CHAPTER 6 | BLACK, WHITES, AND THE MINSTREL STAGE 133
while entertaining audiences with jokes, skits, and music, minstrels also played
on social issues. A black stage character could appear stupid one moment and
cunning the next. On one level, the black face paint enabled white stage min-
strels to amuse audiences by imitating black ways of talking, moving, dancing,
laughing, singing, and playing musical instruments. On another, white min-
strels learned that “blacking up” freed them to behave onstage in ways that polite
society found uncivilized. They could also comment critically not just on black-
white relations but on society in general: on politics, culture, and social class.
The spectacle of performers freed from social restraint could bring an unpar-
alleled delight to audience members. In 1843 H. P. Grattan, an English actor, vis-
ited Buffalo, New York, and there, as part of an audience fi lled with boatmen,
he watched a minstrel troupe perform. “So droll was the action, so admirable
the singing, so clever the instrumentation, and so genuine was the fun,” Grattan
later wrote, “that I not only laughed till my sides fairly ached, but... I never left
an entertainment with a more keen desire to witness it again.”
The freedom enjoyed by performers included behavior not to be found in
other kinds of theater. An English observer in 1846 described minstrels as “ani-
mated by a savage energ y,” their “white eyes roll[ing] in a curious frenzy.” The
frenzy was widely believed to have been inspired by black slaves themselves, who,
as another observer wrote in 1857, were apt to “let themselves go” in “dervish-like
fury... all night long, in ceaseless, violent exertions of frenetic dancing.” In
their unbuttoned manner, blackface minstrels of the 1840s and early 1850s had
much in common with rock musicians from the 1950s on.
Three elements, then—the black mask, the chance for social commentary,
and the creation of a zone of unbridled pleasure—combined to give blackface
minstrelsy its appeal. Minstrelsy’s subject matter was not so much whites’ views
of African Americans as whites’ responses to the conditions of their own lives,
delivered from behind a mask fashioned out of their notions about African
American culture.
The late 1820s and early 1830s saw the creation of two stage
characters who enjoyed a long life: Jim Crow and Zip Coon.
Around 1828 an actor named Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice made the-
atrical history when, after noticing a crippled black stable groom’s
singing and weird dancing in Cincinnati, he memorized the fi rst
and tried to copy the second. He then bought clothes like those the
stable hand wore, and fi nally, blacked up as “Jim Crow,” he began
doing an impersonation between acts of the play in which he
was appearing. Audiences loved it, and Rice soon won fame as an
“Ethiopian delineator” (the term refl ects the eighteenth-century
designation of sub-Saharan Africans as “Ethiopians”). The Jim
Crow character became a self-satisfi ed Southern plantation hand
who strutted the stage, unaware that his raggedy naïveté made
him a buffoon in others’ eyes.
The character Zip Coon was as urban and stylish as Jim Crow
was rural and rough. Like Jim Crow, Zip Coon was boastful, and
he appeared in garishly fancy clothes, including his “long tail blue”
jacket, as one song has it. The adventures outlined in the song “Zip
Coon”—sung by singing actor George Washington Dixon—include
romance:K Among the blackface
characters found onstage
before the 1840s, when the
minstrel show became a full
evening’s entertainment,
one of the most prominent
was the stylish, would-be
sophisticate Zip Coon.172028_06_132-161_r3_ko.indd 133 23/01/13 8:18 PM