Page 70 - 1619 Project Curriculum

The 1619 Project

Ma Rainey, an early blues singer who performed in black minstrel shows, with her band.

before. What they saw caused a taking over concert halls, doing — that would lay the groundwork the borderline-mythical Old Corn

permanent sensation. He report- wildly clamored-for residencies in for American popular music, from Meal, who started as a street ven-

edly won 20 encores. Boston, New York and Philadelphia. bluegrass to Motown. Some of dor and wound up the first black
Rice repeated the act again, A blackface minstrel would sing, these instruments had come from man to perform, as himself, on a

night after night, for audiences dance, play music, give speeches Africa; on a plantation, the banjo’s white New Orleans stage. His stuff

so profoundly rocked that he was and cut up for white audiences, body would have been a desiccated was copied by George Nichols, who

frequently mobbed during perfor- almost exclusively in the North, gourd. In ‘‘Doo-Dah!’’ his book on took up blackface after a start in

mances. Across the Ohio River, not at least initially. Blackface was Foster’s work and life, Ken Emer- plain-old clowning. Yet as often as

an arduous distance from all that used for mock operas and politi- son writes that the fiddle and banjo not, blackface minstrelsy tethered

adulation, was Boone County, Ky., cal monologues (they called them were paired for the melody, while black people and black life to white

whose population would have been stump speeches), skits, gender par- the bones ‘‘chattered’’ and the tam- musical structures, like the polka,

largely enslaved Africans. As they odies and dances. Before the min- bourine ‘‘thumped and jingled a beat which was having a moment in

were being worked, sometimes strel show gave it a reliable home, that is still heard ’round the world.’’ 1848. The mixing was already well
to death, white people, desperate blackface was the entertainment But the sounds made with these underway: Europe plus slavery plus

with anticipation, were paying to between acts of conventional plays. instruments could be only imagined the circus, times harmony, comedy

see them depicted at play. Its stars were the Elvis, the Beatles, as black, because the first wave of and drama, equals Americana.

Other performers came and con- the ’NSync of the 19th century. The minstrels were Northerners who’d And the muses for so many of the

quered, particularly the Virginia performers were beloved and so, never been meaningfully South. songs were enslaved Americans,

Minstrels, who exploded in 1843, especially, were their songs. They played Irish melodies and people the songwriters had never

burned brightly then burned out During minstrelsy’s heyday, white used Western choral harmonies, met, whose enslavement they rare-

after only months. In their wake, songwriters like Stephen Foster not the proto-gospel call-and-re- ly opposed and instead sentimen-

P.T. Barnum made a habit of book- wrote the tunes that minstrels sang, sponse music that would make talized. Foster’s minstrel-show sta-

ing other troupes for his American tunes we continue to sing. Edwin life on a plantation that much ple ‘‘Old Uncle Ned,’’ for instance,
Museum; when he was short on Pearce Christy’s group the Christy more bearable. Black artists were warmly if disrespectfully eulogizes

performers, he blacked up himself. Minstrels formed a band — banjo, on the scene, like the pioneer the enslaved the way you might a

By the 1840s, minstrel acts were fiddle, bone castanets, tambourine bandleader Frank Johnson and salaried worker or an uncle:

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