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- 14 de Mayo, 2019
So there's this topic, I mentioned it once in the Unpopular opinions thread. I like American minstrel music, as in minstrel shows about Blacks. I first stumbled across it listening to 2nd South Carolina String Band. I didn't know what it was yet, I just got to thinking "holy shit a lot of these Confederate songs are love songs about Black women," then started listening more and reading up on them and realized most of them were minstrel songs, sung from Black perspective. In the process that got me to learning a lot about the artform and realizing how underappreciated and unfairly hated it is.
Now, obviously, minstrelsy is not something that anybody has a reason to make nowadays. It'd be like writing a new Viking ballad about raiding England or banging rocks together and chanting about the mammoth you hunted. But I and many others do like to listen to historical music in part as a way of connecting to those times.
The minstrel show was basically a proto-vaudeville/burlesque act, consisting of songs and comedic skits, in which a bunch of Whites dressed like Blacks would go around pantomiming plantation life. Imagine something like Hee Haw but if everyone was Black and spoke like jive turkeys. It was, naturally - and this may be the first shocker - invented by Yankees. What a shocker, and yet at the same time, it isn't. The point of minstrelsy was to exoticize the Old South, who was going to do that, Southerners? No, it was the people for whom slavery and Africanness were an uncomfortable part of their country, yet alien to their own part of that country. Natural for them to have a fascination with it. That said, minstrelsy quickly spread into the South and became popularized there.
Another misconception with minstrelsy was that it was all racist in intent. This kind of comes out of two things, that it made fun of how Blacks talked and acted (especially playing them off as overly reacting to everything, which seems an apt description) and that it tended to depict slavery as a happy institution, the thing had a tone of frolic. But the latter isn't actually true, many minstrel shows were put on by abolitionist organizations or had abolitionist themes. Even politically neutral minstrel shows could include satire that both Whites and Blacks recognized as making fun of the master, often when the slave-characters would then mimic the master (two levels of acting, acting like a character that's acting like someone else).
This shit was like the pop music of the Antebellum period and followed the Union and Confederate Armies to war, and the Americans were so fucking proud of this crap that they brought a minstrel troupe with them on Commodore Perry's mission to the Japanese, like, some diplomatic motherfucker thought "THIS is what we want everyone to know American entertainment is." And despite having no cultural context for it at all, the Japanese became fascinated and have remained so to this day.
If I brushed up on the relevant parts of Wicked River I could tell you more. Either way, here are some selections of minstrel songs I listen to.
EXPLICITLY ABOLITIONIST
NEUTRAL/IMPLICITLY PRO SLAVERY
Now, obviously, minstrelsy is not something that anybody has a reason to make nowadays. It'd be like writing a new Viking ballad about raiding England or banging rocks together and chanting about the mammoth you hunted. But I and many others do like to listen to historical music in part as a way of connecting to those times.
The minstrel show was basically a proto-vaudeville/burlesque act, consisting of songs and comedic skits, in which a bunch of Whites dressed like Blacks would go around pantomiming plantation life. Imagine something like Hee Haw but if everyone was Black and spoke like jive turkeys. It was, naturally - and this may be the first shocker - invented by Yankees. What a shocker, and yet at the same time, it isn't. The point of minstrelsy was to exoticize the Old South, who was going to do that, Southerners? No, it was the people for whom slavery and Africanness were an uncomfortable part of their country, yet alien to their own part of that country. Natural for them to have a fascination with it. That said, minstrelsy quickly spread into the South and became popularized there.
Another misconception with minstrelsy was that it was all racist in intent. This kind of comes out of two things, that it made fun of how Blacks talked and acted (especially playing them off as overly reacting to everything, which seems an apt description) and that it tended to depict slavery as a happy institution, the thing had a tone of frolic. But the latter isn't actually true, many minstrel shows were put on by abolitionist organizations or had abolitionist themes. Even politically neutral minstrel shows could include satire that both Whites and Blacks recognized as making fun of the master, often when the slave-characters would then mimic the master (two levels of acting, acting like a character that's acting like someone else).
This shit was like the pop music of the Antebellum period and followed the Union and Confederate Armies to war, and the Americans were so fucking proud of this crap that they brought a minstrel troupe with them on Commodore Perry's mission to the Japanese, like, some diplomatic motherfucker thought "THIS is what we want everyone to know American entertainment is." And despite having no cultural context for it at all, the Japanese became fascinated and have remained so to this day.
If I brushed up on the relevant parts of Wicked River I could tell you more. Either way, here are some selections of minstrel songs I listen to.
EXPLICITLY ABOLITIONIST
NEUTRAL/IMPLICITLY PRO SLAVERY
