Download or read book Minstrel Traditions written by Kevin James Byrne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minstrel Traditions: Mediated Blackface in the Jazz Age explores the place and influence of black racial impersonation in US society during a crucial and transitional time period. Minstrelsy was absorbed into mass-culture media that was either invented or reached widespread national prominence during this era: advertising campaigns, audio recordings, radio broadcasts, and film. Minstrel Traditions examines the methods through which minstrelsy's elements connected with the public and how these conventions reified the racism of the time. This book explores blackface and minstrelsy through a series of overlapping case studies which illustrate the extent to which blackface thrived in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes and analyzes the last musical of black entertainer Bert Williams, the surprising live career of pancake icon Aunt Jemima, a flourishing amateur minstrel industry, blackface acts of African American vaudeville, and the black Broadway shows which brought new musical styles and dances to the American consciousness. All reflect, and sometimes incorporate, the mass-culture technologies of the time, either in their subject matter or method of distribution. Retrograde blackface seamlessly transitioned from live to mediated iterations of these cultural products, further pushing black stereotypes into the national consciousness. The book project oscillates between two different types of performances: the live and the mediated. By focusing on how minstrelsy in the Jazz Age moved from live performance into mediatized technologies, the book adds to the intellectual and historical conversation regarding this pernicious, racist entertainment form. Jazz Age blackface helped normalize new media technologies and that technology extended minstrelsy's influence within US culture. Minstrel Traditions tracks minstrelsy's social impact over the course of two decades to examine how ideas of national identity employ racial nostalgias and fantasias. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in theatre studies, communication studies, race and media, and musical scholarship

Download or read book The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media written by Tim Brooks and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:  The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's racist past, it nonetheless offered many black performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries their only opportunity to succeed in a white-dominated entertainment world, where white performers in blackface had by the 1830s established minstrelsy as an enduringly popular national art form. This book traces the often overlooked history of the "modern" minstrel show through the advent of 20th century mass media--when stars like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney continued a long tradition of affecting black music, dance and theatrical styles for mainly white audiences--to its abrupt end in the 1950s. A companion two-CD reissue of recordings discussed in the book is available from Archeophone Records at www.archeophone.com.

Download or read book Burnt Cork written by Stephen Burge Johnson and published by Univ of Massachusetts Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy--stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans--remained arguably the most popular entertainment in North America. A renewed scholarly interest in this contentious form of entertainment has produced studies treating a range of issues: its contradictory depictions of class, race, and gender; its role in the development of racial stereotyping; and its legacy in humor, dance, and music, and in live performance, film, and television. The style and substance of minstrelsy persist in popular music, tap and hip-hop dance, the language of the standup comic, and everyday rituals of contemporary culture. The blackface makeup all but disappeared for a time, though its influence never diminished--and recently, even the makeup has been making a comeback. This collection of original essays brings together a group of prominent scholars of blackface performance to reflect on this complex and troublesome tradition. Essays consider the early relationship of the blackface performer with American politics and the antislavery movement; the relationship of minstrels to the commonplace compromises of the touring "show" business and to the mechanization of the industrial revolution; the exploration and exploitation of blackface in the mass media, by D. W. Griffith and Spike Lee, in early sound animation, and in reality television; and the recent reappropriation of the form at home and abroad. In addition to the editor, contributors include Dale Cockrell, Catherine Cole, Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, Alice Maurice, Nicholas Sammond, and Linda Williams.

Download or read book Darkest America Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop written by Yuval Taylor and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the origin and heyday of black minstrelsy, which in modern times is considered an embarrassment, and discusses whether or not the art form is actually still alive in the work of contemporary performers--from Dave Chappelle and Flavor Flav to Spike Lee.

Download or read book Men in Blackface written by Seymour Stark and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2001-11-07 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contents The Minstrel Show Will Never Die Jim Crow and Tom Thumb Irishness of it All Irving Berlin Titillates Gershwins Racial Profiling Jews in Blackface Jolson the Shlemiel Strutting to Redemption Endnotes -------------------------------- How New York City, the Birthplace of Blackface, Defined Humor and Race for 100 Years (MIB: 12-17) Jim Crow, a blackface stage character, lends his name to the pernicious practice of racial segregation. Native New Yorker Tom Rice performed "Jim Crow" at the Bowery Theatre in 1832. (MIB: 22-24) Edwin P. Christy established the first permanent minstrel hall at 472 Broadway in New York City in 1847. Christy created the stylized format which endured for 10 decades. Why Irish Americans Wore Blackface (MIB: 18-19) Dan Emmets "Dixie", written as a minstrel tune, became the Confederate anthem. In an earlier minstrel song, Emmett romanticized slavery: "Ill dance all night an work all day." (MIB: 46-48) Ned Harrigan, the grandfather of the Broadway musical, pitted on stage the Irish Mulligan Guard in 1879 against the black (white actors in blackface) Skidmore Guard--"Ten platoons of dandy coons." The Blackface Burden of Jewishness (MIB: 73-78) Irving Berlin, son of a cantor, penned his first "coon song" in 1909, and added eight more to his "coon song" cycle. Berlin staged blackface minstrel shows for the Army in both World War I and World War II. His 1942 film, "Holiday Inn", introduced "White Christmas" and Bing Crosby in blackface. (MIB: 101-138) Al Jolson in blackface made the first talking motion picture in 1927. In each of his eight Hollywood films over two decades, Jolson weaved the theme of Jewishness into the blackface minstrel show. He is the worldwide icon of blackface.

Download or read book Blacks in Blackface written by Henry T. Sampson and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 1573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1980, Blacks in Blackface was the first and most extensive book up to that time to deal exclusively with every aspect of all-African American musical comedies performed on the stage between 1900 and 1940. An invaluable resource for scholars and historians focused on African American culture, this new edition features significantly revised, expanded, and new material. In Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows, Henry T. Sampson provides an unprecedented wealth of information on legitimate musical comedies, including show synopses, casts, songs, and production credits. Sampson also recounts the struggles of African American performers and producers to overcome the racial prejudice of white show owners, music publishers, theatre managers, and booking agents to achieve adequate financial compensation for their talents and managerial expertise. Black producers and artists competed with white managers who were producing all-Black shows and also with some white entertainers who were performing Black-developed music and dances, often in blackface. The chapters in this volume include: An overview of African American musical shows from the end of the Civil War through the golden years of the 1920s and ’30s New and expanded biographical sketches of performers Detailed information about the first producers and owners of Black minstrel and musical comedy shows Origins and backgrounds of several famous Black theatres Profiles of African American entrepreneurs and businessmen who provided financial resources to build and own many of the Black theatres where these shows were performed A chronicle of booking agencies and organized Black theatrical circuits, music publishing houses, and phonograph recording businesses Critical commentary from African American newspapers and show business publications More than 500 hundred rare photographs A comprehensive volume that covers all aspects of Black musical shows performed in theatres, nightclubs, circuses, and medicine shows, this edition of Blacks in Blackface can be used as a reference for serious scholars and researchers of Black show business in the United States before 1940. More than double the size of the previous edition, this useful resource will also appeal to the casual reader who is interested in learning more about early Black entertainment.

Download or read book Behind the Burnt Cork Mask written by William John Mahar and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in antebellum America. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask not only explores the racist practices of these entertainers but considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century. William J. Mahar's unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music engages new sources previously not considered in twentieth-century scholarship. More than any other study of its kind, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask investigates the relationships between blackface comedy and other Western genres and traditions; between the music of minstrel shows and its European sources; and between "popular" and "elite" constructions of culture. By locating minstrel performances within their complex sites of production, Mahar offers a significant reassessment of the historiography of the field. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask promises to redefine the study of blackface minstrelsy, charting new directions for future inquiries by scholars in American studies, popular culture, and musicology.

Download or read book Whiting Up written by Marvin Edward McAllister and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface superco

Download or read book Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask written by Harriet J. Manning and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-16 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Jackson challenged the power structure of the American music industry and struck at the heart of blackface minstrelsy, America’s first form of mass entertainment. The response was a derisive caricature that over time Jackson subverted through his art. In this expanded, all-new edition, Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask argues for the tangible relationship between Jackson and blackface minstrelsy. It reveals the dialogue at minstrelsy’s core and, in its broader sense, tracks a centuries-long pattern of racial oppression and its resistance and how that has been played out in popular theatre. Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask explores Jackson’s early talent and fame and the birth and escalation of ‘Wacko Jacko’. In relation to all this, the book examines Jackson’s dynamic art as it evolved, from his live performances and short films to the very surface of his own body. Scholarly and interdisciplinary, this work is suitable for readers across a diverse spectrum of academic fields, including African American studies, popular music studies and cultural theory, media and communication, gender studies and performance and theatre studies. Academic but accessible, this book will also be an engaging read for anyone interested in Michael Jackson and especially in his role as an icon of difference, in America’s dynamics of race and his mass media image.

Download or read book Blackface White Noise written by Michael Rogin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1996-06-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tangled connections that have bound Jews to African Americans in popular culture and liberal politics are at the heart of Michael Rogin's arresting and unnerving book. Looking at films from Birth of a Nation to Forrest Gump, Rogin explores blackface in Hollywood films as an aperture to broader issues: the nature of "white" identity in America, the role of race in transforming immigrants into "Americans," the common experiences of Jews and African Americans that made Jews key supporters in the fight for racial equality, and the social importance of popular culture. Rogin's forcefully argued study challenges us to confront the harsh truths behind the popularity of racial masquerade.

Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 1704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Raising Cain written by W. T. Lhamon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cain made the first blackface turn, blackface minstrels liked to say of the first man forced to wander the world acting out his low place in life. It wasn't the "approved" reading, but then, blackface wasn't the "approved" culture either--yet somehow we're still dancing to its renegade tune. The story of an insubordinate, rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it. To follow the subsequent turns taken by the many forms of blackface is to pursue the way modern social shifts produce and disperse culture. Raising Cain follows these forms as they prolong and adapt folk performance and popular rites for industrial commerce, then project themselves into the rougher modes of postmodern life through such heirs of blackface as stand-up comedy, rock 'n' roll, talk TV, and hip hop. Formally raising Cain in its myriad variants, blackface appears here as a racial project more radical even than abolitionism. Lhamon's account of its provenance and persistence is a major reinterpretation of American culture.

Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress. Cataloging Policy and Support Office and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 1336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A E written by Library of Congress. Office for Subject Cataloging Policy and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 1548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Social History of Amateur Music Making and Scottish National Identity Scotland s Printed Music 1880 1951 written by Karen E. McAulay and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-30 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late Victorian Scotland had a flourishing music publishing trade, evidenced by the survival of a plethora of vocal scores and dance tune books; and whether informing us what people actually sang and played at home, danced to, or enjoyed in choirs, or reminding us of the impact of emigration from Britain for both emigrants and their families left behind, examining this neglected repertoire provides an insight into Scottish musical culture and is a valuable addition to the broader social history of Scotland. The decline of the music trade by the mid-twentieth century is attributable to various factors, some external, but others due to the conservative and perhaps somewhat parochial nature of the publishers’ output. What survives bears witness to the importance of domestic and amateur music-making in ordinary lives between 1880 and 1950. Much of the music is now little more than a historical artefact. Nonetheless, Karen E. McAulay shows that the nature of the music, the song and fiddle tune books’ contents, the paratext around the collections, its packaging, marketing and dissemination all document the social history of an era whose everyday music has often been dismissed as not significant or, indeed, properly ‘old’ enough to merit consideration. The book will be valuable for academics as well as folk musicians and those interested in the social and musical history of Scotland and the British Isles.

Download or read book Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain written by Michael Pickering and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blackface minstrelsy is associated particularly with popular culture in the United States and Britain, yet despite the continual two-way flow of performers, troupes and companies across the Atlantic, there is little in Britain to match the scholarship of blackface studies in the States. This book concentrates on the distinctively British trajectory of minstrelsy. The historical study and cultural analysis of minstrelsy is important because of the significant role it played in Britain as a form of song, music and theatrical entertainment. Minstrelsy had a marked impact on popular music, dance and other aspects of popular culture, both in Britain and the United States. Its impact in the United States fed into significant song and music genres that were assimilated in Britain, from ragtime and jazz onwards, but prior to these influences, minstrelsy in Britain developed many distinct features and was adapted to operate within various conventions, themes and traditions in British popular culture. Pickering provides a convincing counter-argument to the assumption among writers in the United States that blackface was exclusively American and its British counterpart purely imitative. Minstrelsy was not confined to its value as song, music and dance. Jokes at the expense of black people along with demeaning racial stereotypes were integral to minstrel shows. As a form of popular entertainment, British minstrelsy created a cultural low-Other that offered confirmation of white racial ascendancy and imperial dominion around the world. The book attends closely to how this influence on colonialism and imperialism operated and proved ideologically so effective. At the same time British minstrelsy cannot be reduced to its racist and imperialist connections. Enormously important as those connections are, Pickering demonstrates the complexity of the subject by insisting that the minstrel show and minstrel performers are understood also in terms of their own theatrical dynamics, t