“Dancing for Eels on the Catherine Wharf: Afro- and Irish-American Musical Interactions

in the Age of Sail”

The role of environment--physical, geographical, demographic, and cultural contexts--in the

formation of a distinctively American popular music idiom has seldom been discussed,

particularly in the case of minstrelsy, the 19th century black/white synthesis which lies at the root

of vaudeville, tap-dance, Tin Pan Alley, and musical comedy. In exploring the roots of the genre,

scholars have identified the role played by shifting antebellum conceptions of class, race, and

politics, and the way the idiom was employed to ritualize or contest these conceptions. But, with

a few brief exceptions, what has been neglected are the physical environments—the multifarious

public spaces—in which the blackface synthesis first occurred.1

This talk suggests that place [slide]—particularly the liminal boundary spaces of 19th century

American maritime and riverine environments on the southern and western frontiers—formed a

key element in shaping the Anglo-Celtic/African-American cultural collaboration which made

blackface minstrelsy possible.2 Received musicological history has depicted blackface as a

phenomenon of northern, urban environments, but this is to neglect the frontier contexts which

both enabled black-white-creole culture contact and provided inspiration for the first generation

of blackface practitioners. This shared riverine/maritime factor unites the disparate communities

and locations in which Anglo-Celtic and African-American instruments, rhythms, and dance

vocabularies met and cohabited. As in the urban North [point] (on the wharves of New York,

1 See bibliography; especially works of Dale Cockrell Demons of Disorder, William J. Mahar Behind the Burnt-Cork Mask, Walter Lhamon Raising Cain and Jump Jim Crow, and Eric Lott Love and Theft.2 Bolster specifically articulates the ability of black sailors to cross “cultural and geographic boundaries.” Black Jacks, 35.

Boston, and Philadelphia, and the old lake-and-river routes and the new canals of the Northeast

and the “Old Frontier” of upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio), so on the southern

frontiers [point] of the Ohio and Mississippi river towns (Louisville, Cincinnati, Natchez, and

Mobile) and in the markets and landings [point] of harbor towns like Charleston, Savannah, and

New Orleans: slaves, free blacks, and poor whites came together in a mutable, fluid, working-

class environment in which tunes and dances, gestural and verbal languages could be—and were

—borrowed, stolen, and combined.

My fundamental thesis, one not previously examined by musicology, but nevertheless supported

by extensive study of a wide range of evidence, is that the musical “creolization” of American

culture—its infusion with and inspiration by a black-white collision of vernacular performance—

was the basis for the blackface synthesis. Though initially celebrated (and later denigrated) as a

“comic portrait of the Southern Negro,” [slide x2] the reality is that minstrelsy, as practiced by

George Washington Dixon, the originator of “Coal Black Rose” (c1829) [slide x2], and Thomas

Dartmouth Rice, popularizer of “Jump Jim Crow (c1828) [slide x2]; and later elaborated by the

singer/dancer/banjoists Daniel Decatur Emmett[slide x2], author of “Dixie” (pub. 1859, but

originating much earlier) and Joel Walker Sweeney (1810-60) [slide x2], was based in close

observation and accurate imitation of a comparatively, if semi-voluntarily, integrated working-

class street culture, in contexts which incubated new performance genres. The blackface

minstrels were close observers on the multi-cultural wharves of New York, Savannah, Mobile,

Cincinnati, and New Orleans: they watched, learned from, and imitated boundary-crossing

individuals of both races—and this prototypical “participant observation” can be identified,

especially, in the iconography of the antebellum painters William Sidney Mount [slide x2],

George Caleb Bingham [slide x2], and James Henry Beard [slide x2], among others. This paper

thus expands the map of minstrelsy’s geographic distribution along the cross-cultural highways

of the great North American rivers and canals: the Hudson, Alleghany, Ohio, Mississippi,

Missouri, Erie, and Pontchartrain; it locates Caribbean, African, English, Scottish, and Irish

inspirations in these multi-racial polyglot communities; and it traces their cultural integration via

demographics, description, first-person accounts, reconstruction, and iconography.

The musical, cultural, and sociological resources for the blackface synthesis were in place long

before the founding of the Virginia Minstrels in 1843 [slide]; before the first performances of

Dixon [slide] and Rice [slide] in the late ‘20s; before the “Haytian” dances on Long Island

described by Washington Irving [slide] in the ‘Teens; before the comic “Mungo” [slide] and

“Juba” theatrical characters of the Colonial and Federalist periods. In fact, these roots can be

demonstrated to reach all the way back, in the plantation South, the frontier West, and the

urbanizing Northeast, to the first contact between Africans and Europeans on the American

continent.

The documentation for minstrelsy’s creole roots is relatively diffuse but can now be

supplemented with additional data: statistical and circumstantial evidence, ships’ records and

census information, and, especially, the work of vernacular painters, both in the North and the

West.3 In the case of minstrelsy, an idiom whose linkage of music-sound and the visual

3 See, among others, W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford, 1995); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Bob Carlin, The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy (New York: McFarland & Company, 2007); Christopher J. Smith, “Blacks and Celts on the Riverine Frontiers: The Roots of American Popular Music,” in Lost Colonies (Mississippi, forthcoming 2009).

vocabularies of dance is one of its most directly African traits, such iconographic study provides

a treasure trove of musicological information.

While imitations of Africans had been a staple of Anglo-American popular theater ever since the

mid-18th century, it is evident that, by New Yorker Micah Hawkins’s “Backside Albany” [slide]

in the 1815 production of The Siege of Plattsburgh (set, like his later The Saw-Mill, or, A Yankee

Trick, in upstate New York), the African-American sources being imitated have shifted to North

America--or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the synthesis depicted itself has shifted

to North America.4 Dialect, names, costume, and body language all reflect a new, black-white

creole mixture emerging in North American urban and frontier contexts: canals, riverbanks,

harbors, and highways.5

The rightful condemnation of blackface’s racist caricature has sometimes neglected the

enormous innovation and impact of the black-white musical exchange which minstrelsy stylized

upon the stage. The early blackface practices were neither incompetent imitation (of Southern

black folkways) nor simple racist parody. As Abrahams says [slide]:

One of the realities of American life is that certain features of African-American

performance style will remain strange and alluring to those outside the culture. Not least

among such features is the making of hard social commentary on recurring problems of

4 T. Allston Brown 1874 account describes Pot Pie Herbert as “an actor of the West” singing “Back Side of Albany Stands Lake Champlain”. See Brown, “The Origins of Minstrelsy,” in Brown and Day, 174. Confirm also that Dibdin got the idea for a comic “Black African” recitation of Shakespeare from witnessing performances at the African Grove—when?5 Though it is beyond the reach of the current study, this shift—to the imitation of urban, creole, and frontier folkways—may explain the relatively late date at which the banjo arrived in the North, and seemingly in the hands of blackface practitioners like Joe Sweeney and Dan Emmett, who learned the instrument from southern blacks.

life, often through cutting and breaking techniques—contentious interactions continually

calling for a change of direction, with alterations expressed in rhythmic, tonal, textural,

and other kinds of figures…The motives of the Southern white dancers who engaged in

the black jig at the end of their formal dances are not that removed from those of the

white bluesman, rapper, or break dancer.6

It is no coincidence that all the early exemplars of the blackface minstrelsy synthesis, the first

two generations of Anglo-American musicians who observed and imitated this creolizing street

culture, and brought it to working-class stages, were products of transracial environments, either

raised as children or working as adults in precisely such riverine, maritime, and frontier

situations. Thomas “Daddy” Rice [slide], though born in New York City’s Seventh Ward the son

of a chandler,7 had experience as a comic and caricature actor and circus acrobat and had toured

with Ludlow’s Company throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in the late 1820s before

returning to Manhattan, where his 1832 performances of “Jump Jim Crow” at the Bowery and

Chatham Theatres marked minstrelsy’s first high-profile success.8 Dixon [slide] (born in

Richmond, Virginia, and educated at charity schools) had toured the frontiers by river with

circuses and traveling theatrical troupes since his teens, like Rice finding a particular niche as a

virtuoso performer of “buffo” roles—which in early 19th century American theatrical parlance

meant singing, dancing, slapstick, and comedic portraits of a wide range of Shakespearian and

6 Abrahams, 152, 157.7 Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 4. See also Walter Lhamon’s comment, in a letter to the Long Island Museum, to the effect that Rice had been “born to a ship’s rigger in the 7th Ward.”8 Ludlow had been touring the frontiers, playing a wide variety of theatrical roles and properties, from 1812. It is likely that elements of the German seasonal tradition of belsnickel, the source of the Afro-Dutch “Pinkster” celebrations of colonial-era upstate New York, traveled with such troupes, a likelihood that would help explain the wide distribution of Anglo-German-Celtic-African theatrical comedy throughout the frontiers. See Cockrell, 36, and Ludlow, 62ff. The Joe Cowell memoirs describe Rice as a touring actor in Cincinnati in 1829; the earliest extant documentation of Rice “jumping” Jim Crow date from 22 Sept 1830 in Louisville. Ludlow, 63-64. Ludlow confirms that “Jump Jim Crow” in the 30s and early ‘40s was always perceived as disreputable and socially threatening, exacting middle-class derogation, in both the USA and England. Ludlow, 67-68.

sub-Shakespearian types, as well as blackfaced African-Americans.9 Similarly, the Ohio-born

Emmett [slide], founder of the Virginia Minstrels, had learned from “a banjo player by the name

of ‘Ferguson,’ who was a very ignorant person, and ‘negger all over’ except in color,” which

Irish banjoist Nathan suggests had learned from slaves working on West Virginia’s Kanawha

River.10 J. G. Bennett claimed that another blackface source, Tom Rice, “eat, drank and slept

with them, went to their frolics, and made himself the best white black man in existence.”11

Sweeney [slide x2], with Emmett the other great popularizer of the banjo in the North, probably

learned his music from slaves on his family’s Appomattox County, Virginia, farm; Carlin points

out that he had been born “about one mile northeast of … the Appomattox River, along the

Richmond/Lynchburg Stage Road.”12

But the idiom begins in the liminal environments of the Southern and Western riverine and

maritime frontiers. Though a “frontier” is conventionally understood as a space at the

geographical limit of the known “civilized” world, it is equally true that, in antebellum America,

“frontiers” also existed at the social limit of middle-class experience. Hence, the Five Points

[slide] and Catharine Wharf neighborhoods [slide] of New York; the bigger-than-life brawling

communities of the Ohio and Mississippi river boatmen and longshoremen [slide]; the shanty-

towns of Irish and African laborers who built the Erie [slide] and Pontchartrain [slide] canals—

all existed in a geographically or culturally “distant” world that exercised alternate horror and

fascination for middle-class citizens. Both Cockrell and Lhamon have explored the cultural

variety and economic opportunity that New York’s working-class streets in Five Points and the

9 See Strasbough, describing TD Rice in 1828 hearing GW Dixon at the Bowery Theatre performing “Coal Black Rose.” Strasbough, 73-74.10 Nathan, 58-59.11 Ludlow, 63.12 Carlin, 19.

Lower East Side made available.13 This study suggests that similar socio-economic conditions

likewise obtained throughout North America in the antebellum period—and that the first

architects of blackface derived their inspiration for minstrelsy’s brilliant synthesis from the

cultural collision going on in the streets just outside the theatres’ doors.

This premise—that blackface music, song, and dance represented a translation to the theatrical

stage of a familiar street idiom—helps explain minstrelsy’s remarkable popularity immediately

upon its appearance: the near-riots at the 1830s Bowery and Chatham Theatre performances of

Dixon and Rice, and the fame and imitation that followed the first touring minstrel troupes,

across North America and in Western Europe as well. This interpretation argues that minstrelsy’

phenomenal popularity derived not from its unfamiliarity or novelty, but rather from the frisson

which its working-class audiences derived from seeing “their” performance idiom, the music and

dance they knew from the streets, wharves, and canals, moved to the “legitimate” stage.14 What

has not been so widely remarked is that those same mobile boundaries and arteries--rivers and

canals, harbors and bays, wharves and highways and early railroads--were not only the conduits

but also earliest incubators of minstrelsy’s theatrical synthesis, comprehensively, and far earlier

than has been presumed.15 In order to understand why minstrelsy was the way it was, then, we

13 See Lahmon’s comments on the significance of frontiers in the “revolutionary subtexts” of 19th century arts: “The world of brotherhood and freedom can take place only in the oceanic friction…or on the river…, in the woods…, qualifiedly in the slave quarters…, or in the drugged imaginary.” Raising Cain, 86. Perhaps the most eloquent and evocative example of the frontier = freedom trope in 19th century literature is the “light out for the territories” passage at the end of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: “…and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Huckleberry Finn.14 This explanation would likewise link the popular response to minstrelsy with later white appropriations of cross-cultural musical syntheses: the riotous responses to the late-1950s “rock ‘n’ roll” films like Rock Around the Clock and The Girl Can’t Help It, the furor over the content and presentation of hip-hop stars in 1980s music television, and so on.15 See Saxton: he claims that the “life-style expressed in minstrelsy…had developed in middle Atlantic cities, moved west with the Erie Canal and urbanization of the Mississippi and its tributaries, and west again with the acquisition of California.” “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 12-13.

need to understand the frontier social contexts which shaped the music of its African-American

sources and their Irish-American imitators.

The Riverine Irish

The first half of the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War—roughly 1792-

c1835—saw an explosion of economic, commercial and infrastructure development in the new

Republic. The nation’s founders were acutely aware of the opportunities and the impedimenta

presented by the sheer size of the continent. Even before the Revolution, speculators and political

leaders had proposed schemes to enhance commerce by dredging, expanding, and linking

waterways, typically by the digging of navigable canals. Those employed to actually do the

specialized work were usually recruited from trades in which related skills were already

essential, including Lancashire tin, copper, and chalk miners, and, especially, the immigrant

Irish. Even Robert Fulton, an essential visionary in the development of viable steamboat designs

and the child of Irish immigrants, began his career creating speculative designs for canal locks

and boats. Canals were also crucial on the frontiers that crossed the Alleghenies [slide] and

Appalachians [slide]: the Cumberland, Green, Kanawha, Licking, Ohio, Ohio-Allegheny,

Tennessee, and Tennessee-French Broad Canals all reached across the mountains to the

Mississippi tributaries and thus provided a cross-continental connection between the Atlantic and

New Orleans; these rivers, and the landings where Anglo-Celtic hillmen and multi-ethnic, often

African-American, river-workers met, would be central to the minstrelsy exchange.

Irish canallers in North America developed a distinctive community identity, one informed by

their (typically) rural, often Gaelic-speaking, working-class background, but which also

paralleled those of the brawling, tall-tale-spinning frontier riverboatmen and the “Bowery

B’hoys” of New York’s Lower East Side. Way describes them as tough, mobile, insular

communities [slide] “largely made up of young males…sharing a similar ethnic background

[and] a rough camaraderie reinforced by male bonding, which manifested itself in the drinking

and roughhousing typical of young men…a social world of their own [and] an identity that

espoused the values of physical prowess, virility, a certain nonchalance to risks, and an equal

willingness to live hard outside of work, with drinking and fighting two main measures of a

man’s worth.” In addition to provoking middle-class “unease”, canaller communities shared

other characteristics which became part of the larger-than-life blackface personae and texts: their

attitudes toward sport, gambling (especially horse-racing), boxing, alcohol, rural violence,

political activism all recalled Irish precursors.16 Thus, both the working-class city and the rural

frontier were liminal, potentially-transformative environments. Parallel environments gave rise

to the populist Jacksonian heroes and anti-heroes Mose the Fireman [slide] (of the Bowery

B’hoys and Lower East Side), Dan Tucker [slide] and Mike Fink [slide] the keelboatmen (and

fictionalized heroes of frontier song and story), and Zip Coon [slide] and Jim Crow [slide], the

clownish jesters of urban minstrelsy.

The economic downturns of the 1830s and the competing technology of the railroad in the 1840s

eroded the pace of canal construction, but the laborers who had built the Erie, for example, did

not disappear after its completion: the Irish communities of upstate New York (and, in other

cases, Cincinnati and Mobile and New Orleans) were first populated by former canal workers,

who transferred their skills at demolition, excavation, and construction to bridge- and highway-

construction and, often, to the waterfront work which the canals had brought.

16 Way, 1408 & 1401.

African-Americans were likewise part of canal culture since before the Revolution, as they had

been (as drummers and fifers) of all three armies involved in the conflict; these roles continued

in the post-Revolutionary period.17 After the War, they participated in the development of river

and canal travel which transformed international trade: gradually, southern cities like Charleston,

Savannah, and, pre-eminently, New Orleans supplanted Boston and New York as the continent’s

overseas centers, while the Atlantic/Caribbean coasting trade remained central to American

maritime activity.18

The Irish worked side-by-side with free blacks and there were frequent conflicts between the two

communities. However, conflict between proximate social groups does not preclude other kinds

of communication—in fact, the evidence suggests that workplace competition was only one

component of a complex, ongoing cultural exchange. Demographic evidence from both Northern

and Southern cities confirms, first, that the Irish continued close involvement with riverine and

maritime work and, second, that they shared jobs, neighborhoods, and housing with African-

Americans.

This cross-cultural “elbow-rubbing” was “especially common in frontier towns;” Eric Lott, for

example, cites Lafcadio Hearn’s reference to Cincinnati Negro singers who could “mimic the

Irish accent to a degree of perfection which an American, Englishman, or German could not

17 The Way of the Ship confirms that, between 1740-1803, African-Americans came to represent 18% of the total seafaring population. 87. Black musicians had been an essential part of Revolutionary armies; Bolster confirms likewise their presence in maritime recruiting: black drummers playing for rendezvous (“rondy”) at taverns. Bolster, 33-34. See also Bolster, “To Feel Like a Man,” 1177-78.18 Ship, 96-99; 145.

hope to acquire.”19 On the river-fronts, African-Americans and Anglo-Celts worked, lived,

fought, and made music together—yet this phenomenon was largely neglected by period sources

and later musicological scholarship.

The Black Atlantic

[slide]

A second factor equally underestimated in the blackface synthesis is the influence of Afro-

Caribbean cultural procedures: instruments, dance vocabularies, and conceptions of musical

procedure and function. By the 1830s, black sailors had been a cornerstone of this maritime

world for centuries; Bolster confirms their presence throughout the Age of Exploration, as

slaves, freed men, and even buccaneers [9 & 13]. They played an essential role in the sugar trade

and exerted a powerful cultural influence everywhere that trade touched: the Caribbean, the

southern riverine cities, New England, Europe, and West Africa [17-21].20

The Atlantic Maritime environment was, “precisely because of the specialized nature of

seafaring”: a unique behavioral zone in which blacks could work alongside, instruct, share with,

or even command whites.21 These comparatively-egalitarian shipboard environments also came

ashore: Bolster for example cites the remarkable anecdote of an 1812 New York City theatrical

19 Lott, 47-48; see also Szwed’s citation of an 1876 Lafcadio Hearn anecdote describing “black roustabouts on the riverfront of Cincinnati dancing a quadrille to the ‘Devil’s Dream’ (accompanied by fiddle, banjo, and bass), gradually transforming it into a Virginia reel, and then changing it again, this time to a ‘juba dance’ done to a shout-like call-and-response song.” Szwed, 33.20 In an interview, Bolster specifically cites the presence of black sailors in all segments of the sugar trade: “men who cross-pollinated a variety of communities around the rim of the Atlantic, in an age when most black people were illiterate… moving between the West Indian islands, the Carolina low country, urban seaports like New York and Philadelphia, metropolitan capitals like London” Link.21 Bolster, “To Feel Like a Man”, 1174.

performance, when “the crew of an American warship…’marched together into the pit, and

nearly one half of them were negroes.’”22

Creolized behaviors which developed on board ship or at the wharfside connected sailors with

both canal-culture (cited above) and the “mechanics and apprentices” who were urban

minstrelsy’s first and most avid audience; Bolster describes how, like Irish canallers, black

seamen and their white fellow hands exhibited [slide] “fierce pride in their technical

competence;…cultivated a fatalistic stoicism in the face of frequent danger;…valued pugilisim

and pluck, traits that stood them in good stead both in their rough-and-tumble world and in their

routine defiance of ships’ officers”.23 Anglo sailors learned not only to sing, play, and dance, but

even to fight like Africans: the notorious head-butt called the “Glasgow kiss”, a staple of

maritime combat, originates in West Africa.24 Moreover, North American harbors saw extensive

immigration and ongoing trade and cultural exchange from the Caribbean, particularly in the

wake of the Haitian Revolution; Cincinnati, St Louis, New York, Boston, and even Albany, all

experienced substantial contact with Caribbean culture.

The first theatrical blackface entertainments also referenced Atlantic creole cultural zones: T. D.

Rice’s [slide]1833 Long Island Juba, or Love by the Bushel has him playing the blackface

character “Gumbo Chaff,” [slide] and culminates with a slapstick fight in a flour mill which

(temporarily) turns the blackface characters white again. William Henry Lane, a/k/a “Master

Juba”[slide], a virtuoso exhibition dancer who was celebrated by Dickens, and who performed in

Europe for royalty, was born on Long Island.25 Moreover, Afro-Caribbean and Southern frontier 22 Bolster, 1188, 1173.23 Bolster, 1187.24 Bolster, Black Jacks, 119.25 Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 43.

folkways also came north: the Long Island painter William Sidney Mount’s iconic work The

Bones Player (1856) [slide] employs several factors (dress, features, instrument, and personal

ornament) which suggest that the original sitter was from the Caribbean, and a number of his

sketches of rural Long Island music-makers (black and white) include depictions of the

Caribbean body-percussion known as “patting juba” (from a Dahomeyan phrase djouba) [slide].

Indeed, the African-American banjo (for example in Mount’s iconic The Banjo Player [slide],

also from 1856) itself is derived directly from Caribbean models: the banza [slide] was well-

known in Haiti before the banjo was ever depicted in North America. Both the figures and

instrumentation they describe show linkages: in Haiti, the presence of minstrelsy’s iconic violin,

tambourine, and bones, and of hard-shoe “battering”; in North America and the Caribbean, the

early 19th century cotillion, a ubiquitous social dance, like the Irish sets included multiple figures

in contrasting meters and tempos (and the “Lancers” and “Caledonia” quadrilles based upon the

Irish sets [slide]). 26 South and North, frontier and cities, music and dance, Caribbean and

continent, black and white, Africans and Irish, were linked by commerce and the resulting creole

street culture.

Musical exchange also flowed in the opposite direction, from white to black: slave musicians

learned the tunes of European court and social dance, and commanded high fees playing for

diverse audiences. Black fiddlers adapted European tunes, “Africanizing” them in form and

technique, and re-introduced them as the sources for new songs which were in turn borrowed by

the blackface imitators. African elements were thus re-injected into the quadrilles and cotillions;

26 Szwed and Marks, “The Afro-American Transformation of European Set Dances and Dance Suites” (1988): 30-31.

these gave birth to the “Virginia reel,” “breakdown,” and “buck-and-wing” which blacks and

whites both danced, and were an essential element in the popularity of the early blackface

soloists.27

Likewise, white musicians from Appalachian and from the North saw black longshoremen and

wharf-rats singing, dancing, and playing banjo and fiddle on the wharves of the Mississippi,

Ohio, and (eventually) Missouri, and borrowed their tunes to sing back East: “Old Dan Tucker,”

attributed to Emmett in 1843 [slide], was probably learned by him on the Ohio, and takes its

larger-than-life stream-of-consciousness braggadocio from the brawling folklore of the River’s

keelboatmen [sing/play]. Of the minstrel standard “Clare de Kitchen” [slide], Hans Nathan

comments that is “said to have been a song of ‘negro firemen on the Mississippi River’”—but on

his own evidence, it originates as a folksong and dance tune [186]. “Jump Jim Crow” itself (first

published 1828), Rice’s iconic song-and-dance routine [slide], of which hundreds of variants and

imitations were spawned in the 1830s, was based in a Georgia Sea Islands children’s singing

game still extant in the 1960s [sing]. Shanties were often based in Southern black folk and work

songs—which shanties were in turn borrowed by the minstrels (for example, “Haul Away, Joe,”

a shanty borrowed by minstrels in the post-War period, begins as the Southern black tune “Jim

Along, Josie,” a staple of the Antebellum minstrel tunebook).28

27 In his extraordinary Singing the Master, on the ritual performance of slave corn-shucking parties in the Antebellum south, Roger D. Abrahams cites numerous examples of whites of all economic classes imitating black dance: Mary Chestnut’s undated Antebellum diary describes a “‘Senator Semmes of Louisiana [who] danced a hoedown for us: a Negro corn-shucking, heel-and-toe fling with a grapevine twist and all.’” Abrahams emphasizes the long and early history of white imitations: “The phenomenon of white Southerners imitating blacks in performance predates even the earliest developments of the blackface entertainments. The earliest reports of whites dancing in slave style…come from the period of the American Revolution. And, by the mid-1820s, when such imitations first appeared on the stage…the slave owners themselves and their families had been carrying on in a similar manner for their own entertainment for some time.” Abrahams, 137. See also Nicholas Cresswell’s report from mid-1770s Virginia, when “[a] couple gets up and begins to dance a jig (to some Negro tune).” Abrahams, 138.28 See Bolster, Black Jacks, 217. See also Bolster, n17 (189). The frontier element is recognized—but mischaracterized—in period accounts of minstrelsy’s sources: the “origin myth” for Rice’s seminal song-and-dance Jump Jim Crow, promulgated by many 19th century historians and referenced by Nathan, held that Rice had first

The Riverine Environment

Riverine and maritime spaces were thus crucial in providing both the constituent elements and

the cultural exchanges which enabled the blackface synthesis. Though beyond the scope of this

presentation, parallel situations reveal parallel results: the Hudson Valley [slide], bringing

together New York’s German/Dutch “upstate” and Anglo-Celtic “downstate”; Long Island

Sound [slide], effecting a surprisingly steady, immediate, and ubiquitous interaction between

black and white rural and urban populations and the sugar, whaling, and trading shipping lines;

the Ohio River Valley [slide], connecting Appalachia, the Mississippi and the Caribbean, which

brought into contact blacks and whites from south and north, introduced the African banjo to

upland whites and to Anglo-Appalachian dance music, formed the boundary of slave versus free

states, and figured prominently in both southern slave and northern Abolitionist folklore; most

significantly for the present study, New Orleans’s New Basin/Pontchartrain Canal [slide], built

by Irish imported in the 1830s, connecting Algiers and its railroad yards with downtown, who

later settled the “Irish Channel” neighborhood. North American riverine/maritime “frontier”

spaces were thus the ground upon which black/white musical/cultural exchange took place.

Few scholars have recognized the characteristic patterns of usage and exchange which these

disparate geographical locations share. These are as follows:

heard the song in Louisville while on tour in the winter of 1831, from “a very black, clumsy negro used to clean and rub down horses.”? Though the story of the crippled stable-hand is probably a fiction—the song itself was widely known, that Rice could have heard the song in that city is perfectly plausible: Louisville was a major river port and the song could easily have made its way with coasting sailors and riverboatmen from the southeastern Atlantic coast up the Mississippi and the Ohio—which would in turn argue for its origin substantially antedating the 1830s, and probably the 19th century altogether.

(1) [slide] All brought into contact diverse populations in zones of exchange, thus providing both

a smorgasbord of modes of expression, but also a degree of anonymity useful for individuals

who could assume or attempt new identities (most notoriously, the great Abolitionist author and

activist Frederick Douglass escaped from slave Maryland to free Philadelphia by donning a

merchant seaman’s clothes, and boarding a train).29

(2) [slide] Because these locations were public “commons” space, they became home to

creolized street cultures which middle-class society viewed as occupying a spectrum from

“exotic” to “immoral” to “threatening”; this both evoked and enabled voyeurism, intentional

public display, and the ritual working-out of social/cultural resistance. These spaces were

attractive to social groups or classes which thrived-upon transgression: prostitutes and criminals,

yes, but also vendors, singers, dancers, and other public performers.

(3) [slide] Because they were extensively populated by sailors and other transients, they were

also spaces in which mutable social behaviors, specifically from the more racially-fluid

environments of frontiers, shipboard, and the Creole cultures of the Caribbean, could be

introduced into North America’s more rigid racial dynamics. The riverine/maritime

environments of Antebellum America were analogous to other New World communities in

which a creole street culture would give rise to new cultural expressions (the obvious examples

being the syncretic musics of the Caribbean: reggae, calypso, samba, and so on): were a social

29 See W. Jeffrey Bolster, “To Feel Like a Man,” 1173. In his Black Jacks, Bolster confirms that Douglass’s was not an isolated experience, saying that “nearly one quarter of skilled runaway slaves in VA between 1736-1801 were mariners.” Bolster, 24.

and psychological “frontier” in which cultural change could be incubated, observed, and

disseminated.

Thus it is no surprise that Five Points and the Lower East Side in New York, the transient

communities of the Erie and Ponchartrain Canals, the “exotic” Afro-Caribbean communities of

the Georgia Sea Islands and the Sugar Islands, were all favorite topics for display, description

and depiction for the middle-class gaze—in illustrated papers, thunder-and-brimstone sermons,

and travelers’ tales—because, like the later Storyville in New Orleans or Harlem in New York,

they permitted the opportunity for both virtuous condemnation and the titillating frisson of

transgression.30 The remainder of this essay will explore the riverine and maritime zones of the

South as incubators for the creole synthesis which blackface later borrowed and popularized,

eventually on a global scale—and an example of the kind of musicological evidence which

period illustrations can provide.

The example is Western Raftsmen [slide], an 1846 painting by James Henry Beard [slide], a

relatively little-known New York-born, Ohio-raised vernacular artist (anecdote about US Dept of

Surveys and access). Serving an early apprenticeship on the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, Beard

joins George Caleb Bingham and William Sidney Mount in a company whose careers and

catalogs reflect the sense of expanded possibilities of the Jacksonian era (roughly 1828-50). All

three share details of autobiography, career trajectory, and artistic agenda.

30 As Lhamon comments: “the river was both a boundary and a conveyance. Catherine Market [in New York], like all traditional markets paradoxically smudged that borderline and also reinforced it…[Public performance] at the Catherine Market addressed the issue of overlap. It appealed to several audiences who were finding different values in the dance at the same time. It was a yoking across perceived differences…After all, appeal and exchange was what display in a market was about.” Raising Cain, 2-3.

At the same time, both painters and blackface originators were much of an age and background

[slide] (painters Beard, Bingham, and Mount were born in 1812, 1811, and 1807 respectively;

minstrels Dixon, Rice, Emmett, and Sweeney in 1801, 1808, 1815, and 1810), and shared a

number of formative experiences: the expansion of class, economic and social opportunities that

new careers in the arts made feasible; the use of nationalist allegory as a means of selling art and

a pragmatic commercial interest in nostalgic, patriotic, historical or vernacular topics; close

practical contact with and observation of ethnic folkways and the working trades; an interest in

presenting these folkways as “true blue Americanisms”; and, finally and most crucially, a

remarkable parity in their portraits of “creolization” in working-class culture.

These painters have largely been neglected by musicologists; only Mount’s works have seen any

investigation, mostly because his ephemera reveal an especially wide range of musical interests.

Even there, however, Mount’s musical activities (for example) have been explored primarily as

eccentric adjuncts to his paintings or personality; no published analysis of his collected musical

manuscripts, much less of his artworks, has recognized the information he reveals regarding

period vernacular practices. Yet in Mount’s paintings and sketches from Long Island and New

York City—and, equally usefully though less obviously, the works of Bingham and Beard from

the Mississippi and Missouri frontier river landings—the social and musical interaction and

synthesis—the creolization—of working-class black/white culture is demonstrable and

inescapable.

While Mount subtly excised working-class origins and experiences from his personal

autobiography, pursuing an upward social trajectory, and Bingham clearly idealized his

flatboatmen and keelboatmen, Beard’s [slide] stance toward his own working-class background

and subjects was more fluid—even contradictory. Born in upstate NY (Buffalo) in 1814, he was

a product of the same geographic and socio-economic environment as the first wave of blackface

practitioners: Beard’s family emigration to the Ohio frontier, for example, exactly parallels that

of Dan Emmett; like Mount, Beard’s eventual contact with New York’s National Academy in the

1840s helped him fashion a later career which brought upper-middle-class respectability, and a

gradual change of topics and themes—Beard in fact ended his life as a painter of sentimental

portraits of family pets. But in the hungry Jacksonian 1840s, Beard painted a series of pictures

whose topics, critical stance, and allegorical content were far more ambiguous, defiant—and

revealing—than his later portraits of cats, dogs, and children.

To understand the indirect but significant musicological evidence of these works, it is necessary

to understand the role of the expressive arts in the mobile, polyglot working-class communities

of the riverine and maritime frontiers. The presence and boundary-crossing work experience of

black and white musicians on these frontiers is attested by biographical, musicological, and

archival evidence—as it is by Beard’s paintings. Hans Nathan, for example, confirms that the

earliest sources of the canonic minstrel tune “Possum Up a Gum Stump” [slide; sing] were on

the Ohio River as early as 1817.31 I’ve already commented on the cross-cultural experience of the

early minstrel architects. While such contacts and the musics that resulted are much better

documented in the post-War era (they would lead eventually to the creole genres of ragtime, in

the black middle class of St Louis and Memphis; and jazz, in the working-class communities of

New Orleans and other Mississippi towns), their origins lie in the antebellum period. Though the

evidence is sparser, the conditions and environments were available for similar interaction

31 Nathan, 186.

throughout the West and South, as they were indeed on the Atlantic seaboard and throughout the

Caribbean.

Those locations’ role as the incubator of minstrelsy’s creole synthesis is likewise confirmed by

the biographical experience of the seminal blackface practitioners: Rice and Dixon, Emmett and

Sweeney all learned and made music in diverse multi-racial contexts throughout this period. In

his study of banjo methods, for example, Robert Winans identifies the sources of the early

banjoists in even earlier black stylists, citing the claim that band-leader E. P. Christie [slide]

learned banjo “with slaves in New Orleans,” and identifies steamboat-borne minstrels working

on the Ohio and Big Sandy rivers by the 1850s.32 Wells traces the “merging” of black-white

fiddling as early as the late 17th century, and, like Nathan, shows that merger in the adoption and

adaptation of tunes across racial boundaries.33 Iconography likewise supports the inference: we

can confirm that black rhythmic elements (via hand-percussion and the body-percussion known

as “patting Juba”), depicted in the anonymous New York sketch cited by Lhamon, “Dancing for

Eels 1820 Catharine Market” [slide]) were there very early. Wells states explicitly that, in the

realm of dance music, “acculturation was working in both directions.”

These same interactions continued in the then Far West, though they are even more sparsely-

documented: Chevan, for example, describes Mississippi riverboat bands which were integrated

32 Winans, 1976, 419 & 421.33 Wells cites the Negro tunes “Pompey Ran Away” from James Aird’s A Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs Adapted… (Glasgow, 1782); “Congo—A Jig” 18th C MS from Bolling family of Virginia; a “Negro Dance” published in Riley’s Flute Melodies (NYC c1814-16). Paul F. Wells, “Fiddling as an Avenue of Black-White Musical Interchange,” in Black Music Research Journal 23/1-2 (Spring – Autumn 2003), 141ff. On a personal note, I was very grateful to discover from Wells’s research that “Black Joe” Brown, a Revolutionary War veteran and freedman of mixed African and Native American parentage, who owned a tavern and the pond where I swam and skated as a child, was a fiddle player (see http://www.legendinc.com/Pages/MarbleheadNet/MM/Articles/BlackJoe.html).

relatively early: the inescapable conclusion is that white musicians playing in integrated bands

must have begun to assimilate this distinctively black “feel.”34

The creole synthesis was thus far more ubiquitous across the emerging Continent than previous

blackface histories have suggested. Black-white exchange occurred not only in the urban East

but also on the Southern and Western frontiers: in fact, the integrated musical culture depicted in

Mount’s Long Island paintings, manuscripts and personal reminiscences is paralleled by the

evidence of Western tunebooks, descriptions, and visual documents. The precise musical

observation of Mount’s 1840s-60s paintings and sketches is matched—less comprehensively, but

no less valuably—in aspects of works by Bingham and Beard.

Like Bingham’s better-known Jolly Flatboatmen (1846) [slide], Beard’s 1846 Western Raftsmen

[slide] depicts vernacular music-making on the riverine frontier. Though Bingham was lauded as

a kind of “painter laureate” of the West (not least because of the optimism of his allegory and the

appeal of his artistic technique), Beard’s very different perspective was grounded in a very

different—and more closely-observed—working-class experience: after relocating to Ohio with

his family from upstate New York, as did Emmett, Beard married into a flatboat/trader family

based in New Orleans and spent his young manhood working the Mississippi.35 Described as

something of a proto-Bohemian[slide] (Husch, calls his social behavior “Romantic posturing”),

Beard, a working-class Whig and a nativist, initially resisted the Eastern arts hierarchy, and the

suspicion was mutual: Rash notes that Beard’s portrayals of Western frontiersmen initially

34 David Chevan, “Riverboat Music from St. Louis and the Streckfus Steamboat Line,” Black Music Research Journal 9/2 (Autumn, 1989).35 Husch, 19.

provoked negative receptions in the East.36 Husch, likewise observes of this painting [slide] that

Beard had “depicted whites and blacks interacting as equals in a way that, for its time, would

have been disturbing. The black dancer and white fiddler are united in pose and gesture as well

as by their common activity. The dancer is even slightly elevated, although he is also isolated

from his fellows by the diagonal placement of the oar.”37 [apology for low-rez image]

Husch’s precise critical reading of the iconography and allegorical intentions behind Western

Raftsmen suggests that the anomie, isolation, and decrepitude of the scene were intentional and

allegorical: the cabin in ruins, the riverboat beached, the postures of the individuals indolent and

ungraceful. However, though Husch is conscious of the clear and intentional contrast between

Beard’s and Bingham’s portrayals of (essentially) identical topics, neither his study nor any other

addresses the concrete musical information both images reveal.

I have already alluded to the fascinating, yet previously little-remarked musical information of

the Bingham [slide]—particularly the portrayal of the fiddler playing Appalachian/Renaissance-

style down on the chest, and of the man playing percussion, in the fashion of the Irish bodhrán

100 years [slide] before that instrument is conventionally understood to have entered the dance

music tradition—and will instead focus here upon the layers of allusion in Beard’s rendition of

the white musician and black dancer.38 The interaction of fiddle and percussive hard-shoe dance,

the location of this impromptu performance on the roof of an idle flatboat, are themselves of

course reminiscent of the Bingham, and for that matter also recall imagery of like dancing in the

36 Husch, 20; Rash cites negative initial reaction to GCB’s Jolly Flatboatmen (1846); note that this shifted in St Louis by 1847, and that “Boatmen Dance” was sung in celebration.37 Husch, 28.

38 A solid argument can be made for a Caribbean origin to Bingham’s portrayal of bodhran-style technique, but such is beyond the scope of the present essay.

East (most notably the image “Dancing for Eels 1820 Catharine Wharf” previously cited,

analyzed by Walter Lhamon in his Raising Cain, and troped extensively [slide]).

Riverine and maritime cultures were both comparatively classless and relatively integrated:

demographic research has confirmed that working-class neighborhoods, crews, and professions

in the riverine and harbor cities assimilated black and white, native and immigrant (especially

Irish) populations in the shared quest for a living wage. My own research has confirmed that

conditions similarly conducive to the blackface synthesis existed throughout both eastern and

western contexts: from the whaling communities of Long Island Sound to the tent cities of the

northern and southern canal works to the crews of sailors and longshoremen working coastal and

deepwater ships and ports. What Beard’s 1846 painting confirms is that the same conducive

conditions which have been documented in biographical, musicological, and archival evidence

on the Western frontiers are also to be discovered in art works by period painters with direct,

participatory experience of those conditions. Beard had worked those boats and river-landings;

like the anonymous draftsman of “Dancing for Eels” and, like Bingham and Mount, whose work

is better-documented by art history but equally neglected by musicology, his observation can be

trusted. What does that observation reveal?

In addition [slide] to a lounging hunter with two dogs (one curled up sleeping), and a chatting

horseman whose steed is attempted to crop the sparse turf, four rivermen are depicted upon their

beached boat: one lounging, head propped on his arm; another leaning with crossed-arms against

a ladder, and two others, engaged in musical exchange: a white fiddler and a black dancer.

As with the Bingham[slide], both musician and dancer are positioned on the wooden roof of a

flatboat’s cabin: a resonant surface (like the wooden wharf in “Dancing for Eels,” the barn floors

of Mount’s rural dancers [slide], or the half-doors or rainbarrels employed by Irish dance masters

[slide] for the same purpose) elevated for a plain view. As was common—and is clearly depicted

in works by both Mount and Bingham—the musician holds the fiddle down on his chest [slide],

a posture that impedes shifting but enhances both resonance and the ability to play fuller-textured

double- or triple-stops, and a technique perfectly suited to executing the simple, narrow-ranged

binary dance tunes of the Anglo-Celtic tradition.

Meanwhile, the black dancer, sleeves rolled up and shirt open, dances to the fiddle’s strains. As

Husch, points out, the very interaction—even the comparable elevation—of black dancer versus

white fiddler would have been perceived as threatening to East Coast establishments. But more

significant for our purposes—and perhaps a partial explanation for establishment critique—is the

implicit cultural exchange that is going on. Though we cannot know the specifics of the tune

being played—whether it is of Anglo-Celtic or African-American derivation, or perhaps already

reflects the crossover of tunes from one tradition to another—the visual evidence confirms white

music and black dance interacting. Analogous to Mount’s paintings of rural whites dancing to

the fiddle, but with elements of African-American body language in the physical choreography

—and in decided contrast to the idealized Highland fling danced by Bingham’s jolly flatboatman

—so here with Beard’s fiddler and dancer. The “bent knee” and “arms akimbo” of “Jump Jim

Crow” iconography [slide] are here translated from the minstrelsy prints—or more accurately,

reveal the existing practices which both prints, and minstrelsy tune-smiths, observed and

appropriated.

This brief survey of the existing evidence for a broader portrait of minstrelsy’s root contexts, one

that extends along the riverine and maritime waterways south to the Gulf and west past the

Mississippi, situates the works of both Henry Beard and George Caleb Bingham, like those of

William Sidney Mount, in a creolizing popular culture, and argues for those works’ relevance to

musicological investigation. Though Beard’s catalog contains far fewer portrayals of music-

making, and Bingham’s fewer and more idealized (but still iconic) examples, than does Mount’s,

the consistency of their biographies, backgrounds, political allegory, and topics; the commonality

of their experience with that of the first blackface popularizers; and the precision of their musical

reportage, suggest that works of this generation of antebellum vernacular painters, watching and

working on the wharves and waterfronts, present a rich, as yet largely-untapped, resource for

musicological investigation of the earliest, creole roots of American popular music.