On February 6, 1842 the very first all Blackface revue
took the stage of the Bowery Amphitheatre in New York City.
The Virginia Minstrels launched a new
theatrical form with their
own entirely self-contained shows after brief trials, first for no admission at a billiards parlor,
and in January as part of a larger program at the Chatham Theater.
While Blackface performers had been
popular on stage for at least two decades, they usually appeared as solo
or duet acts or occasionally in short comic skits. The new show put the whole cast in Blackface
and invented most of the conventions
that became standard to Minstrel shows.
Dan Emmett, a fiddler, conceived and put together the original four-member troupe which also included banjo player Dick
Pelham; Billy Whitlock, dancer/comic/tambourine player; and bones
player/comic Frank Brower. Whitlock and Bower became the first
end men known as Tambo and Bones, who provided the patter and jokes.
Emmett acted as master of ceremonies, a role that would later come to be
known as the Interlocutor and be refined as a character aspiring to dignity, but pompous
and “putting on airs.” Whitlock
also did a Locomotive Lecture, a predecessor to the stump speech, the comic centerpiece of the second act
of later Minstrel Shows.
The Minstrels successfully toured for a year and in
1843 their songs were published
as The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels.
Among the songs the troupe introduced
were Jimmie Crack Corn and Turkey in the Straw
which would later come to be regarded
as genuine American folk songs. They were probably
written by Emmett, an accomplished song writer who later published many
songs under his own name, most famously Dixie, the biggest hit of 1859. Ironically,
Emmett, an ardent Unionist would become distraught when the song became the unofficial Confederate
anthem.
The group broke up late in 1844 with each performer going on to other
projects, including imitation Minstrel shows that were quickly springing
up. They reassembled in England in 1845 and introduced the form to
British and Irish audiences in three months of performances.
Pelham stayed in England and helped popularize
it there.
By the 1850’s Minstrel shows were
the most popular form of theater in America. Dozens of companies toured houses in major cities, and more ragged troupes plied the small towns of the Midwest and South.
Casts grew and a number of stock characters were introduced for the
comic sketches including the beloved
elderly slave Uncle Ned; his wife Mammy (like all women’s
parts in the first decades of the Minstrel show played by a man); the Trickster who could fool his master (often left out of Southern shows); Jim
Crow a braggart actually modeled on
a white stock character of the bragging frontiersman a la Davy
Crocket; the dandy Zip Coon; and the Wench or Yeller,
a light skinned mulatto or high yellow woman in fashionable white clothing who was the object of lust for both
the black characters and the unseen
white massas.
All of these characters were
performed with exaggerated accents—in fact accents some scholars believe
to have been virtually made up but which became so pervasive that
they actually influenced Black speech. Characters
were given to wild gesturing, lip smacking, and eye rolling which was highlighted
by the burnt cork make-up. They were seen as ignorant, foolish, vain, lazy, and apt to petty
crime, although the Uncle Ned and Mammy characters could be sympathetic for their loyalty to the Massa and his family. The shows established stereotypes which persist to this day.
The most famous and successful Minstrel troupe of this period were the Christy
Minstrels which had the good
fortune of having Stephen Foster as their principal song writer. Formed by Edwin Pearce Christy this
company finished firmly setting the conventions of the Minstrel show, including
the division into three acts.
The large company, always seated in a
semi-circle after entering to a grand promenade, provided the specialty performances in the second
act and actors for the final act, an extended
skit often satirizing a classic or popular play.
After Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin came out, many troupes dedicated the final act to short versions of the book or satires
of it. Some were faithful to Stowe and sympathetic to the
black characters. Many others turned the characters into the worst
stereotypes from the Minstrel show stock company—a development that in the years after the Civil War so obscured Stowe’s original work that many assumed that the derogatory
images came from her work. The shows became known as Tom Shows.
This image tarred the reputation of the book and its author
with emerging Black empowerment critics who turned Uncle Tom
into an epithet.
Despite what seems to us today to be
overt racism, the shows were popular
with Black audiences as well as with whites. At least blacks could
see themselves—or caricatures of
themselves on stage. At least they were not invisible.
It has been compared to the later
phenomena of the immigrant Irish embracing the stock Paddy characters
of early Vaudeville with their broad,
but unrecognizable brogues,
pugnacious aggressiveness, sloppy drunkenness, and the sentimental
songs composed for them.
In both cases the victims of the stereotyping came to embrace parts of the image and even to
integrate some of it into their own culture.
By the 1850’s Blacks were getting
into the Minstrel business themselves. A handful in the north even
appeared in the white blackface shows, although they corked their faces in
keeping with the tradition.
In 1855 the first known all-Black troupes started touring,
often touting their “authenticness”
in comparison to white troupes. Some of these troupes began to cork only
the end men and occasionally the Interlocutor. This was popular with
Black audiences, but the same troupes sometimes had to cork the entire cast to
satisfy white ones. The Black troupes were also the first to include women
minstrels and to give them expanding
parts in the shows.
By the 1880’s some of the Black troupes
were as famous as the white ones and producing their own recognized stars.
The most famous of these troupes toured under different names ultimately
becoming Callender’s Consolidated Colored Minstrels. In the 1870
Black troupes began inserting
the first truly genuine Black music
into their shows—spirituals known as Jubilees. White
companies soon followed.
Black touring companies, who often
found their biggest audiences in the South, often faced, both prejudice
and physical danger.
They often could not find accommodations in towns too small for colored hotels
and were expected to stay in make-up
and character while on the street. Mobs sometimes attacked theaters or took pot shots at trains known to be carrying the
companies.
While white minstrelsy faded
with the rise of vaudeville, Black troupes continued to be popular with Black
audiences. In the early 20th Century Black troupes began
introducing more authentic Black music into the mix. Among those who
performed with or began their careers in Minstrel shows were W. C. Handy,
Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Louis
Jordan, Brownie McGhee and Rufus Thomas. So later
Black Minstrel shows played an important
part in spreading and popularizing ragtime, early jazz, and blues.
After dominating the American stage
for decades Minstrel shows, at least for white audiences, began to lose their
appeal to the wider variety of
vaudeville. By the early 20’s the last of the professional White troupes
had closed.
But the Minstrel show retained a strong nostalgic appeal.
Acts based on the first act of the Minstrel shows—when the whole troop is on stage for big musical
numbers, became a standard in vaudeville and were regularly featured in the great Broadway
reviews like the Ziegfeld
Follies where major stars like Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor
made their names performing in them. Many of the most famous comic sketches and skits
lived on in burlesque with the characters often stripped of their Negro identities or even transformed to other ethnic
stereotypes. Amos ‘n Andy, the long running radio
and TV hit was based on Minstrel characters.
Jolson brought blackface and minstrelsy
to the very first successful sound
feature film The Jazz Singer. Bing Crosby played
Edwin Christy in an early bio-pic that was essentially just a parade of Minstrel numbers by Foster. MGM,
especially, mined Minstrel shows in many of their patented show-biz musicals.
Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney did them. Even Fred
Astaire did them. This continued up through the studio’s big budget Technicolor
extravaganzas of the 1950’s. Almost all of these numbers featured their
stars in black face.
By the 1960’s that was impossible on the professional stage, movies, or television even as a historic recreation. But
Minstrel shows were still licensed
and frequently performed by community theaters and by high schools right up to the final decades of the century.
The legacy of the Minstrel show, after the understandable revulsion of the Civil Rights Era, remains debated. If nothing else it was a laboratory for the collision of White and Black worlds and one of the most important formative influences, for better or ill, of an American culture.
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