Blackface Minstrelsy

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Adam Max Cohen

Taboo since the early 1950s, blackface minstrelsy developed in the late 1820s just as the young United States was attempting to assert a national identity distinct from Britain's. Many scholars have identified it as the first uniquely American form of popular entertainment. Blackface minstrelsy was a performance style that usually consisted of several white male performers parodying the songs, dances, and speech patterns of Southern blacks. Performers blackened their faces with burnt cork and dressed in rags as they played the banjo, the bone castanets, the fiddle, and the tambourine. They sang, danced, told malapropistic jokes, cross-dressed for "wench" routines, and gave comical stump speeches. From the late 1820s on, blackface minstrelsy dominated American popular entertainment. Americans saw it on the stages of theaters and circuses, read about it in the popular novels of the nineteenth century, heard it over the radio, and viewed it on film and television. Blackface minstrelsy can certainly be viewed as the commodification of racist stereotypes, but it can also be seen as the white fascination with and appropriation of African American cultural traditions that culminated in the popularization of jazz, the blues, rock 'n' roll, and rap music.

While there are accounts of blackface minstrel performances before the American Revolution, the performance style gained widespread appeal in the 1820s with the "Jump Jim Crow" routine of Thomas Dartmouth Rice. Rice is frequently referred to as "the father of blackface minstrelsy." In 1828 Rice, a white man, watched a black Louisville man with a deformed right shoulder and an arthritic left knee as he performed a song and dance called "Jump Jim Crow." Rice taught himself the foot-dragging dance steps, mimicked the disfigurement of the old man, copied his motley dress, and trained himself to imitate his diction. When Rice first performed "Jump Jim Crow" in blackface during an 1828 performance of The Rifle in Louisville, Kentucky, the audience roared with delight. White audience members stopped the performance and demanded that Rice repeat the routine over 20 times. It is impossible to overstate the sensational popularity which Rice's routine enjoyed throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Gary D. Engle has aptly described Rice as "America's first entertainment superstar." When Rice brought his routine to New York City's Bowery Theater in 1832, the audience again stopped the show and called him back on stage to repeat the routine multiple times. He took his routine to England in 1836 where it was enthusiastically received, and he spawned a bevy of imitators who styled themselves "Ethiopian Delineators."

In 1843 four of these "Ethiopian Delineators" decided to create a blackface minstrel troupe. They were the first group to call themselves "Minstrels" instead of "Delineators," and their group The Virginia Minstrels made entertainment history when it served as the main attraction for an evening's performance. Previous blackface shows had been performed in circuses or between the acts of plays. The troupe advertised its Boston debut as a "Negro Concert" in which it would exhibit the "Oddities, peculiarities, eccentricities, and comicalities of that Sable Genus of Humanity." Dan Emmett played the violin, Frank Brower clacked the "bones" (a percussion instrument similar to castanets), Billy Whitlock strummed the banjo, and Dick Pelham beat the tambourine. Their show consisted of comedy skits and musical numbers, and it enjoyed a six week run in Boston before traveling to England. Dozens of imitators attempted to trade on its success. One of the most famous was Christy's Minstrels, which opened in New York City in 1846 and enjoyed an unprecedented seven year run. During the 1840s blackface minstrelsy became the most popular form of entertainment in the nation. Americans who saw performances were captivated by them. "Everywhere it played," writes Robert Toll, "minstrelsy seemed to have a magnetic, almost hypnotic impact on its audiences."

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, published serially between 1851 and 1852, sold over 300,000 copies in its first year in part because it traded on the popularity of blackface minstrelsy. The book opens with a "Jump Jim Crow" routine, incorporates blackface malapropistic humor, gives its readers a blackface minstrel dancer in Topsy, and its hero Uncle Tom sings doleful hymns drawn from the blackface minstrel tradition. Indeed, Stowe's entire novel can be read as a blackface minstrel performance in which a white New England woman "blacks up" to impersonate Southern slaves.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was immediately adapted for the stage. It not only became the greatest dramatic success in the history of American theater, but it also quickly became what Harry Birdoff called "The World's Greatest Hit." "Tom shows" were traveling musical revues of Uncle Tom's Cabin that continued the traditions of blackface minstrelsy. One historian has described them as "part circus and part minstrel show." They featured bloodhounds chasing Eliza across the ice (a stage addition not present in Stowe's novel), trick alligators, performing donkeys, and even live snakes. One 1880 performance included 50 actors, 12 dogs, a mule, and an elephant. The "Tom shows" competed directly with the traveling circuses of Barnum and Bailey.