244 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
with the winners receiving a cake or some other prize. Long parodied in min-
strel shows, the cakewalk was now being performed to ragtime. Just as the cake-
walk is the high-spirited apotheosis of marching, ragtime infuses the rhythmic
verve of march music with electrifying syncopation.
The characteristic cakewalk rhythm—a short-long-short pattern—enlivens
“May Irwin’s Bully Song,” which the white performer May Irwin introduced in a
Broadway comedy, The Widow Jones, in 1895. Two different sheet music cover images
of Charles E. Trevathan’s song depict the title bully as an overdressed dandy, a later
incarnation of minstrelsy’s Zip Coon, in his “long tail blue” coat, with one impor-
tant distinction: where Zip Coon was portrayed holding a pair of pince-nez spec-
tacles, the bully holds a straight razor, the stereotypical coon’s street weapon of
choice. This and other early Negro dialect songs consistently link cakewalk and
other ragtime rhythms with demeaning portrayals of African Americans.
As Marks noted, accommodation to the racist conventions of the coon
song was for some black entertainers a necessary compromise for professional
advancement. One of the leading black showmen of the time was Ernest Hogan,
whose most famous song, “All Coons Look Alike to Me” (1896), is both demean-
ing to its black characters and unquenchable in musical liveliness. The subject is
courtship. In the verse, the male persona tells ruefully how Lucy Janey Stubbles
has dumped him for a “coon barber from Virginia.” But her dismissal in the cho-
rus mocks the very idea of love, except perhaps as a ploy to corral a partner for
display in public and sex in private.
The song’s cover shows a slim, pert Ms. Stubbles appraising several black men
who, apart from their grotesquely distended lips, look entirely different from
one another. The picture makes it clear that she is not really saying she can’t
tell her suitors apart. Rather, the difference that really matters—a willingness
to spend money according to her wishes—cannot be seen by the naked eye. In
an era when songs often idealized romance, an outlook like this, no matter how
thickly layered with irony, took sheet music buyers into a realm of male-female
relations beyond Tin Pan Alley limits.
The chorus made this song famous, for Hogan’s title line, detached from
the song, could be turned into a racial slur, dismissing a whole people in one jeering
slogan. At the same time, the tune was strong and memorable enough for instru-
mental performance. In January 1900, New York’s Tammany Hall played host to
piano players from across the country, gathered for the Ragtime Championship of
the World Competition. The three who reached the fi nals were required to demon-
strate their skill by “ragging” “All Coons Look Alike to Me”—playing it with additional,
possibly improvised, ragtime syncopations—for two minutes in front of the judges.
Hogan’s music makes an especially strong impact in an alternative version of
the chorus printed as a “choice chorus” in the sheet music. Here the accompani-
ment, full of rhythmic vitality, approaches the style that the following year would
appear in the fi rst published instrumental rags. With all the painful confl icts it
represents, the song is an example of how, despite rampant racial prejudice and
political oppression, African American culture continued to invent music that
was not only complex but could even be joyful.
In the following decade, ragtime syncopations began to infuse songs whose
characters bear no ethnic markers and thus are conventionally construed as
white. In “Wait ’till the Sun Shines, Nellie” (1905), Nellie, the girlfriend of Joe, is
worried because she’s bought a new gown to wear to a picnic, which is threat-
ened by rain. Joe reassures her with the song’s title line. Composer Harry Von“May Irwin’s
Bully Song”“All Coons Look
Alike to Me”“Wait ’till the Sun
Shines, Nellie”172028_10_231-253_r2_mr.indd 244 23/01/13 10:26 AM