An Introduction to America’s Music

134 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

O its old Suky blue skin, she is in lub wid me

I went the udder arter noon to take a dish ob tea;

W hat do you tink now, Suky hab for supper,

W hy chicken foot an posum heel, widout any butter.

O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skolar,

O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skolar,

O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skolar,

Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler.

But this romance has more obstacles to overcome than the unsavory supper

Suky puts on the table. One is that Zip seems too wrapped up in himself to be a

serious lover. Another is that the music of “Zip Coon,” the fi ddle tune known as

“Turkey in the Straw,” fails to evoke even a hint that love can be tender.

The happy-go-lucky Jim Crow and the boastful, self-important Zip Coon

were stereotypes on which whites could project racist fantasies about contented

slaves in the South and “uppity” free blacks in the North. At the same time, how-

ever, Zip Coon could burlesque upper-class whites, and Jim Crow’s dance could

simply occasion an outburst of high spirits that lifted performers and audience

above commonplace, everyday existence.

THE FIRST MINSTREL SHOWS

The fi rst full-length minstrel show was given in Boston in 1843 by Dan Emmet (fi d-

dle), Billy Whitlock (banjo), Dick Pelham (tambourine), and Frank Brower (bones),

billing themselves as the Virginia Minstrels. Despite the group’s name, all four

members had joined forces not in Virginia but in New York City’s Bowery, whose

entertainment district had already begun a long descent from respectability to dis-

repute with the infi ltration of tough street gangs from the neighboring Five Points

slum, the scene of intense rivalry between Irish immigrants and nativist gangs.

In the pseudoscientifi c racist thinking of the time, the Irish were members of the

Celtic race, distinct from and inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race and thus fi t only for

menial jobs scarcely different from the work assigned to slaves. It can hardly be

coincidence that many of the early blackface minstrels were of Irish descent.

Honing their act in Bowery theaters and saloons, the Virginia Minstrels

developed performing customs that were followed by many of the minstrel

companies that sprang up in the wake of their success. The performers arranged

four chairs on stage in a semicircle, with tambourine and bones at either end

and fi ddle and banjo in between, and fi lled their programs with short musi-

cal numbers. They divided an evening’s entertainment into two parts, the fi rst

including a would-be topical speech, delivered in a stage Negro dialect. It was

soon customary for a minstrel show’s fi rst part to concentrate on the Northern

urban scene, with the second shifting to the South and closing with a lively plan-

tation number. But however standardized the overall form, the fl ow of events in

any given minstrel show lay with the performers. Each skit, song, and dance was

a self-contained act. Ad-libbing and topical comments were part of the format,

giving customers and players a sense of collaboration.

Within a few months of their debut, the Virginia Minstrels toured the Brit-

ish Isles, where audiences also welcomed blackface shows. And by the mid-1840s

minstrelsy was sweeping the United States. In 1844 a troupe called the Ethiopian

the Virginia Minstrels

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