Blacksound by Matthew D. Morrison;

Author:Matthew D. Morrison;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520390577
Publisher: University of California Press

Beethoven Hall was well filled last evening by admirers of Ethiopian delineations, assembled to see and hear the original Georgia Minstrels, who have returned from a very successful tour in Europe, and are now located at the above-named hall for a short season. The company is a novelty from the fact that all the members are colored, and then [sic] performances possess a genuineness which no burnt-cork artists can fully imitate. Their music, both vocal and instrumental, is excellent. Each performer seems to be not only a natural, but a cultured artist; and all have the faculty of being exceedingly mirthful, without overstepping the bounds of refinement. In fact, each performer seems perfect in his rôle; and all appear to be masters of minstrelsy.19

The first Georgia minstrel troupe was advertised as consisting of former slaves from Macon, Georgia, and although it can’t be fully confirmed whether they all originated from plantations in Macon, or whether it was a marketing tool to promote their authenticity as “negro delineators,” two things are clear: there were formerly enslaved men in the troupe, and most of the musicians were highly skilled performers.20 As Eileen Southern notes, the Georgia Minstrels relied on the standard (racist and racialized) minstrel conventions in their early acts and did not include much African American folk music early on.21 One of their most celebrated members and minstrels in general, Sam Lucas (the son of an ex-slave), was a self-taught musician who gained his early musical training with a quadrille band and with minstrel troupes. Lucas wrote many of the original songs for the Georgia Minstrels that followed in the more “sophisticated” harmonic and compositional style of minstrel tunes (which often included a chorus), ones that were heavily shaped by the works of Stephen Foster (see Chapter 3).22 Yet, as Lisa M. Anderson suggests, although blackface minstrelsy took up the established conventions of white blackface performers, blackface minstrelsy by black performers at the time “differs from white minstrelsy in that it gave theatrical form to ‘signifyin’ on white minstrelsy in the manner in which slaves practised ‘signifyin’ on whites in real life.”23

Here, Anderson invokes the trope of “Signifyin(g),” as theorized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Signifying Monkey, based on two West-African figures of the “trickster” tradition: Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey. As a literary trope, Gates defines Signifyin(g) as “a trope in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (the master tropes), and also hyperbole, litotes, and metaleosius.”24 Extending the black literary tradition into the black vernacular tradition more generally, Gates further notes that Signifyin(g) “is this principle of repetition and difference, this practice of intertextuality, which has been so crucial to the black vernacular forms of Signifyin(g).”25

Signifyin(g) will remain a critical concept in thinking through the ephemeral and improvised performances of black blackface musicians and others within popular music of the late nineteenth century. Taken together, the intertextual relationship that black performers developed between early African American improvised and oral folk practices (on and off the minstrel stage) continued to shape both black sounds and the making of Blacksound.

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