Minstrelsy was the first truly American pop culture sensation: the original entertainment for the commoner. The medium emerged in the mid-19th century, so white factory workers granted free time and extra cash by the Industrial Revolution would spend their spoils on a minstrel show -- a hodgepodge of dancing, joke-telling, singing, and role-playing, all performed by a string band comprising white men duded up in black-painted faces and the oversized, ragged clothes of the poor. The entire production aimed to reproduce life on the Southern plantation and present the genuine music of the slave, often to Northern audiences with little or no contact with blacks.
Written off by most mainstream historians and musicologists as nothing more than racist theatrics and overwrought melodrama, minstrelsy hasn't merited serious cultural study since its awkward birth in the 1830s. However, a very small but steadily growing cadre of musicians from across the country intends to resurrect it. They're intently researching yellowing sheet music and sepia-hued photographs to ensure absolute authenticity -- from constructing period instruments and donning near-perfect replicas of clothing from the era, to performing the old minstrel classics exactly as they originally were, sometimes even in blackface. The endeavor is done so faithfully that, as one modern-day minstrel player put it, "If you squint your eyes and your ears a little, you can travel right back to the 1840s."
Of course, such a journey would dump you in a briar patch of racial stereotypes repulsive to modern-day Americans, so it's not surprising there's a contentious debate over whether such a project is legitimate at all.
| Continue Darren Keast's East Bay Express article "The Real Shock Rock"
Also worth reading: "Before the Blues," Robert Christgau's Seattle Weekly review of David Wondrich's "Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot 1843-1924"
posted in articles on October 8, 2003 7:55 PM | t (0)
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