What the eye hears, p.8
What the Eye Hears, page 8
In the mix-and-match quatrains of the earliest printed variants, Crow speaks of himself as a skilled fiddler, a flatboat traveler on the Mississippi, a carpenter, a snapping turtle. He kisses the gals, knocks down Jersey niggers, and threatens white dandies with a trip to the gutter. The earliest illustrations depict a figure in a patched suit, knees bent, lolling on the heel of one disintegrating shoe and the ball of the other. One hand rests on his protruding rear; the other waves loosely. As later images of John Smith and John Diamond show, this stance would stick.
By 1832, Rice was all the rage, packing theaters up and down the eastern seaboard. His songs expanded into “extravaganzas,” and adapting English farces and ballad operas, he cobbled together plays in which sassy black tricksters outwit white bosses. Touring England, Scotland, and Ireland, Rice was a runaway success, his song even more so. Journalists described a mania, an epidemic that spread Jim Crow onto every street corner and into every parlor. Nobility attended Rice’s shows, but his core audience, as his detractors emphasized, was made up of carpenters, dustmen, and chimney sweeps—working youth. This was true in America as well, where his popularity drew vicious attacks from snobbish scribes.
What was the dance like? The lyrics grant a few clues—wheeling, jumping, an allusion to “double trouble,” that possibly African variant of “double shuffle.” “Sich a Getting Up Stairs,” another song in Rice’s repertoire, specified how its main character frolicked to a fiddle on a raft by striking toe and heel, cutting de pigeon wing, scratching gravel, and slapping de foot. These are foundational moves, or at least foundational terms: a century later, “scratching gravel” would be one name for the first step of the Shim Sham. An ad for a Rice engagement in 1833 promised “A Virginia Breakdown,” the earliest theatrical use I can find of that term.
Soon, more blackface characters joined Jim. Out of the South came the song “Zip Coon,” which told of a “larned skolar” who jumps “double trouble.” The word coon had lately referred to a white hick, much as Daniel Boone’s coonskin cap served as an emblem of rural folk. Yet as portrayed by Rice and George Washington Dixon, Zip Coon switched colors. The illustrations depict a black dandy in tight pantaloons, a tailcoat, and a top hat. Dangling a lorgnette, the character would seem to be an “Ethiopian exquisite,” “a gentleman of color,” already a figure of fun in stories and drawings that responded to flamboyantly dressed blacks on the sidewalks of New York and Philadelphia. Compared with the unmistakable racial contempt in such cartoons, however, the target of the song is less certain. Is it blacks acting above their station? Pretension in general? One in the guise of the other? The music is a lively jig. It’s catchy, and it lasted. It’s the tune of “Turkey in the Straw.”
Music like that—music for dancing—was what attracted blackface dancers such as John Diamond. He often teamed up with a fellow New Yorker, the banjo player William Whitlock. Whitlock also worked with a dancer named Richard Pelham. The two pitch-black faces on an 1842 playbill for a circus stop in Charleston might depict either pair: the banjoist on a barrel; the dancer, hat cocked and hand on hip, extending a heel. But this was another team: the Baltimorean dancer Frank Brower with Daniel Emmett, a fiddler and banjoist out of Ohio. A year later, two of these duos formed a band in lower Manhattan called the Virginia Minstrels (without Diamond, though he would sometimes join them). In addition to dancing, Pelham thumped a tambourine and Brower rattled bones. Whitlock gave a lecture in malaprop-laden “Negro” dialect and imitated a locomotive. All four men sang, swapped puns, and recited riddles. As they hoofed their jigs and breakdowns and pivoted through their “grapevine twisting,” they shouted out phrases such as “Dars musick in dem old heels” and “dat deaph to creepin insects.” A poster bragged about “knockin’ de breff out o’ bards,” inflicting violence on floorboards.
The Tyrolese Minstrels, a family of Alpine singers, were popular with middle-class audiences, so for a group of Negro-impersonating circus entertainers to name themselves the Virginia Minstrels could have been a roguish travesty or a sincere appeal to a more respectable, wealthier audience. But if the marketing that assured “refined,” “chaste” concerts wasn’t a lampoon of the language used to lure middle-class women, it wasn’t truth in advertising, either. A staple of the Virginia Minstrels’ repertoire was “De Boatmen Dance,” celebrating rough Ohio river men who danced all night till broad daylight and went home with the gals in the morning.
The idea of a minstrel band caught on quick. Imitators proliferated, and so many troupes adopted similar names that appending the word original nearly became a necessity. Minstrelsy was obscenely popular. Its strongholds were the cities of the Northeast—Boston, Philadelphia, New York—where as many as ten theaters might be devoted to minstrel shows and a minstrel troupe could sustain a run of a decade or more. But minstrelsy also spread west, jumping to the Pacific with the Gold Rush and then following settlers and railroads as they closed up the gap. Tours through the South were common, right up to the Civil War and resuming as soon as the smoke cleared. Everywhere minstrels went, they inspired stagestruck youth to black up and put on a show. John “Jim Along Josey” Smith, an immediate success in Britain, was one of many minstrels who went to Australia and never came back. The Virginia Minstrels immediately toured the British Isles. Their tambourinist never returned home. The United States finally had a cultural export that sold.
“Burnt-cork artists” they were sometimes called, in reference to their stage makeup. They dipped cork in alcohol and lit it on fire. After the cork burned to ash, they mixed it into a paste and smeared it on their faces. They painted on thick red lips and wore kinked wigs known as “wool.” The rest of the costume could be the checked shirts of the Southern plantation slave or the long-tailed blue suit of the Northern black dandy. In time, the musicians at each end would take on fixed roles as the comic rowdies Tambo and Bones, named after their instruments. These wildmen would carry on jokey banter with the Interlocutor, a dignified, well-spoken, finely dressed man who sat in the center futilely trying to keep things under control.
The dance finale was frequently labeled a festival dance, a plantation dance, or maybe a walk-around. A promenading solo in playbills of the forties, the walk-around swelled into an ensemble act during the following decade. In one illustration from 1859, the men face in different directions, waving their arms above their heads; their feet and knees twist, squiggly lines indicating oscillation; everything is bowed, everything bent. As the company clapped and patted knees and shouted encouragement, one dancer would advance downstage, walk in a circle, execute a fancy step or a funny one, and return to the group. Then another dancer would repeat the sequence, displaying his own step and style. At the end, everyone would circumnavigate the stage. “A Cornshucking” was the subtitle of the most famous walk-around of all, a song advising the listener to “hoe it down and scratch your grabble” in the land of cotton: Daniel Emmett’s “Dixie.” (Yes, that “Dixie.”)
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The Virginia Minstrels peddled not just “the oddities, peculiarities, eccentricities, and comicalities of the Sable Genus of Humanity” but, quite specifically, the activities of “the southern slaves at all their merry meetings such as the gathering in of the cotton and sugar crops, corn huskings, slave weddings, and junketings.” When they toured England, the Manchester Times reported with anthropological detail on a Corn Husking Jig and a Slave Marriage Dance, which the most expert dancer on the plantation performed for other slaves, and a Slave Match Dance, performed for whites, “who urge the negroes to their utmost skill by making small presents to the negro who can stand the most fatigue or remain upon the board for the longest time.” What the Virginia Minstrels offered, their ads claimed, was “a true copy,” “both new and original.”
Early Northern reviewers often praised minstrels for accuracy, for “mimicry superb and true to life,” and some Southern reviewers concurred. One of Rice’s employers wrote that his strongest talent consisted in his “great fidelity in imitating the broad and prominent peculiarities of other persons,” a talent most evident in “close delineations of the corn-field negro, drawn from real life.” Peculiarities: that was always the word. But also: “drawn from real life.” A newspaper editor who knew Rice well attested to his study of “the negro character in all its varieties,” recounting how Rice ate, drank, and slept with them, “went to their frolics, and made himself the best white black man in existence.” Analogous authenticating stories would be told of other burnt-cork artists. An obituary of the Virginia Minstrels’ banjoist explained how he would “steal off to some negro hut to hear the darkies sing and see them dance, taking a jug of whisky to make things merrier.”
We should be skeptical of such stories, but any attempt at scrutiny runs into obstacles. The information about early minstrelsy, especially about dance, is patchy and imprecise and encrusted with the embellishments of later scribes. Yet the more vexing problem arises from the other side, the scarcity and vagueness of the information about African-American music and dance. The problem isn’t merely that to compare minstrel representations with black practice is to compare two ill-defined subjects; the problem is that minstrelsy, through its popularity and massive cultural influence, shuffled the evidence. Arguments can turn as circular as a Ring Shout.
Look at Jim Crow. It’s quite possible that when he sings “I neeld to de buzzard / An I bou’d to de Crow,” the scavenging birds echo trickster figures out of African-turned-African-American folklore. It’s possible that Jim is cousin to the buzzard called John Crow in the Caribbean. In the mid-twentieth century, a song called “Knock Jim Crow” was still being sung with similar lyrics and acted out with patting-juba rhythms in the Georgia Sea Islands, but there’s no way to know if that practice borrowed from Rice’s ubiquitous ditty, or responded to it, rather than the other way around. The idea of Rice drawing from widespread folk practice is simply a more credible origin story than the one about him stealing from a single stablehand. It accounts better for what his contemporaries found true to life, what early audiences thrilled to recognize. Evidence also points to Rice’s borrowing from black street performers, who borrowed from him. A back-and-forth business, it seems to have been—up to the edges of the stages on which Rice found fame and fortune.
If songs were traded, how about steps? In 1841, the New Orleans Picayune reported a police raid of a Negro ball. Gleefully arch, the article mocked how Sam Jonsing and Pete Gumbo were “dressed ‘to kill,’” quoted the etiquette of their conversation in black dialect, and enlisted dance verbs to narrate how the authorities put the slaves in their place. Before that, the Sambos and Dinahs waltzed, someone did a Virginia breakdown in a corner, and then this: “In the refreshment room, an elderly ‘nig’ was strumming a sickly banjo, to which a ‘science nigga’ was dancing ‘Jim Along Josey.’” Master Diamond, the article suggests, “might have employed himself very usefully in ‘taking items.’” The Picayune had already praised Diamond, who was in town that week performing “Jim Along Josey,” for his “fidelity.” According to the New York Whip, he handed coins to blacks on the New Orleans levees in exchange for steps; this was the source of his “modern improvement,” a style of dancing “particularly his own.”
The setting of New Orleans is intriguing: the most dance-mad American city, the one most closely tied to the Caribbean, the one where the slaves’ African heritage was most openly on display (most famously in Congo Square), but also a place of much mixing, a nexus for trade in slaves, goods, and culture. What, though, should we make of the shared lingo? Does it help confirm the black roots of minstrelsy? Or is it rather an exhibit of contamination, demonstrating how minstrelsy was already determining the form in which whites represented, and even perceived, the behavior of blacks? The questions extend to much of the evidence. When the Picayune reports, in 1845, on blacks dancing “regular Ethiopian breakdowns” in Congo Square and singing “Hey Jim Along,” those phrases might have been shorthand for black song and dance—for blacks acting, you know, like they do in the minstrel show. And then again, maybe they were acting that way, having taught the minstrels, or borrowed from them, or some combination that can’t be untangled by pulling on this one thread.
Pictorial representations aren’t any more or less reliable. The illustrations of breakdowns on minstrel playbills and songsters from the 1840s on depict bowlegged figures, legs hitched up to stomp, their body angles implying an imminent crossing of feet. The postures match, quite closely, those in illustrations of slave dances published in magazines in the 1850s and ’60s (and those of blacks dancing through the end of the century). Some illustrations are so similar that their value as corroborative evidence is suspect, one representation either copying another outright or following the same set of conventions.
All of the parallels, linguistic and visual, could deceive, but my guess is that they don’t. I would bet that the double trouble of Jim Crow is kin to the double trouble of Virginia slaves dancing juba, and also to the double trouble characteristic of Florida crackers. Minstrel scholarship has long noted how the bluster of Jim and Zip samples phrases found in the tough talk of the frontiersman Davy Crockett and the boatman Mike Fink, historical figures who became mythic. When Jim Crow compared himself with a snapping turtle, he was borrowing the tag of Fink and boatmen like him—the kind who referred to their dancing frolics as Virginia breakdowns. These were men who worked the nation’s circulatory system: the Mississippi, the Ohio. These were men who got around. They had that in common with T. D. Rice and Master Diamond and the Virginia Minstrels, who plied their trade on the same rivers.
The boatmen traveled on flatboats, rafts that carried goods and passengers downriver, or on oared keelboats, which could be gruelingly forced upstream. Some of the passengers were goods; the boats carried slaves, and some of the slaves labored as boatmen. “Gumbo Chaff,” a song Rice sang, was about such a slave boatman, who celebrates his master’s death by taking a trip to New Orleans before retiring in Ohio. Boatmen took that trip over and over, the roughest class of white men in continual contact with black slaves, a floating wooden platform always underfoot. When an 1844 account of the death of Mike Fink tallied the uncivilized habits of his kind, dancing “nigger breakdowns” came in the middle of the list, no explanation required.
These were the “joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whisky-drinking, break-down dancing rapscallions” that Mark Twain, poet of the Mississippi, would eulogize. Colonel T. B. Thorpe, who carved a smaller career out of backwoods tales, listed the “rough frolics” of the keelboatmen as dancing, fiddling, and fistfights, and characterized black deckhands as favorites for “keeping time” with “the light fantastic heel-and-toe tap” while someone fiddled “a Virginia hoe-down.” In Thorpe’s stories of Fink and his tribe enjoying themselves by shooting off people’s hats or the tip of a Negro’s heel, the climax of the trip is the landing at Natchez Under-the-Hill, where boatmen got paid and “gratified their humors.” Natchez was another of the country’s main hubs for the trade in slaves (and the dancing that came with it). A “rough jig dance” called “Natchez Under the Hill” was a source for the tune of “Zip Coon,” which Daniel Emmett played as “Turkey in the Straw.”
The twang in that tune is a clue to where many of the songs and dances of early minstrelsy may have survived in their least altered form: Appalachia. In the scene from the 1833 Davy Crockett story in which the white frontiersfolk do the double shuffle, the tune that the black banjoist plays is “Jump Jim Crow.” The descendants of those dancers are Appalachian cloggers, who (as can be seen in Mike Seeger’s 1987 documentary Talking Feet) speak of their rhythmic stepping to banjos and fiddles as “buck dancing” and “cutting the pigeon wing.” They are improvisers, flat-footed and aurally focused, whites and blacks who prize individuality and describe what they’re doing as “freedom dances”—the freedom to express oneself, the freedom from work. It may be instructive to compare Appalachian clogging with the Anglo-Celtic variety of Cape Breton, where there was little slavery. “One lifts, the other sinks,” says the British-born scholar-dancer Tony Barrand, contrasting the way the center of weight bounces up, then falls back in British and Cape Breton dancers with how it drops, then recovers in American ones. In Seeger’s film, that sinking is more pronounced among African-American cloggers, whose accents tend to be syncopated even though their rhythms are even.
If it’s hard to imagine Appalachian clogging as having African roots, that’s for the same reason that people don’t think of the banjo as an African instrument. More and more scholarship connects the “frailing” or “clawhammer” banjo playing described in minstrel training manuals to African practices. But that’s not what the banjo stands for in popular culture. Since at least the 1930s, it has signified redneck, ultrawhite. The sheet music illustrations of bowlegged minstrels dancing in the 1840s look that way, too. Hillbilly. But so do contemporaneous illustrations of bowlegged blacks doing the breakdown after corn shuckings. The testimony of a circus manager that Daniel Emmett learned to play banjo from “a very ignorant person, and nigger all over except in color” pointed to an intermingled frontier culture. In his book Bluegrass Breakdown, Robert Cantwell establishes how the hillbilly persona of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry stemmed directly from minstrelsy—how it was minstrelsy with a new mask. As he points out, it’s tough to find a pioneer of country music without a childhood tale of learning from black musicians. When such country musicians play, Cantwell writes, “if you turn your face away, you can hear the Africanized manner.” You can see it, too, if you know what to look for. And you can find some of the same African-hillbilly roots in tap.
