Music, Muscle, and Masterful Arts

Black and Indigenous Performers of the Circus Age

Sakina M. Hughes

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781469676272, 9781469676265
• eBook ISBN: 9781469676289
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Before the heyday of the Chitlin Circuit and the Harlem Renaissance, African American performing artists and creative entrepreneurs—sometimes called Black Bohemians—seized their limited freedoms and gained both fame and fortune with their work in a white-dominated marketplace. These Black performers plied their trade in circuses, blues tents, and Wild West Shows with Native Americans. The era’s traveling entertainments often promoted the “disappearing Indian” myth and promoted racial hierarchies with Black and Native people at the bottom. But in a racial economy rooted in settler-colonialism and legacies of enslavement, Black and Indigenous performers found that otherness could be a job qualification. Whether as artists or manual laborers, these workers rejected marginalization by traveling the world, making a solid living off their talents, and building platforms for political and social critique.  Eventually, America’s popular entertainment industry could not survive without Black and Native Americans’ creative labor. As audiences came to eagerly anticipate their genius, these performers paved the way for greater social, economic, and cultural autonomy.

Sakina M. Hughes provides a conceptually rich work revealing memorable individuals—laborers, artists, and entrepreneurs—who, faced with danger and discrimination, created surprising opportunities to showcase their talents and gain fame, wealth, and mobility.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. A Circus World: 1870s–1920s America
• Chapter Two. For Good Treatment, Equal Justice, and Sure Salary, Give Me the Circus: Black Musicians Reinvent the Circus from the Inside Out
• Chapter Three. His Skin Is Dark, but He Will Come Out on Top … or Know the Reason Why: Black Labor in and out of the Tent
• Chapter Four. But Simply a Man Normal in His Environment: Indigenous Americans, Wild West Shows, and Taking on the Vanishing Race Narrative
• Chapter Five. Hidden in Plain View: The Circus Towns of Columbus, Ohio, and Peru, Indiana
• Conclusion. The Big Black Boom: Black Art on an International Stage
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index