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CHAPTER THREE Jumping Jim Crow HANDY AS A TRAVELING MINSTREL MUSICIAN, 1896–1900 prosperity’s favorites MAHARA’S COLORED MINSTRELS 40—People—40 WANTED COLORED TALENT of all kinds Musicians for Band and Orchestra; also Good Amateurs address jack mahara, care winterburn printing company 160 south clark street chicago ill. —Advertisement for new employees by the Mahara brothers’ minstrel company The ‘Blues’ are ambiguous.” So a successful W. C. Handy would write in a 1919 article to the African American–owned newspaper the Chicago Defender, describing his new music as an admixture of remembered joy and pain. Handy at the time of this article would be more than a decade and a half removed from the young, gaudily dressed cornet player who had toured nationally in what he later recalled was “the genuine article, a real Negro minstrel show.” But despite Handy’s growing popularity in 1919 as a composer of blues music, his experiences of minstrelsy between 1896 and 1903 would leave their permanent marks on him. The musical stage routines of blackface entertainment were a precursor to the blues in their ambiguous emotions of pain and joy, which Handy experienced during his five seasons as a minstrel cornet player. When contemporary Americans think of black minstrelsy, if they think of it at all, they recall it as a nineteenth-century stage grotesquerie in which white actors, known as “Ethiopian delineators,” with their faces blackened with carbon from burnt wine corks, performed exaggerated dance steps and turns, and sang what they purported to be authentic African American folk songs. Foremost among early nineteenth-century whites who composed or performed for this antebellum minstrelsy were Stephen Foster, George Washington Dixon—who created the stage character of Zip Coon, an urbanized black dandy—and Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice, who first had popularized the routine that later was elaborated into the midnineteenth -century minstrel show. Rice, in blackface makeup, would energetically shuffle onstage dressed in colorful rags during the intermissions in “legitimate” theater of the 1830s, and then sing to the enthusiastic white audiences while making grotesque and frequently erotically suggestive contortions with his body: I jumps jis’ so / And ev’y time I turn about, I jump Jim Crow. There is “a curious lurch in the rhythm, that makes it stick in your mind whether you want it there or not,” a twentieth-century scholar of popular music, John Strausbaugh, wrote of the singing and dancing by this white actor, whom Strausbaugh considers to have become the nineteenth century’s version of Elvis Presley. In fact, Daddy Rice’s black-inflected verses and outré dancing were, like Presley’s, an early international pop phenomenon. Rice eventually performed in the 1830s to sold-out London crowds at the Surrey Theatre. In America, other stage entrepreneurs such as E. P. Christy added new songs, comic stage patter, instrumental solos, and group dances, all performed in blackface, and by the 1850s, the uniquely American minstrel show was an established popular entertainment. Rice claimed to have copied the halting but antic dance steps of “Jump Jim Crow” from an African American he had observed who was dancing and working, in his various accounts, either at a stable Jumping Jim Crow 53 in Louisville, Kentucky (in which case the black dancer probably would have been a slave), or across the Ohio River on the streets of Cincinnati (in which case the black dancer would have been legally a freedman). Yet what was billed as the “Ethiopian Mobility” of Rice’s leg-and-hip-twisting dance moves was probably the only authentically African American influence upon his performance. Black folk music was neither adapted nor outright appropriated until almost the end of minstrelsy. The 1832 score of “Jim Crow: A Comic Song Sung by Mr. Rice,” copyrighted in Baltimore, most resembles “an Irish folk song and English stage song,” in the opinions of musical scholars. So too do the later tunes of antebellum minstrelsy, such as “My Long Blue Tail” and “Coal Black Rose.” Despite the stagy African American dialect of the show’s song lyrics and comedy routines , minstrelsy tunes until almost the end of the nineteenth century exhibited none of the techniques that European visitors to the antebellum South had noticed as unique to the folk songs of the African American slaves—an improvised variation in rhythmic accent and a keening-like use of minor notes. (An exception were the minstrelsy scores written by Rice’s friend the gifted Stephen Foster , most noticeably in the...

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