The face of the soft-cover book was tattered around the edges and stained with water. I was a bit put-off by it at first – not because of its dirty appearance but because of its title.
“Minstrel Songs. Old and New.”
Minstrelsy did not have a pretty image in my head, its history an ugly reminder of how my ancestors were portrayed and treated during the time when minstrel shows were oh-so-prevalent. I put aside my distaste for the genre and decided to examine the book. Interestingly, the illustrations on the cover were benign; in fact, the black people in the drawings were shown as human. They were not the images usually associated with minstrel shows.
In the center of the book’s cover was an African American man and woman in a small boat, him serenading her with a guitar and song, and her listening lovingly. Another was an African American woman wearing an apron and kerchief carrying cotton in a basket, and others were scenes of people picking cotton and the front view of a wooden cabin.
Emboldened, I opened the book and read through the list of song titles. I was curious to see if this book published in 1882 carried the songs of an African American songwriter whose name I knew: James A. Bland. And it did, listing two of his most famous minstrel songs.
The book, published by Oliver Ditson Company of Boston, contained 102 of what it called “minstrel and plantation songs (and) Foster melodies.” I knew that Foster referred to Stephen C. Foster, one of the most prolific minstrel songwriters of the 19th century.
While the images on the front seemed innocuous, the titles were mixed:
Some of the titles were tame: “Rosa Lee,” “Nelly was a lady,” “Listen to the mockingbird.”
And some weren’t: “Oh, dat watermelon,” “Sing darkies sing,” “I’se going back to Dixie.”
And some mocked white people: “Folks that put on airs.”
And one sounded promising: “Massa’s in the cold ground.”
And some I recognized: “Carry me back to Old Virginia (or Virginny),” “Oh, dem golden slippers,” both written by Bland.
And two were déjà-vu: “Jingle Bells” (first written as “One horse open sleigh” by James Pierpoint in 1857 and listed as the second title of “Jingle Bells”); “Camptown Races” (also listed in the book as “Gwine to run all night”), along with “Old Folks at Home” (also listed as “‘Way Down the Swanee River”). The latter songs were written by Foster.
The song titles were a mix of stereotypical dialect that blacks supposedly spoke and the “good English” that others supposedly spoke. The titles and lyrics, though, were indicative of minstrelsy, which was a popular entertainment from around the 1840s and 1850s to 1870s. It had gotten started in the late 1820s after a white actor named Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice put black cork on his face and began mimicking a black man he’d met singing a song called “Jim Crow.” Rice turned it into a dance-and-song routine that made him famous.
Minstrel shows portrayed blacks in the worst light with their dances, songs, tomfoolery and gestures. White men in blackface played the typical black character as a lazy slave or a foolish dandy, and those images stretched years beyond the lifetime of the shows. There were also minstrel shows by black entertainers that started in the 1830s or 1840s, and gained popularity after the Civil War.
When “Minstrel Songs” was published, the shows were waning. Vaudeville was starting to take hold and popular music was changing. Among African Americans, the shows were expanded to include religious and other types of music, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers – formed at Fisk University around 1871 – were ushering in legitimate music.
During the 1850s, Foster wrote some of his most significant songs, which, according to several sites, sought to engender compassion for black people. “I have done,” Foster wrote in 1852, “a great deal to build up a taste for the (minstrel) songs among refined people by making the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really offensive words which belong to some songs of that order.”
Of Foster’s songs “Old Uncle Ned” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” black abolitionist Frederick Douglass said during a speech at a ladies anti-slavery society in 1855:
“Old Kentucky Home” and “Uncle Ned” can make the heart sad as well as merry, and can call forth a tear as well as a smile. They awaken the sympathies for the slave, in which antislavery principles take root and flourish.”
“Ned” is written in dialect, and although the sympathies may be there, you have to get past the language to feel it. Some references to blacks in “Kentucky” are a little disconcerting.
Bland was both a composer and an entertainer. He performed with several black minstrel groups, playing guitar, singing, dancing and composing. His break came in the 1880s when he traveled to London with one group and performed before Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. One site noted that although he was criticized for his minstrel songs, they were not “nasty or degrading.”
“Virginny” was named the state song of Virginia in 1940 and song emeritus in 1997, and “Slippers” is the official song of the Philadelphia Mummers.
