Jim Crow

This sent the audience roaring as real buffoonery sincerely complemented the invented. This garment tradition was carried on in comedy. The Virginia Minstrels wore haphazardly comprised outfits; "oddly shaped hats, and their gaudy pants and shirts were in the traditional style of the stage plantation Negro" (Nathan, 123). This sartorial expression of the Negro highlighted parts of the body's abnormalities, as shown in the drawings. The clothes were wrinkled, dilapidated, hobo-like, and ill-fitting.

The minstrel dance was the first definitive part of the show. A song like Ò"Jump Jim Crow" has a familiar tune and uninteresting lyrics, but the dance was mesmerizing. In the example of "Jump Jim Crow," descriptions of the hop," the rhythms, and the peculiar shoulder and arm movements involved in the dance strongly suggest that it was a variation of a characteristically Negro shuffle in which the feet remain close to the ground and upper-body movements predominate" (Toll, 43). This is especially evident in the example of "Master Juba," one of very few black minstrels. His specialty was the jig, a popular Irish dance, but his specific articulations of style that made it his own did not go unnoticed. In the 1850's, while working on a Mississippi riverboat, a white minstrel named Dave Reed picked up a strange movement of the arm and hands (Toll, 44). Numerous bills and announcements depict the dancing of the minstrel show. The dancers are grotesque, troll-like in gait, wide in the hips, jelly-armed, and wobbly in the knees. They twist, contort, and shake - indeed minstrel shows often depicted the strange dances of the religious sect of Shakers, too. The frenzied manner of dance was some sort of imitation of what many believed to be an expression of religious fervor or ecstasy, which makes the obvious parallel to the Shakers. Although this was a special interest of Northerners who knew little of slave culture, the idea of the Negro dance was by no means new or simply a matter of this period only. Eric Lott expounds on the continued white obsession with the black body, dance, and sexual presence in American culture. And, even in the Lewis & Clark Journals are there documented accounts of Clark having his servant York dance for their entertainment in the evening.

The dancing was often interrupted by tap dancing or heel solos. This is evident in the song "Who Dat Knocking at the Door?" This tapping or clogging could also double the rhythms of a song, creating the so-stereotyped African polyrhythm. The lifting and waving of an excessively large or ridiculously messy hat seemed to be another way of brandishing the black man as pretending to be something he is not, of an upper class. The "double shuffle" was an important but not uniquely "negro" step. A sort of "repeated brush with the foot" (Nathan, 84) it "occurred in dances of Negroes and white in the South, and in those of the frontiersmen as well" (Nathan, 84). The "pigeon wing" was another important move involving the clicking of one's feet or heels together mid-jump. But this too was a dance step familiar to early 19th century ballroom dancers (Nathan, 85-86). The "chicken flutter" was perhaps synonymous with the "pigeon wing", or a name for the different moves often shown in drawings. Men with pelvis back, torso out, and bent arms certainly look like chickens. Other moves and dances, reels, breakdowns, hornpipes, and jubas all seem to be composites of something "other" and something familiar.

That said, there is also the especially important act of "blacking up." The burnt cork masks highlighted the Negro abnormalities with negative space. The mask leaving a wide gaping mouth and bulging eyes, paralleling contemporary stereotypes as well as perhaps setting precedent for the present-day clown make-up. This was perhaps an imitation of what Fanny Kemble remembered as the most fascinating aspect of the slave's sultriness: "what 'these people did with their bodies, and, above all, with their faces, the whites of their eyes, and the whites of their teeth, and certain outlines which 'they bring into prominence and most ludicrous display'" (Nathan, 81). What Lott calls "racial intercourse" is exemplified by this quote from Ben Cotton: "I found myself dreaming of minstrels; I would awake with an imaginary tambourine in my hand, and rub my face with my hands to see if I was blacked upÉThe dream of my life was to see or speak to a performer" (Lott, 54). The "woolly" hair became a definitive mark of the Negro in song and costume. A stump speech describes,

In order to fully 'splain my seff on dis 'portant siance, I went to de slawghter house, up in Christy street, and got dis skull. It was emposable for me to get de hed ob de human body at the Horsepital, so I hab to use dis sheep's head, which no doubt will answer de same purpos, 'kase it hab got de wool on.

But more importantly, the minstrel performers described the difference between themselves and genuine Negros. They could change from black to white whenever they wished but Darkey Sam can't wash off his skin,

ly! I was just as black as ever!
Den dey got a lot of hay,
And dey rubbed and scrubbed away:
Oh! dey kept at it all dat night;
But den dey found, next day,
Dat de job it wouldn't pay,
'Kase dey neber could wash de nigger white.

The deportment of the performers can in part be rooted in the anti-elitist strain of the minstrels. But, for the most part, the acting out of the blackfacers was an intentional imitation of the "Negro" character. Although elegant they advertised, elegant they were not. When forced to sit down, they stretched out their legs, spread them apart, and bend the feet up awkwardly. The fingers, like the legs, were spread apart, often one hand beckoning or waving or pointing. Like jittery children, they were unable to sit still, wobbling and bopping back and forth. The endmen, as the charactertistically rowdy members of the act were also the most unruly in composure.

Banjoist

This contorted composure of course affected the styles of playing instruments. Often nearly falling out of chairs by playing so violently, the performers also had to sustain harmonious sound. Thus the musical abilities of the performers had to be nearly equal to a professional level. As is the case with most musical genres, the minstrel show began to show signs of a formulaic musical ensemble. Probably following the lead of the Virginia Minstrels, the ensemble would have to include banjo, tambourine, fiddle, castanet bones, and sometimes a Jew Harp or mouth harp. The fiddle, of course, is a violin played with the instrument held in front of the body rather than to the side and is bowed rapidly, violently, and without much alarm if a classically unpleasant squawk or squeal should come out. The banjo playing technique of the 19th century has gone under ferocious study in this century. The four strings (the fifth assumed to have been added soon after) on the long thin neck were struck by the player's nails (Nathan, 125-126). Many believe the pace of plucking to have been relatively slow compared to the rapid-fire clawhammer style born in 1940's bluegrass. The tambourine had fewer rattles than we know today and was punched on the hymen-like (Lott), stretched skin. The bones, often the rib bones of some animal, were about ten inches or more (Nathan, 126) and were hit together like castanets between the fingers when the wrist is shaken loose. Again, for authenticity's sake, the instruments were made by hand, and just as many modern-day recorded artists of 19th century music insist upon. The acoustic nature of the instruments allowed for a broad range of dynamics, pianissimo to fortissimo. Only the banjoist played the melody, with infrequent chords made by plucking an open string here or there, so the music was likely to be a mixture of homophony and polyphony. The bones followed the meter, perhaps infrequently falling on unaccented beats. There is no reason to think that minstrel music was in any way similar to the way we think of blues: polyrhythms, token flatted notes creating blues scales, or anything of the sort. The sole of the foot tapped out downbeats, unlike the dancing where the heel did all the work. (Nathan, 124-134).

On the other hand, many minstrel songs were simply lyrics sung to the tune of a familiar traditional song, as was the case of many songs in Europe and America for the last two or three centuries. Many tunes were seemingly disappropriately used for the new lyrics, like the the 18th century English "God Save the King" became "My Country 'Tis Of Thee". And so was the case with minstrel songs. And just as Yankee Doodle was a British tune, making fun of Americans became a patriotic American tune when they adopted its ideas as part of the national identity, so did Southern blacks adopt many minstrel songs. "Jump Jim Crow", for example, was based on a famous English tune. But, for authenticity's sake, the false origin story was released:

On a clear, bright morning...in which Mr. Rice had but little to do...[and nearby] a very black, clumsy negro used to clean and rub down horses...[He] was attracted by the clearness and melody of this negro's voice, and he caught the words, the subject of his song; it was the negro version of "Jump. Jim Crow" (Lott, 59).

Some of the tunes probably were stolen from the anonymous slaves that were studied. Just as trained musicians raced home from a theatre show to write out the score of a song performed only to profit from the publishing of the sheet music, so would these minstrels simply take a tune and reap the benefits. This of course is only one step in the legacy of white profiting financially on the black man. Like "Cuff's stripping, [this legacy employs] a theft that silences and embarrasses him onstage but which nevertheless entails both his bodily presence in the show and the titillating threat that he may return to demand his stolen capital, is a neat allegory for the most prominent commercial collision of black and white cultures in the nineteenth century. Cultural expropriation is the minstrel showÕs central fact" (Lott, 19).

Vocal numbers were minstrel songs, songs popular on minstrel stages, and ballads. Instrumental music was used to accompany a dance, like a reel or jig. It was the vocal music that made another important aspect of "blacking up" - the dialect. The poet Bayard Taylor explains:

The Ethiopian melodies well deserve to be called, as they are in fact, the national airs of America. Their quaint, mock-sentimental cadences, so well suited to the broad absurdity of the words - their reckless gaiety and irreverent familiarity with serious subjects - and their spirit of antagonism and perseverance - are true expressions of the more popular sides of the national character. They follow the American race in all its emigrations, colonizations, and conquests, as certainly of the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day (Lott, 100).

The "Negro dialect" became fairly formulaic, too. All "th" sounds were substituted with "d"sounds. White men became"massas" and black men were "darkies" and "niggas". The word "love" became "lub" as the "b" replaced the "f" and "v." These changes in sound and word reflect the stereotype of the Child-like negro who does not understand complicated semantics, views everything in a master-slave relationship, and is as incapable of grasping expressions as a foreigner, thus the malapropisms.