National Identity in Snyder and Berlin's "That Opera Rag"

Abstract

At a time when the American national character is widely viewed abroad as intolerably arrogant, it is instructive to consider the strong vein of self-deprecation that ran through American humor from Revolutionary times well into the twentieth century, if not quite into the twenty-first. Born of the contrast between the early Yankee settlers and their more refined British forebears, the American self-portrait in humorous songs, plays, and journalism both celebrated and deplored the same shortcomings in American manners that so offended British tourists from Mrs. Trollope to Charles Dickens. Beginning with Brother Jonathan, the simple Vermont farmer who was the model for Uncle Sam, and extending through Mark Twain's innocents and Henry James's not-so-innocents abroad, comic personifications of the national character have paradoxically derided Americans' homespun simplicity of manner while simultaneously equating it with sincerity, virtue, and a natural nobility that has nothing to do with aristocracy.1 The contradictions in these national self-portraits are compounded when the emblematic comic figure is African American. Recent critical thinking about the nineteenth-century minstrel show has begun to delve deeply into those contradictions.2 My purpose here is to extend the investigation begun by scholars of minstrelsy into the early twentieth century by examining as a case study an example of that repertory of popular song called by its practitioners and their audiences the coon song-songs whose lyrics use a stereotyped Negro dialect based on actual African American speech but modified