The Origin Story of Blackface Music

Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop 
W.T. Lhamon Jr., 1998, Harvard Uinversity Press 

Blackface minstrel music is the shameful ancestry of rock & roll music. I mean by this simply cultural mixing is elemental to rock & roll music, the Rock era, and cultural mixing in American popular music history, Black and white*, say the musicologists and historians, begins in popular blackface musical performance in the early 19th century. And a conundrum for me, as lifelong popular music geek, is I’ve always found blackface performance visually cringe-inducing at best, obviously offensive, even repulsive, something I avoid, but I love the sounds of cultural mixing in American popular music, a vital frisson in it that I crave and always have. 

For a prime example of my avoidance, I’ve yet to make it all the way through The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson’s famous iconic blackface movie from 1927, even if I still feel as an old pop music geezer like I’m supposed to. Haven’t been able to take sitting through the blackface performance for that long. I liked Nick Tosches’ book, Where Dead Voices Gather (2001), about obscure blackface minstrel performer Emmett Miller but was a little shocked by Miller’s CD cover when it arrived in my mail. My first thought: Wow, I can’t leave that out for just anybody to see! Blackface imagery is so flagrantly racist, an obviously degrading, clownish, mocking caricature of Blacks. It can take more relatively benign forms in Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemima, cartoony, cute branding forms, but don’t know that I’ve seen a live-action blackface image (even performed by a Black person!) that I didn’t find cringe-inducing and/or repulsive and wanted to avoid. 

 But, by contrast, blackface music, what I know admittedly limited, and the line between what actually is and isn’t blackface music is still blurry for me, I often like and that’s going way back to the source. One of the original blackface music hits from the 1830s, “Zip Coon,” later known as “Turkey in the Straw,” strikes me as undeniable, a fiddle-tune dance number so compelling you can’t hear it without wanting to skip and twirl around like a kid. It is a gold nugget of American popular music history as you'll ever find. In many parts of the country it has been near ubiquitously played by summer ice cream trucks forever, or until in the wake of the George Floyd protests it was canceled for its racist connotations. People complain about cancel culture and the woke mob taking things too far, few of which stories I ever find very convincing. Removing Confederate flags and statues, for examples, way past due by me. But canceling “Turkey in the Straw”?! That is really going too far!  

Or consider Bert Williams’ “Nobody,” his signature hit from 1905, an obvious inspiration to Spencer William’s standard in American popular song, “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” performed most famously by Louis Prima (1950s) and even later David Lee Roth (1980s). Williams and George Walker, African Americans, performed in West Coast minstrel shows in blackface as “Two Real Coons” at the turn of the 20th century. W.C. Fields once said of Williams, “The funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.” William’s “Nobody” registers unmistakably as a kind of protest to the derogative stereotypes of blackface performed in blackface: 

 “I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody

I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody, no time 

Until I get somethin’ from somebody sometime

I’ll never do nothin’ for nobody, no time” 

 So, again, I like some music performed in blackface. But I avoid Williams & Walker’s actual blackface imagery, which reminds me of Spike Lee’s insulting take on the sketch comedy show In Living Color in his 2000 film Bamboozled. For me, blackface imagery is cringe-inducing at best and something I generally avoid. 

Anyway, I know enough to know the history of blackface minstrel music and cultural mixing in American popular music is complicated and I’m curious about knowing more about it. Which brings us at last to the book at hand. 

 The thesis of W.T. Lhamon Jr’s Raising Cain (1998) is that before blackface was a weapon of white supremacist segregation and an odious cultural poison still at large today, in its actual historical origins in the 1830s and 1840s blackface minstrel performance was perhaps America’s first popular multicultural youth movement. It was generally disparaged by the old, as genuine youth movements usually are, was directly inspired by Black performed music and dance, and was much less a putdown and more a raucous sendup of “Jim Crow” as a wry, Black, cultural mixing everyman trickster hero.  

Lhamon tells the origin story of blackface minstrel music. Ground zero was the docks of NYC, Catherine Market, where southern slave culture and urban immigrant populations mingled, and where Blacks played music and danced for Eels, as advertised on local promotional posters (left). Music and dance performances, sometimes no more than a Black fiddler, a wooden box, and some dancers, begin drawing big crowds by the 1820s. Then in the 1830s local stage performers, from the Bowery, a nearby neighborhood with theaters that appealed to relatively poor working class immigrant populations, work up stage routines incorporating some of the Black performances popular at the Catherine Market; trying to match the energy of the Black performances on the docks, while adding their own ethnic proclivities, and comic and dramatic commentary in song. 

 Minstrel singer Thomas “Daddy” Rice performing in blackface at the Bowery Theater in NYC, near 5-Points, teeming with poor immigrants, German, Irish, etc, makes a hit out of “Jump Jim Crow” with sheet music and rowdy tours of other parts of the country between 1828 and the 1840s. 

 I’m not sure his Foucault and Wittgenstein quotes help much but Lhamon effectively makes the case for understanding Jim Crow in early minstrel music as a cross-culturally popular Black hero. Jim Crow is the scorned outsider, put upon, but clever, a crazy good dancer, and by luck and pluck makes lemonade out of lemons, or least always seems to escape disaster to party another day:

“I kneel to de buzzard, an, I bow to the crow;

An eb'ry time I weel about I jump jis so.”

 Jim is always Raisin’ Cain, always getting into mischief and trouble, but always finding ways to get by and thrive as a rustic pop/folk song gloss on the old Biblical story of Cain slaying his brother and being thrown out of his community. Jim is an underclass hero, a survivor, scorned by the segregationist authorities (see later Jim Crow laws) but immensely popular with young multicultural populations of Americans during the early minstrel music period of the 1830s and 1840s. 

 Anyway, it’s a good story and sounds credible enough to me. But tracing blackface performance from Jim Crow to Hiphop, the promise of the subtitle, which admittedly even on its face sounds like an impossibly epic task, is much sketchier in Lhamon’s account, leaving many gaps and questions. Like so how does Jim Crow our culturally mixing popular music hero of the 1830s and 1840s turn into the viciously racist Jim Crow segregation caricature of the latter 19th and 20th centuries? I don’t mean so much I doubt a connection exists but Lhamon really doesn’t offer much support or analysis bridging his original Jim Crow to Hiphop. It might have been curious, for instance, to have traced the Jim Crow trickster figure through Stagger Lee, Iceberg Slim, Shaft, Pimps, or other relevant Black archetypes up to, say, Tupac Shakur. Or maybe better to emphasize the continuity and attraction and vitality of Black music and dance-- trying not to be too rock snobby about this—by connecting the Black music and dance at the Catherin Market to James Brown over, I’m sorry, MC Hammer. (Not that there is anything wrong with Hammer time!) Or, for one more untapped possibility, why not connect the Catherine Market dance performances to Hiphop breakdancing. But none of this is to be found in this book. 

Nonetheless, Raisin’ Cain serves up some documented and deep literary analysis of the historical origin story of blackface minstrel music. Glad to know it. Racist insult, cultural appropriation, and exploitation riddle the story of American popular music history, without doubt. But this can be a broad-brush picture drawn by, understandably, the music industry’s victims and probably as well those who never liked the music much in the first place. Far more prevalent in the Rock era, and as evidenced in the origin story of blackface music performance in Raisin’ Cain, is not a denigration but a homage and/or celebration of the cultural mixing energy of Black music and dance performance. 

 *Really, a polyglot of African and European ethnic multicultural jambalaya caught up in this, so far, inescapable, intractable racist binary conflict in American history.