“William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy”
Tag: minstrels
Walk in the Parlor (1850s)
Note especially the connections delineated between slavery, land, and knowledge…
“They follow the American race” ~ Banjo Songs in the Gold Rush
How antebellum minstrel music served a growing continental empire…
Hodgson: Jim Crow’s Vagaries (1830s?)
In which we discovered such international gems as “Jim Crow’s Trip to France” & sundry others…
Lhamon: Raising Cain (2000)
Lhamon reconstructs the hidden history of public dance, musical fusion, Jim Crow, and racial identity (& transgression) in antebellum U.S. cities, then traces it forward into the 20th century:
Cockrell: Demons of Disorder (1997)
by Dale Cockrell … A riveting analysis of unconventional texts from the first two decades of minstrelsy.
Lott: Love & Theft (1993)
“For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes served to usefully intensify these conflicts. Based on the appropriation of…
Mahar: Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (1999)
Mahar’s survey of early minstrel materials delineates the complex cultural turbulence of the antebellum era:
The Hardtacks 