A History of the African-American Spiritual

How the African-American Spiritual has maintained its integrity
in the face of major social and musical challenges

[Based on an article by Thomas Lloyd published in the August 2004 issue of the Choral Journal of the American Choral Directors Association; all rights reserved.]

4. Countering the images of black-face minstrelsy

The final abolition of slavery by the passage of the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution in 1865 initiated one of the most dramatic social transformations in history, as four million newly freed slaves began to redefine themselves after over three centuries of servitude, arbitrary severance of family ties, and prohibitions against education. Whole communities and an educational and economic system had to be created from scratch. And yet even in the northern states to which many of the newly freed slaves fled, the predominant cultural as well as purely musical images of African Americans were derived from black-face minstrelsy.

While this movement is sometimes viewed today as a quaint racist relic on the fringe of American culture, it was in fact the dominant form of entertainment for the entire last half of the nineteenth century. Offshoots continued well into the next century, in radio and television shows such as Amos 'n Andy, which remained hugely popular well into the 1960’s. What was then also known as "Ethiopian minstrelsy" involved the appropriation of black folk songs by professional white performers whose faces were blackened by cork. They successfully sought to draw laughter at the expense of the black characters they mimed, in particular the slickly urban "Zip Coon" and the laggardly plantation hand "Jim Crow." (The latter’s name was later given to the whole era of racial segregation in the South).[1] Following emancipation, black performers also began to form their own minstrel groups, re-claiming the material in their own fashion, in order to take advantage of the only avenue to the theater and concert stage available to them at the time.[2]

Many of the songs that came out of this era are still with us today (such as Polly-wolly-doodle, Buffalo Gals, Arkansas Traveler, Turkey in the Straw (which is the name of the instrumental version of Ol' Zip Coon), among many others) because their melodies, originating in black folk culture, are great tunes that easily (and pleasantly) stay in the memory. Unlike the spirituals, however, the words did not originate with the tunes, and often still reflect, in subtle or not so subtle ways, the ridicule intended by black-face performers. These songs have become so much a part of our cultural "wallpaper" at this point that the words or their original context are rarely considered.[3] Eileen Southern summarizes the contradictions of this musical genre in this way:

The practices of 'Ethiopian' minstrels in the nineteenth century established unfortunate stereotypes of black men - as shiftless, irresponsible, thieving, happy-go-lucky 'plantation darkies' – that persisted into the twentieth century on the vaudeville stage, in musical comedy, on the movie screen, radio, and television. And yet, blackface minstrelsy was a tribute to the black man's music and dance, in that the leading figures of the entertainment world spent the better part of the nineteenth century imitating his style.[4]

For more background about black-face minstrelsy, see:

 

Please note: the video below is racially offensive;
it is listed here for the purpose of documenting the nature and practice of "black-face" performance well into the 20th Century.

Al Jolson playing EP Christy in 1939 "Swanee River"

 
 

Notes:

[1]For an introduction to the subject of black-face minstrelsy, see Southern The Music, 89-96, and Bean, Hatch, McNamara ed., Inside the Minstrel Mask – Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). For a thorough discussion of the broader cultural ramifications and complexities of the minstrel period, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft – Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 2013). Lott’s thesis is that the minstrelsy movement represented a complex love/hate relationship between white society and black culture, a way in which whites dealt with their fascination with this culture and their repressed need to overcome racial segregation, not because of the injustice it brought to blacks, but because of the void it left in white culture.

[2]Southern 237.

[3]It doesn't take much to see the offence intended in some of the texts, like "Ol' Dan Tucker," who "washed his face with a fryin' pan, combed his hair with a wagon wheel," etc., but with other songs whose words on the surface seem more benign (i.e., "Turkey in the Straw"), the fact that their crude texts were applied to black folk-music by white entertainers solely for the purpose of enhancing the ridicule intended by their farcically costumed and choreographed dance performances should at least give one pause before singing them.

[4]Southern 96.