160 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Presentwho followed in his wake) was generally bound by the same
standards of behavior that the audience was, but the pretense
of performing black identity licensed him to fl ap his arms
wildly and hoot and jump. Th us blackface became a screen on
which white audiences could project their suppressed urges
and repressed behavior. Unchallenged by the viable presence
of black performers, minstrel performance resulted in repre-
sentations of black culture that became increasingly distorted
and increasingly disparaging of black people.
Th e transition of minstrelsy from an innocuous folk
form to a transgressive cultural phenomenon was signaled
by performances that became increasingly rowdy and rau-
cous. Blackface showmen knew how to play to the crowd,
dancing wildly (oft en suggestively) to the stomping synco-
pation of songs full of double entendres. Th e songs were
sometime based on tunes from actual black folk traditions,
but they were more regularly melodies created by the per-
formers themselves and presented as authentic. With the
accompaniment of the fi ddle or the banjo (a new instru-
ment derived from African musical forms), the blackface
performers off ered a boisterous mode of entertainment
that seemed, to an oft en-uninformed audience, to be ut-
terly new and exotically reckless. Performances were oft en
so boisterous that overenthusiastic audience members rou-
tinely rushed onto the stage in spontaneous participation
with the minstrel performer.
Although women had in the past been among the
audiences who enjoyed earlier between-act varieties of
blackface performance, the enthusiasm of crowd response
quickly established this new mode as an entertainment
that was too rough for proper ladies. As a result, the Jim
Crow phenomenon resituated the medium as one that ini-
tially catered to an all-male crowd. Liberated from codes
of propriety generally upheld in mixed company, male per-
formers and audiences could indulge the full freedom and
fl amboyance the blackened guise aff orded. Using the black
cork as a screen of sorts, white male performers could off er
their white male audiences uncensored projections of their
own repressed physicality cast upon imaginary black male
identity.
Th e eff ect was not lost on opportunistic printers, who
cranked out the lyrics of versions and improvisations of the
most popular melodies almost as quickly as performers
gave them voice. Indeed, the sudden rise in the popular-
ity of minstrelsy was in part due to print traffi c of min-
strel music in the form of broadsides (cheaply produced,from the old black man (and according to some accounts,
even borrowing the old man’s clothes to wear as the eve-
ning’s costume), Rice rushed to the theater to “blacken up.”
Th at evening, the song “Jim Crow” and the dance routine
that Rice performed sparked a sensation that would quickly
propel the actor from obscurity to stardom.
Rice brought to the performance a level of physicality
that audiences responded to with fascination and delight;
his popularity led to tours of major venues in both America
and Britain. As James Kennard Jr. reported in 1845 “From
the nobility in gentry, down to the lowest chimney-sweep
in Great Britain, from the member of Congress, down to
the young apprentice or school-boy in America, it was all:
‘Turn about and wheel about and do just so / And every
time I turn about I jump Jim Crow’ ” (James Kennard Jr.
quoted in Lott, Love and Th eft , 56). Although blackface
performance in America before the Jim Crow phenome-
non was generally off ered as a between-act diversion, Rice’s
popularity established the material as a central entertain-
ment worthy of a full evening’s venue.
What seemed to capture the audience’s fascination was
the dance. Th ere was something about the odd and exag-
gerated step—something about Rice’s apt execution of the
movements—that thrilled the crowd as the routine of no
other blackface performer ever had. Rather than simply of-
fering music and dance aligned with British folk forms, as
had been the standard, Rice off ered a routine based on an
actual slave song and imitative of black dance. Th at he cap-
tured the kind of hitch and swagger the audience perceived
as an embodiment of black-seeming corporality marked
the routine not just as a masquerade but also as means of
transgression. Th e song and dance were nothing new, as ev-
idenced by the black performer Rice studied on the street.
What was new was that Rice, a white man, was performing
the material with startling accuracy. In eff ect, he made the
dance visible in ways that it could not be when performed
by blacks in the street; he could bring the curious and ex-
otic dance to a white audience without bringing them into
direct proximity with a “troubling” black body.
Th is new mode of blackface performance marked a
seismic shift in the attitudes that showmen and audiences
brought to minstrelsy. In an era when Americans were ex-
pected to observe a dizzying number of rules of comport-
ment and etiquette, the fl amboyance of this new variety
of blackface performance off ered much-needed release to
white audiences. Rice (and the bevy of white performers