Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture

by W.T. Lhamon Jr.

Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered―and forever transformed―American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow’s first appearance.

Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice―never before published as their original audiences saw them―W. T. Lhamon, Jr., provides a reconstruction of their performance history and a provocative analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow’s sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England.

Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms.

478 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2003

Reviews

[Lulu]

1832? Perlego

SONGS
"Coal Black Rose". http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?...
"The Original Jim Crow",
"Jim Crow, Still Alive!!".
"Dinah Crow"
“Jim Crow" (London).
"De Original Jim Crow"
"Jim Crow" (Boston)
"All de Women Shout Loo! Loo!"
"Clare de Kitchen"
"Gombo Chaff"
"Sich a Gitting Up Stairs"
"Jim Crack Corn, or the Blue Tail Fly".
"Settin' on a Rail, or, Racoon Hunt".


PLAYS
Oh! Hush! or, The Virginny Cupids! 1833
Virginia Mummy 1835
Bone Squash 1835
Flight to America
The Peacock and the Crow
Jim Crow in His New Place
The Foreign Prince
Yankee Notes for English Circulation
Otello 1844


STREET PROSE
"The Life of Jim Crow"
"A Faithful Account of the Life of Jim Crow the American Negro Poet"



Also https://archive.org/details/fishercha...