Page 69 - 1619 Project Curriculum

August 18, 2019

The blackface performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice (T. D. Rice), who Sheet music of ‘‘Jim Crow Jubilee: A Collection of Negro Melodies,’’
pioneered the ‘‘Jim Crow’’ character, in a portrait from the mid-1800s. published in 1847.

The truth is more bounteous and in, underscoring that black people Blackness was on the move before black man singing while grooming

more spiritual than that, more con- have often been rendered unnec- my ancestors were legally free to a horse on the property of a white

t was on the move before my
fused. That confusion is the DNA of essary to attempt blackness. Take be. I man whose last name was Crow.

the American sound. Billboard’s Top 10 songs of 2013: ancestors even knew what they On went the light bulb. Rice took

It’s in the wink-wink costume It’s mostly nonblack artists strongly had. It was on the move because in the tune and the movements but

funk of Beck’s ‘‘Midnite Vultures’’ identified with black music, for real white people were moving it. And failed, it seems, to take down the old

from 1999, an album whose kicky and for kicks: Robin Thicke, Miley the white person most frequently man’s name. So in his song based

nonsense deprecations circle back Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Mack- identified as its prime mover is on the horse groomer, he renamed

to the popular culture of 150 years lemore and Ryan Lewis, the dude Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New him: ‘‘Weel about and turn about jus

earlier. It’s in the dead-serious, who made ‘‘The Harlem Shake.’’ Yorker who performed as T. D. so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump

nostalgic dance-floor schmaltz Sometimes all the inexorable Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted Jim Crow.’’ And just like that, Rice

of Bruno Mars. It’s in what we mixing leaves me longing for some- after as ‘‘Daddy’’ Rice, ‘‘the negro had invented the fellow who would

once called ‘‘blue-eyed soul,’’ a thing with roots that no one can rip par excellence.’’ Rice was a min- become the mascot for two centu-

term I’ve never known what to do all the way out. This is to say that strel, which by the 1830s, when ries of legalized racism.

with, because its most convinc- when we’re talking about black his stardom was at its most reful- That night, Rice made himself up

ing practitioners — the Bee-Gees, music, we’re talking about horns, gent, meant he painted his face to look like the old black man — or

Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, drums, keyboards and guitars doing with burned cork to approximate something like him, because Rice’s
Simply Red, George Michael, Tay- the unthinkable together. We’re also those of the enslaved black people get-up most likely concocted skin

lor Dayne, Lisa Stansfield, Adele talking about what the borrowers he was imitating. blacker than any actual black per-

— never winked at black people, and collaborators don’t want to or In 1830, Rice was a nobody actor son’s and a gibberish dialect meant

weight, of

so black people rarely batted an can’t lift — centuries of in his early 20s, touring with a to imply black speech. Rice had

eyelash. Flaws and all, these are atrocity we’ve never suffi ciently theater company in Cincinnati (or turned the old man’s melody and

homeowners as opposed to rent- worked through, the blackness you Louisville; historians don’t know for hobbled movements into a song-

ers. No matter what, though, a know is beyond theft because it’s sure), when, the story goes, he saw and-dance routine that no white

kind of gentrification tends to set too real, too rich, too heavy to steal. a decrepit, possibly disfigured old audience had ever experienced

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