This is the Sound of Irony: Music, Politics and Popular Culture

Katherine L. Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317010531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

The use of irony in music is just beginning to be defined and critiqued, although it has been used, implied and decried by composers, performers, listeners and critics for centuries. Irony in popular music is especially worthy of study because it is pervasive, even fundamental to the music, the business of making music and the politics of messaging. Contributors to this collection address a variety of musical ironies found in the 'notes themselves, ' in the text or subtext, and through performance, reception and criticism. The chapters explore the linkages between irony and the comic, the tragic, the remembered, the forgotten, the co-opted, and the resistant. From the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, through America, Europe and Asia, this provocative range of ironies course through issues of race, religion, class, the political left and right, country, punk, hip hop, folk, rock, easy listening, opera and the technologies that make possible our pop music experience. This interdisciplinary volume creates new methodologies and applies existing theories of irony to musical works that have made a cultural or political impact through the use of this most multifaceted of devices.

Chapter 1
The Meat in a Humbug Sandwich: The Irony of Want in California Gold Rush Music

Meredith Eliassen

Sharp irony thrived within minstrel songs that entertained hard-working miners during the California gold rush (1848–1855) in a demanding, hazardous environment that inspired a dream but offered real prosperity to few. Wandering from camp to camp in the Sierras during the boom and in urban centers in its waning, Mart Taylor (1824–1894) traveled with his “Original Company” whistling popular minstrel tunes and then embellishing them with his own words. The former tavern owner with a gift for rhymed improvisation came out West as a strolling player in 1853 or 1854 and earned his keep by performing music for the working class at a time when a national third party called the “Know Nothings” held sway in California.¹ When the amenable showman announced his company’s arrival, beating a drum, the miners gathered to hear new songs and see a local girl, Charlotte “Lotta” Crabtree (1847–1924), dance jigs. Taylor’s savvy act launched the career of this American comedic superstar as he wielded a sword of righteous incongruity about the harsh realities of life in the mining camps, communicated with trendy music that cut through the romanticized malarkey found in minstrel music of the era.²

Amidst a recently pristine, breathtakingly beautiful and abundant land, the belief in want became the most toxic contagion in the camps and cities that bent men to plunder the earth and each other. Taylor’s role as an ironist was intentional. Immersed in a working man’s world in remote mining camps, he appeared to be detached from the miner’s inherent economic and cultural prejudices when in fact he was deeply enmeshed in the cultures of both. His physical style was direct—Taylor altered his appearance only to destabilize stereotypes relating to miners of color—while his poetic style was fashionable in the Victorian tradition of literary embellishment; his vivid verses punctuated with the slang of the day deconstructed established hierarchies. Taylor’s transient audiences seemed to accept the implicit difference between his situational irony (the capacity to discern deliberate contrasts between implicit meanings based on explicit shared values) and the vulgarity (crudeness that offended propriety) so often exhibited by other performers. City-dwelling humbugs were the “victims” of his ironic jabs; Taylor, along with his audiences—the long-suffering, ever-toiling miners in the boondocks—condemned their greed by accepting his rough rhetorical aesthetic of irony culled from newspapers and present in the camps.

Although seemingly transient, provincial, and possibly embodying dissimulation in the remote mining camps, Taylor demonstrated musically how anybody could be the meat in somebody’s sandwich by describing a variety of situations in which men plundered others for profit—consuming everything they had. Taylor dedicated his first anthology of songs, The Gold Digger’s Song Book (1856), to his audience—the “Miners of California.”³ In this collection he included a song called “California Humbugs” which captured the essence of ordinary men caught in boom-time entrapments. This chapter will consider ironies embedded in Taylor’s performance style and lyrics, demonstrating the cultural milieu of gold-rush camps and the irony of want embedded in miners’ daily experiences of living in abject poverty even as they extracted abundant wealth from the earth.

Miners carried Taylor’s ephemeral lyrics in their pockets and saddlebags. “California Humbugs” lingered within the collective consciousness just long enough to enter folk-music repertoires. The collection featured fashionable call-and-response songs and Chinese melodies utilizing the popular pentatonic scale. Taylor also crafted clever puns and embellished well-known tunes by Stephen Foster (1826–1864) and Daniel Decatur “Dan” Emmett (1815–1904) with contrafactum, appropriating the hopes and struggles of his particular audience. Minstrel music, carrying political messages to working-class communities, was the vector for spreading gold fever to Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The genre’s great international success during the gold rush was in fact tied to the fates of those very communities.

As the world’s jettisoned poor flooded into California seeking quick riches, they surveyed each other and found that their similarities—despite racial, cultural, and religious diversity—outweighed their differences. They all wanted economic prosperity. Taylor’s lyrics differed from stereotypical minstrel parodies in part because he personalized his rhetoric to suit small, educated and politically engaged African-American communities found in the urban areas of San Francisco and Sacramento, who most likely would not attend his performances but would hear about them from black miners.⁴ Taylor exploited minstrel music’s popularity and inherent prejudices to toy with miners’ perceptions and undermine their perceived oppressors, the California humbugs.⁵

Even before he opened his mouth to perform, Taylor non-verbally advertised his affinity with ethnic “others” in the mining camps.⁶ So tall and imposing that he often had to crouch during indoor performances, Taylor would dress in the Chinese tradition and wear a long single braid down his back to sing his signature song about the plight of Chinese miners in the camps.⁷ Exploitation, corruption, deception, and contemporary political nonsense provided rich fodder for Taylor to ply white male audiences with mindless tunes revamped with his edgy words.

As the gold boom ebbed, Taylor’s primary audience moved from the rural camps to urban areas. Taylor soon followed and adapted his rhetoric to interject dissenting sarcasm with a second anthology of songs called Local Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems (1858). In his preface, Taylor demarcated a local lexicon of seasoned sarcasm understood by urban audiences that included more self-deprecation; he sold himself by claiming not to be any good at what he did best, asserting, “The Local Lyrics contained in this volume, although sung by myself at the Melodeon and Lyceum in San Francisco, as well to the only tune I ever knew, and in a style I have never heard recommended … ”⁸ Through irony, Taylor set up his audiences to address their pervasive double-dealing and double-crossing by employing double entendre. Here, Taylor’s form of irony suggests a double audience: the first hears but does not comprehend the bite of the double meaning because he is perhaps too much of a humbug. The second hears and is aware of the ironist’s double meaning more because he hears it within Taylor’s cultural construct of the miner as “other” (or enlightened common man) justified in toiling in the humbug’s world in order to seek a fortune for the family back home.

Humbug is certainly the go,

It seems to me surprising

That some new humbug every day

Some one is advertising;

’Tis sadly true, I’ll prove to you,

La bagatelle is courted,

The greater now the humbug is

The better it is supported.⁹

Webster defines a humbug as “a person who usually willfully deceives or misleads others as to his true condition, qualities, or attitudes … ” or “something empty of sense or meaning: drivel, nonsense.”¹⁰ Here, humbug means double-dealers of worthless products taking advantage of would-be gamblers. As the pun in the last line asserts: the greater the humbug, the more elaborate his support mechanisms become. Poker was more than the “credit game” described in the verse below; it was analogous to humbug tactics designed to ensnare, entrap, and addict miners—poker’s strategies of “tight” (conservative betting) and “loose” (risk-taking) could be applied respectively to politics and finance in San Francisco. The player (whether cheating or honest) utilized a poker bluff (a wagered bet with a losing hand) to predict the level of his opponent’s aversion to risk and bets to take the pot regardless of the quality of his hand. The humbug’s game depended on having miners surrender hard-earned wealth—for la bagatelle, or small trifles—and thus, the humbug entangled the working man in an economic interdependence in which the player (the miner) always lost to the (humbug) house.

A humbug could come in many guises: the shop-owner, the landlord, and politician, even the seemingly innocuous immigrant. The Daily Alta California on November 11, 1851 chronicled an exotic female humbug offering temptation in exchange for gold dust, advertising “a number of valuable Chinese curiosities which caused a crowd … which necessarily causes a row, so that the neighborhood is [sic] disturbed.” When Chinese sex icon Madame Ah Toy (1829–1928) set up “house” across from the post office in San Francisco, miners picking up their mail were enticed to see her “curiosities,” or private parts, to compare with those of American women. The tall and beautiful Ah Toy was likely advertising the more expensive services of prostitutes under her control, “courting” the miners so that she might be “better supported.”¹¹ The plethora of humbuggery was reflected everywhere through inflated prices, cheap merchandise, jerry-rigged services, and certain risky entertainments—all subjects rife for a song-wordsmith. Taylor loaded lyrics with meaning—even verbal doodles used like improvised scatting in jazz.¹² But he was also a humbug of sorts, selling deceptively simple rhymes to earn his keep.

The credit game is quite played out,

And landlords don’t feel able,¹³

In these hard times, to have a lot

Of “dead heads” at the table,

But bless my stars, we needn’t starve,

If we are but half-witted

We’ve got “free lunches” through the town,

Where dead heads are admitted.¹⁴

Here, Taylor commented on the lure of gambling establishments offering free spreads of oysters and crab to hungry miners with gold dust to spill at the tables. It could be argued that the ever-toiling gold producers needed to blow off steam on weekends so that they could continue harsh production processes during the week. But how could working men with gold dust in their pockets be “dead heads”? The phrase referred to debtors who did not honor credit arrangements, the most dire form of want.

The ladies, I am glad to say,

God bless their lovely features,

Cannot with much consistency,

Be called humbuging [sic] creatures,

For any girl’s a fortune now,

And worthy our caresses,

For if you are deceived in her,

She’ll make it up in dresses.¹⁵

In the absence of good women, men were easily seduced by their counterfeits—prostitutes who had the same outward body parts as wives but ingrained cultural mindsets that were diametrically different. “Ladies” did not overtly appear in Taylor’s spectrum of humbuggery (apart from exceptions like Madam Toy); when a respectable woman entered a public gathering place, vulgar language and raucous behavior immediately ceased. Although many families were reunited when wives and children made it out West, divorce rates skyrocketed which clogged the legislature and courts. Communities established clinics to care for wives infected with sexually transmitted diseases from wayward husbands, and, in order to attend services on Sundays, churchgoing families navigated bustling “red light” districts where prostitutes openly advertised their wares.¹⁶ On May 25, 1855 the California legislature attempted to curb more dangerous and obnoxious entertainments, including cock, be...