The Annals of Aping
A critical episode in the history of American primitivism, crucial to understanding the mid-century rock & roll phenomenon (as a direct extension of it), is American blackface minstrelsy.
“Blackface” constitutes much more than a series of casually-racist, tasteless Halloween-party photographs, taken by clueless high-school students in the twentieth-century, then resurfacing to the embarrassment of supposedly-enlightened politicians in the twenty-first.
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Whole scholarly tomes have been written on the subject, the most-cited of which is probably Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993).
On September 11, 2001 (the day Islam reasserted itself as the West’s significant Other), Bob Dylan released a new album of roots music showcasing the “myths, mysteries and folklore”1 of the American South. Dylan’s album, apparently lifted from Eric Lott’s history of American minstrelsy, was also titled: “Love and Theft.”
A self-reflexive example of the persistence of blackface minstrelsy in images of American popular music: from the nascent popular art form in the nineteenth-century (blackface minstrelsy); to twentieth-century academic interpretations (Lott’s Love and Theft); to the concept’s reintroduction to popular music in Dylan’s 2001 album title, “Love and Theft.”
Dylan, it should be noted, is perhaps the best-known, self-consciously whiteface minstrel in the history of American popular music (Michael Jackson notwithstanding).
The blackface phenomenon, as well as the whiteface one, were most recently reexamined in the dance and screen work of Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino.
The history of blackface minstrelsy deserves its own thorough exposition, which readers can discover in the scholarship of Lott and others (and in later installments of The Third Ear). For now, suffice it to say that in Lott’s estimation, for better or worse, blackface was the first truly original, new American (as opposed to Native American) art form. Bayard Taylor, American poet and diplomat, deemed the songs of minstrelsy "the national airs of America" in 1849. Greil Marcus has called white (blackface) minstrelsy “the first national entertainment craze.”2
The conflicted stance it exhibited towards Afro-Americans and the South is reflected in Lott’s, and Dylan’s, title. Blackface, and its derivative forms, was simultaneously a gesture of appreciation (“Love”) on the one hand, and of so-called cultural appropriation and financial exploitation (“Theft”) on the other, often compounded by racism.
In the nineteenth-century, American minstrel theater consisted of working class, urban, mostly-white (there were in fact Afro-American performers “blackening up” with burnt cork and grease paint, as Sammy Davis Jr would still be doing a century later), Northern actors and musicians.
These mostly-white, Yankee, urban actors were performing their idyllic musical conception of black plantation life in the American South. American minstrelsy lampooned, celebrated and Other-ed not only black, but rural and Southern society, and was inaugurated and promulgated by white city-dwellers in the North, as an expression of angst and dissatisfaction with American mainstream culture in the nineteenth-century.
Its practitioners haunted slave plantations, studied black mannerisms, music and folklore, and according to Constance Rourke, were engaged in “a revolt,” a “deep-lying mood of disseverance” and “broken bonds” with urban civilization.
In the same way that beatniks would embrace Bebop in the 1940s and 50s, or scores of bourgeoise art school dropouts on either side of the Atlantic would study the music of black bluesmen in the 60s, or middle class suburban white kids would spout gangsta rap lyrics in the 90s, nineteenth-century Northern working-class whites before and after the Civil War adopted the imaginary musical personae of Southern plantation blacks, in an imitative gesture of defiance and rebellion.
An act of parody and ridicule, blackface minstrelsy was also an envious and sometimes affectionate imitation, as racially ambivalent and divided against itself as America. A highly-stylized, symbolic act, blackface minstrelsy, according to Lott, was a means of negotiating America’s racial turmoil and moral schizophrenia through art. A symbolic or “magical” resolution to an intractable social dilemma—slavery and racial division—enacted through interracial imitation.
This was was the farcical equivalent of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Its divided reception indicates it touched a nerve beyond so-called musical-comedy.
The pro-slavery contingent resented the suggestion that black people harbored cultural agency and were sometimes endowed with tragic humanity on-stage; abolitionists hated it because it often made light of slavery. Mark Twain loved it, Frederick Douglass decried it (with one notable exception, a subject for a later post).
It was, in the parlance of our times, “edgy.” In a perverted way, its function overlaps with the art of Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, or Dave Chappelle: it negotiated racial tensions and tested the boundaries of moral propriety through what was considered comedy.
Out of blackface minstrel theatre would evolve vaudeville theatre, and out of vaudeville the great female city-blues mamas like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Throughout America’s musical history, a bizarre, fraught, sometimes wondrous (crossing the color line), cycle of interracial imitation would take place, attempting to mediate and overcome, symbolically, America’s original sin.
In the late nineteenth-century, with the advent of the Tin Pan Alley publishing industry, minstrelsy would be eclipsed by what were lamentably known as “coon songs,” with lyrics about sexually-licentious black caricatures.
Yet, some prominent Afro-American composers were able to co-opt this genre for their own purposes, write their own songs, and flip the script. As “Skip” Gates said about the obscenity trial of 2 Live Crew, through the intervention of black artists, the Afro-American version of the coon song tradition would declare “a right to voice itself, even if some of us aren’t comfortable with its content.”
The basis for the music of Tin Pan Alley “coon songs” was ragtime—a New Orleans African American imitation of classical European parlor songs that combined a swinging piano style with the steady oom-pah beat of American brass bands: the roots of jazz.
By the 1920s, America and Europe’s primitivist fascination with Africa had taken the form of jazz appreciation. Thousands of white Americans flocked to Harlem every weekend to “slum” it up with the locals and free themselves from the stultifying temperance of the prohibition era, on the dance floors of establishments along “Jungle Alley.”
American-born bombshell Josephine Baker, the “Black Venus,” was similarly titillating the night clubs of Paris with exotic dance routines, wearing nothing but beaded necklaces and a short skirt made out of artificial bananas.
The phenomenon continued throughout the Swing era in the 30s, with zoot suits and Big-Band revelry, which were eventually adopted as signifiers of American democratic individualism a decade later, in fashionable opposition to European fascism.
After World War II brought an end to the Swing era, Bebop and dope became postwar signifiers of outsider status in the burgeoning hipster culture.
After 1955, Elvis became the sine qua non signifier for rock-&-roll racial and moral transgression. A familiar chapter in the history of mimetic racial politics in American popular music, the Elvis explosion was soon mythologized as the seminal event in the birth of rock & roll, and the commodification of teenage rebellion.
By 1957, Norman Mailer had written a book on the subject. The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, described the process by which young white Americans were rebelling against bourgeois conformity, by emulating the sexually-emancipated pose of marginalized black America. Mailer, the self-styled “philosopher of hip,” highly recommended this form of racial “passing” (pretending to be another race, as many light-skinned, mixed-race “blacks” did to escape prejudice in the twentieth-century, and some “whites” have done more recently, to achieve cultural capital in the twenty-first). Mailer’s most infamous book, The White Negro was both an analysis of the interracial mimetic phenomenon, and a textual reenactment of it—a guidebook for acting black and hip.
By the mid-1960s, as we all know, many American and British musicians converted themselves into disciples of the blues. The countercultural cartoonist Robert Crumb, a blues fanatic, was nevertheless recreating demeaning racial caricatures in his Angelfood McSpade comic strip; ambivalently skirting the line between love and theft in his illustrated biography of bluesman Charlie Patton; and cartooning Janis Joplin’s white-woman-singing-like-a-black-woman routine on the album cover of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills.
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Cheap Thrills features a Crumb-illustrated blackface Mammy figure beneath a speech bubble of Joplin’s lyrics, from her cover of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” aria from Porgy and Bess—a 1934 pop opera (in the tradition later emulated by rock acts like The Who, to similar critical derision). Porgy and Bess was written by a Jewish librettist, Gershwin, who was trying to recreate the feel of an Afro-American spiritual.
While Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was panned by Duke Ellington (who had plans for his own black folk opera), and received mixed reviews from opera cognoscenti, the hit number from Porgy and Bess—“Summertime”—was embraced by black and white artists alike, from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin, and eventually remixed by a band of Long Beach reggae impersonators known as Sublime.
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As an antidote to Norman Mailer’s White Negro, and R. Crumb’s conflicted representations of blues personae, LeRoi Jones’ Blues People: Negro Music in White America, written during the same era, offers an incisive take, from a cultural historian who experienced the “white negro” phenomenon from the Afro-American perspective.
Before he died, Langston Hughes, poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, called Blues People, “A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America’s most popular music.” Hughes, a primitivist himself (particularly in his early work), also witnessed the white Harlem jazz-slumming phenomenon firsthand.
This is merely an overview of one side of the mimetic cycle in American popular music, white imitating black. Over and again, this was a symbolic means for white artists and audiences to differentiate themselves from the American status quo, if only for the weekend, and affect an outsider pose.
Ironically, it soon became the most mainstream act of rebellion in America, an acceptable gesture of defiance and differentiation, that many older onlookers condoned as a teenage social release-valve. An American carnival celebration—Good Rockin’ Tonight!
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Greg Knot, Chicago Tribune
Greil Marcus, “Introduction,” American Humor: A Study of the National Character by Constance Rourke