Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture

by William J. Mahar

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. Drawing on an unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music, William J. Mahar explores the racist practices of minstrel entertainers and considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century.  Mahar 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. Locating minstrel performances within their complex sites of production, Mahar reassesses the historiography of the field.

Genres: History

472 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

Reviews

[Jessica Groen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This writer uses tons of primary documents (playbills, sheet music) etc. to track how minstrelsy moved from side street spectacle to the most popular kind of mainstream stage performance during 1800s. Author demonstrates that anyone who is interested in US pop culture or its musical heritage needs to know that most what we play and sing as "American folk music" or in our early piano books got its popularity through white performers who were blacked up with burnt cork ashes. While Mahar argues that not every impulse in minstrelsy was just about dehumanizing Black lives, so I feel like there is a strong apologist vibe running through the book, a little stronger than necessary for a book published in 1999. But much more critical of the harm done then and now than "Gentlemen, Be Seated" was, so an improvement. Written by and for musicology enthusiasts, so some of it I skimmed through.