minstrel show

minstrel show stage entertainment by white performers made up as blacks. Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who gave (c.1828) the first solo performance in blackface and introduced the song-and-dance act Jim Crow, is called the "father of American minstrelsy." The first public performance of a minstrel show was given in 1843 by the Virginia Minstrels, headed by Daniel Decatur Emmett. Christy's Minstrels (for whom Stephen Foster wrote some of his most popular songs) appeared in 1846, headed by Edwin P. Christy . In the first part of the minstrel show the company, in blackface and gaudy costumes, paraded to chairs placed in a semicircle on the stage. The interlocutor then cracked jokes with the end men, and, for a finale, the company passed in review in the "walk around." This part of the minstrel show caricatured the black man, representing him by grotesque stereotypes that were retained in the minds of white American audiences for many decades. In the second part of the show vaudeville or olio (medley) acts were presented. The third or afterpart was a burlesque on a play or an opera. The minstrel show was at its peak from 1850 to 1870 but passed with the coming of vaudeville, motion pictures, and radio.

Bibliography: See C. Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (1930, repr. 1968).

Minstrel Show, entertainment which originated in the Negro patter songs of T. D. Rice (known as Jim Crow), and from his burlesques of Shakespeare and opera, to which Negro songs were added. From 1840 to 1880 the Minstrel Show was the most popular form of amusement in the United States, whence it spread to England. Unlike the music-hall, which was intended for adults only, it was essentially a family entertainment, given in a hall and not in a theatre. The performers were at first White men with their faces artificially blacked, whence the name Burnt-cork Minstrels, but later they were true Negroes. Sitting in a semi-circle with their primitive instruments, banjos, tambourines, one-stringed fiddles, bones, etc., they sang plaintive coon songs and sentimental ballads interspersed with soft-shoe dances and outbursts of back-chat between the two ‘end-men’, Interlocutor and Bones. Their humour was simple and repetitive, and after a great burst of popularity the Minstrels gradually faded away, some, like Chirgwin and Stratton, to the music-halls, some to stroll along the beach at seaside resorts in the summer in traditional minstrel costume—tight striped trousers and waistcoat and tall white hat or straw boater—singing and playing their banjos. Among the most famous troupes were the Christy Minstrels, the Burgess and Moore, and the Mohawks.