Great post from Zoilus about the Seattle Pop Conference, specifically an intense session on the Minstrel Period, featuring a bunch of the major players. Mr. Lee Henderson asks in Zoilus' Comments section why there's all this buzz these days about the Minstrels. I wonder if it has anything to to with that other conference last week. Certainly there's been a lot of excellent scholarly writing on the subject in recent years. Perhaps it's just time. Nuff water under the bridge. Far enough in the past to do more good than harm by talking about it. Or in the words of Daddy Rice's braver-than-Othello Otello:
More could Iago chat,
If he'd but let de bag out of de cat
But mostly because American musical culture has always been a culture of collision and fusion between black and white. Blackface is one of the hard bits of evidence of that. So's the banjo. So's jazz. So's all of it. It's never been the fashion to write about it. In fact it's anti-fashion, anti-trend, and some of it's very ugly. It's just a truth that's always been hard to talk about.
Like when Michelle Shocked tried to wear blackface for the cover of her Arkansas Traveler album. You'll note that was years ago. 1992. She wasn't permitted. The label put a cheesy semi-cartoon pic on the cover instead, of Michelle with her bare-feet in a bucket, clutching a waltzing-matilda. Though they did allow the flip side of the equation: giving her a pretty, grand-ole oprey style photo of a smiling white girl in a straw hat and calico skirt on the back. They allowed the historical white but not its mirror image. They didn't want to offend anybody, though Michelle's intent was less to shock and more to pay homage and force her audience to remember where all this music really came from in the first place.
It's not easy though to pay homage to a culture that easily finds the homage itself offensive. Easily and understandably. I might be able to appreciate Buster Keaton's sly commentary on US racism (not to mention the blackface tradition) in his short Neighbours, when he shows himself getting dragged away by the police after falling face-first in the mud, to the enjoyment of his black neighbour; but then later, after he's escaped and gotten himself cleaned up, it's the neighbour who's taken instead. What's being commented on here? The neighbour's alleged mud-coloured mug or the lawman's blindness? The question itself is not pleasant. I might appreciate what looks like an accurate depiction of American culture, but not everybody's going to. That's just a fact. The African American response to blackface is more cutting, like this and this.
And also this:
"My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I'm gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?"
(from 'Cross' by Langston Hughes)
It seems though that that's what Daddy Rice himself was doing in the first place. Paying homage to a creole culture, in the 1830's, with his plays. He was more like Emenem than his later imitator/inverters. Lahmon writes:
This creolized street talk stages and speaks for the transracial public Rice has been organizing... The disdain he suffers on the boards is the contempt a good part of his audience endures offstage... Rice is deploying rather than enjoying the social hurt.
But then:
Circus entrepreneurs were learning to merge the newly robust racism gelling in society with some conventions from blackface performance and present them in theatres as the quite distinct minstrel show. This new form of blackface, conventionally dated as beginning during the winter of 1842, inverted Rice's positive connections to "blackness" and made them abhorrent.
But it's hard to see back to Daddy Rice's "positive connections to blackness." Esp. since later the name "Jim Crow" became associated with brutally repressive laws in the south.
In any case, yes Carl, I should've been there.
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