The Minstrel Shows

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Minstrel Shows Minstrel shows developed in the 1840’s, peaked after the Civil War and remained popular into the early 1900s. Minstrel shows emerged from preindustrial European traditions of masking and carnival. Minstrelsy was a product of its time, white men blackened their faces with burnt cork to lampoon Negroes, performing songs and skits that sentimentalized the slave life on Southern plantations. Blacks were shown as naive buffoons who sang and danced the days away, gobbling "chitlins," stealing the occasional watermelon, and expressing their inexplicable love for "ol' massuh." By the Civil War the minstrel show had become world famous and respectable. Late in his life Mark Twain fondly remembered the "old time nigger show" with its…show more content…
Four unemployed white actors decided to stage an African-American style spoof of this group's concerts. Calling themselves Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels, their blackface revue premiered at New York's Bowery Amphitheatre in February 1843. Emmett, Frank Bower, Frank Pelham and Billy Whitlock became the first troupe to offer a full evening of blackface variety entertainment. With their chairs in a simple semi-circle, the quartet offered a fresh combination of songs, dances and comic banter, creating cartoonish Negro caricatures. Most historians mark this production as the beginning of minstrelsy. The form was so natural, it seemed improvised – and, in fact. much of the evening, because of the talents of the four, was. But most of all, there was exuberance and excitement. The minstrels, in their wide-eyed, large-lipped, ragged-costumed absurdity, rolled onto the stage in a thundercloud of energy which hardly ever dissipated. They insulted each other, they baited each other, they made mincemeat of the language, they took the audience into their fun, and, in one night, they added a new form to show business in America – in fact, the world. - Lee Davis, Scandals and Follies: The Rise and Fall of the Great Broadway Revue (New York: Limelight Editions, 2000), p.…show more content…
In fact, they remained in use for decades. A number of white performers used blackface on stage and in films. The offensive content of minstrelsy lived on too. The long-running radio series Amos n' Andy featured two white actors impersonating contemporary black characters that were direct descendants of "Zip Coon" and "Jim Crow." Some blacks protested at the stereotyping, but the network ignored them and listeners made it a top series for more than a decade. When the series moved to TV in the 1950s, black actors were used – but the spectacle of blacks demeaning themselves had become unsettling, and the show was cancelled in

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