Minstrel Traditions

Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age

Kevin Byrne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000172577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age explores the place and influence of black racial impersonation in US society during a crucial and transitional time period. Minstrelsy was absorbed into mass-culture media that was either invented or reached widespread national prominence during this era: advertising campaigns, audio recordings, radio broadcasts, and film. Minstrel Traditions examines the methods through which minstrelsy's elements connected with the public and how these conventions reified the racism of the time.

This book explores blackface and minstrelsy through a series of overlapping case studies which illustrate the extent to which blackface thrived in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes and analyzes the last musical of black entertainer Bert Williams, the surprising live career of pancake icon Aunt Jemima, a flourishing amateur minstrel industry, blackface acts of African American vaudeville, and the black Broadway shows which brought new musical styles and dances to the American consciousness. All reflect, and sometimes incorporate, the mass-culture technologies of the time, either in their subject matter or method of distribution. Retrograde blackface seamlessly transitioned from live to mediated iterations of these cultural products, further pushing black stereotypes into the national consciousness.

The book project oscillates between two different types of performances: the live and the mediated. By focusing on how minstrelsy in the Jazz Age moved from live performance into mediatized technologies, the book adds to the intellectual and historical conversation regarding this pernicious, racist entertainment form. Jazz Age blackface helped normalize new media technologies and that technology extended minstrelsy's influence within US culture. Minstrel Traditions tracks minstrelsy's social impact over the course of two decades to examine how ideas of national identity employ racial nostalgias and fantasias. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in theatre studies, communication studies, race and media, and musical scholarship

1 The Materiality and Circulation of Blackface in the Jazz Age

In 1926, at the height of the Jazz Age, black journalist and novelist George Schuyler penned an acerbic essay for The Nation on the vogue of African American art, titled “The Negro-Art Hokum.” It dismisses racial categorization of any form as oppressive essentialization and theorizes that any work of art—be it music, poetry, or drama—is instead a product of nation, region, economics, or social forces. So caustic is Schuyler in this essay about the “hokum” of racialized artistic characteristics that he baldly asserts, “The Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon.”¹ This sentence is intended to shock, and shock it does. The connections between US race categories and blackface minstrelsy are clearly intentional, as Schuyler continues in the same paragraph to describe African American identity as a jumble of pop culture icons and entertainers, most stemming from minstrelsy, which he believes formulates a definition of blackness in the national consciousness. The list itself, and the fact that he has so much material to draw from, resonates throughout this book. He writes:

Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so “different” from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word “Negro” conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists.

The passage’s breezy yet snarky tone encapsulates a way of defining race construction that is very specific to the era and deserves careful annotation. The “composite stereotype” of African American identity combines real entertainers of sport and stage alongside fictional characters from print and advertising into an amalgam that simultaneously connotes laziness, servitude, and violence. These figures, who will appear throughout this project, each represent a different field of racial representation and impersonation in the US cultural landscape: Bert Williams, the most famous blackface comedian in US history; Jack Johnson, the boxer and sometime vaudevillian who won the heavyweight title in 1910 and was then prosecuted for dalliances with white women; Uncle Tom, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s icon of quiet black suffering, eternally represented on stage and film; Aunt Jemima, a mammy stereotype and pancake shill; and Florian Slappey, main character of Octavus Roy Cohen’s dialect-laden stories for the Saturday Evening Post. These people and caricatures, famous from the live stage to the market shelf, create a patchwork image of blackness for the dominant white society. These images and representations are combined, crucible-like, into a definition of Jazz Age blackness. Schuyler is annoyed, both that these are the representations of blackness and that race in general is such a defining category by which to gauge talent. He argues against attaching racial descriptives to specific art works or even performance categories such as jazz. For him, the essentializing of art generates division and perpetuates oppression. As he concludes his essay, “On this baseless premise, so flattering to the white mob, that the blackamoor is inferior and fundamentally different, is erected the postulate that he must needs be peculiar; and when he attempts to portray life through the medium of art, it must of necessity be a peculiar art.” For Schuyler, the categorization African American is fundamentally a racist one. And, as much as I disagree with Schuyler for ignoring the positive aspects of black self-identity, he raises important considerations for the Twenties and Thirties. He understands the ability of popular culture to create a social dialogue, as much as he decries the specific “monstrosities” that are then produced.

The Nation ran a response to “Negro-Art Hokum” a week later, in dialectical opposition to the stark social and economic focus espoused by Schuyler. Langston Hughes penned the essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Instead of Schuyler’s negative combination of race and art, Hughes is characteristically searching and generative in his rebuttal. Hughes finds in these social differences the basis of a different culture that defines African Americanness and creates a racial community. For him, there are both political and aesthetic reasons to label and celebrate someone as a black artist or a work as black art. Without specifically addressing Schuyler’s essay, he begins by disparaging the African American artist who rejects a racial identification and focuses instead on the unique perspective of the “low-down folks” to create ecstatic art. He notes that the “Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears.”² In this, and throughout, he elucidates a mixture of pain and joy endemic to an oppressed minority. He is, in no small way, portraying the black race and the African American artist as not only a citizen but an ideal citizen, for his or her ability to create art despite racism and belligerence. Not surprisingly for Hughes, jazz is the most visible and enthusiastic art form. “[J]azz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world… the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”³ The rhetoric contrasts starkly to Schuyler. The emphasis on the tom-tom drum of the black soul arrives perilously close to essentialism, which is nonetheless mitigated by an attention to social factors. Hughes also walks a line between celebrating the individual artistic genius and comprehending him through a communal lens of race. The central tension arises from the “folk” identity—a loaded term, starting at least with W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 Souls of Black Folk—and the black “near-intellectuals,” who for snobbish reasons reject these art forms. There is no hokum in the label “folk.” Nor, contra-Schuyler, could the white racial majority of the United States ever devise such art. These two essays, written at the apex of the Jazz Age, are fascinating counterpoints in the era-long discussion about race categorization: of black identity, of art and culture as expressive means of creating positive racial identity, and of a cultural stereotype to denigrate it. In his conclusion, Hughes combines feelings of communal and individual artistry to state that the positive identification with, and political utilization of, authentic black culture can overcome racist oppression. (Schuyler believes that dismissing any race categorization is more the solution.) Hughes writes, “We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.” The black artists discussed in this project articulate a similar push-and-pull tension as they conceptualize their own place in the national landscape.

Schuyler and Hughes have similar goals about overcoming racism, even if they have different concepts of race and different means of achieving parity among artists and groups. The sentiments by these two lionized literary figures echo the arguments happening among black intellectuals who were issuing their own artistic and political manifestoes; most famously, the divide between Du Bois and Alain Locke, patriarch of the New Negro movement. Although I want to acknowledge the sophisticated positions taken in both “Negro-Art Hokum” and “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the theories of race and black identity utilized in this study fall into neither camp. As will be articulated below, the concepts of race and culture unpack how blackface remains a core signifier in the construction of racism and the “composite stereotype” of blacks. These theories are focused on the materiality of race construction, which then influences the readability of raced bodies and the circulation of racial ideologies. This materialist methodology has obvious benefits for a blackface performance analysis. As reflections of the dialectic between Schuyler and Hughes, it allows for a significant discussion into the cultural totems of racist black impersonation, such as those in Schuyler’s parade of icons and celebrities. Yet, from Hughes, a materialist and embodied theory of black identity construction can then draw out the political and social aspects of racial self-actualization, as well as the more positive aspects of minority group identity and community formation. A syncretism of the two captures the complexity of racial ideology formation without essentializing race, as well as advancing elements of materialist cultural production uncommon to racial debates at the time.

As Schuyler recognized in his “composite stereotype” list, distorted representations of blackness in US culture were extensive. But he gives each entity and icon the same amount of prominence in dictating that racial identity. In examining some of the same figures—Williams and Aunt Jemima are each given chapters—this book also factors in necessary aspects of technology, mediatization, and circulation to the analysis of racial formation that shaped national beliefs around blackness. Undergirding the case studies discussed here and thrumming underneath each example is an understanding of the transference of the live and embodied blackface tradition into a mediatized form, which put into dialectical motion the opposites of live and mediated, black and white, tradition and nostalgia, and ersatz blackface and authentic blackness. In addition to Williams and Jemima, the cases covered here include amateur blackface performance, vaudeville productions, and black Broadway musicals. Some are in ascendance and some in decline during this era, although each incorporated blackface and minstrel connections into their performances and reacted to the new culture technologies that, by era’s end, had superseded them. By examining in detail how these images circulated and what messages they tried to convey, and by presenting them as simultaneous iterations of blackface performance, they represent the mutually supporting and totalizing web of race ideology that existed within the US in the Jazz Age. Blackface reached all areas of the country, into all social and economic classes, across all racial designations, and into all areas of both cultural production and the home. In the domestic sphere, for example, minstrelsy arrived through the radio, sheet music, phonograph recordings, and kitchen products. Some of the cases in the book directly respond to one another, but more so than not these various blackface iterations operate independently. Examining the full web of black racist ideology can best explain the “composite stereotype” of the times and how it deeply affected the African American social sphere. This project’s overall argument depends upon the intertwined dependencies of material blackface, culture technologies, and race ideology during this era, to articulate the possibilities and limitations for artists who used minstrelsy to entertain an audience. To make such an argument requires, first, an overview of this most American invention. I follow this history with a theoretical discussion needed to fully understand the social force of racial impersonation.

***

As a form of entertainment, the minstrel show could have been created only in the antebellum United States. It combined rural humor, working-class melodies, and a complex panorama of racial caricatures into a variety show of songs, jokes, and skits. Economically and culturally, the minstrel show dominated US theatre throughout the 19th century, influencing societal norms from music styles to basic racial understandings. The beginnings of the minstrel show and blackface caricature on the US stage is the starting point to this project, not to retread the ground covered by many worthy volumes of scholarship but rather because the content, structure, and design elements of the early show continued to be used by artists working in the Jazz Age. For 20th-century blackface entertainers, there is a dynamic tension between nostalgia and tradition. Groups and individuals made an effort to connect with this past—but whether to comfort the audience or to challenge it, is debatable.

Minstrelsy, a changing yet lasting phenomenon in US culture, adapted itself to any number of social, political, and economic fluctuations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The formal minstrel show originated in the performances of racial impersonation on the professional stage and in seasonal mummer parades of Northern urban areas.⁴ The minstrel show’s direct antecedent was the individual blackface entertainers who populated and then dominated the variety stage in the 1830s. The most famous “Ethiopian delineator” was Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice, whose Jim Crow persona immediately became a sensation first in the US and then beyond.⁵ The minstrel show, a full evening’s program devoted solely to the songs and antics of a group of ersatz black men, arose in the early 1840s. The phenomenal success of the Virginia Minstrels in 1843 spawned innumerable imitators, and for the rest of the century the minstrel show was a commanding form of entertainment, recognized nationally and internationally as an authentically American creation. The early shows established a model that survived into the 20th century. The minstrel show’s tripartite structure highlighted individual talents and group performance alike. In the opening section, called the walkaround, the actors entered together and arranged themselves in a semi-circle facing the audience. A white interlocutor, the only actor not in blackface, was ostensibly the master of ceremonies, but his authority was constantly undermined by the “endman” characters, traditionally named Tambo and Bones after their instruments of tambourine and percussion. The walkaround section balanced humorous dialogue of elaborate wordplay alongside songs both sentimental and comedic. The middle section, or olio (which means miscellany or hodge-podge), was a collection of short skits, solo songs, and stump speeches. A common and expected minstrel show facet, the stump speech featured a performer in blackface delivering a malaprop-laced tirade on current events or pressing national problems. Like much of the minstrel show, the seemingly straightforward comedy hid a real social anxiety while humorously undercutting the speaker’s a...