Coon Songs Research Articles

May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy by Sharon Ammen

Reviewed by: May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy by Sharon Ammen Rhona Justice-Malloy May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy. By Sharon Ammen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 252 pp. $24.37 paper. In 1896, Thomas Edison made a fifteen-second film titled The Kiss. In the film, two fairly unattractive, middle-aged people press cheek to cheek, lips touching at only one corner while the kissers seem to be speaking to one another from "the other side" of their mouths. Then, the man pulls away, pulls his mustachios into perfect curls, and kisses the woman full on for just a few seconds. This little film has always struck me as being a bit salacious and unromantic, too broad and theatrical to be authentic. It turns out, The Kiss was indeed performed by John C. Rice and May Irwin, one of the most popular entertainers of the day. Those fifteen seconds were taken from a scene in Irwin's mega-hit farce The Widow Jones. If Irwin is remembered at all it is largely because of this little film. Irwin may also be remembered and closely identified by the "coon songs" she wrote and recorded. The coon song was a type of ragtime rampant with racist images of African Americans. They were written in "negro dialect" and depicted racist caricatures of black life. Irwin was a "coon shouter," the name given to this style of performer, and her most popular song, The Bully, involved a coldblooded murder. The titular character, a black man, is armed with a straight razor and looking for a fight. She is thus remembered for the racist and distasteful songs that made her a star. Presciently, Irwin wrote: "Sometimes I feel a certain regret that perhaps my name will go down in history, if it even trundles along that far, as 'the woman who sang coon songs,' more than the woman who made the public laugh. The latter would be the height of my ambition" (68). In May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy, Sharon Ammen unapologetically examines the layered and complex meanings of Ir-win's coon songs with their attendant negative images of black people, enacted through "comedy." "It is simply," Ammen writes, "not possible to write about May Irwin without delving into this subject, for if coon songs were indeed the 'nadir' of 'vulgarity in music,' then May Irwin was their most prominent purveyor throughout the period of their peak popularity—from the 1890s until World War I" (70). Nevertheless, Ammen's book and Irwin herself are indeed worthy of study beyond The Kiss and the coon songs that made her a star. Sharon Ammen's exceedingly readable book introduces us to a complex, strong, savvy, and kind woman. Irwin's persona went far beyond her work on the stage. May was called by the critics the "personification of humor," and President [End Page 334] Wilson appointed her "Secretary of Laughter." Irwin was also a writer, home-maker, mother, landowner, dairy farmer, and a vigorous supporter of suffrage who also wrote a cookbook, and she was frequently a contributor to magazines such as Green Book and Cosmopolitan. Yet, despite her great wealth and power, "she was just a sweet, jolly, harmless, fat woman" (111). Ammen examines a complicated life whose success lies in no small part to minstrel music that celebrates a form (the coon song) that today's reader will find shameful and deeply disturbing—no small feat, indeed. She handles the material with a gentle yet insistent hand that mediates the harsh nature of her subject's career. Ammen's writing reveals a sense of humor and irony, is impeccably researched, and very successfully contextualizes the culture of Irwin's time. The reader not only comes to know May and her personal and professional personas but also to understand how performers and audiences could call such racist, violent, exaggerated, and false portrayals of black people "entertainment." Ammen has been studying May Irwin for more than twenty years, and this book is clearly the result of that labor of love. Ammen met with many challenges collecting material, as there are no major studies...

Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley’s Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South by John Bush Jones

Reviewed by: Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley’s Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South by John Bush Jones Stephanie Lewin-Lane Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley’s Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South. By John Bush Jones. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. [xxi, 270 p. ISBN 9780807159446. $45.] Bibliography, index, index of song titles. Why Dixie? This is the question that motivated author and historian John Bush Jones to write his book Reinventing Dixie: Tin Pan Alley’s Songs and the Creation of the Mythic South. The question emerged from a project in which Jones analyzed the lyrics and subject matter of sheet music in the John Hay Library, a special collections library at Brown University in Rhode Island. During his examination of the 140,000-piece collection, Jones discovered roughly 900 works about Dixie. However, the depictions of Dixie in these songs were not contemporary, but “idyllic portraits of an idealized South” (p. 11). Further investigation also determined that most of the Dixie songs were written by Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists, also known as Alleymen, the majority of whom lived in the Midwest and had never set foot in the South. How is it that these songwriters could create such a powerful and profitable vision of a land of which they had no personal knowledge? And why is it that consumers purchased them in such high numbers and for such a long time, roughly 1898 to 1958? Reinventing Dixie sets out to discover the answers to these questions and discuss how the music “invented” and perpetuated the notion of an idealized and fictionalized Dixie. The study of a popularized image of Dixie is nothing new, nor is the discussion of the impact that popular music and Tin Pan Alley had in perpetuating the myth. Stephen J. Whitfield addressed the appeal of Dixie songs for Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists at length in his article “Is It True What They Sing about Dixie?” (Southern Cultures 8, no. 2 [Summer 2002]: 8–37). Whitfield attributes the Tin Pan Alley interest in songs about Dixie to the natural progression from music written earlier about the South by non-native writers, such as the prolific Pennsylvanian composer Stephen Foster (Whitfield, p. 10). He also proposes the idea of a shared empathy in suffering between Jewish immigrants and African American slaves of the South to explain how it was that the Tin Pan Alley songwriters, who were mostly Jewish, could write about the subject in such a powerful way (ibid., p. 21). In Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), Karen L. Cox devotes a full chapter to music about Dixie. Cox writes about the phenomenon of Dixie songs written by northern, Jewish immigrant songwriters of Tin Pan Alley. She credits nostalgia for the South and the interest in “other places” as the inspiration for the popularity of Dixie tunes (Cox, p. 10). Some of Cox’s chapter reiterates Whitfield’s theory of Tin Pan Alley’s attraction to the subject of Dixie as an extension of Stephen Foster’s work. However, Cox also considers the idea that coon songs, which are caricatures of racist African American stereotypes, were predecessors to “back-to-Dixie” songs (ibid., p. 16). What sets Reinventing Dixie apart from similar scholarship is the comprehensive discussion of sheet music about Dixie through detailed examination of the lyrics. Jones has painstakingly analyzed some 1,080 songs and separated them into seven major categories: sentimentality, stereotypes, southern hospitality, songs about lovers, realism and parody, homesickness and “Mammy Songs,” and southern myths and pride. Jones gives each category a chapter and provides examples of songs [End Page 525] that epitomize the topic, being careful to provide the Tin Pan Alley composers and lyricists for each title. He then provides historical and musical context for each piece, which will allow for a wide range of research to be undertaken using the book’s content. Jones states clearly in his preface that there are limitations to his research. The intended audience is general and not academic. Therefore, there are no endnotes or footnotes...

‘To be black is to be funny’: ‘Coon-shouting’ and the melancholic production of the white comedienne

This essay explores the performance of “coon-shouter” May Irwin, the most famous female comedienne of the ragtime era, who developed an identity as a comedienne by popularizing “coon songs” on the musical comedy stage and in vaudeville at the turn of the twentieth century. By drawing upon Anne Anlin Cheng's conception of “racial melancholy,” the essay explores the “melancholic” production of the modern female comedienne in a period where women were discouraged from comedic performance. The essay argues that plain-faced “women of girth,” like Irwin, used coon-shouting to establish themselves as professional comedians in an era of limited stage roles for women. By sonically ingesting the “coon” – the predominant “outsider-within” – Irwin and other coon-shouters used the form of travesty to comically parody an intentionally constructed incongruity between white femininity and black masculinity. In doing so, they disavowed traditional forms of masking historically used by white male comedians in blackface – “blacking up” and costuming – and thus critiqued their exclusion from the most recognizable form of comedy, blackface minstrelsy. By developing an earthy, naturalistic style of comedy, women like Irwin made the female comedienne legible to turn-of-the-century audiences.

Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music

Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music. By Burton W. Peretti. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Pp. 223, glossary of musical terms, chronology of selected dates, acknowledgments, introduction, documents, selected bibliography and discography, index, about the author.)Burton W. Peretti's Lift Every Voice contributes to a much-needed discussion of African American musical history by providing an important, albeit brief, visitation of the social issues entwined in the professional experience of some of the United States' most important and influential artists. Any work that focuses on this subject matter, particularly covering such a broad swath of history in one volume, will bring comparisons to Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans (Norton, [1971] 1997). While Southern focused on chronicling major events and actors in African American music history, Peretti covers less material and embarks much more freely in historical contextualization. His depth of knowledge as a scholar in jazz and blues is clear, and all of the important events and performers are thoroughly covered. Information on these genres is easy to come by, and there are no major new revelations brought to light in LiftEvery Voice. It is the subject matter outside of those two areas that is most significant.Peretti gives readers a fairly unique examination of the lives of numerous historical figures. Two notable subjects include Billy Kersands and William Marion Cook. Kersands was a black minstrel-era entertainer who gained national prominence through the exploitation of stereotypes that were caustic even by early twentieth-century standards. Cook's story is poignantly expressed in the recollections of his mother, as she lamented how Cook devoted years of his life to serious musical training in the United States and Europe only to achieve economic success by writing coon songs. Cook and Kersands are examples of African American musicians who endured the racial indignities that were part and parcel to their commercial success. Both are important stars in an era that needs to be explored more fully to understand early American music. While there are biographical sketches dealing with some of the major figures of the era, unfortunately the nature of their musical contributions are a reminder of a painful and unresolved chapter in American history that is something of an intellectual minefield. Peretti acknowledges not only the strides that these performers made to advance professional possibilities for other African American performers, but he also recognizes the personal and societal conflict inherent in their means to success. …

Racisme anti-noir dans la musique populaire britannique (1880-1920)

The rapid expansion of the British Empire in the second half of the XIXth century was accompanied by a rise in the diffusion and the legitimacy of racist ideas in Britain. Intellectuals wrote of the “scientific” differences between the races, and racial hierarchies were generally accepted by educated people. What of the uneducated? Comic books and children’s magazines about the “heroes” of the British Empire certainly did not hesitate to use racist stereotypes abundantly. Popular racism against Black people served to legitimize the imperial project, but for most of this period was little aimed at a visible ethnic minority in Britain. Our article will aim at analysing the racist content of popular music in this period – both that of the extremely popular “minstrel shows”, where white performers disguised themselves as stereotypical black slaves for the purposes of entertainment, and the “coon songs” which were common in the music halls. We will trace the depiction of the Black Other as the mirror image of the Victorian and Edwardian respectable gentleman and lady, and how, while generally denigrated, the Black persona could also be desired or envied.

Soundtracks of Empire: “The White Man’s Burden,” the War in the Philippines, the“Ideals of America,” and Tin Pan Alley

America’s War with Spain inspired Tin Pan Alley music publishers to generate popular songs to accompany America’s military victories and subsequent occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. By expanding the genre of the so-called “coon song” to include the people of these islands, composers and publishers contributed to the domestication of empire in fin-de-siècle America.

Fonograma 108.077: o lundu de George W. Johnson

Um exame do fonograma Gargalhada (pega na chaleira), cançoneta por Eduardo das Neves, expõe a origem da expressão "pegar na chaleira" e revela incongruências nos critérios de catalogação online do Instituto Moreira Salles. Provavelmente datada de 1906, a gravação aparece como um "lundu" em catálogos comerciais de 1915-1926, e as mesmas ideias musicais foram reaproveitadas em outros registros sonoros da Casa Edison comercializados entre 1913 e 1919. A música e o gargalhar que Neves reaproveita foram criados por George Washington Johnson, o primeiro astro negro da gravação mecânica. Mas enquanto o ex-escravo norte-americano se auto-ridiculariza de acordo com estereótipos brancos, o autodenominado "crioulo" encena uma sátira ao comportamento masculino das classes dominantes do Rio. Neste processo, a coon song transforma-se na antítese do gênero.

Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook (review)

Reviewed by: Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook David Krasner Marva Griffin Carter. Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 184 pp. $27.95. Will Marion Cook (née William Mercer, 1869–1944) was a musician and composer best known for his work in black musicals. A student of the violin at the Oberlin Conservatory, tutored by Heinrich Jocobson at the Berlin Hochschule for Musik, and a protégé of Antonin Dvořák and John White at the National Conservatory of Music, Cook was eminently prepared for a career as a concert performer and opera composer. Because he was African American, however, the scant opportunities available at the time were in musical theatre. His talents were hardly wasted, though, as he composed some of the most enduring songs and lyrics for black and white musicals. Writing music with the great poet Paul Laurence Dunbar as lyricist, and teaming up with the superb musical performers Ernest Hogan, Bob Cole, George Walker, and Bert Williams, Cook arranged orchestration and wrote lyrics and songs for the best musicals of his generation. Influenced by Tin Pan Alley songs and show tunes, Cook made an essential contribution to popular music in American consciousness. Marva Griffin Carter’s book shines a long overdue light on the career of this great composer. Cook worked in several media: art songs, love songs, and spirituals, and as Carter notes, his musical styles included “a diverse range of pseudo-Africanisms, a nostalgic plantation song, tender ballads, waltzes, recitatives and operatic ensembles” (67). He was also masterful at writing the popular “coon song,” the derogatory tunes by white writers that were turned into generally positive representations once written by African Americans. Cook’s most famous song, “Swing Along,” written for Williams and Walker, is a powerful work reflecting the conditions of African Americans moving (“swinging along”) amidst a thicket of racism. During his most productive decade, 1898–1908, he composed outstanding music for shows such as Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), In Dahomey (1903), and The Southerner (1904). In his later years Cook produced choral works, especially his Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Cook’s genius was owing to what Carter calls “his use of highly syncopated, chromatic melodies and extended song forms” (118). Despite his talent, he was a recalcitrant figure in show business. Carter notes that George Walker once said of him: “If Will Marion Cook was a white man I reckon he would pass as eccentric, [End Page 285] but, being as he’s a negro, he’s sure enough plum crazy” (91). Carter quotes Cook admitting that his failure to acquire success “was not because of color; rather, because of uncontrolled passions, too violent a resentment against real of fancied wrongs; too large and too visible a chip on each shoulder and to be sure I missed nothing, another chip on my woolly head” (110). Nevertheless, Cook had numerous admirers. His wife Abbie Mitchell, despite divorcing him, remained supportive of his musical career. He also had a tremendous influence on many important African American musicians, mentoring Eubie Blake, James Reese Europe, and Duke Ellington, among others. The book is essentially an unreconstructed reprint of the author’s 1988 dissertation and the shortcoming of such republication is glaring. There are little to no references to the dozens of works on African American musical theatre that have emerged during the past two decades. The author seems unaware, for example, of several new biographies of Cook’s collaborator, Bert Williams, only referencing the outdated biographies by Mabel Rowland (1923) and Ann Charters (1970). Additionally, many accounts of Cook’s experiences noted in this book are stated with insufficient examination. The author says, for instance, that Cook “could not have chosen a more gifted mentor than Bob Cole to teach him the tricks of the theatrical trade” (37), then says that there was “discord between Cole and Cook” (57) that ended their relationship. But no explanation as to the substance of the discord is provided. The author says that “Cook was widely known as an advocate of Republican principles and an outspoken anti-New Dealer” (109), but then says that Cook...

Forgotten Manuscripts: A Trip to Coontown

Forgotten Manuscripts: A Trip to Coontown Krystyn R. Moon (bio), David Krasner (bio), and Thomas L. Riis (bio) Finding A Trip to Coontown, by Krystyn R. Moon By 1897, most American audiences had had an opportunity to see African Americans perform on the stage during the previous thirty years. Hired by European American agents and managers, they were expected to reproduce many of the songs and skits that had been made famous in blackface minstrelsy in new theatrical genres, such as variety and vaudeville. Others were forming their own concert companies to do a variety of popular and high-art music, and writing and singing ersatz spirituals, “coon songs” (i.e., black dialect numbers), and sentimental Victorian tear-jerkers. These had all become popular thanks to writers/performers such as Ernest Hogan, Sam Lucas, and Gussie Davis, among others.1 It is within this context that Bob Cole and Billy Johnson’s A Trip to Coontown first appeared on the stage during the 1897–98 season. Although African Americans had written numerous short theatrical and musical works, none had written a full-length musical production. To add to its historical significance, A Trip to Coontown was performed, directed, and produced by African Americans, an astounding feat in an era where few independent theaters could even consider taking a chance on such a production. Unfortunately, the play—like so many other nineteenth-century African American documents and artifacts—was lost, and scholars could only make conjectures (based mainly on newspaper reviews) about what it looked and sounded like. My interest in finding A Trip to Coontown began when Jack Tchen, director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at New York University, contacted me about writing a short essay on “The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon” (1897), a song that was originally written for the play. My own research on the dynamics of American Orientalism had uncovered the practice of African Americans in yellowface starting in the late nineteenth century, but I had not thoroughly explored this particular song. “The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon” is an extraordinary piece of music about a series of comedic mishaps during a wedding of a Chinese immigrant woman and an African American man. Because the song was written and performed by African Americans, it was more than a comedic ditty that perpetuated African American and Chinese immigrant stereotypes. To address interracial marriage in a period when African American men were lynched for merely looking at European American women, “The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon” is a bold political statement that celebrates a future where interracial marriage is commonplace. Its performance in a contemporary farce, chock-full of other racial impersonations, including Germans, Italians, and “Hebrews,” might also be viewed as an effort to move specifically antiblack stereotypes out of the spotlight.2 As a historian, I was intrigued by “The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon,” and wanted to see whether the musical play for which it was originally written would shed any further light on the intent of the songwriters. In A Trip to Coontown, Cole and Johnson reworked a skit originally titled At Jolly Coon-ey Island that Cole had written for Black Patti’s Troubadours (the operatic variety company formed by Sissieretta Jones) and named the new production to spoof one of the most popular musicals of the 1890s, A Trip to Chinatown (1891).3 Despite positive reviews in the fall of 1897, Cole was unable to produce his work except in third-rate American and Canadian [End Page 7] theaters over the course of several weeks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the theater industry was owned and operated by a handful of European American men who could blacklist any performer and destroy his/her career. Not until after World War I did actors and writers have some success unionizing, but African Americans were almost unilaterally excluded. Cole’s previous employers organized a boycott of Cole and Johnson’s play because they chose to work independently. Despite this hurdle, its success grew, and Klaw and Erlanger, one of the major theatrical booking agencies in New York City, finally broke the boycott in April 1898...

Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895. By Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. - Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. By Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895. By Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. - Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. By Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. - Volume 5 Issue 1

Passing for Black: Coon Songs and the Performance of Race

Until recently, scholars exploring blackface minstrelsy or accompanying song craze of 1890s have felt need to apologize, either for demeaning stereotypes of African Americans embedded in art forms or for their own interest in studying phenomena. Robert Toll, one of first critics to examine minstrelsy seriously, was so appalled by its inherent racism that he focused his 1 974 work primarily on debunking stereotypes; Sam Dennison, another pioneer, did likewise with coon songs. Richard Martin and David Wondrich claim of minstrelsy that the roots of every strain of American music- ragtime, jazz, blues, country music, soul, rock and roll, even hip-hop - reach down through its reeking soil (5). Marshall Wyatt opines that most coon songs rate scant attention (9). Even Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, compilers of a large and extremely useful volume on black traveling shows and coon songs, are careful to mention that they take no pleasure in repeated use of word coon in ignobly dubbed coon songs (3-4). When I mentioned to an African-American friend that I was writing an essay on black performers of coon songs, he offered to find me a bodyguard. In past decade, however, thanks in large part to groundbreaking research on AfricanAmerican musical theater and blackface performers like Bert Williams and George Walker, scholars have come to recognize that blackface and coon song performances by African Americans signify in rich and complex ways. In decision by Bert Williams to perform with Walker as one of Two Real Coons, for example, one finds a West Indian man performing a white-created racial caricature of an African- American person and billing it as real (Chude-Sokei 5-8). Authenticity evaporates. What might at first seem to be a mere reiteration of deplorable history of racism becomes a profound challenge to its foundational parameters. Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, and Karen Sotiropoulos are among those recent scholars who have argued persuasively that coon songs as performed by black Americans constituted not simple minstrelsy or a capitulation to forces popular consumer culture, but a form of political activism, a way for young, cosmopolitan black musicians and performers of 1890s and earlytwentieth century to challenge racial status quo and thus participate in creation of modern discourse. Recognizing multiple levels of signification in play when African Americans performed in blackface in front of racially mixed authences, Sotiropoulos finds that performers manipulated stage in innovative ways that helped them forge a space for dialogue with their black authence- dialogue that included both assertions of black nationhood and critique of racism that perpetuated stereotypical imagery (2). These performers also represented a new generation of African- American artists, who had to negotiate nineteenth-century notions of morality and middle-class ideas of respectability (97) by their parents, while seeking ways to participate in lively, urban theatrical culture of which they were a part. For Sotiropoulos, This generation of black artists celebrated black communities, denounced Jim Crow, and critiqued black elite pretension- all behind minstrel mask (4). Daphne Brooks similarly contends that Walker and Williams and their peers created a black musical theater that contested cultural legibility of racial representations and black musical form itself (40). Perhaps T. H. Lhamon best sums up this newer, twenty-first century response to minstrelsy in his discussion of Two Real Coons. By using this billing, Williams and Walker held open season on conceptual coons both on and off stage, and eviscerated whatever 'coon' resided in imagination of their diverse authences (7-8). For scholars like these, coon songs thus deserve study not just as a transitional moment between minstrel shows and jazz or blues, but in their own right, as indispensable to our understanding of a American popular music, larger cultural forces that produce it, and sophisticated racial commentary of talented artists who crafted and performed songs. …

Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Marshall Circle: Racial Representation from Blackface to Black Naturalism

No period in American cultural history was more mercurial, and at the present time, no period is less understood than the nadir, which stretched from the end of Reconstruction to World War I. (1) With the exception of touring spiritual choirs celebrated for their natural power, artists were largely invisible to white Americans until the mid-1890s when ragtime exploded, minstrel stars sold millions of copies of their sheet music, and Paul Laurence rose to national prominence. (2) A pioneering novelist who was hailed as the black poet laureate and prince of 'coon' song writers (Paul Laurence Dunbar n. pag.), represents perhaps the best starting place for a reassessment of the nadir. Using Dunbar's varied, often misunderstood career as a lens, this essay studies the fraught relationship between turn-of-the-century art and racism. was enmeshed like no other nadir-period artist in the politics and possibilities of racial representation. Despite burgeoning scholarly interest in minstrelsy, the standard history of Dunbar's songwriting career is plagued with errors and misconceptions. (3) This is unfortunate because the full complexity of Dunbar's dynamic approach to racial representation is only accessible through a careful excavation of his work with Bert Williams, George Walker, and the other members of what I call the Marshall Circle--the talented group of African American and African Caribbean performers who gathered at the black-owned Marshall Hotel. (4) By exploring the continuities and discontinuities of Dunbar's racial representations, I hope to provide insight into the racist forms that turn-of-the-century artists inherited, the new modes of cultural expression that they struggled to produce, and the political tensions between the two. My analysis begins with a simple claim: Racist expectations did not trap Dunbar; rather, they prompted his remarkable movement across genres and forms. By working within and against conventional representations in poetry and song, reached diverse audiences, achieved politically representative success, and contributed to emergent cultural forms. I will examine how different orientations to the dominant politics of respectability imbued plantation verse and coon songs with distinct, uneven cultural possibilities. My essay culminates in a discussion of Dunbar's 1902 novel, Sport of the Gods. Dunbar's contribution to the nascent naturalist tradition doubles as his state-of-the-nadir address on representation in art and politics. Overlooked archival evidence suggests that drafted Sport in the wake of the 1900 theater-district riot, which targeted Williams, Walker, and the Marshall Circle. Featuring a veiled homage to Williams, Sport delineates the forces that impinge on identity, while retaining a slender hope that vital art can emerge from violently racist environments. But the novel also underscores a painful reality. could never quite unify the diverse approaches to racial representation that he spent his brief, brilliant career developing because diverse turn-of-the-century cultural forms were generated from quite distinct orientations to contemporaneous political and social conditions. Being the Black Poet Laureate: Signifying and Re-Presenting Blackness 1898 Wilmington Massacre, which marked the violent suppression of democracy in the South, was the era's watershed event, but it was the North's tacit approval that led to remark: The race spirit in the United States is not local but general in his most militant essay, Recession Never (36). Although the nadir in the North never reached Southern depths of legal disenfranchisement, it was marked by both overt and implicit racial hostility. national ascendance of Southern white perspectives on race would find expression in intensified racial violence. In August 1900, a brutal Manhattan race riot crystallized the nadir's national scope. …

Review: Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 by Tim Brooks. Music in American Life; Lost Sounds: Blacks and

Book Review| April 01 2009 Review: Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 by Tim Brooks. Music in American Life; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1922; Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany by Rainer E. Lotz; Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, edited by Neil A. Wynn Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. xviii, 510 pp.Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. viii, 461 pp.Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919, by Tim Brooks. Music in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. x, 634 pp.Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1922. St. Joseph, IL: Archeophone Records, 2005. 2 compact discs.Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany, by Rainer E. Lotz. Bonn: Birgit Lotz, 1997. 398 pp.; compact disc.Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, edited by Neil A. Wynn. American Made Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. xii, 289 pp. Thomas L. Riis Thomas L. Riis THOMAS L. RIIS has been at the University of Colorado at Boulder as the Joseph Negler Professor of Music since 2002 and as Director of the American Music Research Center since 1992. His most recent book, published as part of the Yale Broadway Masters series, is entitled Frank Loesser. He served as a senior scholar, with a Fulbright Fellowship, at the University of Lüneburg (Germany) in 2005–6. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2009) 62 (1): 252–260. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2009.62.1.252 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Thomas L. Riis; Review: Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 by Tim Brooks. Music in American Life; Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1922; Black People: Entertainers of African Descent in Europe and Germany by Rainer E. Lotz; Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe, edited by Neil A. Wynn. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2009; 62 (1): 252–260. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2009.62.1.252 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2009 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved.2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Ragged but right: black traveling shows, "coon songs," and the dark pathway to blues and jazz

The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. Coon songs, with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of and jazz. In Ragged but Right, now in paperback, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the shows, the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker, Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from coon shouters to blues singers. Throughout the ragtime era and into the era of and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such as the Rabbit's Foot and Silas Green from New Orleans provided and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.

Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff

Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs," and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff

African-American Entertainers in Jahrhundertwende: Vienna Austrian Identity, Viennese Modernism and Black Success

According to jazz scholar Howard Rye, when considering public representations of African-American music and those who made it at the turn of the last century, ‘the average jazz aficionado, and not a few others, conjures up images of white folks in black face capering about’. We could extend this to include white minstrels singing so-called ‘coon songs’, which feature reprehensible racist lyrics set to syncopated rhythms. Traditional representations assign the blacks no role in the public performance of these scurrilous ‘identities’, which essentially banished them from the literature as participating in careers in the performing arts. As a result of the problems with the representation of blacks in texted music from the turn of the century, historians have tended to write vocal performance out of the pre-history of jazz, in favour of the purely instrumental ragtime. However, recent research reveals that African-American vocal entertainers did take agency over representations of themselves and over their careers, in a space unencumbered by the problematic history of race relationships in the USA. That space was Europe: beginning in the 1870s, and in increasing numbers until the ‘Great War’, troupes of African-American singers, dancers and comedians travelled to Europe, where they entertained large audiences to great acclaim and gained valuable experience as entrepreneurs, emerging as an important market force in the variety-theatre circuit. Above all, they performed the cakewalk, the late-nineteenth-century dance whose syncopated rhythms and simple form accompanied unnatural, exaggerated dance steps. By introducing Europe to the cakewalk, they prepared audiences for the jazz craze that would sweep through the continent after the war and enabled Europeans to experience the syncopated rhythms and irregular movements whether as dancers or as spectators.

The Use of Dialect in African-American Spirituals, Popular Songs, and Folk Songs

The presence of vocal works that use dialect in African-American culture has been a controversial and difficult area of inquiry for those investigating the phenomenon. Dialect songs were first heard in the minstrel shows that toured the United States and Europe before the Civil War (Mahar 1999). They continued to be performed after the war as well, although not as frequently by professional troupes. Textually, many minstrel songs presented derogatory caricatures of African-American and slave culture known from depictions of southern plantations. By the 1870s, African-American dialect was still heard, most often in minstrelsy, although probably in some sacred repertory as well. While spirituals and jubilees sung in churches may have used dialect, existing evidence suggests that touring college groups, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Hampton Students, avoided the use of dialect when they performed spirituals as part of their programs. The Fisk Singers' book The Story of the Jubilee Singers (Marsh 1880) and their later recordings (after 1909) offer their repertory in standard English. Ditson's (1887) publication Jubilee and Plantation Songs likewise eschews dialect. Undoubtedly, the use of standard English in these publications and in public performances reflected a desire to demonstrate that African Americans were educated and could speak and sing in standard English. Toward the end of the 1880s, a number of African-American vocal quartets began to appear in various venues, including vaudeville, country fairs, and variety shows. One of the most famous was the Standard Quartet, which toured with the South before the War company. The group made a number of cylinders in the early 1890s, of which one, Keep Movin', also sung in standard English, has survived (Brooks 2004, 96-97). However, the popularity of the antebellum spirituals and jubilees influenced a number of black minstrels to write and perform sacred dialect songs in their shows. James Bland's Oh, Dem Golden Slippers (1879) and Sam Lucas's On My Long White Robe (1879) are two examples of this sacred genre that migrated from the church and concert stage to the minstrel show. Lucas's song has no derogatory sense. Rather, the dialect conveys an African-American perspective (similar to that heard in spirituals) on the voyage that follows death. De gospel Trumpet am sounding loud, Put on my long white robe. See all de children a slipping proud, up an' down de road, When dey get near de pearly gate, Put on my long white robe, You can go inside if you ain't too late, And den how happy you'll feel. Chorus Oh! wait 'till I put on my long white robe, My starry crown and my golden shoes, I pass through the gates of de golden city Den I carry de news. During the 1890s, the most controversial dialect lyrics, which harkened back to the early days of minstrelsy, were set to ragtime melodies; this new genre is usually identified as the song. It was sung in a multiplicity of venues--in the minstrel show, in vaudeville, and on Broadway. It is generally stated that Ernest Hogan's All Coons Look Alike to Me was the first coon song (Woll 1989, 2), but in truth, a number of coon songs predate his piece. (1) His song, however, together with the Bully Song, whose authorship was claimed by no fewer than five composers, introduced the new genre to Broadway, where mainstream theatergoers readily accepted and approved their catchy tunes, sung by May Irwin. The coon song's popularity led many African-American lyricists and composers to write vernacular songs that were sung by both black and white performers. While most of these songs had slangy lyrics in which final sounds were dropped (hangin', for example) and contractions were used (ne'er), they did not use dialect (dere and dem). A small group, however, did. Bert Williams and George Walker, for example, wrote several that were heard in their musicals between 1897 and 1902, as did Irving Jones, Will Marion Cook, and Bob Cole. …

Crazy for Ragtime

Publishers of CD-ROMs about vernacular music are finally starting become competitive. last few years have seen the appearance of products about specific artists such as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Prince, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, and David Bowie. Some are more broadly conceived, purporting introduce the history of blues, country music, jazz, folk music, rap, and rock - or even teach aspects of music theory through these genres. It is not surprising then that two discs regarding ragtime appeared during 1996. Crazy about Ragtime takes a broad view of the cultural and musical history of ragtime, its predecessors, and successors, while Total Joplin focuses on Scott Joplin, who is often referred as the King of Ragtime. two programs share similarities in approach, but there are also differences that are worthy of special attention. Robert Winter's Crazy for Ragtime was the first CD-ROM produced by Calliope Media, which the author founded with Jay Heifetz, son of violinist Jascha Heifetz. According the information on Calliope's Web site (http://www.calliope.com/about), the company's mission is to change the way people experience interactive media titles. Winter has taken significant strides in helping Calliope fulfill its mission with Crazy for Ragtime, which both entertains and educates in a fascinating manner. Those familiar with Winter's earlier products for Voyager, such as Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony, will again experience the author's golden touch with multimedia and will be reminded why he is so highly respected as a teacher, performer, and historian. curtain frame begins by showing an old map of the United States as a ragtime piece plays in the background. From the map's location of St. Louis, Missouri, often regarded as the birthplace of classic ragtime, emerges an image of a maple leaf, an obvious reference Scott Joplin's popular Maple Leaf Rag. A video box displays a series of brief excerpts from very old black-and-white silent movies, starting with rare footage of the dance known as the cakewalk. Still images of illustrated sheet music title pages and portraits of musicians flash across the motion-picture panel as the title frame opens. Users who want proceed directly the title frame can simply hit a key escape from the curtain frame. title frame displays an interactive table of contents on the U.S. map, which now also contains a multiplicity of blinking city names. Clicking on a city displays a captioned illustration of a musician or a piece of sheet music associated with ragtime there. A collapsible menu bar offers options for a glossary, for a Find tool that allows keyword searching of practically the entire contents of the program, for an excellent contextual help function, for back-tracking, and for a table of contents for the CD-ROM's seven major sections. The Ragtime Craze, which is the historical portion of the program, traces the sociocultural and musical context of ragtime from minstrelsy, Victorianism, and salon music dancing, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz. Winter does not neglect the influence of ragtime on vernacular music and on the works of such composers as Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Charles Ives. stimulating and lengthy audiovisual presentation is accompanied by a script that one can peruse separately. Among the strengths of the seven subsections of The Ragtime Craze is Winter's treatment of coon songs, a turn-of-the-century genre that stereotypes African-Americans in a way that is now very offensive. author approaches the subject clearly and cogently without being squeamish. Those unfamiliar with the history of dance will be enlightened by the subsection titled Animal Dancing, which discusses the cakewalk, turkey-trot, grizzly bear, and chicken scratcher, not mention the foxtrot, which was named after the movie mogui Harry Fox. Accounts of ragtime performance at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago are examined in an inquisitive manner without breaching the bounds of musicological objectivity. …

Reclaiming Walt: Marc Blitzstein's Whitman Settings

Between 1925 and 1928, Marc Blitzstein composed nine songs to texts by Walt Whitman. These settings highlight homoerotic and corporeal thematics, which dominant views of the poet had either obscured or denied. Challenging such interpretations, Blitzstein advanced a reclaiming of Whitman by homosexual readers. Subtitled "songs for a coon shouter," four of these settings introduce African American elements, either through "coon song" gestures or through incorporation of jazz idioms. These appropriations were intended to enhance Whitman's eroticism. They also create tensions between the "primitive" and the "civilized," high and low art, and white and black bodies.

Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The "Coon Song" Phenomenon of the Gilded Age

American Popular Entertainment in 1977, the performer-scholar Max Morath noted, with reference to the song of the 1890s, that the phenomenon right now resides exactly where it should-on the back shelves of the pop museum collecting dust. It's a sociological curiosity and nothing more. 1 While one might well sympathize with the liberality of Mr. Morath's sentiment in his consignment of a major pop culture phenomenon to the dustbin of long dead, distasteful exotica, it has become clear that few contemporary students of American culture accept the implication that because racist phenomena are distasteful they are no longer important. It may even be said that the ongoing reassessment of the meaning of the coon song craze (of which this essay is a part) would suggest that the national fascination with coon songs between circa 1890 and 1910 underlay a major shift in white perception of blacks; a shift whereby existing stereotypes came to be either confirmed or embellished and indelibly encoded as part of the semiotic system of the period.2 The stereotyping of black Americans in the popular culture did not, of course, begin with coon songs. The British music halls of the eighteenth century occasionally introduced comic black figures, some of which were exported to Colonial America where, through the process of ascription, a set of assumptions about black characters would come to be accepted as a