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Acknowledgments The origins of this research arise from a combination of intuition and conversation: my intuition, as an American musician and long-time practitioner of both Anglo-Celtic and African American vernacular styles, that these immigrant musical traditions might share complex and tightly intertwined social histories. The conversation, on the other hand, took place on a hot day in July 1999 on the shaded porch of an antebellum tavern, built by slave masons, at the old river port of Weston, Missouri: talking with new friends and fellow roots musicians Roger Landes and Chipper Thompson about the Missouri River painter George Caleb Bingham and the New Yorker William Sidney Mount. My thanks go also to my root musicology teachers J. Peter Burkholder, the late Austin Caswell, Jeffrey Magee, Thomas Mathiesen, and the late George Buelow; and to the remarkable medieval music specialist Thomas Binkley, who located for me an experiential and analytical portal between old music and vernacular music. I am deeply grateful to these giants for their professional example and their personal friendship. I am grateful likewise to my undergraduate professors Robert Prins, Joseph Dyer, and Dianthe MyersSpencer , who opened for me the world of academic music scholarship, and to the staff of the inaugural class of the New School’s Freshman Year Program (1976–77), who first introduced me to the wider pleasures of scholarly inquiry. More distantly, I thank the authors George MacDonald Fraser, Mark Twain, David Halberstam, and Natalie Goldberg, for their shining example, and for teaching me that the very most riveting stories of all are rooted not in fiction but in history. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to be welcomed into the ranks of musicologists specializing in American vernaculars; special appreciation goes to my friends and rigorous discussants Paul Wells, Dale Cockrell, Jeff Todd Titon, and Scott DeVeaux. This book would likewise have been impossible without the superb work of those scholars who, with insight, rigor, and scholarly courage led the way to a reenvisioning of what blackface was and means: Hans Nathan, W. T. Lhamon Jr., Eric Lott, Dale Cockrell, William J. Mahar, Robert Carlin, and Robert Winans. I have also been inspired by many xvi acknowledgments other great writers on various genres of American music, whose work has been a constant source of emotional engagement and interpretive energy: Peter Guralnick, Lester Bangs, Michael Broyles, Richard Crawford, Elijah Wald, Robert Palmer, Eric von Schmidt, and Jim Rooney, among others. I here formally acknowledge and personally thank the several anonymous readers who read and commented in detailed and helpful fashion on the manuscript at several important stages. A special thank-you goes also to editor Laurie Matheson of the University of Illinois Press, who has been a calm, supportive, and insightful respondent and sounding board since we first spoke of Mount and blackface minstrelsy. I would also here thank Deborah Oliver for rigorous, sensitive copyediting and Susan Cohen for her expert indexing. Most centrally among archives and libraries, I thank the staff, board, docents , archivists, and volunteers of the Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages: Eva Greguski, Christa Zaros, and their other colleagues. Appreciation likewise goes to the staff and resources of the NewYork Historical Society and to the staff of the Texas Tech University (TTU) interlibrary loan division. The Texas Tech Libraries provided a Gloria Lyerla Research Travel Grant for work with the Mount archive at the Long Island Museum in 2007. I thank the provost and regents of Texas Tech University for a faculty development leave in fall 2007, during which much of the archival work for this book was completed. Among colleagues and contemporaries, I thank my boss William Ballenger (director), and my colleagues Wayne Hobbs, Thomas Cimarusti, Angela Mariani, and Stacey Jocoy, of the TTU School of Music; I likewise thank my seminar members and research assistants at TTU, most notably Brian Place, Sarai Hughes Brinker, and Shannon Crenshaw. Special thanks go to the irreplaceable and indefatigable Abi Rhoades, administrative coordinator for the TTU Vernacular Music Center, who largely ran the VMC during those periods when W. S. Mount too fully claimed my attention. For support of the most practical and neighborly sort, I thank the owners, management, and baristas of independent coffee roasters J&B Coffee, of Lubbock , Texas, who provided literally years of congenial, creative, and liberating space to work. I also thank my root performance teachers Larry Baeder, Dean Magraw, and the great David N. Baker—towering giants all—and my brothers and sisters...

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