Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (review)

Behind The Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy And Antebellum American Popular Culture. By William J. Mahar. Music in American Life Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; 444 pp. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The publication of Behind the Burnt Cork Mask was long awaited by scholars who have thought, taught, and written about nineteenth-century American blackface minstrelsy. William J. Mahar's previous articles on the subject have been well-researched, meticulous in detail, and invaluable in their presentation of primary source material such as song sheets and playbills. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask does not disappoint in its continuation of Mahar's past scholarship. This time, however, Mahar's intent behind his thoroughness moves into the foreground. In his introduction, Mahar states that he has sought to bring an element of careful study to the field, "clarifying the role of the African and European American styles that entered mainstream pop culture [via minstrelsy], interrogat[ing] texts whose surface meanings are all too easily lost when their antebellum contexts are ignored," and examining what Mahar marks as "musical theatre" through the lens of a music historian (8). In other words, Mahar intends to revisit minstrelsy's history because some previous scholars were not as careful, meticulous, or exacting as they should have been. The minstrelsy scholarship battle lines drawn by Mahar are clear: on one side, non-music historians, and on the other, music historians. What these lines appear to designate is a division between historians who do their homework and those who do not.

Minstrelsy was an ever-changing, transdisciplinary form of entertainment, incorporating many styles of music, dance, oratory, and theatrics. Therefore, the epistemological framework for minstrelsy must be movable and flexible, given that the performance itself was extraordinarily mutable throughout its history. Why does minstrelsy matter? In short, the many legacies of minstrelsy--the music, the dances, and the use of gender and ethnic stereotypes to entertain and amuse--are still present in American musical theatre, television situation comedies, and various public spectacles. The specter of minstrelsy is wide-reaching and profound, and Mahar's book allows non-music historians to approach the music as well as the oratory, skits, farces, and afterpiece (but not the dance; that is another project) from a position of knowledge.

Behind the Burnt Cork Mask is divided into an introduction and five chapters based on conclusions supported by Mahar's extensive playbill research. The introduction is the space in which Mahar is his grumpiest with non-music scholars. But by chapter two, he leaves this fight behind and concentrates on the oratory of minstrelsy. The third chapter takes on minstrelsy's burlesquing of English and Italian opera, and the fourth chapter documents numerous skits, farces, and the afterpiece.

Chapters five and six deal with the performances of gender so key to the minstrels' success. One of Mahar's primary arguments is that minstrelsy reflected anxieties minstrels had about their own lives, as well as those of African Americans. He takes on the latent sexism of minstrelsy in chapter six, the last chapter, "Blackface Minstrelsy and Misogyny in Vocal and Choral Repertories," examining "the most frequently performed and published songs as the basis for an investigation of the ways minstrel shows embodied negative and sentimentalized attitudes about women" (268). He correctly points out that songs about women covered relationships white men had with both African American and white women. "Blackness is the cover," Mahar asserts, "under which the male fantasy of exercising complete control over women is played out in [a] seemingly innocuous comic scene" (312). Minstrels, therefore, utilized black bodies to act out insecurities about white women primarily, and African American women second, according to Mahar. The analysis stops here.

There is no discussion of the use of African American women's bodies as vehicles for white male anxieties and no historicizing of this trend in literature or the...