Note especially the connections delineated between slavery, land, and knowledge…
Category: minstrelsy
I’m Off for California (1850s?)
Here’s a song you’ll recognize, and yet… it’s a side of the Gold Rush story you might not have heard about in school: The melody is Stephen Foster‘s first big hit, “Oh Susannah” (1847), ubiquitous in its time and still common in the “folk song” tradition over a century and a half later. Foster’s original composition features two world-changing technologies…
Picayune Butler’s Come to Town (Rice, 1858)
“And when he made his appearance you should have heard the reception he got. I thought the roof would fall off…”: Picayune Butler takes New York & Tokyo by storm.
United States it am de place (Rice, 1858)
This mysterious half-dialect minstrel song from Rice’s 1858 Method for the Banjo offers an intriguing glimpse into the economics and racial politics of the antebellum era…
Mary Blane (1840s)
The lost-love minstrel tune “Mary Blane” was one of the most popular songs of the early minstrel era (see Mahar’s list):
Gum Tree Canoe (1847?)
A peculiar plantation fantasy of love & liberation…
Here I Am as You Diskiver (1860)
Blackface minstrel tune conflating plantation slavery, the “Indian Nation” (& associated issues of Removal), & antebellum militarism in public space:
The Hardtacks 