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

Preface

Preface The creolization in the title of this book connotes a process of cultural exchange identifiable in many aspects of antebellum life. In the earlynineteenth -century United States, this exchange was particularly rich and particularly visible in the expressive arts; most specifically, in the sounding and bodily performance genres of participatory Anglo-African music-and-dance. While black-white exchange has long been recognized as a major element in shaping North American vernacular music, the extent, geographic distribution , breadth of time span, diversity, and terminus post quem of that exchange have sometimes been misunderstood. Minstrelsy, conventionally understood since the 1840s as a significantly new synthesis of vernacular forms, was in fact not the inception but rather the culmination of an exchange, rooted in the combination of culture-crossing vernacular idioms that significantly predate the first theatrical blackface performances. The Afro-Caribbean elements whose entry into Anglo-American musicand -dance made both blackface minstrelsy and the creole synthesis possible in the United States can be identified not only in textual descriptions or music notations, but also through reconstruction of performances and in the body vocabularies depicted in a range of iconography. The paintings and drawings of William Sidney Mount, the eponymous focus of this book, present particularly rich, detailed, and reliable portrayals of instrumental music making and dance, and as a result provide particularly solid and comprehensive evidence for the presence of the creole synthesis among the African American and Anglo-Celtic populations he represented. But Mount’s evidence, especially considered in light of parallels between his life experience and those of his musician and artist contemporaries, also confirms the presence of the creole synthesis beyond his own localities of Long Island and of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Contemporaneous demographics , iconography, biography, and other data reveal that analogous conditions , conducive to the creole synthesis, existed in riverine and maritime contexts all over the early-nineteenth-century United States. Evidence for such conditions can be identified from New York, Albany, and Boston in the North; Charleston and Savannah in the Southeast; Cincinnati and Louisville x preface on the frontiers; Mobile, Natchez, and New Orleans on the Gulf Coast; and out into several islands of the West Atlantic and the Caribbean. Therefore, in order to fully understand both the musicological significance of Mount’s own works, and of what those works reveal about the Afro-Celtic creole synthesis across the wider realms of U.S. music, it is necessary to situate Mount in a nuanced and overlapping combination of cultural-historical contexts. The musicological scholarship on blackface minstrelsy is rich but has typically focused on one or another subset of primary-source evidence—most commonly, on either period descriptions or printed sheet music. Conversely, while blackface iconography and antebellum vernacular painting have been widely studied, these studies have tended to employ analytical methods derived from semiotics or art history; as a result, the musicological implications of artworks have not been fully explored. This book argues that a cross-referencing of evidence—music notations, textual descriptions, iconography, and vernacular art, along with demographics and other primary sources—reveals an Anglo-African cultural exchange that was much wider, more ubiquitous, and more influential than even the specialist blackface scholarship has previously suggested. Such analysis suggests that the conditions for the creole synthesis existed across a wide geographical distribution from as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and thus far predate the moments or locations of origin conventionally attributed to minstrelsy. Seen in this light, nineteenth-century blackface becomes, not a radical new invention, but rather the codification and theatricalization of a cluster of working-class performance idioms that were already familiar from the boundary zones of streets, wharves, decks, and fairgrounds. Recognizing the wider conditions and distribution of the earliest roots of the creole synthesis conversely helps us situate Mount in a wider range of immediate contexts and experiences than have previously been attributed to him: for example, while he died in 1867, his artistic, musical, and political consciousnesses were formed in a postrevolutionary cultural environment strongly influenced by Dutch, English, Scottish, and Afro-Caribbean musical elements. Similarly, Mount’s early manhood in the 1820s made him a witness to the historical moments at which the creole synthesis began to move from streets, decks, and wharves to theatrical stages. In terms of geography, the conditions that brought about the creole synthesis in riverine and maritime environments across the Caribbean and West Atlantic were mirrored in Mount’s home regions of Long Island and Manhattan...