There’s rarely a moment when John Smith aka Lil’ Jon flashes across the television screen that the “coon” meter lodged deep within my consciousness begins to vibrate. It’s not that Smith’s antics offend me—I’ve long argued that there’s often an untapped complexity attached to even the most lurid of stereotypical racial images, particularly those created by blacks themselves. Indeed Smith is part of a tradition that has produced Stepin’ Fetchit (Lincoln Perry), Butterfly McQueen, Mantan Moreland, or any shuckin’ and jivin’ plantation “darky” that understood that their ability to sing and dance (or break tackles or finish line tapes) went a long way towards self-preservation. If such antics spared you the rod two centuries ago, it can surely earn you seven-figure salaries in this era of global digitized blackness.
Perhaps the truest genius of this tradition—call it blackface minstrelsy, the coon-show, samboisms—was Bert Williams. Almost a full century before hip-hop became sonic blackface, Williams donned the burnt cork and with partner George Walker became the most popular black performers in the United States. The recent release of a collection of recordings that Williams and Walker recorded from 1901-1909, allows us to again revisit the travails of the sad minstrel.
Williams was born in 1874 in the British West Indies of relative privilege. His family later moved to Florida, ultimately settling in Riverside, California, very far removed from the “plantation tales” that Walker and Williams would ultimately perform on Broadway. A natural mimic, Williams began to look for work in the traveling medicine shows (exhibitions where “quacks” sold ointments and the like) and it is there that he met Walker. As Walker wrote in 1906, “My experience with the quack doctors taught me…that white people are always interested in what they call ‘darky’ singing and dancing.”
What particularly caught the attention of Walker and Williams were the numbers of white minstrels, who “blackened up” often billing themselves as “coons”. Unable to compete with these white performers, Williams and Walker came up with a clever marketing scheme—they began to sell themselves as “Two Real Coons”. At their artistic peak in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Williams and Walker could claim to have mounted the first all-black musical on Broadway (1903’s In Dahomey) and an international following as the most popular purveyors of the dance the Cake Walk. After Walker’s death in 1909, Williams became the first black artist featured in the Ziegfeld Follies.
What Williams and Walkers understood then and what so many black performers have come to realize since is that white mainstream interest in blackness is often predicated on their belief that what they are consuming is “authentic”, whether they are capable of discerning black authenticity or not. In the spirit of Mark Twain’s desire for the “real nigger show,” black artists have often found it financially lucrative to give white audiences the “real” that they so desire. Williams and Walker were no different. For example songs like “I Don’t Like the Face You Wear” and “The Phrenologist Coon”, which both appear on Bert Williams: The Early Years, 1901-1909, were written by Ernest Hogan. It was on the strength of his 1896 hit song (sold as sheet music) “All Coons Look Alike to Me” that Hogan became a popular writer of “coon songs”.
Whereas George Walker was just performing the coon, Bert Williams’s relationship to his characters was much more complicated. As a light-skinned black man, Williams resorted to blackening up to come off as a more convincing “coon.” As Camille F. Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star writes, “The blackface covered and effectively hid the real Williams, protecting him from having to be the persona he portrayed on the stage.” The real Williams often lamented that he couldn’t give his largely white audiences a more complex image of his characters—“the pathos as well as the fun.” This lament along with the lack of offers to do serious dramatic roles, were the pressures that squeezed the ambition and ultimately the life out of Williams, who died in 1922 at age 47.
William McFerrin Stowe, Jr. makes the point that Williams humanized the minstrel stereotype, creating a “significant modification within the acceptable structure of Negro stage characterization.” And this is what perhaps distinguishes Williams and a host others who toiled in America’s burgeoning culture industry of the early 2oth century—a desire to give complexity to the “shiftless darky.”
*Originally Published in January 2005
songs-of-sad.html
The author is apparently unhappy with Whites pretending to be parodies of A-As, and even more unhappy with A-As pretending to be parodies of A-As. So what? I know a man who dislikes banjo music. From a performer's viewpoint, you do what people will pay to see. If someone in the crowd does not like banjo music (or parodies of A-As) then that person can seek a different show. If a genre falls out of fashion, then performers adapt and develop new material. Everything else in the article is the author's value judgment (that parodies of A-As are A Bad Thing). Were the author a member of this site, the article would be moved to one of the political advocacy forums.
Also, the author seems ignorant of minstrelsy. He conflates minstrelsy with the blackface tradition in vaudeville, even though the latter theatrical form replaced the former around 1895, and the two genres had little in common beyond delivering song, dance, and comedy from a stage. Specifically, he would probably be shocked to learn that the "Zip Coon" character was invented by a biracial American performer as an embodiment of the folkloric trickster. The following is from "A History of the Minstrel Show" in Six Gems of Forgotten Civil War History.
Frank W. Sweet wrote:
Thomas Rice, in 1830, created one of the two stock comedy personas who continue making people laugh today. Rice’s character was drawn from trickster folklore around the world. Nearly every culture on Earth tells folk tales about a rustic bumpkin who is apparently foolish, but whose clev-erness and luck somehow rescue him from each disaster in the nick of time. In Britain and Europe he is the protagonist of “Jack” tales and is some-times called “Harlequin” or “Punch.” In the Muslim world he is known as “Hajji Baba of Isfahan,” and in Spanish-speaking lands he is called “Juan Bobo.” To the people of the Ashanti nation in West Africa, he is a spider called “Anansi,” and to those of the Yoruba culture, he is a black bird—a crow called “Jim.”
Thomas Rice named his stage persona after the Yoruba tradition. He called himself “Jim Crow.” (Incidentally, nearly a century later, the term “Jim Crow” became attached to laws and social customs meant to humiliate and oppress African-Americans. Mr. Rice, of course, could not possibly have foreseen such hateful misuse of his character’s name.) Rice first portrayed Jim Crow on stage in 1830 Louisville.
George Dixon, a light-complexioned biracial Virginian, created the second stock character. (Incidentally, the custom of labeling free persons of slight African descent as “Negro” or “Black” did not reach widespread popularity until about sixty years later.) Dixon’s character was named “Zip Coon.” In contrast to Rice’s Jim Crow character, Zip Coon was a would-be city slicker, more often than not caught in his own schemes. Whereas Jim Crow would fall into peril through no fault of his own, only to emerge unscathed due to luck or ingenuity, Zip Coon would plot complicated devious strategies, only to be hoist by his own petard each time. Dixon first brought Zip Coon to life on stage in 1834 New York.
Do you think making fun of ethnic groups is acceptable?
Stop me if you've heard this one: An Irishman, an Italian, and a Jew walk into a bar....
Acceptable? Acceptable to whom? Acceptable in what sense?
If you are asking whether making fun of ethnic groups is Right or Wrong in a moral sense, then I cannot answer in this forum without violating rule 1.3. To find out what others think, ask again in one of the political advocacy fora. Either way, the question is as meaningless to me as asking whether eggs Benedict are "acceptable." My view of humor focuses on funny versus unfunny, not on Right versus Wrong.
Having tried countless times to get laughs from on stage, Mary Lee and I are convinced that laughter does not start rolling until audience members turn to each other with grins saying, "That's true! That's so true!" about something you just said.
Humor is poking fun at human foibles. Humorists draw material from their own roots and experience. Tyler Perry would be out of work if he could not successfully parody the idiosyncrasies of A-A culture. Jewish comics parody Jewish customs, Irish comics parody Irish customs, much of today's Country Music genre parodies Appalachian (hillbilly) culture, as did the "Hee Haw" TV show many years ago. Ethnic parody, like one liners about sex, religion, politics, and "Take my wife ... please," either works (bringing laughter) or fails (stony silence). Right or Wrong have nothing to do with it.
Ethnic parody has always been a staple of U.S. comedy. During the minstrel show era...
A History of the Minstrel Show wrote:
... the target varied with time, region, and public interest. Before the [Civil] war, [minstrel shows often ridiculed] ignorant Scots. The 1854 Treaty of Tokugawa brought a flurry of skits mocking the Japanese. The Irish became the most frequent target after the Civil War. In the Midwest, Germans and Scandinavians were the butt of jokes, and on the West Coast it was Chinese. As the century came to its end, jokes shifted to ridiculing Jews and Italians.
All comedy risks offending someone. Mary Lee and I dislike the foul-mouthed comedy common to nightclub stand-ups. Also, public tastes change. Some jokes funny to us would have horrified our grandparents and vice-versa. Comedians must be alert to fashion trends.
Blackface, for example, is no longer used because it offends most audiences today. But be cautious in attributing it to the minstrel shows. Blackface predates the minstrel shows by centuries (in Morris dance, Charivari or Shivaree, Rough Music, Aguinaldo, etc.) and continued in U.S. theater for a half-century after the minstrel shows were gone.
A History of the Minstrel Show wrote:
Most people realize that many vaudevillians such as Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, George Burns, and George Jessel performed in blackface. But few realize that country music greats Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, Gene Autry, Bill Monroe, and banjo virtuosi Hobart Smith, and Clarence Ashley also did so as well. [Fred Astaire sang and danced in blackface.] Indeed, it is difficult to nail down the specific date when country music abandoned the blackface convention and adopted that of the cowboy costume instead. It appears to have been in the late 1930s.
Ultimately, humor works only if the listener sees himself/herself reflected in the parody. The best answer I can give as to the offensiveness of ethnic parody is to tell a classic joke from Act One of the minstrel shows of the 1850s. It shows that offense is in the eye of the beholder:
A History of the Minstrel Show wrote:
Mister Bones! Did you hear about the Mick who bought a mirror? It was in the old country. A man from a tiny village traveled to the fair. A peddler showed him a mirror, something never seen before in those parts. "Begorrah!" the Irishman exclaimed. "'Tis a picture of me old father, God rest his soul!"
So he bought the mirror and took it home. He hid the mirror under the bed to keep it safe until he could show it to his wife. Now, it turns out that his wife was spying on him through the window all along. She suspected he had been having an affair. When he left the room, she tiptoed in, found the mirror, and looked at it.
"Saints preserve me," she cried out. "I knew it! 'Tis another woman, and she's an ugly strumpet at that!"
'
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