I
Of all the varied and manifold kinds of theatrical entertainment
negro-minstrelsy is the only one which is absolutely native to these
States, and the only one which could not have come into existence
anywhere else in the civilized world. Here in America alone has the
transplanted African been brought into intimate contact with the
transplanted European. Other nations may have disputed our claim to the
invention of the steamboat and the telegraph, but negro-minstrelsy is as
indisputably due to American inventiveness as the telephone itself. Here
in the United States it had its humble beginnings; here it expanded and
flourished for many years; from here it was exported to Great Britain,
where it established itself for many seasons; from here it has made
sporadic excursions into France and into Germany; and here at last it
has fallen into a decline and a degeneracy and a decay which seem to
doom it to a speedy extinction. Its life was little longer than that
vouchsafed to man, threescore years and ten, for it was born in the
fifth decade of the nineteenth century, and in the second decade of the
twentieth it lingers superfluous on the stage, with none to do it
reverence.
Time was when the negro minstrels held possession of three or four
theaters in the single city of New York, and when a dozen or more troops
were traveling from town to town; and now they have long ago surrendered
their last hall in the metropolis, and only a solitary company winds its
lonely way from theater to theater thruout the United States. The few
surviving practitioners of the art are reduced to the presentation of
brief interludes in the all-devouring variety-shows, or to the
impersonation of sparse negro characters in occasional comedies. The
Skidmore Guards, who paraded so gaily at Harrigan and Hart's, are
disbanded now these many years; Johnny Wild of joyous memory is no more,
and Sweatnam, bereft of his fellows in sable drollery, is seen only in a
chance comedy like 'Excuse Me,' or the 'County Chairman.' George Christy
and Dan Emmett and Dan Bryant have gone and left only fading memories of
their breezy songs, their nimble dances, and their flippant quips. Edwin
Forrest and Edwin Booth blacked up more than once, Joseph Jefferson and
Barney Williams besmeared themselves with burnt cork on occasion; but it
is not by these darker episodes in their artistic careers that they are
now recalled, and the leading actors of to-day think scorn of
negro-minstrelsy--whenever they deign to give it a thought. And yet it
must be noted frankly that when The Lambs wanted to raise money for
their new club-house, they did not disdain the art of the negro
minstrel, and more than twoscore of them went forth to conquer,
willingly disguised in the uniform blackness assumed long ago by George
Christy and Dan Bryant.
It is to be hoped that some devoted historian will come forward before
it is too late and tell us the history of this very special form of
theatrical art, the only one indigenous to our soil. Indeed, now that
our American universities are paying attention to the drama, what more
alluring theme for the dissertation demanded of all candidates for the
doctorate of philosophy than an inquiry into the rise and fall of
negro-minstrelsy? In the late Laurence Hutton's conscientious and
entertaining volume on the 'Curiosities of the American Stage,' there is
a chapter in which the subject is treated historically, altho the
chronicler wasted much of his precious space in considering the
succession of sable characters in the regular drama--Shakspere's
Othello, Southerne's Oroonoko, Bickerstaff's Mungo, Boucicault's Pete
(in the 'Octoroon'), Uncle Tom, Topsy, Eliza, and their companions (in
the undying dramatization of Mrs. Stowe's story). These were all parts
in plays wherein white characters were prominent. The first performer of
a song-and-dance, that is of a sketch in which the darky performer was
sufficient unto himself, and was deprived of any support from persons of
another complexion, seems to have been "Jim Crow" Rice--the title of
whose lively lyric survives in the name bestowed upon the cars reserved
for colored folk on certain Southern railroads. Rice found his pattern
in an old negro who did a peculiar step after he had sung to a tune of
his own contriving:
Wheel about, turn about;
Do jus' so:
An' ebery time I turn about,
I jump Jim Crow.
Rice carried Jim Crow to England, and he made a specialty of dandy
darkies. But he was not the discoverer of negro-minstrelsy, as we know
it, altho he blazed the trail for it. Indeed, it was quite probably due
to the influence of Rice and his darky dandies that the negro minstrels
confined their efforts to the imitation of the town negro rather than of
the plantation negro, the field-hand of the Uncle Remus type. Rice first
impersonated Jim Crow in the late twenties, and it was in the middle of
the thirties that he went to England. And it was in the early forties
that Dan Emmett, Frank Brower, Billy Whitlock, and Dick Pelham happened
to meet by accident in a New York boarding-house, and amused themselves
with songs accompanied by the banjo, the tambourine, and the bones.
Pleased by the result of their exercises, they appeared together at a
benefit, and negro-minstrelsy was born. At first there was no
differentiation into Interlocutors and End-men; they all took an equal
share in the more or less improvised dialog; they sang, and they played,
and they danced the 'Essence of Old Virginny.'
Probably Emmett began early to provide new tunes for them. He was the
composer of 'Old Dan Tucker' and the 'Boatman's Dance,' of 'Walk Along,
John,' and 'Early in the Morning,' and one walk-around which he devised
in the late fifties for Bryant's Minstrels, 'Dixie,' was introduced by
Mrs. John Wood into a burlesque, which she was playing in New Orleans,
just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The sentiment and the tune
took the fancy of the ardent Louisianans, and they carried it with them
into the Confederate army, where it soon established itself as the
war-song of the South. And then when Richmond had fallen at last,
Lincoln ordered the bands of the victorious army to play 'Dixie,' with
the wise explanation that as we had captured the Southern capital, we
had also captured the Southern song. And 'Dixie,' which had begun life
so humbly as a walk-around in a minstrel-show in New York, bids fair to
survive indefinitely as the musical testimony to the fact that the cruel
war is over, and that these States are now one nation.