The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy

Notes

Notes Chapter 1. Recovering the Creole Synthesis 1. Dixon’s birthdate is contested, but Cockrell has it as 1801; see Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96 n9. 2. Cockrell, Demons of Disorder; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); William Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). For an extended discussion of blackface scholarship, seen the appendix. 3. Edward P. Buffet, “William Sidney Mount: A Biography. The Story of Old Time Life in Brookhaven North Told Through His Pictures, as published by Mr. Buffet in the Port Jefferson Times from December 1, 1912, to June 12, 1924,” typescript in the collection of the Long Island Museum of American Art, History, and Carriages, 93, emphasis added. Buffet also transcribes a good first-person description of Mount sketching cider making from life (57). 4. Buffet, “William Sidney Mount,” 157. 5. Ibid., 167 and 168. 6. See Kevin M. Scott, “Rituals of Race: Mount, Melville, and antebellum America ,” PhD diss., Purdue University, 2004, for examples of this sort of analysis. 7. Reproduced in Lhamon, Raising Cain, 23. 8. See Scott, “Rituals of Race”; also Alfred Frankenstein, Painter of Rural America: William Sidney Mount, 1807–1868 (Washington: H. K. Press, 1968); also Karen M. Adams, “The Black Image in the Paintings of William Sidney Mount,” American Art Journal 7/2 (November 1975): 42–59; Frederick C. Moffatt, “Barnburning and Hunkerism: William Sidney Mount’s Power of Music,” Winterthur Portfolio 29/1 (spring 1994): 19–42; Lucretia H. Giese, “James Goodwyn Clonney (1812–1867): American Genre Painter,” American Art Journal 11/4 (October 1979): 4–31. 9. Mount’s name does appear once in the index of Cockrell’s Demons of Disorder and once in that of Lhamon’s Raising Cain. 10. As Cook says, “Our sensitivity to the inequities of power should not prevent us from acknowledging that this was . . . a dynamic cultural space shaped by a wide range of historical agents.” James Cook, “Dancing Across the Color Line,” Common-Place 4/1 (October 2003): 2. 236 notes to chapter 1 11. But see the notable exception, discussed in chapter 4, of Robert Carlin, The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy (New York: McFarland, 2007). 12. For a technical definition of liminality, and some of its first applications in the analysis of cultural performance, see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), 128. 13. See Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 31–36; also Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 33; also Shane White, “Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley,” Journal of American Folklore 102/403 (January–March 1989): 70. 14. Shane White, “‘It Was a Proud Day’: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834,” Journal of American History 81/1 (June 1994): 19, 21. 15. For “signifyin,’” see Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988); for the original locution “double consciousness”—the requirement that oppressed populations adopt multiple personae and experiential perspectives in order to survive exploitative situations —see W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Forgotten Books, 1965), 4. For modern applications to the topic of this book, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 126. 16. An invaluable resource in productively complicating the nature of blackwhite exchange is Roger D. Abrahams’s seminal Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Penguin, 1994), which examines a context—the slave-era South—in which the imbalance of power was still greater, but in which cultural exchange likewise flowed in both directions. 17. On the various evidence in current scholarship, see Paul F. Wells, “Fiddling as an Avenue of Black-White Musical Interchange,” Black Music Research Journal 23/1–2 (spring–autumn 2003): 135–47; Chris Goertzen, “Fiddle Tunes and the Historic-Geographic Method,” Ethnomusicology 29/3 (autumn 1985): 448–73; Chris Goertzen and Alan Jabbour, “George P. Knauff’s Virginia Reels and Fiddling in the Antebellum South,” American Music 5/2 (summer...