Today's clawhammer banjo is descended directly from stroke style, with the original style considered to be more complex than our modern version. Personally I would not be singing them as a part of my musical entertainment today, but I have great respect for them and I would introduce them to my students because it's a part of the American culture and American heritage. This routine achieved immediate popularity, and throughout the 1830s Rice had many imitators. Which white banjo virtuoso lead the Virginia Minstrels? Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the African-American culture.The blues form is ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, and is characterized by WebJoel Sweeney, a native of Appomattox, Virginia, popularized the African-inspired banjo, although Emmett favored the instrument in his compositions. Minstrelsy, through the body, expressed wildness, expressed abandon, it expressed joy, it expressed sex, it expressed all of these things that the middle-class was trying to repress through a worship of the mind. Obviously, from Elvis Presley to Beck that has been one of the primary impulses behind rock and roll. This was accompanied by a "Comic Morris Dance by the whole company". They had proper instruments playing proper music. This photograph was taken at a minstrel show at the Elk's Lodge in Charlottesville, held on February 2 and 3, 1925. From the Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History. While you are turning off the lights, check the doors, too. Unlike earlier blackface acts that featured solo singers or dancers, the Virginia Minstrels appeared as a group in blackface and what would become iconic costumes and performed more elaborate shows. In March 1843 they appeared in Welch's Olympic Circus as part of an equestrian act. [9] Which songwriting team composed the musical Oklahoma!, which opened in 1943? He was a cornet player and leader of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. American Music xYr6}WGg&Akli$d2>PeHiO Y-8sA They loved it. The classic blues included artists like Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Ethel Waters. Which song recorded by the Paul Whiteman Band sold 2 million copies and featured the Swanee whistle (slide whistle), a novelty that helped sell the record? They sang "I heard it through the grapevine." That Stephen Foster wrote songs in an idiom that is just simply an anathema to me as an American, to me as a human being in the 1990s, and that I would never possibly think in any form of either wanting to hear or sing -- that's true. Which record format released in 1949 by RCA Victor Corporation allowed a listener to load a stack of singles? googletag.cmd = googletag.cmd || []; Fath Ruffins: These long, gut strings produce a far deeper tone than the nickel and steel ones used on modern banjos and are ideal for sliding around on the smooth fingerboard. Combined with a low tuning and thick, gut strings; the plunky, melancholic sound of stroke style on minstrel banjos reflects its dark history amongst slaves. Who proposes the murder of Antony? a. So these classic American songs came to be the music that you would learn at camp or at school or someplace like that. endobj I mean, masks do that. A rhetoric that itself is double in the sense that they'll do anything not to be considered slaves. Which honky-tonk artist recorded "The Wild Side of Life?". %PDF-1.3 I think that they are catchy, wonderful, popular tunes that really reflect something interesting about the United States. Susanna', Camptown Races', and Swannee River' are all among them. What was the first successful, all-black musical? The same thing happens at Mardi Gras. But I think that the rousing nature of the event -- I mean, this is a moment in theater history when it was typical and more or less sanctioned for men to rush the stage. Minstrelsy had clanging banjoes, it had clanking bones. The masks had become much more grotesque. "Historical Origin and Stylistic Developments of the Five-String Banjo". The unique sound and conventions of minstrel banjo remain an attractive option for all players seeking to enrich their experience of the instrument. An enormous amount of American musical history and tradition is tied up with the banjo in this, its earliest standardized form. It was a kind of madhouse. Which Spanish-born violinist, film star, and bandleader was known as the "Rhumba King" and did the most to popularize Latin music during the swing era? It was a sense of attraction to this uninhibited state of being that these characters were depicting. Blacks were presumed to be this way, the stereotype was this and therefore the media had to reflect it in that way. % Ken Emerson: I think we're losing something in not repeating his lyrics or in adapting them, changing them to make them more politically correct, because he was trying to blend some things and create an awareness that we need to remember. One of the most controversial eras of American performance history was launched. Which White actor invented the minstrel character Jim Crow?. This consists of a downpicking motion where strings are struck by the back of the nail and plucked with the thumb. All wood, in fact, save for their brass brackets and tension hoop, skin head, and gut strings. Which crooner released the hit "My Blue Heaven" in 1927? This was an ensemble finale in which members of the troupe in various combinations participated in song, instrumental and choral music and dance. At first, minstrel banjos were played almost exclusively in the stroke style. WebPop Goes the Weasel was the vehicle for many virtuoso and comic fiddlers to display their prowess on the instrument. } One of the best-known and most successful composers of plantation songs; the first successful black songwriter. The son of a trombonist in the U.S. Marine Band, Sousa eventually became its conductor and later formed a "commercial" concert band, which toured widely in America and Europe. Mel Watkins: Which productive, varied, and creative Tin Pan Alley composer was born in Temun, Russia, in 1888 and later immigrated to the United States as a result of the anti-Jewish pogrom in 1892? Minstrelsy effectively did that. We put on masks at Halloween, and it gives us a kind of anonymity to go and to do things and to say things that we normally wouldn't. Sweeney's popularity grew rapidly. Which is the best definition of "strophe? And this was -- they were advertised as "Come to the theatre and get a real look into what plantation life was like." Which of the following is true about the country blues? Also a trained anthropologist, Hurston collected folklore throughout the South and Caribbean reclaiming, honoring and celebrating Black life on its own terms. You can't drink at work anymore. Minstrelsy was invented in southern, aristocratic neighborhoods of cities like Atlanta? Monopoly is Americas favorite board game, a love letter to unbridled capitalism and our free market society. Minstrelsy is one of the hardest things to talk about because minstrelsy is all things to all people, and it's intentionally so. Web1769, White banjo players performed in blackface 1843, First documented minstrel show by Dan Emmett & Virginia Minstrels 1840s-1850s, Minstrel Craze; Banjo becomes urban instrument (the minstrel show popularized the banjo; it was a long time before the banjo could be regarded separately from the racist content of the minstrel show) It developed during the late nineteenth century in Buenos Aires, Argentina. And by the 1860s black performers [were] going on the stage themselves and performing in a similar manner. He wrote the first mega-hit popular song, "After the Ball" (published in 1892). Music Corporation of America rose to become the dominant booking agency for big dance bands in the 1930s. // cutting the mustard WebJoel Walker Sweeney (1810 October 29, 1860), also known as Joe Sweeney, was an American musician and early blackface minstrel performer. Sweeney saw success, and by early 1843, he embarked on a European tour that included stops in London and Edinburgh. They would not become common until well into the 1900s. And from the beginning of my interest in rock and roll, I was fascinated by the question of, "When did it first become cool for white teenagers to pretend they were black?" << /ProcSet [ /PDF /Text ] /ColorSpace << /Cs1 7 0 R >> /Font << /F2.0 9 0 R The relevance of studying Foster is not unlike the relevance of studying Mark Twain andHuckleberry Finn. Which of the following is true of Bing Crosby's recording of "How Deep Is the Ocean"? Which couple were arguably the biggest media superstars of the years around World War I? Whereas the instrument's resonating chamber had formerly been constructed from a gourd (like the banjo's African ancestors and cousins), Sweeney popularized the use of a drum-like resonating chamber (legend has it that he adapted a cheese box for this purpose). James Bland, composer of "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia," and Sam Lucas became known as the leading performers of African-American minstrel shows and eventually branched into other forms of musical theater. Thomas Dartmouth Rice. And so the conflict that minstrelsy is playing out is between America as a common-class culture or America as a middle-class culture. 6 0 obj Byron Almen, Dorothy Payne, Stefan Kostka. I think it becomes much clearer when one looks at black minstrelsy again because when black minstrels started to take to the stage, they were advertised as the real thing. Which of the following was an influential ragtime pianist and composer? Think of, for instance, and this is not restricted to America any more since rock and roll is an international language, but think of Mick Jagger performing almost as if he were a minstrel performer, the sort of extravagant mimicking and caricaturing of black mannerisms that many people do in rock and roll. The influence of minstrelsy is still felt keenly by clawhammer players and in the lyrics and arrangements of classic old time tunes. In 1845, after returning from the UK, Sweeney himself founded the group Old Joe's Minstrels', thus cementing the popularity of the act. It was advertised as a peephole view of what black people were really like. At some point, Brower parted company to tour with Dan Emmett, though he rejoined Sweeney by spring of 1844. xMHa$T&R+SeL b}wg-E"u.VDNC:DuE^";cT03y| URcE4`vztLUF\)s:k-iYj6|vP4*wd>,y4!7CN-lCTS3q";-E#+c> v=S79@`mvUl5`P=Gj)kP*}6 ~^/~.~a2 In probably the summer of 1830, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who was called "Daddy" Rice, a sort of minor character actor out of New York City, was in Louisville, Kentucky. << /Length 12 0 R /N 3 /Alternate /DeviceRGB /Filter /FlateDecode >> Minstrel banjos were tuned differently to the instruments we play today. So simultaneously you can give expression to your identity, and you can also criticize the policies of those that you feel are oppressing you. He embraced both genteel traditions and less highly regarded but popular traditions such as minstrelsy. Which of the following stanzas uses the structure most closely associated with the twelve-bar blues? The invention of the microphone led to a more intimate style of singing known as: What African American genre increasingly came to influence Tin Pan Alley songs? Which of the following is NOT true about James Reese Europe? What was the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment regarded by European audiences as distinctively American in character? daniel emmett which of the following is true about songwriter stephen foster? For everyone to kind of be collecting in a rowdy way, right in front of the footlights, be spitting tobacco on the floor in the theater. Which artist called himself the "Father of the Blues," wrote hits such as "Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues," and was the most influential of the classic blues composers? Mathews, [Charles]. There's a general, sort of clamped-down cleanup going on. From the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. "[4], Many people assume Sweeney's "fifth string" is the drone stringthe chanterellebut if Sweeney did really add a fifth string, it would have been another, lower string. They say, "We'rewage slaves. The "father of American minstrelsy" was Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, who, between 1828 and 1831, developed a song-and-dance routine in which he impersonated an old, crippled black slave, dubbed Jim Crow. The 1870s saw a steep decline in the minstrel style of play. Successful turn-of-the-century songwriter sometimes referred to as the "Daddy of Popular Song"; his big hits included "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" (1900) and "I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad)" (1911). Which of the following is true about Gene Autry's musical style? And that may just be the condition of being white in America, but I think that there's a kind of evasion of the full implications of Foster. At one and the same moment, though, you have a real interest, cross-racial interest in what it feels like to be a black person. Who was he? Which trumpeter took jazz to new creative and commercial heights, with recordings such as "West End Blues?". A minstrel troupe led by the white banjo virtuoso Dan Emmett; their show introduced more lengthy performances featuring a standardized group of performers. << /Length 5 0 R /Filter /FlateDecode >> Which White banjo virtuoso lead the Virginia Minstrels? << /Type /Page /Parent 3 0 R /Resources 6 0 R /Contents 4 0 R /MediaBox [0 0 612 792] Thus, parlor banjo was born, named after the private parlors of more well-to-do individuals and organizations in which it was performed. In the same way that Elvis Presley electrified the world, so did Daddy Rice when he did "Jump Jim Crow" on the London stage. The mask of blackface enabled you to have voice and to speak without fear of repression. The issue of what to do about having slavery in the society is a key issue in the years in which blackface minstrelsy comes to be important. In addition Minstrel shows usually had a fiddler, a bones player and a drum/tambourine. "The Journal of American Folklore", 85(335). The audience for minstrelsy, especially after the 1830s and into the 1840s was a quite localized and specific working class, lower middle-class, mostly male audience that responded very vocally to the kinds of syncopated, pre-rock-and-roll sounds that were put forward on the minstrel stage. Eric Lott: Minstrelsy is much under-rated historically in terms of its influence on American society. The fact that we can see it from both sides and have to see it from both sides is infinitely more important in a questioning process than the right answer. So I learned many of these songs, usually with changed lyrics. Perhaps for that reason alone, it has never been allowed to disappear entirely. But I also understand at the same time -- it's the old thing, minstrelsy is many things to many people. Although blackface minstrelsy was racist, did it have any benefit for African Americans? WebJust as Sweeney began introducing the banjo to England, a group of musicians in New York City was creating the minstrel show as a full-scale entertainment. Who was the most influential songwriter of American popular song during the nineteenth century? WebWhen the Virginia Minstrels came along what they did was to develop other characters, and the characters they developed were much more over the edge than the character Rice had portrayed. Which of the following became the first nationwide commercial radio network in 1926? At this time, Dick Pelham met up with Sweeney and Brower, and the trio decided to reform the Virginia Minstrels with Sweeney as banjoist. The first full-length blackface minstrel show was performed at the Bowery Amphitheatre in New York in February 1843. 2003-2023 Chegg Inc. All rights reserved. As a blackface performer, he introduced the "Jim Crow" character. 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