Minstrel Show

Minstrel Show, type of variety entertainment presenting white men in blackface performances of Negro songs, dances, and jokes, originated in the U.S. and was extremely popular here and in Europe during the 19th century. Thomas Dartmouth Rice (1808–60) has been called “the father of American minstrelsy” because of his blackface performance of the song “Jim Crow” (1830ff.) and his subsequent success in programs of pseudo‐black songs and dances. Dan Emmett was another early minstrel. The most famous troupe was organized by E.P. Christy (1842). Stephen Foster wrote for Christy's Minstrels, publishing under Christy's name such popular minstrel songs as Oh! Susanna!, Uncle Ned, Old Folks at Home, Camptown Races, and Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground. Among the works of Dan Emmett were “Dixie” and “Old Dan Tucker.” By the middle of the century, the program of the minstrel show had become traditional. A row of performers was seated in a semi‐circle on the stage, with an interlocutor in the center, and two “end men” called “Mr. Tambo” and “Mr. Bones,” who played the tambourine and bone castanets. These three maintained a running dialogue of jokes supposedly in the character and idiom of black people, while the whole company presented dances, songs, and farces, performing on banjos, fiddles, and percussion instruments, concluding in a grand finale, comically parading in review in a so‐called walk around. Although probably intended in good humor, the minstrel show actually denigrated black culture in the vulgar white caricatures of ignorant, happy‐go‐lucky, shiftless people reveling in spirited dancing and sentimental singing.