Talk:Blackface/Cockrell

What follows are notes from Cockrell, Dale (1997). Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. New York City: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56828-5.

I hope this information proves useful to editors working on our blackface and minstrel show articles. I own the book this information comes from, so please feel free to ask for clarifications or examples from the text. — Dulcem (talk) 01:05, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Early theatrical blackface
Commonly accepted sequence is that usage of black makeup to represent black characters dates to at least Othello. In the 18th and 19th centuries, plays like The Aethiop, The Africans, Inkle and Yarico, Oroonoko, The Padlock, etc. put blackface characters on the American stage. In the 1820s, Charles Mathews did a mocking, blackface portrayal of a black actor he had watched performing Hamlet. In the early 1830s, actors began doing comic blackface songs such as "Coal Black Rose". In 1832, Thomas D. Rice performed "Jump Jim Crow" in New York City and hastened the full development of blackface minstrelsy. (13-14)

Blackface characters were "extremely common" in early American theater. Cockrell estimates that between 1751 and 1843, there were more than 20,000 productions on American stages that featured blackface characters. (15)

About half of the early (pre-Virgina Minstrels/1843) blackface on the American stage was of the minstrlesy/comic type, featuring songs, dances, and sketches in the minstrel mold. The other half was blackface roles in "legitimate" theater ("plays, operas, melodramas, farces, endpieces, set pieces, pantomimes, and entr'acts") in a wide range of genres. (15)

Of these examples of "legitimate" theatrical blackface, about half of it was English in origin, and the other half American ("Yankee plays"). The American productions often featured native archetypes by impersonators, such as the "down-easter". (20)

These Yankee impersonations, which featured "lower-class, working people as worthy subjects for ridicule and containment by the audience" were a direct antecedent to blackface minstrelsy. (24)

In the pre-Virginia Minstrels period, blacks took the "legitimate" white stage only exceedingly rarely. Any black roles were played by corked up whites. (26)

The most common blackface characters in legitimate theater were servants. They had stereotypical names like Caesar, Pompey, Sambo. They often had little or no dialogue. (26)

Those roles that had more meat to them usually tended to out-and-out comedy or out-and-out tragedy. This usually followed the nature of the play, with humorous characters appearing in comedies and tragic figures in tragedies. (26)

"In almost all cases, blackness was a way of signaling 'intruder' or 'interloper' to the audience." (27)

The plays mostly ignored or mocked problems faced by blacks in America. (27)

Othello is an exception. Of productions that featured blackface characters, it was performed three times more frequently than its nearest rival. (27)

Evidence suggests that on the pre-1843 American stage, the character Othello was portrayed and interpreted as "at heart a simpleminded, hulking black man given primarily to despoiling white womanhood." (28)

"The conclusions are inescapable. To those better sorts in the first two tiers, the comprehension of theatrical blackface was simple: To be black was to be, at best, comic and happy, perhaps musical, and, at worst, unfortunate; to be black was to be, at best, patronized, and, at worst, condemned for the color of skin. Blackness was always understood to be fundamentally different from and lesser than the whiteness of the audience." (29)

"It is not unfair to say that the representation of race on the legitimate stage was what we would today call 'racist'; and it was so by very nearly official decree, emanating from the mouths of the powerful." (29)

Cockrell concludes that the racial mockery aspects of blackface were aspects of legitimate theater long before minstrelsy came on the scene. (29)

Folk antecedents
In the 1820s, '30s, and '40s, callithumpian bands were working-class groups who (often with blackened faces) took to the streets of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other large cities during the end-of-year holiday season. They wore odd costumes, such as inside-out clothing. The bands went about causing a din with "drums, whistles, horns, pots, pans, and kettles". They "[taunted] both their social superiors and inferiors" by throwing lime, flour, and other white powders at people and their houses. (32) The tormented party could only make the callithumpians go away by giving them gifts of food or alcohol. (32-33) The callithumpians were generally young men. (33)

Such groups considered a sort of charivari, or "communal regualation". Those who participated, usually young, unmarried, and male, tried to reinforce the unity and social mores of the community by attacking those they judged to threaten it. Marking such individuals out brought shame upon them and, it was hoped, would cause them to give up their perceived vices. (33)

The callithumpian activities also created a reversal of roles that hearkened back to the lord of misrule festivals of the Middle Ages. (33) They were the only situations in which lower-class Americans could safely chastise their social betters. (34)

Colonial America had similar misrule festivals where slaves were allowed to participate in such charivari. Pinkster Day in the Dutch Hudson Valley was one example. (37)

In Salem, slaves were allowed to hold "elections" on special occasions where slaves made noise and threw white powders about. These were banned in 1758, and by the turn of the 19th century, misrule celebrations by slaves were banned throughout northern America. (38)

A similar celebration in the South was John Kooner, around Christmas, when slaves dressed one of their own in rags and a mask and followed him in carrying out charivari pranks and creating cacophonous music. (38-39) The practice seems to have derived from John Canoe rituals in the West Indies, where slaves used a rosy-cheeked, white-man mask for their leader. (39)

Mumming also came to the Americas with European immigrants. (44)

Mumming plays, generally held in the winter holiday season, often featured heroes and combat as a central theme. They featured lots of music and dancing. The plays were held in private homes where the mummers asked to be admitted. They were masked, unmarried males in costume. The leader swept a stage area in the kitchen with his broom. Most mumming plays featured a devil-like figure, Father Christmas, a fool, a wild man, and a cross-dressed man playing a woman. The plays usually showed an historical figure being called a liar by another character and then being killed in a sword fight. Another character then resurrected the dead hero. The mummers sang and danced and played music. The mummers then collected money from the audience which later helped pay for a dance or party to which all were invited. The mummers then left and tried for their next venue. (42-43)

American mummers replaced European references with American ones. For example, the hero who was killed in the swordplay might have been St. Patrick or St. George in Europe, but was often George Washington or an equivalent figure in America. (44)

Over all, it seems that carnival-like activities were widespread and integral parts of American culture by the early 19th century. (44)

Callithumpians often surpassed their traditional roles at New Year's and took on the tasks of charivari. (45)

Tarring and feathering and "lynching parties" were other example of widespread charivari in early America. (45-46)

Cockrell offers these summations: The participants in early American charivari were usually young, unmarried males. They wore masks of some kind. Their actions bordered on the violent and often became violent. The participants made music or sound that others found as nothing but "noise". The events seemed festive and jolly, but they were underneath a "protest against social structures". Charivari was intended to bring attention to and possibly fix perceived social problems. The events were considered fun by participants and observers alike. (46)

There is no "hard evidence" that these traditions influenced early blackface minstrelsy, but this is hardly surprising because such traditions were primarily preserved orally. (47)

Plenty of circumstantial evidence, though. An 1834 callithumpian New Year's parade in Philadelphia made up of "Indians, hunters, Falstaffs, Jim Crows and nondescripts"; a reference to a black challenge dancer as a "Calathumpian"; references in minstrel songs to charivari, such as "riding a rail" or sweeping the kitchen before a performance. (47)

Cockrell believes that early blackface seems to have inherited "blackface masking, dramatic characterization, and the music itself" from these folk traditions. (50)

Mumming commonly used blackened faces at this time. Characters portrayed in this way were usually devils or savages. (51)

Morris dancing, which also used blackened faces, was popular in the U.S. in the 1820s and '30s. The blackface here was used not racially but rather as a means of disguise and dissociation from the real world. (52)

By and large, these early blackened-face traditions in America were not racially oriented either. Instead, the goal was to use a blackened face to signify "the other", to be used as an inversion ritual. (52-53)

Such masking permitted non-acceptable behavior and speech, and, by extension, strengthened community mores and attitudes while still allowing them to be questioned. (53-54)

Two early minstrel characters, Zip Coon and Jim Crow, are similar to characters in the folk theatrical tradition. The Pinkster festivals in New York, for example, featured the Pinkster King in the outfit of a British brigadier (similar to Zip Coon, who dresses above his station and plays at high society), and colonial British derided the pretension of participants in John Canoe festivities in Jamaica. On the other hand, John Kooner, Belsnickel, and callithumpian band participants in America dressed in rags, as did Jim Crow. Mummers sometimes dressed up, and sometimes dressed in rags. (54-55)

Often, the Zip Coon/Jim Crow dichotomy appeared in the same play in the folk tradition. (55)

Mumming features female impersonation, a prominent component of early blackface minstrelsy. (55)

"There is no question but that the prototype for minstrelsy's need to give slanderous image to the name of woman (white or black) could have come from the legitimate stage; but at least as likely, given early minstrelsy's male, generally common-class constitution, is that the prompt for cross-dressing characters came from the rituals of playacting much closer to the culture of the folk." (55-56)

Cockrell believes that blackface was thus part of this same long European folk theatrical tradition. (56)

Cockrell suggests that the familiarity of the lower-classes with blackened face folk traditions accounts for some of early blackface's popularity. (56)

Early blackface patrons (pre-Virginia Minstrels) were working-class males who would have had little experience with legitimate theatre. (56)

Blackface (both minstrel blackface and folk blackface) warned the audience that the material to come was comic, burlesque, not serious. Cockrell argues that by extension, blackface on the stage originally signaled a parody of the legitimate theatre. (57)

Cockrell agrees with Eric Lott that early minstrelsy was about more than racism. "[D]erision is itended; but so too is incorporation of the Other." (59-60)

Laughing at the Other reinforced the unity of those laughing. (60)

On the other hand, such folk theatre could get out of hand and lead to the powers that be banning it. (60)

Still, the representation of African American characters is "at the most obvious level" minstrelsy's meaning to early audiences. (61)

Certainly, Cockrell argues, racism and putting one group down for the benefit of another was intended in blackface minstrelsy. (61)

After minstrelsy had developed as a genre and become established, it influenced and became associated with older blackened-face traditions in the U.S. (178, note 73; several examples provided)

Early blackface
The same demographic who did street theatricals were the primary audience of early blackface performers such as Thomas D. Rice. (69)

Rice was from the legitimate stage tradition, but his signature song, "Jump Jim Crow", was a racous, noisy piece, not refined. It was much more in tune with the charivari, folk tradition. (76, 78-79)

"This music assaulted sensibilities, challenged the roots of respectability, and promised subversion, a world undone, and, concomitantly, a new set of codes." (81-82)

It seems that early blackface songs represented different things to different people. High class audiences saw "Jim Crow" as a song of racial inferiority. (82)

George Washington Dixon's career shows the masking power of blackface. So long as he remained masked, he was celebrated, but as a journalist and editor, he was reviled. (140)

Blackface drew the eye to the mask, but for lower classes, the music was the true heart of minstrelsy's function as inversion ritual. (141)

The roughness of early blackface music was similar to the roughness of the noise and music of the charivari. (141)

"One hates to say it, because it sounds today so naïve and openly controversial, but the inescapable conclusion is this: White working people saw an ally in the black laborer against their common superiors, not simply an inevitable enemy." (161)

Working-class whites were at the middle of both class and race tensions, and they "had to devise both upward an downward processes and rituals". Through "aggressive behavior", they fought their inferiority; through minstrelsy they assumed superiority but "bridged through the palliative effects of laughter." (161)

"Blackface minstrelsy . . . must have been many things to many people. . . . What I have wanted to do here is, in part, undercut the tired old story that blackface minstrelsy is about unrelenting hatred of blacks by working-class, urban white males, for I believe that interpretation to be ahistorical. It ascribes meaning without understanding context, nor even human nature. It does not seek an ethnograpy of audience: Who were the people in the Bowery Theatre? How did they come to be there? What did they bring with them? For some in that theatre, I do not doubt that hatred and racism formed bedrock. For some, though, probably most, the basic impulse was 'simply' toward entertainment. Most emphatically, we must not underestimate this fundamental human need, and dump and bury posthaste the long-standing conceit that entertainment is merely cultural detritus." (162)

Blacks and whites shared the gallery in early blackface performances. (186 note 92)

Minstrel show era
Cockrell's research shows that about 1840, blackface minstrel music, which had to that point been full of references to social, economic, political, and moral issues, became decidedly less so. Early blackface songs often took the side of the lower-classes and even held out the prospects of "a black-white working-class alliance against slavery". However, later songs veered to more of an out-and-out lampoon of blacks, women, and, to a lesser extent, the powers-that-were, and a means of upholding the status quo. (146-147)

"'representation' [has] in it the original and critical difference between minstrelsy before and after 1843." (149)

Dan Emmett said that the Virginia Minstrels got their first gig via charivari; they browbeat the managers of the Bowery Amphitheatre into booking them by playing raucous music outside. (151)

Emmett and the Virginia Minstrels converted minstelsy from low-brow "noise" to "concerts" that appealed to the middle classes. (151)

By choosing to call themselves "minstrels" (a name then associated with touring European concert groups), Emmett and co. burlesqued the middle class, but they also courted them. It was a genius move that appealed both to blackface's established base but also grew the appeal of the form. (152)

The messages of blackface minstrel songs shifted to a patronizing reaffirmation of the status quo. "With their name, concert format, and middle-class audiences came representation instead of engagement, music instead of noise, and, ultimately, issues of race instead of class." (153-154)

One reason for blackface's shift to racism was that the second generation of blackface performers (Emmett, Joel Sweeney, George Christy, Dan Bryant, Stephen Foster, etc.) was from a stigmatized group themselves: the Irish. They thus "claimed a triumph over blacks in issues of power and control—representation—on the stage and in the streets." (199 note 43)

"By the last third of the century blackface minstrelsy had become what the Virginia Minstrels forecast: a weapon by which one group of Americans defined, marginalized, and contained another — racism, sexism, money, power, and (capital M) Music." (169)