Blue Notes 165Rehin, George F. “Th e Darker Image: American Negro Minstrelsy
through the Historian’s Lens.” Journal of American Studies 9,
no. 3 (1981):365–73.
Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: Th e Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Cen-
tury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.Blue Notes
Blues notes are tones in African American music per-
formed at a diff erent pitch from notes on the major scale
for expressive purposes. Th e most commonly lowered scale
degrees include the third, seventh, and fi ft h (by order of fre-
quency), although any note could be lowered to produce
a “bluesy” feeling in specifi c contexts. Th e pitches usually
do not remain stable and frequently rise and fall, making
notation within Western musical conventions diffi cult. Th e
notes will usually be lowered by a quarter tone to a semi-
tone. Blue notes have been observed in nearly all forms of
African American music, including the blues, jazz, rock,
gospel, work songs, spirituals, R&B, soul, and funk.
Many cite origins in sub-Saharan African music,
brought over by slaves to North America, but recent stud-
ies cannot point to a single defi nitive source. Europeans
imported slaves from many diff erent regions and of Africa,
all with very diff erent musical traditions, making musico-
logical detective work diffi cult. Further complicating re-
search is the presence of lowered quarter and semitones
in much folk music around the world, including that of
Muslim and European folk music. However, it is only over
a European harmonic system that the infl ected notes lead
to a blues tonality or feeling. Th us, all lowered thirds and
sevenths are not necessarily blue notes.
Some musical theorists argue that inserting “blue
notes” into a Western major/minor musical framework
oversimplifi es the harmonies inherit in African American
music. Instead, they argue, genres such as jazz and blues
should be discussed with a unique conception of harmony
divorced from Western musical theory. Regardless of their
origin, blue notes provide an anchoring concept in African
American music that appropriately takes infl uences from
European and African sources.
See also: Africanisms; Blues MusicPeter Carr Jonesdepicting black characters as successful members of the
upper-middle-class, the writer is pressured by his superiors
to generate a script about black characters that will have
broad appeal. In frustration, the writer develops a pilot for
what he describes as a “new millennium minstrel show,” his
expectation being that the courageously racist script will as-
sure his dismissal and free him from his contract with the
network. But to his surprise, not only is the pilot accepted
by the network, but the show goes into production, ulti-
mately becoming the most popular program on television.
In the fi lm, Lee explores many complex, even contradictory
themes: the power of modern media, the considerable cur-
rency stereotypes of blacks still hold in American society,
the ways that blacks are constrained by these stereotypes,
and the ways that blacks themselves are complicit in per-
petuating them. A parallel theme implicit in the fi lm is
the main character’s own pantomime—a black man who
strictly “performs” white behavior, speech, and manner-
isms; he willingly sacrifi ces his own identity to assure his
success in white society. In some ways the fi lm can be read
as a modern morality play in which Lee off ers an important
lesson about the modes and machinery of blackface that are
still in operation in American culture. Th ese stereotypes, he
seems to argue, are not mere paranoid imagining of African
Americans; the fantasies the minstrel tradition has etched
upon our social consciousness are still present and continue
to infl uence our attitudes about race and identity.
See also: Jim Crow; Lee, Spike; Th e Birth of a Nation; White
Supremacy
Stephanie DunsonBibliography
Bean, Annemarie, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds. In-
side the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Black-
face Minstrelsy. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and
Th eir World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1997.
Lhamon, W. T., Jr. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from
Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
Lott, Eric. Love and Th eft : Blackface Minstrelsy and the American
Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Mahar, William J. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface
Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Nathan, Hans. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.