MAIN BOOK PAGE | TABLE OF CONTENTS | AUTHOR BIO | REVIEWS EXCERPT An excerpt from: THE BLACKFACE LORE CYCLE Fugitive Culture Given that North American blackface musical performance goes back at least to 1815, probably in Albany first, why is the minstrel show said to begin in 1843 in New York City? Given that the minstrel show has seeped well beyond its masked variants into vaudeville, thence into sitcoms; into jazz and rhythm 'n' blues quartets, thence into rock 'n' roll and hip hop dance into the musical and the novel, thence into radio and film; into the Grand Old Opry, thence into every roadhouse and the cab of every longhaul truck beyond the Appalachians--why, then, is the minstrel show said to be over? Cultural beginnings and endings constitute a series of problems I will deal with throughout this book. This chapter shows what happens to these matters in their middle, after they have begun and before they seem to have disappeared. I approach the problem by observing two points. One, blackface minstrelsy, as a characteristic lore cycle, is separated and set spinning within specific low groups. Two, tracing the texts of a lore cycle can help us approach again the consciousness of its precipitating publics--and distinguish who these publics were. Already a harlequin mask in the late eighteenth century, bald pate and brows disguising the individual beneath, the visage of labour by the 1840s could be somehow rendered grotesque and faceless; a mass unrecognizable to capital as human thus became subject to the most extreme form of discipline. --Peter Way, Common Labour In one of its simplest forms, the argument about the beginning of the minstrel show revolves around whether its initial instance was in late January or early February 1843 at the Chatham Theatre when Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels first performed. Emmett remembered the preliminary for this coming together in a letter: "I was residing at No. 37 Catherine Street, and one day, while playing upon my violin, and accompanied by Billy Whitlock on the banjo, the door opened and Frank Brower entered." Eureka, Frank Brower walked fully formed through a door to play the funny bones on stage. When the door opened again, and Dick Pelham brought them his tambourine and dancing, the Virginia Minstrels would be complete. A few more days of practice and they would go to the Chatham Theatre for the first formulaic minstrel show--a benefit for Pelham, a boon for the depressed New York theatre, a defining wedge for the construction of whiteness, and an albatross around the neck of black culture that has yet to be lifted. That's the way the story still goes. But there are many reasons not to consider this the beginning either of minstrelsy in general or the formulaic minstrel show in particular. Why should the Virginia Minstrels be said to have started things when Micah Hawkins, George Washington Dixon, T. D. Rice, and many performers imitating, them had been delineating "Ethiopians" in the western Atlantic for more than a quarter-century? Perhaps, you might say, because these forebears did not call themselves minstrels, and the bands in the early 1840s did. Naming is hardly beginning, however. It merely emphasizes one dimension of the whole. A better reason is that there was a difference between creating an entr'acte character, inserting a blackface performer into a melodrama, or even writing a farce as a vehicle for his specialties, as Dixon did in the 1820s and Rice did more elaborately in the 1830s, and aiming to organize a whole evening's entertainment around songs, dances, and patter purporting to be the behavior of southern plantation field hands. That is what the minstrel troupes tried to do in the 1840s. Dixon and Rice were still operating within the framework of the compromise conventions worked out in the English "illegitimate" theatres. Those warped conventions had translated largely intact across the Atlantic to the popular theatres of Chatham Square and the Bowery, Louisville and Cincinnati, Pensacola and Mobile. In the west Atlantic their forms were enforced by neither the same class system nor its entrenched privileges, so were ripe for modification if not supplanting. It is a commonplace that the depression of the late 1830s crippled the American stage, opening up possibilities--by the early 1840s--for ever more vulgar acts. But this partially plausible argument does not account for either the lag between the depression in 1837 and its effect in 1843 or the fact that the vulgar acts were targeting precisely those people with the least capacity to pay for their seats. The depression argument ought to explain why poor people, who could not afford theatrical luxuries, were filtered out of the audience. It ought to account for a performance tradition refined toward literate standards. But that is not what happened as the 1830s became the 1840s. Instead, while literate drama held its own, the most surprising growth occurred in the poor audience--who were spending their money to discover their identity on the stage. Blackface was the first Atlantic mass culture. Too, its performance was shifting from scripted toward improvised theatre. The former mayor and lifelong diarist Philip Hone confirms these trends when he notes that while the Park Theatre did well during this period, the Bowery drew full houses "with Jim Crow, who is made to repeat nightly almost ad infinitum his balderdash song." Moreover, in the 1840s American performers trained in the circus rather than in English theatrical conventions successfully shouldered their rougher performance tradition into the established patterns of tragedy, entr'acte, and farce. Adding to the paradox, in the western Atlantic this possibility for circus acts in theatrical spaces had London precedents. The same tendency had been under way in England before it appeared in the Americas. Thus even the form taken by the 1840s minstrel show was in part a variant of imperial practice. The depression was important, therefore, not for its affordable theatre tickets but because it so drastically increased the critical mass of people aware of their community and their lack of cultural franchise. The depression focused the formation of a new working class that would seek images of itself chiefly on the stage. On both sides of the Atlantic theatrical producers underwrote novelty that would quench the apparently fickle--but perhaps simply unknown, perhaps gargantuan--appetites of the new populations in the rapidly industrializing Atlantic economies. That's why, in London, at the Royal Surrey Theatre in the summer and fall of 1836, T. D. Rice's Jim Crow alternated in the bills with "The Real Bedouin Arabs," a North African acrobatic troupe imported via Paris, who had a run of some ninety nights. Why has blackface performance lasted? Why has minstrelsy produced a lore cycle with legs that have run and run, while tumbling Bedouin Arabs no longer have currency in Atlantic culture? Because the Arab tumblers were imported as novelty, while blackface was built up in the Atlantic markets and other working places where men and women rubbed against each other under the stresses that produce cultural form. This blackface form was a long time coming. It grew out of the way actors copied and adapted the dances of New York markets and plantation frolics. It grew out of the way they proved those gestures in theatres across all regions of the United States and, across the Atlantic, from London to Dublin. It grew out of the way the blackface figure always resisted, or did not easily fit into, other peoples' forms--and so gradually forced a form that gave it room of its own. The Real Bedouin Arabs did not produce that interest in the nineteenth century. Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.