A Southern Paper Disses Negro Minstrelsy

[Pvt Schnapps]

Wikipedia is not normally a preferred source of mine, but in using it as a starting point I came across this passage in the article on "Minstrel Show" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minstrel_show:

"Despite these pro-plantation attitudes, minstrelsy was banned in many Southern cities.[40] Its association with the North was such that as secessionist attitudes grew stronger, minstrels on Southern tours became convenient targets of anti-Yankee sentiment.[41]"

Digging a little deeper into period sources, I was surprised at how little I could find related to minstrelsy in a paper like the "Richmond Daily Dispatch", and somewhat intrigued to find this in the "Daily True Delta" (New Orleans) of November 6, 1858:

"THE AMPHITHEATRE. -- While our contemporaries, the other morning, spoke in the main complimentary of the musical powers of the Buckley Serenaders, we stood alone in the expression of a 'ratherish' plain, and certainly a candid opinion, as to their merits, and of negro minstrelsy generally.
"Touching itinerant negro minstrels, few thoughtful persons can hold any other opinion than that sketched in the issue in which that opinion appeared. But aside from the lampblack and the ridiculousness of the efforts to give real imitations of the Southern negro, we were willing to test the Buckleys as mere singers, and could not see, when we applied a charitable test, that they could be called artists in their peculiar line...."

The passage from "the other morning" (November 4) elaborates the writer's general opinion:

"...For some years past, we have been accustomed to look upon negro minstrels as lamp-blacked Bedouins. To say that a Northern imitator of a Southern negro, is a capital imitator, is not up to the standard of truth... Nobody conversant with the city or plantation negro of Louisiana, will for a moment contend that the Buckleys, or the Campbells, at all aproach them in naturalness. The hearty, whole-souled laugh, the spontaneous jocundity, the swagger and *abandon of the real negro, can not be imitated to perfection..."

http://news.google.com/newspapers?ni...tsec=frontpage

In other words, to the writer in the "True Delta," the minstrel show was a northern phenomenon that not only failed in its imitation of real black people, but was also pretty lame in its own terms.

So now I'm sort of left wondering how authentic it is to hear Confederate string bands or groups of Rebel soldiers around camp fires singing "Negro" dialect songs penned by northern white men and published in New York. Was the writer in the "True Delta" an anomaly, or did most southerners actually accept the fanciful northern stereotype? How typical would it be for a southern soldier to sing minstrel pieces like "Old Dan Tucker" rather than other kinds of songs and ballads, say "I Would Not Have Thee Young Again" or "My Mother's Bible"?

[GeorgeWunderlich]

The answer lies in the regimental histories and in the parodies of song lyrics written in the south during the war. This will give us the best answer. In the mean time think about this.

While blackface was frowned upon as the war got closer, there is little doubt that some songs from the genre were well ingranied in the south. It was reported that in 1858 plantation slaves were heard singing "Blue tail Fly" by a northern visitor.


Remember also that Stuart carried a minstrel with him. Sweeney was with Stuart most of the war and minstrel tunes were his bread and butter.

I think the negative press was not so much the music as the performers. To a southerrn audience they lacked authenticty. The two (performer and music) may need to be separtated in this case.

[Pvt Schnapps]

The answer lies in the regimental histories and in the parodies of song lyrics written in the south during the war. This will give us the best answer. In the mean time think about this.

While blackface was frowned upon as the war got closer, there is little doubt that some songs from the genre were well ingranied in the south. It was reported that in 1858 plantation slaves were heard singing "Blue tail Fly" by a northern visitor.


Remember also that Stuart carried a minstrel with him. Sweeney was with Stuart most of the war and minstrel tunes were his bread and butter.

I think the negative press was not so much the music as the performers. To a southerrn audience they lacked authenticty. The two (performer and music) may need to be separtated in this case.

I hear you, but isn't inauthenticity at the heart of the minstrel phenomenon? It's not just a question of white performers but of white composers applying music hall sensibilities to a culture they know nothing about, and mangling a dialect they have little exposure to.

If inauthenticity was off-putting -- and at least in the case of the New Orleans newspaper man it was -- then the songs would have little hold on the average southerner.

One thinks, by way of comparison, of Thomas Wentworth Higginson's sense of wonder when he encountered the real thing, and the delight he takes in recording spirituals in "Army Life in a Black Regiment." But then, being a northerner, he probably heard more than his share of minstrelsy. At the end of his chapter on music he writes, "A few youths from Savannah, who were comparatively men of the world, had learned some of the 'Ethiopian Minstrel' ditties, imported from the north. These took no hold upon the mass..."

Maybe Stuart represented the equivalent southern white "man of the world."

[hanktrent]

Check out a search like this:

http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp_a...22minstrels%22+

Lots of announcements of minstrels performing in the south.

I can certainly see that a southerner would consider a northern imitation of a black performer to be a poor imitation. There's the iconic image that one often sees in period images of a black man asked to dance for an admiring group of white men.

But even the New Orleans newspaper, quoted in the OP, admits: "While our contemporaries, the other morning, spoke in the main complimentary of the musical powers of the Buckley Serenaders..."

And, let's face it, it was a low-class form of entertainment. Snobbish people just weren't going to praise the artistry of a minstrel troup, no matter how good it was.

So I can imagine a southern planter saying to a northern guest, you think you Yankees can imitate a true Negro singing and dancing? Come out here, Sambo, and show him how it's done.

But based on the examples of minstrel shows put on by professionals and amateurs in the (mostly southern) newspaper search above, I'm not sure that one can extrapolate that southerners wouldn't have known or enjoyed minstrel songs. "Dixie," after all, was straight from the minstrel stage.

I'm especially curious about this, though, from the Wikipedia article:

"Despite these pro-plantation attitudes, minstrelsy was banned in many Southern cities.[40] Its association with the North was such that as secessionist attitudes grew stronger, minstrels on Southern tours became convenient targets of anti-Yankee sentiment.[41]"

The first footnote leads to this page in Lott's book (I don't have access to the book in footnote 41):

One might begin by recognizing that the minstrel show most often glossed not white encounters with life on the plantation... but racial contacts and tensions endemic to the North and the frontier... This regional subtext was ignored, denied, and repressed by its contemporaries (and has been ever since)... But southern venues always had a troubled relationship to minstrel performance, some cities in the South even banning it as the slavery controversy escalated in the 1850s. It was largely the industrializing North that was the minstrel show's immediate cultural purview, political referent, and context of performance.

Okay, I get the first part. Minstrel shows were "supposed" to be about Blacks' life in the south, but in reality they were created for and shaped by the entertainment demands of a northern audience.

But why were they banned in the south? Where? How? When? I think that would help give insight into period mindset.

In a quick search, all I could find were echoes of Lott's book, and, oddly enough, this: "Emmett was attacked by abolitionist newspapers and his group, Bryant’s Minstrels, was banned from performing in Northern cities during the Civil War."

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[Pvt Schnapps]

To me, the interesting question is how much "Negro Minstrelsy" was a part of the experience of the average southern soldier. Based on what I've read so far, I'll hazard the following opinions, in order of least to most controversial:

1. "Negro Minstrelsy" was an very popular art form from the 1840s through the end of the 19th century. Indeed, some aspects of it survived into living memory -- e.g., "Amos and Andy" on the radio and early TV.

2. "Negro Minstrelsy" was largely a northern creation, originating around Buffalo New York and thriving in the New York City area in the years immediately before the Civil War.

3. "Negro Minstrelsy" provided a lot of entertainment among northern troops and audiences during the civil war.

4. Southern audiences don't mention it so much. Heros von Borcke, for example, discusses the minstrelsy of Stuart's banjoist Sweeney, but spends equal time on Sweeney's arrangements of Schottisches, Polkas, and Walzes for Stuart's dance parties, and marches. Check it out at: http://books.google.com/books?id=FhK...=music&f=false

5. Augustus Dickert's history of Kershaw's Brigade similarly mentions march music, but not minstrelsy: http://books.google.com/books?id=zc_...=music&f=false

6. Entire books, such as "War Lyrics and Songs of the South" (1867) present songs purportedly sung by southern soldiers, none of which are products of northern minstrelsy: http://books.google.com/books?id=MA0...page&q&f=false Ditto "TheGrayjackets and How They Lived, Fought, and Died for Dixie": http://books.google.com/books?id=gtI...page&q&f=false

7. Similarly, "Campfires of the Confederacy" presents a lengthy chapter on songs and poems with no references to minstrelsy apart from "Dixie," "Old Folks at Home," and -- oddly enough, "Year of Jubilo." http://books.google.com/books?id=Q8F...page&q&f=false

8. Thus, despite current practice and recordings, there seems to be little contemporary evidence for Negro minstrelsy as a significant form of southern musical expression, especially compared to marches, dance music, and indigenous white balladry.

None of this is meant to detract from the importance of minstrelsy as a popular music form in the middle of the 19th century. I'm glad that people research and recreate it. But I suggest that there are other forms of popular music that are perhaps more appropriate for the Confederate impression that we should also focus on, including marches, ballads, and other lyrics that soldiers actually sang.

In fact, Hank, a significant number of the "minstrel" performances in the link you gave represent pre-war tours of northern groups, or performances in border venues like Kansas, or urban centers like Savannah.

I suggest that, by concentrating on "Negro Minstrelsy," we may be in danger of overlooking much of the actual musical expression of the war in favor of an "old timey" caricature. I would love, for example, to hear someone working on the "Southern Marsellaise" and similar pieces: http://books.google.com/books?id=TrI...0songs&f=false

Again, I don't want to eliminate minstrelsy, but put it in proper perspective.

[hanktrent]

6. Entire books, such as "War Lyrics and Songs of the South" (1867) present songs purportedly sung by southern soldiers, none of which are products of northern minstrelsy:

Those are supposed to be songs about the war and the southern cause, though, right? So I'm not sure they'd include minstrel songs anyway, anymore than a book of northern songs about the war would include "Dandy Jim," no matter how much or little it was sung in camp.

Still, I see your point--minstrelsy was as much a northern phenomenon as rap music is an inner city one today. The question is, how far out of its origins did it spread?

But I suggest that there are other forms of popular music that are perhaps more appropriate for the Confederate impression that we should also focus on, including marches, ballads, and other lyrics that soldiers actually sang.

I'd say, for a middle-to-upper-class northern impression, that's true also. There was way more than minstrelsy. Jenny Lind captured the popularity of the nation without ever putting on blackface, as far as I know. In a quick glance, this 1851 Jenny Lind songster out of Boston doesn't include a single minstrel song, though minstrel shows should have been well underway, and most of the songs are unfamiliar to reenactors, including me.

So here's a question, then.

If minstrel songs should be relegated to a minor position in the south, what was the equivalent demographic (white lower-class) singing and listening to for entertainment in the south? What were the funny, edgy songs of the bar-room and the southern theater, or were there none? Was it really all sad and serious, like Lorena, or stirring patriotic marches?

We don't really have to go back to singing "It's All For Me Grog," do we?

[Silas]

Schaffner, you're just mad because you don't remember all the words to De History Ob De World.

[Pvt Schnapps]

Schaffner, you're just mad because you don't remember all the words to De History Ob De World.

Well, not mad Silas, but awfully frustrated. I enjoyed the heck out of the chorus, though. And I didn't think it inappropriate. I just assumed you'd spent a lot of time in Savannah hanging out in the theater scene.

Hank, you raise a good question and make an excellent point. Any period song, whether or not it's PEC for a specific impression, beats the pants off vaguely "old-timey" substitutes.

I don't know what the southern working class equivalent is of "Dandy Jim." The Confederate Song Book and similar works I cited purport to reflect what was actually sung during the war and, since they seemed to be aimed at an audience that would know, would seem to warrant some credence.

But maybe this is where our constraints and sensibilities differ from theirs. For reenactors, field music and bands are relatively rare and personal banjos and guitars never further than the nearest A tent or parking lot. Back in the day, during the active operations of the real armies, band music would have been more prominent, and there were a huge number of songs in current publication that could have been sung a cappella around the camp fire. Maybe these *were mostly sentimental and the lighter stuff came from the fifers and drummers.

This whole area is new to me, which probably shows. But since I've already crawled well out onto the limb, here's another question I've been wondering about: If minstrelsy hit its highest point before the war -- perhaps peaking as early as the late 40s ("Zip Coon" was written in 1834; the "Boatman's Dance" in 1843, ditto "Dandy Jim") or early 50s (when Foster's career started to wind down) -- how relevant was it to the young soldier in his late teens or early twenties on the front lines two decades after some of the biggest hits had come out?

After all, big bands still played in the 1960s, and Bob Hope still did USO tours long after that point, but neither reflected the culture of the soldiers fighting in southeast Asia.

[hanktrent]

The Confederate Song Book and similar works I cited purport to reflect what was actually sung during the war and, since they seemed to be aimed at an audience that would know, would seem to warrant some credence.

Yes, I didn't mean to imply the songs they included weren't sung (except maybe Goober Peas ), just that they may not include the totality of songs sung, since they were focussed on war-specific songs, not what people still sang from before the war.

how relevant was it to the young soldier in his late teens or early twenties on the front lines two decades after some of the biggest hits had come out?

My guess--just a guess at this point, so I would be interested in more data--was that blackface minstrelsy was like rock music's sustained popularity for several generations now, still going strong but altering somewhat over time, since blackface was still current in the vaudeville generation, long post-war.

Here's an article from the 1890s on the changes in minstrel shows over time, noting that they were still performed, but not the same as they were forty years ago. ("The Decadence of a Black Art," starting at the bottom of the page).

Here's what George Christy was publishing in 1862, "Containing a Choice Collection of New and Popular Songs... Darkey Jokes, and Plantation Wit." Of course, there's no way of knowing from the book alone whether it was aimed at old fogeys or Young America. Also look at p. 82 for a list of other song books, many of which are obviously minstrel-type songs ("Ethiopian," etc.)

I'd say, though, that one could check the pulse of Young America's music, among city-dwelling northerners, at least, by following Tony Pastor's career. He was only 24 himself when the war started, and incorporated blackface and comic minstrel songs, as well as immigrant and other parodies, in his wildly popular New York city performances late-war and post-war.

So I think one could make a case that minstrel songs were still popular even among the younger generation in northern cities, but I have no idea how that applies to the south, since most of my research on Young America focuses on northern cities. What was the equivalent of Tony Pastor's or the Old Bowery in New Orleans? I have no idea.

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[Silas]

The words to "History" and the rest of the songster I made for In The Van can be downloaded from the event listserve.

Hooley's songster is worth a look if you have not seen it : http://www.archive.org/details/hoole...ouse00newyrich Despite having a New York publishing in 1863, it has province to San Francisco. It's got very strong McClellan bias. You'll find several songs which are minstrel as well as some which are anti-Mick.

My recollection is that there are three versions of Ephraim's Lament there. This is a very minstrel tune and apparently very popular during the war as I've seen other versions of it from period songsheets. Few people know about poor Ephraim and his broken heart. Ephraim was first published in the late 1840's but was still going strong during the war.