Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States [1 ed.] 0520390571, 9780520390577

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Origins of Blacksound
Part I. Racial Identity and Popular Music in Early Blackface
1. Slavery and Blackface in the Making of Blacksound
2. William Henry “Master Juba” Lane and Antebellum Blacksound
3. Stephen Foster and the Composition of Americana
Part II. The Birth of the Popular Music Industry
4. The House That Blackface Built: M. Witmark & Sons and the Birth of Tin Pan Alley
5. Intellectual (Performance) Property: Ragtime Goes Pop
Conclusion: Blacksound and the Legacies of Blackface
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ROTH FAMILY FOUNDATION

Imprint in Music

Michael P. Roth and Sukey Garcetti have endowed this imprint to honor the memory of their parents, Julia and Harry Roth, whose deep love of music they wish to share with others.

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Roth Family Foundation Imprint in Music, established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti and Michael P. Roth. Additional support for this publication was generously provided by the H. Earle Johnson Publication Subvention from the Society for American Music.

Blacksound

Blacksound Making Race and Popular Music in the United States

Matthew D. Morrison

university of california press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2024 by Matthew D. Morrison Portions of the Introduction and Chapter 1 previously appeared in Matthew D. Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 781–823. Portions of the Conclusion previously appeared in Matthew D. Morrison, “Gaye vs. Thicke: How Blurred Are the Lines of Copyright Infringement?,” OUPblog, Oxford University Press, March 26, 2015, https://blog.oup.com/2015/03/ blurred-lines-copyright-infringement/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morrison, Matthew D., 1981– author. Title: Blacksound : making race and popular music in the  United States / Matthew D. Morrison. Description: Oakland, California : University of  California Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2023026151 (print) | lccn 2023026152  (ebook) | isbn 9780520390577 (cloth) | isbn 9780520390591 (paperback) | isbn 9780520390607 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Minstrel music—United States—History  and criticism. | Minstrel shows—United States. | Popular music—United States—History and criticism. | African American musicians—Race identity—United States. | African American musicians—Social conditions. Classification: lcc ml3479 .m69 2024 (print) |  lcc ml3479 (ebook) | ddc 780.89/96073—dc23/ eng/20230710 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023026151 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc  .gov/2023026152

Manufactured in the United States of America 33  32  31  30  29  28  27  26  25  24 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

List of Illustrations Author’s Note Acknowledgments Introduction: The Origins of Blacksound

ix xi xiii

1

part i. racial identity and popular music in early blackface 1. Slavery and Blackface in the Making of Blacksound 2. William Henry “Master Juba” Lane and Antebellum Blacksound 3. Stephen Foster and the Composition of Americana

23 65 100

part ii. the birth of the popular music industry 4. The  House That Blackface Built: M. Witmark & Sons and the Birth of Tin Pan Alley 5. Intellectual (Performance) Property: Ragtime Goes Pop

129 161

Conclusion: Blacksound and the Legacies of Blackface

199

Notes Bibliography Index

207 269 289

Illustrations

musical examples 1. “Turkey in the Straw”  /  49 2. “The Glasgow Hornpipe”  /  56 3. “The Post Office”  /  57

figures 1. “Massa Georgee Washington and General Lafayette” (E. Riley)  /  28 2. “The Log House”  /  29 3. “Mr. T. Rice as the Original Jim Crow” (E. Riley)  /  38–39 4. “Zip Coon” (Thomas Birch)  /  46 5. “Zip Coon: A Popular Negro Song” (Firth Hall)  /  48 6. “Zip Coon: A Popular Negro Song” (Firth Hall)  /  50–51 7. “Zip Coon” (Thomas Birch)  /  54–55 8. Lane at Almacks, Five Points neighborhood, New York City  /  75 9. Lane at the Royal Vauxhall Gardens, London (advertisement)  /  83 10. Lane in the London Illustrated News  /  88 11. Thomas F. Briggs’s Banjo Instructor (Oliver Ditson and Co.)  /  98 12. “The Celebrated Negro Melodies” by the Virginia Minstrels  /  102

ix

x   |   Illustrations

13. The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia  /  137 14. “My Gal Is a High-Born Lady,” Barney Fagan (M. Witmark & Sons)  /  152–155 15. “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” Ernest Hogan (M. Witmark & Sons)  /  182–185 16. “Laughing Song,” George Washington Johnson (Ko-La’r)  /  190

Author’s Note

Within this book I investigate the circulation and performance of racist blackface images and sounds from the nineteenth century in an effort to help undo their impact on black people and unpack how we perceive performances of racial authenticity. I acknowledge the inherent violence embedded in these images and their circulation. I ask that readers consider the ways in which these images and performances continue to resonate into the present, shaping how we engage with race and racism throughout society.

xi

Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without the unending love, support, and sacrifices of my dear mother, Charmayne Morrison. She is my first black feminist model and teacher, and I hope the work that I do carries her care and wisdom. She is my greatest inspiration. I love you, Mom. My grandparents, Rev. David L. Morrison, Sr., and Phyllis G. Morrison, have given so much to ensure that their grandson could be free to pursue and explore his interests and desires. I carry within me your prayers and teachings, and I will continue to uphold the high standards of care and community that you have set. My uncles, David (and my Aunt Tonya), Tremayne (and my Aunt Tammy), and Anthony (R.I.P.), have been consummate examples of what it means to be a loving black man, and they have been ardent supporters of their nephew “Matt Cat” from the very start—allowing me to be who I am without apology and ready to shut anyone down who said otherwise. I cannot imagine my life or work without them (and thanks to my uncle David, who shuttled me back and forth to orchestra practices from middle through high school). I’d like to also acknowledge my family members who are now ancestors, as their prayers both here on Earth and now from the other side continue to lead, guide, and cover me. I feel like the luckiest person in the world to be a part of my family, both immediate and extended (shout out to my Uncle Main Ghee, Aunt Peepsie, my cousin Q, all of my amazing cousins, and my chosen aunties—Aunt Sharon, Aunt Kathy, Aunt Trina, Aunt Oneita, and Aunt Cheryl). I love you all very xiii

xiv   |   Acknowledgments

much, and I hope that this book contributes to our family and community legacy. Although writing books can be isolating, I have been supported by many communities and institutions in completing this work over the years. Thank you to Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., and the Hutchins Center for African American Studies at Harvard University, the American Council of Learned Societies (including the endowed fellowship sponsored by Susan McClary and Robert Walser), the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Edinburgh, the Dahlem Humanities Center at the Freie Universität (Berlin), the Catwalk Residency (Catskills), the writing workshop lead by Kiese Laymon, the Hurston/ Wright writers fellowship (lead by Imani Perry), the “Modern Moves” working group lead by Ananya Kabir, the London Writers Salon, and the Society for American Music (H. Earl Johnson Publication Subvention), for providing me with the space, time, and community to complete my research and writing. The work would not exist in its current form without the support of these fellowships and their communities. I appreciate the support I have received from Theaster Gates and Daisy Desroisiers, as well as our collaborations and friendship. I’m also grateful for the friends I made while on writing fellowships and residencies in Edinburgh, Berlin, and Amsterdam, and at Harvard, as I completed my book research and writing. You helped me strike a balance between work and play, while supporting me along the way (intellectually and otherwise). I am also grateful for my more informal writing groups and the support of many colleagues. Being in community with smart and thoughtful individuals is what has allowed me to complete this project. Thank you to my fellow music studies folks, like Samuel Dorf and Phil Gentry (who sent me their book materials early on), Kaleb Goldschmitt, as well as Robin James, Brian Sengdala, Barry Shank, Charles Eppley, Sophie A. Brady, and Celeste Day Moore, whom I worked along with in a writing group for accountability. Christopher Lynch and Stephen Miller have also generously given me access to resources that have been important within my research. I am also indebted to the many universities and other institutions across the United States and Europe that have invited me to give keynotes, class lectures, and colloquium presentations on “Blacksound.” Discussions with colleagues, and especially graduate students, have had a significant impact in shaping my writing and thinking. Many of the ideas in this book have been introduced through dialogue on Twitter over the years, and I appreciate the generosity of so

Acknowledgments   |   xv

many interlocutors on my work. Thank you all for your thoughtful contributions to this book. I have also had the fortune to be in (writing) community with some of my dearest friends, who remind me that my humanity and wellness and happiness are just as important if the work is going to get done well. Shout out to my BBS crew and chosen family, Aja Burrell Wood and Tanisha Ford (love y’all—gotta go back to write at the Vineyard in the off season). My loving friends and colleagues Hentyle Yapp (who has been there for me in so many ways, thank you), Kelli Moore, and Isolde Brielmaier provided and held space for me and one another, and it was this group that helped ground me in myself and my work early on at NYU. And I’m grateful for my dear friend Duncan Yoon, with whom I have spent many, many hours and days (including an unforgettable month-long retreat upstate) toward writing and finishing this book (and hanging out). I would not have gotten the book complete and be a whole person without these folks. I’m thankful for my dear North Carolina brother and friend Alex Alston, with whom I have worked out many of my deepest thoughts, beliefs, ideas, anxieties, and theories over the years—and with whom I found my way to the healing power of nature. Our conversations and vulnerability have definitely found their way into the book. Grateful. I am grateful for the care and training I received from Ms. Doris Jones, music director at my home church and my very first music teacher. Ms. Jones and my secondary school music teachers like Ms. Newlin, Mrs. Howard, Mr. Boyce, and Mr. Sellers were critical to my growth as a musician and music historian. Thank you to my professors and mentors (Alfred Duckett, Robert Tanner, David Morrow, Uzee Brown, Calvin Grimes, Jefferey Boga) from Morehouse College, who set me on my journey and trained me to be rigorous and thoughtful in anything I chose to do, as well as to Catholic University, where Grayson Wagstaff and Andrew Weaver guided me through my early stages of being a musicologist. I am forever grateful to have had Andrew Weaver as my MA advisor (and to be part of his first graduate advisees). I got very lucky during my graduate studies—my dissertation advisor, George Lewis, and my academic advisor, Ellie Hisama, have supported me deeply since we first met at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society before I began my doctorate. I cannot begin to express the number of lessons I have learned from them both. The care that they have shown me and the guidance they have given me have been immeasurable. I hope to pass along the many lessons that I have learned and continue to learn from

xvi   |   Acknowledgments

you, and I would not have made it to this stage without either of you. Thank you to Tamara Levitz for her care since my first JAMS essay. The support, scholarship, and “real talks” of Guthrie Ramsey and Deborah Willis, who are like family to me, have truly carried me through, and I cannot imagine being the scholar and person I am without your love. While at Columbia University, it was the Institute for African American Studies that was my true home. Professors like Farah Jasmine Griffin, Saidiya Hartman, Daphne Brooks (who was a visiting professor at the time and introduced me to blackface), and Alondra Nelson continue to serve as guides for the type of holistic and empathetic scholar I hope to be, and I am grateful for their support over time. Of course, the IRAAS community would not have been what it was without its heart, Sharon Harris, who brought so many of us together and continues to do so. We love you. At Columbia, I met some of my dearest friends, whom I grow even closer to year after year. In particular, Nijah Cunningham (who was the only other black man in our first-year PhD cohort at Columbia), James T. Roane, and Jarvis McInnis are my brothers. I cannot begin to express how much each of them has brought me through in different ways, or how important our comradery with one another has been and continues to be. We have written together, partied together, cussed folks out together, talked shit together on group chat, all of the things, and I am just proud to call y’all my brothers. I’m also grateful for my music studies classmates at Columbia, like my friend David Gutkin, who (lovingly) challenged and supported my ideas during our studies, and James Napoli, who graciously took my new headshots for my book. I don’t take it lightly when I say that black women have held me down. And I hope that I have been able to reciprocate their love and support that have carried me. I’m grateful for brilliant interlocutors and friends like Autumn Womack, Regina Bradley, Alisha Lola Jones, Maureen Mahon (with whom I took my first graduate course on race and popular music), ZZ Packer, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and Treva B. Lindsey, who have each in their own way made all the difference in my growth as a human, thinker, and writer. You all keep me honest and focused on the matter at hand (liberation and care), and you all are appreciated and loved. I have also been inspired and kept by Antonio Thompson, Petero Kalulé (petals), and K’eguro Macharia—your consistent care and expansive ways of thinking, writing, creating, and being help me to be the best me. Thank you. My friends Brittney Taylor, Quinteves “Hosea” Wood, Tavius Bolton, Jimmy Padgett, Jasaun Anthony-Boone, Marcus Anthony-Boone, DeWaylon Johnson, Nicho-

Acknowledgments   |   xvii

las J. Simpson, Antonio Jefferson, Tyre Davis, Matthew Moroney, and Dorian Wilson have been a source of community and love for me over the years in ways that I cannot account for. Truly. Y’all are my forever family. I am blessed to have a community of chosen and gifted family, and so many people have supported me in immeasurable ways, allowing me to complete this project as a whole person. Betty Teng came along at a time that allowed me to recognize that I am more important than my work, and I am grateful for the care I have received at the precise moment it was most needed. Casey Gerald was there before “Blacksound” became Blacksound, and I am thankful to have walked through this long journey to the book (and through life) with you. My dear friend Darwin Smith has provided me with the friendship and support that one can only hope for, and I am grateful for decades of consistent care and many more to come. My lovely and gifted friend Jasmine Johnson has just been such a balm and source of light and love through the years, and I am better because of our friendship. I am so lucky to have Courtney Bryan, the brilliant composer, in my corner ever since we first met at dinner when I began graduate school. Your love and brightness shines through everyone you touch, and how fortunate I am to be so close to the source. My ride or die Asia Leeds has been so many things to and for me since our serendipitous meeting at St. Nick’s Pub in Harlem (with Courtney). We have traveled the world together, and you have held me through some of my most difficult times. I am thankful for our twinship. I am thankful for the love and encouragement of the illustrious Akua Naru, who has blessed me further by making me the Godfather of Kamasi (and my Godnephew Kingsley). Although I am an only child, I have many siblings. But I am especially grateful for my dear Godsister, Vickie Thomas, who (along with our brother Rob and my beloved Godparents) helped raise me and make me. Vickie is one of the most ethereal and gifted beings I know and has always allowed me to be who I am and imagine that I can be even more than that. Your teachings since childhood have guided me, and I am thankful for your light and love, which I will continue to shine in every way possible. And God sent me a sister in Imani Uzuri, who has been my prayer warrior and partner, confidant, teacher, co-conspirator, champion, and voice of reason, and one of my biggest sources of inspiration in life. Your radiance shines beyond imagination, and I am thankful to be in your immediate orbit and call you my sister. This book would not have been possible without the consistent support of my institution, New York University, and my school, the Tisch

xviii   |   Acknowledgments

School of the Arts, as well as my department and colleagues of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. My deans, NYU colleagues, and administrators have provided support and been engaging interlocutors over the years, and all my students have directly contributed to the development of my ideas within this book through classes (bless y’all) and conversations. Thank you. It also would have not been possible without the support of my publisher, the University of California Press, and my immaculate editor, Raina Polivka. Raina reached out to me before I even had an abstract for the book, and has been such a caring, thoughtful, and diligent editor over the years. I got very lucky to have such a pairing, and this book exists because of your belief in my work. Thank you to Anjali Vats and Daniel Goldmark for their thoughtfulness and support of this manuscript and of my work in general. It means a lot. And to my developmental editor, Laura Portwood-Stacer, thank you for walking me through the process from start (abstract) to finish (final draft). I can’t imagine writing Blacksound without your guidance. I am very appreciative for Erin Maher, Chris Laura, and Robert Demke, the consummate editors who contributed greatly to my book after its completion. Thank you to LeKeisha Hughes, Associate Editor at UC Press, who has given great consideration in shepherding Blacksound through its final stages of publication. And finally, thank you to God, my beloved ancestors, and all of the light that I have received to complete this work at this stage of life. I will continue to carry the torch and live to my highest good. This work is in your service.

Introduction The Origins of Blacksound

St. Louis was becoming an epicenter among midwestern American cities in the 1890s. Recent decades of economic growth and a thriving cultural scene had turned the city into a developing “gateway” metropolitan that attracted an array of permanent and transient residents during the Gilded Age following the Civil War.1 Situated in a prime location along the Mississippi River, St. Louis became critical to trade and transportation routes in the mid-nineteenth century, while popular entertainment itself was developing into an industry both within St. Louis and throughout the expanding nation. Like other growing urban centers, it contained what were then known as “vice districts”—areas where urban and political “Reformers” sought to sequester all manner of vice entertainment (e.g., sex work, gambling, and drinking) into one vicinity—usually centrally located in the “downtown” area of a city.2 Popular music served as the soundtrack to these heavily trafficked districts of diversion and became the source that fueled these areas’ economic activity.3 At the same time as the city’s economic importance grew, so did its cultural production, especially its music—and African Americans were some of its central creators.4 Ragtime, jazz, and many other forms of popular music could be heard nightly in the city’s many entertainment halls and clubs. Some of the most famous musical artists of the late nineteenth century emerged out of St. Louis, including Scott Joplin and Thomas Turpin.

1

2   |   Introduction

In 1956, the Baltimore Afro-American reran a story about one of St. Louis’s famous sporting halls of the late nineteenth century. The feature mentions a popular musician named “Mama Lou”—one of the most important singers of the time in St. Louis nightlife and popular entertainment. The article notes that “The Castle was operated by Sarah Bilas Connors, known as Babe Connors, who usually dripped with diamonds when she made her grand entrance down the chandelier-lit stairway to welcome her callers. She maintained eight to ten beautiful ‘Creole’ maidens imported from Louisiana for her guests’ entertainment.” While the article is clear that Babe “ran the house,” it also points out that Mama Lou “sang the songs. Between the two of them, they became undisputed tops in after dark entertainment in 1890 St. Louis.”5 Babe Connors’s the Castle was a members-only club in Chestnut Hill (St. Louis’s red-light/vice district): a US double-eagle gold twenty-dollar piece was required for entry after members paid their club dues. Most of the patrons who got to experience Connors’s “Creole” (i.e., mixedrace black) girls, the bourgeoning ragtime sound, and Mama Lou’s distinct entertainment style were white men with the financial and structural means to do so.6 “Dressed in her comic maid’s apron and red bandana,” the Castle’s “main star” “ferociously insulted the customers and the girls, pausing occasionally to bellow obscene songs.”7 Mama Lou was not only one of the most popular musical acts in St. Louis—her musical performances, as described in this introduction, would influence the growing popular music industry across the country and in the United Kingdom. But this influence took shape in an industry emerging directly out of a culture of blackface minstrelsy—limiting possibilities for black musicians like Mama Lou in that process. My discussion of Blacksound throughout this book goes beyond individuals like Mama Lou to describe the larger cultural and economic history of this phenomenon, as it tells the story of how blackface has shaped the making of American popular music, identity, and culture. To help capture this broader history, Blacksound is defined and explored as the sonic complement and aesthetic legacy of blackface minstrelsy and performance within American popular music and its industry. I have developed the concept to trace the musical, political, structural, and proprietary legacies of blackface minstrelsy—a theatrical form that emerged during slavery as the nation’s first original mass entertainment. Before formally defining Blacksound, a brief foray into the life, musical legacy, and historical treatment of Mama Lou provides a glimpse into how black performance, blackface, and their develop-

The Origins of Blacksound   |   3

ment through popular sound formed the aesthetic and (intellectual) property basis of the popular music industry in the wake of slavery.8 In contrast to the sexualized description of the “beautiful ‘Creole’ maidens” reprinted in the 1959 article from the Baltimore AfroAmerican, many of the historical descriptions of Mama Lou, like the quoted one above, invoke the racist caricatures of black women (as a “wench” or “mammy” figure) that had, by the 1890s, and as discussed in Chapter 1, been rehearsed in blackface through figures like “Lucy Long” for decades. From this historical description (probably written by a white male observer), it appears as though Mama Lou played on and had to negotiate these stereotypes of black women in the United States for (mostly white male) patrons, being herself a larger, dark-skinned Afro-descended woman (possibly of Dominican or Haitian origins, according to descriptions).9 Out of the shadow of minstrel representations of black womanhood and through her own (black) performance practices, Mama Lou simultaneously presented and created some of the most famous popular tunes of the late nineteenth century, as sheet music sales and commercial entertainment reached new peaks. Orrick Johns recounts an event from 1891, as told by his father, George S. Johns (editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch under Joseph Pulitzer). Ignaz Paderewski, the well-known classical Polish pianist and composer (who later became the second prime minister of Poland), was in St. Louis for a recital. Afterward, Paderewski, Johns recounted, was seeking “diversion”; naturally, he was taken to the “hottest” place in town, Babe Connors’s: “After a very informal and polite introduction— a dozen beauties danced to the music of a blind pianist, and Mama Lou sang her raucous songs. Among them was Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay. . . . It was still unknown to the wide world, and it caught Paderewski’s fancy. He went to the piano and asked her to sing it again and again. He learned that, and a number of other songs from her.”10 In the late nineteenth century, Western classical music was commonly associated with “high” or European-descended “white” culture, while popular music was connected to black, poorer whites of various ethnicities, and other people of color of working and lower financial classes.11 This imagined and ideological cultural division, however, is challenged by this anecdote about Paderewski, the European classical pianist and composer who ventured to St. Louis’s red-light district for “novel” entertainment at Babe Connors’s sporting hall. Paderewskis’s fascination (as a European pianist and composer of “classical” music) with Mama Lou’s “raucous songs” highlights the tensions that emerge

4   |   Introduction

with the widespread transmission and regulation of regional, vernacular sounds of black performers, who were largely denied recognition of their own creative practices as forms of property to be owned themselves through sheet music or publication. Ephemeral, innovative, and improvisational African American performance practices were often consumed for their entertainment value, but not valued as sources of property themselves to be claimed by the black people with whom the performances originated. Despite Mama Lou’s significance in early American popular music, direct references to Mama Lou in publications from that era are not easy to trace. Her performances were ephemeral, there is no record that she published her own sheet music, and detailed written recollections of her scarcely remain. And yet still, sources point to two other of the biggest hits of the 1890s as either originating with or being introduced to the wider public by Mama Lou: “The Bully Song” and “A Hot Time in Old Town.” These two songs were eventually recorded and performed by one of the first pop music recording stars, Irish American “coon shouter” May Irwin.12 “A Hot Time” even became such a popular song that it was adapted as a theme of the Spanish American War.13 “A Hot Time,” “The Bully Song,” and “Ta Ra Ra”—all of which have been recorded as originating with Mama Lou—were national and in some cases international hits. They were also some of the best-selling sheet music at the fin de siècle.14 Mama Lou’s songs were heard and (legally) taken up by white writers and publishers who had both the means and the structural access to claim ownership over her performed material. Live musical performances were not deemed copyrightable, and anyone who had the ability to do so could publish their written version of her tunes as sheet music, thereby obtaining ownership over them through copyright.15 Copyright provides the owner with the exclusive right (within a limited amount of time) to reproduce, prepare, distribute, perform, and display their work.16 The vernacular, regionalized sounds of Mama Lou that went from local to popular helped to define the developing “ragtime” aesthetic, a style that registered as novel and original to white audiences of the time.17 What also enabled their popularity was the packaging and marketing of her sounds by mostly white music industrialists into sheet music (as the primary source of music property) for consumption and performance by a wider audience—and the inability for most black musicians to publish and receive royalties or claim “property rights” over their own works. Black performers in areas where this music was

The Origins of Blacksound   |   5

being cultivated (e.g., vice districts) had limited access to the developing publishing rights and presses of the music industry, especially under Jim Crow and racist US systems. Mostly white men were in positions of structural power to claim authority to manipulate, own, and distribute Blacksound out of black and blackface performance practices as the basis of the modern popular music industry in the 1890s. Henry J. Sayers was a (white American) popular music composer who became famous for his copied version of Mama Lou’s “Ta Ra Ra” in his blackface variety show, Tuxedo (1890). Mama Lou’s tune gained international fame through Sayer’s sheet music, which was eventually performed by a British music hall entertainer by the name of Lottie Collins. Collins was an English musician-actress who performed “Ta Ra Ra” in London theaters, after her husband had heard the song in Sayers’s blackface revue in the early 1890s and subsequently purchased the rights to publish it in England (as the 1891 International Copyright Act, discussed in Chapter 5, required publishers in the United States and United Kingdom to obtain rights to publish works in the other country). Once Collins, a then lesser-known entertainer, returned to London in 1892 and performed “Ta Ra Ra,” the song, the dance, her “Can Can” high kicks, and Collins herself became sensations in the metropolis’s burgeoning popular music halls.18 Almost thirty years after Mama Lou performed the soon-to-be-viral “Ta Ra Ra” at Babe Connors’s the Castle in St. Louis, Sayers went on to publish a 1919 version of the song in the United States, which sold over a million copies. A song that had originated with Mama Lou in St. Louis became a sensation across the country and beyond for decades to come.19 Importantly, this song and its sheet music were copyrighted by Sayers after the first major revision of US copyright laws in 1909. The Copyright Act of 1909 granted more comprehensive protection for originally published works against unauthorized reproduction, and it also protected against the unauthorized mechanical reproduction of a musical composition without the consent of its owner.20 “Ta Ra Ra Boom De Aye,” which began with Mama Lou and continues to resonate through American popular culture, travelled from Babe Connors’s local, black-owned sporting house to becoming the subject of a copyright case in 1932: Henry J. Sayers v. Sigmund Spaeth, et al. Sayers claimed infringement by Spaeth’s (a musicologist) reprinting of music and lyrics from “Ta Ra Ra.” In the case, the judge (Patterson) decided that aside from a couple of new verses, the song and melody were ubiquitous enough by this time to be considered “public domain.”

6   |   Introduction

Henry J. Sayers admitted within the court case that the melody originated in a performance he had heard by Mama Lou at Babe Connors’s sporting house. Sayers also suggested during this trial that, although he didn’t print or commercialize them, the melodies for the two other aforementioned high-selling ragtime and coon songs printed in the 1890s—“The Bully Song” and “A Hot Time”—also originated with Mama Lou.21 Sayers did not see a conflict in citing Mama Lou as the original source of the tune within his legal battle, because he still considered himself its “author,” as he was the first to publish it, even though Mama Lou is cited by Sayers and others as its original performer. Although “Ta Ra Ra’s” popularity and style developed through various levels of “interaction” between white and black musicians, it was Mama’s Lou’s performance of ragtime-like, syncopated, vocal, and improvisational practices that was consumed and commodified by the growing industries of music and entertainment. Blacksound is the locus through which the original performances (sonic and corporeal aesthetics) of black musicians—who developed their practices both within their own segregated communities and in relation to European American and other ethnic styles over time—were then taken up as sources of property to be owned and copyrighted by mostly white musicians in the establishment of the popular music industry. At the same time, they absorbed black aesthetics into a more stylized and sanitized popular performance that was consumable for white audiences.22 Thus, by the time “Ta Ra Ra Boom De Aye” was deemed “public domain” in the 1932 court case, it had become associated with (white) American popular entertainment and was rarely attributed to the person responsible for its initial popularity, Mama Lou. As Orrick Johns suggests in the St. Louis Dispatch at the end of his story about Mama Lou: “In a season or two the song, like many others that originated with Mammy Lou, got into vaudeville by way of some manager who visited Babe’s and became a sensation.”23 As the example of Mama Lou’s song “Ta Ra Ra Boom de Aye” demonstrates, the movement and absorption of localized black aesthetics into the popular sphere—from the antebellum era through the turn of the twentieth century—were shaped by several factors, including place, the migration of people and their (structural access to) sounds/performances, political and industrial developments, and legal systems. Blacksound does not take music and its performance a priori without a consideration of how it is produced along a continuum of cultural,

The Origins of Blacksound   |   7

historical, geographic, political, technological, and temporal shifts in the making of popular music and entertainment.24 •

•

•

This book uncovers the story of Blacksound in America through significant figures, musical case studies, IP and copyright law, and performance. By doing so, I bring into view fundamental influences in the construction of American popular music from slavery, through emancipation and reconstruction, and into the establishment of Jim Crow segregation policies. Each chapter chronologically considers the specific racialized and political context in which popular entertainment developed out of blackface. They also highlight how the sounds and styles produced by black people were mined as sources of property and gradually absorbed (as well as amalgamated with other ethnic sounds) into Blacksound as the foundation of popular music throughout the nineteenth century. As the nomenclature Blacksound suggests, it is always (performances of) blackness, whether real or imagined—even within amalgamation—that serves as the foundation of American popular music. Part I, “Racial Identity and Popular Music in Early Blackface,” explores the birth and development of blackface minstrelsy during the antebellum era. Chapter 1 (“Slavery and Blackface in the Making of Blacksound”) reconstructs the sonic and embodied making of blackface’s initial stereotype characters: “Jim Crow,” “Zip Coon,” and “Lucy Long.” This revised history offers new ways to consider how notions of racial authenticity developed out of the sounds and performances of mostly Irish and British American men through the form’s earliest stock blackface characters between the 1820s and 1840s. Chapter 2 (“William Henry ‘Master Juba’ Lane and Antebellum Blacksound”) points directly to how black performance practices influenced the proliferation of blackface minstrelsy as the most quotidian form of US popular music in the mid-nineteenth century. William Henry “Master Juba” Lane— the Long Island–born African American performer known as the “father of modern tap dance”—emerged as one of the first international pop stars in the United States and the United Kingdom because of his unique amalgamation of black performance aesthetics within the blackface tropes that were previously developed by (mostly) white performers. Through Lane, I theorize the concept of intellectual performance property to account for the ways in which performance and black performativity have historically been constructed as public domain. Chapter 3

8   |   Introduction

(“Stephen Foster and the Composition of Americana”) investigates the development of popular music leading up to the Civil War through sheet music, blackface minstrelsy, and the “Father of American popular song”—Stephen Foster. Specifically, it points to how popular entertainment and the explosion of blackface minstrelsy occurred in relation to the rise of Irish immigration, Jacksonian Democracy, and the emergence of the Democratic “populist” party. Blackface reflects the cultural anxieties many European-Americans felt in relation to the potential emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum era. Part II, “The Birth of the Popular Music Industry,” considers the development and dispersal of Blacksound through the industry of popular music in a post-emancipation context. Chapter 4 (“The House that Blackface Built: M. Witmark & Sons and the Birth of Tin Pan Alley”) considers the construction and function of Blacksound through the legacy of slavery after emancipation, large-scale immigration from Eastern Europe and Asia, and the dispersal of black people and their performance practices from rural to urban centers throughout the nation in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, this chapter discusses the establishment of the popular music industry and the aesthetic construction of racial identity through M. Witmark and Sons—a founding popular music publishing house of Tin Pan Alley—their publications, and their marketing tactics, which developed out of the racialized performances of blackface during Jim Crow segregation. Chapter 5 (“Intellectual (Performance) Property: Ragtime Goes Pop”) describes the proliferation of Blacksound as the basis of Tin Pan Alley and the emerging modern music and recording industry from the 1890s to the 1910s through ragtime and the “coon song”—a popular genre that allowed for the performance of blackface tropes and aesthetics with and without the blackface mask. I explore how Blacksound began to develop in relation to and apart from blackface (via technology) through an analysis of two of the earliest popular phonographic recordings, “The Whistling Coon” and “Laughing Song,” by George W. Johnson—a formerly enslaved musician who became one of the first commercial recording artists in the Americas.

a theory of blacksound Blacksound, the sonic complement and legacy of blackface performance, signals both an aesthetic phenomenon (concept) and an analytical tool (theory) for addressing the complex historical relationship between

The Origins of Blacksound   |   9

sound, identity, performance, and property, within American popular music.25 Through Blacksound, I trace the birth of a performance practice (in sound and movement) that laid the foundation for the industry of American popular music and entertainment within the context of chattel slavery. I follow the ways in which blackness is ventriloquized as the arbiter of popular sound, as I consider what performances constitute its actual aesthetic-making. My consideration centers who does the performing, the listening, the consumption, the scripting, and the regulation of these sounds into modes of property to be contained through publications (i.e., sheet music) and performances (both live and early recordings).26 The story of Blacksound is one that extends beyond ideas of “appropriation” and notions of authenticity that often surround discussions of blackface and (black) popular music.27 Within Blacksound, the lens through which fear, desire, fascination, and mimicry collide through blackface performance is considered through the formulation of “terror and enjoyment.” Saidiya Hartman introduces this dyad, as she points out that “the desire to don, occupy, or possess blackness or the black body as a sentimental resource and/or locus of excess enjoyment is both founded upon and enabled by the material relations of chattel slavery. . . . Here my intention is not to shock or exploit the perverse but to consider critically the complicated nexus of terror and enjoyment.”28 While blackface granted white performers and consumers the ability to transgress expectations of a “proper” white (male) citizen—as they expressed their own ideals (of self and other) through racialized ventriloquy and the simultaneous construction of whiteness—this study holds at its center the societal realities stemming from the politics of antebellum society.29 Because blackface developed as popular entertainment during slavery, the ability for white audiences and performers to embody, consume, and enact blackness as a source of “delectability” cannot be separated from the real-life terror that black people experienced in everyday life.30 Blacksound points to how blackface performance developed as a (staged) ritual act of what bell hooks refers to as “eating the other,” enabling both the embodied consumption and the (violent) commodification of blackness under the guise of popular entertainment.31 Exploring the origins and performance of American popular music through such a lens allows one to sit with the complexity of an industry that was established by European-American (white) men during slavery. (White) Blackface minstrels blackened their faces, as they presented their interpretations of blackness and antiblackness through sheet music

10   |   Introduction

and performance, along with their own self-identifying cultural and musical traits. Antiblackness is defined by Calvin Warren as “an accretion of practices, systems, and institutions designed to impose nothing onto blackness and the unending domination/eradication of black presence as nothing incarnated.”32 While my focus is on race, race does not exist apart from its intersectional considerations with gender, sexuality, class, ability, and so on.33 As such, I briefly discuss some of the more complex considerations of gender and sexuality within blackface through figures like “Zip Coon” and “Lucy Long” (Chapters 1 and 2), but further exploration of the construction and impact of gender/sexuality within blackface is warranted and encouraged beyond this book. My approach also demonstrates how American popular sound has been co-constructed by its various black and other non-white players, yet primarily under the control, fantasies, and ownership of its European-American (white) arbiters.34 While this book is largely focused on the United States, blackface was also the first mass popular entertainment export to travel from the America’s to other parts of the world. American minstrel troupes and performers ventured to Europe, Australia, and even Japan by the middle of the nineteenth century. Blackface performers effectively created the network for the globalization of American popular music and culture (alongside its racialized components) out of blackface.35 The rehearsal of blackface caricatures enforced a racialized binary in the white imaginary between blackness and whiteness, and fueled notions of antiblackness, while they also allowed space for the racialization of Indigenous, Asian, and other non-European-descended groups of people.36 As Daphne Brooks notes in Bodies in Dissent, blackface enabled the “scopophilic display of racially indeterminate bodies in transatlantic theatre culture into an expression of (white) ontological anxiety and theatrical control over corporeal representation.”37 Black performance aesthetics might derive from or are “authored” by black people, but their own fungible status leaves their aesthetics available as sources of property (under the control of white producers and consumers) to be possessed, consumed, embodied, and articulated through Blacksound.38 Their fungible status informed how black performance practices (real and imagined) came to be understood as part of the “public domain” early on, or as belonging to anyone who could formally claim authorship or authority of their aesthetics through publication and commercial performance. Although this book looks directly at the construction of the black/ white binary, it is not an attempt to erase other ethnically and racially

The Origins of Blacksound   |   11

marginalized groups. It is important to remember how various communities of people have also been impacted by the ways that white supremacy shapes race relations. By bringing into view how tropes and stereotypes of racialized sound and performance scripts become attached to a particular racialized community through mostly white participants, and how these attachments have been negotiated through the legacy of blackface, this book also aims to allow space for further considerations for how race and notions of racial authenticity have been and continue to be constructed through popular entertainment. Within the ritual of blackface minstrelsy, masked performance developed (racialized) sonic and bodily markings. These markings, or “scripts,” became closely attached to stereotyped ideas of race, particularly of black and other people of color.39 I use scripts to articulate the impact of minstrelsy on racial identity and the aesthetics of property relations, referring particularly to the specific sonic and corporeal markers of identity that came to be performed, stereotyped, embodied, and circulated through blackface. As race and intellectual property scholar Anjali Vats notes, “racial scripts can be baked into the seemingly colorblind ideals of American citizenship that, in turn, inform intellectual property law.”40 Vats defines “intellectual property” as “a set of rhetorics that governs knowledge production. These rhetorics interface with larger cultural narratives about national identity, citizenship, personhood, and economic production. Copyright law, the law of creative works, affords a limited monopoly to authors and artists who create literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and other intellectual works that are ‘fixed in any tangible medium of expression.’ ”41 Blackface contributed to the construction of intellectual property within copyright law through its absorption of black aesthetics that were mined as sources of property to be claimed through performance and in print. The performance medium also created a space for the construction of whiteness (with its own set of scripts) as property owning and property making. This book looks at how these sonic and bodily “scripts”—what K. Anthony Appiah defines as “narratives that people use in shaping their life plans and telling their life stories”—developed during slavery and continued to be transmitted and transcribed onto black people through blackface and Blacksound. At the same time, the formation of racial identity and notions of intellectual (performance) property developed alongside each other.42 This book also highlights how real and imagined performances of blackness could be internalized and commercialized as scripts through the circulation of Blacksound by white actors with

12   |   Introduction

various political and personal aspirations. Such performances were enacted prior to the moment in which notions of an authentic black or white sound in popular music were aligned with the black/white hierarchical division of sound that Jennifer Lynn Stoever defines through “the sonic color line.”43 In his book Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation, Jon Cruz employs the concept of “disengaged engagement” to explain the critical psychological process that allows popular music and its performance to be taken up into the body (as literal vibrations and frequencies) without having to interrogate the political stakes of its making. One can do so either because it does not directly impact one’s own life, or because its potential for individual liberation and enjoyment through popular entertainment overshadows the material histories and people who are most maligned and exploited in the process.44 I explore Cruz’s concept in examining the ways in which blackface and the development of popular music allowed for black creative practices (and the stereotyping of blackness) to be absorbed and commodified, while remaining detached from black people and their humanity. This kind of psychological process was essential for enabling blackface and Blacksound to become the driving force of popular music, identity, and (music) property making in the United States. Blackface performance is ritual in nature. It is a repeated and staged act, but one that conjures self and communal identity relations. Through performance, it articulates this ritual nature through the body and voice. However, in blackface, it was the burnt-cork mask that was the most immediate and striking visual cue through which both performers and audiences were encouraged to obscure the line between (racial) reality and fantasy. The initial primacy of the mask in blackface performance is largely the result of the centrality of the face in human identity and interaction. When looking at the history of masking, scholars often consider the significance of transforming one’s identity by covering one’s face to be a critical aspect of ritual performance—both theatrical and quotidian.45 The blackface mask and its related Blacksound performance rituals helped create the conditions for what Martinican theorist and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon referred to as a “racial epidermal schema.”46 Within this schema, the white gaze, or in this case white embodiment and performance of a black “other” in blackface, imbues “black skin” (and black people) with racialized (and racist) attitudes and meanings that might be taken as fact through the remnants of colo-

The Origins of Blacksound   |   13

nial domination by the white (or non-white) observer or the black person being observed. At the same time, “whiteness” is constructed in relation not to “being,” but to performing the black “other.” Because blackface always involved an embodied relationship to performing (imagined or existing) black aesthetics, the mask that was part of the ritual continued to serve an important function, even when it was not actively adorned in performance. W. Anthony Sheppard describes the mask (in modernist theater) as having a dual function: as disguise and as a marker of identity.47 Masks and masking are a critical component of ritual performance in various cultures around the world. As blackface drew upon commedia dell’arte and white-face clowning traditions from Europe, it created a unique aesthetic ritual through which both visual and vocal masking allowed for whiteness to be articulated in disguise and in contradistinction to the sociality of blackness in a racist society. Although popular sounds in blackface originated in the body of the performer, the hidden scripts of (a white) “self” were embedded into ventriloquized sonic and choreographed performances of the (black) “other” through burnt cork. The singing voice, which emanates from the face, is a form of masking and even less “natural” than the human speaking voice—a (racialized and gendered) construction of the “self.”48 The cultivation of minstrelized performances through the ruse of blackness, as well as varied and counterfeit interpretations of sounds produced by black people via blackface, allowed white participants to be, as Nina Eidsheim states, “liberated to explore the heightened expressivity of the rest of the body and the voice.”49 The paradoxical ritual of blackface performance—i.e., the impersonation of black movement and sound through non-black and often racist interpretations, while coconstructing idea(l)s of whiteness through popular sound—persisted after the disappearance or removal of burnt cork. To attend to the sounds and performances of blackface, and not just its visual mask, elucidates how the ritualistic improvisation of hybrid scripts in sound and movement allowed Blacksound to liberate both the minds and bodies of (white) performers and audiences alike, while simultaneously being absorbed as sources of property within the economy of popular entertainment. Attending to sound also foregrounds the way in which the embodiment of blackface performances and scripts continues, whether blackface is present or not, within American popular music. “Blacksound” is not synonymous with “black sounds”—the multitudinous sounds produced by black people throughout the African diaspora. Considering the full breadth of those sounds is a task beyond

14   |   Introduction

the scope of this book. The singular, compound noun “Blacksound” is employed to unpack the legacies of popular music that have developed during chattel slavery and out of blackface. The neologism acknowledges the real and imagined sounds of African-descended people that laid the foundation for the industry of popular music in and beyond the United States. Through Blacksound, I follow Toni Morrison’s exploration of American literature and the “Africanist Presence” as an investigation into the ways in which “a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the United States, and the imaginative uses this fabricated presence served.”50 Furthermore, Blacksound extends Imani Perry’s foundational discussion of Hip Hop, politics, and poetics, to consider the sonic lineage of American popular music at large since its inception in blackface, as she argues: “Even with its hybridity, the consistent contributions from nonblack artists and the borrowings of cultural forms from other communities, it is nevertheless black American music.”51 Throughout the mid-nineteenth century within the growth of the popular music industry, black vernacular performances, or “black sounds”—on plantations, in rural exchanges, in church, as well as on street corners, in sporting halls, and in theaters in urban areas— developed alongside the scripts of minstrelsy that white performers and listeners substituted for the actual sounds of black people within commercial music. African Americans also cultivated their own (folk) styles, which were drawn from multifaceted African-derived practices, ones that developed in relation to (and apart from) the music of European Americans.52 In a post-emancipation context, localized and oral-based black performance aesthetics (e.g., sounds and practices at the basis of spirituals, ragtime, the blues, and gospel) that were cultivated within more segregated circumstances began to directly shape the course of the sounds of popular music, both in and out of blackface, as I discuss through ragtime in Chapters 4 and 5. While black people (both as they exist and in the white racial imaginary) and their performance practices served as the foundation of an industry that developed into one of the most lucrative businesses of the nineteenth century, they were mostly unable to claim ownership or authorship (through copyright) over their music, as in the case of Mama Lou. Live and oral performances were not deemed legible under property laws that developed vis-à-vis notions of literacy and what was “legible” (i.e., written, or protectable) under copyright during and in the wake of slavery. The exclusion of ephemeral black performance prac-

The Origins of Blacksound   |   15

tices from legal consideration made it easier for them to be commercialized by and for mostly white audiences. Their exclusion enabled them to eventually become detached from their black origins, aesthetically and as sources of property to be claimed through sheet music and in live performance.53 Black sounds might be the base ingredients of Blacksound, but there is an amalgamation of sounds from other racialized communities in the mix. As explained in Chapters 2 and 3, the concept accounts for the unequal conditions and structures of domination under which these sounds converge into popular music. I follow Tavia Nyong’o’s use of “amalgamation” to describe what is often referred to as (racial) “hybridity” or “syncretism” to attend to the more “physical, chemical, and mystical” nature of the process of racial mixing.54 In particular, Blacksound is understood as an amalgamation of sounds from various racialized communities within popular music, while attending to the fact that it originates in blackface and remains heavily shaped by the actual black sounds produced by black people, as the music industry remains under the structural and cultural control of mostly white arbiters. The spirit of “blacking up” or “ragging” various elements of American culture was taken up by white music industrialists in creating an amalgamated, seemingly deracialized popular sonic landscape through the liminal, libidinal, and liberatory potential of blackness for non-black people. Blacksound is the aesthetic materialization of this sonic amalgamation, one that shifts over time, while persistently drawing upon innovative black musical practices. Because sound and movement were largely left out of copyright protection for most of the nineteenth (and well into the twentieth) century, the very sounds that originated in localized black communities (i.e., the blues scale that developed out of harmonic practices derived from black spiritual music, as well as idiosyncratic rhythmic practices and vocal stylings in work songs and other black folk music) have been ontologically understood as part of the public domain since slavery. Even within a system that essentially makes any performance practice originating in a localized or marginalized (black) community easily accessible for exploitation, consumption, and appropriation, what is currently understood as part of the public domain should not be taken as de facto. Ideas of the public domain originated under racialized conditions that structured what was determined to be copyrightable in the first place.55 This approach to interrogating the origins of copyright law highlights how its functioning remains in favor of those who could historically claim and continue to claim authorship under these property regimes.

16   |   Introduction

Those who could claim ownership within these conditions, as Imani Perry discusses in Vexy Thing, have been both gendered and raced under “the dominion of a patriarch” that informed how property relations were assigned and recognized during slavery.56 As Anthea Kraut states in Choreographing Copyright: “copyright for choreography is inherently fraught.”57 Similarly, Blacksound demonstrates that copyright for sound and music is just as fraught, historically and at present. The “legibility” of sheet music (or the written rendering of ephemeral sounds through a set of symbols connected to the notational systems developed in Western European music) was the primary way in which music could be “owned” and protected under copyright law through most of the nineteenth century. As Daniel Goldmark comments, “as the inaugural commodity for popular music business in the United States, sheet music established notions of what constituted the ‘popular’ in American popular music.”58 Initial copyright laws were designed to protect written works like books and maps, and “legible” notions of property that privileged the written over the oral within sheet music drew on this legal framework. But this notion of property also originated during slavery, and it took shape right alongside the birth of blackface. Under these conditions, black people served as sources of property, both in a labor and in an aesthetic sense. Their aesthetic sources continued to be mined after emancipation, as musical property was already understood as the domain of the person who could claim ownership over oral and other ephemeral performances—if they had the means and access to publish them first. Power relations cannot be removed from the systems of oppression that developed out of slavery that largely dehumanized and devalued black people and black creativity, while simultaneously capitalizing on their ephemeral aesthetics and performances through sheet music and live acts. To help explain this process, I also develop the concept of intellectual performance property—the sonic and corporeal practices developed by black people within (black) music—to both recognize and acknowledge the property value inherent in black performance, even as it continues to elude black claims to sonic and musical authorship within most property laws today. My use of intellectual performance property emphasizes the relationship between property, citizenship, race, and performance in the history of blackface, and shares a connection with the concept of “intellectual property citizenship” developed by Anjali Vats. Vats employs this nomenclature in a discussion of how IP and citizenship “have evolved—and continue to evolve—in deeply inter-

The Origins of Blacksound   |   17

twined and raced ways.”59 Indeed, sound has been one of the most elusive components of copyright law in the United States. Sheet music itself did not fall under copyright law until 1831, and dramatic works (which might have included music, e.g., minstrelsy) did not fall under protection until 1856. The legal ownership of the performance of a work— which was particularly relevant for black musicians, who had less access to written publication tools—was not protected until 1897, and the actual recorded sounds and choreography did not fall under copyright protection until 1976 (and even then, it was the recording itself, not really the sounds, that was protected).60 Yet, it is also true that the diversity of black sounds, movements, and performance aesthetics inherently exceed the bounds of how copyright law and IP regimes have been conceived historically. I agree with Rinaldo Walcott that “Black people will not be fully able to breathe—a word I do not use lightly—until property itself is abolished.”61 The structure and formation of the laws themselves are not equipped to recognize the full aesthetics of music of the African diaspora or black American music (as its subsidiary). And yet still, the “phonic materiality” produced by (the excess of) black sonic aesthetics continues to resonate within the commercial industry and the copyright laws that defined whose and which aesthetics might be claimed as IP or made public domain.62 The materiality of these ephemeral sounds are invoked by Fred Moten in his reading of Aunt Hester’s screams recounted in Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative—as she was being brutally beat by her enslaver—to attune to the material hypersonicity of blackness that cuts through and across the violent scripting, control, and erasure of black people and their aesthetic practices in the making of Blacksound. I sit with this tension as I inevitably reproduce some of the violence inherent in blackface sheet music, lyrics, productions, and other materials that developed from this legacy, within this book, as I also consider how the reproduction of these objects for critical interrogation reproduces the violence embedded within commercial entertainment that continues to impact the daily lives of black people today. Blacksound is grounded in the violent history of slavery, and it considers how embedded into copyright law is the historical violence through which blackness is mined as a source of extraction and as existing outside of the protection of the law, without having to acknowledge black people as human with access to rights. Stephen M. Best discusses the elusive nature of sound within IP rights, as he notes: “Acoustic phenomena resist such synthesis yet come

18   |   Introduction

nearer than any other class of phenomena (nearer, even, than literary property) to what may be called the ‘metaphysics’ of intellectual property; for, intangible and evanescent, sounds typify a whole class of disembodied and immaterial items that, seemingly incapable of clear demarcation, often require the translation of property claims into secondary symbolic systems.”63 The secondary symbolic systems that early (white) music industrialists used to make these “intangible and evanescent” sounds legible were mostly carried out through engraved and lithographic sheet music publications in the early to mid-1800s. Throughout the nineteenth century, as printing became more standardized, cities and populations grew, and the time and desire for leisure also grew, sheet music remained the dominant claim to music property.64 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Blacksound was, as discussed in Chapter 5, largely negotiated through Tin Pan Alley and early recording technologies. Also at the turn of the twentieth century, as the case of Mama Lou demonstrates, there were a significant number of African American musicians and their practices that impacted turn-ofthe-century developments, even if they were largely underserved and underrepresented during segregation and the violently racist Jim Crow policies throughout the entire country.65 If the black performers—who eventually gained access to the popular stage over the course of the nineteenth century—were Signifyin(g) upon the pre-established, racist tropes of blackface and attempted to “change the joke, slip the yoke” in their performances, the majority-white audiences still often received and accepted their performances as “authentic” representations of black people and other people of color.66 Their own white bodies were liberated through participation, yet these same acts were treated as degrading and negative scripts when emanating from (and written onto) actual black and other non-white people. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States conceptualizes and reimagines how sonic and corporeal ideas of race were materially taken up into the body through blackface, commercially developed, and further commodified within a system that privileges “whiteness as property,” while drawing upon the intellectual performance properties of black people.67 This work is a musicological project that is developed in direct conversation with black feminist, performance, sound, American, critical race, and intellectual property studies. Blacksound is not intended to be used as the sole approach to considering the impact of race and performance within American music, and it is in fact most effective when studied alongside a litany of work

The Origins of Blacksound   |   19

that engages with Black music and performance, as well as American culture at large, through several different approaches and fields. My exploration of Blacksound lays the groundwork for understanding how popular entertainment, culture, and politics continue to be shaped by the legacy of blackface performance through the modern radio, film/TV, and recording industries, as its persists through the digital age, through artificial intelligence, and across the internet. Although blackface became taboo in the mid-twentieth century as a performance medium, Blacksound as a phenomenon reveals how performance, identity, (intellectual property) law, and popular entertainment remain tethered to slavery and blackface minstrelsy—the historical and material conditions out of which popular music and its industry are sustained. Blacksound might provide a historical basis from which to interrogate and reimagine the current legal and industrial structures that unequally determine how black creativity (sounds/performance/movement) is acknowledged and recompensed within commercial entertainment. The questions and explorations prompted by Blacksound might be further applied to raise inquiries about the larger impact of race, music, sound, performance, within (the industry of) popular music and entertainment among other marginalized groups.

part i

Racial Identity and Popular Music in Early Blackface

chapter 1

Slavery and Blackface in the Making of Blacksound

Blackface minstrelsy, as the foundation of American popular entertainment, is forever connected to slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow. Blackface emerged in the United States in the antebellum north and mid-west, as mostly Irish and British American men darkened their faces with burnt cork and performed their (racist) interpretation of the “slave” for one another’s amusement. Jim Crow, the character who instigated the watershed moment in the early history of blackface, was introduced to the public by Irish American performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice (henceforth T. D. Rice) in the late 1820s. Rice’s blackface ventriloquy was so popular in the United States that he traveled to the United Kingdom and performed in blackface to great success for British audiences in the mid-1830s. On one of his tours, Rice revealed not only that blackface was an amusement for white performers and audiences, but that it was also based upon the ontological status of blackness during transatlantic slavery, both by his estimation and according to the law: Before I went to England, the British people were excessively ignorant regarding our “free institutions.” (Hear) They were under the impression that negroes were naturally equal to the whites, and their degraded condition was consequently entirely upon our “institutions”; but I effectually proved that negroes are essentially an inferior species of the human family, and they out to remain slaves. . . . I have studied the negro character upon the southern plantations. The British people acknowledged that I was a fair representative of the great body of our slaves, and Charles Kemble attested to the faithfulness of my delineations.—(Three Cheers)1 23

24   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music

Here, Rice makes two things clear: that he believed “negroes” (or African Americans) were destined to be chattel slaves by virtue of their inherent inferiority to “whites,” and that his impersonation of black people was a sufficiently “authentic” representation of “blackness.” Rice’s attitude and burnt-cork antics helped to derisively delimit blackness into a monolithic racial category through the popularity of blackface performance for mostly (ethnic) white audiences. At the same time, Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow” and subsequent blackface developments were performative vehicles that helped to forge whiteness into a distinct racial category (of power)—as suggested in his use of “whites” and not “Irish” or “English” American above. These performances emptied blackness of its own potential for creating, defining, and laying claim to aesthetics (in the popular white imaginary) that were representative of the diversity of sounds and movements produced by black people. Rice’s opinion might have been specific to him, but the supposedly inherent “inferiority” of black people was a regular subject of blackface (in lyrics and in live performance), and his belief that African Americans “ought to remain slaves” was shared by many throughout the Confederacy, and some throughout the Union. Through T. D. Rice, early stock blackface characters (Jim Crow, Zip Coon, and Lucy Long), sheet music, and live performance, this chapter reconsiders the origins of the sounds that made up early blackface performance. It does not assume the mimicry of authentic blackness as the basis of early blackface. Racial mimicry and authenticity have become the dominant paradigms through which both popular and scholarly analyses of blackface are often situated. Eric Lott’s influential concept of “love and theft” is based on an anecdote, quoted by the author in his book of the same title, where T. D. Rice takes up the movement, clothing, and sound of Cuff (a local black street performer in Cincinnati) in his first performance of Jim Crow.2 The idea that the construction of white, working-class maleness was buttressed by a fascination with (or “love” of) blackness and the theft of “authentic” black aesthetics has been helpful in resuscitating the impact of blackface performance in literary theory developments of the 1990s. However, Lott’s formulation also suggests that white desire and an assumed black (racial) authenticity are at the root of minstrelsy’s meaning and impact. It also allows one to elide the inherent violence (e.g., the making of antiblackness) embedded into blackface performance when “love” is the lens through which the white consumption of blackness (real or imagined) is understood.

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   25

Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of “terror and enjoyment” is the prism through which I employ Blacksound to unpack the sonic and corporeal aesthetics that were realized through blackface sheet music and performance. Through this dyad, Hartman notes that the economy and culture of “enjoyment [were] predicated on the wanton uses of slave property[;] it was attributed to the slave in order to deny, displace, and minimize the violence of slavery.”3 Blackface performances turned black suffering into pleasure for white participants, while simultaneously drawing upon blackness as a source of aesthetic property under slavery and developing (copyright) laws. The paradoxical nature of blackface performance—through which joy was experienced by nonblack (white) people who inhabited (ideas of) blackness and flipped black suffering into sources of enjoyment—was inherently political. Burnt-cork performance permeated the nation and helped to birth the Democratic party, as it was performed and absorbed by European Americans across the political spectrum.

blackface and the making of democracy in the antebellum era The United States hit a growth spurt during the antebellum era, largely due to its swelling population, its developing urban centers, and the industrial and land profiteering from slavery and the genocide of Indigenous populations. The bulk of the nation’s growing population comprised immigrants from Northern and Western Europe: between the 1820s and 1870s there was a population increase to about 7.4 million, and one-third of the immigrants were from Ireland, while another third were from Germany.4 By 1810, the number of enslaved people had reached 1.1 million (almost double the slave population since the first US census in 1790) and continued to grow to almost four million by 1860. With demographic shifts and the rise of abolitionism in mind, this chapter also explores the relationship between popular entertainment, politics, and identity formation in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. American democracy in the post-colonial era and the birth of the Democratic Party and anti-abolitionism are directly tethered to the emergence of blackface minstrelsy. Regarding the immigration trends of the antebellum era, many of the Irish Catholics who came to the United States at the time were escaping dire living conditions from their homeland, in large part due to the potato famine and persecution under British authority in Ireland. These

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Irish refugees were largely poorer and of the working class and saw themselves as culturally distinct from the Presbyterian “Ulster Scots,” who had largely established themselves in America since the early eighteenth century.5 Irish (Catholic) immigrants throughout the nineteenth century were also often discriminated against by their European American (particularly English and Ulster Scot) Protestant counterparts. They were viewed as of lower class and status, largely because of the history of the English (and Scottish) colonization of Ireland that took place under King James I.6 Many poorer Irish Americans made their lives in developing urban centers throughout the north and the Ohio valley in the nineteenth century. They became the primary progenitors and earliest audience for blackface, as they tried to assimilate themselves into whiteness (or the possibility to be recognized as a citizen) against blackness (of those who were non-citizens under enslavement). However, middle- and upper-class (white) English, Scottish, and Irish American men, such as Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and E. P. Christy, helped to commercialize blackface in music halls, sheet music, and other mediums that laid the foundation for American’s first form of original popular entertainment.7 With the growing population of European immigrants to the United States during the antebellum era came the expansion of universal suffrage to include all white men, largely spawned by the rise of “Jacksonian Democracy” for the “common man” (i.e., voting and other rights for white men who were not English, Protestant, and property owning). The “Populist” movement took shape in the 1820s and lasted until the end of Andrew Jackson’s presidency in 1845. The rise of abolitionism, the immigration of poorer and working-class Irish and other Europeans, the continued genocidal campaigns against Indigenous people (e.g., the Indian Removal Act, spearheaded by President Andrew Jackson and passed by Congress in 1830),8 and the growth of urbanism and city populations helped instigate Jacksonian Democracy as a political ideology. White men of various classes, ethnicities, and religious backgrounds began to rally around the racist ideologies of Jacksonian Democracy.9 Blackface served as a performative vehicle for a more generic construction of “whiteness” to be imagined, embodied, and embedded into popular and civic life throughout America.10 As abolitionist sentiments gained more traction during the antebellum era—instigated by such events as Nat Turner’s rebellion against Virginia enslavers in 1831—the potential liberation of African Americans from enslavement posed a threat to both the economic and the civic life of poorer and working-class immigrants who came to the United States

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   27

from the United Kingdom.11 This threat also extended to the plantocracy and other wealthy white classes who relied on slavery’s labor and resultant caste system for their wealth and status. Importantly, even the non–slave holding, poorer ethnic white people could imagine themselves as above black people and as part of a more generic category of “white” that sat atop of the racial caste system, because of the denial of the personhood and humanity of African Americans under the system of slavery. This demographic of America rallied around Andrew Jackson’s racist and white supremacist beliefs, forming what became known as the Democratic Party—the nation’s first political party to be formed after the Democratic-Republican Party, born in the wake of the American Revolution.12 The emancipation of enslaved black people was a threat to their own (white) personhood and livelihoods.13 In order to develop a widening “white” audience, blackface in theater and the press became a key technology in which to organize racial logics throughout the growing demographics of the American republic.14 The theater remained the primary venue through which popular entertainment was available to the (free and mostly white) masses throughout the nineteenth century. English theater, plays (especially Shakespearian), and other European imports (e.g., opera) filled the bills of houses through the mid-nineteenth century. But blackface, the first original form of popular musical and theatrical entertainment in the United States, began to emerge as primary competition. At the same time, blackface performance amalgamated various European and African (even if imagined or corrupted by racist ventriloquy) forms into a distinctly American style. Importantly, the phenomenon of white actors darkening their skin to perform constructed ideas of blackness was already a trope on European (especially British) and American stages. William Shakespear’s Othello (1603) and Charles Didbin’s two-act opera The Padlock (1768)—which portrayed the caricature of a black servant named “Mungo” from the West Indies in blackface—were already popular in UK and American theater. But it was T. D. Rice’s Jim Crow that became a staple in American entertainment and helped inaugurate the birth of minstrelsy as a widely disseminated medium. Additionally, other comedic ethnic archetypes and stereotypes, such as the Yankee, Savage, and Backswoodsman (derisively or satirically representing the white New Englander or northerner, Indigenous peoples, and the white southerner, respectively), were also popular on early US stages. After Rice’s performance of Jim Crow, the blackfaced character-stereotype began to dominate the popular stage in the late 1830s and 1840s.15

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figure 1. “Massa Georgee Washington and General Lafayette” (E. Riley). Courtesy of the Marquis de Lafayette Print Collection, Lafayette College.

Before Rice’s Jim Crow was embraced across the country and in the United Kingdom, and prior to the publication of “Jump Jim Crow” in 1831, early commercial sheet music inscribed with engraved or lithographic printing had already begun to appear in America. It is notable that two of the earliest publications that used images on their covers reference blackness: “Massa Georgee Washington and General Lafayette” (see Figure 1) and “The Log House” (see Figure 2).16 The latter was printed in 1826, and the song itself is an elaborate, multi-sectional ballad for voice and piano that doesn’t directly invoke black dialect or blackness, aside from a lyrical reference to “minstrelsy” (a theatrical form that precedes blackface in the United States). As one of the earliest sheet music covers to include a lithographic image, it shows a white composer potentially drawing inspiration from the black character dressed in tattered clothing holding a banjo while standing to the side of the cabin (a likely reference to an enslaved person).17 This figure stands in the backdrop, while the well-dressed white character

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   29

figure 2. “The Log House.” Courtesy of the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

composes in front of the house at the center of the cover. Blackness served as a source of inspiration, albeit in the background, to the first lithographic sheet music printed in the United States.18 “Massa Georgee” was printed in 1824 by New York publisher E. Riley, and it was written to commemorate the military exploits of George Washington and Marquis de Lafayette during the Revolutionary War.19 The composer, Micah Hawkins, used blackness as a foil, both in a material and in a performative sense. Micah Hawkins (a native New Yorker and uncle to the famous early American painter who depicted scenes of integrated music making, William Sydney Mount) is also the composer of “Backside Albany” (1815)—a patriotic song that

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was popular into the 1840s about the Battle of Albany during the War of 1812. “Backside Albany” is known as the first popular song to use (stereotyped) black dialect, although it did not feature any black characters.20 In his study of “Backside Albany,” blackface scholar William J. Mahar addresses the difference between the use of blackness as a comedic ruse to tell the battle’s story and the first-person narration of later blackface tunes like “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon”: “The persona in Hawkins’s song does not represent a ‘real’ black seaman, but his language and his dress transform him into the quintessential clown whose demeanor and makeup give him a special place in the world of comedy.”21 The same can be said for “Massa Georgee Washington,” as the topics of Hawkins’s two blackface songs—American patriotism/ nationalism and the commemoration of generals and war battles—do not seem to require narration through the ventriloquy of (stereotyped) black dialect, as they are not told from a first-person account. Yet it is significant that the composer chose this approach for both battle songs, and even more so that the author had opportunity to observe (and mimic) black phonology in Long Island and New York City.22 Hawkins’s use of “black” dialect was more varied and connected to notated patterns of regional black dialect than later blackface songs, many of which further simplified black speech into a few racist phonetic scripts through equally racist dialect.23 Hawkins’s popular (blackface) songs are examples of how early American sheet music and song became a space for whiteness to hear, see, perform, and construct itself as distinctly American, even if the process involved absorbing/embodying imaginaries of blackness, while being detached from the actual black people on which the limited scripts were based. “Disengaged engagement” was a practice that became embedded into early blackface by white performers and observers.24 “Massa Georgee” and T. D. Rice’s “Jim Crow” have another thing in common beyond their blackface basis: they are both published by E. Riley publishers of New York City. Edward Riley started as a music publisher in the United Kingdom in the late eighteenth century and arrived in New York City around 1805.25 Having found success with Hawkins’s “Massa Georgee” in 1824, and with the continued advancement of engraving and lithographic technologies for sheet music, Riley made a wise financial decision in publishing Rice’s “Jim Crow” in 1831, not long after the blackface comedian is said to have first performed his soon-to-be-ubiquitous stereo-character type.26 In the same year, sheet music entered into protection under copyright law, although there were

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   31

still a limited number of American publishers (especially of “popular” tunes). Music was only previously copyrightable as part of a larger dramatic work and expensive to engrave, print, and distribute.27 As a result of copyright, property, and civil law, early sheet music publications began the process, on paper, of drawing on the aesthetic performances of blackness (whether real or imagined) as sources that allowed for them to be scripted by white publishers, authors, and performers, who could claim some level of ownership over the printed or performed material. It also begins the paradoxical erasure and limited foregrounding of (stereotyped) blackness as aesthetic and material (property) sources within popular music and entertainment. As such, the commercial music industry began to develop out of the conditions of enslavement that left most black Americans outside of the category of citizen (or human) able to lay claims to these forms of intellectual property through performance or in print. The foundation of IP and copyright laws privileges literacy over orality. At the same time, systems of oppression only recognized white men/people as citizens with rights and the ability to access, script, publish, and claim ownership over many of these oral and improvised performances—ones that were either drawn directly from or imagined upon blackness.

constructing blacksound in early blackface: (re)introducing jim crow The legacy of Jim Crow is most remembered for bequeathing its name to the racist and segregationist southern laws that legalized discrimination against black and other non-white people, from the Reconstruction era through the Civil Rights movement.28 The character (mis)represents the enslaved, uneducated, poor, and disfigured/disabled black male. It is difficult to trace the cultural connotation of “crow” prior to its Jim Crow interpretation in early America, yet it is one of the earliest and most enduring examples of the inversion of black culture (real or imagined) for comedic, political, or entertainment purposes.29 This stereotype served as a foil for whiteness to both flip and define black cultural and aesthetic practices for the masses—often creating negative imagery and connotations when associated with black people, but which were liberatory and profitable in their possibilities when consumed and performed by others.30 Before he became world-famous for his performance of “Jump Jim Crow,” T. D. Rice (1808–60) had already garnered rather extensive ex­­ perience in (musical) theater from his youth. In his study of T. D. Rice’s

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life, his blackface performance, and his more developed full-scale blackface theatrical works, blackface scholar W. T. Lhamon notes that “learning to dance Jim Crow was a process, the record shows clearly. It was no sudden appropriation of a song from a single model, as contemporary journalists were soon telling.”31 As Lhamon demonstrates, Rice’s experience with mimicking, exploiting, improvising upon, copying, and exaggerating black performance practices stems from the amalgamation of several (re)sources.32 Along with his experiences in the Five Points neighborhood of New York City, where Rice would have had ample opportunity to come in contact with and observe black performers and entertainers, he also traveled extensively and spent time along the Ohio River Valley and in Cincinnati. Here, Rice would have had the chance to engage (at some level, even if just through observation) with black dockhands, street vendors, laborers, and performers.33 But before Rice took up his soon-to-be-infamous act, he had some of his earliest comedic performances in theatrical ventures, such as A Day after the Fair (“a farce in two acts” by A. C. Somerset) and The Irish Tutor (a farce by Elizabeth Inchbald).34 He eventually began to take up Sambo (a precursor role to Jim Crow) in various plays, such as Frederick Reynolds’s English comedy Laugh While You Can and “Mungo” in Charles Didbin’s famous English play the Padlock.35 Sylvia Wynter notes that Sambo becomes a figure through which white people can “activate the experience of participating in Symbolic whiteness . . . as they repress within themselves any subversive desire which flows outside the prescribed and regulated desires of the social order.”36 Through Sambo and his musical animation via Jim Crow, the construction of one’s own (white) self and desires is enabled through ventriloquy and the simultaneously limited scripting of blackness in blackface. Rice’s long engagement with black aesthetics, even from a position of exploitation and racist mimicry, seems to be one of the primary factors that shaped his popularity as a white performer. In particular, the type of improvised, corporeally innovative, flexible, and polyphonic rhythmic performance practices attributed to people of the African diaspora in America (frequently described in accounts by white observers), even if poorly and unimaginatively imitated, still resonated as novel and exciting to mostly white audiences who witnessed a white performer contorting his body and vocalizing in ways that were painted as “foreign” to European American performance. This is most evident in Rice’s overlap with the black New Orleans street vendor-performer known as Old Corn Meal.

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   33

Henry A. Khmen notes in his study of the oft-forgotten yet famous-inhis-time black (street and theater) performer known as Old Corn Meal that “Daddy Rice first came to New Orleans in 1835, when Corn Meal’s popularity was soaring, and again in 1836 and in 1838 when Corn Meal was at his height. Certainly, it is significant that in his second season in New Orleans Daddy Rice prepared a skit entitled ‘Corn Meal.’ ”37 Khmen is referencing an article in the New Orleans Bee (1836). Although it is unclear if Rice performed with Old Corn Meal in New Orleans, or if he impersonated the black vendor-performer in a skit of his own, Old Corn Meal was one of the most famous entertainers in New Orleans in the 1830s each time that Rice visited.38 He was written about regularly in many of the popular New Orleans publications, such as the Picayune, and he was so well known as a local performer that when he was absent for a while, journalists would ask in the newspapers where Old Corn Meal had gone, fearing that he had succumb to some perilous death.39 New Orleans was a cultural center of the United States in 1836; Old Corn Meal undoubtedly influenced many performers, musicians, and observers who witnessed his unique skill as a black performer in the 1830s. In 1837, the vendor-performer moved from his local street acts to the St. Charles Theater, one of the premier houses at the time in New Orleans and the country. New Orleans theatrical manager James Caldwell produced a melodrama titled Life in New Orleans (after the popularity of William Thomas Moncrief’s play Tom and Jerry, or Life in London in the United Kingdom and United States),40 which featured Old Corn Meal as its main performer. Although the show was only performed twice (due to the horse falling off the stage and being killed during the production), it was a great success, according to the papers, further boosting the popularity of the street performer turned theater performer.41 Englishman Francis C. Sheridan traveled to the United States and wrote an account of his visit to Texas between 1839 and 1840, and in his journal, he writes briefly about his time in New Orleans. Old Corn Meal was a staple in New Orleans street culture, and Sheridan observed him performing blackface tunes such as “A Long Tail Blue.” Old Corn Meal left such an impression on Sheridan that he took the time to write about it, even though it was but a small part of his journey to the southwest. This account, like many that we have of black aesthetics in the early nineteenth century, is a description of Old Corn Meal’s performance made by a specific “listening ear”—that of a (European) white male of a particular class and status—and these historical documents

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must always be understood within a racialized lens.42 However, unpacking such accounts are critical to interpreting the sonic remnants that lead to the construction of Blacksound, as well as in unearthing the mostly improvisational and often intangible aspects of black performativity that shape so much of popular performance historically and at present: Of the most approved—Rosin the Bow—My Long tail Blue—the N*gger Jem Brown, I should say bore away the palm. These he sings in a manner as perfectly novel as it is imitable—beginning in a deep bass & at every other 3 or 4 words of his song jumping into a falsetto of power & shrillness sufficient to put on edge the tooth of a Jackall. It has precisely the same effect as one of our “street duets” where the Man & Boy alternately sing a line, but Signor Cornmealis [sic] songs being of a livelier description than those generally heard in our streets, together with the singular merit, if it can be so termed, of executing a duet by himself, fill the professors pockets & amuse the loungers.43

The dexterity and uniquely expressive quality of Old Corn Meal’s voice, as described by Sheridan, point to a flexible range, as well as varied timbres within his vocal agility. Most of all, it seems to be his overall delivery and execution of improvised performances that made them both “novel and imitable” to Sheridan and other observers like T. D. Rice. Sheridan goes further to suggest that it was as though Old Corn Meal was “executing a duet by himself,” which relates to descriptions of Patting Juba—an African American performance style documented on plantations throughout the south, as well as in urban areas throughout the northeast. In this black vernacular dance, the full body is used as an instrument, allowing the performer to provide rhythmic accompaniment to their sound and movement. William Henry Lane—a black performer turned blackface minstrel in the mid-nineteenth century, discussed in the following chapter—was often described similarly by white observers in the United States and United Kingdom for his unique ability to create a polymodal performance that seemed to require only himself. Lane’s full-bodied, vocally experimental, improvised style of non-linear yet carefully executed performance, and black musicians like Old Corn Meal and Picayune Butler, are some of the few documented cases from this era of popular black performers and their styles.44 Yet descriptions of Lane make clear that even if there were few black performers allowed on stage throughout the earlier part of the nineteenth century, their performances both in and outside of the theater were source material for white minstrels and

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   35

people in general to revel in these racial fantasies—ones that allowed for a temporary escape into dissociative states of performing the “self” through the (black) “other.” What becomes even more complex about the ways that Blacksound was constructed through early blackface is the feedback loop that is created between black and white performers, even if that loop is still primarily maintained by the structures of white supremacy. If Blacksound is the construction of a popular sound out of blackface, then from the very start, it comprises sounds that derived from black people, ones that were often taken up and manipulated by white performers. Critical to the making of Blacksound are also the sounds that came from the ethnic white performers’ own Euro-American communal practices that were performed through blackface, as well as the ways that the sounds of both black and white people were shaped by various levels of interaction with one another and other ethnic groups over the course of the nineteenth century. By the time Old Corn Meal became a famous street performer in New Orleans, blackface tunes were already so popular that he was performing them as a part of his own street acts. Further, T. D. Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow” was such a sensation that even in the following description of Old Corn Meal’s voice in the New Orleans Picayune, there is a reference to the primary theme of Rice’s tune: “we never heard a vocalist who could make his voice ‘wheel about and turn about’ so quick from tenor to bass to falsetto.”45 This once-famous black vendorperformer is reflecting the popular blackface songs of his day back to audiences who were accustomed to seeing white performers impersonating blackness in blackface who danced and “wheeled and turned about.” But Old Corn Meal was an actual black person, and he was able to insert his own (black) aesthetics and practices into the pre-constructed racist and racialized scripts of early Blacksound in blackface. These pre-constructed scripts themselves were amalgamations of a white performer’s choice of what to include in his routine that might reference blackness, whether it was real or racially imagined, while inserting his own ethnic sounds and styles into the performances for audiences. As Peter Reed observes in discussing the paradox of Old Corn Meal’s position as a black person performing early minstrel tunes for popular consumption: “Old Corn Meal, the ‘original,’ was thus acting out the complex interchange of authenticity and imitation in the Atlantic theatre world: he generated acts that others then copied, copied other acts himself, and (perhaps most intriguingly) turned out the original— and better—versions of minstrelsy’s own imitations.”46 Old Corn Meal’s

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influence on the popular stage stemmed from his popularity as a street performer and his “novel” improvisational, polymodal style, as well as his actual performance in New Orleans theaters in 1837 and 1840.47 By the time Rice made his third trip to New Orleans in 1838, he had had ample opportunity to observe Old Corn Meal. Although we don’t have documentation of exactly how Old Corn Meal might have influenced Rice specifically, we can account for the potential impact, given that Rice performed either with Old Corn Meal or as Old Corn Meal in an 1838 New Orleans production.48 This is not to assume or suggest that what Rice performed on stage were “authentic” black aesthetics, but instead that what contributed to Rice’s spectacular sensation as a blackface architect was his ability to absorb, adapt, and adopt—as his own— various performance practices that manipulate aspects of black performance. Such practices were in excess of white European and American standards of theatrical, quotidian, and overall musical performance in antebellum America. Rice’s performances might have been developed in relation to black aesthetics, drawing on the practices of performers like Old Corn Meal, William Henry “Master Juba” Lane, and countless other black performers that white minstrels might have observed in various parts of the country, but they were commercialized and consumed within a white marketplace for white musicians and spectators. As Sandra Jean Graham makes clear, the impact of blackface performance remained detrimental to black people, even after its sound shifted to include more of their own aesthetic and performance practices: “not only did these white parodists capitalize on black creativity through appropriation, replacing the black composer, but their lyrics and performances also re-placed black minstrel performers—and by extension black society—under white control.”49 The power dynamics of the music industry in its earliest manifestation allowed for whiteness (and its making) to be the conduit and controlling factor in how black performance, as a source of property, could be scripted into popular performance and sheet music. White actors were possessed by (via embodiment) and possessors of blackness and black people (via slavery) as sources of aesthetic and physical property through the making of Blacksound.

animating jim crow: composing identity via blacksound The music of Jim Crow itself reflects more of a relationship to Irish, Scottish, and English folk music than traditional African (American)

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   37

musical practices. However, there was something about Rice’s performance of Anglo, Scottish, and Irish sounds in an American context, in blackface, and with the freedom to improvise his own idea(l)s of black performance that contributed to his meteoric rise as a popular entertainer. The following analysis of Jim Crow’s blackface ventriloquy through image, body, and music, as well as accounts of T. D. Rice’s improvised acts, illuminates the performative ways in which (white racialized) identity became constructed within the commodified and stereotyped nature of early blackface performance. Rice’s enactments of Jim Crow contributed to the amalgamated (racialized) fabrication of Blacksound and the exploitation of real and imagined performances of blackness/black aesthetics through blackface. The fictional “black” sounds and movements scripted in blackface performance became regarded as natural, realistic displays of African Americans as individuals. These scripts assigned to blackness were racialized by ethnic whites who choreographed their perceptions of blackness in blackface, even if they were based on some aspect of black performance. By “choreographed,” I am referring to the way in which an individual’s voice and vocal timbre are constructed through various psychological, cultural, and physiological factors, yet imagined as naturally produced from their body. As musicologist Nina Eidsheim states: “I hence propose, drawing on concepts from dance and choreography, a theoretical and analytical framework that can address voice as the product of both societal shaping and individual articulation and materiality. This framework foregrounds the ways in which the character of one’s vocal timbre is mistakenly attributed to race. Thus, we may consider how the sound of a singer’s voice is in fact a co-creation to which listeners significantly contribute.”50 Within this vocal choreography in blackface, the racialization of sound was constructed such that noise— nonsensical lyrics; scratchy fiddling sounds; the percussive and metallic sounds of the tambourine; ragged rhythmic clapping, feet patting, and stomping; interjections, calls, and hollers from the audience and performers; snapping—was pejorative when connected to how African Americans sounded, although these very sounds are part of the fabric of Blacksound, which was embodied and performed by white Americans. Black corporeality was also constructed as “improper” movement (or non-European/American, i.e., non-white), as blackface performances assigned new meaning to angular, shuffled, and pelvic-based black vernacular movements as ones that were sexualized and improper (according to Victorian ideals). With Eidsheim’s proposition in mind,

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figure 3. “Mr. T. Rice as the Original Jim Crow” (E. Riley). Courtesy of the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

Blacksound engages what ethnic sounds were “choreographed” into Jim Crow, and how their scripting in blackface impacts their racialization through popular performance. The cover of the “Jim Crow” sheet music (see Figure 3) is decorated with a caricatured image that was meant to represent (in a comedic and

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound

|

39

figure 3. (continued)

negative light) the enslaved black man. Another one of the first editions of the printed sheet music was by early American publisher W. C. Peters. The Peters edition is also an example of the use of lithographic images to introduce the sheet music of popular American (blackface) tunes to audiences.51 Many of the stereotypes that became associated with Jim

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Crow’s derisive character—the exaggeration, sexualization, and almost disfigurement of the character’s body; his tattered clothing and appearance, angular movement, and posture; and the character’s blissfully unaware gaze—are evident in his representation on the sheet music’s cover. Similarly, before audiences heard Rice’s and other blackface delineators’ “Jump Jim Crow” in performance, they were first exposed to the physical and gestural movements of the derisive archetype upon his appearance on stage. As the blackface masked character entered the stage, and as the image on the sheet music cover projects, the initial presentation of a blackened face and caricatured body posturing added a level of artifice that encouraged the participants—whether via sheet music or in live performance—to internalize this archetype as an accurate portrayal of a black “other” in relation to their (white) selves. Significantly, these factors are in play before the blackface character is even sounded or heard. In Blacking Up (1974), an early contemporary study of blackface, Robert Toll imagines what might have had the most resonance in Rice’s successfully improvised performance of Jim Crow: “Since the melody to ‘Jim Crow’ was a familiar English tune and the words were neither unusual or especially clever, it must have been the dance that made Rice’s performance such a public rage. Descriptions of the ‘hop,’ rhythms, and the peculiar shoulder and arm movements involved in the dance strongly suggest that it was a variation of a characteristically Negro shuffle in which the feet remain close to the ground and upper-body movements predominate.”52 Toll does not account for exactly how familiar the “English tune” was, and, as I will demonstrate, the tune is more Irish in origin than English. While Toll also neglected to acknowledge the potential impact of the “blackened” (stereotyped) dialect in the lyrics, his point raises an interesting paradox enabled by the blackface mask: the ways in which traditional Anglo-Celtic sounds, performed in blackface, are developed alongside the performer’s embodiment of what was imagined as the freeing movements, gestures, and eventually sounds of African Americans through the ritual of blackface minstrelsy. Conversely, when the white-ethnic gaze, on and off the stage, was turned toward connecting (vaguely) similar performance scripts of blackface to the actual bodies of African Americans, these racialized scripts became conflated with the real lives of black people. The archetype of the “plantation darky” was grafted onto the ontology of blackness within the structures of antebellum American slave society. The “plantation darky” that became famously billed as Jim Crow represents the paradox of masking created

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   41

by a white-ethnic American embodiment of a “white” self, yet through stereotyped and commodified scripts of blackness in blackface. Laurence D. Hutton’s Curiosities of the American Stage (1890) is one of the first historical accounts of theater and drama in pre-twentiethcentury North America, and his retelling of the origins of the first Jim Crow performance is a revealing anecdote through which to interrogate what is at stake and at play in Rice’s introduction: Thomas D. Rice is generally conceded to have been the founder of Ethiopian minstrelsy. Although, as has been seen, it did not originate with him, he made it popular on both sides of the Atlantic. . . . The history of “Jim Crow” Rice, as he was affectionately called for many years, has been written by many scribes and in many different ways, the most complete and most truthful account, perhaps, being that of Edmon S. Conner, who described in the columns of the New York Times, June 5, 1881, what he saw and remembered of the birth of Jim Crow. Mr. Conner was a member of the company at the Columbia Street Theatre, Cincinnati, in 1828–29, when he first met Rice, “doing little negro bits” between acts at that house, notably a sketch he had studied from life in Louisville that preceding summer. Back of the Louisville theatre was a livery-stable kept by a man named Crow. The actors could look into the stable-yard from the windows of their dressing-rooms, and were fond of watching the movements of an old and decrepit slave who was employed by the proprietor to do all sorts of odd jobs. As was the custom among the negroes, he had assumed his master’s name, and called himself Jim Crow. He was very much deformed—the right shoulder was drawn up high, and the left leg was stiff and crooked at the knee, which gave him a painful but at the same time ludicrous limp. He was in the habit of crooning a queer old tune, to which he had applied words of his own. At the end of each verse he gave a peculiar step, “rocking de heel” in the manner since so general among the many generations of his imitators; and these were the words of his refrain: “Wheel about, turn about, Do jis so, An’ ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.”

Rice closely watched this unconscious performer, and recognized in him a character entirely new to the stage. He wrote a number of verses, quickened and slightly changed the air, made up exactly like the original, and appeared before a Louisville audience, which, as Mr. Conner says, “went mad with delight,” recalling him on the first night at least twenty times. And so Jim Crow jumped into fame and something that looks almost like immortality.53

In this account of Rice’s performance of Jim Crow, Cuff does not enter the stage begging Rice for his clothes to create the watershed

42   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music

moment that sparked the blackface tradition of Eric Lott’s “love and theft” theory. The blackface performance is not conditioned upon embodying a necessarily “authentic” blackness, but instead upon the mimicking, (mis)interpreting, and (re)performing of what was seen as an embodiment of “authentic” black aesthetics, laying the foundation for the paradoxical nature of the blackface performance itself. Through Jim Crow, Rice improvised upon what would develop into an early, ethnically hybrid popular American sound and movement. Rice simultaneously performed stereotyped scripts of blackness (in blackface) that were based on the fictionalization of black performativity, while his own Irish American practices were implicitly infused into these very sounds and movements. Rice’s “blackened” improvisations of his own Irish cultural heritage in the context of the United States buttress the amalgamation of Blacksound in early blackface. A (white) self and (black) other are cognitively negotiated between the performer and himself, the performer and the audience, and the performer and the “othered” (and in this instance voiceless) African American. We can never fully account for Rice’s first performance of Jump Jim Crow, due to the ephemerality of live performance. Regardless of the telling of how Rice first performed this blackface character, what can be confirmed is that blackface was the medium through which he first introduced Jim Crow. And interrogating the sounds that went into its performance might get us closer to understanding the early racialization of popular sound, as well as how notions of racial authenticity were constructed through popular entertainment in blackface.

jumping jim crow In both its rhythmic and its harmonic structure, “Jim Crow” initially resembles a traditional Scots-Irish or Celtic folk tune, specifically the “jig”—defined by Margaret Dean-Smith as a song and dance traditionally for a solo male dancer, “full of leapings” and stepping, and generally consisting of two eight-bar sections in duple meter.54 In many of the versions told of Rice’s performance of “Jim Crow,” however, it is suggested that he directly learned the song and dance either from an African American (a dockhand in some cases, a stableman in others) or by observing the vernacular expressions of black individuals from a distance. How do we then account for the traditional and simple Western harmonies and form that drive the eight-bar verse and refrain? The D-major key in which the song is written is a common tonality within

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   43

Celtic music, as well as the simple and lilting melodic contour that generally outlines the accompanying harmony. Within the accompaniment, the drone-like A in the opening of the phrase, which sustains the tonic and dominant harmony in the first measure, serves a similar function to the drone in bagpipe music of the Celtic tradition. The vocal melody and piano figures that complement this drone function almost as the more rhythmic and melodic figures in the treble line of bagpipe performance. As observed in Garland of Scotia; a Musical Wreath of Scottish Song, with Descriptive and Historical Notes Adapted for the Voice, Flute, and Violin (1841), the short, eight-bar phrasing in which the verse and chorus are equally divided is also common to the airs and dances of traditional Celtic music.55 Additionally, the smoothly syncopated dotted figure of the chorus (“Weel about and turn about and” . . . Eb’ry time I weel about I . . .”) stresses the main (first and third) beats within the measure, emphasizing the dance-like nature of the jig on the words “weel” and “turn.” On the sheet music, the only element that immediately references blackness is the stereotyped dialect used to personify Jim Crow:56 Verse I Come, listen all you gals and boys Ise just from Tucky hoe; I’m goin’ to sing a little song My name’s Jim Crow. Chorus Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.

It is apparent that the origin of Blacksound created in blackface is rooted in the actual sounds of Irish and Scots-Irish folk music in America. The amalgamation of sounds that originated in Ireland and the United Kingdom and were realized in the United States is enmeshed with their own adaptations and mimicry of often exaggerated and (in) authentic black performances practices. James Bennett, Rice’s close friend/biographer and editor of the New York Herald, suggests in 1837 that Rice spent quite a bit of time along the Ohio River Valley, where he left his native New York to train with a southern theater troupe. It was during his travels that he took the opportunity to study “the negro character in all its varieties. He eat [sic], drank and slept with them, went to their frolics, and made himself the best white black man in existence.”57 While we cannot verify the

44   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music

extent of Rice’s “ethnography” of African American cultural practices, central to the blackface paradox of this account is that the song, although of clear British folk origin, is made distinct by its articulation via (real or imagined) African American performance practices.58 Given the many historical blackface anecdotes that mention that Rice was influenced by his stereotyped recollection of an African American figure, how then might we account for the way “Jim Crow’s” melody, of British origin, was (re)interpolated and subsequently (re-)presented in the new nation by an Irish American on stage? How did the blackface figure that represented the enslaved African American become the ventriloquized conduit through which ethnic whiteness and white Americanness were simultaneously expressed during the antebellum era? One possible route is suggested in Peter Kolchin’s account of American slavery: “African-Americans emerged as a people through intense interaction between black and white Americans, an interaction that saw significant cultural influences in both directions. If in some respects blacks and whites inhabited very different worlds in colonial America, those worlds were closely intertwined and bore more in common than was readily apparent to the inhabitants of either.”59 The paradox of American minstrelsy—the already-hybrid nature of American identity and sound during the colonial era, which then becomes articulated by white Americans caricaturing blackness in blackface, while performing their own ethnic identity—requires that we move beyond authenticity and mimicry as the end-goal of analysis within blackface. Dissecting the hybrid sounds of early minstrelsy via sheet music and its most popular blackface caricatures allows one to further investigate the way in which movement and improvisation factor into how the legacy of blackface minstrelsy and more nuanced negotiations of identity are articulated through Blacksound.

zip coon: sounding the blackface urban dandy While Jim Crow inaugurated the blackface craze, it was quickly complemented by another popular stage character, Zip Coon. If the former represented the slow, lazy, dumb Southern “plantation darky,” Zip Coon stood for the urban dandy—well dressed, smooth-talking, a clever schemer, a sexual predator, and aloof.60 Although he performed elements of high society through dress and presentation, the blackening of Zip Coon emphasized that he was a poser, naturally unable to achieve

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   45

the civic and societal status of the “elite” white men on stage. The urban dandy might have appeared alongside and as frequently as Jim Crow in early minstrelsy, but unlike “Jim Crow,” the song that made “Zip Coon” a staple of blackface still survives today through the well-known tune “Turkey in the Straw.”61 As one of the earliest popular blackface publications (1834), the “Zip Coon” sheet music is a direct example of the way Blacksound was constructed and made legible as a source of property within American popular music and identity. “Zip Coon” effectively conflates the character of the song’s title and an actual black individual through musical personification. On the cover of the “Zip Coon” sheet music published by Thomas Birch in 1834, the body of the character might be almost as contorted as that of Jim Crow, but the more performatively effeminate pose, his long-tail coat, and his sartorial accessories, which suggest a possibly upper-class status (top hat, jewelry, tailored vest, and so on) convey a different blackface caricature altogether (see Figure 4). The blackfaced urban dandy—attractive, well dressed, educated—effectively embodies the irony and fear of black “upward” mobility throughout the nation leading up to emancipation, as he also performs the class frustrations of an urban, white, working-class immigrant population on the rise between the 1820s and the 1840s. This quinteseential American archetype “is a mélange of European and African (principally West African and Central African) modes of self fashioning.”62 The middleto upper-class African American impostor of “Long Tail Blue” and “Zip Coon” emerged while slavery was on the decline throughout the north, which was also the time in which urban class conflicts were further developing along racial lines.63 Blacksound reflected the deep anxieties and fears of white northerners who wrestled with the potential of competing with free black people in an already-competitive capitalist society. Before T. D. Rice, George Washington Dixon, a white Virginian, was the best-known blackface “delineator” (as performers in blackface were referred to in contemporary accounts) of the late 1820s. Dixon became famous by helping cement two of the three primary caricatures of early blackface performance through “Coal Black Rose” and “Long Tail Blue” between 1827 and 1828. Like “Jim Crow,” “Coal Black Rose” represented the plantation darky through the Sambo character, while “Long Tail Blue” presented the urban black dandy, an early and more genteel (that is, less overtly racist) version of the Zip Coon stereotype.64 With regard to the connection between these two early popular blackface male characters (“Coal” and “Longtail”), William J. Mahar suggests that “both types embody the contrast between comedic and dramatic characters

46

|

Racial Identity and Popular Music

figure 4. “Zip Coon” (Thomas Birch). Courtesy of Music for a Nation: American Sheet Music, Music Division, Library of Congress.

representing the conflicts between urban and rural, elite and common, white and black in American folk theatricals and on the legitimate stage.”65 Furthermore, in Monica Miller’s expansive study on black dandyism in American culture, she notes that the figure of the black dandy “was a practice that destablized hierarchies of race and power even as it upheld these same structures in the emerging blackface minstrel theater.”66 Layered and often competing ideologies were frequently staged through Blacksound in the early to mid-nineteenth-century American theater. Dixon performed “Coal Black Rose” and other blackface tunes during performances of works such as Rossini’s opera William Tell and Shakespeare’s Richard III.67

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   47

Dixon is mostly remembered for his famous portrayal of the black urban dandy Zip Coon, and as the disputed composer of a later popular blackface tune that remains in the Americana repertoire today—“Dixie” (1859). Evidence suggests that Dixon actually learned this tune and other aspects of his performane from the Snowden family—an African American musical family that were onced enslaved and subsequently established residence in Knox County, Ohio, where Dixon grew up. This is a particular instance in which the absorption and erasure of black performance and aesthetics shaped early blackface performance and Blacksound, as well as African Americans’ inability to claim rights over material published and claimed by white-led publishing housing and performers during slavery.68 George Washington Dixon first appeared singing blackface comic songs in July 1827 at the Lafayette Theater in New York, then the largest theater in England and America.69 It was also between 1827 and 1828 that slavery was officially abolished in New York State. As the presence and visibility of African Americans increased throughout the urban north, structural competition for class and economic mobility often became a racialized matter for working-class Irish Americans of the Jacksonian “common man” era.70 Furthermore, escalating tensions between abolitionist and anti-abolitionist sentiments from the 1830s to the Civil War era culminated in race riots in many urban areas. Newspaper accounts of a riot in New York City in July 1834 referred to mobs of working-class and mostly Irish Americans attacking the establishments of abolitionists and African Americans.71 The mob made its way to the nearby Bowery Theater in Manhattan’s downtown Five Points district, where significant numbers of African Americans were settled in the early nineteenth century. The working-class periodical the New York Sun reported that Dixon and his Zip Coon performance calmed the rioters: “Mr. Dixon, the singer (an American)[,] now made his appearance. ‘Let us have Zip Coon,’ exclaimed a thousand voices. The singer gave them their favorite song, amidst peals of laughter— and his Honor the Mayor . . . made his appearance. . . . Dixon, who had produced such amazing good nature with his ‘Zip Coon,’ next addressed them—and they soon quietly dispersed.”72 Blackface and Blacksound served as a balm to the anti-abolitionist white mob.73 Although the rioters that evening were focused on the elite, English management of the Bowery, Dixon’s Zip Coon (the black Dandy) was called on not to replace Hamlet, but to replace a “Native” of the new nation in the character of Metamora. Metamora (the play interrupted

48   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music

figure 5. “Zip Coon: A Popular Negro Song” (Firth Hall). Courtesy of Hackley Sheet Music Collection of African American Themes, Detroit Public Library.

by the rioters) was by an American author, premiered by Edwin Forrest (an American), and on an American topic—that of Native American and Puritan interaction in New England. As this anecdote suggests, Indigenous Americans posed just as great a threat to manifest-destinydriven European Americans, who stole land from the Indigenous peoples during frontier expansion in mid-nineteenth-century North America. Blackface (as well as constructed ideas of blackness) was a conduit for the expression of American nationalism by (white) actors and audiences who used burnt cork and its performance to exercise their personal and political anxieties. The well-dressed urban dandy shown in Figure 5 was a musician, politician, and frontiersman—in blackface. Blacksound’s racialized

Example 2 in the Making of Blacksound   |   49 Blackface "Turkey in the Straw"

example 1. “Turkey in the Straw”

# & 44 œ œ .. œ œ œ œ œ 5

#

& œœœœœ

œ œœ œ .. œ œ œJ J œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ .. œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœœœœ 1.

# œ œ œ & .. œJ œJ

10

# œ & œJ

15

œœ œ œ œœœœ œ œ œ œœ œœ œœœœœ

œœ œœ œ J J

œ œ œ J œ œ

œœ œœ œ J J

œ œ œ œ œ 1.

œ

2.

œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œœ

.. œ œ œ œ œ 2.

Œ

..

scripts are embedded into the lyrics of “Zip Coon.” The sonic realization of the song’s sheet music served as a basis for the participatory improvisation of an aspirational whiteness through performing a blackfaced “other” in the construction of a “popular” Blacksound. It was not yet possible for a composer or author to attain rights to a published composition until the 1831 sheet music copyright provision was passed. Various presses published their own versions of popular blackface tunes like “Zip Coon” in the mid-nineteenth century. It was common, however, for a publisher to use the name of a famous performer of a song to promote the sheet music, as in the Firth and Hall edition of “Zip Coon” (ca. 1834), which advertises on its cover “Zip Coon: A Popular Negro Song as Sung by Mr. Geo. W. Dixon with great applause” (see Figure 5).74 In this edition of “Zip Coon,” the brief chorus that begins on the second page of the music repeats the line “Old Zip Coon is a very larned scholar” in three consecutive four-measure phrases (see Figure 6). The melody that accompanies the repetition of lyrics is the B section of the familiar tune “Turkey in the Straw” (see Example 1).75 Right away, the sharply dressed Zip Coon is portrayed as the imitation of a “real” middle- or upper-class white citizen. Rather than being a “learned scholar” he is a “larned” scholar, and his blackfaced dialect sonically reminds us of his stereotyped “blackness,” which in turn becomes an ontological indicator of his inability to articulate being an educated scholar and black. As the chorus ends, the lyric clearly shows the dandy

50   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music

figure 6. “Zip Coon: A Popular Negro Song” (Firth Hall). Courtesy of Hackley Sheet Music Collection of African American Themes, Detroit Public Library.

to be a fraud, as Zip Coon goes from being a “larned scholar” to being a banjoist: “He plays on the Banjo Cooney in de hollar.” The banjo was associated with lower- and working-class American folk, particularly because of its African origins—surely not the instrument of choice of a “learned scholar” during the antebellum era. It was, however, the

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   51

figure 6. (continued)

instrument of choice for Anglo-Celtic American immigrants who interacted with African Americans across the Upper South during the colonial era and for those who articulated their class and racial anxieties in blackface during the antebellum era.76 The banjo was so deeply associated with minstrelsy that its African roots were buried beneath

52   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music

the hybrid performance practices that Irish and British American performers developed in blackface and their structuring of Blacksound (see Chapter 5). Although Zip Coon’s musical occupation as a banjoist cast doubt upon his ability to be a “larned” scholar, the blackfaced dandy continued to express both the anxieties and the aspirations of the (white) working class. The political tensions of Jacksonian democracy, European immigration, and frontier and industrial expansion were central topics in both of the versions of the “Zip Coon” song that were printed in 1834. In the version published by Thomas Birch, the fourth through sixth verses speak of the aspiring dandy as president (over Andrew Jackson), with Davy Crockett on the ticket as his VP (see Figure 7): I tell you what will happin den, now bery soon, De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon; Dare General Jackson, will him lampoon, An de bery nex President, will be Zip Coon. An wen Zip Coon our President shall be, He make all de little Coons sing posum up a tree; O how de little Coons, will dance and sing, Wen he tie dare tails togedder, cross de lim dey swing. Now mind wat you arter, your tarnel kritter Crocket, You shant go head widout old Zip, he is de boy to block it[;] Zip shall be President, Crocket shall be vice, An den dey two togedder, will hab de tings nice.77

Jacksonian ideals significantly influenced structural developments in US politics and society, but the exploits of frontiersman Davy Crockett were often celebrated by non-elite, poorer, and working-class (especially Irish) white men. Westward expansion and “outlaw” tactics were celebrated during the growth of the United States. Barbara Lewis notes that Crockett quickly became a national hero, a kind of home-grown Superman, bigger-than-life symbol of the rugged individual who single-handedly roped and harnessed the wild west. In those days, Tennessee was still considered the west. By eliminating the dark savages, pushing them off their lands, Crockett made the territory habitable for decent, law-abiding white folks and their Christian families. Crockett also presided over [Zip] Coon, and Coon’s lyrical attempts to establish his superiority were all the more ridiculous because the audience knew for sure which one was the master and which the slave. Coon’s extravagant pretensions were not disturbing in the least, just laughable.78

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   53

The expressive possibilities for white performers that were embedded in the blackfaced performance of Zip Coon quickly developed into the paradoxical paradigm of blackface, blackness, and Americanness. The simultaneous ridicule of upper-class whites and any class of blacks found in the stereotyped black(face) character is what made Zip Coon a vehicle for whites to freely articulate both sameness and difference in the racialized structuring of American society through the choreosonic and material aesthetics of Blacksound in blackface. The “choreosonic” is defined by Ashon Crawley as “a portmanteau underscoring that choreography and sonicity, movement and sound, are inextricably linked and have to be thought together.”79 While both the cover and the lyric of the “Zip Coon” sheet music might suggest a black character (the latter through its “blackface” dialect), the printed music itself falls squarely within various folk music styles of the British Isles. As many recent Irish immigrants were still closely connected to their folk traditions, vernacular musics such as the hornpipe, jig, and reel, continued to serve as the musical basis of late antebellum blackface performance. Hans Nathan notes that “Zip Coon” is related to two Irish hornpipes, “The Glasgow Hornpipe” and “The Post Office,” both of which, like much dance-influenced folk music of the Celtic traditions, are considered fiddle tunes.80 The relationship between “Zip Coon” and these two tunes, in terms of both melodic contour and rhythm, is indeed striking. Of the two above-mentioned versions of “Zip Coon” published in 1834 in the wake of Dixon’s popular performance, the Firth and Hall edition (see again Figure 6) is a simpler, more straightforward presentation of the melody with only slight rhythmic variation. The Thomas Birch edition (see again Figure 7) is more rhythmically distinct and embellished, although the basic melody, as well as the harmonic and melodic rhythm, remains the same. Given that, to be a successful realization of blackface music, it had to include the improvisational element of the live performance, it is likely that the more distinctive Birch version contains some of the rhythmic and melodic embellishments that would have been added in live performance. In comparing the “Zip Coon” song with traditional Irish folk styles, I reference the simpler version of it published by Firth and Hall (Figure 7). “Zip Coon” is in duple meter and is characterized by rapid rhythmic patterns in two-beat measures of the sort found in traditional hornpipes and reels. The eight measures of “The Glasgow Hornpipe”

54   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music

figure 7. “Zip Coon” (Thomas Birch). Courtesy of Music for a Nation: American Sheet Music, Music Division, Library of Congress.

(see Example 2) closely correspond in harmony as well as in melodic and rhythmic contour to the first sixteen measures of “Zip Coon.” In each case, both the melody and the harmony revolve around the major pentatonic scale on G. The pentatonic basis of the “Zip Coon” melody, characteristic of Celtic folk music as well as various vernacular musics

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   55

figure 7. (continued)

internationally, contributes to the tune’s folk-like quality. Rhythmically, the melody consists of small, repeated cells featuring arpeggiated leaps and dotted figures, suggesting the fiddling styles of both African and Irish folk traditions.81 The melody restarts every eight measures, just as that of “The Glasgow Hornpipe” does every four measures. And in both

56   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music example 2. “The Glasgow Hornpipe”

# & 42 #

j œ

Ÿ œ œ œœ œ œ œœœœ œ œœ œ œ œœœœ œ œ œœœ j œ

& œ œ œ œ œ

6

j œ

Ÿ œ œ

œ

j œ

Ÿ

œ œ œ œœ œ œ œœœœ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ

œ

melodies, a four-measure rhythmic phrase is repeated to form a larger period—one of eight measures in “The Glasgow Hornpipe” and one of sixteen measures in “Zip Coon.” This motor-rhythmic practice is another common trait of hornpipes, jigs, and reels, as it serves to propel the dance frequently associated with the tune. Significantly, these musical forms were also connected to movement, dance, and improvised participatory exchange as key parts of many Anglo-Celtic traditional styles. The frequent “restarting” of rhythmic cells in short phrases might correspond to the rapid rhythmic succession of dancers’ heels and toes in the jig and reel, which became part of the breakdown.82 Yet the way in which the styles were improvised in blackface gave them a distinctly American flair. The precarious ontological conditioning of blackness in American slave society allowed the “noisy” sounds and “ragged” movements—“improper” traits within “proper” society—to be stereotypically scripted onto African American bodies as they were safely and freely expressed by white Americans through blackface performance. The Scots-Irish reel is also characterized by repeated rhythmic phrases that begin and end in the same manner.83 The influence of the reel is evident in both the chorus of “Zip Coon” (mm. 17–32 of the vocal part in Figure 6) and the traditional Irish tune “The Post Office” (see Example 3). While “The Post Office” consists of four two-measure phrases, “Zip Coon” consists of four four-measure phrases; both are characterized by G-major tonality and melodies driven by a rapid rhythmic pattern that alternates between scalar and arpeggiated movement. In the “Zip Coon” chorus, the first four-measure phrase is repeated a tone higher to create the second, while the third and fourth phrases are rhythmically related but melodically independent.

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   57 example 3. “The Post Office”

œ # œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ & 42 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

Ÿ # œ œ œ œ œ &

6

œ œ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

j œ œ œ ‰

The Blacksound scripts within “Zip Coon” are based on the hybridity of ethnic white folk expressions and stereotyped performances of blackness. It is difficult, however, to separate the enjoyment an ethnic white participant might have felt in recognizing self within the familiar tunes from the freedom they felt in expressing the other by imitating and imagining black performance practices. In any case, the traditional ethnic white sounds that helped to popularize “Zip Coon,” along with the performance of sound and movement through an imaginary black other, became the mode through which Blacksound most affected reality. The simplicity, derisiveness, and catchiness of the “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon” songs, ritualistically improvised in blackface, became mapped onto an ontology of blackness as simple and thereby not equal to its white counterparts throughout society. It also allowed for performances of whiteness that did not fit into societal expectations of a proper, property-owning, educated, and elite white male to be expressed through the blackface mask. White actors could distance themselves from performances that became mapped onto blackness in the white popular imaginary. At the same time, the melody of “Zip Coon” continues to resonate into the present, often serving as a signal of pleasure, as it was the tune featured in one of the first animated films synchorized with sound, Disney’s Steamboat Willy, and it has long been one of the wellknown tunes that signal the approach of an ice cream truck.84 Detached from its original blackface context, the “Zip Coon” tune has been taken up as a source of property out of which other forms of lucrative entertainment and products have been sold. Tracing the resonance of Blacksound within the legacy of the stereotyped fop and its tune foregrounds its racialized legacy in any consideration of how “Zip Coon” circulates within and shaped various aspects of American culture.

58   |   Racial Identity and Popular Music

(mis)representing black womanhood: lucy long While Jim Crow and Zip Coon were two of the most popular early blackface caricatures, it was the cross-dressed, blackface character of Lucy Long who became the most frequently performed blackface trope during the formalization of the form in the 1850s and 1860s.85 This popular stereotype would begin to define the way in which black women—as well as any “queered” identity outside of the normative binary construction of white man/woman—were seen, heard, and imagined through the white gaze. White male anxieties around sexuality, miscegenation, and other gendered and sexual fantasies were exercised through drag performance in blackface.86 Lucy Long was a blackface impersonation of black women and womanhood on the minstrel stage. It became a stock character in popular theater after it was first introduced in the late 1820s. Lucy Long is, in fact, one of the first and most enduring representations of drag performance in American popular culture. “When [George Washington] Dixon named Rose’s predicaments in the interlude he called Love in a Cloud, he apparently established the convention of the blackface ‘wench’: male actors representing black women in drag [through his song ‘Coal Black Rose’].”87 By the time that Dixon introduced this racist and sexist (forging into Moya Bailey’s formulation of misogynoir) “comedic” stereotype of black women to the American public, iterations of a cross-dressed black-faced figure had already appeared on stage in the famous Tom and Jerry, or Life in London, performed in London in 1821 and the United States in 1823: “Moncrieff’s stage directions specified that white male actors would cross-dress to play the roles of the fast black women Sally and Flashy Nance.”88 But similar to how Zip Coon became the most popular representation of the black dandy in blackface after the introduction of “My Long Tail Blue” (1827), “Lucy Long” emerged as one the most celebrated blackface tunes. The song introduced stereotyped conceptions of black women/womanhood to the popular stage in the United States and United Kingdom between 1843 and 1852.89 Such representations were created mostly by white men in blackface whose presentation of “Lucy Long” helped to place black women largely outside of the realm of femininity typically afforded to white women in the antebellum era. While Jim Crow and Zip Coon emerged as the most popular stock caricatures of early blackface, they are gendered specifically as male. Zip Coon would sometimes be represented as feminine, thereby

Blackface in the Making of Blacksound   |   59

further posing as a masculine and/or heterosexually normalized white male, or as a sexually deviant queer (i.e., untraditionally/excessively sexual and/or not heterosexual) black man. It might be assumed that these racialized, cross-dressed performances allowed for subversion of gender norms by the mostly white men who perpetuated the rolls, but as gender studies pioneer Judith Butler notes that “there is no necessary relation between drag and subversion, and that drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms.”90 As the homo-social nature of blackface allowed for expressions of gender, class, race, and sexuality to be defined mostly by white men of various ethnic and class backgrounds in blackface, “the search for a secured masculine identity required that a fantasy of a living female be performed, and thus came the advent of the prima donna female impersonator as an integral part of the minstrelsy.”91 Lucy Long and related blackface cross-dressed archetypes are cases through which to interrogate what C. Riley Snorton names a “critical genealogy of modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being.”92 The impact that (white) men in blackface and drag had on perceptions of black womanhood and gender expression in general cannot be understated. The rise of popular entertainment through blackface during the Jacksonian/antebellum era was a moment in which the anxieties around class, gender, race, and sexuality were expressed and maintained. Thereby, the popularity and performance of blackface drag characters like Lucy Long is an opportunity to consider how womanhood, heteronormative whiteness, black women, queer performativity, femininity, and trans identity are bound within the performed scripts of female blackface stereotypes that were controlled mostly by white men. Lucy Long’s tune, like “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon,” borrows directly from Irish and Scottish folk tunes. However, the performance of the stereotyped black women caricatures themselves, the lyrics, and the embodied scripts that developed from their staged enactment helped define the structural conditions that lead to the oppression, suppression, and foreclosure of diverse lived experiences of black women and queer peoples across the spectrum of womanhood and femininity within a heterosexist culture. These performances often expressed ridicule against the potentiality for black (heterosexual) love or presented very specific stereotypes of black women as a wench (associated with prostitution) or jezebel (associated with sexual looseness) figure, to name a few. Through stereotypes like

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Lucy Long, white men (and women) used their own false notions of black womanhood to freely express their own class, race, and gendered anxieties in performance. Yet figures like Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Tubman are examples of black women who escaped slavery and reflect how they found ways to both resist and exist within the constitutional and cultural structures that sought to contain them.93 Their ability to disidentify with the ontologies of black womanhood written onto their bodies by a white supremacist society persists through black queer and femme examples like Mary Jones (also known as Peter Sewalley).94 Jones was one of the earliest documented potentially trans or cross-dressing black figures in the United States, who, in 1836, was accused and convicted of soliciting (as a woman) a white “master mason.” Jones was recorded as stating that “I have always attended parties [in New York] among people of my own Colour dressed this way—and in New Orleans Dressed this way.”95 They were arrested for solicitation, but the copious salacious news stories written about them point to both the fascination with and resistance to the idea of a black person in women’s clothing who was structurally not viewed as a woman, while mostly white blackface minstrels made careers off of cross-dressing in blackface. The sheet music, live performance, and popular tropes of (crossdressed) black women that circulated in blackface performance occurred alongside Jones’s life and infamy in the American national press. C. Riley Snorton notes that “Jones’s commoditized caricature gave rise to a meditation on the gender fungibility of black flesh during slavery, her salacious coverage in the penny press illustrated that the matter of black freedom was equally vexed in print.”96 Although Jones is documented as living a dynamic life outside of the traditional structures of gender and sexuality available to them at the time, the way in which Jones was caricatured in popular press was further complicated by the stereotyped performances of black womanhood by mostly white men in blackface and drag that occurred on the minstrel stage. The life of someone like Mary Jones being documented in public record, because of their arrest for alleged solicitation and inability to exist within the confines of white society’s construction of manhood and womanhood around whiteness, further stresses the idea that “Lucy Long and characters like her were women who were assured in their value as sexual objects and they occasionally needed to be reminded that they had the status of property, not personhood.”97

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The lyrics to “Lucy Long” published in 1842 by Philadelphia publisher G. Willig speaks to this very objectification of black women in blackface: I jist come out afore you, To sing a little song, I plays it on the banjo, And dey calls it Lucy Long. Chorus Oh take your time Miss Lucy, Take your time Miss Lucy Long. Oh take your time Miss Lucy Take your time Miss Lucy Long. Miss Lucy she is handsome, And Miss Lucy she is tall, To see her dance Cachucha Is death to n*ggers all. Oh! Miss Lucy’s handsome teeth is grinning Just like an ear ob corn, And her eyes dey look so winning! Oh would I’d ne’er been born. I axed her for to marry Myself de toder day, She said she’d rather tarry So I let her habe her way. If she makes a scolding wife As sure as she was born I’ll tote her down to Georgia And trade her off for Corn.98

The chorus that begins with “Oh take your time Miss Lucy” is the section in which the cross-dressed, blackface performer would show off their skills at embodying their version of burlesqued and stereotyped black femininity on stage. Yet the lyrics, although comedic and somewhat subtle in some of their suggestions, point directly to how her attractiveness might cause death, how Lucy is a product to be consumed/eaten, and how she performs the jezebel stereotype that became associated with black women through popular culture, since Lucy does not want to be tied down by marriage.99 But to be sure, it was clear that Lucy Long (both in character and in song/performance) was a product: the suitor notes that he will “trade her off for corn” and essentially

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trade her life for another commodity. The suitor’s transaction points to Lucy’s own status as an enslaved person and a product to be possessed, consumed, and owned. Although it was mostly white men in blackface and drag in the height of antebellum minstrelsy, one of the most detailed accounts of the performance of Lucy Long that survives is of William Henry Lane’s—a Long Island–born black dancer and performer who became famous in New York City’s Five Points neighborhood. Lane joined G. W. Pell’s Ethiopian Serenaders on tour in the United Kingdom in the 1840s, where he frequently performed as Lucy Long.100 He is one of the few black blackface performers of the time and probably the best known. The following detailed description of Lane’s performance of Lucy Long in London provides a glimpse into the fascination that audiences had with blackface minstrel characters in drag, creating imagined and stereotyped performances of black womanhood within Blacksound: But the great feature of the entertainment, and that which we imagine attracted the large and respectable audience present, was undoubtedly “Master Juba,” the immortalized of Boz [i.e., Charles Dickens]. . . . His first performance was “Miss Lucy Long, in character.” With a most bewitching bonnet and veil, a very pink dress, beflounced to the waste, lace-fringed trousers of the most spotless purity, and red leather boots,—the ensemble completed by the green parasol and white . . . pocket handkerchief,—Master Juba certainly looked the black demoiselle of the first . . . to the greatest advantage. The playing and singing by the serenaders of a version of the well-known negro ditty, furnished the music to Juba’s performance, which was after this fashion:—Promenading in a circle to the left for a few bars, till again facing the audience, he then commenced a series of steps, which altogether battle description, from their number, oddity, and the rapidity with which they are executed. The highland fling, the sailor’s hornpipe, and other European dances, seemed to have been laid under contribution, and intermixed with a number of steps which we may call “Juba’s own,” for surely their like was never before seen for grotesque agility, not altogether mixed with grace. The promenade was then repeated; then more dancing; and so on, to the end of the song. His other performances were called “marriage festival” and “plantation dances,” in which, in male costume, he illustrated the dances of his own people on festive occasions. They were even more extraordinary than the first,—the grotesque element, in the character of the steps, largely predominating, and the physical exertion apparently much greater. . . . To us, the most interesting part of the performance was the exact time, which, even in the most complicated and difficult steps, the dancer kept to the music.101

In considering this vivid description of Lane’s performance of Miss Lucy Long in Victorian London, as well its overall popularity as one of

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the most frequently performed blackface tunes in the United States and United Kingdom, it is important to attend to the ways in which his and other minstrel performances (including many of the ones by white men in blackface) impact the way in which black women and black queerness in general are perceived in the popular imagination.102 Minstrel performances shaped lived experiences of marginalized people, including black women. Their ontological status (in the public purview) was fashioned by white supremacy and sexism. Because most black people in the Americas were enslaved, including those enslaved in the Caribbean by the British and those enslaved in the United States, black women, in particular, were subjected to multiple levels of violence and exploitation. They had little control over how they were perceived within the structures of society that acknowledged only whiteness as a source of womanhood, as black women in the Americans were treated mostly as chattel.103 In the following chapter, I provide a more detailed analysis of how Lane’s Miss Lucy Long performance might have resonated to audiences on antebellum and Victoria stages, but it is worth noting here that, amid the vivid description of the performance itself, Lucy Long is a mute character who does not speak for herself. Through these performances, black womanhood was represented by mostly white males (and, in this rare case, a black male), who contorted their bodies and movements to articulate their versions of black womanhood, through blackface and Blacksound, that was both foreclosed and inaccessible to them as people. •

•

•

“Lucy Long,” “Zip Coon,” and “Jim Crow” served as the initial arbiters of commercial popular music and the performative construction of racialized identity in the United States. Specifically, they created the limited scripts through which blackness has been imagined since slavery, effectively enforcing stereotypes of blackness that came to stand in for actual black people. These three blackface characters are central to understanding how they developed not just along the lines of racial mimicry, but through a complex amalgamation of ethnic folk sounds of Ireland and the United Kingdom, imagined and real sounds and performances of African Americans, and their overall manipulation and consumption by white audiences. Importantly, white performers and audiences consisted of various ethnic, class, and societal backgrounds, while they themselves became culturally amalgamated into a racialized category of whiteness in relation to not being black. Because the

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majority of African Americans were enslaved during the invention of blackface, their condition as sources of property to be exploited in both a labor and an aesthetic sense helped to shift “property’s drift in the direction of the commodification of personhood.”104 The commodification of personhood through blackface performance limited the ability for black people to combat the anti-black tropes that developed out of this popular form, while they also could not benefit from the lucrative practice of using the (racist) imagery and imagined performance of blackness through blackface to sell sheet music, pack theater halls, and effectively lay the groundwork for the formation of the nation’s popular music industry. Sheet music publishers, performers and troupes, theater producers, sporting hall owners, and other players in early American popular music, regardless of their economic class, had access to capitalizing upon the making of blackface and Blacksound. These actors could also enforce their own ideas of racialization throughout society, ones that were heavily shaped by the nationwide circulation of white supremacist ideologies that emerged during the transatlantic slave trade and were aesthetically enforced through blackface performance.

chapter 2

William Henry “Master Juba” Lane and Antebellum Blacksound

Irish American entertainer Thomas Dartmouth (T. D.) Rice emerged as one of the nation’s first pop stars when he jumped Jim Crow in the late 1820s. Rice’s performance sparked the birth of the nation’s first original form of mass entertainment—blackface minstrelsy. But Rice was not the only “pop star” of the antebellum era. In fact, one of the most influential and written-about performers of this time was a black musician and dancer named William Henry “Master Juba” Lane (c. 1823–c. 1852).1 Although African Americans were mostly enslaved and excluded from the realm of professional entertainment in the mid-nineteenth century, Lane was unique as a (free) black performer (sometimes in blackface) within an industry that was created by and performed for mostly European Americans. Lane’s life and legacy reveal that even though Blacksound in the antebellum era was largely controlled and constructed in blackface by white musicians and producers, minstrelsy’s early popularity was directly shaped by actual black performers. Throughout this book, Blacksound is developed as an amalgamation of sounds within the development of US popular music out of blackface,2 and the current chapter foregrounds the sounds and performance practices created by African-descended people in early America within and outside of Blacksound. Black musical practices and innovations were absorbed into the tapestry of early American popular sound at a time in which black people were mostly enslaved and had limited (property) rights over their bodies and their 65

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own innovative performance practices. I follow the life of William Henry Lane and the copious documentation of his performances in the United States and United Kingdom to illustrate how improvisation, syncopation, and the idiosyncrasy of black performance are foundational to the making of Blacksound in early blackface. After traveling with Lane from the Five Points neighborhood in New York City to England at the end of his life, I consider how blackface went international beyond the United States. It is significant that blackface was the first export of popular entertainment from America to other parts of the world. Its circulation in the mid-nineteenth century helped to shape the globalization of popular sound, the bourgeoning popular (and sheet) music industries in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as the construction of racialized identity beyond the United States.3 Lane might have been an anomaly of sorts, but his influence is as significant as any of his white blackface contemporaries. The young performer first gained notoriety in the 1830s as a music and dance virtuoso in the local halls of New York City’s Five Points neighborhood. After Charles Dickens documented what is assumed to be a performance by William Henry Lane in American Notes (1842), his dancing became immortalized and sensationalized in written accounts in the United States and United Kingdom between the 1840s and 1850s. Soon after his rise to fame in NYC, Master Juba (as he was referred to because of his mastery of a variety of dances) joined G. W. Pell’s Ethiopian Serenaders in the 1840s. Pell’s troupe was among the most popular of the many antebellum blackface minstrel ensembles, and they took their act to the United Kingdom, where they were received with great enthusiasm. From Five Points to the Bowery minstrel halls to London’s Vauxhall and St. James Theatre, Lane’s ability to both master the dances of white blackface competitors and remix them into his own improvised style created a watershed moment in popular entertainment.4 Yet, it was Lane’s “African aesthetics” that made him a hit. Because Lane was black, because performance itself was not deemed copyrightable in the mid-nineteenth century, and because international copyright laws did not yet exist, the (in)tangible contributions that he made to popular entertainment in the United States and United Kingdom have been all but erased from history. Even still, Lane’s life (as well as his performance) is a prism through which to view the continued impact and erasure of black performance aesthetics on popular music since the antebellum era. As blackface became the first form of entertainment to travel beyond the United States, black performance aesthetics and sounds

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were mined as sources of musical property, while slavery continued to shape the structuring of the West. As a free black person, Lane’s ability to claim rights over his performance innovations as a source of property was as limited as those of enslaved black Americans, who were considered to be property themselves. I introduce the concept of intellectual performance property to recognize and acknowledge the property value inherent in black performance, even as it continues to elude black claims to sonic and musical authorship within most property laws today. The phrase “intellectual performance property” refers to the sonic, corporeal, and other live (and ephemeral) performance acts of black people that aren’t considered intellectual property under copyright law, but still function as the primary source material for the scripting of these performance practices into legible forms (e.g., sheet music and recordings). Importantly, there are aspects of black performance and music that can never be contained by the structures of the law itself. And yet still, there are ways in which some of the most recognizable and innovative aesthetics of black people became sources of property to be contained within sheet music and through performance by those in racialized and structural positions of power to do so.

introducing william henry lane Lane’s origins are largely speculative.5 As a free black person, there are no records that say exactly where or when he was born, but contemporaneous oral histories claim Long Island, New York, as his birthplace. A young William would have traveled some distance to the Five Points vice district in downtown Manhattan, where Charles Dickens saw him perform.6 Marian Hannah Winter, who helped to recover the once infamous dancer from the annals of history, suggested that Lane studied as an apprentice of Uncle Jim Lowe in Long Island. Lowe was described as a “Negro jig and reel dancer of exceptional skill, whose performances were confined to saloons, dance halls, and similar locales outside the regular theaters.”7 Lane’s influential performance style impacted the practices of Irish and British American minstrels in popular theaters and halls, such as the Bowery in Five Points and London’s Vauxhall. His musicking virtuosity also influenced the improvised and integrated dances that took place on quotidian stages, as we will see in descriptions of Lane’s performance at Pete Williams’s Almacks dance hall in the Five Points vice district of Manhattan, New York City.8 Lane’s life

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exemplifies the early transmission of dance and sound by black Americans from local and quotidian spaces to the theater and mass entertainment, even as they were absorbed into the popular sphere and claimed as sources of property in sheet music and performance by mostly white music industrialists. In “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” Winter goes on to discuss the origin of Lane’s nickname, “Master Juba”: “The Juba dance (simplified from giouba) was an African step-dance which somewhat resembled a jig with elaborate variations. . . . Juba and Jube are recurrent slave names with particular associations to dancers and musicians.”9 Juba’s dances began to amalgamate with the jig and other folk dances of the British Isles in the colonial and early antebellum eras. The origins of “Juba” as an African-based performance practice, its use as a name for skilled black performers on and off the plantation, and its fusion with the Irish jig defined the ways that the capabilities of black expression— often labeled as “excessive”—were scripted into stereotypes and onto black people’s bodies. At the same time, these expressions were taken into the body by white performers in their own simultaneous expression of self/other through blackface. The term “jig” in the United States became so influenced by black performance practices (often caricatured in blackface) that it became popularly (and negatively) associated with African Americans throughout the nineteenth century.10 In the Federal Writers Project, which took place between 1936 and 1948, formerly enslaved C. B. Burton of South Carolina suggests that the jig is a dance of African Americans on the plantation: “We danced and we had jigs. Some played de fiddle and some made whistles from canes, having different lengths for different notes, and blowed ’em like mouth organs.”11 Dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild notes that the “juba-jig” “is characterized by qualities and body postures (non-vertical alignment, exaggerations in the bend of knees and openness of legs) that are, from a Europeanist standpoint, grotesque and awkward. It is open-ended in duration and improvisatory in vocabulary. Frequently it is characterized by patting, slapping, clapping, and otherwise rhythmically using body parts as musical instruments for percussion and syncopation, characteristics that were formalized in a dance called ‘Pattin Juba.’ ”12 Furthermore, the juba dance is described by Solomon Northup (who was a violinist) in his autobiography, Twelve Years a Slave. Northup’s description suggests that the performance of “Patting Juba” expressed the full-bodied, musicking process common within early African American musical traditions. The violinist notes that it was performed “by

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striking the hands on the knees, then striking the hands together, then striking the right shoulder with one hand, the left with the other—all the while keeping time with the feet,” and that “the acquisition of a sophisticated rhythmic sensibility” was of the highest importance to African Americans.13 In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), philosopher and abolitionist Frederick Douglass describes music in his experience on the plantation between Christmas and the New Year, when enslaved people were allowed by enslavers to celebrate various festivities. Here, Douglass suggests that the rhythmic play of “Juba” (as an aesthetic) is derived from a performance practice known as “jubilee beating”: “The fiddling, dancing, and ‘jubilee beating,’ was going on in all directions. The latter performance is strickly southern. It supplies the place of a violin, or of other musical instruments, and is played so easily, that almost every farm has a Juba beater. The performer improvises as he beats, and sings his merry songs, so ordering the words as to have them fall pat with the movement of his hands.”14 These descriptions of the juba dance and overall aesthetic by Northup and Douglass, which took place throughout the south and on plantations, resonate with the juba-jig as danced by Lane, described in minstrel bills and other media in the northeast and later in the United Kingdom. In “Six Years in a Georgia Prison” (1851), former inmate Louis W. Paine describes his experiences in prison after getting caught for attempting to help an enslaved person to escape. Paine provides a description of the juba dance that is like those described by Northup and Douglass. They also somewhat resemble accounts by white observers who attempted to describe Lane’s performance on and off the minstrel stage: After indulging in these exercises as long as they wish, some one calls for a fiddle—but if one is not to be found, some one “pats juber.” This is done by placing one foot a little in advance of the other, raising the ball of the foot from the ground, and striking it in regular time, while, in connection, the hands are struck slightly together, and then upon the thighs. In this way they make the most curious noise, yet in such perfect order, it furnishes music to dance by. All indulge in the dance. The slaves, as they become excited, use the most extravagant gestures—the music increases speed—and the Whites soon find it impossible to sustain their parts, and they retire. This is just what the slaves wish, and they send up a general shout, which is returned by the Whites, acknowledging their victory.15

Polyrhythms, using the body as a rhythmic and harmonic instrument, and the improvisatory nature of related dances often appear in the descriptions of Lane’s performance. Even before descriptions of the

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“juba” dance appeared in nineteenth-century writings on black folk music practices and blackface minstrelsy, an account from Englishman Richard Jobson describes a similar style of performance in the seventeenth century. Jobson was a part of the Company of Adventurers of London Trading into Parts of Africa, created in 1618 by King James I. They were sent to explore the Gambian River region as part of the slave trade, and upon his return, Jobson wrote the following about his observations of women dancers: “the most desirous of dancing are the women, who dance without men, and but one alone, with crooked knees and bended bodies they foot it nimbly, while the standers-by seem to grace the dancer, by clapping their hands together after the manner of keeping time.”16 Jobson’s narration of his observations, which must also be considered within the sexual violence that black women experienced in their everyday lives by enslavers, foreshadows the descriptions of Juba beating time with his hands, particularly as he inhabits the cross-dressed blackface character of Lucy Long in his British appearances.17 In the history of American dance, Lane is noted as the “inventor” of tap, a distinctly American form, by combining folk Celtic “jig” and “reel” dances with West African shuffle and other polyrhythmic performance practices.18 As Anthea Kraut’s groundbreaking study Choreographing Copyright discusses, dance did not fall under copyright until 1976, and black dancers and choreographers in particular have had a difficult time obtaining rights for their creative work due to racial and systematic exclusions.19 And as we learn, Lane died poor and unrecognized in England after having created a sensation in the United States and United Kingdom with his performances for over a decade.20 Improvisation was at the center of Lane’s style, and he earned the title “Master Juba” because of his mastery of the various styles of Irish, Scottish, and English step dances. Juba earned this designation mostly because of his ability to improvise upon them within his own black American, fullbodied aesthetic practice. It was his performative virtuosity that captured the attention of Charles Dickens in 1842.

juba and charles dickens’s american notes In hopes of experiencing the “spirit” of working-class New York on his first trip to the United States, the famous English writer Charles Dickens ventured to Five Points. In this lower-Manhattan district, sporting

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houses, saloons, and brothels dominated the neighborhood.21 Middleand upper-class (white) patrons often ventured to red-light districts for “entertainment” (as mostly poorer and working-class African Americans and recently immigrated European Americans flocked to inhabit this area in the Lower East Side of Manhattan), and Dickens found himself at “Almacks”—one of the best-known sporting houses of midnineteenth-century Manhattan. Owned by African American proprietor Pete Williams, it was the supposed establishment to which William Henry “Master Juba” Lane traveled from his home of Long Island to perform. It is also where Dickens is said to have made his famous account of Master Juba in American Notes (1842):22 “Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs.”23 Dickens’s account of Lane’s movement helped to immortalize the master dancer in the popular imagination just a few years before he was received to great acclaim in the United Kingdom. Almack’s became so well known from the English author’s writing about Juba that the hall eventually became affectionately known as “Dickens’s Place.”24 The relationship between Charles Dickens and William Henry Lane extends beyond Dickens’s description of “Master Juba” in American Notes. On the very trip in which he observed Lane in Five Points, Dickens was advocating for an international copyright law, as many of his popular works had been pirated by publishers in the United States.25 The English writer could not claim any rights to his own work within the United States as a resident of the United Kingdom, because he was not a US citizen—or, more specifically, he was not a European American male born in the nation. Likewise, Lane could not claim ownership over the intellectual performance property he had developed through his stylized and improvised dances that lead to the invention of “tap,” both in Five Points dance halls and on the minstrel stage. But it wasn’t because Lane was not native to the United States, as he was born in New York, but because he and most black Americans at the time (both enslaved and free) were not deemed citizens and could not typically claim ownership over their bodies, their personhood, or most of their creative practices within a society founded upon the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans in America.

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American society was constituted of European-descended (white) citizens who created both laws and customs that deemed African Americans and those in Indigenous communities, although at the center of the nation’s economy and politics, as “non-citizens.” Inherent in the regimes of “intellectual property citizenship,” as developed by Anjali Vats, is the notion that “copyright, patent, and trademark law define race by and through their racialized understandings of creatorship/ infringement, which are fundamentally linked to American conceptions of good citizenship/bad citizenship.”26 Because black Americans were excluded from the status of citizen under the law, they did not even fall under the rubric of good/bad citizen, and therefore lacked the access to obtain rights to have their creative performance practices (i.e., intellectual performance property) recognized as a source of intellectual property (“inventions of the mind”) under copyright law.27 One notable exception is Francis “Frank” Johnson (1792–1844)—a Philadelphian African American musician, conductor, and composer, who was one of the most popular band leaders and prolific composers in the early nineteenth century.28 And yet still, the relationship between blackness and property is further complicated by the fact that copyright law at the time still did not recognize live performance as a source of property itself, but instead as a part of a larger dramatic work that could only be copyrighted within a publishable text.29 Both Lane and Dickens, albeit for different reasons, were both “alien” in terms of the rights afforded to white men as US citizens. As a result, both men were restricted from claiming rights over their creative and intellectual property within the structures of American culture and copyright law. Yet Dickens was still able to gain wide notoriety and popularity for his works, which are now immortalized, as well as have them copyrighted in his own native country (where Lane himself performed but was not able to copyright or publish any of his sounds or dances). Although Dickens helped to spark Lane’s popularity and shaped the copious writings on the performer during his United Kingdom tour, Juba has been largely forgotten. As such, much of this chapter is devoted to expanding upon and recovering some of the facts that we know about Lane, his life, his performance, and his reception in and outside of the United States. Lane was one of the most influential and popular performers of the mid-nineteenth century, and his impact on blackface through his own black performance aesthetics is critical to understanding the ways that Blacksound (as the sonic basis of US popular music) itself shifts in its making over the course of the nineteenth century.

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from five points, manhattan, to the (international) minstrel stage The context in which Lane emerges as a prodigy dancer is one of the most significant spaces for the cultivation of popular music in the nineteenth century: red-light “vice” districts. Within these zones, popular music was made within various halls of entertainment (e.g., sporting, gambling, prostitution, and the like). In New York by Gaslight, published by social commentator George G. Foster in 1850, the author describes a typical scene at Almacks, which provides a snapshot into what the hall might have felt like when Juba was known to be a featured performer in the Five Points establishment: It is Saturday night, and the company begins assembling early. . . . Already the room—a large, desolate-looking place, with white-washed walls garnished with wooden benches—is half full of men and women, among whom the latter at this hour predominate. In the middle of one side of the room a shammy platform is erected, with trembling railing, and this is the “orchestra” of the establishment. Sometimes a single black fiddler answers the purpose; but on Saturday nights the music turns out strong, and the house entertains, in addition, a trumpet and a bass drum. With these instruments you might imagine that the music at Dickens’s place is of no ordinary kind. You cannot, however, imagine what it is. You cannot see the red-hot knitting-needles spirited out by that redfaced trumpeter, who looks precisely as if he were blowing glass, which needles aforesaid penetrating the tympanum, pierce through and through your brain without remorse. Nor can you perceive the frightful mechanical contortions of the bass-drummer as he sweats and deals his blows on every side, in all violation of laws of rhythm, like a man beating a baulky [sic] mule and showering his blows upon the unfortunate animal, now on this side, now on that. If you could, it would be unnecessary for us to write.30

Under the lure of Charles Dickens’s 1842 account of Juba in American Notes, Foster vividly details his experience at Almacks (i.e., “Dickens’s Place”), as well as the seemingly indescribable improvised performances of its black musicians. Particularly noteworthy is the emphasis on the physical labor of the musician’s bodies, the Jim Crow imagery invoked in describing the musician’s posturing, and the almost inhuman, animalistic, and “otherworldly” way in which the musicians are depicted. It is the scripting of black aesthetics into such (racially) affective performance practices by white performers and commentators alike that allowed for the consumption and imagined embodiment of blackness (and black performance) to permeate the bodies of participants in minstrel and dance halls.

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Many establishments in the Five Points districts throughout the midcentury were noted as having black proprietors, as well as performers, with mostly white patrons. There were also halls with more integrated crowds, in both class and ethnicity. This was another way in which black dance and music traveled outside of segregated black spaces, as well as in which black performativity itself became shaped by outside influences. It was often black musicians who served as the main entertainment within establishments, and it was their improvisational styles derived from “African” aesthetics that caught the attention of white observers. As many descriptive and iconographic accounts show, most of the attendees were working-class, and patrons often danced with, against, and for one another in ethnically integrated halls. A sketch of Pete Williams’s Almacks that appears in a February 18, 1860, issue of the New York Illustrated shows a mixed company of patrons—black men in arms with white women, black women in arms with white men—a depiction that seems as though it is almost emphasizing the integrated setting of the dance hall.31 An image from Dickens’s American Notes (1842), which prominently features a figure whom many consider to be a young Master Juba in Dickens’s Place, shows a similar setting. The image displays the mixing of classes, races, and ages within Pete Williams’s dance hall (see Figure 8). As Lane’s career shows, even in these integrated settings, the influence that African American performers and bodies had upon the development of performance practices in American popular music and dance was momentous. The cross exchange between local amateur and theater spaces, and the improvised, polyrhythmic styles of African Americans, continued to determine the aesthetics of Blacksound in the making of American popular music. Even though Lane’s skill as a dancer had already been immortalized by Dickens in American Notes, Thomas L. Nichols suggests in Forty Years of American Life (1864) that P. T. Barnum introduced Lane to the larger public early in the young performer’s life as one of his many novelty acts. It is Barnum’s promotion (or exploitation) that is said to have helped fuel Juba’s popularity: Barnum, full of expedients, explored the dance-houses of the Five Points and found a boy who could dance a better break-down than Master Diamond. It was easy to hire him; but he was a genuine negro; and there was not an audience in American that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro. To any man . . . this would have been an insufferable obstacle. Barnum was equal to the occasion. . . . He greased the little “n*gger’s” face and

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figure 8. Lane at Almacks, Five Points neighborhood, New York City.

rubbed it over with a new blacking of burnt cork, painted his thick lips with vermilion, put on a wooly wig over his tight curled locks, and brought him out as the “champion n*gger-dancer of the world.” Had it been suspected that the seeming counterfeit was the genuine article, the New York Vauxhall would have blazed with indignation.32

Although Lane, a free black man, was hailed as one of the most revered and influential American dancers of the nineteenth century, it was Barnum who is given credit for helping to make his exceptional talent more “palatable” to white audiences. Barnum smeared Lane’s face with burnt cork to obscure his “genuine” status as an African American.33 According to Nichols, it was Barnum’s choice to blacken young Lane’s face that allowed for the performer’s distinct talent—now caricatured and commodified through the racist prism of blackface—to gain popularity in minstrels developing performance practices at mid-century.34 Having performed in blackface early on himself, and sure to feature blackface in most of his early circus acts, P. T. Barnum was well acquainted with the possibilities of minstrelsy as a form of commercial

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entertainment.35 With the help of shrewd producers or impresarios of popular culture like Barnum, blackface was performed throughout the nineteenth century in spaces beyond the minstrel theater, such as the circus and traveling medicine show (often blurred together), as well as staged in mental asylums for patient “treatment” (and often including them).36 From historical accounts of Juba’s stage performances with Barnum from 1841 to 1842, it remains a bit ambiguous as to whether minstrel audiences were initially aware of Juba’s ethnic heritage. At the time, African American performers were still mostly excluded from professional entertainment theaters.37 Historical accounts of Lane often note that, at least initially, he was imagined to be a white (Irish) blackface performer on the minstrel stage, especially as he became well known in music halls for his perfection and improvisation of the Irish jig, reel, and breakdown. At this point in minstrelsy, black performers in early American blackface are rarely documented, and it wasn’t until after emancipation in 1865 that minstrelsy saw its first popular troupe composed of African Americans in the Georgia Minstrels.38 Unlike any “blackface delineator” before, Lane’s own training in and ragging (or remixing or improvising) upon Anglo-Celtic folk styles as an African American—in his improvisatory, polyrhythmic style—is what separated him from his white blackfaced delineators. The seemingly free and virtuosic fashion in which Lane moved and created sound through his full-bodied improvisations was likely a reason that he was often billed as “The Greatest Dancer in the World”—one who it was said could outdance any competitor, in both the United States and United Kingdom.39 Barnum (through Lane) shaped early blackface performance as he helped blur the lines between perceived racial authenticity and reality. He capitalized upon the practice of white performers scripting blackness in blackface by using an actual black performer to infiltrate these minstrel practices. I define these scripts as the specific sonic and corporeal markers of identity that came to be performed, stereotyped, embodied, and circulated through blackface. In Appropriating Blackness, E. Patrick Johnson asks: “What happens when ‘blackness’ is embodied? What are the cultural, social, and political consequences of that embodiment in a racist society? What is at stake when race or blackness is theorized discursively, and that material reality of the ‘black’ subject is occluded? Indeed, what happens in those moments when blackness takes on corporeality? Or, alternatively, how are the stakes changed when a ‘white’ body performs blackness?”40 Johnson’s questions highlight how racialized misrepresentations (i.e., scripts) in

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(and out of) blackface helped to frame how blackness was ontologically perceived and constructed under the racist regimes that limited black Americans’ ability to define themselves under the law and in popular culture.41 My focus on scripts is an extension of Anjali Vat’s suggestion that “studying intellectual property’s racial scripts demonstrates that ideals of ingenuity are not only consistently invoked concepts used in copyright, trademark, and patent discourses, among others, but also serve as rhetorical shorthand for constructing a white male knowledge citizenry.”42 Barnum’s choice to have Lane “black up” under the ruse of minstrelsy further impeded the performer’s ability to claim rights to his own innovative styles outside of the exploitative model already established by American minstrelsy and the scripting of blackness (and other notions of racial authenticity) at its core. Dance scholar Lynne Fauley Emery raises an important question on how Juba’s race was perceived in his performance: “Did the fact that Juba happened to be black lead people to assume that he was performing real Negro dances—or was he, in truth, a Negro character performing an Irish dance?”43 If Barnum, Lane, and other proprietors played on the ambiguity of the virtuoso’s race in billing his early performances, the actual African American performance practices that propelled Lane’s initial popularity and influence were paradoxically erased (on the surface) via blackface; not unlike the way in which the ethnicity of white performers receded into the blackface mask, as they imagined their white (and mostly) male selves through blackness.44 Essentially, Lane was (re)performing a parody of blackness and black dance that was initiated by white blackface performers like his well-known Irish American minstrel competitor and former Barnum act John Diamond.45 Lane took up these established tropes of black people in blackface, first allegedly in blackface himself, and later as a black performer without blackface, both in and outside of minstrel halls. All the while, he (both in and out of blackface) “imitates” the Celtic-derived step dances of the Irish American minstrels who found liberation in inhabiting and imagining their bodily expressions through blackface.46 At the same time, Lane pushed beyond their scripted stereotyped performances of blackness through his own African-infused aesthetics. Yet as an African American, Juba was unable to ontologically detach himself from the stereotyped conceptions of blackness created in blackface within the racialized structures of a society founded upon slavery. By the same token, he was unable to reap the full benefits of his innovations and influence beyond what he was paid by promoters (if he was paid at all).

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His ability to either recognize or lay claim to his own intellectual performance property, as a black person and a blackface entertainer, was largely unattainable. The ambivalent presentation of Lane’s race in his early career, versus the way he was intentionally advertised as “authentically” black later, is an example of how blackness (and its performance) becomes a moveable signifier through blackface. Blackness served as a rich site on which to exercise one’s own beliefs of (a white) self in and onto (a black) other, while delimiting blackness to stereotyped representations of black ontology (what it means to be and experience oneself as a black person) in the public imaginary. On the one hand—the skill with which Lane performs Anglo-Celtic and African American–influenced styles made him a marketing attraction to Barnum, and it at first appeared to be a successful marketing ploy to “pass” him off as an exceptional white dancer in blackface. Rather than necessarily “authentically” representing blackness, Barnum’s initial racially ambiguous promotion of Lane in blackface signals that it was the mere idea that “authentic” blackness could be so well duplicated by a white performer that he could gain popularity. Conversely, Barnum might have blackened Lane’s face because he didn’t imagine a white audience would want to see a “genuine” black person, but instead the “counterfeit” version that they could contain and control within their imaginaries (and in real time). However, after Dickens’s 1842 description of Juba as a black performer gained traction in the United States and the United Kingdom, it was his “genuine blackness”—as a novelty, circus-like attraction to white audiences—that further popularized his exceptional talent for the few short years that he remained a novelty to British audiences, as evident in the following quote from London’s Theatrical Times in 1848: “The performances of this young man are far above the common performances of the mountebanks who give imitations of American and Negro character; there is an ideality in what he does that makes his efforts at once grotesque and poetical, without losing sight of the reality of representation.”47 The paradoxical relationship between Juba the blackface black performer and Juba the black performer within blackface minstrelsy is emblematic of the ways that blackness served as an arbiter of identity negotiation. William McAllister, in his discussion of the first black-run theater in New York City a couple of decades before Lane’s popularity, notes that “the country’s emerging theaters and other extratheatrical venues provided coping mechanisms or processing laboratories through which American social identities could be constructed and transmitted.”48

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The commodification of African American performance practices into late Jacksonian-era blackface minstrelsy further affected how popular music, through Blacksound’s development, became even more corporeal, improvisatory, ragged, and polyrhythmic. Varying degrees of interaction continued to occur between Anglo-Celts and African Americans on and off the minstrel stage yet remained under white men’s domain of control. Their ability to take on and off the blackface mask yet still assume aesthetics attributed to black people without having to be black (in or out of blackface) enabled a cultural collectivity of European-descended Americans to come into the constructed and racialized category of white. The racialization of pop performance enforced (hierarchical) divisions between blackness and whiteness through the very stereotypes ascribed to black people in blackface. The virtuosically improvising, noisily poly everything, and seemingly unrestricted and free black body of African Americans, such as Master Juba, continued to buttress the freely expressive and sophisticated amalgamated styles that were central to the development of Blacksound. Within American popular sound and dance, these same bodies were continually restricted in their freedom under antebellum laws that denied African Americans equal rights to citizenship. William Henry Lane, along with many African American amateur and professional performers, brought a specifically liberating aspect to the hybridization of American popular music.

setting the stage: blackface in the united kingdom The United States and United Kingdom were crucial within the development of the global popular music market. Their commercial music exchanges are not merely a symptom of the former being a colony of the latter. Blackface helped to establish a direct line between these two countries within the development of commercial popular music in the mid-nineteenth century—especially within the popular theater, sheet music, sporting halls, and saloons. Importantly, many of the racialized tropes that were developed in US blackface began to shape the ways in which the racialization of white and non-white people developed through popular music in the United Kingdom and beyond, once it made its way across the Atlantic.49 The United Kingdom is also where accounts of Lane’s performance were written about the most, as well as where he eventually died in obscurity. But there is a history of blackface

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in the United Kingdom before Lane makes his critically acclaimed debut. Eight years after T. D. Rice became famous for his Jump Jim Crow blackface antics in the United States in 1828, he traveled to England, where he was equally successful in London’s Adelphi Theatre.50 This popular theater also became a regular home of blackface performance throughout nineteenth-century London. Rice’s show ran for twenty-one weeks in 1836 and saw many imitations by local English performers, as well as the subsequent arrival of other performances of Blacksound in the United Kingdom through blackface minstrels.51 Rice soon traveled to Scotland and other parts of England, and the blackface minstrels from the United States followed his routes and created new ones on their tours to the United Kingdom—effectively establishing the roots of the international popular music industry exchange between the United States and United Kingdom during slavery. The London papers, including the Times and the Morning Post, agreed that Rice’s engagement was the theatrical novelty of the year and likely to be a financial success.52 After his success in London, Rice appeared in 1839 at the Adelphi Theater at Broughton Street in Edinburgh, as well as other cities and towns. In November 1839 the Nottingham Journal reported that, at the Theatre Royal, “the great attraction of the week is the celebrated Mr. T. D. Rice, the original and inimitable Jim Crow of the London stage. Mr. Rice made his first appearance in two new pieces, The Mummy and Jumbo Jim, both well adapted for the display of his peculiar style of Yankee-negro humour. Rice’s last appearance in England was January 1843.”53 The entr’acte blackface performances of T. D. Rice’s Jim Crow developed into more spectacular theatrical arrangements in the United States that formally became known as “blackface minstrelsy.” Blackface’s formalization was prompted by the formation of the first blackface minstrel troupe, the Virginia Minstrels. Originally a quartet, the blackface ensemble toured the United Kingdom in 1843—going to Liverpool, Manchester, London, Dublin, Cork, Belfast, and Glasgow—bringing with them their bones, tambourine, fiddle, banjo, and performance practices that they had developed in the United States in blackface.54 Ten years before the formerly enslaved philosopher and abolitionist Frederick Douglass journeyed to Edinburgh, Scotland, for his liberation causes, blackface minstrelsy had been prominent in the United Kingdom for over a decade. By the time Douglass arrived, he sometimes found himself performing in or near theaters that blackface minstrels

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had appeared in, sometimes within weeks of each other. When Douglass traveled to the United Kingdom in 1846 to garner support for the emancipation of enslaved black people in America, blackface minstrelsy had developed into its full-fledged form and had become solidified as the primary form of popular mass entertainment throughout the United States during slavery.55 Outside of New York City, by the 1860s and 1870s, London had become one of the main markets for blackface and the publishing of minstrel sheet music, banjo instructors, as well as manuals for the public to put on their own minstrel shows.56 A popular blackface song of the late 1840s through the Civil War was “De Long Tail Blue,” written by an English journalist named George Augustus Sala for the Lantum Serenaders to perform in London in 1847.57 Blackface became so popular that halls like the St. James Theater in London were well associated with blackface minstrelsy, from its first performance in the hall in April 1859 through 1904, when the building was torn down to make way for the Piccadilly Hotel.58 As I discuss in more detail in the following chapter, blackface compositions like “Old Folks at Home” and “Old Uncle Ned,” composed by the “Father of American Popular Song,” Stephen Foster, became staples in the minstrel repertoire within Britain. Foster’s sheet music became popularized abroad when performed by famous troupes like E. P. Christy’s Minstrels. Importantly, the United Kingdom developed its own version of the Christy Minstrels (and blackface minstrel troupes in general) after this American troupe traveled there in the 1850s and became an immediate sensation. In the United Kingdom, Foster’s works were performed by American and local troupes, and they were also published by UK houses without having to pay him royalties. He was usually paid a flat and often low fee by American publishers, who purchased and subsequently owned the rights to his works, or he received a usually meager fee (compared to the songs’ popularity) from performers like E. P. Christy for exclusive rights to perform or premiere his blackface hits. It was not until the International Copyright Act of 1891 passed almost forty years after Foster’s death that the United States developed reciprocal publication rights with specific countries, including the United Kingdom, and sheet music (and other copyrighted works) could not legally be published without obtaining permission from the author. The 1891 Act was the legal change that Dickens hoped to instigate on his visit to the United States in 1842 when he encountered William Henry Lane at Almacks.

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african aesthetics in early blackface: constructing racial authenticity through performance In the United Kingdom, Lane did not wear blackface, and it was his perceived authentic presence and billing as a “genuine negro” that contributed to his fame among white audiences. Lane’s performance as a minstrel suggests several “Africanist aesthetics” that were introduced to US and UK audiences and adapted into popular movement and dance. Lane’s idiosyncratic style led to both his rapid ascension to fame and his eventual disappearance from popular culture by the end of his life in the United Kingdom, just six or so years after he first appeared in London. While my focus on Lane is an opportunity to consider the specific contributions he made to popular music and dance in the United States and United Kingdom, both on and off the minstrel stage, he also serves as a proxy through which to consider how African (American) aesthetics affected blackface and other forms of popular entertainment that emerged in the antebellum and Victorian eras. Even though most black people in the United States were enslaved and black people in the United Kingdom were mostly unafforded the rights of white citizens (or were enslaved in the Caribbean), their local vernacular performances, along with the few who were allowed to perform on stage, were consumed and embodied by the (white) general populace through (blackface) music and dance. My aim here, as Brenda Dixon Gottschild states in her formative work, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, “is not to valorize Africanisms by comparing them with European phenomena, but to show how the latter are dependent upon the former, and that, overtly and subliminally, these invisibilized influences significantly shape European American Experience.”59 Most of the documentation of Lane’s performances is from periodicals published in the United Kingdom during his tour with G. W. Pell’s Serenaders between 1848 and 1851. The primary members of this blackface minstrel troupe (one of the first to travel internationally) were G. W. Pell (bones and band leader), Thomas F. Briggs (banjo), and Lane (tambourine). The surviving minstrel playbills and advertisements from his British tours frequently advertise Juba as the featured act in his performance of “Lucy Long,” and he was often billed as concluding the show with a “Plantation Dance”—a common closing performance within blackface minstrel shows in the mid-nineteenth century (see Figure 9).60 My analysis of Lane’s performance draws heavily on UK peri-

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figure 9. Lane at the Royal Vauxhall Gardens, London (advertisement). Courtesy of the British Library.

odicals, while accounting for the impact of how European and European American writers perceived black people and their performance practices.61 One of the most consistent observations made about Lane by white critics in the United States and United Kingdom was how “foreign” his movements and sounds were to them, particularly in the descriptions of his virtuosic performance as a dancer, instrumentalist, and singer. Descriptions of Lane’s aesthetic practices echo Frederick Douglass’s statement about the illegibility of black musical practices to white observers on the plantation: “they would sing, with other words of their own improvising—jargon to others, but full of meaning to themselves.”62 What should also be noted is that most of these observers are likely associated with literate and at least middle-class (or middleclass-aspiring) Europeans and Americans (as they were writing for local newspapers throughout the United Kingdom and United States). Such writers might also deflect certain styles of movements and sounds onto blackness that do not fit within their perceptions of a proper US or

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British white citizen (although similarities exist between some Anglo and Celtic folk practices and those of Africans in America, as discussed in Chapter 1). The way in which white onlookers and critics perceived movements and dances of (enslaved) black peoples through their documented observations in Africa, during the middle passage, and across the Americas might also inform how we consider the paradoxical combination of enjoyment (by white onlookers/performance) and terror (experienced by black people). “Terror and enjoyment” is the paradigm through which mid-nineteenth-century English, Irish, and Scottish Americans improvised a “white” American self through African American performance practices and blackface.63 In contemporaneous descriptions of Lane’s movement and performance by British journalists, it is as though his flexibility is beyond human (or alien). His polyrhythmic improvisations were packed with such embodied energy that his performance generally evaded description. Lane’s “alien” status as a black person in the United States, and as a black American in the United Kingdom, created an opportunity for his performance to serve as a liberating proxy for the “proper” American and Victorian white body through blackface minstrelsy, although he wasn’t blackened up.64 Descriptions of Juba’s “other-worldly” performances in the United Kingdom often echoed the description of this Manchester account (and that of Dickens in American Notes): But what of Juba, “Boz’s Juba?” To say that he dances as man or n*gger never danced before; that he shakes his leg with the spirit of ten Jim Crow’s, and postures as never did Keller or Madam Warton dream of, is nothing. Surely he cannot be flesh and blood, but some more subtle substance, or how could he turn, and twine, and twist, and twirl, and hop, and jump, and kick, and throw his feet almost with a velocity that makes one think they are playing hide-and-see with a flash of lightning! Heels or toes, on feet or on knees, on the ground or off, it is all the same to Juba. . . . He is the greatest phenomenon in the dancing line that Manchester has witnessed: and his extraordinary performances must excite wonder and astonishment in every observer.65

Despite the layers of exoticism, dehumanization, stereotyping, and other forms of prejudice embedded into the psyches of many whites who observed Lane, reviewers consistently acknowledged his polymodal, expressively embodied style as one of the most striking and engaging features of his performance. Lane’s idiosyncratic style was what often made him appear as other to white observers. The traditionally high-step tapping and the rather rigid upper-body movements of the Irish jig were “Africanized” and embedded into the American vernacu-

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lar by Juba’s inflection of African American performance practices and improvisation upon Anglo-Celtic forms. Although Lane and other African American dancers of the midnineteenth century were in direct contact with folk styles from the United Kingdom, his performance practices were most frequently described by white observers as grounded in the traditional African practices that influenced black bodily movement in America. Regarding the diversity of black dance styles in early America, Katrina Hazzard-Donald notes importantly that “dancing among skilled urban artisans appears to have differed from that of field laborers. The type of work determined the slaves’ daily routine and consequently their cultural materials. Thus, the model of culture—determined by the work routines and the slaves’ ethnic composition—varied from one region to the next. Just as one cannot speak of a national American culture early in the colonial period, African American culture had not yet acquired its national character.”66 Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, there are parallels between the ways in which African American music and dance had been described on plantations throughout the United States and global south in copious historical documents and the descriptions of Juba’s full-bodied performance in the US north and in the United Kingdom (including “Patting Juba”). Hazzard-Donald goes on to further acknowledge the potential relationship between the description of movement by Africans (in America) during the colonial period and accounts of black dance on the plantation as well as those in other regions beyond the southern United States: “Though the ceremonial context and specific movements varied from group to group, the basic vocabulary of West African dance was strikingly similar across ethnic lines. As a result, interethnic assimilation in the new cultural environment was more easily facilitated in dance than in other aspects of the African culture, such as language.”67 Shane and Graham White note that traditional West African dance, like West African music, is characterized by multiple meters: “Dances in which the performer simultaneously expressed, through the movement of hips, shoulders, arms, knees and feet, the multiple rhythms provided by other members of the group were bound to appear alien and complex to white observers. The African American cultural preference for constant rhythmic variation must have served further to disorient white onlookers.”68 The improvisational, emphatic, polyrhythmic, and angular movements, as expressed by African-descended peoples in the United States, based on joints such as the elbows, knees, and ankles, did not just carry

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the weight of an overrepresented, oversexualized, disfigured, “improper” black body, as many popular stereotypes (e.g., Jim Crow and Zip Coon) and descriptions of minstrelsy (and black representation) suggested to the general populace. But these posturing offered, even within their imitation and commodification, the liberatory potential of the (black) body, as connected to the traditional West African customs of music and dance from which they derived. As Peter H. Wood notes in his study on traditional West African movement and religion, titled “ ‘Gimme de Kneebone Bent’ ”: “straightened knees, hips, and elbows epitomized death and rigidity, while flexed joints embodied energy and life.”69 What I mean by the “liberatory potential of the body” is the ability for white (and other non-black) people to take up African-descended performance practices that, on black people, are often structurally and culturally scripted into negative characteristics that are racialized and written onto blackness. Yet the same scripts, imagined and performed by white minstrels in blackface, allowed for (white) participants and observers to disassociate from being (perceived as) black, while experiencing the freedom to take up the sonic and corporeal performance practices of black people through the mask of blackness, both literally and figuratively. All the while, the embodied practice of juxtaposing one’s own ethnic-white self through a flattened, singular idea of blackness through revelry and performance also allowed for the distinctions between ethnic whites to bleed into a more singular category of whiteness within the popular imagination. The structuring of whiteness carried various levels of cultural, social, and political power in everyday life for people who could claim a direct proximity to whiteness (i.e., those who were European-descended), depending on who was wielding it. I am not suggesting that all people who have historically and at present are considered or identify as white (of European ancestry), of various ethnic backgrounds, experience the same levels of power within a society that structures whiteness at the top of its social and political order. I am instead suggesting that, regardless of their specific positionality, blackness serves as a performative foil through which to imagine oneself not as, and in fact distant from, the “other,” while constructing one’s own white self through masked and embodied modes of black performativity. Blackface minstrelsy had an impact beyond the stage itself on how people danced and imagined themselves (and their identity) throughout the nineteenth century. The astonishment that white observers experienced when witnessing black performance practices through blackface

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(and Blacksound) is captured through descriptions of Lane’s performances in London. The famed American minstrel troupe of G. W. Pell’s Ethiopian Serenaders is documented as having performed for the Queen.70 Importantly, Juba’s performance, like many of the blackface troupes in the United Kingdom, seems to have been most popular among the middle class and elites, including the Queen and many British aristocrats. Although minstrelsy had to be adjusted to fit the tastes of middleand upper-class white audiences in the United States at the time, a newspaper clip from Juba’s performance with Pell’s Ethiopian Serenaders lists over a dozen Dukes, Duchesses, Ladies, Lords, and other dignitaries who attended the minstrel entertainment at London’s Vauxhall in 1848.71 Many of the handbills and advertisements emphasized Juba’s distinct manner of “jigging” (a term that colloquially referred to its Irish folk roots, as well as syncopated and often plantation-based dances), as well as the pure novelty of his “authentic” African-based performance. A New York Herald reporter described Juba’s imitation dance at William’s Almacks in Five Points: “Those who passed through the long hallway and entered the dance hall . . . saw this phenomenon, ‘Juba,’ imitate all the dancers of the day and their special steps. Then Bob Ellingham, the interlocutor and master of ceremonies, would say, ‘Now, Master Juba, show your own jig.’ Whereupon he would go through all his own steps and specialties, with never a resemblance in any of them to those he had just imitated.”72 His “own special steps,” as I have suggested, are inflected by his participation in black (American) dance, and the movements that Lane performed, according to contemporaneous accounts, have an immediate relationship to the styles described by Katrina Hazzard-Donald that she attributes to the “motormuscle memory” of West African ethnic groups brought to the United States during the slave trade: “the dance was characterized by segmentation and delineation of various body parts, including hips, torso, head, arms, hands, and legs; the use of multiple meter as polyrhythmic sensitivity; angularity; multiple centers of movement; asymmetry as balance; percussive performance; mimetic performance; improvisation; and derision. These esthetic and technical commonalities continued to be governing principles as dance moved from its sacred context to the numerous secular uses it acquired under slavery.”73 As Figure 10, a sketch of Lane from the Illustrated London News, might suggest, the stillness of his upper body and emphasis on “footwork” is often considered a variation of the then-popular Irish jig, but descriptive accounts note how his entire body performed the sounds

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figure 10. Lane in the London Illustrated News.

and rhythms of the banjo and bones, or, as Dickens’s noted, “spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on a tambourine.”74 Although Lane’s “imitations” of Irish and British American folk dance were based on the hybrid performance of mostly white-Irish minstrels in blackface—and his own alleged training from African American master jig and reeler Uncle Jim Lowe—it was not merely the imitation of Anglo-Celtic and African-influenced performances that made Lane a sensation. It was also the distinctive way in which he improvised and added his own gestures within the development of the lexicon of African American popular music and dance.

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In my discussion of Blacksound through Lane, I attend to the particularity of black sounds that contribute to its sonic making, in both a US and a UK context. This approach builds upon the foundational work on traditional, African-derived black American cultural and musical (folk) practices by figures such as Samuel Floyd, Katrina HazzardDonald, and Olly Wilson. These authors lay a foundation for the following analysis of Lane’s ephemeral music and dance performances, as I consider the aesthetics of (black) intellectual performance properties that are at the basis of Blacksound and popular music through Master Juba. The closest documentation to what the actual music of Lane and other minstrel performances sounded like before the pre-recorded era is mostly found in surviving sheet music and written documents by white observers. Yet it is still possible to consider how Lane’s Africandescended performance aesthetics might have sounded through Samuel Floyd’s description of the polyrhythms and cross-rhythms derived from Africa in The Power of Black Music: Two against three and three-against-four combinations were common, and the hemiola and additive patterns of 2 + 3 and 3 + 4 were ascendant. These mixed, simultaneous, and conflicting rhythmic patterns are the source of the propulsive excitement of African and African-American drumming and general music making. To the unpracticed and uninformed ear, these additive, multimetric configurations appear to be mere syncopations, but they are not, as been demonstrated elsewhere. Multimetric, additive, and cross-rhythmic configurations were retained in the transition of African music into AfricanAmerican music; their use defined the character and quality of AfricanAmerican rhythm and remain central to its character and aesthetic power.75

An observer (or “unpracticed and uninformed ear”) of Lane at Vauxhall attempted to capture the “character and aesthetic power” that Floyd describes above in the following account from Juba’s UK tour. We can hear the writer attempting within their limited yet florid style (a la Dickens) to describe the rhythmic dexterity and propulsiveness of Juba’s dance. The inability to describe Lane’s performance in a detailed attempt to do so is a pattern that is common throughout the discussions of Lane’s sound and movement in US and UK periodicals. This inability also signals the limits of making the originality and novelty of black performance aesthetics legible under copyright law: The instant focus of attraction is the Ethiopian Band of Serenaders, headed by the celebrated Pell, the Paganini of the bone castanets, who earned such loads of laurels at the St. James Theatre, and a new comer who rejoices in the name of Juba, a genuine n*gger. He is quite a youth, with a joyous

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expression of features, and sings the n*gger songs with a rich gusto not to be imagined by those who have not heard him. His volubility is astounding, and his perfect enjoyment of his own efforts is quite delicious. He trills, he shakes, he screams, he laughs, as though by the very genius of African melody. He would be the Mario and Lablanche of a negro opera-house at Timbuctoo. But his dancing cast into the shade all previous choreographic efforts. St. Vitus was a mere figurant compared to Juba. His limbs seemed to be formed of catouchouc slightly diluted with gutta percha—hence his elasticity and aplomb [emphasis author’s]. Neither the great nor little Vestris, nor St. Leon, nor Perrot, may be compared with Juba. His pedal execution is a thing to wonder at, if his flexibility of muscle did not confound us. He jumps, he capers, he crosses his legs, he stamps his heels, he dances on his knees, on his ankles, he ties his limbs into double knots, and untwists them as one might of skein of silk, and all these marvels are done in strict time and appropriate rhythm—each note has its correspondent step and action. Now he languishes, now burns, how love seems to stay his motions, and anon rage seems to impel his steps. Juba’s plantation dance is a sort of terpsichorean illustration of Collins’s “Ode on the Passions.” One feat which he achieves with his feet excites our especial wonder: he absolutely dances with one foot on the ground and the other never off it. Everybody should go and see Juba.76

The constant juxtaposition between Juba, the African (American), and what would be a proper (white) European performer further helps to draw the imagined sonic color line between blackness and whiteness, even as those very black performance aesthetics laid the foundation for the embodiment of popular music and sound by both black and white people during this time.77 Importantly, the embodiment of actual black sounds occurred under unequal structures and conditions in society and within the theater. The ways in which racialized performances were received varied depending upon who took them up into their bodies and who observed them doing so.

minstrelizing black sounds: the texture of blacksound and blackface The texture of blackface minstrelsy is critical to reimagining Lane’s poly­­modal performance, its impact on the minstrel stage, and popular culture in the United States and United Kingdom overall in the midnineteenth century. Patting Juba, as discussed above, was one of the rhythmic, harmonic, instrumental, and vocal practices adapted by Juba in his performance. Lane’s full-bodied style was performed in concert with the fiddle, as well as minstrelsy’s primary instruments: bones, banjo, and tambourine. This texture, which has its roots in African

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American musical practices, was commercialized and heavily scripted into certain styles and sounds through blackface. The origin of an African-derived musical texture became amalgamated into various styles of folk performance throughout the United States and standardized within the form of the blackface minstrel tradition.78 The four-string violin or “fiddle,” of both Celtic folk and formal European traditions, was introduced to and quickly mastered by African American musicians. In addition to multiple ethnographic accounts that note the importance of black fiddlers on plantations throughout the south, Dickens’s account in American Notes and many contemporary accounts of entertainment and sporting halls point to the presence of an African American fiddler in many red-light district establishments. The fiddle was not only performed in these settings in its traditional classical melodic style, but also served a particular rhythmic and ragged function that helped ground the dance it accompanied. It is worth noting that the fiddle was already a part of Celtic traditions “under pressure from English conquerors against harps and bagpipes.”79 The violin was a noted position for an enslaved person on plantations throughout the south, and although a bowed stringed instrument within the violin family already existed in Africa, the fiddling traditions of black Americans were impacted by the violin of their enslavers and others from the United Kingdom and Europe. Not only was the enslaved black fiddler required to provide entertainment for the “House” on the plantation, but also for celebrations, as well as harvest festivals and other commodity-driven needs. Fiddlers in the south also developed their idiosyncratic style performing for mostly black gatherings on plantations, or in segregated settings in other parts of the country. Thus, as with the jig, reel, and other dances that were improvised or “ragged” upon by interactions between Anglo-Celtic and African customs in America, we might conclude that the fiddling styles of midcentury popular music—popularized through blackface minstrelsy— were also directly impacted by the improvisational, polymetric, and polyrhythmic musicking practices of the black fiddlers. Black string players frequently served as house musicians in establishments like Almacks, where Juba was placed in his youth. The scripts and remnants of Blacksound practices might still be heard in the fiddling styles of white and black bluegrass fiddlers and string bands in the piedmont and tidewater regions of the United States.80 Although the fiddle was prominent in local music halls as well as minstrel halls in the United States and United Kingdom, the tambourine,

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bones, and banjo were the primary instruments of blackface performance. And while copious accounts of Lane’s performance primarily focus on his dance in relation to these instruments, he was also described as a noted vocalist and tambourine virtuoso.81 A reporter in the Illustrated London News remarked on Lane’s overall musicking performance in England—where the master performer appeared as tambourine player and dancer with White’s Serenaders (a white blackface troupe). In commenting on the only “original” dance that came from America, the reporter intones: But the N*gger Dance is a reality. The “Virginny Breakdown,” or the “Alabama Kick-up,” the “Tennessee double-shuffle,” or the “Louisiana Toe-andHell,” we know to exist. If they do not, how could Juba enter into their wonderful complications so naturally? How could he tie his legs into such knots and fling them about so recklessly, or make his feet twinkle until you lose sight of the glory thus conferred. . . . But Juba is a musician, as well as a dancer. To him the intricate management of the n*gger tambourine is confined, and from it he produces marvelous harmonies. He almost questions whether, upon a great emergency, he could not play a fugue upon it.82

In this sensational yet revealing account of Juba’s performance of African American performance practices and American dance styles, the critic suggests that harmonies might have been produced from the tambourine, and that, on the same instrument, Lane might even perform a fugue. In a contemporary, Western conception of the tambourine, it might seem like a hyperbolic statement. But in considering the many descriptions of Juba’s polyrhythmic, syncopated, and virtuosic performances—e.g., adapting traditional African performance practices to Anglo and European forms, such as the tambourine—it is possible that the critic was describing, with the Anglo-centric tools he had available, what the audience witnessed on that London stage. As Winter notes in her study of Juba, his dancing was compared to that of the bones and banjo. The comparison highlights that in addition to the rhythm produced by his feet, his overall performative style included innovative harmonies, vocalizing, melodies on non-melodic instruments, varied rhythmic practices, and other performances that were deemed to be unique to Lane, but were actually characteristic of a variety of musical folk practices of African-descended people.83 An 1848 description of Juba performing in London’s Vauxhall attempts to capture the rarity of his performance style within British culture, as he tries to paint a picture of the polymodal, expressive performance style of William Henry Lane:

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There is a new company of Ethiopian Serenaders, headed by the distinguished Pell, the sultan of singers and the Bonaparte of Bones; also a new banjo player, full of merit and melody, and a natural n*gger, who rejoices in the name of Juba, who from his vocal value, we are sure, is lmeally [sic] descended from the very Jubal, who for so many past ages, has been celebrated for his artistic performance on the lyre. The living Juba beats his ancestor hollow. There never was such a Juba as the ebony-tinted gentlemen who is now drawing all the world and its neighbors to Vauxhall; there never was such a laugh as the laugh of Juba—there is in it the concentrated laugh of fifty comic pantomimes; it has no relation to the chuckle, and least of all to the famous horse laugh; not a bit of it—it is a laugh distinct, a laugh apart, a laugh by itself—clear, ringing, echoing, resonant, harmonious, full of rejoicing and mighty mirth and fervent fun; you may hear it like the continuous humming sound of nature, permeating everywhere; it enters into your heart and you laugh sympathetically—it creeps into your ear and clings to it, and all the subsequent sounds seem to be endued with a cachinnatory quality. Well, though the laugh of Juba be wondrous, what may be said of Juba’s dancing? We fancied we had witnessed every kind of dance, from the wilds of Caffraria to the stage of the Academie at Paris—we, ourselves, have danced in our day, and we have seen n*ggers dance before, and in our dancing days have danced the Coosawatchie rell at Pocotaligo, and “Ole Virginny neber tire,” with the yellow skins at Major Bosh Sanderson’s, who owned two thousand n*ggers at the junction of the Wabash and the Congaree rivers, in South Car’lina, but all these choreographic manifestations were but poor shufflings compared to the pedal inspirations of Juba. Such mobility of muscles, such flexibility of joints, such boundings, such slidings, such gyrations, such toes and such heelings, such backwards and forwardings, such posturings, such firmness of foot, such elasticity of tendon, such mutation of movement, such vigour, such variety, such natural grace, such powers of endurance, such potency of pastern, were never combined in one n*gger. Juba is to Vauxhall what the Lind is to the Opera House. We hear Juba has been commanded to Buckingham Palace.84

In this whimsical description tinged with exoticism, racism, fascination, and fantasy, the writer makes it clear that Juba was the star attraction of the show. The author attempted (like many others after Charles Dickens) to put into words the astonishment that white observers experienced when witnessing William Henry Lane on stage. It is made clear that black performance was not new to the viewers, but that Lane was unique in his skill and ability. There are moments in this passage that point not just to the fascination that they had with the black entertainer, but to some of the distinct practices that influenced the making of Blacksound in blackface in the United States and United Kingdom. In particular, the descriptions of Lane’s sound and voice (e.g., “echo and resonant,” “full of rejoicing and mighty mirth and fervent fun,” and so

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on) mark what Samuel Floyd describes within vernacular African American vocal practices: “in vocalizing that is variously rough, sandy, piercing, and falsetto; in the use of wordless sounds for their own value rather than for the communication of verbal meaning; in the ease of movement ‘from speaking to singing mode within a musical context’; and in the use of ululations, grunts, hums, shouts, and melisma as integral and indispensable parts of the musical meaning.”85 As Lane’s performance is often described as indescribable or indiscernible in the (white) press, it is possible that what Lane was communicating, within his vernacular language of black dance and improvisation upon British American folk dances, was drawing directly from a system of African-influenced musical practices that still carried aesthetic power to white viewers. It did not matter that they were mostly unable to recognize or interpret them as a particular school of dance or thought that carried its own set of meanings. This reviewer, and many like him, described Lane’s “flexibility of muscles” in his attempt to capture the complicated rhythmic performance of his sound and movement, while at the same time the description almost sounds as though Lane is out of control, wild, and non-human (as part of the legacy of the Jim Crow blackface stereo-character type). These intellectual performance properties of Lane’s (black) sonic and corporeal aesthetics were beyond the descriptive capabilities of the observer, but they were critical to the reception of his performance, even as they were scripted through blackface. Yet, as Olly Wilson notes, “The approach to the organization of rhythm is based on the principle of rhythmic and implied metrical contrast. There is a tendency to create musical structures in which rhythmic clash or disagreement of accents is the ideal; cross-rhythm and metrical ambiguity are the accepted and expected norm.”86 The poly- and crossrhythmic practices of African-descended peoples might sound like an uncontrolled display of personhood and body through music, particularly in blackface and under slavery. But it is important to understand that these practices are part of a system—one that changes and develops over time—and that one must have a cultural practice and relationship to that community to properly engage. To this end, in her discussion of black dance in early America, Hazzard-Donald suggests that “The challenge posed by the fiddler-caller, familiar to West Africans, calls upon the dancer to perform difficult combinations of steps. The best performers are those who can meet the challenge while maintaining control and coolness. In the African esthetic, balance is achieved through the

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combination of opposites. Although dancers may be performing a fury of complex steps or figures, they must never lose equilibrium or control. This principle of asymmetry as balance can be observed among many West African groups.”87 Lane, as a black American trained in black vernacular dance and other American dance styles in New York, introduced styles that might have been foreign to white American and British audiences. The aesthetic power and described “asymmetry” of Lane’s musicking were still felt and absorbed by the many performances and participants who were impacted by his act. Many advertisements of Juba’s performance in America and Britain were also sure to point out that Thomas F. Briggs accompanied Juba on the banjo in the Plantation Dance—a testament to the skill of both performers and the popularity of their act. It was also within this Plantation Dance coda, according to many of the reviewers, that Lane was most recognized and encored for his innovative performance practices. As the banjo was central to both the formal and the aesthetic aspects of blackface, it is important to consider its African origins, and how its performance practices might be read in relation to the idiosyncratic polymodal and rhythmically expressive qualities of Lane’s music and dance. The banjo, originally an African instrument, was commercialized in the United States through mostly white minstrels—many of whom learned or copied their practices from African Americans. The banjo was still considered a “novelty” instrument among Anglo-Celtic Americans in the 1830s. After the British banned drums in their American “territories” in 1740, the banjo, particularly within the United States, became one of the primary melodic and rhythmic instruments of African American life.88 Originally constructed using a hollow gourd, early African banjo techniques were also taught to Irish indentured servants in the tidewater region of the United States after the revolutionary war.89 The African origins of the banjo, its polyrhythmic performances practices, and early African American banjo performance vis-à-vis AngloCeltic folk styles heavily influenced the overall sound, form, and development of blackface minstrelsy throughout the nineteenth century. Today, the banjo is frequently associated with the bluegrass and country styles of rural white Americans throughout regions of the south and the Appalachian Mountains. The instrument, however, has a sonic and performance history that begins with early colonial (enslaved) African Americans concentrated throughout the Piedmont, Tidewater, and mountain regions of Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina.90

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The banjo is the Americanized version of the African instrument often written as “banjar” by colonial white observers. As the instrument became more hybrid in its construction, its naming varied until “banjo” took hold in the mid-nineteenth century when it became commercially manufactured. As Thomas Jefferson observed in his influential publication Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), “the instrument proper to them is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa.”91 The African banjo was popularized and developed into the hybrid American instrument largely through the innovations of one of the first pop banjoists, Joel Walker Sweeney. Once Sweeney became a blackface sensation, as Dina Epstein notes, “the banjo became associated exclusively with the minstrel theater in the popular mind, and its African origins were forgotten; likewise, the bones, triangle, and tambourine were part of the caricature of blacks that white men created to entertain other white men.”92 Sweeney was a white Virginian who claimed to have learned his banjo playing from enslaved black people as a youth. Sweeney’s claims were also written about by others who discussed (or promoted) Sweeney’s “authentic” African performance technique on the banjo. It was noted that “several old and reliable farmers in Appomattox related to me . . . how Joe would hang around with the negroes, learning their rude songs and playing an accompaniment on this rude instrument, and how he used to construct others. . . . He finally made one, and getting hold of some strings . . . very soon learned to play almost any tune on it.”93 Sweeney learned, adapted, and continued to spread the “downstroke” method—an African American–influenced style of banjo playing. He then instructed many of the developing minstrel troupes and stars of the 1840s who helped to standardize blackface minstrelsy in theater—particularly the Virginia and Christy Minstrels. The banjo was still a novelty among whites in 1830 when Sweeney embarked on his professional career as a minstrel. The African-derived performance styles on the banjo that Sweeney learned and adapted had already been absorbed into his own technique by the time he began touring locally throughout central Virginia as a blackface solo banjoist/violinist, and well before he established his career as a blackface performer within the popular traveling circuses of the 1820s and 1830s.94 It was not until the advent of Sweeney’s popularity in blackface and the subsequent dissemination of early banjo techniques among blackface troupes that the instrument and its African aesthetics were dispersed among a larger

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population of working-class whites in the mid-century. As blackface troupes like the Virginia Minstrels traveled throughout the northeast, south, west, and United Kingdom, they also carried with them the stylized form of banjo playing that heavily derived from Sweeney’s Irish American adaptation of African American styles of downstroking.95 Blackface minstrels attempted to gain more cachet as “respectable” performance acts with middle- and upper-class audiences leading up to the Civil War. The influence of European classical styles began to impact many of the “folk” Afro-Celtic styles that defined the genre in its antebellum gestation. The standard construction of the “modern” banjo known today developed through the use of metal in the instrument’s manufacturing, the up-plucking technique and addition of frets that gained traction among blackface minstrels in the 1850s (influenced by the classical guitar), the addition of the fifth “high” string (to increase melodic variety), as well as the closing of the banjo’s back. As blackface performers and mountain musicians continued to perform on the banjo throughout the nineteenth century, the polyrhythmic, ragged, and improvised styles that derived from African American banjo performance continued to impact the hybridity of the instrument and its sound during minstrelsy’s mature phase.96 Importantly, Thomas F. Briggs, who accompanied Juba on the banjo during their UK tour, published one of the first banjo manuals in the United States in 1855 (see Figure 11). Briggs drew upon the technique of five-string banjo performance developed by minstrels like Joel Walker Sweeney, who himself was building upon the banjo traditions of African-descended people.97 Briggs and his publisher, Oliver Ditson and Co., were able to commercialize both the instrument and the technique that originated with African Americans. Through this publication, they stylized banjo performances for the white masses out of blackface performance. No documents survive that discuss (or have the capacity to translate) Juba’s performance along with the banjo in musical detail—which seemed to be some of his most improvised, “African,” and appealing acts. As such, the readings that I have provided in this chapter of African diasporic musical aesthetics (via contemporaneous reviews of Lane’s performance) capture the essence of what registered as “novel” to white audiences and performers within his own sounds and movements. Master Juba’s black performance aesthetics became absorbed into the bodies (and minds) of white performers and patrons who observed, consumed,

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figure 11. Thomas F. Briggs’s Banjo Instructor (Oliver Ditson and Co.).

and commercialized his innovative musical practices, as he performed both in and out of blackface through Blacksound. •

•

•

Both in the United States and United Kingdom, the performative connections between Juba’s dance, the instrumental texture of blackface, and its overall execution are indicative of how sound, rhythm, improvisation, and dance were developed into Blacksound during antebellum minstrelsy. Juba was one black performer with an extensive influence on the sonic and corporeal development of early popular music in the United States and United Kingdom. The master performer has been all but erased from its history because of his blackness and association with blackface. Given Lane’s history and erasure, it is possible to consider how even early minstrelsy (with few black performers allowed) was directly shaped by black musicians without credit or acknowledgment (aside from billing their sounds and movements as authentic for commercial purposes). And yet, black musicians were not recognized as deserving rights for their intellectual performance property. Their innovative aesthetics were treated as public (domain) material to be mined, consumed, and performed. African Americans were largely seen as

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property, unable to claim rights for their own bodies, unequal in producing work deemed worthy of property claims (as they were also viewed as subhuman through the systematization of slavery). Under these conditions, the very aesthetics they produced became sources of property to be copyrighted and claimed by white music industrialists through sheet music, through other publications, and in their own performances within the exploitative models of the developing poplar music industry. Blackface effectively established the commercial industry between the United States and United Kingdom, and it provided the aesthetic/ sonic basis of popular sound and culture in both nations, albeit to differing degrees. The theatrical form created scripts of black performativity (developed within Blacksound) that became racialized as “authentically” black and often degenerate when taken up by black people. For white people, the same scripts were thought of as “othered,” through which they could freely express and imagine/construct their own selfidentity. Blackface allowed white performers to take blackness on and off at will, both on and off the minstrel stage, and their audiences bore witness to the transformative acts within their own imaginaries, safely distanced from having to actually be and experience blackness. (White) Europeans/European-Americans had the ability to simultaneously insert themselves into the ruse of the blackface mask and, in turn, blackness, while being able to remove the minstrel mask and/or reassume more proper performances of citizen in their public selves. Blackface performance allowed white people to negotiate their bodies, personhood, and construction of whiteness by reveling in blackness under the rules of Victorian and antebellum societies. At the same time, this culturally homogenized group vis-à-vis blackness was able to carefully and effectively manage the commercialization, circulation, and absorption of the very aesthetics that were exploited in the performances of the black musicians from whom they originated. The following chapter considers how the aesthetic of intellectual performance property became even more subtly embedded into the formalization of blackface minstrelsy and the amalgamation of Blacksound through Stephen Foster, one of its most prolific composers, known affectionately as the “Father of American Popular Song.”

chapter 3

Stephen Foster and the Composition of Americana

Blackface performance attained its ubiquitous status in American culture with the growth and dispersal of popular music during the antebellum era. In fact, blackface was at the crux of mass entertainment’s expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, encouraged by the exponential growth of the nation’s cities, populations, and shifting political movements. Just a year or so after T. D. Rice jumped Jim Crow—inaugurating the popular blackface craze that would sweep the nation— Andrew Jackson was elected the seventh president of the United States in 1829. Of Ulster-Scot heritage,1 Jackson ascended to political prominence by aligning otherwise disparate European American classes and ethnic groups—especially Irish Catholics who immigrated during the potato blight of the mid-1840s—under the guise of “populism” through the formation of the Democratic Party.2 Significantly, the propagandistic construction of the Jacksonian “common man” as anti-Republican/ Jeffersonian, anti–big government, and anti-abolition found its distinctly (white) American voice through blackface and the continued development of Blacksound.3 Under Rice’s influence, blackface began as mostly improvised entr’acte performances in plays, within operatic and Shakespearian performances, on street corners, in pubs and saloons, and in circus acts. But blackface was developed into a full-fledged form through the introduction of minstrel troupes toward the mid-nineteenth century. Blackface minstrels, many of whom were members of the (newly formed) 100

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Democratic Party, translated blackface performance into spectacular theatrical entertainments that featured (mostly) Irish and European American performers seated in a semi-circle in burnt cork, with tambo (banjoist) and bones (rhythmicist) seated on its ends (see Figure 12).4 Lithographic images began to appear on the cover of early sheet music in the 1820s, and some of the earliest of these images attached to popular sheet music during this era contained images that referenced black people in some way (i.e., “Massa Georgee Washington and General Lafayette, 1824, and “The Log House,” 1826, discussed in Chapter 1).5 But the image of the Virginia Minstrels on the cover of this sheet music signals the shift from a single performer in blackface to the development of the blackface troupe. Dan Emmett, a popular circus clown performer in blackface, introduced to the American public an ensemble of blackface performers. Emmett, Frank Brower, Billy Whitlock, and Dick Pelham effectively helped to standardize the banjo, bones (rhythmic instrument), and violin (fiddle) as the primary texture of early minstrel ensembles.6 Emmett’s blackface quartet was named the Virginia Minstrels, and their ensemble started a trend in which blackface minstrel troupes named themselves after southern states, or as “Ethiopian” (a common epithet in the nineteenth century to describe Black people) to market black “authenticity” to white audiences. Strikingly, most members of the newly emerging minstrel troupes were white men who lived in the north and midwest, where blackface was born. By the time minstrel troupes emerged as the standard in American theatrical entertainment in the late 1840s, the Ulster-Scot and Englishdescended Stephen Foster (1826–64) had already published two of his best-known blackface tunes: “Oh Susanna” (1848) and “Camptown Races” (1850). Author, traveler, and critic Bayard Taylor noted in 1849 that “The Ethiopian melodies were well deserved to be called, as they are in fact, the national airs of America.” Calling attention to the sonic landscape reflected by blackface minstrelsy in the composition of Americana, he goes on to note that blackface performance practices “follow the American race in all its migrations, colonizations, and conquests.”7 Before Foster, most popular blackface songs were more derisive and overtly negative comedic reflections of blackness. And yet still, Foster’s “sentimental” blackface tunes are constructed upon and contributed to the scripting of (anti)blackness, especially as chattel slavery created the conditions in which African Americans were unable to protect, define, and present (to the public) their own versions of blackness outside of the structures of white supremacy.

figure 12. “The Celebrated Negro Melodies” by the Virginia Minstrels (Geo. P. Reed).

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The life and work of Stephen Foster directly reflect the political, racial, economic, and cultural tensions out of which Blacksound, blackface, and the sounds of “Americana” emerged.8 My close analysis of Foster’s biography and some of his most famous compositions within this chapter reveals how black performance aesthetics that derived from folk styles like the (African American folk and concert) spiritual directly shaped his approach to blackface composition, as he amalgamated black folk sounds, along with European folk and classical influences of his own. The aesthetic and compositional shifts in Foster’s blackface compositions throughout his career signal a larger music industrial practice—the desire to appeal to the presumed tastes of middle- and upper-class (white) audiences to gain a wider market—especially through his use of more “sentimental” compositional devices in his blackface tunes.9 Through the popularity of Foster’s blackface compositions, black sounds and aesthetics became the property of mostly (white) publishers, performers, and composers to contain them within sheet music to be copyrighted (owned) and distributed for sale. Simultaneously, the racialized scripts that circulated in blackface throughout the nation were central to how whiteness was forged as a racial and political category during the rise of populism, anti-abolitionism, and “Jacksonian Democracy” in the mid-nineteenth century.

fostering the sound of americana (or the rise of the antebellum pop composer) In 1837—the same year in which the US House of Representatives passed a majority rule that prohibited future discussions of slavery in the House—William Foster gifted his son The Parlour Companion, or, Polite Song Book. Stephen Foster’s companion book touted that none of its contents would “tinge the cheek of modesty with the slightest blush, nor . . . offend the most fastidious ear.”10 Stephen’s Parlor Companion, in addition to piano-accompanied adaptations of bel canto arias, contained the popular blackface tunes “Long Tail Blue” and “Sich a Gitting Up Stairs.” As Foster biographer Ken Emerson notes, “While one selection began decorously, ‘Hark, the convent bells are ringing,’ another kicked off rudely, ‘I am science n*gger, my name is Jim Brown.’ ”11 The composer’s songster was but a reflection of the eclectic musical life he (and many middle-to-upper-class European Americans) lived. His brother, Morrison Foster, noted that, as a child, Stephen

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“studied deeply, and burned much midnight oil over the works of the masters, especially Mozart, Beethoven, and Weber. . . . The simple melodies which he gave to the public were not the accidental rays from an uncultured brain, but were the result of the most thorough and laborious analyses of harmonies.”12 In addition to being surrounded by the European-influenced musical training of their sisters, Morrison noted that Stephen studied with Pittsburg’s then most accomplished musician, German immigrant Henry Kleber.13 It has also been suggested that it was Kleber who sparked Foster’s interest in opera.14 Because opera and popular arias were performed in various settings (including in blackface) throughout the mid-nineteenth century (not just in opera houses), Foster may have developed a connection to the European musical form prior to Kleber’s alleged instigation. Along with his Western-classical roots, the music of Foster’s Irish and British heritage, particularly that of Irish poet and songwriter Thomas Moore, had a profound impact upon the sound, phrasing, and sentimentality of Foster’s blackface works. Charles Hamm points out that Foster’s early minstrel pieces are in the English style, used diatonic harmonies, and were “simple, restricted in range to an octave or less; pentatonic scales are often suggested or implied; tempos are usually brisk and dancelike.”15 While Hamm’s description could also be a musical analysis of “Jim Crow,” Foster’s use of a chorus in his latter blackface works, his sentimental, Irish ballad–like style, and his developing harmonic language distinguished his more mature blackface tunes from previous blackface songs.16 Since age nineteen, Foster had already been composing “Ethiopian melodies”—a more genteel name used to market blackface tunes during his developing career. He first penned “The Louisiana Belle” (1845) for the “Knights of the Square Table”—a group of young men who began meeting at his home to practice “ ‘songs in harmony’ with piano, guitar, flute, and violin to support their voices.” Their gathering included performing popular songs and blackface tunes of the day.17 Before his foray into composition, Foster had a deep relationship with blackface performance, both aesthetically and economically. He had been getting paid to jump Jim Crow since the age of nine in his hometown of Pittsburgh. Morrison Foster notes that Stephen “was regarded as a star performer, and was guaranteed a certain sum weekly. It was a very small amount, but it was sufficient to mark his superiority over the rest of the company. ‘Zip Coon,’ ‘Long-tailed Blue,’ ‘Coal Black Rose,’ and ‘Jim Crow’ were the only Ethiopian songs then known. His performance of these was so inimitable and true to nature that, child as he was, he was greeted with

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uproarious applause, and called back again and again every night the company gave entertainment, which was three times a week.”18 Foster’s introduction to minstrelsy was through his embodiment of blackface in performance. As the composer who transformed the form into its most popular style, he carried with him the burlesqued, comedic, derisive performance practices that characterized early blackface. But as Foster took from the stage and began to compose in his early teens, the blackface tunes of the 1830s and 1840s took a turn toward more sympathetic, “sincere” songs that began to emerge toward the end of the decade. Blackface (and blackness), on these terms, assume its delectability— its consumptive and possessive power—through supposed sentimental performances.19 Blackface comedy and performance gave imagined access to the interiority of black life, while whiteness was constructed in relation to the “other” in blackface. Through Foster’s pen, his more mature minstrel ballads evoked sentimentality over the comedic, allowing for the burlesqued and carnivalesque nature of blackface minstrelsy to be imbued with reflective moments of self—(self-)reflection and objectification (of others)—in blackface.20 In a letter to E. P. Christy (1852), Foster describes how he intended the sentimental minstrel tune “Old Folks at Home” to be performed within the carnivalesque tradition of the blackface minstrel show: “I hope you will preserve the harmony in the chorus just as I have written it, and practice the song well before you bring it out. It’s especially necessary that the person who sings the verses should know all the words perfectly, at least hesitation in the singing will damn any song—but this you know as well as myself. Remember it should be sung in a pathetic, not a comic style.”21 By the mid-nineteenth century, Foster’s appeal to more “refined” audiences in the composition and marketing of his “pathetic” (and somewhat less stereotypical/comedic) blackface tunes occurred alongside the anti-abolitionist sentiments that rose throughout the country. In 1850, the United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, declaring that any slave who was captured was to be returned to their owner, as they were considered their property.22 Northern states—havens for the abolitionist movement and hubs of the Underground Railroad— were required to comply by law. In the same year, the popularity of Stephen Foster’s minstrel tunes published in 1848 (“Away Down South,” “Old Uncle Ned,” and “Oh Susanna”) prompted leading New York music publisher Firth, Pond, & Co. to present a set of four new minstrel songs under the title of Foster’s Ethiopian Melodies . . . As Sung by the

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Christy Minstrels.23 As Foster’s tunes gained nationwide and even international popularity, tensions surrounding slavery and abolition were heightening, just a decade before the start of the Civil War. By 1850, Foster had published twelve minstrel songs that he intended to be more commercial in their appeal by softening the abrasive caricature of earlier minstrel tunes. As I discuss below in this chapter, Foster used his blackface sheet music to lean into sentimental expressions of longing, nostalgia, and other sensibilities that captured the complex feelings of a growing nation made of various European ethnic groups who navigated their whiteness in relation to the enslavement of African Americans. Many of Foster’s songs quickly emerged as staples in the blackface repertoire.24 The composer’s turn to sentimentality developed in relation to the more variety-burlesque entertainment and to the black spiritual songs that began to impact the form of the minstrel show between the late 1840s and 1860s.25 Although burlesque and carnivalesque performances in “black fun” persisted in mid-century blackface, the “softer” (or less aggressively racist) turn that minstrel songs took was in response to the mass white audience that blackface sought to capture.26 Importantly, this shift also occurred as the Irish and English folk tunes at the sonic basis of early blackface became more enmeshed with actual black performers and performance practices.27 In considering the sympathetic gestures embedded into the development of Foster’s blackface tunes vis-à-vis the Negro Spiritual, Jon Cruz’s concept of “disengaged engagement” offers a critical intervention into these sympathetic gestures, as he notes that “sentimentality offers a spectacular plunge into soppy disingenuousness.”28 Cruz further points out that “Disengaged engagement provided a safe distance from the immediacy of flesh-and-blood social trauma; it dislocated one from personal implication from the pressures of reflecting on one’s responsibility to a raging crisis.”29 Foster and other white producers and consumers of blackface disengaged from the conditionality of slavery experienced by black people, while they engaged or used their likeness (blackness) and performance aesthetics for personal and commercial gain. Foster’s compositional practices and choices—and his absorption and construction of black music practices in blackface minstrelsy—permeated the musical fabric of the nation and allowed for the absorption and consumption of black aesthetics through popular music, while black people were treated as sources of property during slavery.30 My use of “sentimental” does not equate with a sympathetic or empathetic engagement with black people and blackness. In fact, it

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points directly to the lack of empathy embedded into sentimental performative and compositional gestures that continue to draw on the bodies and/or creative productions of black people who had limited personal and structural control over their person under slavery. Although Foster leaned heavily into developing his sentimental style (over racist caricature) in his mature works, his compositions continued to have a significant effect on the development and dissemination of mid-century blackface minstrelsy and Blacksound during slavery, the exploitative development of the music industry out of blackface, as well as the derisive, racialized scripts that became attached to the African American individuals through stereotyped and stylized performances.

sincerity and authenticity in foster’s mature blackface works “Sincerity” and “authenticity” are racialized performance tropes embedded into the sound of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, particularly through Foster’s pen. Anthropologist John L. Jackson’s discussion of sincerity and authenticity—as differing affective registers of racialized performances—is central to how I analyze Foster’s compositional practices and their reception (and racialization) within commercial entertainment. Hagiographic writings on the composer’s life and work often read his sentimental compositional approach to blackface songs in the late 1840s as an indication of his sympathy toward enslaved black Americans, or as reason to push aside the deleterious impact that blackface continued to have for black Americans through the popularity and performance of his works.31 There is little evidence that suggested Foster was a supporter of abolitionist causes (considering his political affiliations and compositional choices). Christopher Lynch writes that “Foster contributed lyrics to a song called ‘The Abolition Show,’ which attacks Republicans [assumed to be supporters of abolitionism] who participated in the parade that preceded the Republican convention on September 17, 1856.”32 Further evidence shows that Foster was concerned with using blackface as a way to make a career as a serious composer of popular music—even if he incorporated more genteel and sentimental characterizations of black people and more “refined” compositional devices than most earlier blackface songs.33 Drawing on Lionel Trilling’s theorization of authenticity/sincerity as cultural concepts, Jackson asserts that authenticity and its performances

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have come to be the primary way that we recognize how race is both articulated and received in the United States. But beyond notions of racial authenticity that we come to believe and invest in over time from mostly surface encounters, performances of racial sincerity play a much more covert yet equally important role in how race functions throughout society. Exploring racial sincerity moves beyond the surface of what could be considered “real” or “fake” (i.e., “authentic”) performances of race, according to who is doing the acting and who is doing the interpreting. Attending to performances of racial sincerity helps us to understand how authenticity within racial encounters positions the subject to be judged from the outside, turning them into objects, but a look into sincerity (how race is performed between subjects as opposed to upon one by another) might reveal more about the racialized subject that allows both the viewer and the person being viewed to exist as animate subjects. To this end, Jackson notes that authenticity “presupposes a relation between subjects (who authenticate) and objects (dumb, mute, and inorganic) that are interpreted and analyzed from the outside, because they cannot simply speak for themselves.” Conversely, sincerity “presumes a liaison between subjects—not some external adjudicator. . . . Questions of sincerity imply social interlocutors who presume one another’s humanity, interiority, and subjectivity.”34 But importantly, and in relation to unpacking the aesthetic and political impact of Blacksound, sincerity can be faked, or it might be used as a tool for racial exploitation or to convince one’s own self and others that racial authenticity (or what is “real”) is interior, and not merely recognizable from the outside. But within blackface, the “social interlocutors” that Jackson highlights are not the black people that blackface presumes to represent but are instead the white actors and audiences who presume one another’s “humanity, interiority, and subjectivity” through staged performances of blackness.35 As such, I read ideas of sentimentalism as discussed within Foster’s work and compositional practice as another way to suggest and impose racial authenticity onto blackness, while setting up whiteness as its opposition through a purported sentimental engagement with black life within his works. The inability for African Americans to “speak for themselves,” as they were treated as sources of property through enslavement, is what allows for the performances of sentimentality and sincerity to permeate the psyches of white musicians and listeners through blackface. Without the ability to present or determine the expansive capabilities of their own expressions within white supremacist structures (as black people), and without having to experi-

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ence the conditionality of being black in early America (as white people), composers like Foster, blackface performers, and their target audience were able to ventriloquize their own sentimental (self-)expressions and anxieties through the visual and sonic mask of blackface. While arguments have been made for Foster’s mature Ethiopian songs as evidence of his empathy toward abolitionism and enslaved African Americans, to place his commercial and compositional choices within Jackson’s authenticity-sincerity paradigm requires that we consider how use of the word “plantation” (and the nostalgia for plantation life) defines his mature works. His compositions that were published as “Plantation Melodies” (e.g., “My Old Kentucky Home, 1853) by houses like Firth, Pond. & Co. covertly employed black performance aesthetics (which might be less overtly read as stereotypical but no less influential). Earlier blackface tunes between the 1830s and mid-1840s relied on more stereotypical representations of blackness. Performances of stereotyped ideas of blackness (read as authentic by white participants) might appear to be the most obvious layer of how race functioned within blackface tunes. However, race is more discreetly constructed through the performance of racial sincerity within Foster’s “Plantation Melodies.” Gestures of sentimentality were projected onto the silenced black being through blackface, and African Americans were pathetically depicted as longing for the “old south” (i.e., slavery) through Foster’s parlor-like minstrel tunes. What gave Foster’s “Plantation Melodies” their appeal across classes and ethnicities of whiteness was his amalgamation of overtly stereotypical blackface gestures, more sentimental personal expressions projected onto black people through blackface, the use of European classical styles, Thomas Moore–like balladry, and influences of black performance practices. Through Foster’s articulation of Blacksound, these melodies come to sound and function as distinctly “American.” Central to this amalgamation, however, is blackface ventriloquy. The horrors of slavery that dominated southern black life were inverted by the blackface performer (presumed to be representative of an actual black person) as a simpler, happy, pre-industrial (nostalgic) life, exploiting the conditions of the black people who were forced into servitude with no equal protection under the law. The plantation was a site through which white Americans—particularly northerners and westerners—exercised their own uncertainties about the future of an abolitionist America. They established their democratically influenced populist values that turned a scene of subjection (the plantation) into the spectacular finale

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of the blackface minstrel show (i.e., the walkaround). Including the word “plantation” in the titles of his songs was also a marketing scheme to make them more appealing (and authentic) to white audiences.36 As Blacksound developed through composers like Foster and blackface troupes like E. P. Christy’s Minstrels, early music industrialists did not solely rely on the more overtly derisive and “authentic” representations (through lyrics and in performance) of blackness that circulated through initial blackface figures like the Jim Crow (also known as the “plantation darky”) in publications. They cleverly adapted blackface to include more sincere expressions (in lyrics, sound, and performance) to appeal to white people of wealthier backgrounds. Early blackface was primarily supported by working-class audiences in saloons, street corners, and emerging minstrel halls, but “upper-class” patrons began to attend more elaborate and “sophisticated” theatrical styles of popular blackface troupes, which dominated blackface entertainment in the mid-1840s. Foster’s performance of sincerity and sentimentality is an equally exploitative and violent enactment of the conditions that erase and replace black people, while allowing whiteness to consolidate their perceptions of black being in performance while not being black. At the same time, a mostly enslaved black population is employed as a conduit for (personal and communal) expression and entertainment, as well a source of property, in the making of American popular music and its early industry. Furthermore, as black sounds (sounds performed by black people) became absorbed more and more into blackface performances, they were disseminated through Foster’s sentimental turn. And yet, African Americans were still enslaved, treated as property, and exploited for their commercial potential through blackface, without the ability to claim ownership over their own bodies and creative practices. In discussing the commercial tactics of Stephen Foster’s most regular burntcork business partner, E. P. Christy, Emerson notes: It would be gratifying to attribute [the] sentimentality [of]. . . . a bevy of [blackface] songs to an upwelling of popular opposition to slavery and sympathy for its victims. But cultural critic Ann Douglas’s skeptical definition of sentimentality as “the political sense obfuscated or gone rancid,” the handmaiden of “failed political consciousness,” is a healthy reminder not to make too much of this. E. P. Christy was above all else a businessman. . . . Like [P. T.] Barnum, Christy recognized the importance of titillating while never offending. In order to appeal to the broadest possible audience, to women and families as well as to young men, he smoothed the rough edges of the Virginia Minstrels’ raucous act and toned down the raunchy repertory.37

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In questioning the limits of sentimentality, Emerson’s observation also captures the way in which Foster “smoothed the rough edges” of “raucous” early blackface tunes, which resulted in his compositions gaining wider appeal across classes and audiences. The “noisy,” repetitive, and more derisive caricatured performance of the previously popular Jim Crow character evolved into Foster’s somewhat introspective, sympathetically treated “Old Uncle Ned” (1848). In general, the “raunchy repertory” of early minstrelsy shifted to the more sincere, sentimental, and nostalgic compositional style exemplified by Foster—albeit within the scripts of Blacksound articulated through minstrelsy (as we’ll see in Chapters 5, the more derisive, stereotyped blackface performances returned as the standard in the “coon song” of the post-emancipation period).38

composer and democrat Through his blackface works, Foster was particularly concerned with refining his compositional skills and having a successful career as an autonomous composer—still a rarity for a mid-nineteenth centurymusician of popular music. While Foster employed a myriad of styles in his songs, it was through the popularity, publication, and performance of his blackface works that he came closest to his goal. These works were also an opportunity for Foster to create, perform, and commemorate whiteness behind the burnt-cork mask. Writing to E. P. Christy, who founded the troupe that helped to popularize Foster’s work, the composer acknowledges his attempts to make blackface “Ethiopian” songs more appealing to a more “sophisticated” (i.e., middle-to-upperclass white) audience: “I find that by my efforts I have done a great deal to build up a taste for the Ethiopian songs among refined people by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order. Therefore I have concluded to reinstate my name on my songs and pursue the Ethiopian business without fear or shame and lend all my energies to making the business live, at the same time that I will wish to establish my name as the best Ethiopian songwriter.”39 To remove the sting of racist caricature, or to show more care toward the humanity of African Americans, Foster could have created songs more specifically abolitionist in sentiment, or not composed in blackface altogether. However, he continued to find more performatively sincere and sympathetic ways to express his own compositional voice through

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blackface in hopes of gaining popularity. In doing so, Foster helped to shift white middle-and-upper-class tastes—alongside working-class ethnic white audiences who heard his works performed in raucous minstrel halls—toward blackface. Realizing that he could gain notoriety and money from his blackface works, Foster began assigning his name to these compositions (the publishers often touted the performer before the “composer” in early blackface sheet music), making them more “refined,” and dubbing them “Plantation Melodies.” As notions of sentimentality appeared more regularly in Foster’s “Plantation Melodies,” mostly through his use of nostalgia (e.g., “Old Folks at Home” and “Old Black Joe”),40 his works became viewed as more suitable for the middle-to-upper-class, parlor-singing, and theater-going audience to which Foster saw himself belonging and to whom he was marketing his music. The minstrel sheet music popular in American parlors, as Stephani Dunson points out, carried a particular message on their covers and in their lyrics: “black people are all that the American family should not be. In this way, minstrel sheet music provided not only music that was ‘rich in dark fun’ but also ultimately played a central role in offering white Americans counter-images of acceptable family relations and assurance of their own place within the lines of domestic propriety.”41 Consequently, the sonic and formal transition of Foster’s blackface tunes from “Ethiopian” melodies to “Plantation” songs must be considered within the shifts that occurred during the antebellum period, leading up to the Civil War and emancipation. The conditionality of black being and black existence was shaped through blackface by the rise of Jacksonian “common man” democracy during the antebellum era. Democratic (Party) ideologies were championed by the nation’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson, who was an ardent supporter of slavery and states’ rights. He was the poster-child turned poster-president of the then newly formed “populist” Democratic Party (after defeating the British at the Battle of Nola after the War of 1812). Stephen Foster and his wellto-do family from Pennsylvania were ardent democrats, his primary collaborator E. P. Christy had direct ties to the newly emerged Democratic Party, and the composer even campaigned and was the musical advisor for James Buchanan’s presidential campaign—the Democratic nominee who was elected president of the United States in 1856.42 The original Democratic Party was formed through the assimilation of lower- and middle-class Americans and some elite white Americans into the first mass political party in the post-revolutionary period. It developed apart from the dominant Democratic-Republican Party.43

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The Democrats (mainly represented in the public imaginary by the working “common man”) were generally anti-abolitionists and pro– European American (i.e., white), anti-Jeffersonian, and anti–federal government, even as they came from disparate white ethnic and economic backgrounds.44 Many if not most of the antebellum blackface producers and performers were directly affiliated with this political party, and contemporary political themes of the time were frequently burlesqued on the minstrel stage. Foster’s popular blackface tunes, like “Camptown Races” and “Oh Susanna,” elicited popularity through the façade of the (blackface) African American, especially among Democrats across the nation. As blackface and mass entertainment developed, however, both Republicans and Democrats participated and reveled in this ubiquitous form. At the same time, blackface performance helped to tether whiteness to Americanness in the public imaginary through the developing sound of “Americana”—particularly in the wake of manifest destiny and westward expansion, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the westward shift of America’s economic and cultural centers as the California gold rush took hold.45 Fletcher Hodges, a biographer of Stephen Foster, notes that “FortyNiners” (the name for those seeking to “strike gold” in the west in 1849) “took unto themselves Stephen’s hearty Oh! Susanna, made it their marching song across the continent to the gold fields of California, and eventually transformed it into that young state’s unofficial anthem.”46 Importantly, with westward expansion (during slavery and the continued genocide of Indigenous people) also came a wave of Chinese immigrants, who were recruited by the US government and exploited for cheap labor during the gold rush and later for the construction of the transcontinental railroad.47 As blackface proliferated throughout the country during the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, particular in San Francisco, stereotyped and caricatured representations of Asian identity and sounds were also performed by mostly white (and later some black and Asian) actors in blackface—a practice that later became known as “yellowface.”48 These performances, like blackface, limited certain sonic and performative scripts to “represent” Asian identity to white audiences, while they also helped to lay the foundation for anti-Asianness (Chinese and East Asian in particular) throughout the country within the rise of populism and cultivation of white supremacy.49 Within the context of anti-abolitionism, Indigenous genocide, and growing anti-Asian sentiments, Foster composed some of his most popular blackface tunes, and his songs helped to lay the foundation for

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the way that Blacksound functions within the development of American popular music and race in the antebellum United States.

the negro spiritual and the performance of sentimentalism in foster’s “plantation melodies” Stephen Foster’s blackface compositions and “Plantation Melodies”— “Old Folks at Home” a.k.a. “Swanee River” (1851), “Camptown Races” (1850), “Old Uncle Ned” (1848), and “Oh Susanna” (1848)— helped define the sound of Americana, or what sonically registers as “quintessentially” (early) American (i.e., white) for wider audiences. Foster’s popular songs were created for the minstrel stage, heavily shaped by white Democrats (performers and audiences) in the urban centers throughout the north, and it was through the theater that Foster’s contribution to the blackface repertoire flourished. As his compositional practice developed to include more sincere and sentimental expressions in their topics, Foster employed more sophisticated compositional approaches in his blackface tunes. Within early biographies of Foster, his commercial choices have often been interpreted as an attempt to “humanize” black people, and such hagiography continues to shape popular perceptions of the composer.50 Yet there is little to suggest that this sympathetic narrative is true. Given that some of Foster’s most famous tunes were marketed as “Plantation Melodies,” it is worth considering the actual black music sacred practices (i.e., spirituals) of enslaved people on plantations, which became more prominent throughout the nation in the mid-nineteenth century and potentially embedded into the composer’s works. The folk and spiritual songs of African Americans became more clearly defined as the “Negro Spiritual” with the publication of “Go Down Moses” in 1861.51 Before that time, black spiritual and folk songs had flourished on plantations and in hush harbors, to which many African Americans retreated and sang/danced their pains, joys, fears, anxieties, and hopes, under enslavement.52 The development of these practices from their specifically (West and Central) African roots to an African American aesthetic came with waves of religious conversion that happened during the second “Great Awakening” in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Slave owners during the colonial era did not favor conversion out of fears of insurrection. It wasn’t until the mid- to late eighteenth century that enslaved populations

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throughout the south were more actively converted (even if it was a syncretic development) to Christianity. This practice was encouraged through the “camp meeting” revivals of the early nineteenth century, and by the 1850s, most African Americans throughout the south had been converted to Christianity by Protestants of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist denominations. Yet, as Robin D. G. Kelley notes, “Even when they worshipped together, antebellum blacks and whites didn’t worship the same things. Enslaved black people didn’t take much stock in ‘massa’s’ God. They created their own version of Christianity and generally preferred to worship in the woods, in their poorly constructed cabins, anywhere beyond the seeing eyes of the white folks.”53 In the north, many protestant denominations had been active in allowing free and enslaved black people to worship in their churches, but often still on segregated and unequal terms. It was also in northern states the camp meeting developed among Presbyterian Protestants in the mid-eighteenth century.54 Camp meetings were central sites for the transmission of early African American music practices and the hybridization of these customs with Anglo-Celtic religious traditions. Many of the white religious leaders of the Second Great Awakening, such as the influential leader of one of the first camp meetings, James McGready, were Protestants of Ulster-Scot descent.55 Their particular styles of proselytization influenced the preaching styles of African Americans, as their rhetorical practices are noted as originating in conversation with the more ecstatic tradition of Protestant Presbyterian Scots-Irish immigrants from seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.56 The aesthetic amalgamation of African American performance practices through religious conversion, however, did not reach mainstream audiences in the ways blackface performance did early in the nineteenth century. Significantly, at the time of the first camp meeting, the “spiritual” could have been any religious songs of African Americans, including the traditional Protestant hymns that were frequently performed (even if remixed) and used as instruments of conversion and worship.57 With the First Great Awakening originating among Pennsylvania Presbyterians during the colonial era, it is worth considering the statement of Stephen’s brother, Morrison, who noted that his younger sibling began to experience the “spiritual songs” of black Americans as a child, along with an African American “bound girl” (i.e., enslaved to the Fosters) named Olivia Pise. Morrison mentioned that Olivia took little Stephen to camp meetings:

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“Lieve” . . . was a devout Christian and member of a church of shouting colored people. The little boy [Stephen] was fond of their singing and boisterous devotions. She was permitted to often take Stephen to church with her. Here he stored up in his mind “many a gem of purest ray serene,” drawn from these caves of negro melody. A number of strains heard there, and which, he said to me, were too good to be lost, have been preserved by him, short scraps of which were incorporated into two of his songs, “Hard Times Come Again No More” and “Oh, Boys, Carry Me ’Long.”58

Foster biographer Ken Emerson suggests that Stephen might have been too young to attend church with Olivia, and he also doubted that the congregants of Lewis Woodson’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh (where it is presumed Olivia attended) were a “church of shouting colored people.”59 Emerson casts doubt upon this possibility (suggesting that Stephen’s brother was attempting to “authenticate” the relationship between black music and Stephen’s “Ethiopian melodies”), but Morrison goes on to suggest how the sounds of local black people in Pittsburgh might have influenced his brother’s work: “[Old Black Joe] does sound a little like what a British visitor to Pittsburgh reported hearing in a black Methodist church in 1848 before the shouting started, when, right after the sermon, worshipers sang ‘their own peculiarly soft and melancholy airs.’ ”60 How might have Foster’s compositional engagement with early African American religious culture and sound been influenced by contact with the spiritual songs of African Americans—whether in person, at services, or in print? His stylistic amalgamation of blackface tunes with a more sympathetic tone helped produce the aesthetic basis of what developed into the quintessential American popular sound (i.e., Blacksound) during the late-antebellum period. Embedded within Foster’s sentimentalism are issues of class, commodification, and a disengaged engagement with the African American lives through which sentimentality (as well as self) was expressed in blackface. What began to distinguish Foster’s minstrel songs from previous ones after the late 1840s was their inclusion of a chorus, which was not yet common in the popular style of parlor singing, or any other popular song types in mid-nineteenth-century America.61 “Camptown Races,” “Oh Susanna,” and “Old Folks at Home” all contain a chorus, and it is the chorus of most of his tunes that remains popular today. What led Foster to include a chorus at the end of his minstrel songs? His other popular tunes of this era, particularly those influenced by Irish and English parlor tunes that evoke English balladry or the Irish composer

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Thomas Moore, did not contain a chorus.62 It is worth considering here the possible impact of the “wandering refrain” (“the [African American religious] practice of adding a refrain, any refrain, to hymn texts composed by any author or chorus”)—functioning as a chorus in Foster’s tunes.63 In 1791, a former slave by the name of Richard Allen established the first independent African American denomination in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Coming from the Methodist traditions, Allen continued to view the hymn as one of the primary ways to reach congregants and found the popular hymns of Protestant composer Isaac Watts particularly suitable for the needs and hopes of a mostly enslaved African American congregation. In 1801, Richard Allen and the AME Church published the first recorded African American hymnal. Although no music is in the hymnal, the texts of important hymns were included, often sung to familiar hymn tunes adapted from white Methodist traditions or based on popular tunes of the day.64 Importantly, before Foster penned his first songs, the AME hymnal underwent two revisions, the second of which included the tunes associated with published hymns (1818).65 What was novel and specific to the African American Methodist congregation, however, was the inclusion of the “wandering refrain,” also known as the “wandering chorus,” at the end of any verse. As this practice had already been fashioned in the early history of the AME church and codified in an 1801 publication, it is likely that the musical practices of the AMEs—one of the main congregations in attendance at camp meetings—had an impact upon the integrated crowds of large-scale events. Black people attended camp meetings in large numbers (sometimes outnumbering white congregants) in the nineteenth century, and African American musical practices are often described in contrast to or as distinct from those of many white congregants.66 The church that Foster would have likely visited with Olivia, if he indeed attended, as Emerson notes, was an AME church. The piety of black Methodists often reflected the more subdued, reflective style of their white forbears, which is why Emerson suggests that the likelihood Foster attended a church of “shouting colored people” was slim. However, considering the popularity of the camp meeting throughout the early nineteenth century in Pennsylvania and the state of the church’s origin (where shouting, “hymn lining” (described below), and congregational singing were common), the establishment of the AME church and hymnal in the early nineteenth century might have factored into why he

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began to employ a chorus in his more mature and popular blackface tunes—especially considering the proximity that Foster had to all of these circumstances. As the pop composer sought to “build up the taste” of black themes and racial representations in his blackface songs for commercial purposes, his work also demonstrates a potential relationship with the musical/religious practices of the African Americans with whom he had direct contact in his early life. The growing popularity of black religious music practices during the Second Great Awakening in Pennsylvania and throughout the south and west, in addition to the rise of the Negro Spiritual during the abolition era, is evidence of the black (religious and folk) sounds that would have been a part of Foster’s soundscape. Whether his choices were “authentically” Anglo-Celtic, African American, or European-classical, or “purely” compositional devices, Foster still made use of the blackface pantomime to apply the various techniques that he had at his disposal as a composer in his blackface songs. His most popular sentimental blackface works composed between 1848 and 1851—“Oh Susanna” (1848), “Old Uncle Ned” (1848), “Camptown Races” (1850), and “Old Folks at Home” (1851)— included a chorus, still a rarity for popular song at the time. As Charles Hamm notes, the “four-part chorus [was] a feature reserved for minstrel songs to this point in Foster’s career.”67 “Old Uncle Ned” and “Old Folks at Home” (of which the latter’s chorus is currently the official Florida state song) are often discussed as an indication of Foster’s “sympathy” toward enslaved Black Americans, primarily because their tone was less blatantly racist than earlier blackface songs (e.g., “Lucy Neal” and “Oh! Mr. Coon”).68 Sympathy is also often assumed due to the frequent song themes of longing, love, and nostalgia. Foster’s “Old Uncle Ned,” with its alternation (or call and response) between solo voice and four-part chorus, sounds almost like a Protestant hymn that might have been performed by a group like the Hutchinson Family Singers—one of the most popular touring ensembles of the antebellum era, who promoted anti-abolitionism and sang in four-part harmony.69 The rhythmic variety within the verse and the use of the chorus itself extends beyond the simpler rhythms and forms of early blackface tunes.70 But Foster’s use of call and response—a recognizable performance script frequently connected to African diasporic cultural practices—in tunes like “Camptown Races” and “Old Uncle Ned” might suggest a more clandestine incorporation of black performance practices into his sentimental blackface works.

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Congregational, polylayered, heterophonic, and antiphonal styles are commonly documented in the history of African diasporic music and early black music in the Americas. The particular call-and-response mode of employing a solo singer, who leads a dialogue with a responding congregation, also developed within the colonial churches of New England at a time when books were scarce and literacy was low. This method, which became known as “lining hymns,” became a standard form of teaching hymns to many black congregations of the Second Great Awakening, as literacy was still not common among many enslaved African Americans (or the larger populace).71 The leader would begin by singing a hymn (unmetered), and the congregation would respond (usually in a specific meter) with a particular phrase or chorus. Call and response is cultivated within the sacred and secular musical styles of African Americans, but it also might be found in traditional musical practices in West Africa. Foster employs a version of a call-andresponse practice in “Camptown Races,” as the leader begins, “Camptown ladies sing dis song,” followed by the chorus responding, “Doodah! Doo-dah!” Although historical evidence has not been recovered that immediately suggests the direct impact of African American music traditions on Foster (as many of these acts and encounters would have been ephemeral), it is worth considering how the soundscapes that surrounded him might have contributed to the composition of some of his most famous blackface tunes within the development of Blacksound. The text to “Old Uncle Ned” refers to him as an “old n*gger” and speaks about his death as a respite from the life he lived as an enslaved person—not unlike the ways in which death was imagined as an escape from bondage for enslaved people within their spiritual songs (e.g., “Swing Low, Swing Chariot”). At the end of the first verse (“No more hard work for poor Old Ned, He is gone whar da good nigg*rs go”) the chorus states: Lay down de shubble and de hoe . . . Hang up de fiddle and de bow; Lay down de shubble and de hoe . . . Hang up de fiddle and de bow;

However, the sentimentality expressed in the song’s lyrics and chorus is neither abolitionist in nature nor specifically engaging with the experience or interior lives of enslaved peoples. Instead, sentimentality is used to employ the stereotyped dialect that suggested the ignorance of the black protagonist, and it is generic enough in its sentimentalism that

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any person—especially if they are detached from the experience of being black—can insert their own feelings of loss, longing, or pain through the ventriloquy of blackface performance, while erasing the actual black person that the song is constructed upon. The supposedly more sincere expressions of blackface in Foster’s songs are composed for commercial circulation by white performers and audiences, and Foster understood that idyllic and simplistic expressions of black personhood appealed more to middle- and upper-class white audiences—particularly those who found more everyday blackface performances to be crass, regardless of their political affiliation. Through sentimentalism, as Jon Cruz notes, “social crises [were able to] metamorphose through a series of symbolic substitutions that would allow one, with ease of conscience, to vehemently oppose slavery yet have no concrete sense of the slave as a human being with a face, a name, a voice.”72 Within these songs, Foster and the white performers and consumers of his work effectively disengagedly engaged with the actual lives and experiences of African Americans.

performing racial sincerity, constructing racial authenticity Stephen Foster’s contemporary Frederick Douglass had a clear opinion on the value and impact of blackface minstrelsy on African Americans. Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, and by 1847, he had settled in Rochester, New York, where he published the (blackowned) abolitionist periodical The North Star.73 Many of the majority of white-owned newspapers in the city of Rochester published antislavery advertisements and even announced Douglass and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s events. These same newspapers, however, also published several columns that included blackface caricatures, as the form was so ubiquitous that it appeared in almost every facet of popular culture.74 In the second year of The North Star’s publication, Frederick Douglass addressed and challenged a scathing review of the Hutchinson Singers in a local newspaper, and he also shared his opinions on the “value” of minstrelsy: We believe he does not object to the “Virginia Minstrels,” “Christy’s Minstrels,” the “Ethiopian Serenaders,” or any of the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellowcitizens. Those performers are undoubtedly in harmony with his refined and

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elegant taste! Then those beautiful and highly sentimental songs which they sing, such as “Ole Zip Coon,” “Jim Crow,” “Ole Dan Tucker,” “Jim along Josey,” and a few other of such specimens of American musical genius, must spread over his spirit a charm, and awaken in his bosom a rapture only equalled by that celestial transport which thrills his noble heart on witnessing a TREMENDOUS SQUASH!75

The observations that Douglass makes in The North Star (where “he” refers to the white blackface minstrels) provide a rare contemporaneous account of how a black person experienced blackface during the mid-nineteenth century. Harkening back to English comic actor Charles Mathews’s proclamation in 1824 that he will be “rich in black fun” (by impersonating African Americans on stage), the abolitionist points directly to the moral, economic, and cultural impact of antebellum blackface. Because of Douglass’s direct, strong language (e.g., “filthy scum of white society), the italicized section of the quote above is often cited in the discourse on blackface as “evidence” of the racism embedded into minstrelsy. This quote is often used to explore the “love and theft,” to borrow Eric Lott’s terms, that white minstrels took up and engaged in as a way of self-making and “appreciation” for black culture in burnt cork.76 As he continues, however, Douglass’s ironic tone (e.g., as he references the “beautiful” and “highly sentimental songs” known well in blackface at the time) conveys his awareness that beyond the “theft” of a “complexion denied to them by nature,” the desire (through sentimentalism) for (ethnic) white Americans to possess and be possessed by blackness (through blackface) allowed for both economic mobility and racial solidarity through the exploitation of black people and their aesthetics. Importantly, African Americans were still largely enslaved throughout the nation and mostly unable to claim property rights over themselves or their creative practices. The scripts that composed Blacksound during the antebellum period—from the more stereotypical tunes of the early minstrel era to the more sympathetic blackface tunes introduced by Foster in the late 1840s—might have drawn directly from black performativity or blackness in general, but they were not authentic representations of black people. And yet still, the stereotyped dialect, lyrical content, improvised performances, and caricatured mimicry of black movement emerged as some of the primary signifiers of blackness in the white racial imagination that were thought to be genuine representations of African Americans. Many of these conceptions shape the racist, structurally employed notions of black “being,” black authenticity, and black sounds—ones

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that continue to shape the racialization of sound and popular music today. But in addition to the stereotyped sounds of blackness that were amalgamated in blackface with European-American (folk) sounds and songs (especially Irish and English), there were other ways in which minstrels and composers absorbed black vernacular performances into their works and through their pens. The more sentimental scripts, ones that drew less on supposed genuine performances of blackness (as with T. D. Rice’s Jump Jim Crow), often employ a less overt absorption of black performance practices, yet they are as important to unpack within the aesthetic basis of Blacksound, both sonically and politically. Blackface performance contributed to the creation of “authentic traits” of racial performance that get taken as natural to African Americans. At the same time, the more interior expressions of white racial subjectivity continue to be conveyed through sincere gestures that often go unrecognized beyond the more overtly stereotyped (read as authentic) performances of blackness. Therefore, blackface appears to bear specific markers of racial authenticity that can delimit and stereotype blackness for black people, while allowing white participants to live and freely express their individual and collective identities through burnt cork. Yet Blacksound reveals how even blackface contains within it more interior, subjective, and emotional expressions of racial meaning that resonate between individuals and communities. To attend to those nuances does not remove the anti-black authentic portrayals and impact, but instead pushes beyond the frequent assumption that the appropriation of “authentic” racialized scripts that signal blackness (in and out of blackface) is the only way to understand how race functions through (blackface) performance. In fact, Jon Cruz’s concept of “disengaged engagement” in conversation with Jackson’s “sincerity-authenticity” paradigm helps to further unpack how black performance practices— whether authentic, stereotypical, or presumed—are absorbed into public discourses without having to recognize the humanity of black people or the political contexts in which they exist, while laying the foundation for both cultural and social developments throughout the nation. Blacksound is at its base founded upon the sonic and embodied performances of African Americans, but embedded into its myriad sonic scripts is also its paradoxical construction out of blackface by white people (and their own European-influenced sounds) as the basis of American popular music. And from there, black performers continued to remix the counterfeit performances of their own aesthetics in their expansion of Blacksound, particularly as the localized sounds of black

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people become more public. These sounds were then taken up by both black and white performers over the course of the nineteenth century in and out of blackface. Even as actual black aesthetics were more frequently adapted into blackface music and performance, as in the case of Foster’s “Plantation Melodies,” his aesthetic co-option did not eliminate the conditionality of black being (as property, non-citizen, non-human) during slavery or in its perpetuation through Jim Crow segregation policies established in the post-emancipation era. Disengaged engagement allowed early European American music industrialists to absorb, commercialize, and racially script black aesthetics through blackface in relation to their own white bodies and racial imaginaries. At the same time, they were able to lay claim to black performance practices as sources of property under copyright law within the amalgamation of Blacksound through publication and performance. Foster (and other independent composers at the time) might have been able to reap some benefit from the success of a work through their use and manipulation of black aesthetics. But it was mostly the performers who received the greater financial benefits for including Foster’s songs in their blackface shows, and it was the publisher who held the rights to the sheet music itself, even if the composer was listed on its cover (and usually for marketing purposes).

whose intellectual (performance) property? With the political and economic growth of blackface in the midnineteenth century came the expansion of copyright law to include both sheet music and dramatic works. Prior copyright law protected “prints,” particularly books, maps, or what was deemed “legible” under a system that viewed written documents as the primary means of authorship. When Firth, Pond & Co. published Foster’s melodies, composers of popular songs were generally not acknowledged as “authors” of their work. Composers, like Foster, sold the rights to their compositions to publishers and often paid for the printing of their works, because there had not yet developed a large-enough market for publishers to risk being unable to sell their items, and production costs were not inexpensive. This is also because performance was not protected under copyright law until 1897, dramatic works (which might have included music) were not protected under copyright law until 1856, and music (sheet music, specifically) was not deemed copyrightable until 1831.77 As such, the publisher who produced the song or the performer who

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made a song popular received both the credit and the most compensation for a work, largely until federal copyright law was revised in 1909. Although he died with little money, Stephen Foster did acquire a little wealth as a career composer during his life. Emerson notes that Foster made $1400 a year on average, and between 1849 and 1860 (when most of his compositions were published by Firth, Pond & Co.), he made upward of $15,000.78 While his earnings could support a comfortable lifestyle in the 1850s, they pale in comparison to the $1,000 a night that P. T. Barnum was paying Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind in the same era.79 Foster hardly received compensation that equaled the popularity of his works. Poor financial management and other factors might have been a part of the composer’s economic woes toward the end of his life, but it was the way in which copyright laws and the developing (popular) music publishing industry was structured at the time that limited his ability to claim certain rights over his own compositions. Although sheet music could be copyrighted as early as 1831, it was the publisher who mostly submitted the copyright requests to the copyright office (not the composer), as they were the ones who could print and distribute the work to the masses. The publisher would often pay the composer a flat (and usually low) fee for full rights to the work. If they were successful enough, like Foster later in his career, the composer might negotiate royalties with the publisher from their sheet music sales. Because the performance of a copyrighted work for profit was not under protection until 1897, any minstrel troupe or performer could use Foster’s tunes without payment or permission (first, because he didn’t own the copyright and, second, because it was not required to get permissions from the publishers who did).80 Having a song performed by a popular act could increase sheet music sales and lead to potential revenue for the composer, so Foster began to freely give his compositions to musical acquaintances to be performed, until he realized that he should at least negotiate some fee if he wanted to earn income from his songs. “Oh Susanna” and “Old Uncle Ned” were published in 1848, and almost as soon as the music was made available by C. Holt, Jr., and Millets Music Saloon (respectively), the sheet music was pirated by other publishers in Cincinnati, Louisville, Baltimore, New York, Philly, and Boston. As a result, Foster earned almost nothing from the sale of his very popular pieces.81 Because international copyright law was not established until 1891, any works published abroad (especially in London) were also pirated copies over which Foster could not claim ownership, even though the

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international distribution of his music proved lucrative for US and UK publishers. In 1849, Foster was able to strike a deal with Firth, Pond & Co. (likely because of the popularity of his “Oh Susanna” and “Old Uncle Ned”), negotiating a royalty of 2 cents per copy for new songs. This was rare for a composer at the time, particularly of popular works, and it is one of the reasons that Foster is recognized as one of the first (professional) composers of popular music in the nation.82 Learning his lesson, or so he thought, Foster began to negotiate with Edward P. Christy of Christy’s minstrels to grant the troupe first rights to perform his works before the music was published. Christy would pay Foster a small sum for exclusive access and his troupe helped to popularize them on the burnt-cork stage. However, because the troupe’s popularity helped to sell the sheet music itself, Foster’s name didn’t appear on his earliest works, while Christy’s name appeared (as composer) on fifteen of Foster’s songs published between 1848 and 1854.83 He was left with even less control over his works, as he did not own the copyright, and he was also not viewed by the public as being so central to the songs as someone like Christy. Therefore, the composer had less power to negotiate fair royalties and fees with publishers. Because Foster was trying to establish himself as a career composer, he made several rash choices (like selling his rights to Christy to claim authorship over “Old Folks at Home,” 1851, for $15),84 but the ways in which sound, sheet music, and copyright laws functioned are primarily what left the “Father of American Popular Song” in a precarious financial state. Foster moved to New York City from Pennsylvania four years before his death in 1864, when the center of music publishing began to shift from places like Philadelphia and Cincinnati to New York City. Possibly, the somewhat destitute composer moved there after being separated from his wife, Jane, in hopes of gaining some fame and money as a composer.85 Unfortunately, Foster’s only real hit of the period was the composer’s posthumous song “Beautiful Dreamer.” Although he died rather impoverished and alone, and without fame that matched the popularity of his works, Foster’s music and name remain a staple in American popular music and Americana today.86 Foster also might not have been able to attain clear rights to his works during his lifetime, but he still developed a career as a composer of popular music through blackface and the exploitation of black people and their aesthetics during slavery. The composer was also highlighted throughout the twentieth century for his contributions to the birth of early American popular music. Foster, along with other (white) composers

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and performers, took up the real, imagined, caricatured, and ephemeral aesthetics of black performativity in their making of American popular music and its bourgeoning industry out of blackface. At the same time, African Americans were mostly enslaved and considered to be property and had limited claims over their bodies, sounds, and performances (legal or culturally) within the structures of antebellum society.87 The black sounds that began to shape blackface minstrelsy more directly in the antebellum era through Foster’s pen continued to affect the development of Blacksound in a post-emancipation context. In the following chapter, I explore the systematic expansion of popular music through the formation of Tin Pan Alley and the founding of the modern popular music industry. This formation took place as African Americans contributed even more directly to the production of popular music and entertainment within the structuring of Jim Crow segregation policies that legalized racial discrimination throughout the south and across the country at every level of society. M. Witmark & Sons is an inaugural publisher of Tin Pan Alley through which I unpack how property rights, race relations, and Blacksound are connected in the exponential growth of the commercial music industry during the Gilded Age.

part ii

The Birth of the Popular Music Industry

chapter 4

The House That Blackface Built M. Witmark & Sons and the Birth of Tin Pan Alley

Between 1870 and 1900, the period now known as the Gilded Age was marked by several technological and industrial developments that would shift the overall landscape of the nation.1 In addition to electricity, mining, farming, railroad expansion, factories, communications (telephone), steel, and oil, music emerged as another major player within the nation’s expanding industries. One of the most significant actors within music’s commercialization in the late nineteenth century was Isidore Witmark. As the eldest of the Witmark brothers, Isidore was born into the budding metropolis of New York City in 1870 just after emancipation. The brothers’ parents, Marcus (b. 1834) and Henrietta (b. 1840), had emigrated from Prussia to New York City almost fifteen years before Isidore was born.2 By 1886, M. Witmark & Sons Publishers was established in Union Square by seventeen-year-old Isidore and his younger brothers, Julius and Jay. Although music publishing had taken place in city centers throughout the nation in prior decades—e.g., Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati—(and those places remained important in the development of the popular music industry), by the 1890s New York “was the center of popular music publishing.”3 As I explore within this chapter, the Witmarks were critical to the formation of the modern popular music and entertainment industries. The choices that the Witmarks made while building their publishing house reveal much about how the industry of popular music emerged in the wake of slavery and blackface minstrelsy 129

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during the Gilded Age.4 At the same time, the migration of black performers from rural spaces to urban centers throughout the country set the stage for the musical innovations of black itinerant performers (e.g., Mama Lou, discussed in the Introduction) to be cultivated in various urban centers. Such innovations were commercialized by music industrialists, like the Witmarks, and absorbed by the masses through popular sheet music publications, performances, and (later) recordings. The brothers established their publishing house in 1886, halfway into the decade in which the nation’s population increased to fifteen million.5 Most of the growth was concentrated in urban cities, as the number of people in townships decreased by almost 40 percent. By 1900, 40 percent of the populace lived in cities.6 With the increase in population and the rise of the middle class in urban centers, there emerged new markets for leisure and entertainment. Music was at the center of the entertainment boom, and M. Witmark & Sons, along with their colleagues with whom they helped to establish a modern music industry hub through Tin Pan Alley, was central to the ways in which consumers engaged with popular music and entertainment throughout the nation. The brothers left an archive of documents and publications (still largely unexplored) that not only demonstrate their commercial prowess, but also illustrate how their music and business ventures reflected self and self-making in relation to blackness and blackface. As Ashkenazi Jewish people were negotiating their relationship to Americanness and whiteness, especially among growing violence and anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe and their subsequent immigration to the United States, members of its community in NYC were central to the construction of the modern popular entertainment industry between the 1890s and 1920s. Popular music was an avenue through which Jewish Americans negotiated their identity, and they inherited the blackface tradition from the already-complex race relations of American society.7 The history, writings, and creative legacies of M. Witmark & Sons explored in this chapter amplify the tensions among local and national politics, urbanization, race, racism, identity making, and popular music.8 The expansion and eventual absorption of the Witmark’s catalogue by Warner Bros. in the twentieth century place blackface at the historical foundation of the modern entertainment industry—from sheet music and recordings, to film, TV, and radio. As musicologist Guthrie Ramsey observes, “popular music (in actuality, all music) participates in a continual historical conversation, collecting important aspects of its meaning from dialogues between present and past.”9 My

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exploration of publications by Isidore Witmark and his contemporaries reveals a deep desire to possess (in a material sense) and be possessed by (in a metaphysical sense) blackness through (the industry of) popular music from its earliest stages. The house itself was directly founded upon the legacy of slavery and minstrelsy, and I explore how the ritual of blackface performance shaped the establishment of M. Witmark & Sons publishers and the modern commercial music industry, along with the negotiation of Jewish-American identity vis-à-vis the construction of blackness, anti-blackness, and whiteness, through blackface.

slavery in the making of the house of witmark The emergence of the Witmark house, Tin Pan Alley, and the American popular music industry at large is materially wedded to the legacy of slavery. Marcus Witmark, the namesake of M. Witmark & Sons publishers, immigrated to the United States from Prussia after his brothers, Simon and David, had “joined the mass immigration of Germans to America” in 1848.10 One of Marcus’s older brothers had settled in Fort Gaines, Georgia, and the other in Eufaula, Alabama. Although Marcus entered the country through New York City in 1853, he soon joined his brothers in the south as a “peddler”—an occupation frequently filled by GermanJewish immigrants to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.11 After joining his brother in Georgia, Marcus quickly gained financial success, as “he had inherited the initiative of both his father and mother,” and graduated from being a peddler, to owning a handcart, and then to acquiring a horse and wagon before becoming a storeowner. Soon, Marcus had gained enough wealth to build his own home, and, like other European Americans in the south who had the means to do so in the antebellum era, he eventually purchased slaves. Marcus Witmark had attained enough economic and thereby social status in the United States to become an enslaver, aligning him, his business, and his family with the planter class—a social stratum that was almost exclusively designed for (white) European Americans. This body of European descendants contributed to constructing the racialized category of “white,” even as they remained disaggregated by their ethnicity in other facets of society.12 But his investment in whiteness as a source of property and ownership does not stop there—Marcus Witmark, according to the Witmark biography, voluntarily joined the Confederate Army when war was declared against the Union in 1861. It is worth quoting the following section of The Story of the House of Witmark: From Ragtime to Swingtime

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(coauthored by Isidore himself) at length, as it illuminates how tethered the Witmark family, as Ashkenazi-Jewish immigrants, was to the social, political, and economic investment in whiteness as Americanness during the Civil War era: He equipped his own company, trained it, and received his commission as Lieutenant from Governor Brown of Georgia, whose son eventually occupied the same office. For a short time Lieutenant Witmark was placed in charge of the city of Macon. Later he commanded a battery at Richmond. He saw plenty of active service, and rose to a Captaincy on the battlefield. . . . . . . [b]y the time the War had come to an end, he was mourned as one killed in battle. So great was the rejoicing when he returned that for a week he was feted by everyone. He was offered an appointment as probate judge, but declined. He had gone to war leaving behind a flourishing business. He had returned to find himself all but ruined, until he made a happy discovery that friends had nailed up in an isolated barn some $60,000 worth of his cotton. There was a magnetism about the man that inspired confidence and affection. His slaves had been freed by the war, yet when he closed out his Southern interests and made up his mind to go North to live they refused to be left behind, and followed him. In New York, however, they found they were unwelcome—New York resented the influx of plantation hands—and he was obliged to send them back to the South. In after years, talking to his sons about his slaves, Dad used to say “Boys, some of the slaves may not have slept on a bed of roses; but on the whole they came in for much consideration. When we were sick we tried to cure ourselves with home remedies, but when our slaves were sick we generally sent for specialist.”13

At the time of its publication (1939), Isidore thought that his family and his father’s history with slavery were an important part of the house’s story to tell. His recollection doesn’t suggest a sense of shame in Marcus and his uncles’ status as slave owners in the south during the antebellum period. It is instead presented as a progress narrative that undergirds the making of the Witmark publishing house and the family’s overall representation as quintessentially American property-owning citizens. The “coon song” (a vestige of blackface minstrelsy developed during the antebellum era), ragtime (a local black sonic aesthetic that was commercialized in the boom of popular music at the turn of the century), and other legacies of blackface minstrelsy buttressed the establishment of M. Witmark & Sons as an inaugural house of Tin Pan Alley. Their relationship reflects the immediate connection between (slave) property, possession, personhood, and blackface, in the construction of the popular music industry at the turn of the twentieth century.

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According to The Story of the House of Witmark, Marcus reluctantly left the south after the war and returned to the north, but his $60,000 worth of cotton (assumedly acquired through his success as a slave owner, which today would amount to over a million dollars in cash) would have comfortably enabled his ability to return to New York City. Marcus had served as an officer and slave owner in the Confederacy during the Civil War.14 By October 1866, Marcus had married Henrietta Peyser, “the little fraulein with the long, golden locks,” who had recently arrived from Prussia and is said to have been the “last face he gazed upon before he crossed the bridge to go to America.”15 Because the enslaved African Americans that Marcus brought with him to New York City from the south had to turn back, due to discrimination against recently emancipated black Americans in the north just after the Civil War, it is unlikely that Isidore (b. 1870) met them. However, their legacy remains in his memory and in the economic comfort and status the family experienced because of their exploited labor. The story that Isidore tells of the house of Witmark, as well as contemporaneous accounts by the elder brother himself, suggests that he inherited some of his father’s entrepreneurial spirit. After a number of failed business ventures, Marcus went bankrupt and eventually decided to make a family business out of selling spirits—“it was an immediate success, and Marcus was on top of the world again.”16 The first three of the Witmark brothers—Isidore, Julius, and Jay—became acquainted with music and the theater early on, as their father “dressed them alike” on Sunday afternoons that were “devoted almost ritually to the Grand Opera House at Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue” (built in 1868).17 This outing was a performance of their societal and economic status as “well-to-do people” in New York City. The precocious boys, according to the Witmark biography, would stage their own shows at home, and each began to demonstrate skills that would soon be cultivated for public consumption. After refining their musical abilities in several settings (Isidore was a pianist, taught piano, and was a piano tuner; Julius was frequently invited to sing solos for clubs and organizations; and their younger brother, Frank, was a “prodigy of music and memory”),18 the pre-teen Witmark brothers’ first foray into public theater was through minstrelsy: “Going on the musical stage in those days, before musical comedy and light opera had arrived to alter the complexion of things, literally as well as figuratively, meant joining a minstrel troupe, parading on the morning before the show opened, blacking up, participating in the

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‘olio’—the variety acts between the first part and after the afterpiece— and barnstorming.”19 Here, Isidore points to blackface as the origin of popular music in his estimation, and although he himself was given an offer to join Billy Birch’s popular San Francisco Minstrels by invitation of a classmate from Public School 28, he passed the opportunity along to his little brother Julius, who began with the troupe on August 27, 1883. Young Julius would continue to rise as a vocalist in minstrel troupes, as well as at the Grand Opera house. His skill as a performer would become integral to the success of the Witmark publishing house, which he soon founded with his brothers. The legacy of minstrelsy is directly connected to the property relations of slavery (where blackness can be owned, traded, and consumed). As copyright law became more robust in protecting “legible” musical works (i.e., sheet music) with the 1891 International Copyright Act and the 1909 federal copyright law revision, the Witmarks were already positioned (by not being black) to capitalize upon the absorption of black aesthetics into popular music through blackface, amalgamated with their own musical practices. They were able to do so without having to acknowledge their own exploitative methods or the history of slave ownership from which they descended—a legacy that helped them to gain footing in their business ventures. The brothers were simply able to exist as young, entrepreneurial boys looking to make a name for themselves in the developing industry of popular music in Gilded Age New York City.

blackface in the birth of tin pan alley The year in which the Witmarks began their career as publishers, the children (from eldest to youngest) included Isidore (almost sixteen), Julius (fourteen, known as “Julie”), Jay (thirteen), Frances (ten, the only girl in the family), Frank (nine), and Eddie (seven). The least musical of the brothers, Jay, was the reason the family got into the publishing business in the first place. In 1883, Jay had won an arithmetic competition in school, and in consultation with his brothers, the award he chose was a toy printing press. The brothers started their publishing venture by printing greeting and business cards, and their lucrative home venture soon led their father to purchase the family a higher-capacity gas press. Within two years, the brothers combined their musical success with their publishing prowess and began printing their own sheet music— “Isidore was to write the songs and Julie was to sing them.”20 In 1885,

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the brothers began adding “Witmark Brothers, Printers, 402 W. 40th St.” to their publications, signaling the publishing house’s birth. The Witmark sons’ first major musical collaborative success (outside of mainly local performances that often took place in their home) came in 1885, when Julius was invited to sing with the famous Buffalo minstrel troupe Thatcher, Primrose, and West. Notably, he was the only minstrel not in blackface (but rather in “white-face,” as referenced in the Witmark biography).21 Isidore notes that even as Julius performed in blackface minstrel troupes, he never “blackened up.” If true, the choice to not blacken his face serves as an early instance of Blacksound without blackface.22 In his inaugural performance with this Buffalo troupe, Julius sang Isidore’s first published composition, “A Mother’s a Mother after All.” It was published by Willis Woodward & Company, and Julius received a favorable review from the Buffalo Courier, which noted he was “a handsome lad with a singularly sweet and musical voice. His enunciation is especially distinct and he sings with unmistakable refinement and intelligence.”23 After the success of “A Mother’s a Mother after All,” the Witmarks decided to go full-time into the publishing business for themselves once Woodward, one of the earliest houses dedicated to publishing popular music, reneged on their promise to pay the brothers royalties for their work. Realizing that Julius was a “natural born ‘plugger’ ”—with the ability to popularize the sale of a song simply from his performance—the boys decided to take a cue from the minstrel tradition of taking up political topics, and Isidore penned the tune “President Cleveland’s Wedding March” (1886). The song’s popularity made M. Witmark & Sons, as young as they were, one of the major contenders in the market of popular music publishers of the late 1880s.24 As immigration increased throughout the nineteenth century, populations became more concentrated in urban areas, and the working and middle class increased exponentially. These conditions provided a larger audience for the consumption of popular music through sheet music and performance. In particular, the ventures of music impresarios like Tony Pastor, who sought to expand popular theater performance to more “polite” audiences, helped to set the stage for vaudeville (a form of variety entertainment that incorporated a number of theatrical forms, including blackface), which rose to prominence in the early twentieth century.25 The bourgeoning entertainment industry continued to draw on its blackface antecedents to appeal to the largest sect of the populace who had the most access to capital—those who were deemed part of the

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citizenry by virtue of their proximity to Anglo-Saxon-Protestant constructions of whiteness and not being black or, by extension, not belonging to a non-white ethnicity.26 In a few years the Witmarks became amateur minstrel center of the country. The house published not only minstrel songs, but a full line of jokes books, Negro acts, minstrel overtures, and finales. It supplied tambos, bones, high collars, and ties for end men, costumes, props and—symbol of all this black madness—burnt cork.27

By their own admission, the Witmark brothers had extensive experience in blackface minstrelsy as performers, as well as marketers and promoters of the form. Soon after they began their publishing venture, the brothers established the “Witmark G. B. Minstrels” (“G. B.” stood for “great boys”) and placed an ad calling for “boys or young men for orchestra, who double in brass preferred; also boy quartet singers: salaries paid” to create a professional blackface troupe. While the troupe itself only gave one performance, it became a training ground for performers who would go on to be professionals in music and entertainment, and it also helped the Witmarks establish what they thought of at the time as “talent development” and what we might now call A&R (Artist & Repertoire) in major music companies. Julius, as one of the most experienced and sought-after performers of his day, was critical to this branch of the expanding publishing house. For the performance at the Columbia Club in 1895, Isidore was able to convince the wellknown performer Louis Mann to participate in this minstrel show. When Mann expressed to Isidore that he had never performed in blackface, Isidore told him: “You’re going to do your Cohen on the Telephone (monologue), in Hebrew dialect, blacked up on the end.”28 The infusion of Yiddish tropes through blackface reflects the amalgamation of Blacksound at the turn of the century through Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, and, eventually, Hollywood. Isidore was so invested in blackface as a creative form and as a moneymaker that the house set up a “minstrel show department” that offered mail-order arrangements for minstrel performances, tailored to a specific community’s needs. The minstrel show department was one of the first of its kind, and it helped to establish the amateur minstrel show as a mainstay of American culture throughout the first half of the twentieth century.29 Its department also helped boost the sale of minstrel supplies offered by the house for amateur performers.30 As a part of the minstrel department, the brothers tapped Frank Dumont, a star among the burnt-

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figure 13. The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia (1899).

cork performers of his day, to collaborate in issuing The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia (one of the first of its kind; see Figure 13). In addition to the Burnt Cork Encyclopedia, these “innovative” publications were significant for their comprehensive nature, as they “covered every want of the amateur quite as well as the mastodonic Sears, Roebuck catalogue covers the needs of its vast patronage.”31 The Witmarks also capitalized upon the practice of “plugging” a song in an attempt to increase the sale of sheet music by having a popular performer sing a new song. Plugging was cultivated early on in

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blackface minstrelsy (and was why the composer was often considered secondary to the performer).32 While the brothers began to build their catalogue of songs, it was the house itself that reaped the primary benefits and property rights within this marketing scheme, as the composer often sold their song rights to the publisher. Daniel Goldmark notes that the Witmarks would “give away for nothing, or next to nothing, scores of copies of their new tunes,” likely in hopes of having the song plugged by the performer, which would potentially spark sales of the published sheet music.33 The Witmarks catalogue began to grow by the late 1880s with songs composed by Isidore, often in collaboration with a lyricist.34 While the firm itself grew out of the blackface tradition, many of the songs Isidore composed were merely popular tunes without a specific racialized designation. Their songs drew on the sentimental, comic, and ballad styles that shaped popular songs throughout the nineteenth century, influenced by the European tradition and the popular “Plantation Melodies” of Stephen Foster discussed in Chapter 3. Initially, Julius would plug most of the songs in the early Witmark catalogue, but as his voice changed and the catalogue grew, Isidore began to venture out and recruit popular singers of the day to perform his songs. He specifically began to place them “with almost every top-notcher who appeared at Tony Pastor’s [theater].”35 The Witmarks helped to codify the practice of plugging songs that many publishers who would later join Tin Pan Alley followed. Importantly, by the late 1890s, the Witmarks gradually began to add composers, arrangers, orchestrators, and lyricists to their roster—helping to establish a structure that would become common in many of the Alley’s houses.36 The Witmark house’s constant movement around New York City, from their founding in 1886 until they were bought out by Warner Bros. almost fifty years later, demonstrates how the industry itself continued to develop across Manhattan (from Downtown to Midtown) at the turn of the century. As Jane Mathieu suggests, this view allows us to “realign our understanding of Tin Pan Alley as a place, industry, and process in favor of a much wider active, mobile, and mingling space and community of popular song as music in Midtown.”37 Tin Pan Alley is not merely a city block but instead a coalescence of various commercial attempts at popular music making and distribution between the 1890s and early 1900s in the establishment of the modern music industry in Manhattan, New York. The Tin Pan Alley moniker might currently connote a nostalgic view of the modern popular music industry’s founding at the turn of the cen-

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tury, but at its time, as Keir Keightley notes, “this mocking phrase would have resonated widely, its insinuations instantly intuited: trash, mass production, inferiority, alterity, disturbance, fraud, inauthenticity.”38 By then, new and established publishing houses began to relocate to the same area as the Witmarks’. Although it became a central location for NYC publishers by the latter part of the 1890s, it was dubbed Tin Pan Alley around 1900 after the simultaneous clanging of pianos that could be heard from song demonstrators coming from multiple publishers on West 28th street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Eventually, Tin Pan Alley (not simply as a location, but as a Midtown music community turned industry) would help shape the larger publishing business devoted to the creation and commercialization of popular songs in the nation.39 The brothers started their firm in their father’s house in Midtown Manhattan at 402 West 40th street.40 Isidore felt that the house was too far from the theater and entertainment district at Union Square, so they decided, with their growing success, to relocate to 32 East 14th Street, near the theaters, into their first independent office in 1888.41 Soon after, M. Witmark & Sons moved their offices to 841 Broadway, where they purchased a Beatty organ—a precursor to the multiple keyboard sounds coming from publishing houses that gave their name to Tin Pan Alley.42 It was at this location that the brothers decided that music publishing would be the house’s primary business (over theatrical production).43 Before their move to West 28th Street, Isidore became one of the first American publishers of popular music to travel to London to establish relations with publishers in the United Kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century.44 The brothers’ astute business move came in the wake of the 1891 International Copyright Act (which provided protection to foreign works of selected European countries in the United States and vice versa). Their overseas publishing ventures followed the path that blackface minstrels took in the mid-nineteenth century, as many toured around the world, particularly within the United Kingdom.45 Isidore made arrangements with two established London firms, Charles Sheard & Company and Reynolds & Company, and soon began to import works to the United States and publish some of the Witmark’s music in Britain. While in London, Isidore met an American named Charles Warren, whom he appointed as the personal representative of M. Witmark & Sons across the Atlantic.46 The trafficking of popular music and entertainment that we find between the United States and the United Kingdom throughout the twentieth century into today was, in part,

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shaped by blackface in the mid-nineteenth century and international relations established by the Witmarks in the 1890s. After making these connections in London, the Witmarks also began to establish houses in major US cities, like Chicago.47 The Witmarks transitioned to their next location, 49–51 West 28th Street, in 1893.48 Their move coincided with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the large-scale dissemination of ragtime from local black communities to the masses. Soon after the Witmarks moved to West 28th Street, other houses began to follow, such that by 1910, over thirtyeight publishers made their way to the area that became known as Tin Pan Alley, including Attucks Music Publishers—one of the first African American–owned publishing houses in the nation.49 As the Witmarks continued to grow in size and stature, they eventually moved into their first complete building at 8 West 29th Street. From here, the brothers relocated a few times until constructing “the first building devoted exclusively to the publication of popular music” at 37th Street, between Broadway and Seventh Avenue in 1903.50 Whether the building with “six floors and two basements” was exactly the first or one of the first, it was surely one of the most developed single establishments for commercial music at the time. The concentrated locale in which the modern pop music industry emerged reached its zenith around 1910, just as recorded music began to usurp sheet music sales as the primary form of popular music to be sold and consumed in the country. The Witmarks declaration in their biography rang true in the history of Tin Pan Alley: “Thus the five years from 1893 to 1898 may be regarded as a transition period in the history of the United States that was mirrored, in miniature, in the history of the Witmark firm.”51 In addition to the Witmarks’ use of blackface as a source of economic and structural establishment within their publishing house, the oldest brother, Isidore, published a biography of the house with music critic Isaac Goldberg, in what seems like a somewhat propagandistic attempt to construct their own narrative in which Witmark & Sons is central to the founding of Tin Pan Alley during the ragtime era. But in their biography, Witmark and Goldberg also provide statements through which I (re)construct how one of the first houses of Tin Pan Alley imagined itself in relation to actual black people alongside their own Jewish Americanness. I do not read their publications as a matter of fact, but instead as historical artifacts that—in close reading—reveal some of the cultural complexities embedded into the establishment of one of the modern industry’s central houses. I raise and attempt to

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address questions regarding the complex relations between blackness, whiteness, and property, at the fin-de-siècle through popular music.

ritual, whiteness, and the possession of blacksound The minstrel show, however, soon acquired a character that is aptly symbolized by burnt cork. It became, so to speak, pseudo-Negro. Blackface, after all, was not black-skin. Already, then, we have the touch of what is later to become Tin Pan Alley. Even Stephen C. Foster never saw the Swanee River, the occurrence of which in his famous song is simply a geographical accident. Foster no more knew, or cared about, the Swanee River than George Gershwin, years later, when he wrote his song, Swanee, and saw it earn a fortune for him. It is quite the nature of things that Dixie was written up North, and that ragtime and jazz, both born of Negro spirits, should have received their intensive commercial development in New York City.52

Isidore Witmark coauthored The Story of the House of Witmark: From Ragtime to Swingtime with his colleague and music critic Isaac Goldberg in 1939. By the time this book was published (over fifty years after the house was established), the catalogue of M. Witmark & Sons had been acquired by Warner Bros. a decade earlier, and the Witmarks were attempting to solidify their founding legacy in American popular entertainment through this narrative.53 What the authors expressed in the above quote captures the complexity of the racial, performative, and industrial underpinnings of the popular music industry, in both its founding and its contemporary forms. Witmark and Goldberg unwittingly point to the material basis of Blacksound as the core of popular music in the United States—a materiality that is derived from the exploitation of black performance practices and commodified primarily by non-black people. In the above quotation, Witmark and Goldberg give a sweeping ac­­ count of how blackface itself shifted from its antebellum roots into the com­mercialization of ragtime and jazz at the turn of the century in urban centers like New York City. The quote also points to, maybe less obviously, a certain “affinity” that non-black music industrialists had for black sounds, whether real or constructed/imagined through blackface. Their affinity, however, was developed without having to attend to the lived experiences of black people or recognizing their creative practices as sources of intellectual property—“blackface, after all, was not black-skin.”54 Because blackface was founded during enslavement,

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African Americans were considered property themselves and their cultural productions were either taken up as property for profit by nonblack (usually white) people, discounted as having merit to be recognized as (intellectual) property, or both. The populations who emigrated to the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century— particularly from eastern Europe—inherited the systems that placed African and Indigenous people at the bottom of the social, political, and economic ladder, even as they might have experienced various levels of disenfranchisement in the European homelands they had left, or within the United States. What might also be gleaned from Witmark and Goldberg’s quote is the recognition of the lucrative practice of co-opting the intellectual performance property of black people, as it was not recognized as intellectual property under copyright law proper during the antebellum or post-emancipation periods.55 Under copyright law, performance itself was not deemed copyrightable until the 1897 Act, in which a copyrighted work was protected from public performance without permission from the author or publisher. The ephemerality of performance, particularly that of African Americans, was often deemed to be a mere idea that had no value under copyright law if it was not somehow written or transcribed by an “author.” (Who gets to claim authorship is often racialized and determined by class and access.) What’s important to note here, however, is that black aesthetics were surely deemed valuable by music industrialists who used blackface as a technology to script blackness and black performance (whether mimicked, remixed, or imagined) into the aesthetic base of popular music—without having to recognize black authorship culturally or lawfully. Beginning with blackface and dissipating into other forms of popular entertainment at the turn of the century, Blacksound could be owned and commodified through sheet music and other forms deemed “legible” under copyright law by those who had access to claim authorship. Although slavery had been abolished for almost two decades before the establishment of the Witmark house, it set the tone for the way that property relations, particularly the creative property of African Americans, was perceived. Steven A. Best notes that “slavery provides a particular historical form of the ongoing crisis in which persons are treated as things, and things as persons, one that lends historical depth and contour to the subordination (at century’s end) of personality to the property relation.”56 Blacksound could also be separated almost without question from actual black people and their lived experiences by music industrialists

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who drew directly upon black aesthetics or imagined blackness through their own (non-black) lens within popular performance. This separation, or “disengaged engagement,” was a part of both dehumanizing and racializing blackness in ways that limited how black people could represent themselves on the popular stage and in everyday life.57 It is what allowed Witmark and Goldberg to flippantly think of blackface as “pseudo-Negro,” standing in place of actual black people and their innovation of myriad performance aesthetics. Through the “pseudoNegro,” the Witmarks and their Tin Pan Alley colleagues created an entire industry by claiming ownership through their scripting, marketing, publication, and commercialization of blackness. It also provided an avenue through which to freely express one’s own (white) identity, because absorbing scripted black aesthetics and fusing them with one’s own non-black performance practices in making popular music (and whiteness) did not require that they carry the burden or lived experience of being black in a racist and segregated society.58 Like the poorer Irish immigrants that dominated blackface performance and popular music in the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe faced discrimination (specifically, antiSemitism) in the United States in the late nineteenth century. And even still, members of both communities joined the chorus of American popular music through performances of blackface. Both white ethnic groups faced different levels of intraethnic discrimination yet contributed to the construction and performance of “whiteness” that fused class, ethnicity, and origin into a singular racialized category through popular entertainment—even as whiteness remained internally heterogenous across political, cultural, religious, and class lines. Whiteness as a source of “property” that might afford one certain privileges and rights, as defined by Cheryl I. Harris, is “facilitated by an oppositional definition of Black as ‘other’ . . . fundamentally, the question was not so much ‘who is white,’ but ‘who may be considered white,’ as the historical pattern was that various immigrant groups of different ethnic origins negotiated their relationship to white identity that was constructed upon AngloAmerican norms.”59 The narrative provided by Witmark and Goldberg in The Story of the House of Witmark is a critical source in both uncovering and unpacking how these figures—and the larger music communities they were a part of—weaved themselves into the fabric of American popular culture through musical entertainment. For during [the time between 1893 and 1898] the taste of the nation swung, though with a halting, nervous indecisive rhythm, away from the servitude

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of the three-quarters time and the polite, moral four-four of the sentimental ballad. Already the negroid rhythms of the minstrel show had been insinuating a new tempo in the national consciousness. The more we learn about the early minstrel singers and the minstrel show that grew out of their activities more than a hundred years ago, the more we realize that such shows contained both the fast and slow rhythms that were to come forth one day in the guise, respectively, of “ragtime” and “blues.” The minstrel show is one of the spiritual and material sources of Tin Pan Alley.60

This passage, written over fifty years after the establishment of the Witmark house and over a hundred years since T. D. Rice was the first to jump Jim Crow in blackface, captures the historical and aesthetic basis of the popular music industry leading up to the 1890s. Although blackface had dominated mainstream popular performance for almost half a century, the popular sheet-music market was heavily geared toward middle- and upper-class (white) audiences between the 1850s and 1880s.61 It wasn’t until 1892 that (what would later become known as) Tin Pan Alley achieved its first big hit with Charles K. Harris’s sentimental ballad “After the Ball,” which sold over five million copies within the decade.62 Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, there was somewhat of a splintering within the market of popular entertainment between performance and sheet music, as those with access to pianos and home parlors were generally considered to be more “refined” in their tastes, preferring the sentimental ballad, operetta, or European ballroom dances (like the waltz) over “vulgar” (i.e., associated with blackness) minstrel songs.63 Minstrel sheet music at the time was geared primarily toward performers, but more “genteel” versions of blackface songs—popularized by composers like Irish American Stephen Foster and African American James Bland—often sold well as solo works and appeared in songsters alongside popular ballads and tunes of the day.64 Goldberg’s claim that the minstrel show served as the “spiritual and material” basis of Tin Pan Alley might sound like a romanticization of the deleterious form, but it points to the multiple ways in which white music industrialists over the course of the nineteenth century sought to possess (through commercialization) and become possessed by (through performance and consumption) actual or fabricated ideas of blackness on which the minstrel show was based. The idea of becoming possessed by black performativity—again, whether drawn on real life blackness or (white) imaginaries of black people—is not immediately legible in how we historicize the consumption and performance in popular music.

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However, untangling the historical duality of possessing (as a consumer or producer) a racialized musical object, and being simultaneously possessed by a racialized “other,” demonstrates how the ephemeromateriality of Blacksound serves as a source of property and identity within popular music.65 Blackface minstrelsy is a ritualized performance of visual and sonic masking that invokes being possessed by the aesthetic properties of Blacksound. Early blackface was a ritual of popular entertainment that allowed for whiteness to be constructed socially and legally by mostly Irish and other American men of Western European heritage, as black people and black performativity served as sources of property to be claimed, embodied, and exploited during slavery. By the time the modern popular music industry emerged in the 1890s during the Jim Crow era, blackface had been the aesthetic and structural basis of American popular entertainment for almost seventy years. Blacking up was deeply embedded into the practice of making popular music, and it functioned as an “aesthetic ritual” with “religious ritual” overlap, drawing on the work of Victor Turner, that involved not only masking with burnt cork but a corporeal, sonic, and psychic transformation of self through an imagined black “other.”66 The blackface mask and the aesthetics of Blacksound functioned as the realized “spirit” of the white performer.67 At the same time, these aesthetics also served as a source of property to be scripted, copyrighted, and “owned” by (ethnic) white music industrialists who had more access to publishing rights overall. Because there were no copyright laws in place that protected sound throughout the nineteenth century, and the sounds of black people, in particular, were most frequently treated as public domain, blackface performance laid the aesthetic foundation for commercial popular music and served as a space for ritual and legal “possession” of black performance aesthetics (i.e., intellectual performance property) by non-black people. My analysis of blackface and the aesthetics of Blacksound within popular performance rituals seeks to blur the lines between performances that are “sacred and secular, that are religious, aesthetic, and recreational.”68 In The Story of the House of Witmark, Witmark and Goldberg display that they—and by extension and practice their colleagues who helped found Tin Pan Alley—thought of embodying blackness in and out of blackface as a (secular) ritual process that involved spirit, possession, and performance.

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ragtime in the aesthetic shift of blacksound Minstrelsy had long been established as the dominant form of popular music that was performed and consumed throughout the country by the late nineteenth century. The aesthetics of Blacksound that were heavily scripted in blackface began to shift dramatically as more and more black musicians began to participate both in and outside of the form, on and off stage, as well as in local halls and larger theaters. The black vernacular style that became known as “ragtime” traveled throughout the country with the African American musicians who migrated from rural to urban centers in the wake of emancipation. As Witmark and Goldberg note: “It was the five years between 1893 and 1898 that the ballad and the waltz types gradually yielded, often to the accompaniment of stern moral denunciation, to the allurements of ragtime. Ragtime derived from the familiar minstrel South that, in a different mood, had given us the Negro ‘spirituals,’ ‘the mellows,’ the work songs.”69 Since the late 1890s, there has been copious writing on ragtime as a performance style and genre. Yet even though ragtime is foundational to the aesthetics and business of modern popular music, it had almost disappeared from the popular (and scholarly) imagination by the midtwentieth century. The style had been absorbed into jazz, blues, and other black music inventions that shaped the development of Blacksound within popular music. But with the success of the 1973 movie, The Sting, ragtime received a popular and academic resurgence, as Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” became a sensation (once again) almost eighty years later as part of the film’s soundtrack. On the heels of The Sting came more musicological studies of ragtime, and one of the most cited authors on the subject is Edward A. Berlin, who acknowledged in his critical study Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (1980) how ragtime moved from local, more novel black contexts to a commercialized form for white performance and consumption, as he notes: “Public acceptance of ragtime, as shown by the enormous increase in commercial publications since 1899, was coupled with the gradual absorption of its name and style into the mainstream of American popular music. Ragtime as an exoticism, as a quaint music from the fringes of society, was replaced by ragtime, the white American popular music.”70 Today, ragtime is most thought of as a piano style (i.e., the “classic” ragtime of Scott Joplin and James Scott), but in its early history, the term also referred to other instrumental music, to vocal music, and to dance during the 1890s and early 1900s. “Coon songs,” ragtime band

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music, and the “cakewalk” dance craze were all genres of ragtime that developed from this innovative black vernacular style. To consider the movement of black sounds into Blacksound by Tin Pan Alley publishers like the Witmarks, it is necessary to consider the origins of ragtime’s aesthetic traits within black performance. The “exoticism” of ragtime that Edward A. Berlin references in the above quote might be attributed to the novel performance aesthetics of black Americans that have their origins in (primarily West and Central) African practices. These musical practices were often historically described by white observers (from colonialism onward) in ways that distinguish them from the musical practices of (classical) European styles. Styles that were associated with the formal principles of rhythm and harmony were often coded as “white” (even though the early folk tunes of many British descendants shared similar characteristics with African ones). The racialization of musical sound created a paradigm in which black sounds were both sonically and materially racialized as “other,” even as they were absorbed into the popularized sonic construction of Blacksound. The racialization of musical styles and sounds became even more common with the early proliferation of ragtime, as it was especially defined by one of its most identifying aesthetic traits: its ragged, i.e., syncopated, rhythm, which was developed in relation to the black performance practice of improvising or “ragging” upon a variety of African and European harmonic and rhythmic forms. And as my discussion of black blackface performers has aimed to demonstrate, “what later, in the last decade of the 19th century, was labelled as ‘ragtime’ was played much earlier at minstrel shows, disseminated by itinerant musicians (e.g., banjo players), and performed at the same time as dance and song.”71 The banjo and string band music in general are important within the development of ragtime and in its transition into the classic piano style.72 The banjo is native to Africa and was cultivated on plantations and in other regions throughout the country by African Americans before it was co-opted as the primary instrument to be mimicked and commercialized by white minstrels in early blackface.73 With the proliferation and commercialization of the banjo through minstrelsy in the United States and United Kingdom came the detachment of the instrument from its African (American) roots. But the influence of the banjo on ragtime style is evidence of its continued significance within the musical practices of black Americans, as the rhythmic and harmonic practices from black banjo performance served as a core aesthetic

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within this Gilded Age–era black musical style. In Rudy Blesh’s work They All Played Ragtime, he quotes an 1899 essay on ragtime published by Rupert Hughes noting that ragtime (as a dance) “is sort of a frenzy with frequent yelps of delight from the dancer and the spectators, accompanied by the latter with banjo strumming and clapping of hands and stamping of feet. The banjo-figuration is very noticeable in the ragmusic and the division of one of the beats into two short notes is perhaps traceable to hand clapping.”74 Hughes’s description doesn’t offer much in terms of the specific musical aspects of ragtime, and it in fact reads a lot like the description of “Patting Juba,” which was cultivated by black performers like William Henry “Master Juba” Lane and Solomon Northup on and off plantations in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 2). Yet, as Samuel Floyd and Marsha J. Reisser demonstrate in their analysis “Classic Ragtime Music”— which remains a critical intervention into the black roots of ragtime—the rhythmic figurations that developed from the “downstroke” and picking method of banjo performance and the arpeggiation of melodic lines that resembles a “broken” rhythmic figuration are evident in the syncopated patterns found in the right hand of piano rags.75 The melodically rhythmic performance practice of ragtime was in concert with the drone-like bass in the five-string (African American) banjo, serving as a constant pulse against the shifting rhythmic patterns in the melodic figurations.76 The “oom-pah”-like figuration in much of (classic) ragtime might be related to the popularity of marching band music (where ragtime was also performed and cultivated) and the waltz. Floyd and Reisser also expanded upon Hughes’s assertion that hand-clapping in black folk and religious music might serve as a precursor to such figuration, pointing to the alternating “stomp + clap + stomp + clap” pulse within duple meter spiritual songs.77 While classic piano rags form the basis of much ragtime analysis, it was an improvised, danced, sung, and instrumental style. My deconstruction of how ragtime sounded within past ephemeral performances builds upon the analysis of piano rags, while I consider the Signifyin(g) practices of black performativity that took place.78 Tin Pan Alley publishers and composers moved between operetta, ballads and sentimental songs, and minstrel tunes in the first half of the 1890s. But the pulse and form of popular music began to make a gradual shift that became seismic by the turn of the century after ragtime was introduced to the masses at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Once a localized aesthetic style cultivated primarily by black performers in the south and midwest—especially Missouri—ragtime was quickly

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exposed to the larger population. Over twenty-seven million people visited the Chicago World’s Fair, where the new and exciting sound could be heard performed in multiple locations around the city and just outside of the Fair itself.79 Already, the more “ragged” (i.e., not strict or on the beat) or syncopated and improvised performances of African Americans—both offstage in local halls and onstage as minstrels—had shifted the aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy during the antebellum era and after emancipation. The distinct performance styles of local black performers who encountered white patrons and copyists in various urban centers throughout the country had an impact upon how Blacksound was both directly and loosely based upon their intellectual performance properties. The “taste of the nation swung” toward ragtime with its public introduction in the 1890s, the centralization of Tin Pan Alley in New York City, technological developments, immigration, migration, urbanization, and a swelling population searching for a new beat through which to conduct their daily lives.80

publishing blacksound through ragtime One of M. Witmark & Sons’ first popular ragtime coon song publications was Irish American musician Barney Fagan’s “My Gal Is a HighBorn Lady” (1896). This year was known as the “year of the ‘coon song’ ” due to the popularity of commercial ragtime songs such as “My Gal” and African American musician Ernest Hogan’s “All Coons Look Alike to Me” (discussed in Chapter 5), both of which were published by the Witmarks. Early Witmark publications helped inaugurate the ragtime and coon song craze, and they are also an example of how black aesthetics and Blacksound became sources of property that were mostly possessed by white music industrialists while being consumed by the masses. Barney Fagan was a seasoned minstrelsy veteran, and “My Gal Is a High-Born Lady” demonstrates how mainstream white culture both received and consumed ragtime, which was pioneered by African Americans under the shadow of blackface performance. The “ragged” (polyrhythmic, syncopated, improvised, polymetrical) styles of black vernacular performance that developed into ragtime were largely regional and cultivated within black communities until the mid-1880s. The popularity of the coon song was directly responsible for the national spread of black vernacular styles like ragtime, by both black and white performers. Fagan’s use of stereotyped black dialect (as common in the coon song genre), accompanied by light syncopation and regular use of dotted

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rhythms in the melody and piano, became characteristic of the popular Tin Pan Alley style that developed out of the coon song, especially after the huge success of Ernest Hogan’s “All Coons” (see Chapter 5). The compositional choices found in many coon songs by white composers were often simpler than the more sophisticated rhythmic and melodic practices of ragtime by itinerant black musicians and classic ragtime composers. And still, their live performances allowed for another level of rhythmic and melodic improvisation that might not be captured in the sheet music itself (see Figure 14). Some of ragtime’s idiosyncratic rhythmic practices were employed in many coon songs of early Tin Pan Alley. According to Isaac Goldberg: “to break down the rhythm, to rag it, would mean simply to pep it up with off-beat rhythms and effects of syncopation.”81 The complex rhythmic, harmonic, and motivic play of ragtime was regularized to “pep [‘regular’ rhythm] up with off-beat rhythms” and found in much of the commercial ragtime music published by white composers prior to the 1890s. The stylistic normalization of ragtime is most evident in the chorus of “My Gal Is a High-Born Lady”: My gal is a highborn lady; She’s black, but not too shady, Feathered like a peacock, just as gay, She is not colored; she was born that way, I’m proud of my black Venus, No coon can come between us, Long the line they can’t outshine, this highborn gal of mine!

First, the dotted rhythm of the opening verse (played by the piano and possibly sung in a similar rhythm by the voice in practice) presages the emergence of the repeated dotted figure that begins to dominate popular songs out of Tin Pan Alley in the early twentieth century (often a dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note, or some variation within duple meter). Again, the more complex rhythmic practices of even classic ragtime piano music by black composers in the 1890s and 1910s demonstrate a much-varied approach to rhythm and melody in ragtime. As Floyd and Reisser observe about many of these works in their analysis of ragtime piano music: “It is clear that the ‘syncopations’ of the melodic lines of classic ragtime pieces do not result from ‘off-beat accents,’ as some denote them, but occur as a natural consequence of the irregularities of multimetric configuration (additive rhythms such as 3 + 3 + 2).”82 The effect of ragtime-influenced syncopation is most obviously presented throughout the chorus of “My Gal Is a High-Born Lady” by the eighth-to-dotted-quarter-note rhythm that occurs on the fourth beat of

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the second, fourth, tenth, twelfth, and thirteenth measures of the sixteen-bar chorus. Fagan also smoothly inserts syncopation into the melody by creating an agogic accent on the second beat of the opening measure. The accent subsequently becomes a motive that occurs in the first and third measures of the first and third stanzas. Fagan’s use of stereotyped black dialect, accompanied by light syncopation and the regular use of dotted rhythms in the melody and piano of his hit “My Gal,” was a blueprint for the popular style of Tin Pan Alley pop that developed out of the coon song. The codification of a smooth, relaxed, and syncopated style within this and other coon songs simultaneously expressed freedom from the constrictions of stoic, rhythmic regularity connected to the “highbrow” sounds of European-based classical music. Recounting his composition, Fagan notes: My greatest success of recent years was “My Gal Was a High-Born Lady,” and I wrote that in a peculiar way. It was on my birthday, two years ago. My wife and I had just been out for a wheel ride, and when we came in, hungry, for it was a crisp, clear morning, January 12, I remembered that it was my birthday, and also that we were flat broke, for we had been idle for five weeks and had used up everything. . . . When I had the thing finished and began to hum it over, the first thing I knew my wife was singing it with me. This was a good omen. . . . Then I walked down to Witmark’s publishing house, asked young Witmark to give me a chord and I sang it for him. “Give that to us,” he said as soon as I finished.83

Whether one reads his account as fact or fiction, Fagan is the center of his narrative. In its background were the black performers and musicians with whom the practices originated that became absorbed into commercial ragtime and that were published as sheet music as a form of property to be protected. In a highly successful attempt to create a hit and garner financial success, Fagan used a familiar genre, minstrelsy, and its popular derivative, the coon song, as a basis to create a slightly ragged, dialect-infused “love song.” The freedom to express such topics, through a milder use of recognizably “authentic” and thereby “freeing” scripts of black performance, points toward how Blacksound laid the sonic foundation for Tin Pan Alley. These popular and lucrative developments, however, were already embedded within the racialized scripts and embodied discourses that developed out of blackface (see Chapter 3). Eugene Stratton, a contemporary of Fagan and one of the best-known coon shouters of his era, who began in blackface minstrelsy, notes the process of “sanitizing” (his view of) black vernacular aesthetics for white audiences: “The genuine

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figure 14. “My Gal Is a High-Born Lady,” Barney Fagan (M. Witmark & Sons).

original Coon Dance, however, was a heavy and ungraceful affair; still, there it was, the basis of something better, and I determined to work up from it something lighter, more piquante, more attractive altogether. Then, their songs, like their dances, were just a trifle heavy, also. I wanted something more delicate and dainty.”84

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figure 14. (continued)

the house that blackface built Ragtime sheet music, vaudeville, commercial recordings, dance crazes, and other forms of popular entertainment proliferated at the turn of the century—soon after Fagan’s “more delicate and dainty” hit coon song was published by the Witmarks. By this moment, consumers of popular

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figure 14. (continued)

music in the United States had been heavily invested in a (ritual) practice (of performance) that no longer required burnt cork to transcend the more formal, restrictive expectations assigned to the construction of whiteness in making popular music. Popular music and entertainment were “colored” by its association with black or non-white people because of its origin in blackface. Simultaneously, “high art”—

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figure 14. (continued)

socially tethered to European-American forms such as opera, the symphony, “formal” theater (e.g., Greek, Shakespeare, and the like)— became more directly associated with white elites in the last decades of the nineteenth century.85 But through the manipulation of Blacksound within commercial music, ragtime could be marketed to a wider (white) audience, across classes and ethnicities.

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What happens in the liminal space between blackface performance and the making of Blacksound when the ritual itself is a part of constructing versions of whiteness by intentionally burlesquing and delimiting blackness?86 What blackface theater enabled—and popular performance mediums derived from blackface rituals—is a dialectic of belief and disbelief in which the performer asks the audience to “suspend belief, at least for a time, in order to treat what they experience as being provisionally ‘authentic.’ ”87 This performative dialectic not only functions in the making of racialized (and often racist) caricatures taken as authentic representations of minoritized people (e.g., Asian, African, and Indigenous Americans), but it also allowed for many of the eastern European Jewish immigrants in urban centers like New York City to negotiate between constructed ideals of whiteness as citizen (based upon Anglo Protestantism) and the formerly enslaved African Americans whose citizen status remained structurally unrealized. Since its invention, blackface served not just as a platform for ridicule and violence toward black people, but also as a primary stage for the quotidian engagement with local and national politics, major cultural events, and the everyday concerns of its participants and audiences within the making of whiteness as Americanness. It was through the ritual of blackface—which invoked being possessed by a black “other”—that non-black people felt free to express topics from the most taboo to the most common. They especially used blackface to address topics that might otherwise be deemed by society to be improper or inappropriate, especially with the increasing competition for class and cultural status among various ethnic groups within the swelling population in the late-nineteenth century. The “deeply psychological influence” that Witmark and Goldberg claimed black people had “upon [their] fellow Americans” was based not on their exploration of the actual interiority of black people, but on the common dispossession of black humanity and aesthetics for personal, economic, and/or political gain.88 Because they did not have to carry the actual burden of being black while donning blackface or manufacturing Blacksound, their ability to engage with black aesthetics yet be disengaged from the conditions or actual lives of black people was central to the ways in which (white) audiences and performers could realize their own social anxieties, while being assured that someone else was more disenfranchised within classed and racialized hierarchies. The process of erasing actual black people (through blackface caricature)—while seeking (self-)expression through the possession of black aesthetics/blackness—contributed to

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shaping anti-blackness (i.e., racist violence directed toward a person simply by existing as black) in America. At the base of the aesthetic, structural, and economic foundations of the music industry at the turn of the twentieth century is the exploitation of the lived experiences of black people and their performances alongside the negation of blackness and the negotiation of whiteness. The Negro is the symbol of our uninhibited expression, of our uninhibited action. He is our catharsis. He is the disguise behind which we may, for a releasing moment, rejoin that part of ourselves which we have sacrificed to civilization. He helps us to a double deliverance. What we dare not say, often we freely sing. Music, too, is an absolution. And what we would not dare to sing in our own plain speech we freely sing in the Negro dialect, or in terms of the black.89

Considering that race is understood as a social construction that carries material meaning and consequences, Isaac Goldberg (quoted above) points to the ways in which this construct is centered on performance— particularly the performance of “self” and “other” through the legacy of blackface. Blackface, along with the construction of blackness and the making of anti-blackness, is one of the primary organizational systems that has helped to both construct and constitute whiteness through popular entertainment within US history.90 And because blackface developed out of slavery and feeds the ontological construction of black people as a source of property to be “possessed,” the “double delivery” that the “negro” allows, according to Goldberg, is itself made possible by the ritual possession of blackness through sound and music.91 Witmark and Goldberg remark: “[the] Negro has become for us a mask from behind which we speak with less self-consciousness of our own primitive beliefs and emotions.”92 By using the universal “we” here, it is possible to consider that the authors are referring not merely to themselves, but to anyone who is not black and, more specifically, to the construction of white identity as a racialized category in opposition to the “negro”—or blackness. The Witmark brothers may not have specifically articulated their relationship to whiteness in their writings, but a proximal alliance might be understood through their oppositional relationship to blackness as non-black, European-descended Americans.93 Isidore notes very clearly in The Story of the House of Witmark that blackness and blackface were the spiritual and material source through which the Witmark publishing house, Tin Pan Alley, and he himself were made. When once asked about his favorite hobby, Isidore replied, “My hobby . . . is another man’s death.” The hobby in question,

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according to the Witmark biography, was the minstrel show.94 Witmark and Goldberg go on further to note that whatever else the minstrel show may have been, and it was a number of entertaining and even important things, it was also the first foreshadowing of Tin Pan Alley. And although the minstrel show, even in the early Nineties, was beginning to yield to other developments of burlesque, to the eye-andear excitements of comic operetta and extravaganza from England, and to budding musical comedy of our own, it was still a powerful influence in the theater. Powerful enough, in fact, for the Witmarks, under the impulse of Isidore’s fondness for the form, Julie’s voice, and the vaudevillian capabilities of Frank and Eddie, to build up a highly profitable branch of their business.95

Through the legacy of blackface, the Witmarks are often discussed as one of the earliest Tin Pan Alley publishers, if not the earliest, within the history of popular music. I want to be explicit about their innovations that led to many of the practices taken up by other houses that helped establish the modern popular music industry, and how these practices remained heavily grounded in the brothers’ investment in blackface minstrelsy as the structural and aesthetic basis of popular music making, marketing, and consumption. Although sheet music served as the primary vehicle for distributing and owning popular music, unpacking marketing and other extramusical factors within the Witmark & Sons publishers is as important as sheet music and performance in analyzing the commercialization of popular music at the turn of the twentieth century.96 The Witmarks participated in the advent of a number of new technologies of commercial entertainment at the end of the 1890s. Julius recorded phonographic records as early as 1898 and was a part of some of the earliest moving-picture features in 1897.97 In addition to engaging with emerging technologies of popular entertainment, the Witmarks set the precedent for the structuring of major music companies through their innovatory endeavors: the launches of the Witmark Monthly and the Witmark Entertainment Bureau, the acquisition of other publishers, and the building of the Witmark music library. The launch of the Witmark Monthly helped inaugurate a trend in which publishing houses would not only present their catalogue and lists of popular songs, but also include articles, interviews, and marketing materials that would promote various aspects of their company (including blackface), establishing them as a go-to voice within the industry at large. The year in which the “Tin Pan Alley House organ” was launched, the Witmarks also signed one of the foremost women composers at the time, Caro

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Roma, and “perhaps most significant of all,” Victor Herbert joined the list of composers to be exclusively published by the house.98 The brothers also built upon their booking and talent-development ventures in the establishment of the Witmark Entertainment Bureau, which began as early as they performed minstrel shows for various institutions in the 1880s. One of the first of its kind within a publishing house, this office began to sign talent and book them for various engagements, as well as serve as producers of shows themselves. The Witmarks signed popular performers like Marie Dressler, who would eventually go on to win an Academy Award for Best Actress at the third annual Oscar ceremony in 1931.99 In addition to their entertainment bureau, the Witmarks began to acquire publishers, such as Weber & Fields (who owned one of the most popular music halls and presented some of the leading acts of the time), greatly expanding their catalogue and music library.100 The Witmark music library, which eventually grew into the largest library of the popular music publishers at the time, was eventually bought out by Warner Bros. in 1929—helping to secure this new entertainment firm as one of the most powerful in the business. Isidore notes that “With one exception—and an important exception, for it had been the inspiration for the Witmark venture—this Library was the only business of its kind in the world. Fifteen years before, at almost the moment in which the Witmark children were embarking upon their career, the Tams Music Library had been organized. It became the ambition of the Witmarks to overtake this institution, despite the handicap of a fifteen years’ start.”101 Eventually, the Witmarks absorbed the Tams Music Library, making their collection unrivaled among early music publishers.102 The coon song craze, band music, and the cakewalk helped instigate a stark shift in the aesthetic and formal basis of the bourgeoning popular music industry. Ragtime—a distinctly African American performance practice that became eventually absorbed into a seemingly de-racialized (or white-centered) popular style—became the inaugural genre that shaped the “fast and slow rhythms” commercialized by Tin Pan Alley as popular music through publishers like the Witmarks. At the same time, mostly white music industrialists targeted a primarily white audience (comprising various classes and ethnic groups) in its growth into a fullfledged industry in the latter half of the 1890s. Already established by blackface minstrelsy as the first form of original popular entertainment to develop in the United States, the music-industrial practice of absorbing a localized black style as the basis of popular music would continue

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through the blues, jazz, rhythm & blues, hip hop, and so on over the course of the twentieth century and into the present.103 M. Witmark & Sons helped lay the foundation of the emerging economy of popular entertainment, as well as constructions of blackness and whiteness through the making and performance of popular sound. In the book’s closing chapter, I give special attention to the commercialization of ragtime, Blacksound, and African American musicians—aesthetically and structurally—within the emergence of the modern economy of popular music at the turn of the twentieth century. During this time, records and other technologies began to compete with sheet music as the primary music commodity within popular entertainment. I also consider how particular aesthetic and industrial operations impacted the lives and intellectual performance property of black people under the racist structures of Jim Crow that conditioned black life from the 1890s until after the mid-twentieth century. The house that the Witmarks built—as an inaugural publishing house of Tin Pan Alley—was the house that blackface built, laying the foundation for modern popular music and recording within and beyond the United States.

chapter 5

Intellectual (Performance) Property Ragtime Goes Pop

T. Thomas Fortune (1856–1928), known as the “Dean of African American journalists,” had great hope for African American entertainers in the late nineteenth century: I believe that within fifteen years the leading comedians, dancers, and musicians of the day will include many Afro-Americans. The colored man is a natural born humorist, musician, and dancer, and when the prejudice against him which is now moderating shall have been entirely or nearly wiped out, you fill find him occupying prominent places upon the amusement stage.1

Having noticed the segregation of black and white minstrels in the mid1890s, a critic from the (New York) Sun wrote to Fortune to inquire about the status of black performers in popular culture.2 Fortune—who was born into slavery in Florida, attended Howard University, and went on to become one of the most prominent black civil rights activists, critics, editors, and writers of his day—turned out to be partially correct in his response to the critic: the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century saw the expansion of the emergent modern entertainment industry to include more African American musicians and performers.3 However, their status and skillset as a “natural born humorist, musician, and dancer” continued to be shaped by the racialized scripts of minstrelsy and popular entertainment that had been in constant circulation since the antebellum era. His hope that the prejudice against the “negro at the time was now moderating” did not come to fruition.4 Plessy v. Ferguson gave legal backing to the transformation 161

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of Jim Crow,5 as the character itself went from being one of the most enduring (and racist) icons of blackface, to becoming the name for a set of discriminatory practices and laws that buttressed white supremacy beginning in the late nineteenth century after Reconstruction. And yet still, African Americans increasingly seized the opportunity to enter popular music after slavery was abolished. It was one of the most lucrative ways to earn income for many black people, and one could tap into a market if there was an audience and the economic and cultural access available to do so.6 However, that access was often racialized, such that most of the black performers who entered as professional pop musicians had to do so through the most enduring form of popular entertainment of the century, blackface minstrelsy. One of the most profitable forms of professional work for any musician or entertainer in the United States, blackface ironically provided a source of economic and cultural capital for a minoritized population that had experienced severe disenfranchisement after almost two hundred and fifty years of enslavement. It also provided them with the opportunity to challenge the racialized and racist blackface scripts that had come to stand in for actual black people through the history of blackface.7 Even as they pursued performance and other occupations in their unpredictable quests for a better means of existence, African Americans continued to endure the burden of structural racism. Black codes, convict leasing, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, white supremacy, the KKK, and other forms of racial terror continued to shape everyday black life. Even still, the post-emancipation migration of black people from rural to urban spaces (or from localized black communities to the general public) in search of new opportunities in a developing industrial society led to the nationwide dissemination of their performance practices, both in and out of blackface. Despite the continued structural oppression of African Americans after slavery, their sounds and movements had an even more direct influence upon the growth of popular entertainment across the country at the turn of the twentieth century. The popular music industry’s expansion parallels the exponential growth of other major American industries and cities after the Civil War and leading into the Gilded Age. Industries such as the railroad system, coal mining, and steel were critical to positioning the United States as an economic and cultural empire, yet so was the developing modern music industry. These industries also grew within the political and cultural landscape of Jim Crow, and the creative work of black Americans continued to be exploited and co-opted by those with systematic power.

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Through the commodification of ragtime (via coon songs and recordings), invented by African Americans in the late nineteenth century, I explore within this chapter the specific aesthetic and performative contributions of black (minstrel) performers, as well as how forms of (black) intellectual (performance) property become subsumed or consumed within ragtime. I also consider how the sounds of black people— as scripted and performed within sheet music, live acts, and early recordings—overlapped with the construction of race and racism, the shifting aesthetics of Blacksound at the turn of the twentieth century, and the legal structuring of copyright law. I begin with the International Copyright Act of 1891, as I continue to discuss the legacy of blackface through black performers and troupes. This chapter goes on to consider how black vernacular performances (in and out of blackface) shape the development of Blacksound at the turn of the century, as I unpack the significance of the “coon song” that helped introduce ragtime to the masses. This discussion culminates with the advent of the commercial recording industry through one of its first recording stars, George Washington Johnson, a former slave whose recordings sold tens of thousands of units in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

intellectual property and the 1891 international copyright act Popular music is shaped not only by the people who perform, consume, and package it, but also by the law. The nation’s first copyright law was passed in 1710, but it was not until 1831 that sheet music legally became the first “creative” work under protection.8 From the very start, copyright law relied on the written over the oral and performed. As a result, it was publishers and a select few individuals who could claim authorship over published works. Importantly, these laws were established during slavery when African Americans were considered property themselves. After emancipation, one of the most significant legislations in the development of the modern popular music industry and the commercialization of Blacksound is the 1891 International Copyright Act. The Act provided limited protection to foreign copyright holders in the United States (and vice versa). It was especially designed for UK and US copyright holders to negotiate terms of music property exchange across the Atlantic.9 For much of the nineteenth century, music publishing was decentralized and generally led by independent houses in urban areas

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throughout the US, heavily based on the sales of European classical music and/or parlor tunes and ballads to wealthier classes.10 This publishing model was particularly lucrative for the few who could afford to publish, because independent dealers could simply reproduce sheet music from European composers without having to pay for the original work in its US publication and sale. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, much of the sheet music that was considered popular was mostly limited to blackface tunes, ballads, band music, and opera/operetta arias and scenes that were not yet widely accessible to the masses. Although the popularity of minstrel tunes in the 1850s and 1860s instigated the dissemination of blackface sheet music, most of these publications were geared toward minstrels and those interested in performing in blackface for profit. But with the passing of the 1891 legislation came the widening market of popular sheet music production. Publishers were now required to develop a new commercial model that did not include the pirating of European music. The growing pop music market was also instigated by the swelling middle class and general population, urbanization, and the more direct inclusion of performance practices by black people within popular music. Importantly, until recordings and radio took precedence within the industry in the mid-twentieth century, sheet music was the primary method through which a publisher or composer could claim rights to their musical works, and sheet music was therefore one of the main products that helped to build the modern music industry economically and legally. The wholesale value of popular sheet music tripled between 1890 and 1909, from $1.7 to $5.5 million, and the price for sheet music rose from twenty-five to sixty cents a copy during the era of international copyright protection.11 The idea of intellectual property (inventions of the mind) had not fully materialized under copyright law during slavery. Yet the concept sowed seeds of development as an inherently regulating idea that denied black people rights to their own bodies and creativity, leaving them vulnerable to constant theft by those who could claim ownership over their person and anything they produced.12 Orally transmitted and performed aesthetics were not copyrightable by black people, both because of their racialization and because of the general denial of protection to most types of performance (outside of large dramatic works) until the twentieth century. At the outset and during the continued development of the US popular music industry, those who were granted the most “rights” to claim

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authorship over these and other sounds and performances through sheet music publications were mostly white men who “appropriated” real and imagined sounds and performances of black culture through blackface. Their own vernacular sounds were “blended” with others (e.g., European classical, Irish, and Scottish folk music, and the like). This foundation sets the sonic basis for my concept of Blacksound as the sonic complement to blackface. The sounds and legacies of blackface performance continued to shape popular music after the disappearance of the blackface mask. After the 1891 International Copyright Act, the Copyright Act of 1909 was the largest revision to the federal law since the Constitution. Tin Pan Alley composers lobbied for its revision so that their authorship might extend to the mechanical reproduction of their copyrighted works. Sheet music began to find itself in competition with sound and other mechanical reproduction technologies as the primary medium through which popular music was commercialized and consumed outside of performance.13 Under the 1909 Act, it became required to request and pay for permissions to reproduce published songs through recordings and mechanical instruments. Even protections for (and in some cases against) mechanical sound reproduction technologies were still based on the written score—leaving the sounds that went into their live realization up for legal grabs.14 As David Suisman astutely notes, “Fetishizing the composer and the composition, copyright law reaffirmed and materially strengthened the value of music as property, not process.”15 The intellectual performance property developed by black Americans through their sonic and embodied performances were often created in real time and circulated through intracommunal oral traditions. Although sounds were often scripted into sheet music and early recordings in more simplified ways by mostly white music industrialists for white consumers, the ways that the folk practices of enslaved Africans in America—e.g., the ring shout, (negro) spiritual, and other black vernacular styles of the nineteenth century—found their way into the mainstream through (black) blackface minstrelsy and ragtime reveal how the aesthetics of Blacksound continued to morph in the 1890s and early 1900s. Black people and their aesthetic practices, which were once more localized, began to travel from rural and southern communities into urban centers in a post-emancipation context. They also took on new styles and forms that became synthesized through ragtime (alongside developing early blues and gospel aesthetics) and spread among the masses. Black sounds were simultaneously commercialized, consumed,

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and absorbed, by various classes and ethnicities of white people throughout the nation and during its exponential growth during the Gilded Age. Such a practice had already been in place, as many black performers entered pop through blackface minstrelsy post-emancipation.

absorbing black sounds into blacksound through (black) blackface performance In her monumental study on the history of African American culture and dance, Katrina Hazzard-Donald points directly to the shift in Blacksound that took place in the wake of the Civil War: Between 1877 and 1920, African Americans saw their music and dance adopted (poorly) by the white theater, the recording industry, and the newly emerging popular culture industry, while they suffered systematic exclusion from those markets. The songs of Mae West, Sophie Tucker, and Tin Pan Alley, Ann Pennington’s black bottom, and the dances of Vernon and Irene Castle transformed black culture into something that white Americans could safely partake of. They led to the white invasion of black cabarets and the outright exploitive commercialization of African-American entertainment of the next three decades. Still, though tidied up and rendered bland, AfricanAmerican dance and music permeated American households as never before. In this way the black and white cultures merged to form a distinct entity on the western international scene.16

The sounds of early minstrelsy in the United States were based largely upon white minstrels in blackface singing mostly folk melodies from Ireland, Scotland, and England. Minstrels contorted their bodies and feigned “broken” accents in ways that caricatured black people and enabled the improvisation of whiteness through blackness/blackface. But the number of black minstrel performers, and black popular entertainers in general, rapidly increased leading up to the Civil War. While black musicians like “Old Corn Meal” and James “Picayune” Butler (Chapter 1) and William Henry Lane (Chapter 2) were significant players in the development of early blackface, the institution of slavery meant that black performers in pop entertainment were mostly still rare through the early 1860s. Yet in a post-emancipation context, the gradual increase of a black presence on the popular stage led to the increase of the actual black sounds produced by black people, now available for wider consumption and circulation in and out of blackface. Black sounds were part of remixing the existent Blacksound scripts that had developed from the amalgamation of European folk and clas-

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sical styles in early blackface, alongside the actual influences of black aesthetics. These performances were expressed through the ruse of the blackface mask by white performers imitating the corporeal and sonic gestures that they assigned to black people and experienced through their own (racist) imaginaries, observations, and fantasies of blackness. The “merging” of black and white cultures that Hazzard-Donald refers to is one that has been in place within American popular music since blackface began (and even prior). Yet this merging is historically shaped by the constant inflection of (real and imagined) black performance under the structural control of white music industrialists. After emancipation, the direct influence of black performers leading up to the birth of ragtime—as arguably one of the first commercial styles of popular sound in the United States—is a considerable moment, and black blackface minstrels were its most significant players. Callender’s Georgia Minstrels were one of the most celebrated blackface minstrel troupes that featured black performers in the nineteenth century, if not the most celebrated. This troupe was established in 1865 by Charles B. Hicks, a black man who it was suggested could almost pass for white.17 After a successful reception in the United States, the Georgia Minstrels toured Ireland, England, Wales, and Germany, where they teamed up with well-known white minstrel and producer Sam Hague (and his band of white minstrels). Hicks eventually sold the troupe to Hague before it was later bought out by its most successful proprietor at the time, George Callender—another well-known white minstrel and producer.18 Due to their acclaim and fame, the Georgia Minstrels spawned many copycat black minstrel troupes of the same name, but this troupe, originally established by an African American, was finally bought out by J. H. Haverly (white minstrel). Haverly used his all-black minstrel troupe to further expand the spectacular and sensational entertainment style of late-nineteenth-century blackface theatricality. In a review of a Boston performance by the Georgia Minstrels, a Boston Herald critic wrote that Beethoven Hall was well filled last evening by admirers of Ethiopian delineations, assembled to see and hear the original Georgia Minstrels, who have returned from a very successful tour in Europe, and are now located at the above-named hall for a short season. The company is a novelty from the fact that all the members are colored, and then [sic] performances possess a genuineness which no burnt-cork artists can fully imitate. Their music, both vocal and instrumental, is excellent. Each performer seems to be not only a

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natural, but a cultured artist; and all have the faculty of being exceedingly mirthful, without overstepping the bounds of refinement. In fact, each performer seems perfect in his rôle; and all appear to be masters of minstrelsy.19

The first Georgia minstrel troupe was advertised as consisting of former slaves from Macon, Georgia, and although it can’t be fully confirmed whether they all originated from plantations in Macon, or whether it was a marketing tool to promote their authenticity as “negro delineators,” two things are clear: there were formerly enslaved men in the troupe, and most of the musicians were highly skilled performers.20 As Eileen Southern notes, the Georgia Minstrels relied on the standard (racist and racialized) minstrel conventions in their early acts and did not include much African American folk music early on.21 One of their most celebrated members and minstrels in general, Sam Lucas (the son of an ex-slave), was a self-taught musician who gained his early musical training with a quadrille band and with minstrel troupes. Lucas wrote many of the original songs for the Georgia Minstrels that followed in the more “sophisticated” harmonic and compositional style of minstrel tunes (which often included a chorus), ones that were heavily shaped by the works of Stephen Foster (see Chapter 3).22 Yet, as Lisa M. Anderson suggests, although blackface minstrelsy took up the established conventions of white blackface performers, blackface minstrelsy by black performers at the time “differs from white minstrelsy in that it gave theatrical form to ‘signifyin’ on white minstrelsy in the manner in which slaves practised ‘signifyin’ on whites in real life.”23 Here, Anderson invokes the trope of “Signifyin(g),” as theorized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Signifying Monkey, based on two WestAfrican figures of the “trickster” tradition: Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey. As a literary trope, Gates defines Signifyin(g) as “a trope in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (the master tropes), and also hyperbole, litotes, and metaleosius.”24 Extending the black literary tradition into the black vernacular tradition more generally, Gates further notes that Signifyin(g) “is this principle of repetition and difference, this practice of intertextuality, which has been so crucial to the black vernacular forms of Signifyin(g).”25 Signifyin(g) will remain a critical concept in thinking through the ephemeral and improvised performances of black blackface musicians and others within popular music of the late nineteenth century. Taken together, the intertextual relationship that black performers developed

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between early African American improvised and oral folk practices (on and off the minstrel stage) continued to shape both black sounds and the making of Blacksound. Black musical performance practices developed from a variety of African sources that had been amalgamated with European American folk and classical music, minstrelized versions of performances of blackness by white minstrels, and the improvisatory Signifyin(g) practice of black musicians (in and out of blackface) on all these styles.26 As the minstrel business proved lucrative for black musicians and composers, they eventually began to increase inclusion of black vernacular and other styles of music into their blackface acts. The distinction between their minstrel acts as “authentic” and those of white minstrels as “counterfeit” developed into a selling point. I use “counterfeit” here (as it was sometimes employed within blackface marketing materials) to highlight the intentional imitation of blackness by white performers (whether real or imagined) with the impact of defrauding black ontology, while capitalizing off black people and their musical practices. Black minstrel performances also differed when presented to mostly black audiences, as the latter had a different relationship to black music than their white counterparts. The stage was set for black sounds to move more rapidly from a popular black vernacular into mainstream popular entertainment, especially as audiences for mass consumption increased through rapid population growth in the nineteenth century. In particular, the folk spiritual and Negro Spiritual became a frame for the inclusion and dissemination of black performance aesthetics (or intellectual performance property) within minstrelsy performed by black musicians, in addition to work songs and comic songs.27 It became especially common after the publication of Slaves Songs in the United States (1867).28 The incorporation of African American folk elements from the spiritual was also instigated by the popular tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers—a group of black vocalists from the Historically Black College Fisk University, some formerly enslaved, and formed under the direction of a white musician by the name of George Leonard White in 1871. The Fisk Jubilee Singers garnered international acclaim on their tours and performances of Negro Spirituals in the mid-1870s, and the Jubilee Singers were key to the popularity of African American vernacular and sacred music practices in and beyond the United States.29 The Negro Spiritual is the formal development of folk practices invented by Africans in America under the conditions of enslavement on mostly southern plantations. Its formalization can be marked by the

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publication of “Go Down Moses” in 1861—the first Negro Spiritual to be published as sheet music.30 But the Negro Spiritual itself was a stylization of the aesthetics that derived from the African American folk and spiritual practices that developed on plantations and in hush arbors throughout the country. As black music historians have demonstrated, the folk spiritual is a culmination of African diasporic aesthetics that emerged out of the “ring shout” within spiritual and religious practices in relation to European/American musical folk and religious practices. These aesthetics syncretized into a quintessentially (and dynamic) black American vernacular sound.31 In The Power of Black Music, Samuel Floyd builds upon Sterling Stuckey’s theorization in Slave Culture on the centrality of “the ring” in African American aesthetics and the spiritual, as Stuckey suggested that “the ring shout was the main context in which [transplanted] Africans recognized values common to them.”32 Floyd carefully details some of the sonic and performative aspects that develop from localized African aesthetics within the ring, and many ring-derived practices have permeated the spiritual and subsequent styles of black secular music, like ragtime, that have developed out of African American culture in America. Black performance aesthetics then travel into the mainstream and become deracialized for (white) consumption, or stereotyped and interpreted with negative connotations when embodied by the black people from which they originate.33 In addition to pentatonic harmonies and the “bent” notes (particularly third, fifth, and seventh scale degrees) frequently found within major and minor systems of tonality in many early spirituals, Floyd names the following practices that derived from the ring shout that shape black music traditions in the United States and beyond: “calls, cries, and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and polyrhythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes, and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables, and other rhythmic-oral declamations, interjections, and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game rivalry; hand clapping, foot patting, and approximations thereof; apart-playing; and the metronomic pulse that underlies all African-American music.”34 Several of the devices that Floyd describes above are part of the musical Signifyin(g) process—through a variety of rhetorical, sonic, and corporeal devices—in black music. The ability to improvise (in sound and

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movement) upon black musical Signifiers has historically contributed to the most innovative performances within black cultural production. Improvisatory yet skillful innovations were frequently even more appealing to non-black or white consumers who had limited engagement with intracommunal black cultural practices but gained access to them through popular entertainment. This process allowed (and allows) for a disengaged engagement with the actual black people from whom the performance practices (and properties) originate.35 The process of disengaged engagement allows for cognitive dissonance to be developed between (a white) “self” and (a black) “other,” while having access to consume and embody cultural practices from the “other” without having to experience or consider their lived experiences. Floyd’s list of aesthetic and performative traits of black music making is not exhaustive, but it captures many of the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and improvisatory sounds that emerge from the ring that have been reconfigured through other styles of black performance, both sacred and secular. As in many of the descriptions of black sounds and aesthetics throughout the nineteenth century—in racialized attempts by white critics, as well as in the writings of black authors—several foundational elements are hinted at, if not directly referenced. Importantly, the ring invokes a ritual, sacred practice that is not separate and apart from the everyday, lived experiences of the African Americans who practiced them. Their curation into other styles of black vernacular music then takes on new meanings when absorbed into the mainstream by non-black performers or takes up a new context altogether when removed from its original. The movement of black aesthetics from local to popular carries both possessive qualities and proprietary ones that are embodied and commercialized by mostly white audiences through popular entertainment. The embodiment of actual black aesthetics became more of a common practice within the growing music industry and increased participation from black people.

from blackface to blacksound Black minstrel troupes like the Georgia Minstrels (in their various iterations) often performed for black and white audiences, usually within segregated contexts.36 Although the black elite and press often derided minstrel performances for their racist representations of black people, they were popular among working-class and poorer black folks.37 It was the sonic and corporeal Signifyin(g) on the minstrel tradition through

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the ring shout and spiritual-derived “Call-Response” devices—that is, “Signifyin(g) figures (call) and Signifyin(g) revisions (responses, in various guises) that can be one or the other, depending on its context”38—as well as the satirical treatment of the minstrel form itself that separated black minstrels from the performances of their white counterparts. While black performers were taking practices from the Negro Spiritual, folk music and dances, and other vernacular forms of black music and infusing them into the minstrel show format, their success was further capitalized upon by white proprietors in the late 1860s and 1870s, especially once black performers proved to be a financial success on the national and international (blackface) market. Yet there was an awareness among black performers, who acknowledged that their creative labor was a source of property to be recognized, awarded, and exploited. In response to the poor and exploitative management by George Callender, one of the most successful white minstrel show proprietors of black troupes, Billy Kersands, Bob Height, and Horace Weston (some of the biggest blackface stars and the featured performers of Callender’s Georgia Minstrels) left the company and made a statement asserting their value as performers and people: “We are all men under no obligation to anyone, and looking for our best interest in the elevation and maintenance of ourselves and families. We are not blind or insensible to our worth, and honorably proceed to negotiate for better positions which we have accomplished from our present manager, Mr. Charles White.”39 Black performers still laid claims to their own intellectual performance properties within blackface and popular entertainment, even though they were legally refused equal treatment to white people under rapidly emerging and violent laws of Jim Crow segregation.40 Their public refusal to work with Callender is a pushback against their treatment as sources of property (as people and in performance). Black minstrels, ironically, staged spectacular plantation skits and invoked the sounds of spirituals and folk songs of those who were once enslaved within their blackface performances. They were forced to improvise upon the inherited legacy of blackface within commercial popular entertainment. What liberated the bodies of white Americans who consumed and performed blackface in popular music were not just the degrading, racist scripts and caricatures of blackness themselves. Their liberation also stemmed from the actual innovative black vernacular sounds and movements that developed out of African musical practices and alongside European/American ones. Black sounds were also cultivated among and

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within (often segregated) black communities under the shadow of blackface. Although the practice of Signifyin(g) or “ragging” (i.e., stylized improvisation) upon rhythms, melodies, and harmonies derived from the folk practices of African Americans, it quickly developed into the aesthetic basis of the pop music. While black performance practices remained mostly outside of the scope of black claims to authorship, aesthetic developments in late-nineteenth-century popular music began to include even more black sounds that were stylized by mostly white performers and composers (through the making of Blacksound). Their target audience was white consumers who constituted the “mainstream” audience of popular entertainment.41 The introduction of ragtime to the masses—as the first commercial sound to emerge after the proliferation of blackface and a myriad of popular performance styles throughout the nineteenth century—eventually developed into the aesthetic foundation of Blacksound and popular music. Ragtime rapidly spread from being a local black performance to becoming a nationwide phenomenon. The movement and aesthetic shift in Blacksound in a post-emancipation context are critical to the making of vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. With the formalization of the modern popular music and recording industry in the 1890s through ragtime aesthetics, sheet music sales greatly increased, recording technologies were invented, and sporting halls and saloons populated urban centers.

ragtime aesthetics in blacksound during the late nineteenth century Ragtime (in its black vernacular form) is an example of the syncretism of European musical styles with African ones, as it takes up marches, traditional major and minor modes of harmony, European dance styles (within the cakewalk), and standard rhythmic practices. But the Signifyin(g) upon these styles is what propelled ragtime into the mainstream. The musical Signifyin(g) in ragtime included “the use of pentatonic scales, large leaps in melodic lines, the use of short phrases in the construction of melody, variation of melodic materials, the prominent position of percussion in the music as a whole, and the use of poly­ meters.”42 The pentatonic scale, along with flattened thirds, fifths, and sevenths, is a common harmonic attribute found in black American music. Although the pentatonic scale itself (in its various patterns) might appear in folk music across the world, it was often sonically racialized in the context of the “West” (European/American) as being

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outside of the formal structures of major/minor tonality that “governed” common practice in classical music at the time.43 Such harmonic devices are often developed within the short, motivic, rhythmically propelling phrases found in the melodies of ragtime music. Instead of ragtime melodies and motives taking precedence over the harmony or rhythm within a piece, they were more integrated with one another, leading to a distinct sound and style (versus the melody taking precedence over harmony and rhythm more common in European-American songs and compositions). It is important to emphasize that what became known as ragtime was still local to black performance and novel to mostly white listeners in the 1890s when it began to circulate as a mainstream aesthetic. There were critiques from the black middle class and elite of ragtime styles such as the coon song, as well as the public dismissal of ragtime by the American Federation of Musicians at their annual meeting in 1901 in a publication titled Ragtime Must Die. But the originally black genre’s popularity soared and served as the sonic basis of popular music and its industry at the turn of the twentieth century.44 As Daphne Brooks denotes in her pioneering study Bodies in Dissent on the challenge that black performers faced in popular entertainment: “With the genealogical roots of minstrelsy as well as the coon song phenomenon spectacularly visible, postReconstruction black theatre weathered a taxing gestation period as it struggled to garner the support of African American critics and patrons and as it aimed to earn the respect of mainstream culture.”45 The rhythmic practices of ragtime that propelled the dancing bodies of the Gilded Age and caught the attention of mainstream white audiences were especially driven by its idiosyncratic, syncopated style. While syncopation has been recognized as ragtime’s most distinct characteristic, there are differences between the way that syncopation developed in live performance and rags by many black composers, like Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Thomas Turpin. Such differences might also be observed in the way the spirit of ragtime rhythm shaped the rise of the syncopated dotted figure that defined the coon songs and popular (dance) sounds published as sheet music in the 1890s with the birth of Tin Pan Alley.46 As an extensive study of approximately eleven thousand ragtime pieces reveals, the “short-long-short” dotted pattern that became a hallmark of commercial ragtime and is a derivation of more complex rhythmic developments in black vernacular ragtime is one of the “most characteristic patterns of the ragtime genre.”47

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Popular tunes by many white composers in the 1890s and 1910s, influenced by black vernacular ragtime, simplified the metric and rhythmic play at the heart of the ragged, disjunct, or displaced rhythms of black vernacular expressions. Syncopation—defined in a musical cognitive sense as the process of creating “violations in listener’s expectations,”48 or rhythmically as “accenting a weak instead of a strong beat, by putting rests on strong beats, by holding on over strong beats, and by introducing a sudden change of time-signature”49—unfolds based upon the listeners expectations. Using expectations, I am referring to the way in which sound both shapes and reflects an individual’s listening experience, based on their relationship to their specific communities (whether segregated by race and/or class), as well as how they encounter the sounds of those who are outside of their home or day-to-day encounters. Black performers and musicians in the nineteenth century were accustomed to varied rhythmic and harmonic performance practices within more localized African American contexts, as well as in sporting halls, saloons, (churches), and other venues in which ragtime developed among black itinerant musicians.50 The sonic “violations” that white listeners experienced through ragtime were less disruptive to black musicians and listeners. Within black musical styles, such violations functioned as a part of the performance practice of Signifyin(g). Musically, the practice included the “use of additive rhythms in duple, triple, and hemiola patterns [as] the hallmark of rhythmic organization in African music.”51 More recent scholarship on rhythm and ragtime in American popular music has concerned itself heavily with determining the origins (whether British, European, European American, or African American) of syncopation and classifying the degrees of ragtime syncopation found in popular music within early and late ragtime.52 I am less interested in the origins of ragtime and classifying its specific syncopated patterns. More might be revealed by uncovering how black vernacular rhythms and performances proliferated in the commercialization and expansion of the popular music industry in the 1890s (out of blackface) within the dissemination of ragtime. With this approach in mind, I give careful attention to the aesthetics of ragtime through the coon song in sheet music and recordings to highlight the ways that ragtime and other vernacular black performances shape Blacksound at the turn of the twentieth century. My analysis also underscores how they were swiftly absorbed into the commercialization of popular music and the establishment of its modern industry.

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the “coon song” craze Coon songs swept the nation during the early development of the modern music and recording industry in the 1890s. These popular ragtime songs were derived from blackface performance, usually in stereotypical black dialect with anti-black references, and set to syncopated (ragtime) tunes and accompaniment. Some of the first coon songs were written by white performers in the 1880s, such as “The Dandy Coon’s Parade” (1880), “The Coons Are on Parade” (1882), and “New Coon in Town” (1883).53 “The Whistling Coon” was also written by a white minstrel banjo player named Sam Devere. Devere’s work is one of the first popular coon songs that later took on a new life through the recorded performances of one of the first pop recording stars, African American musician George Washington Johnson.54 Leah Cathleen Cothern suggests that the before the word “coon” became associated with African Americans, it was used as a political reference to the Whig Party leading up to the Civil War. Because the Whig Party in some respects precedes the Republican Party, and Lincoln himself was referred to as a “coon” in political propaganda, Cothern suggests that “[it] seems likely that if the ‘old coon’ Lincoln were blamed for the downfall of slavery, the term itself may then have been applied to the freedman and women, in the sense of being wards of northern politicians—the Republican coons; hence, the transition from the antebellum darkey to the postbellum coon.”55 Whatever the origins of how “coon” became tethered to black people, as Janet Brown observes, “by serving as a projection of the fears of the dominant group, the ‘coon’ functioned as a scapegoat.”56 The black dandy figure, Zip Coon, became one of the most ubiquitous blackface stereotypes and songs after Jim Crow in early blackface (see Chapter 1). “Zip Coon” is not only the first popular blackface song with “coon” in its title, but this stereo-archetype, alongside Jim Crow (the enslaved “plantation darkey”), also became the character basis of the coon caricature during the ragtime era.57 Coon song publications and their performances were some of the best-selling forms of commercial entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. They incited the spread of localized ragtime styles that were introduced by itinerant black musicians during emancipation throughout the country.58 As the aesthetics of ragtime introduced by black performers was consumed by mainstream audiences through the coon song, James Dormon critically observes, “the immense popularity of the ‘coon’ image nationwide merely reflected the ongoing commit-

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ment to racist assumptions that underlay the system of American apartheid in which blacks were maintained in subordinate and subservient roles.”59 The coon song tradition, deriving from its blackface roots, continued to develop racist scripts and stereotypes that were attributed to blackness: for example, coon songs often promoted the ideas that all black people ate watermelon, fried chicken, and pork chops; they carried razors, were violent, and were prone to gambling/hustling; they engaged in unrestrained sexuality (and also were a threat to white purity, particularly black men); and even worse, they might try to pass as white, or might try to “become” white through transmutation.60 These and many other racist/racial scripts were rehearsed regularly in blackface and through coon songs. Blackness was presented even more as a monolith defined by a variety of derisive attributes. As Colin L. Anderson notes in a discussion of the southern pastoral (or references to the “old south”/plantation) in popular sheet music of the late nineteenth century: “Indeed, ‘coon songs’ represent the height of racist vitriol in sheet music. They mark the larger shift in white supremacy in this period toward more extreme racism, or what Joel Williamson has termed ‘Racial Radicalism.’ Heavily informed by scientific racism, this increasing antiblackness was what led historian Rayford W. Logan to label the 1880s and 1890s the ‘nadir’ of race relations.”61 Popular perceptions of blackness in the coon songs from the point of a constructed white racist gaze helped to enforce the belief that black people were inferior or less than their white counterparts, particularly within the discriminatory and segregated practices that were enforced by Jim Crow laws (and other racist/discriminatory policies across the country) and placed upon black people in the postbellum period. In the wake of minstrelsy, paradoxically, the coon song was also a way in which black performers were able to enter the popular stage, gain an audience, attempt to revert the stereotypical images introduced by minstrelsy and carried through the coon song, and gain enough resources to become professional musicians themselves. In 1896, the African American comedy and musical duo Bert Williams (who was Bahamian American) and George Walker staged a popular vaudeville show titled Two Real Coons at Koster and Bail’s Music Hall in New York City.62 The Williams and Walker performance took up the coon imagery derived from the minstrel characters of Jim Crow and Zip Coon, and both performers dawned blackface. While their show drew on the racist stereotypes of black people embedded into the coon song, it represented the commercial potential for the introduction of black

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musical styles by black performers in the mainstream, albeit within the legacy of blackface and the structural conditions of white supremacy.63 Williams became the most recorded black performer before the 1920s, and he recorded coon songs and comedic tunes along with his musical partner, George Walker.64 Unfortunately, blackface and the coon song continued to carry within them the potential to define blackness for mass audiences under the systems of white supremacy in which they were developed. Williams himself, as a Caribbean American, was “performing” scripts of (US) black Americanness, ones that drew heavily on pre-established (racist) tropes and stereotypes of blackness that had been embedded into popular culture through minstrelsy and slavery in the previous decades. While the coon song in sheet music and in recording is but one aspect that contributed to the proliferation of ragtime—along with band music, the cakewalk, and instrumental/piano music—it also spawned a popular performance style that became known as “coon shouting.” Pamela Brown Lavitt defines “coon shouting” as “the distinct performances delivered by female soubrettes to get ‘rough’ and ‘neat’ coon songs across. Coon shouters employed a bricolage of vocal styles and physical gestures, including eccentric costumes, character impersonation, ‘black’ dialect, and cakewalking.”65 Although coon shouting has become mostly associated with the white women who were wildly successful (in and out of blackface) through the genre in the 1890s and 1900s, such as Jewish American Sophie Tucker and Irish American May Irwin, its performance style originated with black vocal practices and performers—both men and women.66 With the advent of commercial recordings in the 1890s came the impact of a distinct style of popular vocal performance that originated with black (women) singers and continued through blues singers like Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith. Singers like Rainey and Smith were referred to as “up-to-date” coon shouters. This label was placed upon them in relation to the popularity of white women coon shouters, who were successful in adapting and disseminating black performance practices to mainstream white audiences.67 Musician and coon song accompanist John J. Niles makes rather illuminating observations about the vocal stylings of coon shouting in a 1930 article titled “Shout, Coon, Shout” in The Musical Quarterly. Niles’s article is a contemporaneous analysis of coon-shouting (ragtime) vocal technique, and he suggests that there are two styles of coon shouting: sacred coon shouting and the “shouting of moans, blues, and ballads.”68 Niles further notes the vocal

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techniques included in shouting, such as “voice-breaks, slides and high, rasping, wails to be employed,” in addition to “the technique of breaking up the melody, of superimposing an obbligato of voice breaks and growls,” as well as a diction that emphasizes sound versus full pronunciation of words.69 Interestingly, Niles’s own observations as a white, coon song accompanist—who observed black vocalists and performed with white shouters—suggest that the vocal stylings (both sacred and secular) derived from the ring shout described by Samuel Floyd, Jr., as the calls, cries, hollers, moans, groans, melismas, and so on of black vernacular musical practices.70 These vocal styles, as well as the distinct ragtime rhythmic and harmonic play, set themselves apart from the more formal European American styles of vocal performance. But through their commodification, idiosyncratic black vocal stylings became quickly absorbed, simplified, and racialized as white. The commercialization of black aesthetics was instigated by performers like Sophie Tucker, who dropped the blackface mask, but continued the coon shouting traditions, as well as May Irwin, who (although she is said not to have worn blackface) continued to be one of the most popular vocalists of the early twentieth century via her introduction through coon songs. Non-black performers like Tucker and Irwin helped introduce Blacksound as a generic American sound to white audiences who came to identify such sounds as “popular” (i.e., generic enough not to be racialized as black by white listeners) without having to acknowledge its black roots or the lived conditions of the people from whom it emerged. Relatedly, Cedric Robinson observes that the “class which a half century earlier condescended to the view that all the social strata below were somehow ‘black’ now appropriated the masquerade as an amusing signature of its own unassailable whiteness.”71 At the same time, racial masquerading was lucrative for individual performers and the industry itself, as ragtime aesthetics (and the intellectual performance property of black people) became foundational to the popular music industry—both in performance and through the sheet music published mostly by white music industrialists.

ernest hogan, ragtime, and “all coons look alike to me” Two of the most commercially successful ragtime coon songs in the 1890s were “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” by African American musician and minstrel Ernest Hogan, and “My Gal Is a High-Born Lady,” by Irish

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American musician and minstrel Barney Fagan.72 Both hit songs were published in 1896 by M. Witmark & Sons, one of the inaugural publishing houses of Tin Pan Alley (see Chapter 4). After the sensation caused by “All Coons” and “My Gal,” over six hundred coon songs were published in the 1890s and continued through the 1920s, and many sold into the millions.73 With the growth of the sheet music industry during the coon song era came the rapid expansion of the music industry, and publishers like M. Witmark & Sons at the center of its development relied heavily on the coon song craze and the commercialization of the (black) ragtime aesthetic to build the popular music industry. An analysis of Hogan’s “All Coons” provides a lens into the dissemination and commercialization of ragtime (and racist tropes) in its earliest phases, as this song demonstrates the ways in which a localized black vernacular sound was introduced to the masses through popular blackface publications. Ernest Hogan’s “All Coons Look Alike to Me” has a complicated history. On the one hand, it helped to provide Hogan and the ragtime style of black Americans with more access to wider audiences. The song’s popularity increased black performers and musicians’ ability to develop careers as professional musicians within a traditionally racist and exclusive system that often denied them access to mainstream theaters and stages. But distribution came at a cost, as the structures of minstrelsy (and white supremacy)—both aesthetically and topically— continued to limit just how far performers and their styles could travel without being exploited by (white) producers and performers. Nor did the systems in existence require white music industrialists to deal with the very real material conditions of racism that black people faced because of the circulation of blackface-related images and stereotypes. Regardless of their personal choices, black performers always had to contend with their “alien” status as outsiders within an anti-black society—both in politics and in culture. The performances of Hogan and other black minstrels of his time occurred within a process defined by Daphne Brooks as “Afro-alienation acts,” in which “the condition of alterity converts into cultural expressiveness and a specific strategy of cultural performance. Afroalienation recurs as a trope that reflects and characterizes marginal cultural positions as well as a tactic that the marginalized seized on and reordered in the self-making process.”74 Under the lure of white supremacy, black minstrel performances reinforced the popular and racist conception of black inferiority already present in the white imaginary that had shaped society since the slave trade. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff

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observe the following about the popular impact of Hogan’s ragtime sensation that helped to introduce the style to the masses: “ ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’ was adopted as the slogan of a Jim Crow society that refused to acknowledge African Americans as individuals.”75 They go on to quote a report from the Kansas City Star that warned, “A Chicago policeman shot the wrong Negro during a row in that city. . . . His only excuse was: ‘All N*ggers look alike to me.’ ”76 As this quote demonstrates, regardless of the choices made by black performers (through blackface or otherwise), they always had to contend with white supremacy and the impact of blackface performance on racist perceptions of black identity within the United States. The gist of Hogan’s song and its chorus is that all “coons” (or black people/men) look alike or are the same (i.e., there is no difference between black people, they are a monolith, which helped fuel idea that they are not humans with interiority). The song’s male protagonist laments being dumped for “another coon barber from Virginia” by “ma Lucy Janey Stubbles” through a rather jaunty, dance-like comedic tune. The verses were actually written by Isidore Witmark and arranged by Max Hoffman, because Witmark felt (from his purview as a non-black music industrialist) that the rhythm and melody of the chorus did not lend themselves to a proper refrain that would appeal to the (white) masses.77 The two make ample use of the syncopated dotted sixteenth to eighth note pattern in the verse—a rhythmic trope that soon developed into a marker of commercial ragtime. Even still, there are various slight metrical shifts that occur within this recurring pattern. In the section marked “recite,” which seems to invite improvisation, the vocalist repeats the same octave-leap melodic motive between the sustained half note followed by the dotted sixteenth to eighth note pattern in its transitions to the chorus. The motive also appears in the call-and-responselike figures and varying rhythmic patterns between the voice and piano, as in the first six measures of the verse (see Figure 15). The “syncopated,” dotted pattern itself is not singular to ragtime, but its employment within Hogan’s song and early coon songs like Barney Fagan’s “My Gal” is what begins to shape the rhythmic style of Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville, and popular tunes marketed to the masses at the turn of the twentieth century. The chorus itself, written by Hogan, but based on a tune that he heard “while walking through the park alone at night in an Eastern city,” is what made the song a hit.78 It included an “oom-pah”-like bass accompaniment (found in band music, the waltz, and ragtime) beneath a repeated syncopated melodic motive

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figure 15. “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” Ernest Hogan (M. Witmark & Sons).

throughout the verse (in which the dotted quarter on the second beat of the first measure rhythmically emphasizes the word “coon,” followed in the next measure by a quicker syncopated pattern that takes on the same melodic structure). Hogan’s chorus both helped inaugurate the coon song craze and became a ubiquitous tune for decades after its

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figure 15. (continued)

publication by M. Witmark & Sons, who owned the rights to the work itself. Yet it is Hogan who seems to bear the brunt of the shame from black critics and contemporaries for composing a disparaging work against black representation (as he was credited as the composer on the cover

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figure 15. (continued)

of the sheet music and was well associated with the tune).79 At the same time, the Witmarks were able to benefit both from the selling of his music and from the commercialization of ragtime through this and other coon songs. Sherman H. Dudley, as Abbott and Seroff uncover, was a comrade of Hogan and pointed out as late as 1928 that Hogan

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figure 15. (continued)

“gained fame over night by writing, ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me.’ This was a national hit. I remember when I was traveling with the ‘Original Nashville Students’ way back in 1899, when we were playing all onenight stands. Every time I would pass a little white child, it would start singing ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me,’ and those who could not sing

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would whistle it.”80 Hogan’s song took on a life of its own. He himself even later regretted the impact that it had on perceptions of blackness within an already antiblack society. Hogan and the Witmark’s popular collaboration introduced ragtime rhythm and aesthetics to the masses through derisive representations of blackness.81 The origins of ragtime’s syncopated, improvised, and dance-like style were based upon a myriad of local African American performance practices that had been developed throughout distinct regions of the nation and cultivated in urban settings. These sounds were absorbed into simplified, less “ragged” styles, ones that were still distinct from the ballads and popular tunes published as sheet music that appealed to mainstream white America. The long and contentious history of black sounds in the development of the coon song and ragtime was absorbed into the construction of Blacksound as the sonic basic of American popular music at the turn of the twentieth century. The racialized imagery and embodiment of black performativity in the making of whiteness, blackness, Asianness, and other racializations of identity in a rapidly diversifying nation were accompanied by the harmonic and rhythmic backdrop of ragtime, in addition to blues, jazz, and gospel, leading up to World War I. As Abbot and Seroff point out, “the use of the word ‘coon’ in popular song greatly diminished after 1910. The descent of coon songs was an almost foregone conclusion by January 2, 1909, when an especially bitter commentary appeared in the black periodical, The Freeman, under the headline ‘Coon Songs Must Go.’ ”82 While describing the commercialization of the coon songs and ragtime of black composers, a writer for the Freeman details the formula through which “White composers, now seeing that there were money in ‘coon’ songs, they all commenced to write. They soon discovered it didn’t require education, talent, refinement, or anything that was really good to write a ‘coon’ song. All they had to do was get two verses and a chorus of anything bad they could say about the Negro in a humorous way, put the words to rag time or a slow drag tune to suit the words, and in the poetry use the word ‘coon’ as often as possible, and their fortune was made provided the song became popular.”83 In his denunciation, the critic points to a phenomenon of black performance moving from local to popular in its commercialization. Even after the disappearance of the word “coon,” ragtime aesthetics continued to form the basis of popular music in the early twentieth century. Edward Berlin notes that the most distinctive feature of commercial ragtime, the dotted figure, seemed to become more prominent after the

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removal of the word “coon” from song titles: “The most noticeable shift in ragtime of the 1910s is in the increased use of dotted rhythms. . . . During the first decade of the century this figure was rarely more than incidental, appearing in less than 6 percent of published piano rags. Beginning in 1911, however, there was a sudden and dramatic upsurge in the use of this rhythm, the number of prominent occurrences almost doubling for each of the next few years: 1911, 12 percent; 1912, 23 percent; 1913, 45 percent. A high-level use continued to the end of the ragtime period, going as high as 58 percent in 1916.”84 Even though the word “coon” began to disappear from popular song titles, ones that were shaped by the stylized, syncopated rhythms developed from the coon song itself, ragtime and black vernacular sounds persisted within the continued amalgamation of Blacksound in Tin Pan Alley and popular music. Ernest Hogan, aware of the popularity of his “All Coons Look Alike to Me” and its significance within the dissemination of ragtime via the coon song, recognized that “one song opened the way for a lot of colored and white songwriters. Finding the [ragtime] rhythm so great, they stuck to it changing the lyrics, and now you get hits from my creation without the word ‘coon.’ ”85 The diffusion of ragtime not only took place in sheet music and performance but might also be seen in the general erasure of one of the first recording artists that helped to inaugurate the marketability of sound recordings for a wider public during the early phonographic era— George Washington Johnson. Johnson was a formerly enslaved composer and performer, and he recorded two of the first and most popular coon song records in the early 1890s: “Laughing Song” and “The Whistling Coon.” Paul Gilroy writes about the “comprehensive history of that special period in which phonographic technology first made black music into a planetary force,” as he recognizes that “the memory of that time haunts us in the shadow of its demise.”86 As Johnson’s recording career shows, even after the phonograph disappeared, his laughter and sounds continue to haunt and resonate in the sonic tapestry of American popular music. Louis Chude-Sokei offers the colloquial naming of the phonograph during its time, “the talking machine,” as a way to mark “a necessary early stage in a history of black technopoetics, where technology emerges as a primary mediator between the inhuman and the human and does so through race and sound.”87 The following study of Johnson considers how such a mediation took place through “the talking machine” and early commercial sound recording, as the recording star’s idiosyncratic and “ragged” performance style

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became absorbed by the masses in two of the first “pop” records of the early recording industry.

george washington johnson and the coon song on record Although sheet music formed the economic basis of the music industry until the 1920s, early phonographic commercial sound recordings in the 1890s signaled the shift that was soon to come. Sheet music gave way to (mechanized) sound and film, which emerged as commercial music’s most prominent mediums in the 1920s and 1930s. At the forefront of this impending sound revolution was George Washington Johnson, a black street performer who became a pioneering artist of early commercial recordings.88 Johnson was born into slavery in northern Virginia in 1846, and when his father, Samuel, was freed from slavery in 1853, he himself gained freedom around the age of seven.89 As a small child, George was the boy servant (slave) and “companion” to the son of his then slave owner. His “master-companion” was named Samuel (like George’s father) and a year older than George. Samuel is said to have gained great skill as a flautist from a very young age. In the most comprehensive discussion of George Washington Johnson to date, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919, Tim Brooks notes that it has been reported that George learned how to whistle from Samuel, as he began to imitate the sound of Sam’s flute.90 After the Civil War, Johnson moved to NYC (somewhere between 1873 and 1876) and became known as a street entertainer—where whistling and comedic performances were part of his routine.91 These performances, which occurred on street corners and in urban spaces, can’t be separated from the shadow of minstrelsy that continued to dominate popular culture into the 1880s and 1890s, even as it set the stage for other forms of music and entertainment through vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. Johnson is said to have toured with the famous Georgia Minstrels, and, like many black street entertainers, found himself having to negotiate his identity and performance practices within the standards set by blackface minstrelsy, especially if he wanted to have a lucrative performance career.92 The story of how Johnson went from being a formerly enslaved, local street musician to one of the first major recording stars of the early phonographic era is a muted sonic history within the development of commercial recording technologies

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that deserves amplification here. This forgotten history starts with the invention of the first recording technology—the phonograph. Edison’s phonograph, invented between 1878 and 1879, was not initially designed for commercial use. But continual improvements to the technology and competition from other inventors (such as Charles Sumner Tainter, who introduced the wax cylinder, or Emile Berliner, who developed gramophone discs) led to Edison developing a new wax cylinder phonograph by 1888. The inventor’s improved machine was ready to distribute pop music.93 As one of the first “labels” to emerge in the bourgeoning recording industry, the North American Phonograph Company purchased the rights to this new sound recording technology, which had prior been used mainly for business and office purposes.94 The struggling New Jersey Phonograph Company—a regional division of the North American Phonograph Company—was convinced by a telegraph operator, Victor H. Emerson, to record music as a potential commercial venture. Emerson first recorded a four-piece band of white musicians, paying them each $3.50 a piece per session. The company then sold five hundred records at $2 each.95 Hoping to capitalize upon his successful new recording venture, Emerson was looking for a cheaper and more novel second act, and he remembered Johnson—a black street entertainer—performing at a Hudson River ferry boat terminal, so he decided to offer the street musician twenty cents per recording to perform “The Whistling Coon” ($3.20 less than he offered each member of the band he originally recorded).96 Johnson could have potentially performed any number of songs he had in his repertoire, but Emerson thought that a coon song, one written by Sam Devere (a white vaudevillian), might be a better hit.97 On the one hand, it was easy to pick up whistling onto the wax cylinder, and on the other, derisive songs about black people that developed out of blackface minstrelsy via the coon song continued to be a commercial attraction throughout the late nineteenth century. Emerson was following the trends that had already been established in the early popular music industry through blackface—the exploitation and commodification of blackness and black people through performance. Soon after the success of “The Whistling Coon,” Johnson recorded “Laughing Song,” which was published in 1894 and attributed to Johnson as its composer and lyricist on the sheet music cover (see Figure 16). Johnson’s song also became a huge hit (touting on the cover of the sheet music that there were “over 50,000 records up to date for

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figure 16. “Laughing Song,” George Washington Johnson (Ko-La’r).

phonograph use all over the world”).98 His popular records were mimicked and recorded by major phonograph companies of the time, including New York’s Metropolitan Phonograph Company, Columbia, Edison, as well as Berliner and Victor.99 Although Johnson is credited as composer on the cover of the sheet music for “Laughing Song,” he was generally paid a flat fee for the recording, so he did not actually own the rights to its distribution. Additionally, the comedic (or nonserious) nature and anti-black stereotypes that derived from blackface overshadowed the (black) sonic practices that the artist introduced to the (white) public. Johnson captured several sonic (and ragtime) innovations on record, which included “non-traditional” styles of African American rhythmic performance practices (as he sings almost just behind the beat, while introducing smooth yet varied syncopation in the

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opening verse that extends beyond the dotted pattern that later became associated with ragtime), rhythmic and vocal variations (the elisions and slides both within and across measures, particularly within the jocular performance of the chorus that signifies upon the black laugh itself), and his timbral variation (as he switches between laughing, declamation, singing). Johnson cleverly performs these aesthetic innovations within a deceptively seamless and jocular style. His performance introduces a novel sound to white audiences that circulates new aesthetics within the popular realm, while locking Johnson (and black people) into the tropes of blackface representation that simultaneously deny or malign the innovations inherent within (black) intellectual performance property. Johnson’s stylized “laughing” (in song) through a new technological medium might not have only been a source of entertainment to its listening audience, but maybe also a bit unsettling or “uncanny,” depending on who was listening. His laughing was sonified through a new technology that simultaneously invoked the construction of the “southern plantation darkey” (slave) through blackface (but without the visual mask) and mechanical (inhuman) reproduction. This listening encounter signals the uncanny nature of the sonic mechanization of blackness through the constructed avatar of the (monolithic) black “other” in and beyond blackface, as well as through the new medium of recorded sound.100 Chude-Sokei makes a related observation, as he notes that “it is through those machines—particularly the phonograph—that the sound of black voices, for example, made such a cultural impact that they began a history in which race or its aural signifiers functioned as a mask for the socioeconomic regime that the machine itself actually stands for, much in the way that Sambo spoke racism and white anxieties through a black mouth.”101 Through early “acoustic recordings” (ones made by singing into the horn, as the frequencies were transcribed directly onto the cylinder or disc by a stylus), black performance practices began to permeate the actual bodies of many white people who listened to Johnson’s recorded voice. His performances also lined the pockets of the publishers and mechanical reproduction agents of devices like the phonograph, coin slot machines, and player pianos. Coin slot machines and phonographic exhibitions were the primary way that listeners encountered such novel recordings in the 1890s and early 1900s. Tim Brooks quotes a traveling exhibitor in New England in an 1892 issue of Phonogram (an early recording technology industry magazine) who notes that “My patrons are of all classes—rich

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and poor, young, and old, male and especially female. I go to schools, colleges, asylums, etc., etc., wherever I have paying inducements.”102 Listeners would be required to put a tube up to their ear to hear playback on some of the devices. So, the ways in which white listeners internalized unfamiliar, “novel” sounds of a black performer through technology— ones that also carried within them remnants of blackface performance and were divorced from actual black people—are a critical aspect of the disembodied absorption of black aesthetics without black people for personal entertainment and financial gain. The “disembodied absorption” of black aesthetics led to “new forms of (racialized and gendered) embodiment.”103 Blackness was an avatar through which popular sounds were shaped by blackface and black performers, and it continued to serve as such through many of the coon song recordings of the early phonograph and gramophone era. Johnson’s recordings of “The Whistling Coon” and “Laughing Song” were the most popular during most of his lifetime, although many labels tried to create pirate versions to capitalize on the commercial success of these songs. He was often pictured with a wide grin when advertised by record companies and on the cover of sheet music, evoking the trope of the “happy negro” of blackface minstrelsy.104 The tethering of recorded sound to image, without having to engage with the person, encouraged the ability to disengage from the fact of blackness, while creating and imagining one’s own version that was co-constructed by the anti-black structures of society. The numbers that Johnson’s records did were astronomical for the 1890s and signaled the birth of the popular recording industry. “Laughing Song” was recorded after the success of “The Whistling Coon,” and the two are likely the best-selling recordings in the United States during the decade. It is estimated the total sales of his wax cylinders were somewhere between twenty-five thousand and fifty thousand units. But what is important about these record-breaking numbers is not just the numbers themselves, but the fact that it was Johnson who recorded most of them made before 1900. The multiple “original” or “master” recordings, as they are referred to, were made by placing three to four phonographs in front of Johnson, and over the course of about five years, he performed and recorded onto them thousands of times. The technology to duplicate wax cylinders was still very limited at the time, although some of his recordings might have been duplicates made by placing one phonograph in front of the other. Yet Johnson, who was once enslaved, did not own the masters to his own recordings. They were owned by the phonographic companies

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who pressed them, and this practice generally remains the default practice today. Johnson was paid about five cents per wax cylinder, while the New Jersey Company sold them for $1.00 to $1.50 each to exhibitors, who would then charge patrons a fixed amount per listen.105 As with blackface performance when it first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, the target consumer market for early phonographic records was a primarily white audience; but, different than the white performers in blackface, Johnson’s blackness and its minstrelized shadow were at the forefront of his performance and advertising. The sonic stereotyping of his blackness was highlighted by the inclusion of the word “coon” in his popular songs. The New Jersey Phonograph Company also set up their own coin slot listening machines where the public could consume Johnson’s performative black “whistling” and “laughing” as commercial entertainment. Through this technology, listeners could even further disengage from the lives and performance of black people living in the wake of slavery and the backlash to Reconstruction during the Jim Crow era. The commercial music industry became a more viable prospect because of the success of Johnson’s recordings, and as Chude-Sokei has observed: “America’s global expansion would be fueled both by ideologies of racial dominance and of technological development.”106 There were initially no exclusive contracts in the early recording era (since record companies themselves were still largely in formation), so Johnson recorded for most of the major labels after the popularity of “The Whistling Coon” and “Laughing Song.” He recorded multiple sessions for Thomas Edison and the New York and New Jersey Phonograph Companies. Johnson also recorded early on with Emile Berliner, inventor of the gramophone—which eventually replaced the phonograph because it used discs that allowed for easy duplication. The singer sat for sessions with Columbia, which touted in their 1895–1897 catalogue that Johnson’s two most famous records “had wider sales than any other specialties ever made.” He also recorded with other labels that wanted to capitalize on the fixation of Johnson performing his infamous ragtime tunes.107 Unfortunately, however, the early recording innovator became locked into the public expectation of his performance of coon songs. Johnson made other recordings, but his only other phonographs of the 1890s that garnered some commercial successes were “The Laughing Coon” and “The Whistling Girl.” George Washington Johnson, as a black person who existed in relation to and under the shadow of slavery, blackface, and its scripted performances, was unable to shake the ways that he was expected to sound

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and perform for primarily white audiences—the main market for recordings. In this way, “technology is naturalized through race and made intimate, but also inevitable.”108 Blacksound—as the basis of American popular sound, which developed out of blackface, through the ruse of blackness, and included both real and imagined black aesthetics—was taken up with great success in its adaptation by white performers. But its racialized scripts continued to limit not just Johnson, but also the way in which black performers and musicians were expected to sound and perform for the masses in the production of popular music. The recordings, although sources of entertainment, shaped the way in which popular beliefs in anti-blackness emerged throughout society. In fact, by the 1910s, Johnson’s fame began to wane, as reproduction technologies developed, and producers and recording engineers eventually only needed a master copy to duplicate and sell a record in mass. Even though he was one of the first artists to have an exclusive contract with Columbia records between 1898 and 1890, and he remained on the roster of labels in the 1900s and 1910s, he didn’t receive any money from the actual sale of his records. Johnson was never paid any royalties for his recordings, and he also did not own any rights to them—those belonged to the record company. While Johnson continued to live in tenement buildings in New York City until his death in 1914, record companies like Berliner, Victor, and Columbia, who were beginning to form a monopoly on the recording industry after the depression in the mid-1890s, began to issue his works as performed by white singers.109 Although the sounds of these recordings differ greatly from Johnson’s originals in terms of innovation, improvisation, and variation, they were still novel sounds to a mostly white audience. The novelty found in Johnson’s recordings was removed from catalogues in the 1900s and replaced by white performers like Burt Shephard, domestically and abroad. Prior to this moment, the sounds of black musicians that made their way into Blacksound had to be absorbed in real time through witnessing black performance. However, sound recording allowed for black sounds (whether vernacular or commercially developed) to be absorbed through further disassociation from actual black people. The ability to engage disengagedly with black people through coon song recordings furthered the process in which black people and their bodies were no longer needed to consume blackness, to use black aesthetics (and/or racist ideas of blackness) for consumption, for enjoyment, and to be mined as sources of musical property. Such a process builds upon the way that blackface sheet music and performance by white minstrels served as a technology

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through which black people and their practices were subsumed into commercial entertainment and popular culture in general without recognition or through denying their musical innovations that might have lent themselves to protection under property laws through their racialization. It is noted that “Laughing Song,” as performed by Burt Shephard, sold a half-million records in India, and there were versions of Johnson’s song recorded by other artists in both French and Swedish for international audiences.110 As Tim Brooks notes, it was Shepherd, not Johnson, who was most identified with “Laughing Song” outside the United States. Obviously, Johnson did not receive any financial reward for the duplication of his performances in and outside the United States, because he did not own the masters to the recordings themselves, meaning that they were not considered his intellectual property, but instead belonged to the company who pressed them. Johnson had no rights to the original tens of thousands of recordings that he made himself, or the “gold master” recordings that labels began to print once duplication technology improved after the 1900s. Although this was racialized in its impact—due to Johnson’s voice and personhood being largely packaged and commercialized for white consumption—recordings themselves (and still not the performed sounds on the recordings) were not actually protected under actual copyright law until 1976. •

•

•

While coon songs had become one of the most popular genres of early recordings, white performers began to become even more recognized for absorbing and shifting the aesthetics drawn from ragtime songs by black musicians to the tastes of white audiences—globally. Resonances of Johnson’s performance might also be found in another genre of early recordings, that of minstrel skits. By 1894, early music industrialist Lester Spencer—who was said to be a colleague and friend of Johnson—had begun to record minstrel show miniatures, and they are some of the last recordings that Johnson was featured on after his popularity had waned in the wake of mechanical reproduction and duplication. Notably, Johnson is at the center of two racialized forms of early commercial recordings that were shaped directly by blackface: coon songs and minstrel skits. Johnson introduced innovative ragtime sounds and black vernacular practices to the masses at the turn of the twentieth century through these recordings, even under the limits of blackfaceinfluenced coon songs. His sounds were not under protection from exploitation by white music executives, nor were they recognized as

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sources of intellectual property to be claimed by Johnson, as sounds and performance were not protected under the law. Sheet music continued to remain the primary way that authors could claim ownership over musical material through the turn of the twentieth century. Publishers would often purchase the rights from the composers or offer them limited royalties for the work of established artists. However, Johnson and many black artists like him were often offered lower wages for their work, as well as low royalty percentages, if any at all. After his death, rumors circulated about Johnson being lynched— two of his wives had died violent deaths, although he was found not guilty of their murders, and he was acquitted of murder in New York City after his third wife was found dead in their apartment in 1899.111 But that false information about his lynching came mainly from a 1942 book written by pioneering phonograph executive Fred Gaisberg.112 Johnson stood trial for the murder of his wife, and while he was acquitted, there is an interesting relationship between rumors circulating about his lynching, the coon song, and his place within the early history of commercial phonographic recordings. Johnson’s trial overlapped with the distribution of “lynching” phonographs in the 1890s— commercial recordings that staged lynchings on phonographs for amusement and enjoyment by white audiences. These phonorecords were thought (by a white listener) to be authentic recordings of the racial terror experienced by black people during these lynch mobs.113 The distribution of lynching phonographs, minstrel skits, and coon songs in the last decade of the nineteenth century—for mostly white consumption and voyeurism—demonstrates how our earliest history of popular music recordings is founded upon the exploitation, erasure, and commercialization of black aesthetics and black people. These inherently racialized commercial records also served as sources of enjoyment and entertainment for a rapidly growing and diverse urban population—specifically for the entertainment and pleasure of white listeners.114 The historical and structural ambivalence between black people as human and phonographs/machines as reproducing the human is at the center of the racialized consumption of black sounds and the construction of Blacksound through the advent of commercial recordings.115 The racialization of sound and recorded music is foundational to the establishment of the modern popular music industry, as it was steeped heavily in the legacy of blackface minstrelsy. Ragtime was being marketed to customers as a popular American sound by pop music industrialists and performers in the late nineteenth century through the coon

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song, the cakewalk, and blackface, within the development of vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. Masses of white people absorbed and consumed real and imagined black aesthetics in the making of their own selves. George Washington Johnson has been all but forgotten within the larger history of recorded music despite his centrality to its inception. But his voice, his legacy (which extended from slavery into the advent of modern recording), and the systems of exploitation in which he both suffered and existed, hauntingly resonate into the aesthetic, structural, material, and performative aspects of popular music from the nineteenth century into the present. More than ever before, the performance of Blacksound and the ways that it was manipulated under copyright law were steeped heavily in both black vernacular and minstrel aesthetics (comprising an amalgamation of sounds through blackface ventriloquy) by the turn of the twentieth century. And the continued construction of Blacksound out of the legacy of blackface persists in shaping the ways in which we package, distribute, hear, and consume music and artists along racialized lines. This practice extends to how individuals and communities are imagined (and imagine themselves) within the machinations of society through the consumption of popular entertainment. The incessant legacy of blackface also helps determine who has access and proprietary rights to claim ownership over the sounds produced through the commercialization of popular music.

Conclusion Blacksound and the Legacies of Blackface

Blacksound—the sonic complement and aesthetic legacy of blackface performance—accounts for the proprietary, political, and structural development of American popular music and its industry from slavery into the present. Blacksound demonstrates how blackface performance (which began with European American men who blackened their faces and combined real and imagined sounds/movements of black people with their own ethnic performances) developed over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. As discussed throughout this book, black performers and other non-white people also had a direct impact on the development of popular music and its industry, even as it continued to be under the control and manipulation (both structurally and legally) of white music industrialists during slavery and after emancipation. Furthermore, the concept reveals how the racialization of sound and shifting notions of intellectual property throughout the nineteenth century made popular music a space to hear, see, and interrogate the circulation and commodification of the (black) sounds and performances that serve as the aesthetic and property basis of the pop music industry and (racial) identity formation. The blackface mask might have all but disappeared from the public eye after the Civil Rights movement, but the Blacksound tropes that developed within blackface minstrelsy persisted into various strains of American popular entertainment. Blackface and its sonic complement, Blacksound, are at the foundation of almost every entertainment industry, 199

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including film, radio, television, recordings, and sheet music.1 Importantly, the diversity of styles of popular music that developed in the twentieth century—that is, Tin Pan Alley pop, vaudeville, “hillbilly”/bluegrass/ country, jazz, race music/blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, rock, house and EDM, and hip hop—carried within each of them the structural, legal, aesthetic, and cultural baggage left by an industry that was birthed in blackface during slavery. More contemporary implications of Blacksound might be found in one of the most contentious copyright cases of the 2010s. In 2013, R&B singer Robin Thicke became a household name. “Blurred Lines” was Thicke’s fortuitous soul-disco-funk-influenced “pop” collaboration with producer Pharrell Williams and rapper Clifford Harris, Jr. (a.k.a. T.I.). It became the top-selling single of the year globally (selling over 14.8 million units), spent the longest time at the top of the Billboard’s Hot 100 of any single, set the record for reaching the largest US radio audience, and reached number one in eighty countries. Since then, however, “Blurred Lines” and Thicke’s overwhelming success have been eclipsed by the federal court case, in which a jury decided that its creators infringed upon the copyright of Marvin Gaye’s 1977 Billboard Hot 100 chart topper “Got to Give It Up.” Initially, the Gaye estate requested a jury trial on the basis that there were “quantitatively and qualitatively distinct, important, and recognizable portions of Got to Give it Up” that “greatly enhance[] the musical and financial value of Blurred Lines.” After the Marvin Gaye estate formally requested some sort of recompense in 2013 from Thicke, Williams, Harris, and the distributors of “Blurred Lines” for its sonic similarity and “feel” to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” the trio launched a “Complaint for Declamatory Relief” against the Gaye estate.2 In this case, the creators of “Blurred Lines” claimed, “Defendants continue to insist that plaintiff’s massively successful composition, ‘Blurred Lines,’ . . . and ‘Got to Give It Up’ ‘feel’ or ‘sound’ the same. Being reminiscent of a ‘sound’ is not copyright infringement. The intent in producing ‘Blurred Lines’ was to evoke an era. In reality, the Gaye defendants are claiming ownership of an entire genre, as opposed to a specific work.” After sufficient evidence was produced to suggest a discrepancy between the plaintiff and defendant’s claims, the historic court case was initiated. While Gaye vs. Thicke, et al., sparked many debates about the precedents the case and its verdict set for copyright law and artistic freedom, one of the more striking observations worth considering is how the legal proceedings of the trial reflect the complex evolution of and rela-

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tionship between sound, intellectual property, and (recorded) music, from the advent of copyright law in the United States into the present. As a reminder, (post-1972) sound recordings did not fall under copyright law until 1976, and even then, the sounds on the recordings themselves are not under protection.3 There are two basic matters that must be proved to establish copyright infringement under our current law: ownership of a valid copyright and copying of “original” constituent elements of the copyrighted work. As the case’s court instructions indicate, to prove infringement under copyright law, one must prove the copying of an expression of an idea, and not just an idea itself. Despite losing the overall case, the Thicke/Williams camp made arguments during the trial that drew on a loophole in copyright law—a loophole that led to debates regarding the commercial recording of Marvin Gaye’s song “Got to Give It Up,” which contains many of the sonic and performative elements that suggest the “groove” and “feel” of “Blurred Lines.” The commercial recording, which included Gaye’s voice, they argued, was not to be admissible in court as evidence. Lawyers for Thicke/Williams pointed out that the lead sheet (a truncated score that contains limited musical indications) and commercial recording for Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” were deposited for copyright before the new 1976 Copyright Act went into effect in 1978. Importantly, the sounds within the sheet music, not unlike the legacy of blackface tunes in print, were bound by the limits of Western music notation. Based on this loophole, Thicke/Williams argued that Gaye owned the copyright to the lead sheet (not the full score) and could not use the commercial recording of “Got to Give It Up” as evidence within the trial, since it was not under the protection of the 1976 law, which included sound recordings. Without the commercial recording of Gaye’s song as evidence in the trial, both parties needed to seek out a wide array of other evidence to support their case to show whether the relationship between Thicke/Williams’s song and Gaye’s song was inspiration or exploitation. This would include a forensic analysis of sounds of the Thicke/Williams’s recording and the pre-published recording of Gaye’s song by musicologists hired by the Gaye estate and the opposing party. It also included an analysis of Gaye’s original lead sheet and other documents. While many (including Thicke in his early discussions of his song) have admitted to the relationship between the “feel” or “groove” of the two pieces, the language and tools for proving such claims are limited under copyright law. Because the law is still primarily steeped in assigning copyright to “original” written works, lyrics, or recordings, which

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are generally owned by record companies, a legal discussion of “groove” or “feel” leads to what musicologists’ call “structural listening/analysis”—where musical elements are singled out by the chosen examiner to show how what we hear might be quantified. In doing so, the experts in this case were charged with providing evidence to convince the jury of the following questions on their verdict form: (1) Do you find by a preponderance of evidence that the Thicke parties infringed the Gay Parties’ copyright in the musical composition “Got to Give It Up” and “Blurred Lines”? (2) Do you find by a preponderance of the evidence that the Thicke parties’ infringement of the copyright in “Got to Give It Up” was willful? (3) Do you find by a preponderance of the evidence that the Thicke parties’ infringement of the copyright in “Got to Give It Up” was innocent? With only the limited lead sheet that Gaye deposited for copyright, an edited recording of the copyrighted elements (sans Gaye’s voice) of “Got to Give It Up,” statements made by the creators, and the music analysis, the Gaye party and its expert witnesses relied on an expanded understanding of sound as intellectual property to make the musical case that “Blurred Lines” went beyond mere homage to illegal imitation. In accordance with copyright law, the “similarities” under consideration had to be proven independently of one another to show infringement. However, it was not the explicit discussion of more ephemeral aspects of “groove” or “feel” (which are crucial to the sonic and aesthetic making of black music) or a legal consideration of these concepts as copyrightable elements (e.g., sources of intellectual property) beyond what the court deems as “scènes à faire” (or “generic ideas”) that reflected a novel way of understanding sound in the context of copyright law. Instead, specific musical elements were highlighted within traditional structural analysis in order to present the sounds as something “scientifically quantifiable” or legible. Under the law, this was the approach taken to effectively convince the jurors that there was “direct and circumstantial evidence” that “Blurred Lines” was in some part derived from Gaye’s work. In an unprecedented verdict and after two years of litigation in various courts, the Gaye estate was awarded $7.4 million in recuperative damages. The verdict was a huge win for the Gaye estate. Symbolically, it was also a win for the many artists, especially African American artists in the United States, who have historically suffered unfair use of and unequal compensation for works (through the impact of Blacksound), or who have been denied access to copyright their original creations (and/or had them stolen). On the other hand, because of the traditional

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and structural approach to presenting the case, the verdict also reveals that the sounds themselves, the Blacksound and black sounds at the base of popular music and these two songs, are not truly decipherable under copyright law. In fact, the litigation might create a situation in which artists could feel limited in their creative license to explore sounds and styles of previous eras, or it might encourage shrill industry executives (and companies who purchase recording and publishing rights of artists to amass massive catalogues of music for which they then own the rights) to create practices that exploit both the freedoms and the limitations of copyrighted and potentially copyrightable material. Though a difficult task, this significant case begs for new considerations of what constitutes intellectual property in music, as well as for interrogating the full range of music’s constituent components beyond structural listening and how we understand the copyright potential of music that exceeds its textual and recorded basis.4 As black performance aesthetics became even more prominent in the construction of American popular music and Blacksound across the nineteenth century and into the present, they continued to be bound by the constraints and expectations of Western notation and other modes deemed “legible” under copyright. The legal exclusion or denial of nonwritten elements of music continues to leave many of the improvisatory and oral traditions of black music that are foundational to American popular music up for grabs. These sounds and performances have the potential to be litigated according to traditional notions of property based on a musical text within court cases and other negotiations, as my brief discussion of the “Blurred Lines” case demonstrates.5 I discuss throughout this book how print (sheet music) has historically been the medium through which one gained the most direct access to music (outside of live performance) and claimed property rights (until the recording era). Paul Théberge suggests that “both sheet music and piano rolls could be considered ‘software’ components of a primarily hardware driven industry”—pointing to the function of sheet music and the piano roll (and later mechanical sound reproduction devices) as programs or technologies that were realized through performance and sound recordings. Our earliest music technologies (sheet music and early phonographic recordings) have been “programmed” by their producers, recorders, and performers. This programming, or what Ruja Benjamin defines as “the explicit codification of racial stereotypes in computer systems,”6 precedes the algorithms that now drive the ways in which music and popular sound circulate across the internet, especially

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on social media, on streaming platforms, and through Artificial Intelligence. The histories of blackface and legacies of Blacksound continue to be rehearsed through these new technological mediums and require careful unpacking when considering their racialized, cultural, and proprietary contexts and developments. We often engage with commercial recordings in popular music as though the sounds emanating from them are natural or neutral to the performer, rather than considering how they are complexly developed by individuals, among specific communities, and then by a constellation of producers and executives. All of these actors contribute to constructing the ways in which sound has been racialized through commercial recording since the advent of the technology in the late nineteenth century. Sound recording technology and technology in general are not racially neutral in their development or their application, because they are developed and used by racialized people within a racialized (and racist) culture.7 In 2001, veteran music industry executive and former chairman of Def Jam Island Records Jim Camparro made a revealing statement that continues to reflect our contemporary (capitalist) ethos around popular music and consumption: “If we do our job . . . Music’s not black or white, it’s green.”8 Considering, however, how the embodiment of racialized sounds, styles, and marketing strategies has been historically constructed within popular music through the hierarchical formation of race in the United States, we might better understand why national and global economies of music and popular entertainment remain built upon the subjugation, commodification, erasure, and embodiment of blackness, along with black and other marginalized people, through Blacksound. If artists, music scholars and critics, litigators, industry executives, lawmakers, and consumers begin to reorient ourselves around the history and recent developments in copyright, as well as ideas of what might constitute intellectual property in music (i.e., sound and groove), we might find ourselves lobbying for changes to the 1976 Copyright Act that reflect twenty-first-century needs, rather than trying to find ways around outdated laws and procedures in contentious litigations on sound. To this end, Blacksound enables a material reconstruction of the often-ephemeral sounds and movements of black intellectual performance property that continue to cut and resist its regulation. It does so even as these performances are co-opted within systems and industries that seek to silence them as commodities under regulatory regimes and

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notions of intellectual property that emerged during slavery under copy­ right law. An application of the concept reconsiders the right (and whose right it is) to claim ownership over (black) intellectual performance properties beyond the capitalistic systems that have taken ownership over their varied aesthetic practices in the history of popular sheet music, recordings, and performance. It challenges assumptions that these performances should not be protected under copyright law (and are often considered “public domain”), and it also challenges the belief that the law is able to offer “protection” for these sonic and corporeal innovations in the first place. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States might provoke further studies that deconstruct the relationship between sound, performance, and intellectual property in the making of popular music and culture. Through Blacksound, we might interrogate our understandings of how (racialized) sound and performance play into the construction of individual and collective racialized identities, as well as the structure of copyright and property law, within (the industry of) popular music. I hope that the concept and its application to popular sonic histories provide a way toward how we might remake music industrial practices and the creation of popular music in pursuit of justice, repair, and reparations within a system designed for commercial exploitation.9

Notes

introduction 1. The Gilded Age was a period of exponential growth in industry, economy, population, and urbanism between the 1870s and 1900 in the United States. As I make the case for in Chapters 4 and 5, the establishment of the modern commercial music industry was a product of and central to developments in this era. See Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Roosevelt, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993); Joel Shrock, The Gilded Age (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004); Charles Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Lewis L. Gould, America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 2. When progressive-era reformers sought to sequester “vice”—prostitution, drinking, gambling, and so on—into specific districts throughout these rapidly growing cities, they unwittingly created concentrated areas for popular entertainment to flourish, such as the Tenderloin district in downtown New York City and Storyville in New Orleans. These areas might have become legally sanctioned by lawmakers as they increased in number throughout the end of the century, but similar neighborhoods where popular music was made and heard had already sprung up in cities around the country by the mid-nineteenth century. With the spread of new technologies in urban centers in the 1890s, such as the electric streetlamp and streetcar, people had easier access to downtown areas located near red-light districts, and they were able to venture later into the night seeking diversion and entertainment. 3. Mara L. Keire, For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890–1933 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 3. “Sporting class” was used to refer to patrons of these districts. 207

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4. After emancipation from slavery, African Americans traveled from rural areas to urban centers throughout the country in search of opportunities, as well as to escape the racist backlash to the Reconstruction policies that led to the establishment of Jim Crow laws. In Gunnar Myrdal’s important 1944 study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem in Modern Democracy, he describes the exponential migration of African Americans from the south: “so widespread and disruptive did this movement appear that the U.S. Senate felt compelled, in the winter and spring of 1880, to investigate ‘The Cause of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern State.’ ” Quoted in Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 330–31. Black people took their aesthetic practices with them into these developing cities, and music became the soundtrack to many diversions within the racially mixed red-light districts, especially since black performers were often the primary entertainment sources in many of the music halls. In St. Louis, Chestnut Hill was the famed red-light district where ragtime (the then emerging American vernacular sound originating in black communities) was cultivated by itinerant and professional African American musicians, such as Tomas Turpin, Scott Joplin, and John Stark. 5. Although Connors owned her own lucrative business near the end of the nineteenth century, she was born into slavery in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1856, and she established the Castle once she moved to St. Louis after attending the Historically Black College Fisk University. John A. Wright, Discovering African-American St. Louis: A Guide to Historic Sites (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002), 11. 6. “The Fabulous Babe Connors,” Baltimore Afro-American, 1893– (periodical), December 22, 1956, p. 26. 7. “The Fabulous Babe Connors,” p. 26. 8. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Sharpe’s concept of “the wake” is significant within how I discuss the legacy and impact of blackface (especially on blackness), as she employs “wake” to “mourn and illustrate the ways our individual lives are always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery” (8). Saidiya Hartman defines the conditionality of the “afterlives of slavery” in Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) as “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment (6). Blacksound also takes up Sharpe’s charge that “thinking and care need to stay in the wake” as “[wake] work insists and performs thinking that needs care.” Sharpe, In the Wake, 5. In addition to these works, the political and scholarly aims of black feminist theory are central to how I conceptualize Blacksound. 9. Even in the black-run Baltimore Afro-American, Mama Lou is here described as “short, fat, dark, and always herself. . . . She wore a calico dress, gingham apron, and head bandana.” Baltimore Afro-American, December 22, 1956. 10. Douglas Gilbert, Lost Chords: The Diverting Story of American Popular Song (New York: Doubleday, 1942), 208–9. It is worth noting that Johns, as a

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prominent St. Louis figure, suggested Babe Connors’s the Castle to a revered, European classical musician as a place where he could find his desired “novelty”—and Paderewski did not seem to mind. 11. For more on this cultural division of “high” and “low” culture in the mid-nineteenth century, see Paul Charosh, “ ‘Popular’ and ‘Classical’ in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” American Music 10 (Summer 1992): 117–35. 12. “Coon shouter” is a designation given to mostly white women performers who entered pop entertainment out of the minstrel tradition and often in blackface in the 1890s. For more discussion on coon shouting, see Chapter 5. 13. It was suggested that although Theodore Roosevelt himself led his men to strains of “A Hot Time” in war, he requested that it be omitted from a collection of war songs he asked the Library of Congress to assemble, because “the tune was ragtime and not music.” Wright, Discovering African-American St. Louis, 11. 14. Sigmund Spaeth, The Facts of Life in Popular Song (New York: Whittlesey House; McGraw-Hill, 1934), 206–7, 212. 15. The 1897 Copyright Act (passed January 6, 1897) was the first copyright law that protected “the unauthorized public performance of a copyrighted dramatic or musical composition.” This protection was still based upon alreadypublished sheet music and not a live performance, as in the case of Mama Lou. See Benjamin W. Rudd, “Notable Dates in American Copyright,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 28, no. 2 (April 1971): 137–43, www .copyright.gov/history/dates.pdf. 16. “What Is Copyright?,” U.S. Copyright Office, www.copyright.gov/whatis-copyright/. 17. I discuss the sonic and musical aesthetics of ragtime in Chapters 4 and 5, as well as how this style became central to the popular music compositions of Tin Pan Alley. 18. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Ragtime and Early Jazz (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2. 19. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, vol. 2, From 1709 to 1909 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 291. 20. David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 167. 21. Spaeth, The Facts of Life in Popular Song. 22. While there is vast literature on the concept of the aesthetic, I am using aesthetic (in its most basic sense) to describe the sounds and movements that emerge from performance and are cultivated into a particular practice or style through communal engagement over time. Regarding black (performance) aesthetics, I follow Pearl Williams-Jones’s assertion that “The cultural traditions and ideals of West Africa are the ultimate source from which the basic concept of a black aesthetic definition is arrived,” in “Afro-American Gospel Music: A Crystallization of the Black Aesthetic,” Ethnomusicology 19, no. 3 (September 1975): 373. Because black aesthetics have developed in both segregated and integrated contexts, I do not try to describe a singular “black aesthetic” throughout this book, but instead try to unpack the sounds that are part of a specific performance

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or practice under consideration. For more on a philosophical orientation toward various black (musical) aesthetics in the US, see Addison Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972); Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Vintage, 1998); Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1966; New York: Harper Perennial, 2002); Portia Maultsby: “Soul Music: Its Sociological and Political Significance in American Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 17, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 51–60; Tricia Rose: Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Mark Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 2002); Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Shana L. Redmond, Anthems: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Hoboken: Wiley, 2016); Imani Perry, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Alisha Lola Jones, Flaming: The Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Maureen Mahon, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Regina N. Bradley, Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip Hop South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Kira Thurman, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021); and Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City (New York: New York University Press, 2022). 23. Gilbert, Lost Chords, 209, emphasis added. 24. I follow Farah Jasmine Griffin’s conceptualization of “migration narratives” within black cultural production in “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3: “Most often, migration narratives portray the movement of a major character or the text itself from a provincial (not necessarily rural) Southern or Midwestern site (home of the ancestor) to a more cosmopolitan, metropolitan area. Within the migration narrative the protagonist or central figure who most influences the protagonist is a migrant. The representation of the migration experience depends on the genre and form of the narrative as well as the historical and political moment of production.” Griffin’s discussion of black migration narratives is also in conversation with Katherine McKittrick’s discussion of “black geographies,” through which she points out that “the relationship between black populations and geography—and here I am referring to geography as space, place, and location in their physical materiality and imaginative configurations—allows us to engage with narratives that locates and draws on black histories and subjects in order to make visible black social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic.” McKittrick, Demonic

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Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), x. In dialogue with these ideas of movement, this book traces the sounds that originated and then migrated with black musicians from rural to urban centers, how those geographies were shaped by their sounds and movement across time, and the property and performance value of those sounds that continued to disseminate from localized black spaces to the popular sphere, as in the case of Mama Lou. 25. “Blacksound” might also be defined as a “race-based epistemology,” one that intentionally places race and identity at the center of analyzing the history of American popular entertainment to demonstrate how deeply tethered the two are to each other. See Shana Almeida, “Race-Based Epistemologies: The Role of Race and Dominance in Knowledge Production,” Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women and Gender Studies 13 (Summer 2015): 79–105; and George E. Lewis, “Americanist Musicology and Nomadic Noise,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 691–95. 26. It should also be noted that Jayna Brown’s “racial mimicry”—forms of racial delineation with and without cork—is a cogent framework for many useful concepts that have been developed to describe the ways in which black people and blackness have been imagined, appropriated, and consumed in popular culture. In its analysis of race from an intersectional position, Blacksound is in dialogue with this and other concepts that engage with the legacy of racial mimicry and consider the impact of black aesthetics on and their absorption into popular culture. These include Mendi Obadike’s “acousmatic blackness” (a “sonic skin” that enables stereotypes of blackness to be articulated and understood when no blackness is visualized); Nina Eidsheim’s “sonic blackness” (the perceptual phantom of a vocal timbre, projected by the listener, which happens to match current expectations about blackness, or the shaping of a vocal timbre to match ideas about blackness); Barbara Savage’s “aural blackface” (“sounding” black by performing what might be recognized as black dialect); Kristin Moriah’s “sounding blackness” (black performance, singing, and listening as a political act); Daphne A. Brooks’s “sonic blue(s)face” (“a palimpsest of spectacular aural racial and gendered iterations” developed out of minstrelsy by black and white women performers); and Noémi Ndiaye’s “cosmetic blackness” (or black-up), “acousmatic blackness” (black speak), and “kinetic blackness” (black dance). Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Nina Sun Eidsheim, “Marian Anderson and ‘Sonic Blackness’ in American Opera,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2011): 641–71; Barbara Savage, Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938– 1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Kristin Moriah, “ ‘I Dreamed and Loved and Wandered and Sang’: Sounding Blackness in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess,” Sounding Out!, August 20, 2018, https://soundstudiesblog .com/2018/08/20/i-dreamed-and-loved-and-wandered-and-sang-sounding-blackness-in-w-e-b-du-boiss-dark-princess; Daphne A. Brooks, “ ‘This Voice Which Is Not One’: Amy Winehouse Sings the Ballad of Sonic Blue(s)face Culture,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20, no. 1 (2010): 37–60; Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance and the Making of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

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27. “Love and theft” has become a central paradigm through which the more complex aspects of early blackface performances have come to be understood in contemporary discourses on the subject. It was proposed by Eric Lott in his 1993 text of the same title, one that helped to reignite a scholarly and popular interest in blackface, and Lott suggests that minstrelsy was “based on a profound white investment in black culture” and that “Minstrel performers often attempted to repress through ridicule the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed—minstrelsy’s mixed erotic economy of celebration and exploitation, . . . what my title loosely terms ‘love and theft.’ ” Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6. This conception presumes black (musical) “authenticity” as the basis of its formulation. 28. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21, emphasis added. Blacksound does not simply trace the aesthetics of black performance at the base of American popular music that signify black “authenticity,” but instead attempts to decipher how these sounds and their “illocutionary forces” are (re)produced, by and for whom, and the process through which these sounds are embodied as personhood and embedded into legal and economic structures that determine their property value. Sylvia Wynter defines “deciphering” as a process that “seeks to identify not what texts and their signifying practices can be interpreted to mean but what they can be deciphered to do,” and that also “seeks to evaluate the ‘illocutionary force’ and procedures with which [those texts and practices] do what they do.” Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye E. Cham (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1992), 237–79. 29. Hartman continues this conversation, as she notes that “the donning of blackface restaged the seizure and possession of the black body for other’s use and enjoyment. The culture of cross-racial identification facilitated in minstrelsy cannot be extricated from the relations of chattel slavery” (31). 30. Vincent Woodard’s discussion of the “taste” and “appetite”—both literal and metaphorical, as he documents the cannibalism of enslaved people— that white Americans developed for African Americans during slavery resonates with this study: “Whites often satiated this taste [for the African] and appetite through acts of violence, sexual exploitation, imagined ingestion of the black, or through staged rituals designed to incrementally harvest black spirit and soul.” Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture, ed. Dwight A. McBride and Justin A. Joyce (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 18. 31. bell hooks’s concept of “eating the other” complements Woodard’s discussion and extends Eric Lott’s proposition on the role that sexuality plays in blackface, as she argues: “When race and ethnicity become commodified as sources of pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, and sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other.” hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 23. My

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attention to “consumption” takes into consideration Paul Gilroy’s observation that “The term ‘consumption’ has associations that are particularly problematic, and needs to be carefully unpacked. It accentuates the passivity of its agents and plays down the value of their creativity as well as the micro-political significance of their actions in understanding the forms of anti-discipline and resistance conducted in everyday life.” Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 103. 32. Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 9. For more on anti-blackness, see Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); and Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargards, eds., Antiblackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). 33. Critical race theorist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw developed intersectionality as an analytical tool for deconstructing the interconnection between layers of social categorization (race, gender, class, and so on) and the structural oppression experienced by marginalized people—black women in particular—within the United States. See Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–99. 34. Ethnic white performers in burnt cork—who were initially mostly of Irish, Scottish, and English backgrounds (either recently immigrated or secondand third-generation American)—began to perform a uniquely popular style that became ubiquitously American throughout the nineteenth century. This sonic landscape was painted through the melding of Indigenous, Anglo, Irish, Scottish, Jewish, German, Asian, African, Latin American, and other sounds from the diversity of people within a developing new nation. A hybridized American popular sound was imagined during the antebellum era through blackness and blackface ventriloquy by men who had the structural, political, and cultural power to claim some proximity to whiteness. 35. In a diplomatic visit to Japan from the United States in 1852 (in hopes of establishing economic and cultural relations with the East—even if by force), Commodore Matthew C. Perry took with him a blackface troupe to present an example of American culture to the Japanese. These became some of the first representations of black Americans and American popular music in general in the East. See Victor Fell Yellin, “Mrs. Belmont, Matthew Perry, and the ‘Japanese Minstrels,’ ” American Music 14, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 257–75. For more on blackface in an international context, see Susan Thomas, Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Catherine M. Cole, “American Ghetto Parties and Ghanaian Concert Parties: A Transnational Perspective on Blackface,” in Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Stephen Johnson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 224; Michael Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Bradley G. Shope, American Popular Music in Britain’s Raj (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2016); Danielle Roper, “Blackface at the Andean Fiesta: Performing Blackness in the Danza de Caporales,” Latin American Research Review 54, no. 2 (2019): 381– 97. See also Roper, Hemispheric Blackface: Impersonation and Racial Formation

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in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming); Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020); Larisa Kingston Mann, Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022); Kellen Hoxworth, Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, and Performance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024). 36. Before blackface emerged as the primary vehicle of American popular entertainment, white Bostonians used “redface”—posing as Indigenous people through costuming and makeup—in their declaration of independence from the British as “Americans” during the Boston Tea Party of 1773. And as I discuss in Chapter 3, “yellowface” developed out of blackface conventions as another way to inhabit the “other” while distinguishing oneself as “white.” Redface, yellowface, and blackface all contribute to how white identity and nationalism have been constructed through popular culture and performance, even if blackface becomes the primary vehicle throughout the nineteenth century. See Jill Lane, “ImpersoNation: Toward a Theory of Black-, Red-, and Yellowface in the Americas,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1728–31. For more on redface, see Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Jason Richards, Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017); Christine Bold, “Vaudeville Indians” on Global Circuits, 1880s–1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022). For more on yellowface and the performance of Asian identity, see Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Esther Kim Lee, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022); and Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). For a discussion of the race in early American music, see Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman, eds., “Early American Music and the Construction of Race,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, no. 3 (2021): 571–657. 37. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 10. Furthermore, an (ethnic) white male, working-class “love” or fascination with what Lott assumes as “black culture” carries more cultural weight and responsibility than the word “love” allows within this paradigm, particularly within the moment of enslavement in which blackface was born. 38. “Fungibility” is developed by Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection, and this work, along with that of Brooks, is critical to understanding how Blacksound functions within the history of popular music and out of the legacy of slavery that shapes all types of property relations—including the aesthetic. Hartman suggests that “the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of other’s feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the

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enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and domination.” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 21. 39. My use of script is also in conversation with Noémie Ndiaye’s “scripts of blackness,” through which the author aims to explore “scripts that animated three specific performance techniques, . . . black-up, black speak, and black dances.” Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness, 16. 40. Anjali Vats, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 3. 41. Vats goes on to define patent law and trademark: “Patent law, the law of inventions, affords a limited monopoly to inventors who create new and previously unknown technologies, which they disclose to the public. Trademark law, the law of identifying marks, affords a limited monopoly to trademark owners who use words, names, symbols, and designs to identify their goods and distinguish those goods from the goods of others.” Vats, The Color of Creatorship, 5. 42. K. Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 17, ed. Grethe B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996), 127. 43. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). It should be noted that Stoever’s formulation is based upon W. E. B. Du Bois’s oft-repeated projection that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Routledge, 2015). Blacksound highlights the action-based process described by Erich Nunn as “sounding the color line” by analyzing the aesthetics of blackface performance in its historical context. Nunn, Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). Like “the sonic color line” and “sounding the color line,” Blacksound is a conscious attempt to centralize the processes whereby sound and its circulation are as critical to understanding the formation of identity and isms/phobias in discourses on race as visuality (imagery, skin, and other forms of representation). As Nicholas R. Jones notes, “All groups of people, not only those ‘of color,’ are classed, gendered, raced, and (hyper)sexualized based on how they do and do not speak.” Jones, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019), 19. 44. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 45. In an anthropological study on drama, David Napier discusses both the ritualistic and ceremonial nature of masking in ancient religious practices throughout the world, as well as in the origins of Greek drama. Napier states: “The special efficacy of masks in transformation results, perhaps, not only from their ability to address the ambiguities of point of view, but also from their capacity to elaborate what is paradoxical about appearances and perceptions in the context of a changing viewpoint.” His discussion of the paradoxical nature of masked performance, and its direct attachment to transformation (spiritual and/

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or theatrical), is central to a conception of how self and group identity, ritual, and performance were mobilized through blackface in America’s early history. A. David Napier, Masks, Transformation, and Paradox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), xxiii. Psychologist Patrice A. Keats further notes that masks are both “contextually and culturally dependent,” and were a “means to process a variety of spiritual, emotional, and social events that happened within a community.” Patrice A. Keats, “Constructing Masks of the Self in Therapy,” Constructivism in the Human Sciences 8, no. 1 (2003): 108. In the ritualized performances of early blackface minstrelsy, the burnt-cork mask allowed ethnic white performers and observers to negotiate self and other among one another. Keats goes on to note, “the self is appraised and refined in the reflection of others. In this way, the self is constructed and reconstructed or transformed through emotionally experienced processes in relationship” (106, 108). 46. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (1952; New York: Grove, 2008), 112. 47. Musicologist W. Anthony Sheppard, in his examination of masked performances in modernist musical theater, notes that to analyze the function of the mask in theater, one must “first accept the premise that the human face is the center of personal identity and expression. Four of the five senses are centered on the face and much of both verbal and visual communication emanates from this region of the body.” To this end, Sheppard states: “The sound quality of an individual’s voice is perhaps the ultimate marker of a person’s identity. Singing itself can be understood as a form of vocal masking, since the singing voice often differs from an individual’s speaking voice.” Sheppard, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Musical Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 27. 48. Sheppard points to the acoustic, musical, and vocal masking that takes place in musical theater: “The sound quality of an individual’s voice is perhaps the ultimate marker of personal identity. Singing itself can be understood as a form of vocal masking, since the singing voice often differs from the individual’s speaking voice.” Sheppard, Revealing Masks, 33. 49. Nina Eidsheim, “Voice as Action: Towards a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice,” Current Musicology 93 (Spring 2012): 9–32. 50. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1997), 7. 51. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 10. 52. While this study considers practices by Africans in America that can be traced to practices that were carried over during the transatlantic slave trade, it doesn’t essentialize these practices, and keeps in mind the statement of Olly Wilson (who specifically studied African “retentions” in African American music) that “Thus, black American music has both influenced and been influenced in important ways by several nonblack musical traditions thereby making it more difficult to pinpoint precisely the essential aspects of the music which make it a part of a larger African or black music tradition.” Olly Wilson, “Black Music as an Art Form,” Black Music Research Journal 3 (1983): 2. As Paul Gilroy notes,

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“black music cannot be reduced to a fixed dialogue between a thinking racial self and a stable racial community.” Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 110. 53. In centering performance in the nineteenth century, this book also highlights improvisation and the particularities of nineteenth-century black and blackface performances, acknowledging the importance of Christopher J. Smith’s assertion in The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 25, that “participation was both a fundamental part of AfroCaribbean and African American performance, powerfully attractive as a target not only of observation but also imitation, and, as a result of this attraction, powerfully subversive. The music and dancing made audiences want to participate; this desire for participatory pleasure is at the root of popular music’s appeal.” One way to capture the ephemerality of these participatory performances is by attending to the “intermaterial vibration,” as discussed by Nina Eidsheim, which might “afford a better understanding of the ways in which music does what it does, and the ways in which humans use it as a force for good and bad.” Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 163. For more on how improvisation shaped racialized and racist performances through the comedic legacies of blackface, see Raúl Pérez, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022). 54. Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 74. Nyong’o notes that this definition of “amalgamation” is derived from its use in the nineteenth century and emerged decades prior to its association with the word “miscegenation” (often implied to negatively define racial mixing, particularly that of black and white or white and Indigenous people), and he notes that the term “was a political deployment of sexuality through which American subjects were gendered and racialized.” Blacksound is an aesthetic process that comprises an amalgamation of sounds performed in and out of blackface that similarly contributes to the construction of gender, race, and other expressions of identity. 55. For a discussion of the colonial origins of “Fair Use” and the public domain, particularly in relation to Indigeneity, see Trevor G. Reed, “Fair Use as Cultural Appropriation,” California Law Review 109, no. 4 (August 2021): 1374–442; see also Anum Chander and Madhavi Sunder, “The Romance of the Public Domain,” California Law Review 92 (October 2004): 1331–373. Regarding the public domain, Jessica D. Litman suggests that “To characterize the public domain as a quid pro quo for copyright or as the sphere of insignificant contributions, however, is to neglect its central importance in promoting the enterprise of authorship. The public domain should be understood not as the realm of material that is undeserving of protection, but as a device that permits the rest of the system to work by leaving the raw material of authorship available for authors to use.” Jessica D. Litman, “The Public Domain,” Emory Law Journal 39 (1990): 968, emphasis added. 56. Imani Perry, Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 24. Perry goes on further to point out that “The legal

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family and the property it possessed, including human property, were therefore constitutive to the idea of modern patriarchy.” 57. Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Gender, Race, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2. 58. Daniel Goldmark, “Creating Desire on Tin Pan Alley,” Musical Quarterly 90, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 198. 59. Vats, The Color of Creatorship, 2. Blackface and Blacksound helped to produce the conditions for the process legal scholar Brenna Bhandar describes in which “culturally inscribed notions of white European superiority, and philosophical concepts of the proper person who possessed the capacity to appropriate (both on the level of interiority and in the external world) worked in conjunction to produce laws of property and racial subjects.” Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 6. Bhandar goes on further to note that “the massive difference between the nineteenth century, the era dominated by the growth of industrial capitalism, and contemporary modes of neoliberal capitalism require close attention to the ways in which modes of appropriation, rationales for ownership, and the legal form(s) of property have adapted themselves to the imperatives of colonial domination” (28). 60. For more on the history of copyright law and performance, see Derek Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); for more on the history of copyright and dance, particularly in relation to black performance and the racialization of property rights within choreography, see Kraut, Choreographing Copyright. Kevin J. Greene has also produced substantial legal studies on the limits of copyright law and IP in black music and Hip Hop, in particular, see Greene, “Copyright, Culture & Black Music: A Legacy of Unequal Protection,” Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal 21, no. 2 (1998): 339; “ ‘Copynorms,’ Black Cultural Production, and the Debate over African-American Reparations,” Cardoza Arts and Entertainment Journal 25 (2007): 1179–227, www .cardozoaelj.com/wp-content/uploads/Journal%20Issues/Volume%2025 /Issue%203/Greene.pdf; Greene, “Intellectual Property at the Intersection of Race and Gender: Lady Sings the Blues,” American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 16, no. 3 (2008): 365–85. 61. Rinaldo Walcott, On Property (Windsor, ON: Biblioasis, 2021), 11. 62. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1. It should also be noted that Moten’s analysis in this introduction, “Resistance of the Object,” is based upon Saidiya Hartman’s refusal to reproduce the scene of Aunt Hester’s scream from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in her own account within Scenes of Subjection (1997) to avoid reproducing the violence experienced by Aunt Hester repeatedly. Moten’s assertion is that “The question here concerns the inevitability of such reproduction even in the denial of it” (3). 63. Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 60. 64. The control over the racialization of popular sound was exercised through slavery into Jim Crow and the general establishment of the popular music

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industry; even as more black performers could claim authorship in the latter part of the nineteenth century and continued to shape the most innovative developments that would shift the course of popular sound and music, they were still often under the shadow of blackface performance and beholden to mostly white publishers and music industrialists. See Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) for a discussion of how black musicians and performers navigated this terrain through the musical and film in the early twentieth century. 65. It should be noted that, because blackface was so ubiquitous throughout the nineteenth century, all manner of people throughout the entire country have been noted as participating in the practice, yet its origin and then proliferation overlapped with increased immigration from European populations in the midand late nineteenth century. 66. Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke, Slip the Yoke,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 100–112. Ellison goes on to note: For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness but gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and the sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man’s creation, not God’s. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into the Boston Harbor masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of masks for good and evil ever since. As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask. Masking is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities are many. When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical. (107–8, emphasis added)

Signifyin(g) is a literary device developed by Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), and built upon by Samuel Floyd as a musical device in The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). I discuss Signifyin(g) in Chapter 5 of this book in relation to black performance in the post-emancipation and ragtime eras. 67. See Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91, a foundational text in Critical Race Theory that considers how the construction of whiteness as a racial identity developed itself into a form of property protected within American law and customs. This formulation is important within the analysis of race and racialization within Blacksound.

1. slavery and blackface in the making of blacksound 1. Baltimore Sun, 1837, full quotation cited in Douglas A. Jones, Jr., “Black Politics but Not Black People: Early Minstrelsy, ‘White Slavery,’ and the Wedge of ‘Blackness,’ ” in The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination

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of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 67–68. Jones goes on to address claims within the scholarly discourse on minstrelsy that suggest a “sympathetic” relationship that white blackface actors, like T. D. Rice, had toward black people, as he states: “As this curtain speech made clear, however, black grotesquerie was both Rice’s vehicle and his target; he imagined his work not simply as anti-abolitionist but as patently pro-slavery. To claim Jim Crow as a champion of antebellum blackness is, at best, to work within a toorigid binary of black and white. Instead, it is critical that we admit ‘blackness’ into the social fold, and position Jim Crow as its ‘racial’ icon” (68). 2. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19. Lott further notes that this anecdote he recounts is probably the “most accurate account of American minstrelsy’s appropriation of black cultural practices,” yet as this chapter demonstrates, it is but one of many accounts of T. D. Rice’s first attempt to “Jump Jim Crow.” Lott assumes automatic “authentic” scripts of blackness in early blackface, while this study demonstrates how notions and performances of racial authenticity came to be through blackface performance from the start. 3. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 25. See the introduction to this book for a more detailed discussion of how “terror and enjoyment” functions within Blacksound. 4. Decennial Census Official Publications, United States Census Bureau, www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade/decennialpublications.1810.html. 5. “Ulster Scot” (sometimes referred to as “Scotch Irish” in America) is an ethnic group primarily from the region of Ulster, Ireland, after the establishment of the Plantation of Ulster, and was settled mostly by Protestants from Northern England and the Lowlands of Scotland. For more, see Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scotch Irish, and the Creation of the British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6. Cedric J. Robinson discusses how feudalism in the context of the United Kingdom set the stage for the economic and racial conditions out of which capitalism based upon chattel slavery emerged in the United States. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). 7. Each of these early blackface progenitors came from well-to-do families. Foster’s family were of Ulster-Scot heritage, Emmett’s grandfather came to the United States from Ireland during the revolutionary war and served as a chaplain and surgeon, and much of E. P. Christy’s early life is unknown, but he was born in Philadelphia in 1815, the surname “Christy” is of Irish origin, and his wife’s parents were from Ireland. As Philadelphia, Boston, and New York were hubs for both Ulster-Scot immigration during the colonial period and Irish immigration in the early 19th century, it is likely that Christy was of Irish background, too. 8. For more on Andrew Jackson and his impact on the lives and genocide of Native populations in America, see Alfred A. Cave, Sharp Knife: Andrew Jackson and the American Indians (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017).

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9. See also David R. Roediger, “White Skin, Black Masks: Minstrelsy and White Working Class Formation before the Civil War,” in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1999), 115–31. For more on the construction of whiteness, see Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton: 2010); and Karen A. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2012). 10. See Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1975): 3–28; and Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1999). 11. See Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, Including the 1830 “Confessions” (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006), and Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 12. See Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 13. In both the north and south, white fears of “miscegenation”—the term used at the time to denote racial mixing with those who had been constructed as inferior to white people, specifically black Americans—developed in relation to the political endowment of whiteness as citizen during the antebellum era. 14. This process precedes what Louis Chude-Sokei defines as “technopoetics,” as he recognizes the way blackface, slavery, and other factors contributed to the mechanization of blackness through various forms of technology toward the end of the nineteenth century. Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015). 15. Constance Rourke points to these early blackface ethnic caricatures in American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; New York: NYRB Classics, 2004). 16. This analysis is in conversation with Daniel Goldmark’s approach in his article “Creating Desire on Tin Pan Alley,” Musical Quarterly 90, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 197–229, in which Goldmark considers the importance of sheet music and its publication (from its cover to the music, to the back material) in a critical analysis of its commercialization within popular music. 17. John Mills Brown, “The Log House” (Boston?: A. P. Heinrich?, 1826), Courtesy the Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection, Sheridan Library, Johns Hopkins University, https://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/collection/032/060a. 18. For more on early sheet music, blackface, and representations of blackness, see Stephanie Dunson, “Black Misrepresentation in Nineteenth Century Sheet Music,” in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of Popular Culture, 1890–1930, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 45–66. 19. There appears to have been a deluge of music written to commemorate General Lafayette and/or him and George Washington since the revolutionary era; for more, see Damien Mahiet “Music for Lafayette, 1780s-1830s, A Catalog,” https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/lafayette/collection/Lafayette_music_catalogue_

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24082009.pdf, and Lafayette College Marquis de Lafayette Collection, https:// academicmuseum.lafayette.edu/special/marquis/CelebratingLafayette/music.htm. 20. For a detailed discussion of this tune, see William J. Mahar, “Backside Albany and Early Blackface Minstrelsy: A Contextual Study of America’s First Blackface Song,” American Music 6, no. 1 (1988): 1–27. 21. Mahar, “Backside Albany,” 20. 22. As Mahar notes, the “battle song” was common in the Revolutionary War era, for example, “The Battle of New Orleans,” “The War Turned Upside Down,” and “The Old Soldiers’ King”—most of which were comedic songs that included satirical commentary on the British. Mahar, “Backside Albany,” 16. Mahar notes that Hawkins family enslaved Anthony Hannibal Clapp (1749–1816), and that Anthony “was a devoted friend and musical associate of Micah,” in “Backside Albany,” 13. 23. As a reminder, I defined “scripts” in the Introduction as “referring to particularly the specific sonic and corporeal markers of identity that came to be performed, stereotyped, embodied, and circulated through blackface.” Through a brief study of black dialect by dialectologists and linguists of the early twentieth century, Mahar concludes that “the large inventory of features characteristic of Black English in the song suggests that the greatest number of linguistic variations occurs in the earliest blackface songs. As the number of performers entering the field of blackface entertainment grew during the 1830s and 1840s, the number of lexical, grammatical, and syntactical features borrowed from Black English decreased, leaving only a few phonological elements (e.g., de, gwine, bery, jis, sich) typical of the post-1840 repertory,” in “Backside Albany,” 13. 24. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 25. Richard J. Wolfe, Secular Music in America, 1801–1825, vol. 3 (New York: New York Public Library, 1964), 1156–57. 26. Riley was one of the most successful music publishers of his era, publishing over 450 works during his lifetime. For more, see Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, vol. 2, From 1709 to 1909 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11. 27. This revision was lobbied for by William Wolcott Ellsworth, who argued that US copyright law should be uniform with European copyright law in its protection of musical compositions. President Andrew Jackson signed the bill into law on February 3, 1831. For more, see Frank Evina, “First General Revision Gave Copyright to Musical Composition and Extended Term,” Copyright Lore, November 2006, www.copyright.gov/history/lore/pdfs/200611%20 CLore_November2006.pdf. 28. The Reconstruction era (1865–77) is the period after the Civil War when African Americans, with federal aid and the passing of several civil rights acts, began to establish themselves politically, culturally, and economically, after recent emancipation from enslavement. Reconstruction policies were met with great resistance by white people of various classes and ethnicities throughout the south, as local laws were established and violently enforced by white supremacist groups to prevent African Americans from attaining civic and social equality. After the federal government stopped supporting the civic equal-

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ity of African Americans during the 1880s and ’90s with economic, legislative, and military aid, these vagrants and organized white supremacist groups maintained a stronghold on life throughout the south until the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision ruled that “separate but equal” education facilities established under Jim Crow law (in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896) were unconstitutional. This federal decision was central to instigating the Civil Rights movement. See Eric Foner, “The Facts of Reconstruction,” in Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 2005), 159–81. 29. As Katrina Dyonne Thompson discusses in Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), African cultural and musical practices were already turned into sources of “entertainment” for enslavers on the decks of slave ships during the middle passage. This “entertainment” often consisted of girls and women being forced to dance for the pleasure of enslavers, often experiencing sexual violence in the process, or enslaved people being required to dance to stay “fit” on their extensive journey to being sold as chattel in the Americas. 30. It has been suggested that the “crow” had its own distinct connotations in West African (Yoruba) culture, and so its misinterpretation might be an early example of decontextualizing a popular cultural African (American) symbol to be used for commercial, social, political, and economic use by white Americans, who were able to both take ownership of and define this character-stereotype that came to stand in for blackness. 31. W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 33–34. 32. As I discuss in the Introduction, my use of “amalgamation” draws on Tavia Nyong’o’s The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), in which he unpacks the racialization of performance and identity through the mixing of black, white, and other racial/ethnic groups under the structures of slavery and white supremacy in the nineteenth-century United States. 33. For more on the opportunity for cross-cultural exchange between African Americans and Irish Americans along the Ohio River Valley and other frontier spaces of the nineteenth century, see Christopher J. Smith, “Blacks and Irish on the Riverine Frontiers: The Roots of American Popular Music,” Southern Cultures 17, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 75–102. Cincinnati, Ohio, is where the account of Rice’s first performance of “Jump Jim Crow,” based on the black dockhand Cuff, is said to have taken place. See Lott, Love and Theft. 34. C. A. Somerset, A Day after the Fair: A Farce in Two Acts, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/dayafterfairfarc0000some. 35. Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 34. In The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Joseph Boskin notes that Sambo “was conceived in Europe, particularly in England, and drew his first breath with the initial contact with West Africans during the early slavetrade years. Sambo was a concept long before assuming a specific identity. Sambo’s existence gradually evolved as Western Europeans directed the energies of blacks on sugar plantations in the West Indies and the tobacco fields in the

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tidewater regions of Virginia and Maryland—and later in the north American colonies as well. Over a period of time Sambo became an integral part of the colonial family, particularly as a worker but entertainer, too” (8). 36. Sylvia Wynter, “Sambos and Minstrels,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 154. 37. Henry A. Kmen, “Old Corn Meal: A Forgotten Urban Negro Folksinger,” Journal of American Folklore 75, no. 295 (January-March 1962): 33. 38. Kmen, “Old Corn Meal,” 32. 39. Kmen, “Old Corn Meal,” 30. 40. For more on the legacy of Tom and Jerry, or Life in London in American theater and performance, see Peter P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 41. Kmen, “Old Corn Meal,” quotes the New Orleans Picayune, in which it was noted that “Life in New Orleans” was “met with such a warm reception” that a repeat performance (where the horse fell off the stage and died) was demanded for the following Tuesday (New Orleans Picayune, May 13, 1837). 42. This concept is developed in Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016), in which she states, “the listening ear drives the sonic color line; it is a figure for how dominant listening practices accrue—and change— over time, as well as a description for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms” (7). 43. Francis C. Sheridan, Galveston Island; or, A Few Months off the Coast of Texas: The Journal of Francis C. Sheridan, 1839–1840, ed. Willis W. Pratt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014). 44. In Fun in Black, T. Allston Brown notes that one of the earliest popular blackface performers and a contemporary of Rice, George Nichols, also drew directly on performances of a local New Orleans black performer named Picayune Buter, who was referenced in contemporaneous publications, but not described in as much detail as well as Old Corn Meal has been. Colonel T. Allston Brown, Fun in Black; or, Sketches of Minstrel Life, with the Origin of Minstrelsy, by (New York: Robert M. DeWitt, 1874), 5. 45. Kmen, “Old Corn Meal,” 31, emphasis added. 46. Reed, Rogue Performances, 146. 47. Kmen, “Old Corn Meal,” 31. 48. New Orleans Bee, February 23, 1836. 49. Sandra Jean Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 243. 50. Nina Eidsheim, “Voice as Action: Towards a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice,” Current Musicology 93 (Spring 2012): 9–32. 51. John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster, America’s Troubadour (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1934), 137. 52. Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 43. 53. Laurence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), 115–17, emphasis added.

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54. Margaret Dean-Smith, “Jig,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber /article/grove/music/14307. 55. John Turnbull and Patrick Buchan, eds., The Garland of Scotia; A Musical Wreath of Scottish Song, with Descriptive and Historical Notes, Adapted for the Voice, Flute, Violin, &c. (Glasgow: Wm. Mitchinson, 1841). 56. Linguistic and cultural studies of Celtic practices in America also suggest that the stereotyped dialect often attributed to African Americans originated with the linguistic patterns of “culture” of the inhabitants of Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, and English Borderlands who immigrated to the American south during colonialism. For further discussion, see Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988); Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (San Francisco: Encounter, 2005), 1–65; and John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (New York: Gotham, 2009). 57. Reprinted in Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); originally printed by James Bennett, New York Herald (April 27, 1837). 58. In Chapter 2, I consider how African American banjo traditions, along with Anglo-Celtic fiddling, might have impacted the distinct rhythmic practices that likely accompanied a live performance of Rice’s “Jim Crow,” and how this sonic component factored into how Blacksound incited polyrhythmic sounds and movement in blackface. 59. Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 43. 60. This is a frequent racist reference to “Jim Crow” in printed sheet music and advertisements of the mid-nineteenth century. 61. See Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: Norton, 1983), 124. 62. Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 89. 63. The racialization of sartorial practices of black people under the white (supremacist) gaze is what Monica Miller defines as “the crime of fashion,” which “describes the racial and class cross-dressing that was, as practiced by blacks, a symbol of self-conscious manipulation of authority and, as seen in blackface, an attempted denigratory parody of free black’s pride and enterprise.” Miller notes that “the black dandy is thus both a perpretrator and a victim to crimes of fashion, a figure that both escapes and falls into pat definitions of blackness, masculinity, and sexuality.” Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 81. Miller goes on to encapsualate the paradoxical impact of the three popular black dandy figures, and how these minstrel icons shaped the racialized construction of masculinity (and sexuality) through style and performance, as she observes that “Long-Tail Blue, Zip Coon, and Daddy Jim menace even as they amuse, revealing the affinity between effiminacy associated with extreme attention to dress and appearance and hypermasculinity linked to a sexual rapacity that exceeds racial boundaries” (99).

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64. See Barbara Lewis, “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Daddy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 267. 65. William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 210. For more on the Sambo character, which was supposed to represent the simple, dumb, and lazy but harmless and docile black (enslaved) male, see Shirley Anne Tate, Decolonising Sambo: Transculturation, Fungibility and Black and People of Colour Futurity (Leeds: Emerald Group, 2019). 66. Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 81. 67. See Hamm, Yesterdays, 126. 68. Dixon was so revered for his performance of Zip Coon that his name was used as an advertisement on the cover of the sheet music issued by various publishers at the time, such as that published by J. L. Hewlett in New York: “Sung by Mr. G. W. Dixon.” During antebellum minstrelsy, this was a common practice by which to boost sheet music sales of individual songs. For more on this case, see Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks, Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). 69. See Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 257. 70. On the rise of Irish immigration in the 1840s, the populist candidature and election of Andrew Jackson, and what is referred to as “Jacksonian democracy” in relation to blackface performance, see Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology.” 71. See Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 99. 72. New York Sun, July 11, 1834, quoted in Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 100. 73. Dale Cockrell notes that before Dixon appeared on the Bowery stage that night, a performance of Metamora by Edwin Forrest (the famed American Shakespearean actor) had been cut short by rioters. Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 100. On this performance, see Scott C. Martin, “Interpreting Metamora: Nationalism, Theater, and Jacksonian Indian Policy,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 73–101. 74. “Zip Coon” (Firth and Hall, 1834), https://digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A208302. 75. Example 1 is transcribed from Francis O’Neill and James O’Neill, eds., O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (Chicago: Lyon & Healy, 1903), 281. 76. See Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 77. “Zip Coon” (New York: Thomas Birch, 1834). 78. Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 268. Cockrell goes on to suggest that “from the perspective of the white working-class audience, was its ability to ridicule both up and down the social ladder simultaneously, making a funny song a double treat, and to give expression to white common-person feelings of being bracketed out of the day’s sociopolitical dialogue. Zip . . . gives character to the rea-

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son why blacks cannot possess the honorable status accorded whites and, at the same time, expression to the abstract, distant, unnatural, and, finally, unworkable pretensions of the powerful” (94). 79. Ashon Crawley, “That There Might Be Black Thought: Nothing Music and the Hammond B-3,” CR: The New Centennial Review 16, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 125. 80. Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 166. Examples 2 and 3 are transcribed from Nathan’s study, 168. 81. This style might also be impacted by the black fiddling traditions that came from various parts of Africa and continued to develop in the Americas; see Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, “The (Mis)Representation of African American Music: The Role of the Fiddle,” Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 1 (February 2016): 1–32. DjeDje notes that “playing the fiddle in the Americas can be regarded as a reinforcement rather than a diminishment of Africanisms, which led to transformation and the development of new stylistic trends” (13). 82. The “breakdown” became associated with any popular black dance style (particularly ones that riffed upon the Irish “reel” and “jig” dances) in the nineteenth century. There were different regional breakdowns (i.e., the “Virginia” breakdown), but they were all connected to the idiosyncratic movements (bent hips, knees, leaning forward and backward, contorting one’s body for performative affect, and so on) of early black American dance. For more, see “Tap Dance in America: A Short History,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item /ihas.200217630/. 83. See Nathan, Dan Emmett, 182. 84. For more on the legacy of blackface in early cartoons, see Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). For more on the legacy of the ice cream truck song, see Natalie Escobar, “An Ice Cream Truck Jingle’s Racist History Has Caught Up To It,” August 14, 2020, www.npr.org/sections /codeswitch/2020/08/14/902664184/an-ice-cream-truck-jingles-racist-historyhas-caught-up-to-it?t = 1656582846866. 85. Robert B. Winans, “Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 147. In a study of the most popular minstrel shows on 151 programs between 1843 and 1852, Winans determines that 34 percent (the largest of any song) of these programs featured “Miss Lucy Long.” 86. It is also important to note here that the idea of cross-dressing for popular/comedic performance through the style that has come to be known as “drag” performance in the United States can also find its origins or at least its popularizing through blackface. 87. Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 43. 88. Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York: New York University Press, 2021); Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak, “Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London,” in The Oxford

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Companion to American Theatre, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 620; Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 44. 89. Winans, “Early Minstrel Show Music,” 147. Winans goes on to discuss the different song types that might be found in early minstrel programs, and another cross-dressed character that emerged after Lucy Long was “Lucy Neal”—who was treated more “sympathetically. Although Lucy is mostly spoken for, as in Lucy Long, the sentiment of the song itself expresses the sadness experienced by the suitor who tells the slave catcher who comes to take her away to ‘Stan back! you white slave dealer; She is my betrothed bride’ ” (152). Although this song is more “sentimental” in nature, it still does not remove the racist caricature or impact of white men articulating their fantasies of black womanhood on the minstrel stage. This tune was also not nearly as popular as “Miss Lucy Long.” 90. Judith Butler, “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 125. 91. Annemarie Bean, “Transgressing the Gender Divide: The Female Impersonator in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 246. 92. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 2. 93. See Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, with “A True Tale of Slavery” by John S. Jacobs, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Jean M. Humez, Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). Mary Prince was born enslaved in Bermuda and escaped to England where she dictated her conditions and life under British slavery in the Caribbean, and they were written by the Englishman Thomas Pringle. Harriet Jacobs absconded to a tiny crawl space in the attic of her grandmother’s house in North Carolina after being sexually abused by her enslaver. Seven years later, Jacobs escaped from that crawl space to New York and claimed her freedom. Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in Maryland and made several trips on the Underground Railroad to help dozens of enslaved black Americans escape slavery in the south to the north in search of freedom. Tubman also served as an armed scout and spy with the Union army during the Civil War, when she led a raid at the Cohambee River in South Carolina that freed more than seven hundred enslaved people. 94. José Muñoz develops the term “disidentification” to describe the process in which femme, queer, and trans individuals might “perform the self” to elucidate a “minoritarian politics that is not monocausal or monothematic, one that is calibrated to discern multiplicity of interlocking identity components and the ways in which they affect the social.” José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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95. Quoted in Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 60. For more on the legacy of Mary Jones, see also Tavia Nyong’o, “In Night’s Eye: Amalgamation, Respectability, and Shame,” in The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 69–102. 96. Snorton, Black on Both Sides, 62. In thinking through the life and work of Julius Eastman, Ellie Hisama suggests that it is necessary to take an intersectional approach to analyzing his life and music, as his experiences in life were not separate from the work that he created as a composer and performer. This is an important notion toward the necessity of an intersectional analysis within Blacksound and the legacy of American popular music born out of blackface. See “ ‘Diving into the Earth’: The Musical Worlds of Julius Eastman,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 260–86. 97. Bean, “Transgressing the Gender Divide,” 247. 98. “Lucy Long,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (directed by Stephen Railton at the University of Virginia), http://utc.iath.virginia.edu /minstrel/lucylongfr.html. 99. For more on the jezebel stereotype and its impact on shaping perceptions of black womanhood throughout culture, see Tamura Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 100. In most of these performances, it appears as though Lane did not perform “Lucy Long” in blackface, but instead as himself (a black man) in drag, further adding to the attributed authenticity of this cross-dressed, stereotyped character as a black woman for white audiences. See Chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of Lane and his performance in the United States and United Kingdom. 101. Manchester Guardian, October 18, 1848, www.utm.utoronto .ca/~w3minstr, emphasis added. 102. Winans, “Early Minstrel Show Music,” 159. 103. For more on the lives and experiences of black women during slavery, see David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, ed., Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Rachel A. Feinstein, When Rape Was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence during Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2018); Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About; Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 104. Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 37.

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2. william henry “master juba” lane and antebellum blacksound 1. For a comprehensive collection of multiple written accounts about Lane’s performance across England from Manchester to London’s Vauxhall, see Stephen Johnson, University of Toronto, “The Juba Project,” www.utm.utoronto .ca/~w3minstr. 2. As I discuss in Chapter 1, these popular sounds in the mid-nineteenth century are built on those of Indigenous, European, African, and Asian people, and they are expressed primarily through the racial imaginary of white performers through the blackface mask. Yet the construction of this popular sound developed in relation to the black sounds created by black people, either directly through black performers, or through the mimicry (and/or imaginary) of black aesthetics performed by non-black/white people, or through other forms of masking related to blackface, like redface and yellowface. 3. For a book-length study on blackface minstrelsy in the United States and United Kingdom during abolitionism, see Robert Nowatzki, Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). 4. As I discuss later in this chapter, Lane was often pitted against popular white minstrels like John Diamond (another P. T. Barnum act) in minstrel show dance competitions, where he mimicked Irish and Scottish folk dances, as he improvised upon them through his own African American performance practices. 5. Although Lane was exceptionally popular during his lifetime, it seems as though he almost disappeared from the histories of popular music and minstrelsy until an important study by Marian Hannah Winter titled “Juba and American Minstrelsy” was published in Dance Index in 1947. 6. Five Points was the New York neighborhood in the lower east side of Manhattan during the nineteenth century that was settled by poorer and working-class people, particularly African and Irish Americans, between two streets that cross each other and a third that ends at their intersection. It was also the neighborhood that included several sporting halls (gambling, prostitution, drinking, and the like) that people of all classes traveled to, and where wealthier white people would go seeking “diversion” and entertainment made primarily by black performers. For more, see Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19thCentury New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). 7. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” 226. 8. Christopher Small defines music not as a noun, but as a verb, “to music,” through his concept of “musicking.” This approach centers performance and the sociality of music’s performance and listening, and it is central to how I think through the aesthetics of Blacksound throughout this work. See Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998); and Small, “Musicking—the Meanings of Performance and Listening: A Lecture,” Music Education Research 1, no. 1 (1999): 9–21.

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9. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” 224. 10. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), 97. Dina Epstein also notes that as early as 1776, a writer in Dublin wrote of (white) women in Virginia that “it is usual to dance jigs; a practice originally borrowed, I am informed, from Negroes.” Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 121. 11. Reprinted in Eileen Southern, ed., Readings in Black American Music (New York: Norton, 1971), 117. For more on the Federal Writers Project, see “Great Depression and New Deal: A General Resource Guide, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/newdeal/fwp.html. 12. Gottschild goes on to further note that “The jig became so closely associated with African expressive forms that early twentieth-century white rural carnivals and small circuses—the descendants of the minstrel era—had a segregated section for African American performers called the jig top. An early form of piano ragtime music was known as ‘jig piano,’ and the epithet ‘jigaboo,’ for African American, surely comes from the same root.” Gottschild, Digging, 97. 13. Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Gottschild, Digging, 80. 14. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [1845] and My Bondage and My Freedom [1855] (New York: G&D Media, 2019), 220. 15. Lewis W. Payne, “Six Years in a Georgia Prison” (1851), reprinted in Southern, Readings in Black American Music, 89. 16. Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade (1623), reprinted in Southern, Readings in Black American Music, 3. 17. For a discussion of the sexual violence that enslaved people, particularly women and girls, experienced during the middle passage on slave ships, as they were forced to dance and perform for the “entertainment” of crew mates and captains, see Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). 18. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” 223. 19. Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 20. Stephen Johnson, “Juba’s Dance: An Assessment of Newly Acquired Documentation,” Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Society for Dance History Scholars, 2003, www.utm.utoronto.ca/~w3minstr /featured/pdfs/JubasDance.pdf. 21. In The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), Christopher J. Smith discusses the significant exchanges that occurred between AngloCeltic Americans and African Americans in both rural and urban settings, specifically noting the frequency of integrated musicking practices in rural spaces. He discusses these exchanges in working-class, integrated rural neighborhoods in

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Rhode Island, New York, from where performers, such as William Henry Lane, went to Manhattan’s Five Points red-light district during the mid-nineteenth century for work. Smith amplifies the way we might hear the sheet music of early blackface music, by suggesting that we use the paintings of William Sydney Mount—recognized as one of America’s first genre and landscape painters—to consider past performance practices and the relationship between Anglo-Celtic and African music and sound during everyday, improvised performances. Smith notes that “[the] musical analysis [of minstrelsy’s sheet music] is primarily predicated on analysis of tunes as they were notated, not as they would have been realized in performance: danced, improvised, polyrhythmicized” (10). He goes on to discuss how the visual and historical evidence indicates that, contrary to the “squareness” represented by minstrelsy’s sheet music, live blackface performance was heavily driven by “polyrhythmic and polymetric shifting accents that were an essential element of African American improvised performance practice” (11). Smith makes a significant observation that parallels my consideration of how improvisation of “self” in relation to “other” formed the basis of the development of Blacksound: “Even those pieces that in the ’40s and ’50s were printed in simplified and squared-out versions for bourgeois consumption were often syncopated or ‘ragged’ (as the process was later labeled) in performance. Certainly this rhythmic cutting or ragging was an essential part of the African-creole street performance idiom as it is depicted in period sketches, and in images and descriptions of T. D. Rice, G. W. Dixon (both white), and William Henry ‘Juba’ Lane, the long Island-born African American dancer witnessed by Charles Dickens” (11). 22. Anbinder, Five Points, 172. 23. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, vol. 1 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 218. 24. In many of the accounts of Dickens’s description of William Henry Lane, neither the original name of the establishment, “Almacks,” nor its AfricanAmerican proprietor, Pete Williams, is often mentioned; until recent critical histories appeared, such as Winter’s “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” the figure of Dickens has dominated the narrative. 25. See Lawrence H. Houtchens, “Charles Dickens and International Copyright,” American Literature 3, no. 1 (March 1941): 18–28. 26. Anjali Vats, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 6. Vats goes on to note that “The relationship between intellectual property and citizenship fuels understandings of creatorship that protect white interests in copyrights, patents, and trademarks” (7). 27. The World Intellectual Property Organization, formed in 1967, defines “intellectual property” as “creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce.” www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/. 28. See the Kurt Stein Collection of Francis Johnson Sheet Music, University of Pennsylvania, www.library.upenn.edu/detail/collection/kurt-stein-collectionfrancis-johnson-sheet-music. 29. Derek Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 89.

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30. George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light with Here and There a Streak of Sunshine (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1850), 73. Contrary to Foster’s rather sordid description of Williams’s tavern, another contemporary account by reporter Nathaniel Willis noted that Almacks “looked very clean and cheerful. It was a spacious room with a low ceiling, excessively whitewashed, nicely sanded, and well lit, and the black proprietor and his ‘ministering spirits’ (literally fulfilling their vocation behind a very tidy bar) were well-dressed and wellmannered people.” Quoted from Forty Years of American Life (1864), in Anbinder, Five Points, 198–99. 31. Anbinder, Five Points, 199. 32. Anbinder, Five Points, 48. 33. P. T. Barnum is one the primary progenitors in the development of variety and circus entertainment in antebellum America. He built his career from presenting (racist) “exotic” or “eccentric” oddities to European American audiences, and he helped to construct a normalized idea of “whiteness” within the public imaginary (i.e., white gaze) in opposition to the “other” through his staged racist acts like the “Aztec children,” the “Siamese Twins,” and “General Tom Thumb.” James W. Cook, “Race and Race Relations in P. T. Barnum’s New York,” Lost Museum Archive, City University of New York, https:// lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/race-and-race-relations-in-pt-barnums-new. 34. Eileen Southern, ed., “Black Musicians and Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 48. 35. P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum (London: Routledge & Sons, 1889), 44. 36. See Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 37. There were exceptions, such as the African Grove Theater built in 1821 by free West Indian American William Alexander Brown in New York City. This theater, like many segregated black establishments in the north, faced constant harassment by police and was eventually closed by the city a few years after its opening. For more information on the African Grove Theater Company, see Jonathan Dewberry, “The African Grove Theatre and Company,” Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 4 (1982): 129; and Marvin Edward McAllister, “ ‘White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour’: A History of New York’s African Grove /African Theatre” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1997). 38. The Georgia Minstrels were established by Charles B. Hicks (who is documented as being mixed-race black and white) in 1865. For more on the Georgia Minstrels, see Eileen Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels: The Early Years,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 163–75. See my discussion of the Georgia Minstrels in Chapter 5. 39. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” 226.

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40. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2. 41. In Appropriating Blackness, E. Patrick Johnson notes: Of course, the power relations maintained by white hegemony have different material effects for blacks than for whites. When white Americans essentialize blackness, for example, they often do so in ways that maintain “whiteness” as a master trope of purity, supremacy, and entitlement, as a ubiquitous, fixed, unifying signifier that seems invisible. Alternately, the tropes of blackness that whites circulated in the past— Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, Jim Crow, Sambo, Zip Coon, pickaninny, and Stepin Fetchit, and now enlarged to include welfare queen, prostitute, rapist, drug addict, prison inmate, etc.—have historically insured physical violence, poverty, institutional racism, and second-class citizenry for blacks. (4)

42. Vats, The Color of Creatorship, 15. 43. Lynn Fauley Emery, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today, 2nd ed. (Hightstown, NJ: Dance Horizons), 189. 44. One way in which early blackface minstrelsy in the United Kingdom differed from that in the United States is the participation of women in early blackface performance. For example, the popular Edinburgh theater impresario William Henry Murray introduced an all-female troupe titled The Buffalo Gals or “Da Real Transatlanticum Ethiopium Serenadiums” in the late 1840s, and a resident actress at the Adelphi Theatre in London was performing “Jump Jim Crow” within weeks of his appearance there. For more, see Eric J. Graham, “The ‘Blackface Minstrelsy’ in Scotland,” Scottish Local History 80 (February 2011): 22, 25. 45. Paul Gilmore, “ ‘De Genewine Artekil’: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism,” in The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 51. 46. For more on the construction of whiteness in relation to Irish and Irish American identity, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995; New York and London: Routledge, 2009), in addition to the discussion of Irish American performers, whiteness, and blackface in Chapter 1. 47. Quoted in Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” 231. 48. McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave, 4. 49. The direct legacy of minstrelsy in the United Kingdom might be seen through one of the United Kingdom’s most popular TV shows of the twentieth century—The Black and White Minstrel Show. In 1958, the same year this blackface variety show began, the Nottingham riots erupted, signaling the racist and anti-black sentiments within the United Kingdom against the Caribbean immigrants known as the Windrush generation. This community left its colonized Caribbean islands by invitation of the British to fill the shortage in the labor market after the war. The correlation between the popularity of this blackface variety show and the actual experiences of black people in Britain cannot be understated. In the two decades of its existence, it’s hard to dispute the sheer popularity of The Black and White Minstrel Show. In the 1960s, it received viewing audiences of sixteen million. Its stage-show spin-offs were breaking box-office records. It was even a critical success: in 1961, it won the

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prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux (an international awards festival in entertainment broadcasting and programming). Between 1961 and 1963, The Black and White Minstrel Show’s commercial albums all rose to number one on the UK Albums chart. In 1967 the Campaign against Racial Discrimination presented a petition to the BBC calling for the show to be canceled, but the TV show itself was not finally canceled until 1978. The Black and White Minstrel Show also had a successful stage show that ran in the Victoria Palace Theater London from 1962 to 1972. This stage-show spawned troupes that toured to Australia and New Zealand through the 1980s. 50. Instances of white actors imitating black people in theater performances happened in the United States and United Kingdom as early as the eighteenth century. One of the earliest documented examples is Thomas Southerne’s stage version of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, which became a successful play first in Britain in 1695, and then later became as popular in America. See Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave, ed. Catherine Gallagher (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000); and Elizabeth Landford, “Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Abolitionist or Sympathist Text?,” in Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Maria Suzette Fernandes-Dias (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 195–210. Another early British drama that represented blackness through whiteness on stage and subsequently became popular in the United States is Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Padlock (1768), and Charles Didbin both wrote the music for and played the role of the central black character, Mungo. Ira Aldridge, the black American tragedian who later traveled to London and found success in Europe, also played the part of Mungo in the 1820s. For more, see Nicholas M. Evans, “Ira Aldridge: Shakespeare and Minstrelsy,” American Transcendental Quarterly 16, no. 3 (2002): 165–87. 51. Graham, “The ‘Blackface Minstrelsy’ in Scotland,” 21. 52. Graham, “The ‘Blackface Minstrelsy’ in Scotland,” 76. 53. Graham, “The ‘Blackface Minstrelsy’ in Scotland,” 78. 54. For more on the Virginia Minstrels in the United Kingdom, see Michael Pickering, “Mock Blacks,” in Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 1–25; and Jessica H. Legnini, “A ‘Genuine Display of Ethiopian Life’: The Virginia Minstrels at the Manchester Athenaeum,” Popular Entertainment Studies 2, no. 2 (2011): 35–54. 55. Britain was the most dominant European nation in the transatlantic slave trade from 1640 until 1807 when the British slave trade was abolished. Together with Portugal, the two countries accounted for about 70 percent of all Africans transported to the Americas. In 1672, the Royal African Company is formed to regulate the English slave trade, with a legal monopoly over the twenty-five hundred miles of African coast from the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope. The company is financed by royal, aristocratic, and commercial capital. It is estimated that Britain transported 3.1 million Africans (of whom 2.7 million arrived) to the British colonies in the Caribbean and North and South America and to other countries. The early African companies developed English trade and trade routes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it was not until the opening of Africa and the slave trade to all English merchants in 1698 that Britain began to become dominant. Importantly, in addition to its

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abolitionist leanings, Scotland was also the hub of the Confederacy outside of the United States during the Civil War. By 1864, twenty-seven shipyards on the River Clyde were working around the clock, employing twenty-five thousand men in the construction of blockade runners (ships with reinforced decks and armor, designed to be equipped with cannons for use by the Confederate navy). Around three thousand Scots worked onboard the vessels, breaking Britain’s law against subjects becoming involved in foreign wars, but for the captains it was a business too lucrative to ignore. Many were earning $3,000 per run, and those who made it through the blockade to Charleston with their holds laden with food and arms were able to fill them up with bales of cotton, which they then sold in Scotland for thirty times the purchase price. See Stephen Mullen, “It Wisnae Us”: The Truth about Glasgow and Slavery (Edinburgh: Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, 2009), https://it.wisnae.us/glasgowand-the-slave-trade/. Thank you also to Lisa Williams (caribscot.org) for introducing me to the history of blackface and Frederick Douglass in Scotland during my fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. 56. See Pickering, Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain. 57. Harry Reynolds, Minstrel Memories: The Story of Burnt Cork Minstrelsy in Britain from 1836 to 1927 (London: Alston Rivers, 1928). 58. Reynolds, Minstrel Memories, 95. 59. Gottschild, Digging, 2. 60. See Chapter 1 and my discussion of “Lucy Long” for a consideration of how gender, race, and sexuality overlap in these cross-dressed performances in blackface. 61. Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s concept of the “listening ear” is also useful in considering how whiteness is structured as the default positionality from which everyone else (non-white) is judged and treated within larger society. Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 62. Frederick Douglass, “My Bondage My Freedom” (1855) in Southern, Readings in Black American Music, 83. 63. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21. For more on the relationship between the middle passage, slavery, and (black) performance, see Katrina Dyonne Thompson, Ring Shout, Wheel About. 64. Anbinder, Five Points, 175. 65. The Manchester Examiner, October 1848, Stephen Johnson, “The Juba Project,” https://minstrels.library.utoronto.ca/~w3minstr, emphasis added. 66. Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 14. 67. Hazzard-Donald, Jookin’, 18. 68. White and White, Stylin’, 81. The authors go on to quote Alan Lomax: “On the basis of his cross-cultural study of dance forms, [Lomax states] that ‘African cultures lead all the rest in emphasis on bodily polyrhythm, where the shoulders and the pelvis erotically rotate and twist, often to two separate conflicting meters.’ ” However “erotic” the hip movements might have been to

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Lomax, his observation of the polyrhythmic musicking function of West African styles supports Shane White and Graham White’s critical observation of an apparent “alienness” of black performance practices to white observers in the colonial and antebellum eras. 69. Peter H. Wood, “ ‘Gimme de Kneebone Bent’: African Body Language and the Evolution of American Dance Forms,” in The Black Tradition in American Modern Dance, ed. Gerald E. Myers (Durham: American Dance Festival, 1988), 7–8. 70. For more on the Ethiopian Serenader’s and other blackface acts that performed for Queen Victoria, see Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 51–54. 71. The United Service Gazette and Naval and Military Chronicle, John Bull, July 1, 1848, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0c6b1a70-746b0134-9574-00505686a51c: Vauxhall Gardens.—This delightful retreat has received a liberal share of the patronage during the past week, some of the highest names in the country being amongst the visitors, to witness the new troupe of Ethiopian Melodists under the original Pell, and the dancing Juba. The following leaders of the fashionable world visited these Gardens on Thursday night:—Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, Viscount Emlyn, Earl and Countess of Bruce, Earl of Shelburne, Countess of Dunmow, Comte de Neushell, the Hon. George and Lady Caroline Duncombe, the Hon. Thomas and Lady Emma Vesey, Sir Edward and Lady Butler, the Hon. Mr. and Mrs. Trelawney, Hon. Charles Butler and Family, Hon. St. John Butler, Earl of Chesterfield, Earl of Mubster, Earl of Pembroke, and Lord Wrottesley.

72. Quoted in Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” 226. 73. Hazard-Donald, Jookin’, 18. 74. Dickens, American Notes, 218. 75. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 66. 76. (London) Post, June 21, 1848, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items /0c6b1a70-746b-0134-9574-00505686a51c. 77. See Stoever, Sonic Color Line. 78. Olly Wilson’s discussion of the heterogeneity of black sounds in his brief survey of conceptual approaches to African and African American music making describes the amalgamated process: “There is a common approach to music making in which a kaleidoscopic range of dramatically contrasting qualities of sound (timbre) in both vocal and instrumental music is sought after. This explains the common usage of a broad continuum of vocal sounds from speech to song. I refer to this tendency as ‘the heterogeneous sound ideal tendency.’ ” Olly Wilson, “Black Music as an Art Form,” Black Music Research Journal 3 (1983): 3. 79. Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 118. 80. The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a Grammy-Award-winning African American string band from North Carolina, is also an example of the continuation of these early African-influenced, Anglo-Celtic traditions.

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81. Constance Valis Hill, “William Henry Lane,” Dance Heritage Coalition, www.danceheritage.org/treasures/lane_essay_hill.pdf. 82. Reprinted in Southern, “Black Musicians and Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy,” 50. 83. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” 231. 84. The Mirror and United Kingdom Magazine, July 1848, https:// digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0c6b1a70–746b-0134–9574–00505686a51c. 85. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 57. 86. Wilson, “Black Music as an Art Form,” 3. 87. Hazard-Donald, Jookin’, 20. 88. Cecelia Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 64. 89. Bob Carlin, The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 5. See also Robert B. Winans, ed., Banjo Roots and Branches (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 90. Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia, 59. 91. The “banjo” is the Americanized version of the African instrument often written as “banjar” by colonial white observers. As the instrument became more hybrid in its construction, its naming varied until “banjo” took hold in the mid-nineteenth century when it became manufactured. 92. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 147. 93. Reprinted in Carlin, Birth of the Banjo, 3. 94. Carlin, Birth of the Banjo, 20. 95. The “downstroke,” “clawhammer,” or “beating” method of early African American banjo playing became central to the polyrhythmic, syncopated, and corporeal-based performance styles that came to dominate many strains of American popular sound. Similar to how dynamic rhythmic variation and metrical shifts sounded from the African American bodies who “patted Juba,” the African American downstroke style of banjo playing encouraged similarly varied rhythmic and bodily movements during improvised moments of popular music making throughout the nineteenth century. In describing the technique of the downstroke method, Cecelia Conway notes that striking down (i.e., away from the thumb) with the nail of (usually) the forefinger or the right hand, rather than plucking, [performers] achieved a sound more energetic and propulsive. The forefinger, which is curled toward the palm, is held relatively motionless with respect to the hand. The motion of the hand in striking the strings originates at the wrist and is more or less circular. As the fingernail makes contact with one of the strings, the fleshy part of the thumb comes to rest on another string. Then, as the hands begin its motion away from the string struck by the forefinger, the thumb is crooked slightly, thus sounding the string against which it has been resting. Because of the smooth, circular right-hand motion . . . downstroking is capable of great speed and energy without loss of accuracy. Thus, this method is well suited to non-arpeggiated melodies with pitch changes at sixteenth-note time intervals and is associated with up-tempo banjo songs and fiddle tunes—both of which often accompany dancing. (Conway, African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia, 203)

The downstroke method is also significant because of its rhythmic emphasis on the weak second and fourth beats of a four-beat measure. In the up-picking

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style—often attributed to Anglo-Celtic Americans and the influence of European guitar playing—melodic variation and arpeggiation take precedence over rhythmic development, and the rhythmic emphasis tends to fall on the strong beats (one and three) of the measure (201). The presence of the drone string on the early banjo and subsequent variations of the instrument throughout the mid-nineteenth century also displays its African origins, but the way in which this shortened, high string was used in nineteenth-century banjo performance reflects what method is being employed. In the downstroke method, the drone string is unstopped, serving to both ground and vary the rhythmic line, while the up-picking technique often plucks and stops the drone, adding the possibility for more melodic variety, along with the other four strings (189). Significantly, it was not until after the popularization of the banjo through minstrelsy that the up-picking method of Anglo-Celtic Americans became a prominent style of banjo performance. As slavery remained concentrated in the upper south during the colonial era, the banjo’s circulation, and downstroke performance style, generally remained between enslaved blacks and the (mostly ScotsIrish) whites with which they had contact. But as slavery spread throughout the US south with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and the eventual outlaw of slave importation in 1808, the regional practices of African American banjo playing spread and became even more prevalent throughout the nation during the early antebellum era. Consequently, the incorporation of the banjo into blackface minstrelsy resulted not only from a caricature of “typical” black plantation life, but also from the direct cultural interactions between blacks and whites in the upper south during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 96. The history of the banjo in the United Kingdom is also directly connected to blackface minstrelsy. The famed American banjoist Joel Walker Sweeney (who claimed to have learned banjo techniques from enslaved people on a Virginia plantation) traveled to the United Kingdom in 1843, where he spent almost two years touring successfully around the country, both with minstrel troupes and as a solo act. 97. Thomas F. Briggs, Briggs’ Banjo Instructor (Boston: Oliver Diston, 1855).

3. stephen foster and the composition of americana 1. Although many came initially as indentured servants in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several Protestant Ulster Scots, or “Scots-Irish” inhabitants of the Ulster region, soon established themselves among the middle and elite classes alongside their English counterparts, and some became a part of the slave-owning class. See Warren R. Hofstra, ed., Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012). 2. The relationship between blackface performance and the formation of the Democratic Party and Jacksonian ideology is discussed in Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1975): 3–28. One-third of the immigrants to United States between

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1820 and 1860 were from Ireland, and in the 1840s, they comprised over half of the nation’s immigrants. “Irish-Catholic Immigration to America,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/irish/irish-catholicimmigration-to-america/. For more, see Thomas D’Arcy McGee, The Irish Settlers in North America: From the Earliest Period to the Census of 1850 (Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1855); and Timothy J. Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 3. In the wake of a newly emancipated nation, opera became an institution that was culturally attached to the rising middle- and upper-class elites, who sought to emulate Victorian and European manners and performance in their own realization of American “high” culture—part of the imagined (and material) construction of whiteness in the United States. Within this developing cultural schism, blackface minstrelsy took its place as the medium through which original American popular entertainment (and not just a reproduction of European styles and forms) was developed, performed, and received by the masses. The “common man” persona was typically assumed by recently immigrated, Irish Catholic, poor and working-class men who were, in most cases, pro-slavery or anti-abolition, although they simultaneously faced discrimination from more wealthy Protestant European Americans (German, Ulster-Scot, and English alike). 4. The minstrel show itself was divided into three parts: (1) The opening, which often consisted of dances and jokes, featured the semi-circle arrangement with the Interlocutor (typically the only character not in blackface) in the center and “tambo” and “bones” on its ends; (2) an “Olio” that consisted of variety acts and scenes, which served as a precursor to vaudeville and subsequent entertainment mediums (e.g., Saturday Night Live) that move between skits, songs, comedy, dances, monologues, dialogues, and so on; (3) and a closing “plantation” scene or a related large-spectacle musical skit that influenced early Broadway productions like the Ziegfeld Follies. Robert C. Toll’s Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) provides helpful analyses on the formal development of the minstrel show in “The Evolution of the Minstrel Show” (25–65); see also Brian Roberts, Blackface Nation: Race, Reform, and Identity in American Popular Music, 1812–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 5. For more on early American sheet music, see “Historic American Sheet Music,” Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/sheetmusic/about.html. 6. For more on the development of these early blackface ensembles, see Laurence Hutton, “The Negro on the Stage,” Harper’s Magazine, June 1889, 131– 45; and Toll, Blacking Up. See also my discussion of G. W. Pell’s Serenaders, another of the most popular minstrel troupes, which was the first to feature a black performer, William Henry “Master Juba” Lane, in Chapter 2. 7. Quoted in Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931; New York: NYRB Classics, 2004), 89. 8. Webster’s dictionary defines “Americana” as “1. materials concerning or characteristic of America, its civilization, or its culture broadly: things typical of America; 2. American culture; 3. a genre of American music having roots in early folk and country music.”

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9. Steven Saunders points to Foster’s sentimental turn, particularly within his “Plantation Melodies,” as an attempt for middle- and upper-class white audiences to embody and “give voice to their own values and sensibilities, yet they are forced to do so while imagining themselves as African American during slavery.” Saunders, “The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster’s Plantation Melodies,” American Music 30, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 286. 10. Quoted in Ken Emerson, Doo-dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 57. 11. Emerson, Doo-dah!, 57. 12. Quoted in John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster, America’s Troubadour (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1934), 108. 13. Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (Norton, 1979), 203. 14. Hamm, Yesterdays, 203. 15. Hamm, Yesterdays, 209. 16. Hamm, Yesterdays, 210. 17. Hamm, Yesterdays, 210. 18. Hamm, Yesterdays, 206. 19. Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture, ed. Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 20. Within the milieu of “terror and enjoyment” out of which popular entertainment emerged in blackface as an “alternative playground,” the performative aspects of the theatrical and musical form itself were conditioned through the “carnivalesque” and “burlesque.” Performance studies theorist Tavia Nyong’o points to the carnivalesque as a lens through which to unpack how the ritual of blackface performance not only allowed for the imagined construction of whiteness, but also enabled the antithetical making of blackness (in relation to whiteness) both in and beyond the theater. Nyong’o suggests that the carnivalesque, as Mikhail Bakhtin argues, “is the participatory, infectious spirit of carnival, which does not truly come alive until it is taken into the mouth, shaken from the feet, expelled from the body in odor and shouts.” The improvisation and embodiment of a “whitened” self in blackface through the carnivalesque helped to shape the imagined binary racialization of “black” and “white” into monolithic and opposing categories, even as they were developed in relation to each other under the rubric of anti-blackness and other notions of “authentic” (and often stereotyped) racial identity for people of color. Also being burlesqued were the identity or assumed characteristics of ethnic groups (from the perspective of the white gaze), particularly of black, Indigenous, and Asian backgrounds (but also including European Americans from various ethnic backgrounds). Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 108. Nyong’o further notes that the improvised performances of self and other that occurred in blackface minstrelsy were framed by its “carnivalesque spirit [that] pervaded visual, print, and performance culture, disseminating across the Atlantic as a kind of lingua franca that was recognizably American” (107). 21. Quoted in Ken Emerson, Doo-dah!, 178, emphasis added.

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22. For more, see Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (1970; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 23. Hamm, Yesterdays, 209. 24. Hamm, Yesterdays, 209. 25. Sandra Jean Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 26. Charles Mathews was a famous English actor and one of the most popular of early American theater. He is said to have observed African American culture and became one of the first to appear in blackface in the United States. He is often quoted as stating that he would become “rich in black fun” in a letter he wrote on his travels to America in 1823. See Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz, 106–7, for a critical discussion of Mathew’s statement; and Robert Michael Lewis, “Speaking Black, 1824: Charles Mathews’s Trip to America Revisited,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 43, no. 1 (2016): 43–66. 27. For more on this shift from blackface tunes being based primarily on folk music from the United Kingdom to being based more on African American/ African diasporic practices, see Chapter 2 and the discussion of William Henry “Master Juba” Lane. 28. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 31. 29. Cruz, Culture on the Margins, 31. 30. Cruz, Culture on the Margins, 33. 31. Jennie Lightweis-Goff discusses this rewriting of Foster’s legacy as a “conversion narrative” in “ ‘Long Time I Trabble on de Way’: Stephen Foster’s Conversion Narrative,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 20, no. 2 (2008): 150–65. For examples of this conversion narrative, see Howard, Stephen Foster: America’s Troubadour; Emerson, Doo-Dah! Some of the articles in the issue of American Music dedicated to the life and work of Stephen Foster attempt to push beyond this narrative, particularly Saunders, “The Social Agenda of Foster’s Plantation Melodies.” It is worth noting that the Society of American Music’s Spring 2014 newsletter included an essay titled “The Expansion of Stephen Foster Songs in Japan: From Their Reception in the Meiji Period to Their Acculturation in Our Digital Age,” by Kazuko Miyashita. Miyashita, a Foster scholar, noted that Stephen Foster’s songs are “the earliest examples of Western songs that the Japanese have come to appreciate after the country opened up to the Western world in the late nineteenth century.” See Society for American Music Bulletin 40, no. 2 (Spring 2014). 32. Christopher Lynch, “Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question,” American Music 40, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 25. In this article, Christopher Lynch provides an in-depth study of Foster and his family’s relationship to slavery. Thanks also to Christopher Lynch for generously sharing materials with me from the Stephen Foster archive. 33. Furthermore, Lynch writes that “enslaved people were a significant part of the Foster’s lives from the moment they arrived in Pittsburg following their

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wedding. . . . They serve as symbols of the family’s elite status in a bygone era.” Lynch, “Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question,” 6. 34. John L. Jackson, Jr., Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 15. 35. As Jackson goes on to note, “To talk exclusively in terms of racial authenticity is to risk ossifying race into a simple subject-object equation, reducing people to little more than objects of racial discourse, characters in racial scripts, dismissing race as only and exclusively the primary cause of social domination and death.” Jackson, Real Black, 15. Jackson describes racial sincerity as the “something else” of race (as discussed by Ralph Ellison in “A Very Stern Discipline,” Harper’s, March 1967, 76–77), to help explain why race feels like such a “natural” category in the context of the United States. As Jackson points out: “Racial sincerity is an attempt to apply this ‘something-elseness’ to race, explain the reasons it can feel so obvious, natural, real, and even liberating to walk around with purportedly racial selves crammed up inside of us and serving as invisible links to other people.” Jackson, Real Black, 15. 36. The “walkaround” was a minstrel show finale act in which the blackface performers would perform by moving in a circular motion within a circle. This minstrel practice is said to be derived from mocking the “ring shout” practiced of enslaved Africans on (and off) plantations. Dan Emmett is credited with introducing the walkaround to the minstrel show; see “Here We Are! Here We Are! or, Cross Ober Jordan: A Walk Around by Daniel D. Emmett; Arranged for the Piano Forte by M. Keller,” sheet music from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/scsm000045/. 37. Emerson, Doo-Dah!, 95. 38. In the late antebellum period, blackface minstrel songs began to move beyond their earlier British-influenced dance and folk phase that included simple comic verses, refrains (often in unison), and harmonies that followed two or three basic chords to songs that employed poetic and sentimental lyrics, full choruses, and more “sophisticated” harmonies. Foster’s more mature blackface sentimental ballads, to be sung in a “pathetic” style, are also influenced by the popularity of Irish melodies and English parlor ballads with topics of love, longing, and loss—suggested by the pathos of the melodic lines, sentimental topics, and “sweet” harmonies. For more on Irish balladry, see Sarah McCleave and Brian G. Caraher, eds., Thomas Moore, and Romantic Inspiration: Poetry, Music, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2018). 39. Hamm, Yesterdays, 215, emphasis added. 40. The end of the chorus in “Old Folks at Home” nostalgically states, “Oh, darkeys, how my heart grows weary / Far from de old folks at home!” while the character in the first verse of “Old Black Joe” reminisces, “Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay / Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away / Gone from the earth to a better land I know / I hear their gentle voices calling ‘Old Black Joe.’ ” 41. Stephanie Dunson, “The Minstrel in the Parlor: Nineteenth-Century Sheet Music and the Domestication of Blackface Minstrelsy,” ATQ: 19th Century American Literature and Culture 16, no. 4 (December 2002): 249.

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42. For more on Foster’s Democratic affiliation, musically and politically, see Fletcher Hodges, Jr., Stephen Foster, Democrat (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1946). 43. See William S. Belko, “Toward the Second American Party System: Southern Jacksonians, the Election of 1832, and the Rise of the Democratic Party,” Ohio Valley History 14, no. 1 (2014): 28–50. 44. Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 15. George Harrington, Christy’s protégé who took over the troupe, was brother to threetime democratic congressman Benjamin Wood, who later presided over the democrat-lead New York Daily News, and his brother, Fernando, eventually became the mayor of New York. 45. Andrew Jackson and his democratic supporters were deeply connected to the genocide of native peoples through violent displacement, as with the Trail of Tears. See A. J. Langguth, Driven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). 46. Fletcher Hodges, Jr., Swanee Ribber and a Biographical Sketch of Stephen Foster (White Springs, FL: Stephen Foster Memorial Association, 1958), 10. 47. For more on Chinese Immigration and the rise of anti-Asian sentiment in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 48. A review of Bob Cole and James Rosamund Johnson’s vaudeville hit “A Trip to Coontown” (1898) notes that it was “worth the price of admission merely to hear the blackest Negro in the company sing ‘All Chinks Look Alike to Me.’ ” Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib /nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID = 515543. Because blackface had been the primary conduit of popular entertainment for white actors for decades, it remained so for black people, other people of color, and women. And as blackface had already included the burlesquing/stereotyping of Asian people by white actors in its West Coast development, black and Asian actors wrestled with, negotiated, and sometimes performed these racist tropes. 49. For more, see Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Yellowface began in the early part of the nineteenth century, as British and French theatrical productions (plays, operetta, and opera) were set in imaginary “Oriental” settings, and many of these acts were parodied in blackface. In addition, actual Chinese performers who toured the country were caricatured in blackface and used as fodder for comedic material. Anti-Chinese sentiment rose in areas in which East-Asian communities lived in large numbers, such as San Francisco, and by 1875, the Page Act (which prohibited the immigration of Chinese women) expanded into the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, restricting Asian immigration and heightening anti-Asian sentiments. These xenophobic acts weren’t repealed until the Magnuson Act of 1943, and finally with the Immigration Nationality Act of

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1965, which was designed to lift immigration restrictions based on race. Yellowface (through the blackface model) emphasized stereotypes of Asian identity that limited them to very specific, racist ideas of how they sound, look, act, and so on, and these notions continue to shape the racist ideologies that inform the ways in which people from the vast continent of Asia are understood within the United States. And, like blackface, yellowface becomes the delimiting conduit through which Asian performers and representations of Asian identity are presented through popular entertainment, functioning as another exploitative means through which to limit how Asian-descended peoples can represent themselves to the masses, while making fortunes from these stereotypes by appealing to the beliefs and gazes of white audiences in a society structured on the latter’s dominance. See also Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Esther Kim Lee, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022); and Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, eds., Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 50. Steven Saunders refers to this hagiography as a “conversion narrative”: According to the conversion narrative, Foster, after penning several early songs that contained deplorable racial stereotypes of blacks, sought to impart a more elevated tone to minstrelsy. Perhaps influenced by Charles Shiras, an ardent abolitionist and close friend, he penned increasingly sympathetic portrayals of African Americans living under slavery, shed the use of dialect, and had African American characters express subtle, complex emotions, using the musical gestures that typified more genteel parlor song. In songs like “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Old Folks at Home,” Foster created a hybrid genre, sometimes called the “plantation melody,” that melded elements of minstrel song and parlor ballad. Through this process, as the conversion narrative suggests, he humanized rather than caricatured blacks, thereby promoting racial tolerance and understanding. (Saunders, “The Social Agenda of Stephen Foster’s Plantation Melodies”)

51. “Go Down Moses” was the first “Negro Spiritual” published as sheet music, as recorded by Revered Lewis Lockwood in Hampton, Virginia, and published by Horace Waters of New York. See Graham, Blacks and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 21. Significantly, the first published spiritual was credited to the white actors who recorded the oral traditions of African Americans. 52. For more on hush arbors, see Vorris L. Nunley, “From the Harbor to Da Academic Hood: Hush Harbors and an African American Rhetorical Tradition,” in African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Elaine B. Richardson and Ronald L. Jackson II (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 221–41. 53. Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009), 4. 54. Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 55. One of the first documented large-scale camp-meetings was held in Kentucky in 1801, where hundreds to thousands of black and white attendees gathered, worshiped, and made music in close proximity to one

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another. See Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999). 55. See Kimberly Bracken Long, “The Communion Sermons of James McGready: Sacramental Theology and Scots-Irish Piety on the Kentucky Frontier,” Journal of Presbyterian History 80, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 3–16. 56. Bracken Long, “The Communion Sermons of James McGready,” 4. 57. Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 219. See also Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1983) and Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 58. Quoted in Howard, Stephen Foster: America’s Troubadour, 83. 59. Emerson, Doo-Dah!, 70. 60. Emerson, Doo-Dah!, 259. 61. Hamm, Yesterdays, 21. 62. Hamm, Yesterdays, 21. 63. Melva Wilson Costen, In Spirit and in Truth: The Music of African American Worship (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 54. 64. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 79. 65. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 82. 66. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 83. 67. Hamm, Yesterdays, 223. 68. Even though the “Swanee River” from “Old Folks at Home” is a fictitious location (Foster is not recorded as having even visited Florida), the song had such an impact on American culture that it still can be heard today, and it was adapted as the Florida state song in 1931 with its original racist lyrics, which were not amended until 2008. 69. The four-part singing of the Hutchinson Family Singers—the most popular touring American (non-blackface and abolitionist-supporting) vocal ensemble of the 1840s—European opera, and the ritualistic burlesquing of the two in blackface heavily influenced minstrelsy’s harmonic developments. The Hutchinson singers (John, Asa, Jesse, and Judson) performed as a quartet, and importantly, their performances of European and American airs and other songs (some written by Jesse, and some specifically written in a sentimental vein on the topic of slavery) had a significant impact upon minstrelsy and American popular music. Minstrel composers began to adapt their tunes to adopt this four-part harmony in their quartets and troupes. The Hutchinson singers garnered the “sympathetic” attitudes of those in attendance at their performances for abolitionist causes. For more, Scott Gac, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 70. Many descriptions by white observers focus on the distinct rhythmic practices of African-descended peoples in various colonial documents and are often presented in contrast to more regular rhythms of European-descended peoples (even though this itself was a romanticization of standard rhythmic practices). The first in-depth study on black music in this country was compiled

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by Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison, and William Francis Allen in 1867—all of whom were white and “sympathetic” to the abolitionist cause— and descriptions of their idea of African American rhythm and sound continue to shape subsequent studies on Black music. See Ware, Garrison, and Allen, Slave Songs of the United States (1867; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 71. For more on hymn lining in the African American sacred tradition, see William T. Dargan, Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans (Berkeley: University of California Press; Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, 2006). 72. Cruz, Culture on the Margins, 31. 73. The North Star (Rochester, NY) 1847–51. www.loc.gov/item /sn84026365/. 74. Frank E. Fee, Jr., “Blackface in Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Frederick Douglass’ Hometown Newspapers, 1847,” American Journalism 20, no. 3 (2003): 73–92. 75. Frederick Douglass, “The Hutchinson Family,” North Star, October 27, 1848, emphasis. 76. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). As discussed in the Introduction to this book, Lott’s work has been central to the postmodern discourse on blackface, which sought to move beyond focusing on the “racial ridicule” of the form and focusing on the construction of whiteness, while this book holds both that construction and racial ridicule/anti-blackness together in deciphering the complexity of the form. 77. Before 1831, if sheet music was part of a larger copyrighted work, it might be protected, but independent sheet music did not fall under copyright protection until that year. 78. Harold Vincent Milligan, Stephen Collins Foster: A Biography of America’s Folk-Song Composer (New York: G. Schirmer, 1920); Hodges, Swanee Ribber and a Biographical Sketch of Stephen Foster, 11. 79. Emerson, Doo-Dah!, 241. 80. “The 19th Century,” US Copyright Office, www.copyright.gov/timeline /timeline_19th_century.html. 81. Hodges, Swanee Ribber and a Biographical Sketch of Stephen Foster, 10. 82. Hamm, Yesterdays, 225. For more on Stephen Foster and his relationship to music copyright and publishers during his lifetime, see John Tasker Howard, “Stephen Foster and His Publishers,” Musical Quarterly 20, no. 1 (January 1934): 77–95; Steven Saunders, “Stephen Foster and His Publishers, Revisited,” College Music Symposium 28 (1988): 53–69; and Jason Lee Guthrie, “America’s First Unprofessional Songwriter: Stephen Foster and the Ritual Economy of Copyright in Early American Popular Music,” Journal of the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association 19, no. 1 (2010): 37–72. 83. Hamm, Yesterdays, 12. 84. Hamm, Yesterdays, 12. Although Christy was credited as composer on the cover of “Old Folks at Home,” Foster received $1,647.46 in royalties from this popular song.

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85. Emerson, Doo-Dah!, 201. 86. Hodges, Swanee Ribber and a Biographical Sketch of Stephen Foster, 24. 87. African American Francis “Frank” Johnson (1791–1844), the first published black composer in the United States, is a notable exception within this period, as he had a successful career as a composer and performer during his lifetime; see Charles K. Jones, Francis Johnson: Chronicle of a Black Musician in Early Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2006).

4. the house that blackface built 1. National developments during the Gilded Age occurred within the racist backlash to the Reconstruction era and notions of African American “progress” that took place across the country in the wake of emancipation. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 2005). 2. Isidore Witmark and Isaac Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark: From Ragtime to Swingtime (New York: Lee Furman, 1939), 25, 31. 3. Paul Charosh, “Before and After the Ball: Approaching Tin Pan Alley,” in Music, American Made: Essays in Honor of John Graziano, ed. John Koegel (Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park, 2011), 311. 4. “Rise of Industrial America, 1876–1900,” US History Primary Source Timeline, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-stateshistory-primary-source-timeline/rise-of-industrial-america-1876-1900/. 5. “City Life in the Late 19th Century,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov /teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline /riseind/city/. 6. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin, 2019); and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Immigrants, as well as residents who migrated from rural to urban centers after the war, were the bulk of these populace areas, and the industrial boom concentrated in cities across the country led to the increase in working- and middle-class residents. Importantly, these shifts happened in the wake of slavery and the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans after the Reconstruction era— which appeared to be a brief period of promise for black progress—was rapidly overturned through the sanctioning of Jim Crow discrimination policies throughout the south and present throughout the rest of the country. 7. Although the Witmarks themselves were second-generation Americans (their father moved to the United States during the Civil War and served in the Confederate Army before reestablishing himself in New York City some years

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after the Civil War), they became integrated into the community of European immigrants and other residents in New York City with whom they interacted with through their performance and commercial ventures. 8. Blackface was introduced as the basis of popular entertainment vis-à-vis the cultivation of American “high” culture through imported European forms (e.g., Italian opera and English theater). Opera became popular among wealthy European/Americans elite in the late eighteenth century, but it did not attain popularity among wider audiences until after it was burlesqued in already-popular blackface acts in the 1830s and 1840s. The sounds that became associated with American “elite” (or white) musical culture (e.g., European “art” music and parlor songs) were often viewed in opposition to ones attached to the folk music of African American, Indigenous, and ethnic-white Americans. See Joyce Green MacDonald, “Minstrel Show Macbeth,” in Weyward “Macbeth”: Intersections of Race and Performance, ed. Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 55–63. The British ballad opera Flora is the first opera said to have been performed in the United States in a Charleston Courtroom in 1736, and it was later mounted in one of the first public theaters in America during the colonial period. James R. Oestreich, “Colonial Ingénue Meets Modern Ingenuity,” New York Times, May 30, 2010, www.nytimes.com /2010/05/31/arts/music/31spoleto.html. 9. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 37. 10. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 25; 1848 was also the year of the revolution in Posen (which later became an Eastern province of Prussia and, eventually, was absorbed into Poland) when the (Ashkenazi) Jewish people of the region rebelled against the various levels of intense persecution they had experienced in the Prussian confederation of German states since before its establishment in the sixteenth century. See Salo W. Baron, “The Impact of the Revolution of 1848 on Jewish Emancipation,” Jewish Social Studies 11, no. 3 (July 1949): 195–248. 11. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 26. Hasia Diner, writing for the German Historical Institute, notes that Jewish peddlers in America, unlike those in Europe, rarely sold goods to other Jewish people, but to almost every other non-Jewish community, including both planters and the enslaved: “Jewish peddlers came onto the cotton plantations. They sold to the planters, offering usually higher end goods, well within the ability of the white planters to afford. They enjoyed the privilege of being defined as white and at times, despite being immigrants with limited English, they socialized with the landowners.” Hasia Diner, “German Jews and Peddling in America,” German Historical Institute, www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/german-jewsand-peddling-in-america/. 12. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 28. 13. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 28–30. 14. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 31. 15. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 31. 16. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 32. By the age of nine, Isidore was delivering wine and liquor for the family business across

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New York (from their brownstone home at 402 W 40th street to as far north as 125th street in Harlem to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the south), which gave him an opportunity to meet a variety of people and to learn the skill of networking from a young age. 17. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 32. 18. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 33. 19. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 45. 20. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 49. 21. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 53. 22. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 55. 23. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 55. 24. Toward the late nineteenth century, Willis Woodward and Co. was one of the first publishers dedicated to the publication of popular music, along with T. B. Harms and Co., Harding on the Bowery, and William A. Pond & Co. 25. See Armond Fields, Tony Pastor, Father of Vaudeville (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2007). 26. Particularly in relation to Chinese or East Asian communities in general in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the establishment of Jim Crow laws. As Cheryl I. Harris indicates, “the amalgamation of various European strains into American identity was facilitated by an oppositional definition of Black as ‘Other.’ ” Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1742. The widest white audience, in fact, was and remains the target demographic for popular entertainment. Popular culture and its marketing practices had as much to do with the construction of whiteness as its socio-political formations. It wasn’t until the designation of “race records” after the First World War that the popular music industry began to consider marketing directly to non-white audiences. And the marketing of these genres is shaped heavily by the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in the continued construction of Blacksound. 27. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 133. 28. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 128. 29. For more on the amateur minstrel show, see Rhae-Lynn Barnes, Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface (New York: Norton, forthcoming). 30. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 134. 31. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 134. Additionally, Isidore, the blackface impresario, produced a minstrel show in 1906 aboard the cruise of the Princess Victoria Luise, giving a performance on a stage built on the deck of the ship before it arrived in Havana, Cuba, featuring the former mayor of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Daniel England. Blackface performance was in many ways the primary aesthetic and economic foundation of the house before (and after) its exponential growth. 32. See Chapter 2 and the discussion of minstrel troupes like Christy’s Minstrels, who helped establish the practice of “plugging” songs by Foster to the public to boost their popularity, performance, and sheet music sales. 33. Daniel Goldmark, “Creating Desire on Tin Pan Alley,” Musical Quarterly 90, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 214. 34. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 71.

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35. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 70. Tony Pastor, who gained popularity as a blackface performer, is referred to as the “Dean of Vaudeville” and was one of the most influential theater impresarios of his day. Pastor was known for having top-billing performers, so the relationship that Isidore established with this impresario was especially beneficial for the Witmarks’ song catalogue. See also Parker Zellers, Tony Pastor: Dean of the Vaudeville Stage (Ypsilanti: Eastern Michigan University Press, 1971). 36. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 87. 37. Jane Mathieu, “Midtown, 1906: The Case for an Alternative Tin Pan Alley,” American Music 35, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 199. Mathieu further notes that by 1906, there were many popular music publishers who had established themselves beyond 28th Street in Midtown, Manhattan, but were still a part of the commercial development of the industry in the early twentieth century that is popularly associated with Tin Pan Alley and 28th Street. 38. Keir Keightley, “Tin Pan Allegory,” Modernism/Modernity 19, no. 4 (2013): 728. 39. Tin Pan Alley folklore maintains that composer-lyricist Monroe Rosenfeld was the first to name Tin Pan Alley in a series of articles written on the neighborhood for the New York Herald. See David A. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers, and Their Times (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988), 1. 40. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley, 274. 41. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley, 73. 42. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley, 77. 43. Jasen, Tin Pan Alley, 81. 44. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 102. 45. For more, see my detailed discussion of William Henry “Master Juba” Lane and blackface minstrels on tour in the United Kingdom during the antebellum era in Chapter 2. 46. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 103. 47. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 118. The Witmarks established a Chicago branch after Julius and Isidore traveled to the Chicago’s World Columbia Exhibition in 1893. 48. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 111. 49. “The Attucks Music Publishing Company is Founded,” African American Registry, https://aaregistry.org/story/attucks-music-publishing-founded/. 50. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 274, 273. 51. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 111. 52. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 130. 53. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 421. Warner Bros. acquired the Witmark catalogue and firm in 1928. They were the first publishing house to be purchased by the entertainment company that would come to dominate Hollywood in its early history. 54. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 113. 55. As discussed in Chapter 2, I use the phrase “intellectual performance property” to refer to the sonic, corporeal, and other live performance acts that aren’t considered intellectual property under copyright law, but still function as

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the primary source material for publications that can claim ownership over the scripting of these performance practices into legible forms (e.g., sheet music and recordings). The phrase specifically speaks to the unrecognized legacy of African American performance practice as intellectual property since blackface during slavery. 56. Stephen Michael Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 39. 57. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 161. 58. In a 1935 review of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, Isaac Goldberg observes: “Why the Jew of the North should, in time, take up the song of the Southern Negro and fuse it into a typically American product is an involved question.” Isaac Goldberg, “George Gershwin’s Music for Porgy and Bess,” Stage: The Magazine of After-Dark Entertainment 13, no. 3 (December 1935), www.oldmagazinearticles.com/Porgy_and_Bess_review_by_ISAAC_GOLDBERG-pdf, emphasis added. Isaac Goldberg was a prolific author, music critic, and editor, who, in addition to co-authoring The Story of the House of Witmark, with Isidore Witmark, was the literary editor of the American Freeman, music reviewer of the American Mercury, founder of Panorama, and editor of The Reviewer. A polyglot who won a Guggenheim in 1932, Goldberg also wrote biographies of Tin Pan Alley luminaries like W. S. Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan, and George Gershwin. Goldberg, like Isidore Witmark, was born to (Ashkenazi) Jewish parents, but unlike Witmark, who worked professionally in music as a young teen in New York City, he was born in Boston and obtained a PhD from Harvard University in 1912. Armed with the highest degree from one of the most elite and oldest universities in the country, Dr. Goldberg devoted much of his writing to popular music, and specifically to highlighting how black (performance) aesthetics served as primary source material in the making of American popular music. In his writings, as well as in his co-authored work with Witmark, Goldberg often juxtaposes this legacy with the impact made by many Jewish American musicians who were central to the making of Tin Pan Alley and modern popular entertainment between the 1890s and 1940s. 59. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1742–43. 60. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 112, emphasis added. 61. See Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, vol. 2, From 1709 to 1909 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 62. Charles K. Harris’s sentimental ballad “After the Ball” is commonly acknowledged in historical and contemporary accounts as a watershed moment in American popular music. Although composers like Stephen Foster and James Bland had already attained commercial success through their original (blackface) publications between the 1840s and 1870s, Harris’s ballad (written in 3/4 waltz time, as European dance styles were still popular through the 1890s) sold an unprecedented two million copies in 1892 and, by the end of the decade, had sold over five million copies—making it the biggest-selling sheet music publica-

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tion in Tin Pan Alley history, see Peter Gammond, The Oxford Companion to Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7. Although the Witmarks published Harris’s first work, “When the Sun Has Set,” the composer decided to self-publish “After the Ball” after some disputes over royalties from his first song, considered by the Witmarks to be a flop. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 115. Like some of Foster’s and Bland’s more “mature” sentimental ballads that make less direct reference to “authentic” blackface conventions but were still composed and performed within the medium by employing a “sincere tone,” Harris’s “After the Ball” was originally written for an amateur minstrel show in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it initially gained notoriety for its performance in one of the nation’s first original musical comedies, A Trip to Chinatown (1892). A Trip to Chinatown had the longest show run for almost three decades, with 657 shows. “After the Ball” was also featured in Showboat as an example of popular music from the 1890s. Julius Witmark also appeared in Hoyt and Thomas productions of A Trip to Chinatown to great success between 1893 and 1896. See Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 105. The song became especially popular after John Philip Sousa performed it almost daily at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893—the same event in which ragtime was introduced to the public. 63. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 96. With the rise of the middle class and the construction of “elite” culture, the piano became a favorite household instrument among families who could afford to purchase one, and sheet music existed as the primary avenue for music distribution. As a practice of leisure and status, they would gather with friends in their parlors to perform arias and popular tunes of the day. Lawrence Levine notes that across rising middle-class America, bel canto arias from popular operas by Donizetti and Bellini would be performed alongside the popular songs of the Hutchinson Family Singers and Stephen Foster in the parlor. Opera was part of both elite and popular variety entertainment in the early nineteenth century—it was interspersed with comic acts, operatic arias were replaced with local popular songs, blackface acts were inserted between opera acts/scenes, and there were fully burlesqued popular European operas in blackface. For more, see Renee Lapp Norris, “Opera and the Mainstreaming of Blackface Minstrelsy,” Journal of the Society for American Music 1, no. 3 (2007): 341–65. For representations of blackness in opera historically and contemporaneously, see Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). 64. I.e., less overtly racist in their dialect and topic. Stephen Foster’s “Swanee River” (1851) and James Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” (1878) are examples. 65. This concept is drawn from Alexander G. Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), in which he discusses both the ephemeral and material nature of black music and sound in relation to each other, as opposed to separate conditions. 66. W. Anthony Sheppard, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Musical Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 16; Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human

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Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982), 121–22. In From Ritual to Theater, Victor Turner describes three categories of human ritualization: social ritual, religious ritual, and aesthetic ritual. 67. “A mask is the spirit realized—inner urges given shape and form and displayed upon the face.” Jamie Kamph and Jamie Shalleck, Masks (New York: Viking, 1973), ix–x. Sheppard, Revealing Masks, 26. 68. Tom F. Driver, Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual (London: Routledge, 2020), 81. 69. Driver, Liberating Rites, 113, emphasis added. 70. Edward A. Berlin, Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 123. 71. Ingeborg Harer, “Defining Ragtime Music: Historical and Typological Research,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungricae 38, no. 3 (1997): 410. 72. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 449. 73. For a more detailed discussion of the banjo, its African origins, and its commercialization through blackface, see Chapter 2. 74. Quoted in Abbott and Seroff, Out of Sight, 442. 75. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., and Marsha J. Reisser, “The Sources and Resources of Classic Ragtime Music,” Black Music Research Journal 4 (1984): 39. In discussing the more symbiotic relationship between melody and rhythm in classic ragtime music, the authors further note that “classic ragtime melodies often contain arpeggios set in the additive meters” (39). 76. Floyd and Reisser, “Classic Ragtime Music,” 33. 77. In their analysis of ragtime works by black composers in “The Emergence of Classic Ragtime,” Floyd and Reisser note three important elements (in addition to the rhythmic motives in the right hand and oom-pah patterns in the left) within black ragtime music and performance: (1) “the melodic and directional shifts which create natural cross rhythms”; (2) “the cross-accented phrase-ending formula” [of four eight-notes, with the last being tied to the next measure]; and (3) “melodic chromaticism.” Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., and Marsha J. Reisser, “Social Dance Music of Black Composers in the Nineteenth Century and the Emergence of Classic Ragtime,” Black Perspective in Music 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1990): 172. 78. As Floyd and Reisser note, Portia Maultsby’s analysis of spirituals in her dissertation, “Afro-American Religious Music: 1619–1861” (1974), showed that 90 percent were in duple meter: either 2/4 or 4/4, in “Classic Ragtime Music,” 28. 79. “History of Ragtime,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/ihas .200035811/. 80. This is in reference to the above quote in The Story of the House of Witmark, that states, “For during [the time between 1893 and 1898] the taste of the nation swung, though with a halting, nervous indecisive rhythm, away from the servitude of the three-quarters time and the polite, moral four-four of the sentimental ballad” (112).

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81. Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1930), 141, emphasis added. 82. Floyd and Reisser, “Social Dance Music,” 173. See also David Temperley, “Second-Position Syncopation in European and American Vocal Music,” Empirical Musicology Review 14, nos. 1–2 (2019): 66–80, for a discussion of what he calls “second-position syncopation” or the tied syncopated figure in ragtime music. This figure was specific to mostly performers and composers of ragtime until it became more mainstream in the early twentieth century. 83. Barney Fagan, manuscript (date and periodical unknown); Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript—Isidore Witmark Papers. 84. Robert Machray, “The Song and Dance of the Coon,” Ludgate 4 (September 1897): 520. 85. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 101. 86. Importantly, the transition from blackface to Blacksound in the 1890s as the primary aesthetic vehicle of popular music making was a moment of “liminality” that Victor Turner describes as crucial to both ritual and theater. For more on “liminality” and ritual (within) theater, see Victor Turner, “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?,” in By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8; and Nicholas M. Hobson et al., “The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 22, no. 3 (2017): 260. 87. Sarah Goldingay, “To Perform Possession and to Be Possessed in Performance: The Actor, the Medium and an ‘Other,’ ” in Spirit Possession and Trance: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Bettina E. Schmidt and Lucy Huskinson (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 208. 88. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 132. 89. Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley. In “Taking Popular Music (and Tin Pan Alley and Jazz) Seriously,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 90–97, Keir Keightley suggests that Goldberg’s book is “incredibly influential yet seldomly read” and merits attention. These works (along with the work Goldberg co-authored with Witmark) are a product of their time, of course, but they also provide a lens into how contemporary writers who both studied and chronicled the development of popular music understood the various functions of the industry from the ragtime era on. 90. Bryant Keith Alexander, “Performance of Race, Culture, and Whiteness,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, last modified 20 November 20, 2018, https://oxfordre.com/communication/view/10.1093/acrefore /9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-566. Alexander also notes the following principles along which human social engagement operates: “notions of naming and recognizing features of particularity and difference; instantiating hierarchies of power that regulate the vagaries of daily living; and enacting methods of communication that seek to promote ideas and mediate social understanding.” 91. The multiple meanings that might be gleaned from Goldberg and Witmark’s seemingly sincere statements on the making of American popular music

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might be further unpacked through Sarah Goldingay’s discussion of how (stage) actors embody characters through three primary relations to the self: the pedestrian-self (the quotidian in the performer); the self-as-other (non-ordinary, heightened/spiritual self); and the technical-self (the management of the pedestrian self and self-as-other in real time), Goldingay, “To Perform Possession,” 210. In considering trance (death of the pedestrian self) and possession (replacing the pedestrian self with another entity), Goldingay’s deconstruction of the self into these three relations illuminates how both stage(d) performances and the racialized performance of one’s own socially constructed “white” identity are both developed in relation to consumption or assumption of an-other. 92. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 131. 93. As a reminder, the brothers were born in New York City and descended from Eastern European parents who immigrated to the United States, and their father and his brothers made their fortunes off slavery before the Civil War. 94. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 131, emphasis added. The use of the phrase “another man’s death” also recalls the “social death” concept developed by Orlando Patterson to denote the condition of the slave who was not accepted as fully human in US society at large. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 95. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 132–33, emphasis added. 96. Attending to these extra-musical factors highlights the “creation of desire for a product, as well as . . . actual promotion.” The Witmarks, along with other Tin Pan Alley publishers, contributed to how desire was created for consumers through various marketing strategies and other practices within their publishing house. See Goldmark, “Creating Desire on Tin Pan Alley,” 198. See also Daniel Goldmark, “ ‘Making Songs Pay’: Tin Pan Alley’s Formula for Success,” Musical Quarterly 98, nos. 1–2 (Spring 2015): 3–28, in which the author discusses how many writers and publishers on Tin Pan Alley sought to share “their insights and experiences in the public” (3) through publishing guides on composing popular song, as well as their own experiences/backgrounds. This is also the context in which the Witmarks published their own guide to the history of their house in 1939. 97. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 159–60. 98. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 187. 99. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 125. 100. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 187. 101. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 179. 102. Witmark and Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark, 236. 103. This remains true into the contemporary moment in which Hip Hop has emerged as the vernacular sound of American popular entertainment in the twenty-first century. See Patrick Ryan, “Rap Takes Overtakes Rock as the Most Popular Genre among Music Fans, Here’s Why,” USA Today, www.usatoday .com/story/life/music/2018/01/03/rap-overtakes-rock-most-popular-genreamong-music-fans-heres-why/990873001/, January 3, 2018.

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5. intellectual (performance) property 1. Quoted in Marian Hannah Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Mel Watkins (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 238. 2. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy,” 236–38. 3. For more on T. Thomas Fortune and his writings, see Shawn Leigh Alexander, ed., T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880–1928 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). 4. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin, 2019). 5. Plessy v. Ferguson is the 1896 federal court case in which the Supreme Court legalized the “separate but equal” racist segregation policies that were violently enforced by white people throughout the south and other parts of the country. The court case determined that Homer Plessy (who described himself as “seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighths African blood”) was not allowed to sit in the “whites only” train car in Louisiana, but instead was rightfully arrested, as he should have sat in the “black” car. See Williamjames Hull Hoffer, Plessy v. Ferguson: Race and Inequality in Jim Crow America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012). 6. Robert C. Toll quotes W. C. Handy’s memoire, Father of the Blues, in which he comments on the ubiquity of minstrelsy as a venue for black performance: “The minstrel show at that time was one of the greatest outlets for talented [Negro] musicians and artists. . . . All the best [black] talent of that generation came down the same drain.” Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 195. 7. For a detailed account of black performers in popular music and theater from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century, see Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009); Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 8. Congress voted for the approval for the Copyright Act of 1831, which was the first major revision of US copyright law since the Constitution. This revision included the protection of sheet music for the first time, as well as the extension of the general copyright term from fourteen years to twenty-eight. See Frank Evina, “First General Revision Gave Copyright to Musical Composition and Extended Term,” Copyright Lore, November 2006, www.copyright.gov /history/lore/pdfs/200611%20CLore_November2006.pdf. 9. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, vol. 2, From 1790 to 1909 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 392–93.

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10. Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 2:357. 11. Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 2:23. 12. Lydia Goehr’s formative 1994 book in the philosophy of music, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, introduces important ideas about the constructed nature of Western (classical) music and its analysis, ideas that are useful in unpacking how Blacksound functions as a philosophical concept. In particular, Goehr’s distinction between “regulative” and “open” concepts in philosophical discourse points to the political intention and methods behind a theory of Blacksound. In The Imaginary Museum, Goehr defines a regulative concept as one that is “delimiting” and often treated as “natural” and given, rather than considering how it is made and how it functions as a construction (91). I apply this notion of “regulation” to how copyright laws and IP property were conceived throughout the nineteenth century. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 13. For a detailed discussion of lobbying efforts of popular music composers in the early twentieth century that shaped the passing of the 1909 Copyright Act, see Jane Mathieu, “ ‘The Injustice of the Thing’: Negotiating the Song Market in the U.S. Copyright Debates of 1906–1910,” Popular Music and Society 44, no. 3 (2021): 292–305. 14. For more on the shift in music property rights and the impact of composers, performance rights orgs, publishers, and record companies on these developments, see David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 150–77. 15. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 168. Suisman goes on to point out that “the law, therefore, protected only one dimension of the creative labor of music making. If the purpose of the law was to truly protect works of the imagination or offer incentives for those whose originality created something of economic value, then it left much to be desired” (169). 16. Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 93, emphasis added. 17. One of the first documented black blackface minstrel troupes was the Mockingbird Minstrels Southern, who appeared in Philadelphia in 1855. Lisa M. Anderson, “From Blackface to ‘Genuine Negroes’: Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy and the Icon of the ‘Negro,’ ” Theatre Research International 21, no. 1 (1996): 17. But it wasn’t until the popularity of the Georgia Minstrels that black blackface troupes were able to gain a foothold in the field of minstrelsy. Eileen Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels: The Early Years,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Mel Watkins (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 167. 18. Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels,” 165–67. 19. This quote is provided without a date in James Monroe Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1878), 280, but as Trotter was discussing another Boston performance in 1876 within the same section in which this performance is mentioned, it is possible that it occurred in the same year or prior to the publication of this work.

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20. Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels,” 164. Eileen Southern notes the high caliber of musical training that many of the black Georgia Minstrels (in their various permutations) had in her discussion of members like John Thomas Douglass (1847–86), who was an accomplished violinist and was the first violin tutor of David Mannes, who went on to establish the Mannes School of Music in New York City. 21. Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels,” 172. 22. Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels,” 171. 23. Anderson, “From Blackface to ‘Genuine Negroes,’ ” 17. 24. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Gates goes on to name specific black rhetorical gestures within the Signifyin(g) tradition: “talking shit, woofing, spouting, muckty muck, boogerbang, beating your gums, talking smart, putting down, putting on, playing, sounding, telling lies, shag-lag, marking, shucking, jiving, jitterbugging, bugging, mounting, charging, cracking, harping, rapping, bookooing, low-rating, hoorawing, sweettalking, smart-talking, and no doubt a few others that I have omitted” (85). 25. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 70. For more on Signifyin(g) as applied to the black music tradition, see Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 87–99. 26. The “cakewalk” was an amalgamation of American dance styles that is said to have originated on plantations, as enslaved people were performing their own (ironic and improvised) versions of coupled European-American ballroom dances, contorting their hips, backs, legs, and bodies in novel ways to white audiences. These dances were (unironically) observed and rewarded by enslavers with a cake for the best performance, and they were later absorbed and performed by white audiences. The cakewalk began to be taken up in minstrel performances, especially toward the latter half of the nineteenth century, and black performers (like Aida Overton Walker) were especially adept at improvising upon the moves to early ragtime music. This dance became an international craze, and it was so popular that large competitions were held at Madison Square Garden as early as 1892, as well as in European cities like London and Paris throughout the 1890s. Furthermore, the cakewalk was performed in a circular motion, like both the “ring shout” cultivated by early enslaved African Americans, as well as the “walk around” that was a parody of this very ritual by white performers in early blackface minstrelsy. For more on the cakewalk, see Brooks, Bodies in Dissent; Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Megan Pugh, American Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Brooke Baldwin, “The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 2 (1981): 205–18; Richard Newman, “ ‘The Brightest Star’: Aida Overton Walker in the Age of Ragtime and Cakewalk,” Prospects 18 (1993): 456–81; James Deaville, “Cakewalk in Waltz Time? African Americans in Jahrhundertwende Vienna,” in Reverberations: Representations of Modernity, Tradition, and Cultural Value in-between Central Europe and North America, ed. Susan Ingram, Markus

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Reisenleitner, and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), 17–39; Danielle Robinson, “Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy,” Dance Chronicle 32, no. 1 (2009): 89–126; Davinia Caddy, “Parisian Cake Walks,” 19th-Century Music 30, no. 3 (2007): 288– 317; Elizabeth de Martelly, “Signification, Objectification, and the Mimetic Uncanny in Claude Debussy’s ‘Golliwog’s Cakewalk,’ ” Current Musicology 90 (Fall 2010): 7–34. 27. Eileen Southern notes that Sam Lucas, Jim Grace, and Peter Devonear all composed songs for the Georgia Minstrels in the minstrel tradition, but that all three of them included references to slave songs as “sources of refrain texts and melodies.” Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels,” 173. 28. This is the first published collection of African American folk music and spirituals in the United States, and it was compiled (i.e., translated an oral African American tradition into Western European music notation) by white northern abolitionists William Francis Allen, Lucy McKim Garrison, and Charles Pickard Ware and was published in originally in 1867 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 29. For more on the Fisk Jubilee Singers, see G. D. Pike, The Jubilee Singers, and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1873); Andrew Ward, Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); and Toni P. Anderson, “Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus”: The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers and Christian Reconstruction, 1871–1878 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010). 30. “Go Down Moses” was published with music on December 14, 1861, by Horace Waters (New York City), and attributed to Rev. C. L. Lockwood, arranged by Thomas Baker; Dina Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 247. Rev. C. L. Lockwood receives credit for this publication, although it is based directly upon his experience hearing African Americans (potentially runaway slaves) singing this song in Fort Monroe in Virginia, see Sandra Jean Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 21. 31. The overlap or lack of separation between the “sacred” and the “secular” within African cosmologies continued to shape black American practices, even after coerced conversion to Christianity. 32. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), quoted in Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 7. 33. For more on the impact of spirituals in and out of blackface by black performers on popular music, see Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry. 34. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 8. 35. Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 36. Eileen Southern and others note that the popularity of black performers in minstrel shows is what led some halls to admit black patrons, as the audiences were large and willing to pay. She notes that Hicks’s Georgia Minstrels

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played in Washington, DC, in July 1869 and that they were so popular among black audiences that the managers were able to negotiate for “colored persons [to be] admitted to ‘all parts of the house,’ ” and that they were “something of a novelty for Washington.” Southern, “The Georgia Minstrels,” 165. 37. Douglas Jones notes that “Black audiences understood the Black minstrel as one of their own and, unlike Black elites and bourgeois racial uplifters, they cared little about how persons outside of their community might decry his art. When troupes came to town, they often lodged with Black families and recruited locals for bit parts and supernumeraries” (134). Jones goes on to further note that “[blackface] was a property of the stage that did not signify racial ontology the way that white minstrels in blackface generally did” (136), in “ ‘The Black Below’: Minstrelsy, Satire, and the Threat of Black Vernacularity,” Theatre Journal 73, no. 2 (June 2021): 129–46. For more on the performance and reception of black minstrels by black audiences, see Tina Post, “Williams, Walker, and Shine: Blackbody Blackface, or The Importance of Being Surface,” Drama Review 59, no. 4 (2015): 83–100. See also Louis Chude-Sokei for a detailed discussion of black performance in blackface through one of its most significant figures, Bert Williams, in The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Blackon-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). For more on black performers on the developing “Chitlin’ Circuit” through blackface, vaudeville, and after, see Rashida Shaw McMahon, The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2020). 38. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 95. 39. Toll, Blacking Up, 203. 40. Black codes were racist and restrictive laws, such as vagrancy laws (e.g., if you were black and did not have identification or verified papers of employment you could be arrested), against freed black people that often lead to incarceration and/or death. See Stephen Middleton, “Repressive Legislation: Slave Codes, Northern Black Laws, and Southern Black Codes,” Oxford Encyclopedia of American History, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore /9780199329175.013.634. 41. Although this chapter is focused specifically on the emergence of ragtime and its precursors in the late nineteenth century, there were several black performers and musicians, both in and out of blackface, who contributed to the variety of black sounds that were in circulation through Blacksound. Performers like the virtuosic and enslaved pianist Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, opera stars Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and Madam Sissieretta Jones (known as “The Black Patti”), the theatrical and musical sensation known as the Hyers Sisters, band leader Frank Johnson, and famous minstrel composer James Bland (composer of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” c. 1878, who also composed songs for the Georgia Minstrels) are some of the key examples of the diversity of black performance styles that continued to proliferate under the aesthetic and racist restrictions created by blackface minstrelsy for black people during the nineteenth century. 42. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., and Marsha J. Reisser, “The Sources and Resources of Classic Ragtime Music,” Black Music Research Journal 4 (1984): 22. Floyd

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and Reisser detail the additive rhythms, hemiolas, and polyrhythms that came to North American from Africa by way of the Caribbean and Latin American through the slave trade (27). 43. I put “governed” in quotes because although the major/minor systems of tonality are endemic to the development of musical systems in the “West” (Europe and America), they are also malleable in the hands of composers, but still viewed as operating within this large system. Floyd and Reisser observe that “most ragtime melodies, however, include all of the pitches of the major scale and yet clearly emphasize those pitches that belong to the pentatonic scale, relegating the fourth and seventh scale steps to ornamental and structurally important roles.” Floyd and Reisser, “Classic Ragtime Music,” 45. 44. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 18–19. Black intellectuals, critics, and composers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, critics Sylvester Russell, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, were all start opponents of how “the negro” was represented through coon songs, particularly in relation to the white public and gaze. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon, 1965), 378–80. 45. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 213. 46. Floyd and Reisser give close attention to the motivic and rhythmic patterns in several classic ragtime piano pieces by black composers, as they observe that “some of the musical events that are commonly called syncopations are shifts in metric organization of the melodic material. Heard against the even pulse of the left hand part, however, when this part is used as a reference, the metric shifts in the melody may be felt as syncopations.” Floyd and Reisser, “Classic Ragtime Music,” 45. These metric shifts in the melody that produce idiosyncratic rhythmic patterns of syncopation in ragtime are also related to the “cinquillo” pattern found in many Latin and Caribbean musical practices of the African diaspora (23). The authors go on to note that these metric shifts—which are more rhythmically complex and improvisatory in style than what became the standardized, dotted-syncopated patterns of mainstream (white) American ragtime—are also a result of a number of other musical techniques employed by black ragtime musicians: “change of direction in the melodic line, large leaps or changes of register, and the deliberate placement of the metric accents of rightand left-hand parts so that they do not occur simultaneously” (45). 47. Hendrik Vincent Koops, Anja Volk, and W. Bas de Haas, “Corpus-Based Rhythmic Pattern Analysis of Ragtime Syncopation,” in Proceedings of the 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (Málaga, Spain: ISMIR, 2015), 483. 48. Koops, Volk, and de Haas, “Corpus-Based Rhythmic Pattern Analysis of Ragtime Syncopation,” 483. See also H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins and Christopher S. Lee, “The Perception of Musical Rhythms,” Frontiers in Psychology 11, no. 2 (1982): 115–28. For a deep exploration of rhythm and cognition in black music practices, see Vijay Iyer, “Embodied Mind, Situated Cognition, and Expressive Microtiming in African-American Music,” Music Perception 19, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 387–414. 49. “Syncopation,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Music, ed. Joyce Kennedy, Michael Kennedy, and Tim Rutherford-Johnson (Oxford University Press, 2012),

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www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199578108.001.0001 /acref-9780199578108-e-8887. 50. As Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff discuss in Ragged but Right, the saloon culture in the Midwest, and particularly urban centers in Missouri, was a special hub for the development of ragtime. The authors point out that the lore of Missouri as the “Land of John Brown” and a hard-won free state made it an epicenter for black people and musicians in the period, potentially making it a haven from post-Reconstruction backlash in the 1880s when ragtime was on the rise among traveling itinerant black musicians (447). 51. Floyd and Reisser, “Classic Ragtime Music,” 24. This idea is also related to Stoever’s concept of the “listening ear,” which points to the positionality that whiteness assumes as the constitutive norm within racialized regimes of listening. See Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 52. See David Temperley, “The Origins of Syncopation in American Popular Music,” Popular Music 40, no. 1 (2021): 18–41; and Temperley, “SecondPosition Syncopation in European and American Vocal Music,” Empirical Musicology Review 14, nos. 1–2 (2019): 66–80. Building upon Edward A. Berlin’s discussion in Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) of untied syncopation (“a pattern [that] starts on a strong metrical position and does not pass over a bar line”) versus tied syncopation (“a pattern starting on a weak metrical position”), Temperley suggests that “second-position syncopations” (“accents on the second quarter of a metrical unit,” the second eighth- and half-note span, or the second sixteenth of a quarter) and “fourth-position syncopations” (accents on the fourth quarter of a metric unit) were the primary rhythmic divisions of ragtime. He further goes on to suggest through his analysis that while the former has origins in the Scotch snap, the latter is of African American origin and can be found mostly in ragtime produced after the 1900s (19). 53. Tim Brooks and Bill Doggett, “Racial Representation in Popular Songs and Recordings of 1901,” ARSC Journal 50, no. 2 (2019): 214. 54. Brooks and Doggett, “Racial Representation in Popular Songs,” 215. 55. Leah Kathleen Cothern, “The Coon Song: A Study of American Music, Entertainment, and Racism” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1990), 13. Cothern also notes that prior to its use as a term for the Whig party, “coon” is a word that was used to refer to working-class white people in the early 1800s. See also Pamela Brown Lavitt, “First of the Red Hot Mamas: ‘Coon Shouting’ and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl,” American Jewish History 87, no. 4 (1999): 256. 56. Janet Brown, “The ‘Coon-Singer’ and the ‘Coon-Song’: A Case Study of the Performance-Character Relationship,” Journal of American Culture 7, nos. 1–2 (1984): 3. 57. James H. Dormon suggests that black people had been associated with the “racoon” because it was suggested (by white people in the nineteenth century) that they loved “hunting, trapping, and eating racoons.” Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age,” American Quarterly 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 452. Patricia Schroeder suggests that the term “probably came from

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the Southern belief that all black people were thieves, and racoons were known for stealing food.” Schroeder, “Passing for Black: Coon Songs and the Performance of Race,” Journal of American Culture 33, no. 2 (June 2010): 141. 58. Abbott and Seroff point out that not all coon songs had the word “coon” in the title, but still made use of references to blackness and black vernacular practices, depending upon the composer and song. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 17. 59. Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image,” 465. 60. Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image,” 456–62. 61. Colin L. Anderson, “Segregation, Popular Culture, and the Southern Pastoral: The Spatial and Racial Politics of American Sheet Music, 1870–1900,” Journal of Southern History 85, no. 3 (August 2019): 600. 62. Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image,” 454. 63. Importantly, coon songs were also performed by black performers for black audiences, especially on tours throughout the south, from the 1890s into the 1920s. These tours set the stage for what would become known as the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” as black performers often had to perform in segregated venues and outside of the vaudeville theaters because of the violence of Jim Crow segregation. Patricia Schroeder further notes that many of the coon songs recorded by black performers in the early twentieth century were targeted to black audiences. Schroeder, “Passing for Black,” 140. In this article, Schroeder also makes an important observation that studying the rural black performers of coon songs, outside of the more popular artists that are often discussed, will reveal even more about the practices of these songs by black musicians. 64. Louis Chude-Sokei, “Race, Sound, and Naturalizing Technology,” Current Musicology, nos. 99–100 (April 2017): 83, and Brooks and Doggett, “Racial Representations in Popular Songs,” 223. 65. Lavitt, “First of the Red Hot Mamas,” 257–58. 66. “Coon song” accompanist and musician John T. Niles in an analysis of “coon shouting” notes that the first coon shouter he heard was a black woman named Ophelia Simpson in 1898 in “Shout, Coon, Shout!,” Musical Quarterly 16, no. 4 (October 1930): 519. And as I discuss in the Introduction, Mama Lou, whose works were copied and popularized by May Irwin, was active in St. Louis in the 1880s and described in ways that suggest the aesthetics of coon shouting. Abbott and Seroff provide copious details about black male and female coon shouters in Ragged but Right, part 1: “Coon Songs, Big Shows, and Black Stage Stars of the Ragtime Era,” 17–44. Patricia R. Schroeder also discusses several recorded performances into the 1920s by black performers of coon songs, such as Alec Johnson and Luke Jordan, who themselves might not have been labeled “coon shouters” by this time but were performing within the larger tradition established by black performers in the earlier decades of ragtime. Importantly, coon songs were the way in which white (and particularly white Jewish) women singers were able to enter the sphere of popular entertainment, and it often allowed for them to distinguish themselves as “white,” even as they adapted black performance practices under the cover of the minstrel tradition within their performances. For more, see Sharon Ammen, May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy (Urbana: University of Illinois

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Press, 2016); Schroeder, “Passing for Black”; Daphne A. Brooks, “ ‘This Voice Which Is Not One’: Amy Winehouse Sings the Ballad of Sonic Blue(s)face Culture,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20, no. 1 (March 2010): 37–60; Lavitt, “First of the Red Hot Mamas”; and Brown, “The ‘CoonSinger’ and the ‘Coon-Song.’ ” See also Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 67. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 29. 68. Niles, “Shout, Coon, Shout.” 69. Niles, “Shout, Coon, Shout,” 516–17. Although Niles continues to say that these techniques are an “ancient and highly respected trick,” he goes on to make a point about the distinct way in which these practices derived from black performers and found their way into the mainstream by white coon shouters and singers. 70. Floyd, The Power of Black Music, 8. 71. Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 142. 72. I provide an analysis of Fagan’s “All Coons” in Chapter 4, as well as a larger discussion of the Witmark & Sons publishers as a founding house of Tin Pan Alley and the popular music industry out of the legacy of blackface and slavery. 73. Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 2:278. 74. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 4. 75. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 20. 76. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 19. 77. Isidore Witmark and Isaac Goldberg, The Story of the House of Witmark: From Ragtime to Swingtime (New York: Lee Furman, 1939), 195. 78. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right 49. 79. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right 19. 80. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right 19. 81. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, 141. 82. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 42. 83. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 43. 84. “The Erosion of a Distinctive Style,” in Berlin, Ragtime, 147. 85. Quoted in Schroeder, “Passing for Black,” who draws this quote from Tom Fletcher, 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (1954; New York: Da Capo, 1984), 151. 86. Paul Gilroy, “Analogues of Mourning, Mourning the Analog,” in Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky, ed. Karen Kelly and Evelyn McDonnell (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 261. 87. Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture, 79. 88. This interrogation of Johnson’s life and recorded performances is heavily indebted to the work of Tim Brooks in Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), particularly the section “Part I: George W. Johnson, the First Black Recording Artist,” 15–70.

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89. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 17. 90. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 18. 91. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 24. 92. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 24. 93. See Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) for a discussion of the physiological and ideological origins of early recording technologies such as the telephone, phonograph, and radio. 94. Sterne notes that “before the phonograph became a means for reproducing music, it was an office tool, a form of long-distance communication, and a home recording device.” Sterne, The Audible Past, 192. 95. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 26. 96. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 26. 97. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 26. 98. “Laughing Song,” Duke Repository and Collections, https://repository .duke.edu/dc/hasm/b0814. 99. Tim Brooks, “ ‘The Laughing Song’—George Washington Johnson (c. 1896),” www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board /documents/LaughingSong.pdf. 100. For more on the uncanny in blackface performance, see Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2005): 175–207. 101. Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 50. 102. “From a Phonograph Exhibitor,” Phonogram, July 1892, in Brooks, Lost Sounds, 34. 103. Julie Beth Napolin, “Uncrecordable Sound,” in Sound and Literature, ed. Anna Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 109–209. 104. Brooks notes that the New Jersey Phonograph Company began to distribute their own records, independent of the North American Phonograph parent company, and Johnson’s records were at the center of their business. His image was used to advertise their brand beyond the songs themselves. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 34. 105. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 29. 106. Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture, 27. 107. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 40. 108. Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture, 32. 109. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 61. 110. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 41. See Bradley G. Shope, American Popular Music in Britain’s Raj (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2016) for more on blackface in India. 111. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 49–50. 112. Brooks, Lost Sounds, 16. 113. Henry Smith, Paris, TX, 1893; Gustavus Stadler, “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity,” Social Text 28, no. 1 (2010): 87–105.

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114. Because it was impossible to record a lynching onto a wax cylinder with a phonograph, as Stadler notes, these recordings were “staged” performances of lynchings that were supposed to sonically represent this event for the entertainment of mostly white consumers. Stadler also points out that these recordings could be used for anti-lynching activism. Stadler, “Never Heard Such a Thing,” 88. 115. For more on blackness and ideas of the human, see Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review Michigan State University Press 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337; Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

conclusion 1. In addition to “coon songs” of the 1890s that were central to both the sheet music and early commercial recordings (discussed in Chapter 5), D. W. Griffin’s Birth of a Nation is the first twelve-reel film that helped to inaugurate the Hollywood film industry—it featured (white) actors performing black stereotypes in blackface, in addition to its racist propaganda narrative; Amos and Andy was one of the first syndicated radio shows, and it was performed by two former minstrels who sonically caricatured black characters using blackface tropes (and later became a popular TV show in which the original blackface characters were played by actual black actors); Al Jolson starred in blackface in The Jazz Singer (the first “talkie,” i.e., film with synchronized sound and moving image), and Jolson became Hollywood’s first “movie star” as a blackface actor; and Disney’s Steamboat Willie is one of the first synchronized sound cartoons, inspired by The Jazz Singer, and featured the popular minstrel tune “Zip Coon” (i.e., “Turkey in da Straw”). For a specific discussion of black musical representation in early twentieth-century American entertainment and film, see Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 2. The following publication from the Ninth Circuit Court provides details on the district and court cases, as well as the opinions of judges involved in the case, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, https://cdn.ca9 .uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2018/03/21/15–56880.pdf. 3. Under the 1976 Copyright Act, sound recordings after 1972 were protected under copyright law. Although the sounds on the recording are not protected, the lyrics and written music are if the work was has been published as sheet music. See General Guide to the Copyright Act of 1976 (September 1977), www.copyright.gov/reports/guide-to-copyright.pdf. 4. For a discussion of further legal and cultural questions the “Blurred Lines” case presents, particularly the gendered considerations of the song itself, see the Introduction to Anjali Vats, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property,

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Race, and the Making of Americans (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020). 5. For more on the constraints of music notation on black music practices (and the inability to claim rights over improvised acts of performance), see Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, “Writing Rights: Copyrights Visual Bias in African American Music,” UC Irvine School of Law Research Paper, no. 2019–2 (2012). 6. Ruja Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 42. To this end, Ruja Benjamin’s observation in her discussion of algorithms and the programming of technologies that “these default settings, once fashioned, take on a life of their own, projecting an allure of objectivity that makes it difficult to hold anyone accountable” is applicable to early recording technology (42). 7. Safiya Umoja Noble points out in her groundbreaking study Algorithms of Oppression that “while we often think of terms such as ‘big data’ and ‘algorithms’ as being benign, neutral, or objective, they are anything but. The people who make these decisions hold all types of values, many of which openly promote racism, sexism, and false notions of meritocracy, which is well documented in studies of Silicon Valley and other tech corridors.” Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 1–2. Noble wants us to understand that the overwhelmingly sexist and racist search results that come up when you Google terms like “black girl” versus “white girl” are part of a larger constellation of participants who both input and search for terms that feed and create stereotypes continually placed onto black women and people of color. For more on how this applies to recent debates on TikTok and the “AI Rapper,” as well as how Blacksound might be used to unpack the legal, aesthetic, and political stakes, see Enongo Lumumba-Kasango, “(A)I Rapper: Who Voices Hip Hop’s Future,” Public Books, www.publicbooks.org/ai-rap-synthesis-tools-black-hiphop/. 8. Larry E. Wacholtz, Mark Volman, and Jennifer Wilgus-Fowler, eds., Off the Record: Your Ultimate Resource for Success in the Music Industry (Thumbs Up, 2011). 9. For more on the case for reparations for African American music, see K. J. Greene, “ ‘Copynorms,’ Black Cultural Production and the Debate over African-American Reparations,” Cardazo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 25 1179 (2008): 1182–227.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abbott, Lynn, 180–81, 186, 263n50, 264n66 abolitionism, 26, 47, 107, 109, 111, 247n70 “Abolition Show, The” (song), 107 Adelphi Theatre (London), 80 African Americans: Anglo-Celtic immigrants’ interactions with, 51, 79, 91; Celtic origins of stereotyped dialect attributed to, 225n56; conversion to Christianity in the south, 114–15, 260n31; denial of personhood and humanity of, 27; folk styles derived from African practices, 14, 216n52; limited (property) rights of, 65–66, 67, 107, 121, 126, 190, 202; musicians in red-light districts, 1, 208n4; in northern cities, 47; popular music industry and, 126; as property or sources of property, 98–99, 106, 108, 110, 142, 163; Reconstruction policies and, 222n28; religious musical practices of, 117–18, 119, 148; rural-to-urban migration of, 8, 130, 162 African Grove Theater (New York), 233n37 “Afro-alienation acts,” 180 “After the Ball” (Harris ballad, 1892), 144 Alexander, Bryant Keith, 255n90 Algorithms of Oppression (Noble), 268n7

“All Coons Look Alike to Me” (Hogan, 1896), 149, 150, 179–87; sheet music, 182–85 Allen, Richard, 117 Allen, William Francis, 247n70, 260n28 Almacks dance hall (Five Points, New York City): black string players at, 73, 91; Dickens’s visit to, 71, 73, 74, 81, 232n40; Lane (Master Juba) at, 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 81, 87, 232n40 amalgamation, 15, 65, 187, 217n54; African-derived musical texture and, 91; of blackface tunes with sympathetic tone, 116; blackface ventriloquy and, 109; copyright law and, 123; of European folk and classical styles, 166–67; heterogeneity of black sounds and, 237n78; Rice’s use of, 32; of sounds in Ireland and Britain, 43 AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, 116, 117–18 “Americana,” 103–7, 113, 240n8 American Notes (Dickens, 1842), 66, 70–72, 73, 74, 84, 91 American Revolution, 27 Amos and Andy (radio and TV show), 267n1 Anderson, Colin L., 177 Anderson, Lisa M., 168

289

290   |   Index Anglo-Celtic folk music, 36–37, 43, 56, 76, 84; black musicians/performers’ interactions with, 91, 106; dance and, 88; fiddling styles, 55, 91, 225n58; Irish folk music, 43; Scots-Irish folk music, 43; white minstrels in blackface and, 166 antebellum era, 6, 7, 8, 82, 161; anxieties of white actors/audiences in, 59; blackface and making of democracy in, 25–31; hybridized American popular sound in, 213n34 anti-abolitionism, 25, 47, 100, 103, 113, 240n3 anti-blackness, 9–10, 24, 131, 157, 194 anti-Semitism, 130, 143 Appiah, K. Anthony, 11 Appropriating Blackness (Johnson), 76, 234n41 appropriation, 9, 15, 211n26; of black creativity, 36; imperatives of colonial domination and, 218n59 artificial intelligence, 204 Asia, immigration from, 8 Asian peoples, 10 Attucks Music Publishers, 140 “authenticity,” black, 7, 9, 77, 121, 212n28; African aesthetics in early blackface and, 81–99; of black minstrel performances, 169; dialectic of belief and disbelief, 156; in Foster’s mature blackface works, 107–11; interchange of authenticity and imitation, 35; Lane’s performances and, 78, 87, 229n100; marketed to white audiences, 101; of “negro delineators,” 168; racial mimicry as dominant paradigm of scholarship, 24, 44, 220n2; racial sincerity and, 243n35; scripts of black performativity, 99; stereotyped performances read as authentic, 122; Sweeney’s banjo playing and, 96; white audiences and, 18 authorship, 14, 123, 165; black performance aesthetics and, 10; public domain and, 15, 217n55; unrecognized black claims to, 16, 142, 173, 218–19n64, 252n55 “Away Down South” (Foster song, 1848), 105 “Backside Albany” (Hawkins song, 1815), 29–30 Bailey, Moya, 58 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 241n20

Baltimore Afro-American (newspaper), 3, 208n9 band music, 148, 159, 164, 178, 181 banjo, 28, 80, 88, 225n58; as accompaniment to Lane’s dancing, 95, 97; African aesthetics dispersed among workingclass whites, 96–97; Brigg’s manual (1855), 97, 98; buried African roots of, 50–52, 95, 96; described as “banjar” by colonial whites, 96, 238n91; “downstroke” style of playing, 96, 97, 148, 238–39n95; as “novelty” instrument among Anglo-Celtic Americans, 95; as a primary instrument of blackface performance, 92; ragtime and, 147–48; up-picking Anglo-Celtic style, 97, 238–39n95; Zip Coon character and, 50, 52 Barnum, P. T., 74–76, 78, 110, 124, 230n4, 233n33 “battle songs,” 30, 222n22 “Beautiful Dreamer” (Foster song), 125 Behn, Aphra, 235n50 Benjamin, Ruja, 203, 268n6 Bennett, James, 43 Berlin, Edward A., 146, 147, 186–87 Berliner, Emile, 189, 193 Best, Stephen M., 17–18 Best, Steven A., 142 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Pittsburgh), 116 Bhandar, Brenna, 218n59 Bickerstaffe, Isaac, 235n50 Birch, Billy, 134 Birch, Thomas, 45, 52 Birth of a Nation (film, dir. Griffith, 1915), 267n1 black aesthetics, 13, 167, 209n22; absorption and erasure of, 47, 106, 134; “authentic,” 42; commercialization of, 179, 196; consumed in white marketplace, 36; deracialized for white consumption, 170; “disembodied absorption” of, 192; embodiment within music industry, 171; mined as sources of musical property, 66–67; as property of white publishers, 103; Rice’s engagement with, 32; sanitized for consumption of white audiences, 6; scripted by white performers and commentators, 73; scripted into aesthetic basis of popular music, 142; theft of, 24; white self-expression through possession of, 156

Index   |   291 Black and White Minstrel Show, The (British TV show), 234–35n49 black codes, 162, 261n40 blackface, paradox of, 31, 40; “authentic” black aesthetics and, 42; identity articulated through Blacksound and, 44, 122–23; Lane (Master Juba) and, 77, 78; Old Corn Meal and, 35; persistence after removal of burnt cork, 13; political nature of, 25; Rice’s “Jump Jim Crow” and, 44; “terror and enjoyment” dyad and, 84; whiteness embodied through scripts of blackness, 41; Zip Coon character and, 53 blackface minstrelsy, 2, 8, 19; Anglo-Celtic sounds performed in, 40; anxieties of white actors/audiences and, 48; “aural blackface,” 211n26; birth and development of, 7; black performers and troupes, 65, 167, 171–72, 258n17, 261n37; chattel slavery and, 212n29; as competition to theater and opera, 27; connection to slavery and Jim Crow, 23; “coon shouters” and, 209n12; development of popular entertainment out of, 7; drag performance and, 58, 227n86; as driving force of popular music, 12; emergence of, 23; gender and sexuality in relation to, 10; as improvised entr’acte performance, 100; increased immigration from Europe and, 219n65; interior/subjective expressions of racial meaning, 122; Irish and British American men in, 7, 23, 52; legacies of popular music developed out of, 14; “love and theft” paradigm of, 24, 121, 212n27; making of democracy in antebellum era and, 25–31; minstrel ensembles/troupes, 66, 100, 101, 135; minstrelized sounds and texture of, 90–99; performance tethered to, 19; recording industry and, 189; “respectable” aspirations of, 97; sentimental turn in mature stage, 105–7, 121, 243n38; three-part structure of minstrel shows, 109–10, 134, 240n4; Tin Pan Alley and legacy of, 132, 134–41; transition to Blacksound, 171–73; variety of venues featuring, 76; in vaudeville, 135; as venue for black musicians/performers, 162, 257n6; “walkaround,” 110, 243n36; world travels of minstrels, 10. See also ritual, blackface as black feminist theory, 18, 208n8

black folk music, 15, 36–37, 55, 168, 172, 227n81 Blacking Up (Toll, 1974), 40 black musicians/performers, 73, 98, 160, 161; aesthetic shift of Blacksound and, 146; inability to receive royalties, 4; interaction with white musicians, 6; legal ownership of performance of a work and, 17; lucrative opportunities in minstrel business for, 169; as source material for white minstrels, 34 blackness, 24, 177, 208n8; “acousmatic” (black speak), 211n26; associated with “vulgar” minstrel songs, 144; choreographed white perceptions of, 37; as comedic ruse in early sheet music, 30; commercialization or commodification of, 143, 144, 189, 204; “cosmetic blackness” (black-up), 211n26; embodied corporeality of, 76; erasure and limited foregrounding of, 31; “kinetic” (black dance), 211n26; mechanized through technology, 221n14; ontological status of, 23, 49, 56, 57, 78, 169; performances of, 7, 11–12; as performative foil, 86, 99; racialized binary with whiteness, 10; stereotyped, 12, 42, 57, 77, 109, 234n41; ventriloquized, 9; violent commodification of, 9; Zip Coon character and, 49 Blacksound, 5, 7, 11, 179; as amalgamation of sounds through blackface minstrelsy, 65, 79; anxieties of white northerners reflected by, 45; as basis of Tin Pan Alley, 8; black sounds absorbed into through blackface, 166–71; “black sounds” distinguished from, 13–14; Celtic folk music and origin of, 43; as complement and legacy of blackface minstrelsy, 2, 8; constructed in early blackface, 31–36; copyright law and, 16, 193; cultural exchange in aesthetics of, 74; deciphering and, 212n28; drag performances of Lucy Long and, 62, 63; as driving force of popular music, 12; ephemeromateriality of, 145, 253n65; feedback loop between black and white performers, 35; formation of identity and, 215n43; Foster and, 111, 113–14, 116, 119; identity composed through, 36–42; Jacksonian Democratic Party and, 100; layered and competing ideologies in, 46; legacies of blackface and, 199–205; minstrelized sounds and

292   |   Index Blacksound (continued) texture of, 90–99; paradoxical nature of blackface and, 122–23; as race-based epistemology, 211n25; racialized and stereotyped scripts of, 48–49, 121; ragtime aesthetics and, 173–75; ragtime and aesthetic shift of, 146–49; sonic amalgamation and, 15; as sonic basis of US popular music, 72, 186; as sonic complement of blackface, 2, 8, 165, 199; sound recording and, 194; theory of, 8–19; transition from blackface minstrelsy to, 171–73; whiteness and possession of, 141–49; white performers and audiences liberated by, 13 black women: dance and, 70; escape from slavery by, 60; jezebel stereotype, 59, 61, 234n41; Lucy Long character and, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63; racist caricatures and stereotypes of, 3; vocal styles of, 178, 264n66 Bland, James, 144, 252–53n62, 253n64, 261n41 Blesh, Rudy, 148 bluegrass music, 91, 95, 200 blues, 14, 144, 146, 160, 186 blues scale, 15 “Blurred Lines” (Thicke/Williams/Harris, 2013), 200, 201, 202 Bodies in Dissent (Brooks), 10, 174 bones (instrument used in blackface performance), 80, 88, 92 Boskin, Joseph, 223n35 Bowery Theater (New York), 47, 226n73 breakdowns, 56, 74, 76, 337n82 Briggs, Thomas F., 82, 95, 97 Broadway productions, early, 240n4 Brooks, Daphne A., 10, 174, 180, 211n26 Brooks, Tim, 188, 191, 195, 266n104 Brower, Frank, 101 Brown, Janet, 176 Brown, Jayna, 211n26 Brown, T. Allston, 224n44 Brown, William Alexander, 233n37 Brown v. Board of Education, 223n28 Buchanan, James, 112 Buffalo Gals, The (female blackface troupe), 234n44 “Bully Song, The,” 4, 6 burlesque, as aspect of blackface, 105, 106, 156; applied to Asian people, 244n48; of black femininity, 61; of ethnic groups under white gaze, 241n20; opera as object of, 249n8

Burton, C. B., 68 Butler, James “Picayune,” 34, 166, 224n44 Butler, Judith, 59 “cakewalk” dance, 147, 159, 173, 178, 197, 259n26 Caldwell, James, 33 call and response, 118, 119, 170, 172, 181 Callender, George, 167, 172 Camparro, Jim, 204 camp meetings, 115–16, 117, 245n54 “Camptown Races” (Foster song, 1850), 101, 113, 114; call and response in, 118, 119; chorus in, 116, 118 capitalism, 45, 204, 205 carnivalesque, the, 105, 106, 241n20 Carolina Chocolate Drops (string band), 237n80 “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” (Bland song, 1878), 253n64, 261n41 Castle, the (St. Louis sporting hall), 2, 5, 208n5, 209n10 Castle, Vernon and Irene, 166 Charles Sheard & Company (London music publisher), 139 Chestnut Hill district (St. Louis), 2, 208n4 Chicago World’s Fair (1893), 140, 148–49, 251n53, 253n62 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 244n49, 250n26 Chinese immigrants, stereotyping of, 113, 244–45n49 “Chitlin’ Circuit,” 264n63 C. Holt, Jr. (music publisher), 124 Choreographing Copyright (Kraut), 16, 70 choreography, vocal, 37 choreosonic, 53 Christy, E. P., 26, 81, 105, 111, 247n84; commercial tactics of, 110; Democratic Party and, 112; listed as composer of Foster songs, 125, 247n84; possible Irish heritage of, 220n7 Christy Minstrels, 96, 106, 110, 120, 250n32 Chude-Sokei, Louis, 187, 191, 193, 221n14 Cincinnati, birth of Rice’s Jim Crow character in, 41 circus, 76, 96, 100, 233n33 citizenship, 11, 16, 79, 232n26; “intellectual performance citizenship,” 16; “intellectual property citizenship,” 72 Civil Rights movement, 31, 199, 223n28 Civil War, 1, 81, 112, 132, 166, 236n55; Marcus Witmark as Confederate officer

Index   |   293 in, 133, 248n7; tensions around slavery leading up to, 47, 106 Clapp, Anthony Hannibal, 222n22 class, 10, 116, 156; anxieties around, 59, 60; Foster’s “sentimental” blackface tunes and, 103, 112, 120; middle class and growth of pop music market, 164; middle/upper-class elites’ emulation of European high culture, 240n3; popularity of minstrel shows among poor/working-class blacks, 171, 261n37; rise of urban middle class in Gilded Age, 130, 135 classical music, Western/European, 3, 164, 165, 174, 258n12 “Classic Ragtime Music” (Floyd and Reisser), 148, 254n77, 262n46 “Coal Black Rose” (blackface song), 45, 46, 58, 104 Cockrell, Dale, 226n73, 226n78 Cole, Bob, 244n48 Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, 262n44 Collins, Lottie, 5 color line, sonic, 12, 90, 215n43, 224n42 Columbia Club, 136 commedia dell’arte, 13 Company of Adventurers of London Trading into Parts of Africa, 70 Conner, Edmon S., 41 Connors, Sarah Bilas “Babe,” 2, 5, 208n5, 209n10 Conway, Cecelia, 238n95 “Coons Are on Parade, The” (song, 1882), 176 “coon shouters,” 4, 178, 209n12, 264n66, 265n69 “coon songs,” 8, 132, 159, 196–97, 262n44; composed and performed by black minstrels, 179–88, 264n63; condemned by Black intellectuals, 262n44; craze of 1890s for, 176–79; denounced in the Freeman (1909), 186; evolution of the “coon” descriptor, 176, 263n55, 263n57; as genre of ragtime, 146–47, 163; “year of the ‘coon song’” (1896), 149 Copyright Act (1831), 49, 123, 124, 163, 222n27, 247n77, 257n8 Copyright Act (1897), 142, 209n15 Copyright Act (1909), 5, 165 Copyright Act (1976), 204, 267n3 copyright law, 4, 7, 25, 77, 123–24, 205; black performance aesthetics and, 89–90; “Blurred Lines” case (2013),

200–203; dance and, 70; first US copyright law (1710), 163; inability to claim authorship through, 14; intellectual property within, 11; international, 66; “legibility” of musical works and, 134, 203; literacy privileged over orality, 31; live performance and, 67, 142; musical compositions protected by, 30–31, 49, 222n27; origins of, 15; public domain and, 5, 6; publishing of songs and, 6; sound as elusive component of, 17; written works privileged by, 201 Cothern, Leah Cathleen, 176, 263n55 Crawley, Ashon, 53 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 213n33 critical race theory, 18, 213n33 Crockett, Davy, 52 cross-rhythms, 89, 94 Cruz, Jon, 12, 106, 120, 122 Cuff (black street performer in Cincinnati), 24, 41 cultural capital, 162 Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Cruz), 12 Curiosities of the American Stage (Hutton, 1890), 41 Daddy Jim (black dandy figure), 225n63 dance, 56, 68, 70, 87, 92, 172; asymmetry as balance in, 94–95; breakdown, 56, 337n82; British American folk dances, 94; “coon songs” and, 151–52; copyright law and, 70; diversity of black dance styles, 85; interethnic assimilation on plantations and, 85; Lane’s “Master Juba” nickname and, 66, 68, 70; ragtime and, 148, 173; sexual violence and, 231n17; tap dancing, 7, 70, 71 dance halls, 67, 71, 73, 74, 87 dandy, black urban, 44–52, 58, 225n63. See also “Long Tail Blue”; “Zip Coon” “Dandy Coon’s Parade, The” (song, 1880), 176 Day after the Fair, A (Somerset), 32 Dean-Smith, Margaret, 42 democracy, blackface and, 25–31 Democratic Party: blackface and birth of, 25; blackface minstrels as members of, 100–101; emergence of, 8; Jackson’s “populism” and, 100; white supremacism in formation of, 27. See also Jacksonian Democracy

294   |   Index Democratic-Republican Party, 27, 112 Devere, Sam, 176, 189 Devonear, Peter, 260n27 Diamond, John, 74, 77, 230n4 diaspora, African, 13, 17, 32, 170, 262n46 Dickens, Charles, 62, 66, 67, 84, 88, 93; Lane’s relationship with, 71–72, 78; visit to Five Points neighborhood, 70–71, 73. See also American Notes Didbin, Charles, 27, 32 Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance (Gottschild), 82 Diner, Hasia, 249n11 “disengaged engagement,” 122, 171; defined, 12; in early blackface, 30; Foster’s sentimentality and, 106 Ditson, Oliver (publisher), 97 “Dixie” (blackface song, 1859), 47, 141 Dixon, George Washington, 45, 46–47, 49, 58, 226n68 DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell, 227n81 Dormon, James, 176–77, 263n57 Douglas, Ann, 110 Douglass, Frederick, 17, 69, 80–81, 83, 120–21, 218n62 Douglass, John Thomas, 259n20 Dressler, Marie, 159 drinking establishments, 1, 207n2, 230n6 Du Bois, W. E. B., 215n43, 262n44 Dudley, Sherman H., 184–86 Dumont, Frank, 136–37 Eastman, Julius, 229n96 “eating the other,” 9, 212n31 Edison, Thomas, 189, 193 Eidsheim, Nina, 13, 37, 211n26, 217n53 Ellingham, Bob, 87 Ellison, Ralph, 219n66 Ellsworth, William Wolcott, 222n27 emancipation, 7, 112 Emerson, Ken, 103, 110–11, 116, 117, 124 Emerson, Victor H., 189 Emery, Lynne Fauley, 77 Emmett, Dan, 26, 101, 220n7, 243n36 “Entertainer, The” (Joplin), 146 Epstein, Dina, 96, 231n10 E. Riley (New York publisher), 29, 30 “Ethiopian melodies,” of Foster, 104, 105–6, 109; appeal to “sophisticated” (upper-class) audiences, 111; black spiritual songs and, 116 Ethiopian Serenaders, 62, 66, 82, 89, 93, 120; performance for Queen of England, 87. See also Pell, G. W.

Fagan, Barney, 149, 153, 180 Fanon, Frantz, 12 femininity, 58, 59, 61 fiddle (four-string violin), 80, 91–92, 94 film industry, 19, 200 Firth, Pond & Co. (music publisher), 105, 109, 123 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 169 Five Points neighborhood (New York City), 32, 47, 62, 66; Dickens in, 70–71; history and characteristics of, 230n6; Lane’s performances in, 70–71, 73–74, 75, 87; as red light district, 232n21. See also Almacks dance hall Flora (British ballad opera), 249n8 Floyd, Samuel, 89, 94, 148, 150, 170, 254n77, 262n43 Forrest, Edward, 48, 226n73 Fortune, T. Thomas, 161 Forty Years of American Life (Nichols, 1864), 74–75 Foster, George G., 73 Foster, Morrison, 103–4, 115 Foster, Stephen, 8, 26, 168, 235n30, 250n32, 253n63; black performance aesthetics and, 103; chorus used in blackface tunes, 116–17, 118; Democratic Party and, 111–14; early life, 103–5; earnings of, 124, 247n84; as “Father of American Popular Song,” 81, 125; hagiography of, 107, 114, 245n50; harmonic language of, 104; intellectual performance property and, 123–26; introduction to minstrelsy, 104; Negro Spiritual and sentimentalism in “Plantation Melodies,” 114–20; as one of first professional composers of popular music, 125; “sentimental” blackface tunes of, 101, 103, 107; sincerity and authenticity in mature blackface works, 107–11, 243n38; “sympathy” toward enslaved African Americans, 105, 106, 114, 116, 118, 121; Ulster-Scots heritage of, 220n7; unfamiliarity with Florida’s Swanee River, 141, 246n68; visit to an AME church, 116, 117–18. See also “Ethiopian melodies,” of Foster Foster, William, 103 free blacks, 45, 65, 67, 75, 225n63 Fugitive Slave Act (1850), 105 Fun in Black (Brown), 224n44 Gaisberg, Fred, 196 gambling, 1, 177, 207n2, 230n6

Index   |   295 Garland of Scotia (Turnbull and Buchan, eds., 1841), 42 Garrison, Lucy Kim, 247n70, 260n28 Garrison, William Lloyd, 120 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 168, 248n6, 259n24 Gaye, Marvin, 200–202 gender, 10, 59, 60 geography, black populations and, 210–11n24 Georgia Minstrels, 76, 167–68, 233n38, 258n17, 259n20, 260n27; Bland’s songs composed for, 261n41; George W. Johnson and, 188; performances for black and white audiences, 171, 260–61n36 German immigrants, 25 Gershwin, George, 141, 252n58 Gilded Age, 1, 126, 129–30, 134, 162, 166, 207n1 Gilroy, Paul, 187, 212n31 “Gimme de Kneebone Bent” (Wood), 86 “Glasgow Hornpipe, The,” 53–56, 56 “Go Down Moses” (spiritual), 114, 170, 245n51, 260n30 Goehr, Lydia, 258n12 Goldberg, Isaac, 140, 141, 143, 146, 252n58; on race and performance of self, 157; on syncopation of ragtime, 150 Goldingay, Sarah, 256n91 Goldmark, Daniel, 16, 138, 221n16 gold rush, California (1849), 113 gospel music, 14, 186, 200 “Got to Give It Up” (Gaye song, 1977), 200–202 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon, 68, 82, 83, 231n12 Grace, Jim, 260n27 Graham, Sandra Jean, 36 gramophone, 192 Great Awakening: First, 115; Second, 114, 115, 118, 119 Greene, Kevin J., 218n60 Greenfield, Elizabeth Taylor, 261n41 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 210n24 Griffith, D. W., 267n1 “groove” and “feel” of music, 201–2, 204 Hague, Sam, 167 Hamm, Charles, 104 hand clapping, 148, 170 Handy, W. C., 257n6 “happy negro” trope, 192

“Hard Times Come Again No More” (Foster song), 116 Harris, Charles K., 144, 252–53n62 Harris, Cheryl I., 143, 250n26 Harris, Clifford, Jr. (a.k.a. T.I.), 200 Hartman, Saidiya, 9, 25, 208n8, 212n29, 213n38, 218n62. See also “terror and enjoyment” dyad Haverly, J. H., 167 Hawkins, Micah, 29, 30, 222n22 Hazzard-Donald, Katrina, 85, 87, 89, 94, 166, 167 Height, Bob, 172 hemiola patterns, 89, 175, 262n42 Henry J. Sayers v. Sigmund Spaeth, et al., 5 Herbert, Victor, 159 heterophony, 170 Hewlett, J. L. (publisher), 226n68 Hicks, Charles B., 167, 233n38, 260n36 hip hop, 14, 160, 200, 218n60, 256n103 Hisama, Ellie, 229n96 Hodges, Fletcher, 113 Hoffman, Max, 181 Hogan, Ernest, 149, 150, 179–80, 181, 183–86 Hollywood film industry, 136, 251n53, 267n1 hooks, bell, 9, 212n31 hornpipes, 56 “Hot Time in Old Town, A” (song), 4, 6, 209n13 Hughes, Rupert, 148 Hutchinson Family Singers, 118, 120, 246n69, 253n63 Hutton, Laurence D., 41 hybridity, 14, 15, 57, 97 Hyers Sisters, 261n41 hymn lining, 117, 119 identity, 2, 9, 19, 86; centrality of the face in, 12, 216n47; hybrid nature of, 44; identity making, 130; Jewish-American, 130, 131; masculine, 59; masking and, 13; masking in ritual performance and, 12, 215–16n45; national, 11; popular entertainment and identity formation, 25; property and, 45, 145; racial, 8, 11, 37, 63, 241n20; scripts and, 76; white, 143, 214n36, 256n91 Illustrated London News, 87, 88, 92 Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, The (Goehr, 1994), 258n12 Immigration Nationality Act (1965), 244–45n49

296   |   Index improvisation, 37, 66, 217n53; in blackface performance, 232n21; by black minstrels, 172; copyright law and, 203; dance and, 69; of Lane, 76, 94; “ragging,” 173; in Signifyin(g) practices, 170–71 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 32 indentured servants, 95 Indian Removal Act (1830), 26 Indigenous peoples, 10, 26, 142; genocide of, 113, 244n45; as obstacle to manifest destiny, 48; in theatrical stereotypes, 27 intellectual performance property, 7, 11, 16, 18, 65, 251–52n55; co-opting of, 142; George W. Johnson and, 190, 191, 195, 196; Lane (Master Juba) and, 71, 89; ragtime and, 163, 179; as ritual and legal possession of black aesthetics, 145 intellectual property (IP), 3, 7, 16, 141; “Blurred Lines” case (2013) and, 203; citizenship and, 16, 72, 232n26; defined, 11, 232n27; literacy privileged over orality, 31 International Copyright Act (1891), 5, 81, 124, 134; intellectual property (IP) and, 163–66; transatlantic property exchange and, 163; Witmark brothers and, 139 internet, 19, 203–4 intersectionality, 10, 213n33, 229n96 Ireland, 43, 63, 166 Irish Catholic Americans, 23, 47, 143, 230n6; construction of Jacksonian “common man” and, 100, 239–40n2, 240n3; “coon shouters,” 4, 178; immigration in nineteenth century, 25–26; indentured servants, 95 Irish Tutor, The (Inchbald), 32 Irwin, May, 4, 178, 179 Jackson, Andrew, 26, 27, 52; copyright law and, 222n27; genocide of native peoples and, 244n45; as supporter of slavery, 112; Ulster-Scots heritage of, 100 Jackson, John L., 107–8, 122, 243n35 Jacksonian Democracy, 8, 26, 47, 103, 112. See also Democratic Party Jacobs, Harriet, 60, 228n93 James I, King, 26, 70 Japan: blackface minstrelsy in, 10, 213n35; Foster songs in, 242n31 jazz, 1, 141, 146, 160, 186, 200 Jazz Singer, The (film, 1927), 267n1

Jefferson, Thomas, 96 Jewish Americans, 140, 143; immigrants to America from Prussia, 129, 249n10; “peddlers,” 131, 249n11; whiteness in America and, 132, 156; women “coon shouters,” 178, 264n66; Yiddish tropes and blackface, 136 jezebel stereotype, 59, 61, 234n41 jig (Celtic song and dance type), 42, 56, 337n82; “Africanized,” 84; influenced by black performance practices, 68, 231n10; Lane and, 76, 87; West African shuffle combined with, 70 “jigging,” 87 “Jim along Josey” (blackface song), 121 Jim Crow (stereotype character), 7, 63, 80, 94, 110; birth of, 41–42; “improper” black body and, 86; introduced by Rice in blackface, 23, 27, 42; stereotypes associated with, 39–40. See also “plantation darky” archetype Jim Crow segregation policies, 5, 7, 8, 18, 126, 172; blackface minstrelsy connected to, 23; conditionality of black being perpetuated in, 123; instituted after Reconstruction, 162, 248n6; popular music industry and, 160 Jobson, Richard, 70 Johns, Orrick, 3, 6, 208–9n10 Johnson, Alec, 264n66 Johnson, E. Patrick, 76, 234n41 Johnson, Francis “Frank,” 72, 248n87, 261n41 Johnson, George Washington, 8, 176, 187, 188–97, 266n104 Johnson, James Rosamund, 244n48 Jolson, Al, 267n1 Jones, Douglas, 261n37 Jones, Madam Sissieretta (“The Black Patti”), 261n41 Jones, Mary (a.k.a. Peter Sewalley), 60 Jones, Nicholas R., 215n43 Joplin, Scott, 1, 146, 174, 208n4 Jordan, Luke, 264n66 Juba (African step dance), 68–69, 70 “Juba and American Minstrelsy” (Winter, 1947), 68, 230n5 “jubilee beating,” 69 “Jump Jim Crow” (Rice song/dance, 1831), 24, 28, 57, 104, 121, 220n2; caricatured image of enslaved black man on cover, 38–39, 38; Celtic folk tune as melody of, 40, 42–44, 59; as popular sensation, 35; publisher of, 30; Rice’s world-

Index   |   297 famous performance of, 31; sheet music before, 28–30, 28, 29; stereotyped dialect in lyrics of, 43; as supposed genuine performance of blackness, 122 Keats, Patrice A., 216n45 Keightley, Keir, 139, 255n89 Kelley, Robin D. G., 115 Kersands, Billy, 172 Khmen, Henry A., 33 KKK (Ku Klux Klan), 162 Kleber, Henry, 104 Knights of the Square Table, 104 Kolchin, Peter, 44 Kraut, Anthea, 16, 70 Lafayette, Marquis de, 29, 221n19 Lafayette Theater (New York), 47 Lane, William Henry “Master Juba,” 7, 34, 36, 65, 89, 148, 166; “African aesthetics” of, 66, 82; Barnum and, 74–76, 78; as competitor of white blackface performers, 66, 230n4; Dickens and, 70–72; erasure from history of early popular music, 98; Ethiopian Serenaders and, 82; as free black man, 65, 67, 75; initial racially ambiguous promotion of, 76, 78; as “inventor” of tap dance, 70, 71; Lucy Long performance of, 62–63, 70, 229n100; musical instruments of minstrelsy and, 90; origins and career of, 67–70, 230n6; performances in UK tour, 82–84, 87–88, 88, 92–95; white critics’ observations about, 83–84, 92–94; without blackface, 77, 82, 84. See also Almacks dance hall Lantum Serenaders, 81 “Laughing Song” (Johnson, 1894), 8, 187, 189–91, 190, 192, 193, 195 Laugh While You Can (Reynolds), 32 Levine, Lawrence, 253n63 Lewis, Barbara, 52 Lewis, George, 210n22, 211n25 Lhamon, W. T., 32 Life in New Orleans (Caldwell melodrama), 33, 224n41 Lightweis-Goff, Jennie, 242n31 Lincoln, Abraham, 176 Lind, Jenny, 124 “listening ear,” 33, 224n42, 236n61, 263n51 literacy, 14, 31, 119 Litman, Jessica D., 16

Lockwood, Reverend Lewis, 114, 245n51, 260n30 Logan, Rayford W., 177 “Log House, The” (Brown song, 1826), 28–29, 29, 101 Lomax, Alan, 236–37n68 “Long Tail Blue” (blackface song), 33, 45, 103, 104 “Long Tail Blue, De” (Sala song, 1847), 81 Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Brooks), 188 Lott, Eric, 121, 212n27, 212n31; “authentic” scrips of blackness in blackface assumed by, 220n2; “love and theft” theory of, 24, 42, 121, 212n27; postmodern discourse on blackface and, 247n76 “Louisiana Belle, The” (Foster song, 1845), 104 Lowe, Uncle Jim, 67, 88 Lucas, Sam, 168, 260n27 Lucy Long (stereotype character), 3, 7, 10, 24; Lane’s performance of, 62–63, 70, 82, 229n100; “Lucy Neal” compared with, 228n89; as misrepresentation of black womanhood, 58–63; as mute character, 63; performed by white men in drag, 58, 59, 61, 62. See also “Miss Lucy Long” song “Lucy Neal” song, 118, 228n89 Lynch, Christopher, 107, 242nn32–33 lynching, 162, 196, 267n114 lyricists, 138, 251n39 Magnuson Act (1943), 244n49 Mahar, William J., 30, 45–46, 222nn22–23 Mama Lou, 2–4, 14, 18, 130, 208n9, 209n15; “coon shouting” and, 264n66; ragtime aesthetic and, 4; “Ta Ra Ra” song and, 3, 4, 5, 6 “mammy” figure, 3, 234n41 Mann, Louis, 136 Mannes, David, 259n20 marching band music, 148 masculinity, 59, 225n63 masking, 12–13, 215–16n45, 216n47; in musical theater, 216n48; as play upon possibility, 219n66; racial imaginary of white performers and, 230n2; racial masquerading in ragtime era, 179; realized spirit and, 145, 254n67; singing voice as form of, 13; white ethnicity faded into blackface mask, 77

298   |   Index “Massa Georgee Washington and General Lafayette” (Hawkins song, 1824), 28, 28, 29–30, 101 Mathews, Charles, 121, 242n26 Mathieu, Jane, 138, 251n37 McAllister, William, 78 McGready, James, 115 McKittrick, Katherine, 210n24 mellows, the, 146 Metamorea (Forrest play), 48, 226n73 Methodist traditions, white, 117 Metropolitan Phonograph Company, 190 migration narratives, 210n24 Miller, Monica, 46, 225n63 Millets Music Saloon (publisher), 124 miscegenation, 58, 217n54, 221n13 misogynoir, 58 “Miss Lucy Long” song, 59, 61–62, 227n85, 228n89. See also Lucy Long (stereotype character) Miyashita, Kazuko, 242n31 Mockingbird Minstrels Southern, 258n17 Moncrieff, William Thomas, 33, 58 Moore, Thomas, 109, 116–17 Moriah, Kristin, 211n26 Morrison, Toni, 14 Moten, Fred, 17, 218n62 “Mother’s a Mother after All, A” (Witmark song), 135 motion pictures, early (1890s), 158 Mount, William Sydney, 29, 232n21 movement, 9, 19; African aesthetics/ practices and, 85; in Anglo-Celtic music styles, 56; black corporeality as “improper” movement, 37, 85–86; black vernacular dance and, 34; in caricatured images and mimicry, 39, 40, 121; copyright protection and, 15; impersonation of black movement, 13; in Lane’s performances, 87, 94; “ragged,” 56; Rice’s use of, 24 Mungo character, in The Padlock, 27, 32, 235n50 Muñoz, José, 228n94 Murray, William Henry, 234n44 Music and Some Highly Musical People (Trotter, 1878), 258n19 music halls, British, 5, 26, 91 music industrialists, white, 4, 68, 99, 142–43, 144, 159, 165; material conditions of racism and, 180; ragtime aesthetics and, 179; structural control over merging of racial cultures, 167, 199

musicking (music as a verb), 67, 68, 239n8; of black fiddlers, 91; integrated practices, 231n21; of Lane, 95 M. Witmark & Sons (music publisher), 8, 126, 129, 135, 180; catalogue absorbed by Warner Bros., 130, 138, 159, 251n53; Chicago branch of, 140, 251n47; “coon songs” published by, 149–52, 152–55; establishment of (1886), 130, 139; as house built by blackface, 153–60; London operations of, 139; marketing practices, 158, 256n96; other publishers acquired by, 159; slavery and the making of, 131–34 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass, 1855), 69 “My Gal Is a High-Born Lady” (Fagan, 1896), 149–50, 152–55, 179–80, 181 “My Long Tail Blue” (Dixon song, 1827), 58 “My Old Kentucky Home” (Foster, 1853), 109, 245n50 Napier, David, 215n45 nationalism, American, 48 Ndiaye, Noémie, 211n26, 215n39 Negro Spirituals, 106, 146, 165, 169, 172; Fisk Jubilee Singers’ performances of, 169; as formal development of folk practices, 169–70; rise during abolition era, 118 “New Coon in Town” (1883), 176 New Jersey Phonograph Company, 189, 193, 266n104 New Orleans: Old Corn Meal in, 32, 33, 36, 224n41; Rice in, 33; St. Charles Theater, 33 New York by Gaslight (Foster, 1850), 73 New York City: as center of music publishing industry, 129; riot at Bower Theater (1834), 47, 226n73; Tin Pan Alley location in, 138, 149, 251n37; Witmark family and publishing house in, 129, 133. See also Five Points neighborhood New York Herald, 43, 87, 251n39 Nichols, George, 224n44 Nichols, Thomas L., 74–75 Niles, John J., 178–79, 265n69 Noble, Safiya Umoja, 268n7 North American Phonograph Company, 189, 266n104 North Star, The (abolitionist periodical), 120, 121

Index   |   299 Northup, Solomon, 68–69, 148 nostalgia, 106, 109, 112, 138 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson, 1785), 96 Nyong’o, Tavia, 15, 223n32, 241n20 Obadike, Mendi, 211n26 “Oh, Boys, Carry Me ’Long” (Foster song), 116 “Oh! Mr. Coon” (blackface song), 118 Ohio River Valley, Rice in, 32, 43 “Oh Susanna” (Foster song, 1848), 101, 105, 113, 114; chorus in, 116; Foster’s inability to claim ownership over, 124; popularity of, 124, 125 “Old Black Joe” (Foster song), 112, 116, 243n40, 245n50 Old Corn Meal, 32–36, 166, 224n41, 224n44; blackface tunes performed by, 35; in Tom and Jerry, 33 “Old Folks at Home” [“Swanee River”] (Foster song, 1851), 81, 105, 112, 114, 243n40, 245n50; chorus in, 116, 118; as “genteel” (less racist) blackface song, 253n64; as official Florida state song, 118, 246n68; rights sold to Christy, 125, 247n84 “Old Uncle Ned” (Foster song, 1848), 81, 105, 111, 114; call and response in, 118; chorus in, 118; Foster’s inability to claim ownership over, 124; popularity of, 124, 125; sentimentality and stereotyped dialect in, 119–20 “Ole Dan Tucker” (blackface song), 121 opera/operetta, 27, 46, 240n3, 246n69; blackface burlesque of, 248n7; as both elite and popular art form, 253n63; Foster’s interest in, 104; as “high art,” 154–55; sheet music for, 164 oral traditions, 14, 165, 169, 203, 245n51 Oroonoko (Behn play, 1695), 235n50 Othello (Shakespeare, 1603), 27 Paderewski, Ignaz, 3, 209n10 Padlock, The (Bickerstaffe/Didbin opera, 1768), 27, 32, 235n50 Page Act (1875), 244n49 Paine, Louis W., 69 parlor songs, 116, 249n8 Parlour Companion, or, Polite Song Book, The, 103 Pastor, Tony, 135, 138, 251n35 patent law, 72, 212n41 Patterson, Orlando, 256n94

Patting Juba (African American performance style), 34 “Pattin Juba” dance, 68–69, 85, 148, 238n95 Pelham, Dick, 101 Pell, G. W., 62, 66, 82, 87, 89, 93. See also Ethiopian Serenaders Pennington, Ann, 166 pentatonic scale, 54, 104, 173, 262n43 performance, 7, 9, 19; audience participation and, 217n53; blackness and anti-blackness interpreted through, 9–10; black performance practices internalized by white phonograph listeners, 191–92; constructed as public domain, 7; copyright law and, 66, 67, 123, 142, 164; division with sheet music in entertainment market, 144; liberatory potential of blackness for nonblacks and, 15, 86; live performance, 15, 24, 40, 60, 203; masking and ritual nature of, 12; ritual practice of, 154 Perry, Commodore Matthew C., 213n35 Perry, Imani, 14, 16, 217n56 personhood, 11, 60, 212n28; African Americans’ inability to claim ownership of, 71; commodification of, 64; denial of black personhood, 27; idyllic expression of black personhood, 120; polyrhythmic performance and, 94; white, 99 Peters, W. C. (publisher), 39 Phonogram magazine, 191 phonographic recordings, 8, 158, 187, 203; “coon song” craze and, 176, 195; first uses of, 189, 266n94; invention of phonograph, 189; “lynching” phonographs, 196, 267n114; minstrel skits, 195, 196 piano, as middle-class household instrument, 144, 253n63 piano rolls, 203 Pise, Olivia, 115–16, 117 plantation, 69, 83, 91, 114, 239n95; nostalgia for, 109; plantation dances, 62, 68, 85, 87, 90; as scene of finale in minstrel shows, 109–10, 240n4 “Plantation Dance,” 82, 95 “plantation darky” archetype, 40–41, 44, 45, 110, 176, 191. See also Jim Crow (stereotype character) “Plantation Melodies” (Foster), 109, 112, 138, 241n9; black aesthetics adapted into, 123; Negro Spiritual and sentimentalism in, 114–20

300   |   Index Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 161–62, 223n28, 257n5 pluggers/plugging, 135, 137–38, 250n32 polyrhythms, 69, 74, 79, 232n21; aesthetic power of, 89; “alienness” of black performance to white observers and, 236–37n68; banjo and, 95, 238n95; of Lane, 76, 87, 89; ring shout and, 170; as uncontrolled display of personhood through music, 94 popular music industry, 1, 4, 122, 124, 144, 162, 164; blackface performance and, 5; black performance aesthetics and, 90; blacks and lower classes associated with, 3; decentralized in nineteenth century, 163; development out of blackface minstrelsy, 65; diverse styles with roots in blackface minstrelsy, 200; emergence of modern economy of, 160; establishment/founding of, 6, 126; expansion during ragtime/“coon song” era, 175, 180; globalization of, 10; Jewish immigrants and, 130; New York as publishing center of, 129; opportunities for black musicians/performers in, 162; publishing houses, 8; racialization of sound and, 196; stereotyping of blackness and, 12. See also blackface minstrelsy; Tin Pan Alley populism, 26, 103, 113 Porgy and Bess (Gershwin), 252n58 “Post Office, The” (traditional Irish tune), 56, 57 Power of Black Music, The (Floyd), 89, 170 “President Cleveland’s Wedding March” (Witmark song, 1886), 135 Prince, Mary, 60, 228n93 Pringle, Thomas, 228n93 property rights, 4, 65, 126 prostitution, 1, 207n2, 230n6 Protestants, 115, 117, 118, 156 public domain, 10, 15, 205; authorship and, 217n55; intellectual performance property and, 7; “Ta Ra Ra” court case (1932) and, 5, 6. See also copyright law queerness, black, 63 race, 16, 46, 108, 130; anxieties around, 59, 60; intersectional connections of, 10 “race records,” 200, 250n26 racial capitalism, 220n6 racial imaginary, white, 14, 123, 144, 180, 230n2

“racial mimicry,” 211n26 racial mixing, 15, 221n13, 223n32 racism, 5, 27, 64, 121, 130, 191; in Barnum’s staged acts, 233n33; “coon song” tradition and, 177; in descriptions of Lane (Master Juba), 93; in Foster songs, 118, 246n68; Jacksonian Democracy and, 26; of Lucy Long character, 58; material conditions of, 180; mimicry and, 32; programmed into computer systems, 268n7; scientific, 177; sentimental turn of blackface and, 106; structural, 162 radio, 19, 200 Ragged but Right (Abbott and Seroff), 263n50, 264n66 ragtime, 1, 2, 4, 8, 140, 144; aesthetic shift of Blacksound and, 146–49; African American folk practices and, 165; black performance aesthetics and, 14, 186; Blacksound and aesthetic of, 173–75; “cakewalk” dance and, 259n26; classic piano style of, 146, 147, 148, 150; commercialization of, 141, 159, 160, 163; denigration of, 209n13; dotted figure as distinctive feature of, 174, 181, 186–87, 191; as “jig piano,” 231n12; marketed to white audiences, 155; relationship between melody and rhythm in, 148, 254n75; Tin Pan Alley and, 159; Witmark publishing house and, 132, 149–52, 152–55. See also “coon songs” Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (Berlin, 1980), 146 Ragtime Must Die (American Federation of Musicians, 1901), 174 Rainey, Gertrude “Ma,” 178 Ramsey, Guthrie, 130 Reconstruction era, 7, 31, 162, 193, 222n28, 248n1 recording industry, 8, 18, 19, 163, 173, 189; birth of, 192; merging of black and white cultures and, 166; monopoly of record companies, 194. See also phonographic recordings redface, 214n36, 230n2 Reed, Peter, 35 reels, Scots-Irish, 56, 70, 337n82 reformers, progressive-era, 1, 207n2 Reisser, Marsha J., 148, 150, 254n77, 262n43 Republican Party, 107, 176 Reynolds, Frederick, 32

Index   |   301 Reynolds & Company (London music publisher), 139 rhythm & blues, 160, 200 rhythms, additive, 150, 170, 175, 262n42 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth, 37, 45, 80, 100, 144; birth of blackface minstrelsy and, 65; dance element of Jim Crow performance, 40; Irish cultural heritage of, 42; Jim Crow character introduced by, 23, 27; life of, 31–32; Old Corn Meal and, 32–33; pro-slavery views of, 23–24, 220n1; study of African American cultural practices, 43–44 Riley, Edward, 30, 222n26 ring shout, 165, 170, 172, 179, 243n36, 259n26 ritual, blackface as, 12, 40, 154, 215n45; the carnivalesque and, 241n20; “eating the other” and, 9; liminality and, 156, 255n86; masking and, 13; possession by black “other,” 156, 157; scripts and, 11; social and legal construction of whiteness and, 145, 156; Witmark music publishers and, 131 Robinson, Cedric J., 179, 220n6 Roma, Caro, 158–59 Roosevelt, Theodore, 209n13 Rosenfels, Monroe, 251n39 Royal African Company, 235n55 Russell, Sylvester, 262n44 St. James Theatre (London), 66, 81, 89 St. Louis, city of, 2, 5; Chestnut Hill district, 208n4; vice districts of, 1, 3 Sala, George Augustus, 81 saloons, 67, 71, 79, 100, 110, 175 Sambo (stereotype character), 32, 45, 191, 223–24n35, 226n65, 234n41 San Francisco Minstrels, 134 sartorial practices, black, 225n63 Saunders, Steven, 241n9, 245n50 Savage, Barbara, 211n26 Sayers, Henry J., 5–6 Scenes of Subjection (Hartman), 213n38, 218n62 Schroeder, Patricia, 263n57, 264n63, 264n66 Scotland, 80, 166, 220n5, 236n55 Scott, James, 146, 174 scripts (markings), sonic and bodily, 11, 99, 215n39, 222n23; of Blacksound, 48–49, 121; racialized, 40; ventriloquized performance of black “other,” 13; Zip Coon character and, 57

segregation. See Jim Crow segregation policies Seroff, Doug, 180–81, 186, 263n50, 264n66 sexism, 58, 63, 268n7 sexuality, 10, 58, 59, 177, 225n63 Shakespeare, William, 27, 46, 155 Sharpe, Christina, 208n8 sheet music, 3, 4, 8, 60, 158, 194, 200, 205; black aesthetics as property contained within, 103; blackface commercialized through, 26; blackness and anti-blackness interpreted through, 9–10; blackness referenced in early sheet music, 28–30, 28, 29; Blacksound contained as mode of property in, 9; bound by limits of Western music notation, 201; burgeoning US and UK industries of, 66; “coon song” ragtime, 152–55, 177; copyright laws and, 5, 17, 30, 49, 81, 123, 134, 209n15, 247n77; division with performance in entertainment market, 144; as inaugural commodity in popular music industry, 16; “Jump Jim Crow” (1831), 38, 39; “legibility” of, 16, 67, 134; lithographic images on covers of, 28, 28, 29, 101; names of famous performers used to promote, 49, 124, 226n68; Negro Spirituals published as, 170, 245n51; as primary claim of musical authorship into twentieth century, 196; property claimed through, 15, 18; sales of, 226n68; wholesale value of, 164 Shephard, Burt, 194, 195 Sheppard, W. Anthony, 13, 216nn47–48 Sheridan, Francis C., 33, 34 Shiras, Charles, 245n50 “Shout, Coon, Shout” (Niles, 1930), 178 “Sich a Gitting Up Stairs” (blackface tune), 103 Signifying Monkey, The (Gates), 168 Signifyin(g) practices, 18, 148, 168–69, 172, 259n24; improvisation and, 170–71; in ragtime, 173, 175 “Six Years in a Georgia Prison” (Paine, 1851), 69 Slave Culture (Stuckey), 170 slavery, in the United States, 2, 7, 8, 11, 36, 99, 157, 211n25; abolished nationwide, 142, 162; abolition in New York State (1827–28), 47; banjo and spread of slavery, 239n95; blackface minstrelsy connected to, 9, 23, 134; Democratic

302   |   Index slavery (continued) Party support for, 112; escape from, 60, 228n93; feudalism in Britain and emergence of, 220n6; legacies of popular music developed out of, 14; legacy of George W. Johnson and, 193, 197; Nat Turner rebellion of the enslaved (1831), 26; performance tethered to, 19; population of enslaved people, 25; rarity of black performers in early pop entertainment and, 166; sentimental depiction of longing for “old south,” 109; “social death” of the slave, 256n94; violence of slavery denied or minimized, 25; Witmark family and, 131–34 Slave Songs of the United States (1867), 169, 260n28 slave trade, transatlantic, 64, 216n52, 235n55 Small, Christopher, 239n8 Smith, Bessie, 178 Smith, Christopher J., 217n53, 231–32n21 Snorton, C. Riley, 59 Somerset, A. C., 32 “sonic blue(s)face,” 211n26 “sounding blackness,” 211n26 sounds, 9, 10, 18, 19, 205; amalgamation of, 65; black American vernacular sound and dance, 34, 170; black/white hierarchical division of, 12; construction of whiteness and, 13; copyright protection and, 15, 16; ethnic white, 57; globalization of popular sound, 66; hybridity of early minstrelsy, 44; intellectual property (IP) rights and, 17–18; of Lane, 93; racialization of, 11, 37, 42, 122, 147, 196; of singer’s voice, 37. See also Blacksound Sousa, John Philip, 253n62 Southern, Eileen, 168, 259n20, 260n27 Southerne, Thomas, 235n50 Spanish American War, 4, 209n13 Spencer, Lester, 195 spirituals, 14, 103, 115, 119, 169. See also Negro Spiritual sporting halls, 79, 175, 230n6 Stark, John, 208n4 Steamboat Willie (Disney animated cartoon), 57, 267n1 stereotypes, 11, 27, 58, 59–60; of black dialect, 30, 40, 43, 49, 119, 121, 149; “coon song” tradition and, 177; Juba dance and, 68; programmed into computer systems, 203; sonic, 193

Sting, The (film, 1973), 146 Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, 12, 215n43, 224n42, 236n61, 263n51 Story of the House of Witmark, The: From Ragtime to Swingtime (Witmark and Goldberg, 1939), 131–32, 133, 140, 141–42, 255n89; on emergence of ragtime, 146, 254n80; on minstrel show as source of Tin Pan Alley, 143–44, 157–58; possession of blackness and, 145 Storyville district (New Orleans), 207n2 Stratton, Eugene, 151 Stuckey, Sterling, 170 Suisman, David, 165 Supreme Court, US, 223n28, 257n5 “Swanee River.” See “Old Folks at Home” (Foster song, 1851) Sweeney, Joel Walker, 96, 97, 239n96 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (spiritual song), 119 syncopation, 6, 66, 68, 149, 190–91, 232n21; in “coon songs,” 181–82, 187; “fourth position,” 263n52; in ragtime, 147, 149, 174, 255n82, 262n46; “second-position,” 255n82, 263n52; violations of listeners’ expectations and, 175 Tainter, Charles Sumner, 189 tambourine, 37, 80, 82; Lane’s playing of, 92; as a primary instrument of blackface performance, 91–92 Tams Music Library, 159 tap dancing, 7, 70, 71 “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay” (song), 3, 5–6 Taylor, Bayard, 101 T. B. Harms and Co. (music publisher), 250n24 technopoetics, 187, 221n14 television, 19, 200 Temperley, David, 263n52 Tenderloin district (New York), 207n2 “terror and enjoyment” dyad, 9, 25, 84, 241n20 Thatcher, Primrose and West (Buffalo minstrel troupe), 135 theater, 68, 79, 235n50, 249n8; black-run, 78; “formal,” 155; “liminality” and, 255n86; Shakespearean, 27, 46, 100, 155 Théberge, Paul, 203 They All Played Ragtime (Blesh), 148 Thicke, Robin, 200, 201 Thompson, Katrina Dyonne, 223n29

Index   |   303 Tin Pan Alley, 149, 166, 173, 188, 197, 200; blackface in birth of, 134–41; Blacksound and sonic foundation for, 18, 151; “coon songs” and, 150, 151; Midtown Manhattan location of, 138, 251n37; origin of moniker, 138–39, 251n39; ragtime and, 159, 174; Witmark brothers and, 8, 126, 130, 132, 147, 157–60 Toll, Robert C., 40, 257n6 Tom and Jerry, or Life in London (Moncrieff play), 33, 58 tonality, major/minor systems of, 170, 174, 262n43 trademark law, 72, 77, 212n41 trans identity, 59, 228n94 traveling medicine show, blackface in, 76 “trickster” tradition, West African, 168 Trilling, Lionel, 107 Trip to Chinatown, A (musical comedy, 1892), 253n62 “Trip to Coontown, A” (Cole and Johnson, 1898), 244n48 Trotter, James Monroe, 258n19 Tubman, Harriet, 60, 228n93 Tucker, Sophie, 166, 178, 179 “Turkey in the Straw” (traditional tune), 45, 49, 57 Turner, Nat, 26 Turner, Victor, 145, 255n86 Turpin, Thomas, 1, 174, 208n4 Tuxedo (Sayers, blackface revue, 1890), 5 Twelve Years a Slave (Northup), 68–69 Two Real Coons (Williams and Walker, vaudeville show, 1896), 177–78 Ulster Scots (“Scotch Irish”), Protestant, 26, 100, 115, 220n5, 239n1 Underground Railroad, 105, 228n93 United Kingdom, 2, 5, 7; banjo playing in blackface minstrelsy, 239n96; blackface as basis of popular sound/culture in, 99; blackface performance in, 79–81; drums banned in British “territories” in America, 95; England and Scotland in transatlantic slave trade, 70, 235– 36n55; Ethiopian Serenaders on tour in, 62; folk music in, 43; Lane in, 66, 71, 78; legacy of minstrelsy on television, 234–35n49; Rice’s blackface show in, 23; women blackface performers, 234n44 United States, 10, 108; Africanist presence in, 14; blackface as basis of popular

sound/culture in, 99; demographic expansion in nineteenth century, 25; race as “natural” category in, 243n35; westward expansion of, 52 urbanization, 130, 149, 164, 248n6 Vats, Anjali, 11, 16–17, 72, 77, 215n41 vaudeville, 135, 136, 153, 181, 188, 200, 240n4; Blacksound and making of, 173; Mama Lou and, 6; Pastor as “Dean of Vaudeville,” 251n35; ragtime and, 197 Vauxhall Gardens (London), 66, 83, 89, 92, 237n71 ventriloquy, racialized, 9, 213n34; of black dialect, 30, 222n23; Foster and, 109 Vexy Thing (Perry), 16 vice districts, in urban areas, 1, 5, 73, 207n2 Victorian era, 82, 99 Virginia Minstrels, 80, 96, 97, 120; on cover of sheet music, 101, 102; raucous act toned down by sentimentality, 110 voice: African American as voiceless other, 42; identity and, 216n47; of Lane, 93–94; of Old Corn Meal, 34, 35; recorded on phonograph, 191; ritual nature of blackface and, 12; singing voice as form of masking, 13, 216n48; vocal choreography, 37 “wake, the,” 208n8 Walcott, Rinaldo, 17 “walkaround,” 259n26 Walker, Aida Overton, 259n26 Walker, George, 177–78 waltzes, 144, 148; decline in popularity of, 146; “oom-pah” bass, 181 wandering refrain (wandering chorus), 117 Ware, Charles Pickard, 247n70, 260n28 Warner Bros., 130, 138, 159, 251n53 Warren, Calvin, 10 Warren, Charles, 139 Washington, George, 29, 221n19 Watts, Isaac, 117 Weheliye, Alexander G., 253n65 “wench” figure, 3, 58, 59 West, Mae, 166 Weston, Horace, 172 Whig Party, 176, 263n55 “Whistling Coon, The” (Devere song), 8, 176, 187, 189, 192, 193 White, Charles, 172 White, George Leonard, 169 White, Graham, 85, 237n68

304   |   Index White, Shane, 85, 237n68 white-face clowning tradition, European, 13 white gaze, 12, 40, 58, 177, 233n33, 241n20 white men, 5, 165; blackface “delineators,” 45, 76; in blackface performance, 9–10, 199; drag performances of Lucy Long, 58, 59, 61, 62; Jacksonian populism and, 26; as model of “proper” citizen, 9; performers in burnt cork, 213n34; poorer ethnic whites, 27; as red-light district patrons, 2, 3; “self” performed through black “other,” 35, 41, 42; working-class fascination with “black culture,” 24, 213n34. See also music industrialists whiteness, 9, 24, 30, 106, 136; Americanness tied to, 113; assimilation into, 26; Barnum and construction of, 233n33; blackface no longer required for construction of, 154; constructed through performance of black “other,” 12–13, 49, 84, 86, 99, 145, 241n20, 256n91; distanced from elite propertyowning white male, 57; expressed through ventriloquized African American, 44; heteronormative, 59; improvised through blackness/blackface, 166; internal heterogeneity of, 143; Jacksonian Democracy and, 103; negotiation of, 156, 157; popular culture and construction of, 250n26; as property, 18, 219n67; racialized binary with blackness, 10; womanhood and, 63 White’s Serenaders, 92 white supremacy, 11, 27, 35, 101, 108, 162, 180; anti-Asianness and, 113; black women and, 63; extreme racism of 1880s–1890s, 177; resistance to Reconstruction and, 222n28 white women: “coon shouters,” 4, 178, 209n12; participation as blackface performers, 234n44 Whitlock, Billy, 101 Wiggins, Thomas “Blind Tom,” 261n41 William A. Pond & Co. (music publisher), 250n24 Williams, Bert, 177–78 Williams, Pete, 67, 71, 74, 87, 235n30 Williams, Pharrell, 200, 201 Williams-Jones, Pearl, 209n22 Williamson, Joel, 177 Willig, G. (publisher), 61

Willis, Nathaniel, 235n30 Willis Woodward and Co. (music publisher), 135, 250n24 Wilson, Olly, 89, 94, 237n78 Winans, Robert B., 227n85, 228n89 Winter, Marian Hannah, 67, 92, 230n5 Witmark, Frank, 133, 134 Witmark, Henrietta Peyser, 129, 133 Witmark, Isidore, 129, 132, 133, 146, 249–50n16, 251n35; on blackface as origin of popular music, 134; as lyricist for “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” 181; shipboard minstrel show organized by, 250n31; songs composed by, 135, 138; on the Tams Music Library, 159 Witmark, Jay, 129, 133 Witmark, Julius, 129, 133, 134, 253n62; in Buffalo minstrel troupe, 135; as song plugger, 138 Witmark, Marcus, 129, 131 Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia, The (1899), 137, 137 Witmark Entertainment Bureau, 158–59 Witmark family, 129, 248–49n7 Witmark G. B. Minstrels, 136 Witmark Monthly, 158 Wood, Peter H., 86 Woodson, Lewis, 116 work songs, 15, 146 Wynter, Sylvia, 32, 212n28 yellowface, 113, 214n36, 230n2, 244–45n49 Zip Coon (stereotype character), 7, 10, 24, 63, 176, 234n41; as banjoist, 50, 52; as blackface urban dandy, 44–63; characteristics of, 44–45; Dixon’s portrayal of, 47, 226n68; effeminacy and hypermasculinity of, 45, 58–59, 225n63; as embodied fear of black “upward” mobility, 45; as imitation of “real” upper-class white citizen, 49; “improper” black body and, 86 “Zip Coon” song (Dixon, 1834), 30, 45, 56, 104, 121; Blacksound scripts within, 57; Celtic folk music and, 54–56, 59; cover illustrations, 46, 48; first song with “coon” in title, 176; melody in Disney cartoon Steamboat Willy, 57, 267n1; political tensions of Jacksonian Democracy and, 52; sheet music, 50–51, 54–55

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