Elegy for the minstrel show

Cafe Society
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Inspired by this thread.

Despite the irreducible racism, its passing is in a way to be regretted – because it is perhaps the only uniquely American form of live stage entertainment ever invented. General drama goes back to ancient Greece, vaudeville was essentially the same thing as British music hall, the Broadway musical derives from European light opera, but the minstrel show was purely American.

As commercial entertainment, the minstrel show died out around 1910 – and not because of rising racial consciousness; that period was what African-American historians call the “nadir” of postbellum race relations in the U.S. It just couldn’t compete with general vaudeville. But it lived on for some time in community theater and college productions. Standalone blackface acts survived for a time in vaudeville, and can be seen in early cinema:

Babes on Broadway – One of Judy Garland’s and Mickey Rooney’s “backyard musicals.”

Judy Garland in blackface.

Eddie Cantor in blackface.

Eddie Cantor, again. This one is not so much a parody of black culture as a tribute to it, specifically to the Harlem Renaissance.

And then there was Al Jolsen. He actually liked blacks – he helped many break into showbiz, and always insisted they be treated as equals. And they liked him – he was the only white man allowed into Harlem’s all-black clubs. I guess in those days, not even blacks thought of a blackface act as racially offensive.

Part of the appeal, I think, was that a minstrel-show character was a kind of all-licensed fool. He (it was always he – the few female parts were played by men in drag) could say and do things that in the 19th Century would have been considered beneath the dignity of a white man, even while playing a white character on stage. But a negro was assumed to be a creature without dignity – and a creature without dignity has none to lose.

For most of American history, white America regarded black America with a curious mixture of fear, contempt, and affection. In the minstrel show we see only the contempt and affection – the characters are lovable fools, but harmless. The “black brute” stereotype does not appear.

In elementary school, in the '70s, I once watched a biopic of Stephen Foster – and it entirely glossed over the fact that he wrote most of his songs for the minstrel stage. We tend to forget that many songs we still sing – and might have sung in elementary school – were originally written to be sung by white men in blackface.

“Ring, Ring the Banjo” & “Old Folks at Home/Swanee River.”

“Some Folks Do”.

“Oh, Susannah”.

"Camptown Races’.

Now, none of this is authentic African-American folk music. It was mostly written by whites. Artistically, much minstrel-show material was very good – as witness its still being sung today. That is because minstrelsy was the most popular form of American stage entertainment in its heyday, and the talent goes where the money is.

Minstrel-show dancing, OTOH, was often authentic – the performers did field research, observing the dances slaves made up to amuse themselves. One characteristic dance was the “cakewalk,” a dance with a lot of high-stepping leg action that slaves made up to parody their masters’ ballroom dancing and generally haughty carriage. So, in the minstrel-show cakewalk, we see white people making fun of black people making fun of white people.

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Ok

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“Old Folks at Home” (for a long time the state song of Florida) originally included the line, “Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary . . .” If you ever hear the word “darkies” in a song, it comes from the minstrel stage. There was never a time in American history when AAs called each other “darky” – they use the n-word a lot, but never “darky.” “Darky” was a word white people used to use when they thought they were being polite.

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At its best the banter between Mr. Interlocutor and Mr. Bones was genuinely funny. Mr. Bones was a trickster figure, tricking the authority figure of Mr. Interlocutor (who actually was played as having a lot of dignity – that was taken down by Mr. Bones).

Minstrel shows were popular with both whites and Blacks. There were even Black minstrel troupes that performed in blackface; it was makeup, much like mimes performing in whiteface.

As time went on, though, people began to react to the appearance of the performers more than the show, and the overall offensive origins it were noted. It gave birth to an ugly image that became a cruel caricature. It is a good thing that it died out.

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The BBC had the Black and White Minstrel Showwhich I remember seeing on TV around the late 60s-early 70s.

Since it took the innovative American entertainment from the stage to small screen and from a racialised society to one which was at least outwardly proud of its record in abolishing slavery, and kept it going for more than half a century, should we consider this a further slow decline of a once-mighty cultural phenomenon or a renaissance of the form?

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Nope. One doesn’t make up for the other. There is nothing to be regretted in its passing.

Also, minstrelsy is not uniquely American. Turning it into a stage show isn’t a huge step.

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That all looks disgusting, but I can see now the appeal. Members of “good society” got to listen to catchy music while watching people dance around like a bunch of racist caricatures, and they didn’t even have to pay actual people of color to do the performing (which, while still marginalizing them by casting them as caricatures, would have at least given them a greater foothold in the arts and helped put food on their table). Best of all, after the performance was done, the audience could comfortably rub elbows with the performers and not have to worry about associating with any who might be considered… not of their own kind. Likewise, there wouldn’t have to be any controversy or display over the performers having to go somewhere else to eat if the venue was associated with a restaurant, or somewhere else to stay if associated with a hotel.

Good riddance.

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Those days are gone forever
Over a long time ago

/Incidentally, what’s the over/under on when the mods close this thread?

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Don’t forget Mr. Tambo! The classic minstrel show had three emcees – Brother Bones, who played the bones; Brother Tambo, who played the tambourine; the two of them were the “endmen” in a semicircle of performers (“Gentlemen, be seated!”) – and at the center, on an elevated thronelike chair, the Interlocutor, who was a white man not in blackface, and who spoke in a high-flown vocabulary which the endmen deflated with their puns and disengenuous misunderstandings.

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Actually, sometimes they did, advertising themselves as “the genuwine article!” See Minstrel Man. Of course, they tended to get exploited by the white show-runners in ways white minstrel performers escaped.

Of course, the audience really couldn’t tell the difference.

In fact, I recall one YouTube video – can’t find it right now – which is an interview with an old black performer, talking about another such who for a long time resisted pressure to “take off the co’k” (blackface makeup was usually burnt cork) – and, when he finally did take it off, his natural skin was actually darker than the blackface.

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We’ve all heard of “Jim Crow” – Jim Crow was a stock character, a plantation slave, an ignorant hick.

Another stock character was Zip Coon, who was a dandified city free-black. Zip Coon had some education but apparently had not fully understood it – he used fancy words, but mostly used them wrong. Which was the basis of something that still seems funny today – the minstrel-show stump speech.

See Michelle Schocked’s “Jump Jim Crow.”

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And yet, we still sing the songs.

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Black face is required for singing songs?

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It was required for the songs to be written.

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Minstrel show sand dance. Done by a white performer who did not even try to put on a stage-negro dialect – he sounds like a white southerner, which no doubt he was. I don’t care what color you are, if you can’t appreciate this you got no soul!

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Speak for yourself.

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Stephen Foster was an undeniable talent, but the lyrics of his songs have not aged well.

Plus he wrote a lot of songs about the South for a guy who rarely left Pittsburgh.

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“Jingle Bells” is still pretty popular.

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Let’s just say I’m not the kind of person to go carolling…

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James Loewen, in his book Lies Across America, notes that a campus-wide minstrel celebration used to be a yearly thing in Vermont (of all places) up until the 1970s. Black student groups on campus had been protesting the shows as racist since at least the 1950s, but it was too entrenched. In an attempt to keep the show going without (they thought) the racist overtones, Vermont tried the bizarre experiment of doing it in GREENface instead of blackface. It really didn’t change anything – the jokes were still racist, and operated on the assumption that the now-greenfaced performers were incapable of dressing properly, speaking “normal” English, and were obsessed with stereotypical activities. The entire minstrel festival stopped the next year.

Minstrel shows, like a lot of the racist entertainment that followed in its wake, were cases of what I call self-Organizing Racism. The insidious thing about this is that the black (and white) performers and even the (sometimes white) writers and composers became known and famous for the work they did in this fundamentally racist milieu. Many times black performers could not find work UNLESS they appeared in such entertainments, which meant that they had to do this, or starve. Even after the heyday, anyone acknowledging the achievements of these people, whether re=performing songs, jokes, and routines or showing movies or listening to recordings of them, had to do so by presenting the same racist material. You couldn’t show new generations their work and bring them to new audiences without the racist matrix they were preserved in. So we get Stephen Foster’s songs with their lyrics preserving visions of the “romantic” Old South. More often, songs arte presented with lines changed or verses suppressed. Movies and cartoons have been cut to remove such offensive scenes, or aren’t shown at all (except in special screenings).

Yet the performers WERE talented. The jokes were funny. Mark Twain adored the Minstrel show, and it helped form his humor. Al Jolson, as noted above, wasn’t racist himself, but his best-known performances were. The Minstrel show really WAS the American creation (telling jokes on stage wasn’t new, nor were interspersing humorous skits with dance and other performances. But the structure and formalism of the minstrel show was uniquely American. And its punchlines and signature lines still permeate our culture (even if most people aren’t aware of it).