The record changer (Jan-Feb 1945)

"Padlock" of 1768, Fan Tan in Burgoyne's "Boston Blockade" of 1775, Wags in 1790, Kickaraboo in 1795, Negro Philosophy in 1796, A New Negro Song in 1797, Negro and Buckra Man in 1811 and the Bonj'a Song of 1813. The second stage began around 1787, when the abolitionist movement started to question slavery's moral status. Almost immediately the minstrel stage turned to the Negro with a new attitude of pity and compassion. Thus the Negro begins to emerge as a tragic figure in George Colman's Inkle and Yarioo of 1787, and this development continues with Pity for Poor Africans in 1788, The African during the same year, The Negro Boy in 1792, The Desponding Negro in 1793, On Slavery published in 1797, Paul and Virginia in 1800, The Dying Negro in 1809 and the Negro Lament for Munqo Park in 1827. With the Victory of Plattsburg, a third stage of development begins. The Negro ceases to exist as a figure of fun or of compassion and begins to emerge as a patriotic character. In 1814, Micah Hawkin's Siege of Albany sets the stage for this new attitude. During the next year, 1815, The Guinea Boy takes up the same trend, and this is followed in 1823 by The Tailor in Distress, in 1824 by The Battle of New Orleans and later that year by Massa George Washington. The fourth stage, minstrelsy proper, starting in 1799 with Graupner's Gay Negro Boy, may be considered as a summary of all preceding tendencies. It is characterized, however, by a further advance in social and political awareness which is reflected in the use of actual folk song material, both African and European in origin. Opossum Up A Gum Tree in 1822, Jim Crow in 1830, Zip Coon in 1834 and Old Dan Tucker in 1843 represent four significant steps in the development which, in 1862, led to Lucy McKim's Dwight Magazine letter and thus to the first recognition of AfroAmerican music as an autonomous form of American folk music. For whereas the earliest appearance of the Negro on the American stage was but an appearance of burnt cork on a white performer's face, the actual substance of minstrelsy as it developed into a mature art was contributed by the Negro himself and not by his blackface imitators. From the heyday of minstrelsy, through the transition stage of coon songs, to the emancipation of the Negro idiom which culminated in the application of ragtime to the blues, the whole movement hinged on a few Negro key figures — James Bland, Gussie L. Davis, Samuel Lucas, Sydney Perrin, Scott Joplin, Tom Turpin, Irving Jones, Ernest Hogan, Shelton Brooks, John Black, W. C. Handy, Clarence Williams, Jim Europe, Will Marion Cook, Walker and Williams, Cole and Johnson, Sissle and Blake. Ragtime, in its widest, meaning, of "ragged time," i. e., syncopation, was the defining mark of Negro progress within this movement. Melodically and harmonically, minstrelsy was a white man's art. Only the performer, not the composer, marked early minstrelsy as an African departure — in its vocal timbre and vibrato and in the peculiar enunciation of Negro speech. Not until the advent of ragtime did minstrels)' show any African influence on the composer's part. James Bland's songs, like Stephen Foster's and Dan Emmett's, showed very little use of Negro folk themes. Sydney Perrin's songs resembled Bland's when they made their first appearance on the minstrel stage. His Mammy's Little Pumpkin Colored Coons, for instance, showed no syncopation when it was first published in 1897, but within one year it re-appeared as part of Ragtown Rags, a medley of "Coon Song Hits," and this time the tune had been transferred into out-and-out ragtime. Coon songs, therefore, mark the transition stage fron minstrelsy to ragtime ; by the turn of the century it had become impossible to define the difference between syncopated coon songs like Walker and Williams' / Don't Like No Cheap Man and vocal ragtime like Scott Joplin's Ragtime Dance Song. All the old standbys like Old Black Joe, Zip Coon and Old Dan Tucker made their re-appearance as ragtime tunes. Gradually ragtime spread from the accompaniment to the melody, and before the white audiences could make out what was happening to them, Negro ragtime had pushed the old burntcork imitations off the minstrel stage. Negro ragtime had been preparing for this invasion of the White Man's popular music ever since the Negro pianists of the St. Louis and New Orleans bawdy houses had noticed the Negro brass bands' tendencies of shifting the accents of all march tunes from strong beats to weak ones and had tried to produce similar effects on a piano keyboard, ll was therefore no accident that the first ragtime tunes sounded like off-beat march tunes and that the music-hall type of thematic material made its appearance in ragtime a good decade after the original tempo di marcia rags. Common to both stages of ragtime development, however, and characteristic of their immaturity as 5