Sights and Sounds in the History of Black American Music (Part 1)
Maybe things have changed since I was in elementary school not all that long ago (90s), but the way I learned American history was White. I remember watching Johnny Tremain in class, a 1957 Disney musical that told the story of the American Revolution. Our teacher must have seen it as an opportunity to learn from the reenactment of history. The image of Hollywood-handsome white folks struggling against the British affected my imagining of American history for a long time. When we learned about the origins of America in school, we also learned whose story it was. Sure, there were other side players—Native Americans, Black slaves—but the main story began with the British-Americans who fought for independence from Britain. We thought we were living out the longer narrative arc of Johnny Tremain.
This White History remains a powerful organizing principle in everyday American thought. The existence of “Black history” courses (or months) demonstrates how Black narratives are viewed as an addition to “regular” (read: White) history. Many of us never heard much about the experiences of Black Americans in our history courses except as sidebars to a White narrative.
This post starts a new series on “The Sights and Sounds of Black American Music.” I am White, and I don’t claim any personal insight into life as a person of color in the United States. Nevertheless, it’s important—perhaps especially for White folks—to consciously think about the way race has shaped American society and our culture.
You cannot understand the history of mainstream American popular music without understanding the cultural impact of Black Americans. Black Americans’ role in the history of American music has truly been integral, though rarely has it reflected equality and justice.
Part of the difficulty of telling the history of Black music is that much of the written historical record deals with White people’s reactions to Black music, but there is relatively little of the perspective of Black performers themselves. What is clear is that mainstream White America was deeply fascinated with Black culture.
The first genre of American popular music to be exported internationally in the mid-19th century was the music of blackface minstrel troupes, which consisted of white performers wearing burnt cork makeup to make them appear “Black.” By fashioning stage characters out of racist stereotypes of Blacks, performers could be socially transgressive in ways they would not have been acceptable in “White” contexts.
Cover to the sheet music collection The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as sung by the Virginia Minstrels (1843).
Above we see Virginia Minstrels as depicted on the sheet music collection Celebrated Negro Melodies published in 1843. The Virginia Minstrels are considered the first ensemble of blackface performers. Notice how the performers of the Virginia Minstrels from a commercial sheet music. The blackface performers are not uniform in their bodily postures, rather their limbs are all going different directions. These “unrefined” and sexually suggestive postures would not have been acceptable in typical middle-class musical performances. Blackface allowed White Americans’ to indulge these transgressive fantasies while using racial boundaries to maintain a psychological distance from them.
Blackface minstrelsy became one of the most popular mainstream entertainments during the 19th century. Music was often very explicitly racist, and composed by the white performers themselves, even when they maintained that songs were “authentically” Black.
But not all the elements can be dismissed as misrepresentations of Black culture. The banjo was a central instrument in the minstrel troupe. Though today the banjo is typically associated with rural White styles of music, its roots are in Africa, and the instrument came to the U.S. via the tans-Atlantic slave trade. (Check out the work of Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. She’s a black professional fiddler and banjoist who is reclaiming the Black cultural origins of the banjo. She was interviewed recently for the Dolly Parton'‘s America podcast episode “Neon Moss”, beginning at 28:00)
One melody advertised on the cover of The Celebrated Negro Melodies is “Old Dan Tucker”, written by Dan Emmett, (though it is probable that some of Emmett’s songs can be traced to the Snowden Family, a well-known Black family of musicians from Emmett’s hometown of Mount Vernon, OH.) Many of these songs live on, usually stripped of the blatantly racist verses that were part-and-parcel of blackface minstrel songs.
After the Civil War, the period of Reconstruction offered the hope for programs repairing some of the damages inflicted on slaves, though these efforts were soon limited by new Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation. One Reconstruction-era initiative was establishing colleges and universities for recently freed slaves, now known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). One such university was Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1870, the Jubilee Singers formed to raise money to help establish the University. The group exists to this day.
Fisk Jubilee Singers England Tour Poster (ca. 1885)
Here we have a poster from their tour to England circa 1885. (The Jubilee Singers were an international phenomenon by the 1880s). The visuals advertising the singers served an important purpose. Compare their physical appearance in this photograph with the illustration of the Virginia Minstrels. These performers were working very hard to counter the racist understandings of Black music purveyed in popular blackface minstrel performances. Their dress and postures communicated that Black Americans and Black songs were equally well suited to the standards of “refined culture.”
