The record changer (Jan-Feb 1945)

VVU\ if From Minstrelsy to Jazz Chapter Nine of the Anthropology of Jazz by Ernest Borneman The story of jazz in America is the story of the American Negro's emancipation from slavery. The most important steps of this cultural and political development are reflected with extraordinary accuracy in the development of A froAmerican music from minstrelsy to ragtime. Minstrelsy, as we are using the term, does not begin with Daddy Rice and Dan Emmett but with the very recognition of the Negro as a contributor to the music of America. In 1782 Aird's "Selection of Scottish, English, Irish and Foreign Airs" published a Negro Jig in the very same edition which contained the first printing of the Yankee Doodle. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson in his "Notes on Virginia" spoke for the first time of the 'ural musical talents" of the Negro ^c.es. Fifteen years later, in 1799, the acknowledgment bore fruit in the first Minstrel Show. This most characteristic of all early American forms of showmanship was, like so many other Americanisms, invented by a European. Johann Christian Gottlieb Graupner, born in German Hanover on October 6, 1767, came to England with Haydn's orchestra in 1791 and went on to America in 1795. On December 30, 1799, at the Federal Street Theatre, in the most American city of Boston, at the end of the second act of Oroonoko, Graupner, dressed and painted as a Negro, sang The Gay Negro Boy to his own accompaniment and started in this peculiar manner what was to become the most popular American entertainment for half a century to come. In 1830 Thomas "Daddy" Rice sang Jim Crow in Pittsburgh and in 1843 the Virginia Minstrels started the racket at full blast, followed by Dan Emmett, Frank Brower, Dick Pelham, Billy Witlock, H. C. Work, Stephen Foster, L. V. H. Crosby, James Power, John Power, F. S. Pike, F. Lynch, J. H. Burdett, E. P. Christy, and all the others. By 1852, the popularity of minstrelsy had reached such proportions that the staid Albany State Register was forced to come out with this piece of badinage : • • .( The last Negro melody is on everybody's tongue, and consequently in everybody's mouth. Pianos and guitars groan with it, night and day ; sentimental youngladies sing it ; sentimental young gentlemen warble it at midnight serenades ; volatile young bucks hum it in the midst of their business and their pleasure ; boatmen roar it out stentoriously at all times ; all the bands play it ; amateur flute players agonize over it at every spare moment; the street organs grind it out at every hour ; the 'Singing Stars' carol it on the theatrical boards and at concerts ; the chamber maid sweeps and dusts to the measured cadence . . . the butcher's boy treats you to a strain or two of it as he mixes it up strangely with the harsh ding-dong accompaniment of his tireless bell . . ." in short, here we had the beginning of the modern wave of Tin Pan Alley hit tunes. Out of this mid-nineteenth century vogue of "Negro Melodies" and "Coon Songs," there grew the ragtime era which culminated at the turn of the century and merged thereafter almost imperceptibly into the jazz era. The precise dates and borderlines separating these consecutive stages of Afro-American music from each other are, of course, as vague and arbitrary as, say, the borderline separating the jazz era of the nineteen 'twenties from the swing era of the 'forties. Jazz survives in today's swing music as ragtime survived in jazz. What separates these musical idioms from each other is their social and political background rather than their structural pattern, and it is the minstrel show in particular which reflects this background with unfailing accuracy. Five consecutive stages of the Negro's cultural and political development are most clearly recognizable in the changing attitude of the minstrel show towards its protagonist. In its first stage, which might be dated from the time of the Stamp Act, the Negro was treated mainly as a barbarous, comic and somewhat childish figure. This was the natural attitude of a society resting securely on the benefits of slavery, unchallenged by moral and economic opposition and thus amicably paternal in its attitude to the "good nigger" who took his fate as God's will. The development of this attitude was clearly reflected in Tea's Negro Dance of 1767, Hallam's Mango in BickerstafTe's 3