In 1832, a young man named Thomas Dartmouth Rice shuffles across the stage of the Bowery Theatre, a rather low-class establishment that caters to the young rowdies from the surrounding slums and tenements of lower Manhattan. At his appearance, the crowd of boys and young men (the only females in the house are some whores trolling the balcony) bursts into thunderous applause, shouts, laughter and foot-stomping. T. D. Rice is a local lad, born and raised among them, who escaped the slum to seek fame and fortune in showbiz. While touring “out west” in places like Cincinnati and Louisville—frontier towns in those days—he has developed a new act. For the last several months he's been touring it to great applause back from the frontier and up the East Coast. Tonight is his triumphal homecoming, debuting this routine for his homeboys.

Rice claims to have been inspired by watching an old Black slave mucking out some stables in Louisville. Though his back was bent and he was lame, this old man, as every good old darky was expected to, went about his sweeping and hay-raking with a light heart, singing an oddly catchy little ditty and dancing an eccentric little dance. Rice says he so enjoyed the old man's unselfconscious song-and-dance routine that he just had to adapt it for the stage. The old man's name, he says, was Jim Crow.

So now here's T. D. Rice, a ghetto White boy from New York, shuffling across the Bowery stage in the character of a Southern Negro. His costume is threadbare, like a slave's humble rags. His face is grotesquely shiny with a tar-black make-up that's a paste of burnt cork ashes mixed with a little water. Contrasting red lips are painted clownishly wide. There's nothing remotely “Negroid” about this “Negro” masquerade—Rice's features and his mussed-up hair are distinctly Caucasian—but that's part of the joke, the wink to his delighted audience. He's hardly the first performer they've ever seen in blackface. In fact, many of them have worn an amateur version of it themselves. They're all in on the joke.

His back crooked, his knees comically splayed, one hand on hip, the other saluting the roaring crowd, Rice goes into his song. It's an utterly simple little ditty, like something a country fiddler might idly scratch out. In fact, it's almost idiotic in its simplicity; yet, like any good pop tune, there's a quirkiness to its melody, a curious lurch in its rhythm, that makes it stick in your mind, whether you want it there or not. And there's something about its rustic lack of ornament or pretension that appeals directly to the rough street gangs in the audience. At a time when popular songs are mostly treacly sentimental ballads or fussily ornate imitations of highbrow concert music, this artless, silly song is like a blast of fresh air in a stuffy parlor. It's got a pulse and a sense of humor. It's new and exciting.

By way of structure it's just an endless repetition of two-line verses and a two-line chorus, verse-chorus-verse, over and over. Rice sings it in a broad, theatrical “Negro” drawl:



As he sings, Rice does his dance. An old man's shuffle for the verses, something like what would later be called the soft shoe; then, illustrating each chorus, he does a slow heel-and-toe spin, a kind of voguing with one hand on bent hip and the other in the air. Finally, at the words “jump Jim Crow,” he winds up with a little crow-like hop.

It ain't grand ballet, but the boys in the crowd eat it up. As Rice does his last little hop, bringing the song to an end, they leap to their feet, clapping, stomping, whistling. Rice bows and bows, grinning and grinning, his teeth flashing inside those red lips. A shower of pennies rains down on the stage—the ultimate sign of approval from this crowd. Clapping and stomping in unison now until it feels like they could shake the building down, they demand an encore. And Rice, grinning, grinning, obliges.



A star is born. A new figure, Jim Crow, is launched into American popular mythology. His song, “Jump Jim Crow,” rockets to the top of the pops throughout the English-speaking world. It is soon heard everywhere, as maddeningly ubiquitous as a Muzak Beatles tune. Shopgirls hum it in Boston; slaves sing it in fields of Virginia tobacco; noblemen on their country estates in England set their scullery maids into fits of giggles imitating the funny little shuffle and hop. According to one account, the U.S. ambassador to Ecuador, on arriving in the city of Merida, is greeted by a brass band playing the song, thinking it's our national anthem. One traveler claims to hear Hindu street performers singing it in Delhi.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was not the first blackface minstrel, and he was very far from the last. But he was the genre's first international superstar--its Elvis, if you will. And “Jump Jim Crow,” as long as we're stretching a metaphor, was its “Hound Dog.”

For the next half-century, blackface minstrelsy would be the dominant form of popular music in America. The huge minstrel-show spectacles that roamed throughout the cities, towns and provinces after the Civil War were the first truly American form of mass entertainment. Charles Dickens was a fan, as were Mark Twain and Abe Lincoln. Minstrel music was played and enjoyed by both Whites and Blacks. It was also despised by both Whites and Blacks. It was enormous in England, where in fact it remained popular long after it petered out in the States.

What was it about blackface minstrelsy that made it so extraordinarily popular?

Centuries before the first American minstrel put on “the burnt cork mask,” blackface was a familiar theatrical device in Europe. The most famous blackface performance in the legitimate theater is Shakespeare's Othello, first produced in 1604 and almost always performed by a White actor in blackface until nearly the end of the 20th Century. Verdi's operatic version will no doubt continue to be sung by blackfaced Whites until opera develops enough strong Black tenors to take over the role. As theater historian Robert Hornback explains, Shakespeare did not invent theatrical blackface, but was consciously using a convention with a very long tradition and some very specific implications for his audience. From the folk rituals of pagan Europe through Medieval religious pageants to the theater of Shakespeare's day, a black face and black skin were used to denote both evil and folly. The symbolism was basic: white/light/day equaled good, dark/black/night equaled evil. Europeans simply carried the symbolism over to “light” and “dark” skin. A blackened, sooty or begrimed face was the sign of the scapegoat in pagan rituals. From the early Middle Ages, blackface, black masks, black gloves and leggings, frizzy-haired wigs and other devices made up the costumes of Satan, his fallen angels and the souls of the damned. Dark skin was also associated with the biblical “mark of Cain” (an association of which American minstrel men were well aware). Feast of Fools festivities were often led by blackfaced or black-masked figures, the Lords of Misrule. The evil trickster Harlequin was routinely played in a black mask in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Morris Dance in rural England was led by a blackmasked fool, known variously as King Coffee, Old Sooty-Face or Dirty Bet. As late as 2005, every winter in the fishing village of Padstow, in Cornwall, England, townsfolk were still blackening their faces and parading through the streets in festivities clearly descended from the Feast of Fools. Unfortunately, they called the event “Darkie Day,” leading to charges of racism and attempts to outlaw the centuries-old practice.

The blackfaced Moor was a figure found in dozens of London plays from at least 20 years before Othello and for decades afterward. In court masques and other costume affairs of the period, blacking up as Moors was quite popular; Queen Anne and a dozen of her ladies in waiting blackened their faces and arms, and apparently wore frizzy-haired wigs, at a masque the year after Othello premiered, causing one noble gentleman in attendance to shudder and remark, “[Y]ou cannot imagine a more ugly Sight.”

So in his character of Othello, Shakespeare was both drawing on a rich tradition of symbols and allegory, and toying with his audience's expectations that a blackface figure would represent evil (which he assigns to the real villain of the play, the White Iago), as well as folly and ritual scapegoating (both of which Othello plays to the hilt).

The English colonists brought all those blackface traditions with them to America. Blackface characters were appearing on the stages of America's earliest legitimate theaters well before the first blackface minstrel strutted his stuff. In fact, historian Dale Cockrell offers the astounding estimate that between 1751 and the appearance of the first full-fledged minstrel show troupes in 1843, some 20,000 blackface performances were given in American theaters. Topping his list is Othello itself, first performed in America in 1751 and by far the most popular “blackface” play in early America. Why? Cockrell believes that it played directly to one of the greatest fears of the White elite who founded the nation: race-mixing, which the Founding Fathers and city fathers were convinced would dilute the American stock. John Quincy Adams read Othello as a morality tale about the dangers of miscegenation, and saw in Desdemona's destruction a lesson to be learned by all White women who might be tempted to mate with Black men.

Blackface folk rituals also crossed the Atlantic with the settlers. When young men went wilding, which they did a lot, it could involve all sorts of outlandish costumes, disguises, cross-dressing and “ethnic drag.” Some festivities were seasonal, like the pre-Lent Carnival, which spread throughout the Americas. The most famous is Mardi Gras in New Orleans, which included Whites in blackface and Blacks in whiteface. Mumming plays, which went door to door demanding food and drink, survive today as Philadelphia's Mummers Parade, which allowed blackface among its outrageous costumes into the 1960s. Around New Year's, mobs of young men would often roam the streets in “callithumpian” bands, making a horrendous din banging on pots and pans and blatting horns. Their faces were often blackened with soot, and their costumes could be anything from women's clothing to their own clothes worn inside-out.

Mobs of disguised young males took to the streets at non-seasonal times to express social or political discontent. The “Indians” of the Boston Tea Party are only the most famous instance. In the practice of “charivari,” they'd descend in the middle of the night on the house of someone in the community whom they accused of some transgression--adultery, philandering, wife-beating, or, in Cajun country, when an older man married a much younger bride. Their raucous behavior was intended to shame the person in front of his/her neighbors. Charivari could often boil over into mob violence. Tarring and feathering, making someone “ride the rail,” the lynch mob and even the costumed vigilantism of the Ku Klux Klan can all be seen as extreme versions of charivari. Even stranger are the race riots that periodically broke out in the tenements and slums of lower Manhattan, when mobs of poor and discontent White youths ran wild in the streets. Their faces often blackened, they not only ransacked establishments symbolic of upper-class Whites, like the Park Theatre, but also targeted the homes, businesses and persons of their Black neighbors, producing the bizarre image of blackface-on-Black violence. Some of T. D. Rice's audience at the Bowery in 1832 had undoubtedly blackened their own faces and participated in this kind of street violence.

There was a third and very important source for minstrelsy: the circus. While not the lavish affairs we think of today, some early, rougher form of traveling circuses were popular in America from Revolutionary times--George Washington was a fan. Blackface clowns were traveling with them from at least the 1810s and maybe before; certainly they were a staple by the 1820s. The wide red or white mouth painted on by today's clowns is a remnant of the blackface mask. Many of the first stars of the minstrel stage apparently toured as/with blackface circus clowns in their early years, doing brief song and dance routines between the other acts. In many respects minstrelsy was born when these performers moved their acts from the tent to the stage of American variety theaters.

But none of this—blackface in theaters, blackface on the streets, blackface clowning—would have come together as minstrelsy without the crucial elements of music and dance. Eileen Southern tells us in The Music of Black Americans that Blacks and Whites admired and picked up each other's music and dances from the earliest colonial days. Though they'd come from numerous lands—they were Wolof, Yoruban, Igbo, Ashanti, Ewe, Fons—the West Africans brought to America a shared culture suffused with music and dance as ritual, celebration and recreation. In the colonial British settlers, and in the Irish and Scots workers, they met people for whom music and dance were equally important—both the sacred songs and hymns they sang in church, and the secular playing and dancing that was their chief form of entertainment for decades. No tavern was complete without music, sometimes a bit bawdy by the day's standards, and dances were frequently organized in any hall or barn large enough to hold them. Christmas, New Year's and Easter were celebrated with days of music and dance. Music was important in colonial homes as well, where someone in every family could play the violin/fiddle, the flute or fife, maybe the harpsichord or piano. The favorite old ballads colonists brought over with them—“Lord Randall,” “Barbara Allen”—were joined by new, indigenous hits, “Yankee Doodle” among the earliest.

The Africans instantly proved themselves willing and adept students of the Europeans' music and instruments. There are innumerable records from the early 1700s onward of slaves who were accomplished not just in singing, drumming and playing the violin/fiddle, which we might expect, but also on the French horn, the trumpet, the flute and other more arcane instruments. Black fiddlers were soon ubiquitous and their playing highly praised. American troops in the Revolutionary War often marched to the music of black fifers, drummers and trumpeters. The brass bands marching at the head of parades and in park bandshells throughout the 1800s frequently included Black musicians, and some of the very finest were all-Black bands.

The exchange went both ways. Whites loved learning the banjo, which the Blacks had brought with them from Africa. Blacks loved the piano, and learned to play it with promethean genius. When, after the Civil War, mass-produced guitars could be cheaply bought from any Sears catalogue, everybody learned to play them. Blacks loved to dance to Celtic jigs and reels, Whites learned to imitate Black field hollers, and both sides shared an affinity for plaintive airs and ballads. There was instant affinity between the sung poetics of the Gaelic bard and the African griot. Other influences came along with other waves of immigrants—German polka rhythms, Latin rhythms, soulful rabbinical voices—or were simply enjoyed and appropriated, like the Viennese waltz and the Italian aria. A White man, imitating Blacks, taught White audiences how to “Jump Jim Crow.” Blacks, imitating Whites, developed the Cakewalk, then taught it back to them.

And on and on. T. D. Rice's story of having learned his routine from an actual Jim Crow strikes one as just too pat to be entirely true. But it is quite possible that he heard slaves' music and observed their dancing while “out west.” Although most minstrels, like Rice, were Northerners, it seems that many of them did travel west and south with circuses and theater troupes, and based at least some of their songs and routines on their observations. Still, it was very rare for them to have had any long or intimate association with the “plantation life” they claimed to be representing; some of the most popular writers of “plantation” songs, including Stephen Foster, never set foot near one. As a general rule, it seems that minstrels' presentations were one part “authentic” to three parts comic caricature and sentimental fantasy.

But even that makes it sound less muddled than it actually was. Some minstrel songs started as Negro folk songs, were adapted by White minstrels, became widely popular, and were re-adopted by Blacks. Others, like Stephen Foster's, were the work of White composers trying to evoke a plantation life with which they were wholly unfamiliar, but nevertheless became as popular in the slave shacks of Southern Blacks as they were in the parlors of Northern Whites. There were also Black performers and composers involved in minstrelsy from early on, and after the Civil War Black minstrel troupes eventually came to dominate the form. While they conformed to what had become the minstrel show's set conventions by then, they were also intent on making the images and music more authentic to Southern Black culture. Certainly by that point the question of whether minstrelsy was White or Black music was moot. It was a mix, a mutt—that is, it was American music.

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