Talk:Blackface/Lott
Some notes from
- Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0195078322.
I've been drawing on this book for articles on various individual performers, etc. These notes all have potential for use in blackface, minstrel show, or elsewhere, but I'm not sure exactly what to do with them. Please, feel free to draw on this. If you incorporate a passage into an article, please strike through like this and leave a note about where it landed, so we don't end up using the same material twice. I will probably still be adding to this: I have a lot more handwritten notes I'm going through. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:12, August 22, 2005 (UTC)
Even prior to the great popularity of blackface minstrelsy beginning in the 1830s, there were at least some whites interested in black song and dance performed by black performers. In New York City, in the early 19th century, black slaves on their days off Shingle danced for spare change. The New Orleans Picayune wrote of singing street vendor Old Corn Meal, that he would bring "a fortune to any man who would start on a professional tour with him." (Lott, 1993, 41-43) There had been several attempts at legitimate black stage performance, the most ambitious probably having been New York's African Grove theater, founded and operated by free blacks in 1821, with a repertoire drawing heavily on Shakespeare; it was harrassed out of existence by authorities unwilling to tolerate its mostly black audiences behaving in the same boisterous manner typical of all New York audiences of the time. (Lott, 1993, 44)
Lott states that in the antebellum period, blackface minstrelsy was mainly a northern phenomenon, and was banned in several southern cities. (Lott, 1993, 38)
Lott argues that, overwhelmingly, and despite the elements of ridicule contained in blackface performance, mid-19th century white audiences by and large believed the songs and dances of minstrelsy to be "authenticaly black". (Lott, 1993, 39) Insofar as the minstrel performers had authentic contact with black culture, they had "…visited not plantations but racially integrated theaters, taverns, neighborhoods, and waterfronts—and then attempted to recreate plantation scenes." It was, of course, "to their professional advantage" to claim more serious "fieldwork." (Lott, 1993, 41, 94) The dancing was "more enjoyed than mocked" (Lott, 1993, 115), though Fanny Kemble, who had traveled in the South, described it as "faint, feeble, impotent—in a word, pale Northern reproductions of that ineffable black conception. (Lott, 1993, 116)
"From the beginning", writes Lott, "there seems to have been a general forgetting of the fact of white impersonation." J.K. Kennard in 1845 wrote resentfully in Knickerbocker that negro slaves are becoming "our national poets". A generation later, Bayard Taylor would say almost the same thing, but embrace it as a positive thing. Both men seemed equally forgetful that this was, by and large, writing and performance by white people. (Lott, 1993, 98-100)
In fact the texts of the minstrel show mixed black lore with "southwestern humor (itself often an interracial creation); black banjo techniques and rhythms interrupting folk dance music of the British Isles… the vigorous earth-slapping footwork of black dances warring with the Irish lineaments of blackface jigs and reels." The instruments were also a mix: African banjo and European fiddle. In short, the music and dance were a mix of black and white elements; the lyrics and dialogue were generally a racist, satiric, and of largely white origin. (Lott, 1993, 94) "What was on display in minstrelsy was less black culture than a structured set of white responses to it…", a "racial ventriloquism." (Lott, 1993, 101, 103)
Blacks had little chance to contest the meaning of blackface in its heyday: Lott cites Robert Toll as remarking that blacks in blackface, far from providing an immediate corrective to minstrel types lent them credibility. (Lott, 1993, 104)
Lott sees in some blackface performers the first phase of American bohemianism's infatuation with black culture. He singles out Ben Cotton proudly talking about mingling with blacks on Mississippi riverboats and performing music with them, and points out that Frank Brower of Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels learned his dancing directly from black men. (Lott, 1993, 50)
The river cities of the Appalachians and West figured significantly in the origin of blackface minstrelsy. T.D. Rice first performed in the West. Dan Emmett got his musical education there. Stephen Foster was from Pittsburgh, and was still living there when he started writing songs; his first exposure to African-American music came from a house servant who sang religious songs. (Lott, 1993, 47)
Another point of origin was the fact that Irish Americans of the time often had close contact with black culture. Blackface was heavily Irish American: Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, Dan Bryant, Joel Walker Sweeney, and George Christy, just to name a few prominent figures. Sometimes black "coded" for Irish, as when Irish songs of exile were transposed into songs about black slaves being sold, or Irish comic types from the British stage were recast as black. There are some particularly clear examples: in the early 1850s "Sad to Leave Our Tater Land" and "Ireland and Virginia" were both blackface Irish nationalist songs. (Lott, 1993, 95) Lott argues that for new Irish immigrants, attendance at blackface performances was part of their Americanization, "simultaneous [cultural] appropriation and ridicule". (Lott, 1993, 96)
Blackface did not neatly line up with a particular politics, though the tendency ran toward the (pro-slavery) Democrats. Henry Wood of Christy's Minstrels was brother of congressman and New York City mayor and southern sympathizer Fernando Wood. Stephen Foster supported U.S. president James Buchanan, who wished to expand slavery into Kansas, and who was his relative by marriage. But there are also pro-Henry Clay blackface songs. (Lott, 1993, 50) Walt Whitman had mixed feelings about blackface, but was most a fan precisely at the time he was involved in the Free Soil Party in the late 1840s: at that time he compared it to opera, much as Mark Twain would when he looked back at that era. (Lott, 1993, 75)
Lott: "That the minstrel show took up… [slavery and race] at all is perhaps more significant than that it did so in an objectionable way." (Lott, 1993, 90)