The minstrel show, the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment

Popular music both shaped and reflected American culture throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. This period saw the birth of minstrelsy, the first distinctively American form of popular culture, the rise of the modern music industry, and rapid audience expansion, not least because new technologies enabled the dissemination of music to a national audience. Some of the song and dance music styles that emerged would influence profoundly U.S. popular music throughout the 20th century.

The Minstrel Show
The minstrel show, the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment to be regarded by European audiences as distinctively American in character, featured mainly white performers who blackened their skin and carried out parodies of African-American music, dance, dress, and dialect. Today blackface minstrelsy is regarded with embarrassment or anger. Yet there is reason to believe that its common interpretation as an expression of racism oversimplifies the diverse meanings it represented. In any case, it would be difficult to understand American popular music without some knowledge of the minstrel show.

The minstrel show emerged from working-class neighborhoods where interracial interaction was common. Early blackface performers were the first expression of a distinctively American popular culture, in which working-class white youth expressed their sense of marginalization through an identification with African-American cultural forms. This does not mean that minstrelsy was not a projection of white racism, but its meanings were neither fixed nor unambiguous.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808-60), a white actor born into a poor family in New York City’s Seventh Ward, demonstrated the potential popularity of minstrelsy with the song “Jim Crow” (1829), the first international American song hit. Rice sang this song in blackface while imitating a dance step called the “cakewalk,” an Africanized version of the European quadrille.

Soon after Rice introduced “Jim Crow” to New York in 1832, there was a veritable explosion of blackface performance in venues ranging from theaters to saloons, the latter often patronized by a racially mixed audience. Black and mixed-race performers were on view in most of the local “dives” that featured minstrel performances. The musical and linguistic heritage of early minstrelsy was just as mixed as its audience and practitioners. The most likely inspiration for “Jim Crow” was not an African-American song but an Irish folk tune subsequently transformed into an English stage song.

“Daddy” Rice’s Jim Crow character spoke and sang in a dialect based on white rural characters (such as the Kentucky rifleman Davy Crockett) and partly on the variety of black and Creole dialects heard by Rice as a youngster growing up by the Seventh Ward docks.

Come, listen all you gals and
boys, I’se just from Tuckyhoe
I’m goin to sing a little song, My
name’s Jim Crow
Weel about and turn about and
do jis so
Eb’ry time I weel about I jump
Jim Crow

The Jim Crow character used this hybrid dialect – neither black nor white but something in between – to make fun of pretentious politicians and social elites, introducing a satirical subtext that Rice’s high- class targets found threatening.

From the 1840s through the 1880s blackface became the predominant genre of popular culture in the United States. As the genre was transformed into the more formally organized “minstrel show,” much of its original subversive quality was lost. The 19th-century minstrel show displayed many of the themes that will concern us throughout this survey. Minstrelsy arose during the 1830s as an expression of a predominantly white urban youth culture, which sought to express its independence by appropriating black style. As minstrelsy became a mass phenomenon in the decades just before and after the American Civil War, its form became routinized, and its portrayal of black characters more rigidly stereotyped. This basic pattern, in which a new genre of music arises within a marginalized community and then moves into the mainstream of mass popular culture, in the process losing much of its original rebellious energy, will be encountered many times in this book.
 

Minstrel shows typically featured white people wearing blackface and unflatteringly depicting blacks.
 

Dance Music and Brass Bands
American popular music has always been linked to dance

From the beginning, American popular music has been closely bound up with dance. The earliest examples of published dance music were modeled on styles popular in England. Until the early 20th century, social dancing among white Americans was dominated by offshoots of the country dance tradition and by dances such as the waltz, mazurka, schottische, and polka, performed by couples. The adoption of country dances by the urban elite was an aspect of a common romantic fascination with rural themes.

The typical setting for dancing among the upper classes was the ball, organized around pre-selected music played by an orchestra to accompany a specific sequence of dances, overseen by a dance master, who called out the movements. Ballroom dancing focused more on uniformity and restraint than improvisation or the expression of emotion. However, as the 19th century progressed, there was a shift away from formal dances toward an increased emphasis on couple dancing. By the end of the century, the waltz had become the ultimate symbol of sophistication and romance.

Throughout the 19th century there was a continual feedback between urban “high-class” and rural “low-class” dance styles. Urban professional musicians arranged folk dances for mass consumption, and some of the popular songs published by big New York City music companies were adopted into rural dance traditions. The diversity of American popular dance was reinforced by waves of immigrants from different parts of Europe. And the mass influence of African-American dance – which began in the 1830s with the cakewalk steps performed by white minstrels – intensified, becoming the dominant force in American popular dance during the first few decades of the 20th century. From the Civil War through the 1910s, brass band concerts were one of the most important musical aspects of American life. Although military bands had been around since the birth of the United States, they spread rapidly during and after the Civil War (1861-65). While a number of these regimental bands continued to flourish after the war, many decommissioned musicians formed bands in their home communities. By 1889 there were over 10,000 brass bands in the United States.

The brass-band movement drew energy from the interaction of patriotism and popular culture, and from the growing force of American nationalism. The lion’s share of a band’s repertoire consisted of patriotic marches. Brass bands are associated with national holidays, and their music holds a special significance for those who have served in the armed forces. Many bands also played arrangements of the popular sheet music hits of the day. This ability to move between patriotic music and the popular styles reinforced the brass band’s role as a community institution.

The most popular bandleader from the 1890s through World War I was John Philip Sousa (1854-1932). Sousa conducted the U.S. Marine Band and later formed a “commercial” concert band. This band made two dozen hit phonograph recordings between 1895 and 1918. Sousa toured constantly, and the appearance of his band created a sensation that could only be surpassed by a presidential “whistlestop” tour. (These were named for the campaign tours of presidents and other political candidates – made by rail, they often included the “whistlestops,” small stations the train normally would bypass unless signaled to stop.) Sousa was one of the first musicians to negotiate royalty payments with publishers, and an important advocate of copyright reform.
 

The “Elmira Cornet Band,” Thirty-third Regiment, of the New York State Volunteers, July 1861


March King” John Philip Sousa, center, leads the United States Marine Corps band.
 

The Birth of Tin Pan Alley
The music publishing business coalesces in Manhattan

By the end of the 19th century, the American music publishing business had become centered in New York City. The established publishers, who had made their fortunes in classical music and genteel parlor songs, were, from around 1885 on, challenged by smaller companies specializing in the more exciting popular songs performed in dance halls, beer gardens, and theaters.

George Gershwin’s “American folk opera” Porgy and Bess fuses jazz and blues elements into an operatic form.These new publishing firms – many of them founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe – had offices along a stretch of Manhattan’s 28th Street that became known as “Tin Pan Alley,” a term that evoked the clanging sound of many pianos simultaneously playing songs in a variety of keys and tempos. The 1890s saw the rise of the modern American music business, an industry that aimed to provide “hits” for an expanding urban mass market. For the first time, a single song could sell more than a million copies.

By the turn of the century vaudeville, a popular theatrical form descended from music hall shows and minstrelsy, had become the most important medium for popularizing Tin Pan Alley songs. Vaudeville shows consisted of a series of performances – singers, acrobats, comedians, jugglers, dancers, animal acts, and so on. Every city had at least one vaudeville theater.

Tin Pan Alley songs dominated the American music industry for almost 70 years. The romantic parlor song remained popular, as did “Irish” and waltz songs. Plantation songs, descended from the minstrel song tradition, were also popular. One of the best-known and most successful composers of plantation songs was James A. Bland (1854-1911), the first commercially successful black songwriter. Bland wrote some 700 songs and became popular in Europe. In stylistic terms, Bland’s songs are similar to those of his white contemporaries. Although Bland has been criticized by some later observers for pandering to white misconceptions about blacks and lionized by others for his supposed championing of “authentic” African-American music, the real situation is more complex. Bland, the product of a comfortable middle-class home, was determined to achieve the same level of economic success as his white contemporaries. Like many other black musicians who sought access to mass markets, he had to work through the imagery of blackness already established in mainstream popular music.
 

One of many sheet music publishing houses lining “Tin Pan Alley” — Manhattan’s West 28th Street
 

The Ragtime Craze, 1896-1918
A highly syncopated African-American influenced sound emerges by 1900

This same period saw the intensification of African-American musical influence, a trend best represented by ragtime. Ragtime emerged in the 1880s, its popularity peaking in the decade after the turn of the century. In some regards the ragtime craze was a descendant of minstrelsy, but the ragtime style also represented a more intimate engagement with African-American musical techniques and values, due to the increasing involvement of black songwriters and performers in the music industry.

Irving Berlin entertaining Women’s Army Corps members during the Second World WarThe word “ragtime” derives from the African-American term “to rag,” meaning to enliven a piece of music by shifting melodic accents onto the offbeats (a technique known as syncopation). This technique has the effect of intensifying the beat and creating rhythmic momentum. The basic patterns of ragtime music were transferred from the banjo, a stringed instrument developed by slave musicians from African prototypes. Ragtime was also influenced by Latin American rhythms such as the Cuban habanera and by marching band music. During the height of its popularity, from the late 1890s until the end of World War I, ragtime music was played by every imaginable type of ensemble: dance bands, brass bands, country string bands, symphony orchestras, banjo and mandolin ensembles, and, in the classic ragtime style, by solo pianists.

The growing market for ragtime songs at the turn of the century suggests a continuation of the white fascination with African-American music first evinced in minstrelsy. Tin Pan Alley composers simply added syncopated rhythms and ersatz black dialects to spice up bland popular tunes. The idea was to create songs novel enough to stimulate the audience’s interest but not so radical that they required a great deal of work on the listener’s part. Just as the songs performed by blackface minstrels were European in style, most popular ragtime songs were march-style songs with “irregular” rhythms added for effect.

Some young white Americans associated themselves with ragtime to rebel against the cultural conservatism of their parents and other authority figures, a pattern that became even more prominent during the jazz age of the 1920s and the rock ’n’ roll era of the 1950s. Ragtime is an interesting example of the complex crosscurrents of American musical history: rooted in the mastery of European musical forms by talented black musicians, the style circulated across boundaries of race, class, region, and generation and was put to different uses by various communities.
 

Irving Berlin entertaining Women’s Army Corps members during the Second World War