushing us to temper our late twentieth-century sensibilities and broadening our horizons in the process. However, Demons of Disorder and Behind the Burnt Cork Mask also foreshadow a disquieting trend in the field that seeks to displace racial context in the service of creating a less threatening, less ostensibly racist account of blackface. Minstrelsy is, in effect, made safe by expunging from it the painful details of racism. Cockrell’s hope is to “undercut the tired old story that blackface minstrelsy is about unrelenting hatred of blacks by working-class, urban white males...” The story may be old, but tired? Mahar, while initially acknowledging the importance of race, proceeds to undermine his own assertion by locating minstrelsy’s significance elsewhere in burlesque, English theater, class, sex, Eurocentric critique, and gender issues. Cockrell and Mahar’s call for a broader interpretation of minstrelsy is not without merit. Privileging race should not impede us from exploring other crucial narratives and social critiques. Yet their approach must not obscure the reality that race and racism, evinced by the minstrel’s gesture of blacking up and his subsequent parodic performance of blackness, are the central and undeniable components of minstrelsy. —University of Wisconsin at Madison