Who was the most influential songwriter of American popular song during the nineteenth century? Theatrical productions, concerts, dances, exhibitions, including Barnum-style "museums" all drew large audiences. 11 0 obj The publisher of Songs So that image came totally from minstrelsy, and if we could go down the line and point out other ways in which those images pervaded the society at that time, those were the images, that was the sense of what black people were like. It would be historically inaccurate for me, as a musicologist, to suggest that we abandon a repertory of music which is so historical because of the racial insensitivity of some of the text. [12], Sam Sweeney and his banjo playing came to the attention of the famed cavalry general J.E.B. The large opposition is a rising American middle-class that wants to cast what it is to be American in a middle-class image. As a blackface performer, he introduced the "Jim Crow" character. It goes back before the turn of the century when immigrant songwriters such as George Gershwin and Irving Berlin fell in love with black culture. 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. The first full-length blackface minstrel show was performed at the Bowery Amphitheatre in New York in February 1843. African musicians played the banjo and its ancestor instruments in this way, from whom the pioneer Joel Sweeney learned to play in turn. In fact, one group was called "The Real Nigs." Although early minstrelsy relied on existing American and British genres, by the 1820s the American minstrel show had developed a distinctive national character. Which of the following is NOT true about James Reese Europe? I think that that's somewhat unfortunate because it's a song that grew out of a minstrel tradition but was critical of the minstrel tradition. Which White banjo virtuoso lead the Virginia Minstrels? People congregated around the footlights. It's part of black history and it's part of American history and you can't change history. hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(1901150,'ddcc31c2-080c-41df-aacf-014e931a954e',{"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); clawhammer banjo is descended directly from stroke style, Ukulele Sizes Soprano, Concert, Tenor & Baritone, Top 5 Tips For Improving Single String Playing On the 5-String Banjo with Ryan Cavanaugh. endstream Not only does minstrelsy mirror in many ways the cultural and social predicaments of the country in the 19th century, it itself changes form and gets new life every 20 years or so until, as a stage form, it basically dies out in the 1920s and migrates to film, where it has a very long afterlife all the way to the present day in a film like Warren Beatty'sBullworth. I believe as a teacher, and as a historian, that they should be placed in the historical context and people should understand where these songs fit and why. The University of Illinois Press is one of the leading publishers of humanities and social sciences journals in the country. Dale Cockrell: By the 1840s, the banjo was widely associated with southern slaves through minstrel shows, performed by white men in blackface, which became the prevailing form of theatrical entertainment in America for most of the century. Eric Lott: A twelve-bar structure made up of three phrases of four bars each. That is part of it, but it's also done by people of African descent. Mathews, [Charles]. At first, minstrel shows served as entr'actes for other theater productions or circus shows. Which of the following is true about Al Jolson's 1921 recording of "April Showers"? During the 1840s the show was divided into two parts--the first concentrated largely upon the urban black dandy, the second on the southern plantation slave. The first thing to note about minstrel banjos is that they tended to be wood-heavy constructions, from the tuning pegs down to the tailpiece. 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. The masks had become much more grotesque. 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. London: Hodgson, [1824]. Well, religious songs drop out because everybody at the camp isn't necessarily of one religion. However, without the additional scale length provided by a minstrel instrument, your strings will be uncomfortably loose. Music is socially defined. 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. WebBlues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. 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. And in many ways it's a song that enabled us to begin to undo racial bigotry and prejudices that exist in this country. He is known for popularizing the playing of the banjo and has often been credited with advancing the physical development of the modern five-string banjo. By the turn of the twentieth-century, what form of popular theater became the most important medium for popularizing Tin Pan Alley songs? And of course that was the minstrelsy, that's what was happening and the sort of the exaggerated caricatured stereotypical black dialect of minstrel songs in the 1830s and 1840s. It's the arena, for better or worse, in which black people come to be displayed and black issues come to the floor, in the American culture industry, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s and extending all the way to our own day. And Jacksonian Democrats, common people, wanted to cast it in their own image. Minstrelsy was by no means the only form of popular entertainment of the time. "The Journal of American Folklore", 85(335). So this was not advertised as a stage show. And by the 1860s black performers [were] going on the stage themselves and performing in a similar manner. I think the stereotypes that emerge from the 19th century minstrel show circulate to the present day and are crucial in defining white people's sense of who black people are, I'm sad to say. You can't drink at work anymore. Sweeney began performing with the banjo in the early 1830s. The basic features of the blues form include which of the following? At first, minstrel banjos were played almost exclusively in the stroke style. This consists of a downpicking motion where strings are struck by the back of the nail and plucked with the thumb. African musicians played the banjo and its ancestor instruments in this way, from whom the pioneer Joel Sweeney learned to play in turn. [1] Aside from his important role in popularizing the instrument, he has often been credited with advancing the physical development of the modern five-string banjo. He toured through Virginia in the early 1830s with his 5-string instrument, his face darkened with cork ash, performing tunes picked up from black musicians and embellishing them with comedic routines and speeches. 1994 University of Illinois Press Why does Brutus oppose it. Which of the following is generally true about Tin Pan Alley songs? The music industry's discovery of black music can be traced to a set of recordings made in the early 1920's by which black vaudeville performer? Led by white banjo virtuoso Dan Emmett (18151904); created a lengthy stage performance that featured a standard group of performers a) Mr. WebWhich white banjo virtuoso lead the Virginia Minstrels? What's the connection between blackface minstrelsy and rock and roll? Which of the following is true of Bing Crosby's recording of "How Deep Is the Ocean"? Whereas the parlor classes had pianos. This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. It's a way for people to negotiate or to think about or to find humor in an extremely problematic aspect of American society, which they are arguing about in their politics and in government and in other ways. Stephen Foster, when he heard a minstrel show, would have heard something that sounded altogether different from what his sisters or other polite society were playing at home. The new Virginia Minstrels performed in Dublin at the Theatre Royal from 24 April to 7 May during entr'actes, then continued for a series of entr'actes and complete minstrel shows in Cork, Belfast, then Glasgow by the end of May. [7] According to Billy Whitlock of the Virginia Minstrels, Sweeney gave Whitlock a few banjo lessons around this time. The 1870s saw a steep decline in the minstrel style of play. Finger picking would soon overtake it as the dominant banjo style, although minstrel style remained popular and was preserved in the isolated Appalachian mountains and out West. ', '$.027', '$.03', '$.054/mbf', '$.07', '$.07/cwt', '$.076', '$.09', '$.10-a-minute', '$.105', '$.12', '$.30', '$.30/mbf', '$.50', '$.65', '$.75', '$. Now its political charge varies enormously through the decades, but there are exemplars of the minstrel tradition all around us, both white, as well as black. They called themselves the Virginia Minstrels' and were made up of banjo, bones, fiddle, and tambourine players. On the other hand, they feel like they've been reduced to slavery and so that they are not all that different from slaves on the plantation and there is a kind of, I think, a kind of felt identification of, based on oppression, given these two labor systems: a really kind of booming capitalist industrialism in the North and a slave economy, plantation economy in the South. That would provide more melodic and harmonic expression, as the quote suggests. 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. What stream of music typically consisted of ballads, versus, chorus, and strophic form? They did several shows at the Theatre Royal, Adelphi, and later in the Waterloo Rooms in Edinburgh, followed by a return engagement in Glasgow, this time at City Hall. Composed around two hundred songs during the 1840s, 1850s, and early 1860s; regarded as the first important composer of American popular song. Which of the a. But at the same time, there's an embrace of that culture that's happening on the stage at the same time. endobj African Americans come to be excluded from certain aspects of American society. In 1831William Lloyd Garrisonbegins his newspaper,The Liberator, in Boston, proclaiming the cause of immediate abolition. That's precisely when issues around slavery and abolition begin to heat up -- not at the center of American politics but certainly as its margins and increasingly moving towards the center. Name the people responsible for promoting, often using unethical means, Tin Pan Alley. What did the music industry call recordings from the 1920's until the late 1940's that were made by African Americans artists and produced mainly for sale to African American listeners? He is the earliest known person to have played the banjo on stage. 2003-2023 Chegg Inc. All rights reserved. The associations are certainly too strong there. Songs of the Virginny Banjoist. All wood, in fact, save for their brass brackets and tension hoop, skin head, and gut strings. The banjo as described above did not assume its familiar, 5-string form until at least the 1820s. Sweeney saw success, and by early 1843, he embarked on a European tour that included stops in London and Edinburgh. 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. Which fiddler from East Texas led the Texas Playboys in hits like "New San Antonio Rose?". Which ensemble recorded Dippermouth Blues?. Then when a white boy did it, John Fogerty in Creedence Clearwater, he sang, "I hoid it through the grapevine," almost as if he was going to exaggerate the black characteristics. It's not just on one side or the other. Who was the most influential songwriter of American popular song during the nineteenth century? They did not deal directly with the troubling issues of the 1920s and 1930s: racism, massive unemployment, and the rise of fascism in Central and Eastern Europe. As a rule, minstrel banjos are also much bigger than their contemporary counterparts. It's not just done by whites to parody blacks. If they didn't like the song, they would cut it off. Ken Emerson: What legacy did blackface minstrelsy create for American culture today? Eric Lott: The Briggs Banjo Instructor', the first fully fledged banjo tutoring book, released in 1855, utilizes this tuning based on the experiences of leading minstrel banjo player Thomas Briggs. Sweeney's popularity grew rapidly. What was the first successful, all-black musical? First of all, because of the obvious racial epithets and caricatures and stereotypes that he uses, which were typical of the time and unfortunately are still typical of our time today. It's too easy and too unfair to just simply write someone off until we've actually looked through their eyes at their world. From the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature. In 1845, after returning from the UK, Sweeney himself founded the group Old Joe's Minstrels', thus cementing the popularity of the act. It's at the very earliest moments where Americans are beginning to define who they are distinctively apart from the rest of the world, particularly apart from western Europe, where many American ancestors had come from. If you are a working-class American in New York City at the time, you're feeling yourself squeezed politically, economically and socially from the top, but also to some extent from the bottom. Photograph of a blackface minstrel. By the middle of the 1830s there are tense riots directed against abolitionists in the North and in the South. WebLed by white banjo virtuoso Dan Emmettb. Perhaps the most prolific songwriter of the Tin Pan Alley era, and the composer who wrote the song "Blue Skies" for "The Jazz Singer," was: Tin Pan Alley songs usually began with a slow introduction, followed by a refrain, which was most often in what form? In addition Minstrel shows usually had a fiddler, a bones player and a drum/tambourine. Which of the following artists recorded "Chicago Electric Blues"? That's when you get the semi-circle with the traditional minstrel set-up, with these two characters being outrageous, who fidgeted all the time, who were saying the most inane things that could possibly be said. 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. 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. Blacks were presumed to be this way, the stereotype was this and therefore the media had to reflect it in that way. Foster is no less ambiguous. They loved it. Throughout the 1830s he would tour North Carolina, then arrive and perform in New York City, before crossing the Atlantic to play in the United Kingdom. Which songwriting team composed the musical Oklahoma!, which opened in 1943? [9] Another raved, "Only those who have heard Sweeny [sic] know what music there is in a banjo. In some ways, African-American life and the Southern life has always functioned as a fantasy for Americans in popular culture. People who control the dictionaries say, "This is music," and "That isn't music," that that is noise out there. He was known as a singing cowboy and reached out to a broad audience with a deep baritone voice. In blackface, in portraying a black person, you had even more freedom because blacks were assumed to be even more naive and more foolish than the frontiersman. They spit upon the stage, they threw peanut shells on the stage, and the kind of jumpy quality that the music exemplified was right up their alley. Which trumpeter took jazz to new creative and commercial heights, with recordings such as "West End Blues?". As a blackface performer, he introduced the "Jim Crow" character. Which of the following was a well-known composer of plantation songs and the first successful black American songwriter? Request Permissions, Published By: University of Illinois Press. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. One of the biggest celebrities of the 1920-1930s was the singer who starred in "The Jazz Singer." The act itself gradually grew in complexity, developing a unique three part structure and cast of recognizable characters. How did class issues relate to the race issues? 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). Virginia Minstrels: A minstrel troupe led by the ", The most popular bandleader from the 1890s through World War I; was known as America's "March King." I mean, masks do that. It accompanies dances featuring sexual role-playing and was originally suppressed by Cuban authorities. Music began to be written with the act in mind and it is during this time that Stephen Foster, legendary American songwriter, penned some of the eras most iconic songs. Daniel Emmett. Which white banjo virtuoso lead the Virginia Minstrels? The London Mathews; Containing an Account of This Celebrated Comedian's Trip to America. He toured through Virginia in That's when you really get the negative characterization of blacks as the total comic fool, and that is what minstrelsy was about, to a certain extent. In 1862 during the American Civil War, Sam Sweeney enlisted in the Confederate Army, serving in Company H of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry. In July 1843, Sweeney played during entr'actes at the Adelphi Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland. Interlocutor lead performer, snag and And it's one of the reasons that it's such a popular phenomenon. Which legendary French-born superstar of tango was inspired by operatic bel canto singing and the criollo songs of the Argentine gauchos? Sean Wilentz: Secondly, all minstrel banjos are completely fretless. What was the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment regarded by European audiences as distinctively American in character? Jolson is accompanied by an orchestra that plays an elaborate and decorative accompaniment suitable to the flowery sentiments of the song. The South and black life in particular has an appeal to Americans of all races that is fantastical, that is unquestionably on some levels deeply racist, but it also speaks to a longing that we all feel, I believe, for a pre-technological, pre-urban, primal, more essential life, as it were. Who lead the Ambassador Orchestra, the most successful dance band of the 1920s? Bailey, Jay (1972). His earliest documented use of the banjo on stage was in April 1839. Between 1895 and 1915, Joplin composed many of the classics of the ragtime repertoire and helped popularize the style through his piano arrangements, published as sheet music. At its core, however, the banjo always remained, supported by percussion, fiddle, and other traditional slave instruments. What was the first form of musical and theatrical entertainment regarded by European audiences as distinctively American in character? Which artist established the myth of the outcast (i.e., the resourceful, lone wanderer) in songs, like "Waiting for a Train," that has proven to be a potent force in country music up to the present time? WebPop Goes the Weasel was the vehicle for many virtuoso and comic fiddlers to display their prowess on the instrument. Al Jolson billed himself as "The World's Greatest Entertainer". Copyright 2010 Center for American Music. % At this time, Dick Pelham met up with Sweeney and Brower, and the trio decided to reform the Virginia Minstrels with Sweeney as banjoist. Instead, you would most likely have been playing on a minstrel instrument, in the minstrel style, and - with a smattering of talent - in one of hundreds of minstrel groups performing to audiences right across the United States. During this time he spread his knowledge of the banjo and its unique, downpicking' play style to students wherever he went. This consists of a downpicking motion where strings are struck by the back of the nail and plucked with the thumb. African Americans live both enslaved and free within that society, but everybody else is living in the society, too. But I also understand at the same time -- it's the old thing, minstrelsy is many things to many people. Born to a farming family in Appomattox County, Virginia, he claimed to have learned to play the banjo from local enslaved Africans. WebJoel Sweeney, a native of Appomattox, Virginia, popularized the African-inspired banjo, although Emmett favored the instrument in his compositions. The publisher of Songs originally presented this copy to Napoleon W. Gould, a British musician who played in Emmett's minstrel troupe. One of the best-known and most successful composers of plantation songs; the first successful black songwriter. As the United States expanded westward and new towns sprung up across the continent, traveling minstrel troupes would follow in their wake, providing entertainment to the settlers. n0%f|U9l 7?j`l7"tiNf]?uhgM Z4i[&LY_x Was blackface minstrelsy only about caricaturing blacks? When I got Foster's songs in grade school, they're such terrific melodies that it's almost a crime not to parlay the melodies into the classroom setting but if I got the racist lyrics, I don't remember it. They're embracing a culture that they're seeming to deride at precisely the same time. WebWritten by Nick LaRocca Perf Original Dixieland Jazz Early Jazz Recording Fath Ruffins: Into the 1850s and 60s, minstrel shows kept on gaining popularity. Which singing style emerged soon after the invention of the electronic microphone? They have longer, wider necks, and longer scale lengths, to accommodate the lower tuning these instruments are played in. Our standard tuning in G, which runs gDGBD, is at a far higher pitch compared to the standard D tuning on minstrel banjos, which runs dGDF#A. I think that they are catchy, wonderful, popular tunes that really reflect something interesting about the United States. He became the sniveling black man who was really a coward and was ignorant and somewhat comical in his connection to the slave masters. In fact, many actors and actresses were taught by whites to speak as if they were black because that was demanded. WebWhich White banjo virtuoso lead the Virginia Minstrels? Middle-class culture is one that has worshipped the mind and has largely tried to divorce the body from the expression of what they are. He composed popular marches such as "El Capitan," "The Washington Post," and "The Stars and Stripes Forever.". Obviously, from Elvis Presley to Beck that has been one of the primary impulses behind rock and roll. >> stream Which of the following is true about African American ballads of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The most offensive of the lyrics used words like "nigger" which would have been common in the 1840s or 1850s [but] the lyrics that I was taught didn't have that in them. 5" and did the most to popularize the mambo throughout Latin America and in the United States? The difference was not so much a structural one because the musical style, the musical structure, the form of the melody and so forth, followed certain European patterns that were derived from the same kinds of music that genteel society were playing and singing. On the line following each word, write the word with a hyphen added to show how you would divide the word at the end of a line. 1768 At first, minstrel banjos were played almost exclusively in the stroke style. One of the most controversial eras of American performance history was launched. Huckleberry Finnis, I think -- this is hotly debated now -- but it's ambiguous to this day in ways that I think still one could make a fairly defensible argument for withholding [it] from school students until a certain age, 13 and 14, when they're able to deal with certain of the racial implications. The first white performer to establish a wide reputation as a "blackface" entertainer. Mel Watkins: WebWhite actor born into a poor family in New York's Seventh Ward. Crosby constantly varies his dynamics within individual phrases. Sam Sweeney's signature song, possibly penned by Stuart himself, was "Jine the Cavalry." They had proper instruments playing proper music. marks $\underline{\hspace{3cm}}$. Current issues are available through the Scholarly Publishing Collective. 2 0 obj At some point, Brower parted company to tour with Dan Emmett, though he rejoined Sweeney by spring of 1844. // cutting the mustard **(a)** List two causes for the split in the Democratic party in the 1860 election, **(b)** List two effects of the election. Dick also died in 1860. They first appeared in 1843. By the 1850s, however,black elements had been reduced and moved to the concluding section of a three part show. Frank Brower of the Virginia Minstrels met him there and joined Sweeney's act as a bones player. It's not really a coincidence that T. D. Rice and the so-called Ethiopian delineators got going in the early 1830s. African American composer and pianist; the best-known composer of ragtime music. After a performance by Dan Emmett at the Bowery Amphitheatre Circus, the New York Herald wrote, "Emmit's [sic] banjo playing is fully equal to Jo [sic] Sweeney's, and far ahead of any other now in the United States. Which of the following stanzas uses the structure most closely associated with the twelve-bar blues? Sam Sweeney died, possibly of smallpox, on January 13, 1864, and was buried in Graham Cemetery, Orange, Virginia.[13]. I think it's more important to study history as it is, lest we ever repeat ourselves. Which song, recorded by Nat "King" Cole and written by Eden Ahbez, is similar to a Yiddish folk song called "Shvayg mayn harts" and was originally part of a suite of songs called the Gospel of Nature? Which artist was the focus of the first documented example of modern pop hysteria, the so-called Columbus Day Riot of 1944? PBS American Experience page on minstrelsy, University of Virginia site on minstrelsy. That was considered -- too wild, too uninhibited basically for what America thought of itself as at that time. An enormous amount of American musical history and tradition is tied up with the banjo in this, its earliest standardized form. Grand Ethiopian Concert! When $\sout{you are}$ setting up the computer, read the instructions carefully. American Music What's fascinating about minstrelsy is really just how strange it is, how weird it is at bottom. Which of the following is true about the song "In the Mood"? Eric Lott: Minstrel troupes toured the United States constantly from the 1840s until the 1870s, helping create an embryonic national popular culture. 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. 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? https://quizlet.com/160626533/music-162-chapter-2-flash-cards Individually, however, they also carry specific meanings which offer tantalizing insights into the development of the banjo throughout the ages. var googletag = googletag || {}; John Philip Sousa. Eric Lott: WebWhich white actor invented the minstrel character "Jim Crow?" An ex-minstrel show performer from a middle-class background, Bland wrote some seven hundred songs, including "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" (published in 1878, for a long time the official state song of Virginia) and "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" (published in 1879). Which of the following became the conductor of the US Marine Band?
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