26. The Everlasting Minstrel Show

© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.

[OPENING THEME - transition to "Philadelphia Minstrels" music]

On January 5th, 1929, Emmett Welch’s Famous Minstrels played their last show in Philadelphia, at the theater on the northwest corner of 9th and Arch Street. . “The season closes Saturday night” read a small newspaper ad in the bottom corner of that day’s Philadelphia Inquirer. It was a surprisingly tiny announcement for the usually brash and enthusiastic Welch’s Minstrels, almost as if they merely were going through the motions of publicity, discouraged at the demise of their company, and this was their last feeble attempt at drawing some final holiday season theatergoers. Two weeks earlier, before Christmas Day 1928, at least, their ads had been a bit more prominent. “LAST WEEK of a Famous Philadelphia Institution!” they proclaimed. “DON’T MISS the last performances - Old and young patrons of minstrelsy invited to attend!” There would be a comedy skit called “No Wedding for Me”, and  there would be a melodious revue of 12 minutes of syncopated music, as well as numerous songs and stories. The whole evening would conclude with the ‘laughable afterpiece entitled The Voo-Doo Doctor, or The Fortune Teller.” There was even a special midnight show to ring in the New Year of 1929, but then five days later, at the end of the week, the final permanent resident blackface minstrel troupe in Philadelphia put its banjos, tambourines, and burnt cork away for the last time. It was the end of an era in the Quaker city’s entertainment landscape, one that had lasted almost uninterrupted for 85 years.

Hello and welcome back to Adventures in Theater History. Today we have a very important topic about Philadelphia theater to discuss. It’s perhaps the most consequential topic we’ve ever taken on, in terms of both its historical context and its long term effects on the society, culture, and politics of Philadelphia. But it’s definitely not one that the city is the proudest of, or that it goes out of its way to commemorate, anymore.

Over the course of this first season of the podcast, we’ve already examined many examples of white performers in Philadelphia circuses and on its stages portraying people of other races and ethnicities - Ricketts Circus had clowns portraying Blacks and Polynesians, the New Theatre on Chestnut Street did shows about Pocohontas or ones that were set in Turkish harems with orientalist blackface marching bands - not to mention all the British and American tragic actors doing Shakespeare’s Othello and Aaron the Moor in blackface over the years. And most tellingly, the theater managers of early 19th Century Philadelphia were not at all shy about booking solo acts ‘delineating’ social and racial types that the actors had “scientifically studied”. Everything from Western Mountain Men in coonskin hats, to British Aristocrats, to New England Yankees, to crude portrayals of urban African-American dandies - a character usually called ‘Zip Coon’ that had already been the subject of a well-known series of racist prints in a book called Life in Philadelphia. These latter solo performers were usually known as “Ethiopian” or “Negro Delineators,” by the way. That was the way they signaled that it was a white person pretending to be Black. African American performers themselves were called “Colored” or "bona fide" Blacks. I tell you this just to make clear the nomenclature of the day. Of course the word “darky” was thrown around quite a lot in the nineteenth century, and much much worse terminology was right out there in the open, too. You know what I’m talking about - but I’m not going there, I promise you.

We also discussed in an episode about Edwin Forrest how avenues of advancement in theater that were opening up for ambitious and talented young American white men - such as Philadelphia’s well-known star - were not open at all for his Black contemporaries elsewhere in America, such as Ira Aldridge. Aldridge, after a brief apprenticeship with the short-lived African Grove Theatre in New York City, left America as a young man and spent the entire rest of his career in Europe, having learned a hard lesson that he was not able to even think about performing on American stages. Not that his career in Europe was without difficulties, but at least it was possible.

The enslavement and disenfranchisement of millions of human beings in the supposedly free and democratic American republic were among the increasingly burning issues of the day, though a decidedly small number of white people supported both the abolition of slavery and the voting rights for women. On January 1, 1831, in Boston Massachusetts, the editor William Lloyd Garrison published his first issue of the anti-slavery and pro-women’s rights newspaper, The Liberator. Anti-Slavery societies began to be formed in many cities in America, including Philadelphia, along the lines of those that were successfully working to abolish the institution of slavery in the British Empire. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1833, by Philadelphia women, both white and Black, of the city.

Amongst many white working class men of northeastern American cities, however, this seemed less like a possibility of liberation from an unfortunate legacy, and more like a threat. There was a feeling that a cultural ‘elite’, as the expression is often used these days, was working to undermine their economic opportunities and social prerogatives. In August of 1831, Nat Turner’s brief slave rebellion had broken out in Virginia, and in the horrific violence and repression that followed, many free Black people had fled the South and had moved to Philadelphia, where there was already a long-established African American community for them to join. But still many white Philadelphians found the influx alarming. The black community in the city had a significant degree of social stratification - with many middle class and even quite well-off families, but the overwhelming majority of Black Philadelphians were working class. As Philadelphia's growing economic industrialization continued as the century went on, there was increasing competition between white working class and black laborers, who shared many of the same neighborhoods and workplaces. Ugly anti-black riots broke out in the neighborhood south of the city in 1834, over a dispute about a carousel on the corner of Seventh and South Streets. One man was killed, many other people were assaulted and beaten and an African Presbyterian Church was looted and burned to the ground.

Two years previously, in 1832, had been the first performance on a Philadelphia stage by Thomas Rice, the delineator of the infamous singing and dancing “Jim Crow” character. Already a massive hit in New York and elsewhere, on July 25th he did a highly successful run at the Walnut Street Theatre. It was such a big deal that by the next month he was playing at the more prestigious Chestnut Street Theatre stage. and he drew a great return at the box office. Only the arrival in town of Fanny Kemble and her father that autumn were able to finally drag people's attention away. But his stage career, unlike hers, continued to last - in 1835, you could find Rice again on the Chestnut Street stage, performing on the same evening as a full production of Othello, interestingly.  

As the 1830s ended, economic depression and widespread unemployment struck many American industries, including the theater industry - We’ve examined how many American actors and performers, outside of the few major stars, found it really difficult to make a steady and profitable living. All across the nation, issues about fair wages, slavery, immigration and race were hot-button issues. The stage was set for the next big development of American entertainment: the minstrel show.

[MUSIC UNDER]

Minstrel shows, in fact, were to rule American show business for most of the 19th Century. But what do we mean exactly by a minstrel show? I don’t just mean black-face performances or other aspects of racist appropriation and caricature - although that’s certainly a major part of it. By the term ‘minstrel show’ I’m specifically referring to the type of fast-paced variety performance that arose in America starting in the early 1840s and perfected in the 1850s. 

Typically, as a minstrel show began, a line of a dozen or so men entered and paraded to a semi-circular row of chairs placed across the stage. All or most of them are dressed in a caricature of African-Americans. The performers' faces, ears, and necks were covered in dark makeup, their heads were adorned with unruly black wigs. Their mouths had either a thick red or white band around the lips. They wore white gloves and brightly colored clothes that had exaggerated lapels and large buttons. They carried musical instruments; banjos, fiddles, tambourines and bone castanets. Sometimes there was an additional orchestra of musicians and a chorus grouped on the stage behind them. 

“Gentlemen, be seated” said the authority figure in the center of the line, and they all would park themselves on their chairs, though they don’t stay there for long. From that point on, almost anything could happen - a series of fast paced-banter and jokes were passed between the two ‘end men’ to the left and right of the stage, usually called Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, who acted as the principal comedians. Mr. Interlocutor in the center, attempted to keep them under control, but Bones and Tambo were continually breaking free to sing songs, tell topical jokes, do monologues and quick skits - always using a highly contrived “Negro dialect’ - an absurd  parody of African American speech patterns. [MUSIC]

Soon a deeply sentimental song about missing home and mother was performed by a sweet-voiced tenor in the group, and everyone wiped away a tear. [MUSIC CHANGE]

But then the tempo of the music picked up again. The group of men in the chairs sometimes sat formally, as if they were giving a concert, but at other times they moved rhythmically, danced in their seats, or left them to do tap dances and soft shoe numbers. At the end of this section there was usually a ‘walk around’ in which the group would circle round the stage, while each man got a quick solo in which they did their signature dance move or joke.

In the second part of the show, there was an ‘olio’ or variety section, during which a curtain was lowered across the proscenium, while solo performers did special turns, usually including a ‘stump speech’ - an extended sermon, political oration, or pseudo-scientific lesson by a black-faced performer, employing numerous malapropisms and easily-spotted grammatical mistakes. Sometimes a ‘wench’, a man clownishly dressed up as a woman in bloomers and carrying a parasol, would deliver a comedic diatribe against women’s rights.

The olio curtain was then brought up for the final part of the show, usually involving a melodrama set on a plantation or an elaborate burlesque of a formal play, like Shakespeare or the opera. Sometimes this section had nothing in particular to do with racial humor, but usually it did. Anyway, the overall message of the entire show was that the rural South, the plantation, and NOT the city, was the natural home of Black people - the place where they really belonged. And like in the songs ‘Oh, Susanna’, or ‘Dixie’, which often appeared in this section, that was where they sang that they really wanted to be. The show ended with a grand chorus and an ecstatic ‘break down’ in which the most energetic and popular songs were played to engage the audience. The final curtain (often decorated with advertising, with an image of a blackface minstrel on it) came down, and the audience was encouraged to come back again soon, as there would be new songs, new material, and even more fun the next time around.

 [MUSIC OUT]

Now, not that long ago, anywhere in America, that description I just gave would have been totally unnecessary. Everybody knew what a minstrel show was. Everybody had been to them, or participated in them. Everybody. Now I’m perfectly aware that minstrel shows and many more insidious aspects of what is termed ‘minstrelsy’ have hardly disappeared, not at all. But in our present historical era minstrelsy is generally, and rightly, regarded as so highly offensive and racist as to need specific content warnings whenever it is discussed in places such as classrooms . .  and podcasts.

Let me be clear at this point that I do not intend to share much specific content from minstrel shows that is racist or offensive in nature. Since this is blessedly an aural medium, I can’t share any of the images, engravings and photos that usually accompany printed articles or online discussions of the topic. But I’m not even going to quote any lyrics or play recordings of offensive minstrel dialect songs. I’ll put a few things on the website, in the interests of historical documentation, but I have no interest in bringing out the worst stuff once again. They’re easy to find, if you want to look for them. I’m just not going to add to the appallingly huge pile. 

But believe me, it's out there. You don’t even have to look very hard. For example, if you’re a fan of old Hollywood movies and musicals, like I am, and in the evenings you tend to watch certain cable channels that feature classic films, well, you usually don’t have to wait too long before a minstrel show pops up, and Fred Astaire or Judy Garland or Eddie Cantor are dancing in front of you, in full blackface minstrel regalia, looking so pleased and so very very happy with themselves. At this point I usually sink down into my chair in writhing agony and I’m reaching for the fast forward button on my remote. But I can’t deny what I was seeing. That was the truth of the matter. It was there, it happened, and as shameful as it was it would be even more shameful to ignore it.

Indeed, you can say that in a very real way that for a hundred years minstrel shows were American show business - they were the foundation of the popular music industry, they were the place where popular dance forms were developed and showcased, and they were where the Broadway musical theater, as a commercial enterprise, got its real start. Minstrel shows were an entry point for people, especially working class people, of all races, to find their way into show business. To completely exhaust the topic would require a podcast episode that was decades long. There’s plenty of scholarship about it. In fact it’s one of the most-explored topics in academic theater history research, so I’m not revealing any secret or obscure information here.

So how can I best approach it, in about an hour’s time? Well, a real historical service that I think I can provide is to discuss minstrel shows specifically mostly as they occurred in the city of Philadelphia, and how the world of minstrelsy interacted and existed within the context of theater and performance in the city. That’s actually something that hasn’t really been treated that deeply or specifically, but there are a few notable exceptions. And as we explore this topic and travel into the very deep and tangled and contested ground of Philadelphia history, we will bring a few eminent scholars and their books along with us. I’m very grateful for their expert advice. There are many authors and studies worth mentioning actually, and as we do every time, I will list them all at the end of this episode’s blog post on our website, AITHpodcast.com - the link is in the show notes. 

Having gathered our guides with us, let us now proceed to the narrative. What was the story of minstrel shows in Philadelphia, from the earliest days of its theater history, down to the present day? How did minstrel shows fit into the context of the rest of the Philadelphia theater world? How did they begin, and why did they end – or if they didn’t really end, where did they go?

[18:52 - MUSIC - "Old Dan Tucker" ]

The first actual minstrel troupe, it is generally agreed, was The Virginia Minstrels, four white men performing in blackface - Dan Emmet, Billy Whitlock, Frank Brower, and Dick Pelham - who first gave shows at New York City theaters, hotels and circuses in  December of 1842 and January of 1843. Their act was high-powered and raucous, with constant music, jokes and dancing. The ‘Virginia’ in their name was meant to represent a certain ‘genteel’ type of enslaved person, and the “Minstrel’ was a reference to several European four-part harmony singing groups that had been touring America using the word “minstrels” in their name, like say, the Tyrolese Minstrels. And in the personas of the Virginia Minstrels there was also a pointed rebuke to the Hutuchison Family Singers, a famous singing group of its day that advocated Christian values like, you know, not owning people. But unlike them the Virginia Minstrels did not proselytize for womens’ rights or abolition of slavery. Instead, the Virginia Minstrels gleefully lampooned these sentiments. And in songs like ‘Old Dan Tucker’ and ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’, their lyrics advocated the idea that enslaved people were actually rather fine with their lot, as long as they were having a good time. The fact that minstrel shows are structured more like concerts than plays is not a coincidence. Minstrel men soon found that they could earn more as concert-givers than mere stock company actors - much more. In the midst of a generally depressed economy, this was  a sudden gold mine for formerly marginal clowns and musicians. Immediately audiences were flocking to hear and see them, and by the spring time they were already touring as stars and headliners to other American cities.

By March 16 1843, the Virginia Minstrels were playing at a small Philadelphia venue called, significantly, The People’s Theatre on Arch Street. By April, one of their early imitators, “The Kentucky Minstrels” took the next step up the ladder, and were performing at the Arch Street Theatre, giving ‘a variety of breakdowns, jigs, songs etc.” These new minstrels were welcomed as being good for any flagging box office by other theater professionals, we can easily see. They were quickly accepted as part of the Philadelphia theatrical world. On October 25, 1843, a new formation of the Virginia Minstrels were at the Walnut Street Theatre, on the very same bill with the respected classical actor George Vandenhoff. In fact, the announcement of their show in the Evening Ledger was right below one for Edwin Forrest, who was doing Metamora at the National Theatre, and above one for his great rival, Charles Macready, who was doing Hamlet at the Chestnut Street Theatre! Three days later, both Forrest was doing the play Richelieu at the National, while Macready was doing the SAME PLAY at the Chestnut - with Charlotte Cushman in the role of Julie de Mortemar. Meanwhile a few blocks away at the Walnut, the Virginia Minstrels were doing their act as well as an “Ethiopian Operetta” called Oh, Hush! By November of 1843, they were playing the National on Chestnut, just down the street from where Macready and Cushman were doing Macbeth. By 1849, a group of minstrels called the New Orleans Serenaders Operatic Troupe were giving a burlesque concert at the stately Musical Fund Hall on Locust Street. Songwriter Nelson Kneass shared the strains of his new tunes “I Hear the Hoofs”, “Rosa Clare” and “Nelly Was a Lady”. More ominously, he and the others also performed a song entitled “Go Way Black Man”.

There is hardly a popular tune written in the middle of the nineteenth century that didn’t get first introduced in or was integrated into a minstrel show. Not only those you might easily spot like ‘Dixie’, or ‘Camptown Races’, or ‘Blue-tail Fly’, but also “The Yellow Rose of Texas”, “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and  - I’m sorry to report - that dear old Christmas standard: "Jingle Bells." These tunes were destined to work themselves deep into our consciousness. Even today, you probably know lots of minstrel tunes yourself. Just think about all the songs you learned in summer camps or elementary school chorus. You know, like “Buffalo Gals, Won't you Come out Tonight?’ If you think a song you know is a ‘traditional folk melody’ just Google it or look it up on Wikipedia. It’s likely a minstrel tune. 

By the way, what you might learn is that a previous title of “Buffalo Gals” was “Philadelphia Gals.” In a time of . . fuzzy . . copyright laws, the music, lyrics, and antics associated with minstrel shows were always being passed along, re-written and re-adapted to suit the occasion and the audience. So there’s seldom a definite copyright or origin to any of them. Minstrel troupes themselves, with their flexible programmes, were famous for forming and reforming into new groups and professional arrangements. Within a few years, the original Virignina Minstrels had broken up, following a tour of England, but dozens of new groups, including the famous Christy’s Minstrels, were ready to take their place.
 
Edwin Pearce Christy had been born and raised in Philadelphia, from a family of Irish background. Indeed, as has been noted by many scholars, it was Irish-Americans and Irish immigrants who formed the large majority of early minstrel show performers, bringing their jigs and reels and sentimental song styles, along with a dash of their supposed ‘observations’ of authentic Southern plantation life. Though in truth most of the minstrels, like Christy, were from the cities of the North and had never been south of the Mason-Dixon line. But they often lived in quite close proximity with urban Blacks, and their clownish parodies of Black vernacular speech patterns, dress and dancing styles were freely lifted from their neighbors.

E.P. Christy had left Philadelphia as a young man and gone to Buffalo, however, and his early career in minstrelsy was spent in upstate New York. By 1846 he had moved his troupe to New York City, and started incorporating into his show the songs of his friend Stephen Foster, including ‘Oh, Susanna’ and ‘Old Folks at Home’. It was Christy who had refined the minstrel show into the format we described at the opening of the episode, the line up of eight to twelve men in a semicircle of chairs, and the three act structure. Most importantly, he had learned that if your minstrel show was good enough, you did not have to tour. He was the one who set up along Broadway in New York City, where he played shows almost nonstop, three times a day. It was a highly lucrative business. In a very real way, the American minstrel show was the beginning of the Broadway musical. He had even started to franchise his operations, sending troupes to other American cities. Which is why in 1855 a group of Christy’s Minstrels started performing at Wood’s Museum, right next door to “Old Drury,” the Chestnut Street Theatre.

But by then Philadelphia already had its own permanent minstrel company, at Sanford’s Opera House. Its leader, Sam S. Sanford, took over a former dancing academy in a commercial building on 12th Street just below Chestnut. He grandly decorated the exterior with bright gas lights, and a statue of a seated minstrel hanging out of an upper window, holding a huge flag that proclaimed SANFORD’S OPERA HOUSE to all passersby. The troupe specialized in burlesques of high culture events, from operas like La Sonnambula to touring concert singers like Jenny Lind, to the visiting Ronzani’s Grand Ballet Company at the Academy of Music. They thrived at the 12th Street location for a few months, gamely changing their act almost every week, until an unfortunate fire in December of 1853 drove them out. Undeterred, Sanford took over the “Old Drury,” the Chestnut Street Theatre and did shows there - invading the former seat of high culture in the city. By 1855, as the Chestnut Street Theatre was demolished, Sanford purchased a former Presbyterian Church on the west side of Eleventh and Ludlow Streets, just south of Market St., which had already been converted into a stage. By 1857 it too was called Sanford’s Opera House - though when he lost control of it due to some financial speculation, Sanford went and built another opera house on Arch and Second Street, which would in turn be destroyed in a fire in 1871. 

In the 1850s and 60s the minstrel show reached its absolute peak as a way to spread music, dancing, and social commentary in Philadelphia. Having spent a lot of time in both digital and physical archives of Philadelphia theater history recently, I can tell you that the amount of documentation is almost overwhelming. The collections of the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Library Company, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, local university collections - everywhere you look, minstrels. Pages and pages of posters, ads, sheet music, memoirs, photos, and other memorabilia. Dozens and dozens of companies either formed in Philadelphia, or passed through on tours. 

But let’s return to that small minstrel theater on Eleventh Street. This  establishment would become the longtime home of a succession of resident Philadelphia minstrel companies for the next five decades. For a long time it was run by two men, Carncross & Dixey, who catered to the crowds of Philadelphians who continued to flock to see blackface minstrel shows throughout the 1870s and 80s. Every theatrical season the Carncross minstrels returned with new sketches, new songs, new burlesques - but always in the old time blackface minstrel format. And their white audiences, by all accounts, loved them. There was a certain sort of childish glee in contemporary descriptions when people wrote down how they felt about going to a minstrel show. Laughter, joy, and innocent fun are the words you see the most often. Invigorating and healthful, even! An advertising poster from the 1870s shows a sickly and emaciated group of people going in the front door of the Eleventh Street Opera House, and then emerging afterwards, healthy, happy and rounded. “Laugh and Grow Fat!” was the tagline of many minstrel shows of the era.

Frank Dumont took over the company in the 1890s. A native of Utica, NY, Frank Dumont had been a member of various touring minstrel shows since he was a young man. He was ready to settle down into a longtime gig in Philadelphia.

Dumont was enthusiastic in continuing loyalty and advocacy for the minstrel show format. His 1899 How-To book for aspiring minstrel show performers (both male and female) called The Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia had been a big seller for M. Witmark and Sons. The publishers even advertised in the back of the book their own branded tambourines, bones, and jars of burnt cork makeup.

By that time minstrel shows were fading as professional entertainment in America, but staid old Philadelphia, famously comfortable and set in its ways of doing things, stubbornly held on to its minstrel companies much longer than other American cities. Dumont kept on creating new shows every year, hiring new company members as needed, and writing new material. He authored a popular afterpiece that became a play entitled "A Parlor Match".  He claimed to have introduced the popular songs "Silver Threads Among the Gold", and "When You and I Were Young, Maggie" into his shows at the Eleventh Street Opera House, which by the turn of the century now bore a huge electric sign on its roof: Dumont’s Minstrels.

In 1911 this building, which by that point found itself in the heart of Philadelphia’s booming department store district, was finally torn down to become a Horn & Hardart’s automat. By then many many generations of Philadelphians had seen the shows there. In the 1920s, the graphic artist Frank Taylor, who lovingly and diligently made detailed renderings of almost every 19th century Philadelphia theater building, made a drawing of the old Eleventh Street Opera house, with Dumont’s sign adorning it. “Where Our Mothers and Fathers Laughed Their Troubles Away”, Taylor called the drawing. 

In fact, by the late 19th and early 20th Century there was quite a slew of sentimental articles and drawings and memoirs about the heyday of the minstrel show. “When you come to think of it,” wrote one newspaper reporter in 1914, “It is rather remarkable that we have had our old friends the minstrels with us for more than 60 years. They have weathered every innovation in theatricals; the decline and fall of the stock ventures, the advent of the traveling companies,  comic opera, vaudeville and now even moving pictures. And they are going on . . .night after night.” 

[TRANSITION MUSIC Buffalo Gals ]

But we’ve been leaving out a big part of the story. Were not Philadelphia’s substantial African-American population highly offended and disdainful of all this racial caricature and cultural appropriation? Especially in the years before the Civil War, when chattel slavery held millions of Black people in legal bondage, did they not object to what many have termed the commodification of Blackness itself? Even after Emancipation, when the struggle for full rights of citizenship for African Americans was often a violently burning issue on the streets of Philadelphia, were there not protesting in the streets outside all these minstrel shows?

Well, for most part, no. And as we shall discuss next there is considerable evidence that there were many Black performers working in the minstrel genre too, even quite early on. This much to the discomfort and distress of many others of the community, especially to the small but growing African-American intelligentsia. There was a good reason for this discomfort. From the very inception of slavery in America, the performances of dances and songs had been forced on Blacks by their enslavers, both as exercise and as a demonstration of their ‘happiness and fitness’ in the slave markets. The writer William Wells Brown even wrote of his own experience of leading his fellow enslaved people to create performances for prospective buyers in New Orleans. There has often been a deep distrust of being put on ‘display’ for the entertainment of whites ever since. And we can see that African-American journalists had great disdain for such “Ethiopian Delineators” such as Thomas Rice and his Jim Crow character.

But Black minstrels often performed for people of their own community too. In 1849, quite early in the history of minstrel shows, in upstate New York, the orator and journalist Frederick Douglass attended a performance by Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders, one of the first all-Black minstrel troupes. In spite of his distaste at minstrelsy’s racist tropes, Douglas decided to go to attend the show because of his “love of music” and “curiosity to see persons of color exaggerating the peculiarities of their race,” as he put it in his review that ran in his newspaper, The North Star, the following day. Much to Douglass’ initial dismay, he strongly felt that the group  “exaggerated the exaggeration of our enemies” and “catered to the lower elements of the baser sort.”

But then Douglass reflected on the political potential of black performance in harsh realities of the America of that time, writing: “It is something gained, when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even in this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race.” 

In other words, as the Philadelphia born and raised cultural historian Alain Locke put it: the process was one in which whites had begun by imitating Blacks, and then was picked up by Blacks imitating whites imitating Blacks. And in this cultural exchange, some mutual respect might be gained.

There was much to respect, after all. The 19th Century African American musicologist James Monroe Trotter, who after reluctantly attending the performance of a Black minstrel troupe in 1878, marveled at the excellent musicianship and deep musical education of many of the performers. In fact many Black writers and historians of the day insisted that what made minstrels music and dancing so inherently compelling was in fact the very things that it had gathered from African and African-American culture.  

In Philadelphia itself, William Henry Dorsey, the official custodian of the American Negro Historical Society, seemed very interested in the local appearances of professional Black minstrel companies, along with classical music concerts, church socials, and plays, and pasted many programs of minstrel shows he had seen and newspaper articles about them in his voluminous scrapbooks. I was privileged to look through a microfilmed copy of those Dorsey scrapbooks, thanks to the kindness of the librarians at Cheyney University. In them there seemed to be a general ease on Dorsey’s part about ethnic humor and cross-cultural impersonation in the late 19th Century. He even proudly noted in his own handwriting on a playbill for Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado, that had been staged at Fox’s American Theatre in 1879, that all the cast had been “colored people of Philadelphia” - who were playing Japanese people, as burlesqued by white people. 

For the Black performers themselves, who before the Civil War had not been allowed opportunities in large symphony orchestras or theater ensembles, this new genre of show business was seen as a chance for economic advancement and the chance to travel - one in which they naturally felt they could do better than the white men who were ‘blacking up’ and crudely imitating them. Every group mocked every other group back then. In minstrel shows, instead of just being mocked, Black could get a chance to make the rest of America listen to the real thing, as it were.

[38:37 - MUSIC UNDER “Listen to the Mockingbird”]

In Philadelphia, we know that there were groups of Black men, like the ones that Frederick Douglass saw, that organized themselves into occasional minstrel troupes from quite early on, and who even wrote their own songs for the genre. Because, after all, minstrel shows were the biggest venue in which popular songs got performed in this era. There was money to be made there, if you could manage it. True, most early black minstrel groups did not last long, not being able to command easy funding to keep their groups going, like their white counterparts.

Richard Milburn, for example, was a Philadelphia African American barber, known as Whistling Dick,” who cut hair in his father's shop on Lombard Street. He played the guitar in shows when he performed for audiences, and whistled tunes to his customers while he worked his regular gig. You likely know his most famous tune "Listen to the Mockingbird", which by the way, we’re listening to right now. The song was arranged and printed by a white Philadelphia musician and publisher named Septimus Winner. Winner credited Milburn on the original sheet music, but later sold the rights, and unfortunately Milburn’s name was dropped from subsequent printings. Under the pseudonym “Alice Hawthorne”, Septimus Winner also apparently wrote and published the songs known as “Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone”, “Ten Little Injuns” and “Carry me Back to Tennessee”. Both white and Black performers would make free use of these compositions over the years. “Listen to the Mockingbird”, in particular, became a favorite of country music fiddlers, who usually interpolate a section of bird imitations into the song, exactly as “Whistling Dick” Milburn had once done. [MUSIC OUT]

Most notably, during the Civil War, in June of 1863, we have an odd account by a white reporter in the theatrical trade publication The New York Clipper. The article describes a show by a group of Black performers calling themselves as “The Ira Aldridge Troupe’, named in tribute to the famous actor, gave a show in Franklin Hall in Philadelphia. Franklin Hall in those days was a large civic meeting place on Sixth street below Arch, but other scholars say this particular show took place at a different Franklin Hall, in the Fifth Ward of South Philadelphia.

By this account the Ira Aldridge Troupe seems to have been thrown together just for the occasion, and all the advertised instrumentalists in its orchestra had not shown up except for a couple of fiddlers and a cello player. The audience was a mixture of both black and white people, with a delegation from the Weccacoe Volunteer Fire Company in attendance. Male and female singers performed, including the popular ballad “When This Cruel War is Over,” sung by a Miss Burton - which she did in a straightforward conventional style the first time through, but then in an encore she did a more demonstrative “Camp Meeting breakdown”. Some of the troupe did acrobatic tricks involving poles and knives, while others did a farcical skit called “The Irishman and the Stranger” in which one performer did a fair version of an Irish dialect with a costume that used soda crackers as buttons - a decided payback to all the white Irishmen playing black men with wooly haired wigs and burnt cork on their faces.

The middle part of the show was a burlesque on a famous play. I am somewhat amazed to report that the play being parodied was a show already well-known to listeners of this podcast: Metamora, Edwin Forrest’s play about the rebellion of Wampanoags in 17th Century Massachusetts. This parody was called “Red Man of the Forest, or The Oath”. And the Black actor playing the principal Red Man reportedly got a huge laugh from the mixed-race audience when he shouted the line “I am Maneokee - let the pale face beware!”. There was then another display of acrobatics, and the final part of the show was a farce, about a tailor, entitled Jeremiah Backstitch. The white reporter from The Clipper allowed that the entire show was all done very well, and that he felt some white minstrel performers could benefit from seeing real Black performers on the stage. Despite some descriptions of this performance by other scholars and authors as a ‘minstrel show’, however, I can see no indication that the Ira Aldridge Minstrels did any material in either red, white or blackface, and at no point do they seem to have employed the traditional line-up. They had no comic end men or Interlocutor. And it’s important to note that both men and women performed in this show, which was not standard practice in white minstrel shows. Still and all, this article is a fascinating glimpse into the world of Philadelphia working class entertainment, in an era when such things were rarely even mentioned in the major newspapers of the day.

It was after the American Civil War, of course, that professional black performers really became involved in America’s minstrel shows, using the by now standard minstrel format - but giving it their own particular twist in the musical stylings and dances and jokes. Troupes of Black men crisscrossed the country, usually being described as “Georgia Minstrels,” or “Callender's Minstrels” after a particularly famous group. Riding on the popularity of another entertainment phenomenon of the day, the Fisk University “Jubilee” Singers, many black minstrel troupes began adding gospel material and explicitly religious songs to their shows, which had never before been part of the genre. Furthermore, the military experience of black men in the Union Army was put to use, and black minstrel troupes often featured precision marching bands with spectacular drill steps, who offered to compete head to head with any white band in the towns they visited. Most importantly, by the end of the 19th Century, it was Black composers and performers - many of them with long experience of performing in minstrel shows - who would eventually bring the energy and rhythms of African-American dance and music into the formation of the 20th Century American musical.

I have to share at this point the story of James A. Bland, the well-known African American songwriter and performer, who had a life story that was closely tied to Philadelphia.

Bland is still today famous in Philly for composing the song "Oh Dem Golden Slippers", which has become the theme song of the annual Mummers Parade. Bland was born in Flushing, New York, into a middle class family. His father, Allan Bland, was one of the first African-American college graduates, who also obtained a law degree from Howard University and eventually became an Examiner in the United States Patent Office.

But his son's particular talents led him in a different direction in life. When "Jimmy" Bland was 12 years old, the family was living in Philadelphia, at the corner of 5th and South Streets. It was on South Street that he first became fascinated with  music. One day, the story goes, he heard an older Black man in the neighborhood playing the banjo and singing traditional spirituals and folk songs. Jimmy quickly built himself his own banjo from scraps and learned to play it, but the makeshift instrument was destroyed in a fight with a local bully. He was naturally heartbroken, so his father bought him an eight-dollar banjo at a store to make up for the loss- quite an investment at the time.

Later, Allan Bland might have had cause to regret encouraging his son's musical talents. When the family moved to Washington DC, James Bland was soon playing on the streets and writing his own songs. He was even earning money by joining local minstrel shows whose companies were made up of "authentic" Negro Minstrels - an increasing trend in American show business. He enrolled in Howard University, but was forced to leave because his involvement in theatrical shows violated the code of conduct for the school.

James Bland was soon launched on a theater and music career that would take him around the world. He first joined the "Original Black Diamonds" minstrel troupe in Boston in 1875, but by 1878 he had joined the much larger group Sprague's Georgia Minstrels. Already he had composed the song that would become the most well-known: "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny."

In 1880 Bland had joined an even more successful troupe, Haverly's Genuine Colored Minstrels, whose company included two of the most famous performers of their day, Sam Lucas and Billy Kersands. The show included an act in which two rival African-American marching bands would enter from opposite sides of the stage, and then merge and blend their music and dancing.

In December of 1880, Haverly's Minstrels, with Bland in their ranks, played the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. By then the trend for ever-larger companies of minstrels troupes had reached such a point that the advertising boasted that there were hundreds of performers on the stage, including 20 "end men," 20 "song and dance" men, 3 "Interlocutors", a brass band of 20 musicians and a chorus of 200 voices. It was billed as a "Colossal Christmas Carnival" and included scenic effects of a ”Moving Flatboat and Steamboat.” James A. Bland was likely one of the Interlocutors at the Academy for those shows - literally a central role, who stood in the middle of the 'line' and directed the action. And of course the show features many of his songs and compositions.

In the 1880s and 90s, Bland left for Europe with a touring company, and stayed abroad for a long time. He achieved such personal success and acclaim that eventually he even was able to stop performing in blackface.  He composed over six hundred songs, including "Hand Me Down My Walking Cane" and "In the Evening by the Moonlight" - as well as "Oh Dem (or Them) Golden Slippers". He even played for Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. (These two British royals were quite fond of minstrel acts, by the way. Looking over the literature on this subject, there’s hardly a famous American minstrel who didn’t at some time perform for Vicky and her son Bertie. Really those two must have had a booking agent on constant lookout or something)

James A. Bland, known as "The World's Greatest Minstrel Man", earned a lot of money in his heyday, but unfortunately like his fellow 19th Century songwriter, Stephen Foster, he never kept much of it. He was a poor manager of his own material, and sold the rights to most of his songs to publishers for a pittance. All the money he made was soon spent or otherwise lost.

By the early 20th century, with the minstrel boom dying away, he returned to America. He eventually chose Philadelphia for a home, likely because of its large Black community - and also because it was one of the few cities that still had several permanent minstrel troupes performing regularly. In fact, he seems to have worked with Dumont's Minstrel company, by then performing on 9th and Arch Street.

And it was the longtime manager of that company, Frank Dumont, who evidently introduced Bland's song "Golden Slippers" into the Mummers Parade. Dumont was an enthusiastic Mummer in the early days of the parade in the early days of it, and it is possible that James Bland even marched with Dumont's 'fancy club' in both the 1909 and 1910 New Year's Day parades, dressed as a Spanish-American war veteran.

[MUSIC UNDER - "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" - sung by Marian Anderson,]

But by that point in time Bland was quite ill with tuberculosis. He died in 1911 in abject poverty. His friends tried to raise $25 to have him properly buried, but could only come up with $6. He must have had a falling out with Dumont, because the minstrel show producer did not step in to help. To save him from the anonymity of a potter's field, a sympathetic funeral director finally secured him an unmarked plot at Merion Memorial Park in Bala Cynwyd, just outside the city limits of Philadelphia. In the 1930s, African American fraternal groups raised money, and placed an appropriate marker on the grave.

So we’re almost back where we began, with Frank Dumont and his minstrels on Arch Street. Frank Dumont was in his early seventies by the spring of 1919, had been ill for several months, but he was insisting on overseeing the new St. Patrick's Day show.  On March 17th, standing by the front door of the theater, the old time minstrel man suddenly collapsed. His longtime business manager Howard Evans sat him down on a chair in the tiny box office. But Dumont died, five minutes later.

But, you know, there’s no business like show business. Evidently no one judged a dead man in the lobby as a reason to cancel the non-stop minstrel merriment at Dumont’s. According to the story in the newspaper the next day, "The death of the venerable minstrel did not interfere with the programme. The performances were given as usual, although for several hours his body lay in the building."

After his passing, Dumont’s company was combined with a minstrel troupe from Atlantic City, led by Emmet Welch. Welch’s Minstrels apparently kept finding a loyal audience among Philadephians for the rest of the decade in their bandbox of a theater, at 9th and Arch. But soon you didn’t need to go to live theater to see the shows of these small-time Philadelphia minstrels, by then mostly old hands at the game in their late middle age. By 1927, through the new invention of sound movies, you could see and hear Al Jolson, on the big screen, in The Jazz Singer! So in January 1929, when Welch’s gave their last show, those old guys knew it was time to pack it in, long after most other American cities had already done so.

It isn’t like the minstrels went away - instead they went everywhere - they had live radio shows on local Philadelphia stations and national networks, and there were many many many amateur shows by fraternal organizations, (both white and black) university sororities, church groups (again, both white and black) that when they wanted to have a party and raise some money, well heck put on a minstrel show. A simple internet search for the term ‘minstrel show’ on any newspaper database will bring up literally thousands of hits. Let’s pick out two of them. In 1932 we can see that the radio station WIP, 610 on the AM dial, “Philadelphia’s Pioneer Voice” was presenting Charlie Stark’s Minstrels at 5:00 pm, describing them as “A genuine, old fashioned minstrel show with end men, line men, and a real minstrel band.” And in June of 1935, we can note that the Philadelphia Tribune, the longtime African-American newspaper of the city, had a story about the Octavius V. Catto Lodge of the Elks Club, who were giving a Mardi Gras and Minstrel show to celebrate its 29th Anniversary.

We could go on, but there’s just so much. Minstrels were everywhere in America, they were all over Broadway shows and Hollywood movies up until the middle of the century. And certain aspects of things you would not think are the legacy of minstrels, like university fight songs, the format of country music’s Grand Ole Opry, and many many comedic skits on television, still showed the format’s continuing deep influence.

Beginning in the 1950s there was a developing consensus that at least white people performing in blackface was now unacceptable. Largely due to the concerted efforts of the NAACP, churches, social clubs, and other institutions were persuaded to stop fundraising with minstrel shows. In the 1960s, an attempt by a white fraternity at Temple University to hold a minstrel show at their frat house on campus was met with a substantial demonstration from Black community organization in North Philadelphia. There were pointed conversations within the Black community too. In 1978, a new play called The Last Minstrel Show, starring the actress Della Reese, played the New Locust Theatre, across the street from the Academy of Music where James Bland and Haverly’s Minstrels had appeared a century before. A show about a group of African American minstrels doing a final tour in the year 1926, it met with some interest from Black Philadelphia audiences of the time, but also some resistance from many others, who felt that this was a topic from history that did not need any further re-enactment. However, we might note that in the year 2012, the Kander and Ebb musical The Scottsboro Boys, which used a Brechtian minstrel show format to tell the story of a famous civil rights case from the 1930s, played at the Philadelphia Theatre Company on Broad Street and Lombard, to generally rapturous reviews. 

And as we learned two episodes ago, of course, the biggest ongoing inheritance of minstrelsy in Philadelphia was and is the Mummers Parade that marches right up Broad Street every year. Even though in 1963 the decision was even made by Philadelphia’s city government to ban blackface at the Mummers Parade, it is an inescapable fact that minstrel performance traditions are still there, deep in the DNA. All those big hats and shiny costumes and the cakewalk struts and the ‘string bands’ with all their banjos and their comic brigades . . . cultural practices and norms come from somewhere - they are exchanges between social groups, and they change and morph and evolve over time, as our ethical boundaries and moral tolerance  for certain performance traditions change. Whether you think that’s an inherently bad thing or an inherently fascinating thing, well, that’s up to you. But I’m always on the side of people knowing the deep and detailed history about any topic first, and then maybe we can make better decisions about where to go from here. 

I thank you all for your interest and kind attention, as I’ve done my best to bring some light on the subject, and craft some narrative order onto an enormous and unruly trove of available information. It’s been quite a journey, hasn’t it?

I’m Peter Schmitz. Our podcast’s theme music, as well as all the other sound engineering and sound effects, are created by Christopher Mark Colucci.

We’ll have lots of great new episodes coming up next month, and we urge you all to keep listening, keep sending us those supportive emails, keep posting reviews on iTunes and elsewhere about us, find us on Patreon, keep following our daily posts on Facebook and Twitter, and most of all, keep supporting your local theater companies, whether in Philadelphia or anywhere else you might be listening! Thank you and we’ll see you again real soon, on another Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia!

[CLOSING THEME MUSIC]

© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.