Minstrel Shows

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by M. Alison Kibler

Originating around 1830 and peaking in popularity twenty years later, the minstrel show offered blackface comedy for the common man. The minstrel show, prominent primarily in Northeastern urban centers, had a profound impact on nineteenth-century Americans, including Mark Twain who remarked in his Autobiography that "if I could have the nigger show back again ... I should have but little further use for opera." Although it declined by 1900, the minstrel show continued to shape American popular entertainment and remained a topic of intense historical and political debate. It is both reviled for its racism, including its exploitation of black culture, and celebrated as the "people's culture" and the first indigenous form of American popular culture.

Thomas D. Rice, an itinerant blackface performer, is responsible for one of the founding moments in the history of the minstrel show. In approximately 1830 Rice saw an elderly black man performing a strange dance while singing "Weel about and turn around and do jus so;/Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow." He copied the dance, borrowed the man's clothes, blacked up and soon launched a successful tour in New York City with an act that included his new "Jim Crow" dance. Over the next decade ensembles, rather than solo performers, began to dominate this industry. In 1843 one of the first minstrel show troupes, the Virginia Minstrels (which included Dan Emmett), formed in New York City, the birthplace and then hub of the minstrel show productions.

The blackface minstrel stands alongside the Yankee (independent, patriotic, and honest) and the backwoodsman (such as the uneducated and robust Davy Crockett) as early expressions of American identity, in defiance of European aristocracy. In literature or on stage, these stock characters undermined pretentious and immoral elites with their comedy. Significantly, the minstrel show was the first form of American commercial entertainment to draw on black culture, although scholars admit that it is difficult to sort out this complex history of racial exchange.

White male performers put on blackface to offer comic commentary on a variety of topics (including women's rights and slavery); undermine many experts and authority figures; and make fun of immigrants, Indians, and African Americans. The burlesque of Shakespeare's major plays--with exuberant physical comedy and transvestite heroines--was a regular feature of minstrelsy. Although the minstrel show underwent many transformations in the nineteenth century, the basic structure included three distinct parts. In the first section of the show a pompous interlocutor was situated in the center of a semi-circle of performers made-up in blackface (burnt cork or greasepaint), with two unruly endmen, named Brudder Tambo and Brudder Bones (their names referred to the instruments they played). These comedians were usually the stars of the show. Dressed in grotesque costumes and gesturing wildly on stage, they exchanged malapropisms, riddles, and one-liners, often deflating the interlocutor with their comic barbs. The second part of the show featured variety acts, while the final segment was a one-act skit, often depicting plantation life.

The representation of African Americans, one part of this diverse entertainment form, became popular when political tensions surrounding slavery were rising. The minstrel show emerged approximately at the time of the first publication of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator (1831), and Nat Turner's slave rebellion (1831). Songs and dialogues in the minstrel show sometimes featured grotesque portrayals of the Northern black dandy (Zip Coon) and the happy, errant slave (Jim Crow). In addition, Stephen Foster, who sold many of his songs to the minstrel show performer E. P. Christy, created images of peaceful Southern plantation life, with emotional and sympathetic slaves, in tunes like "Old Folks at Home." Through sentimental images of contented slaves in the South and rebellious, incompetent free blacks, the minstrel denigrated blacks but its depiction of slavery was often ambivalent, particularly prior to 1850. The minstrel show included black tricksters who outwitted masters and at times criticized the cruelty of slavery, particularly the break-up of slave families. One of the minstrel show's "plantation melodies" even supported abolition:

The minstrel show's approach to race relations was thus contradictory. Although it tended to support the Union cause during the Civil War, it envisioned no place for free blacks in the North.

The blackface mask of the minstrel show was also a medium of misogyny. Overwhelmingly male-dominated, particularly in the antebellum period, the minstrel show made independent women the butt of jokes and also attacked women's supposed moral superiority. The minstrel show, for example, often included songs that ridiculed women's rights:

The minstrel show featured a stock low comedy character, the grotesque black woman or the "funny ole gal." In contrast to male performers' creation of the "plantation yellow girl" (an attractive, well-dressed mulatto), female impersonators made the "funny ole gal" decidedly unattractive with mismatched clothes and a shrill voice.