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The Creolization of American Culture
William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy
By Christopher J. Smith UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09504-7
CHAPTER 1
Recovering the Creole Synthesis
The Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy
Body to body, culture is communicated, and the more one identifies with the other person, the more easily there is a transfer of knowledge.
—Rebecca Sachs Norris, "Embodiment and Community"
THIS BOOK USES THE ARTWORKS, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, ephemera, and biography of the vernacular painter William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), and similar materials from some of his predecessors and contemporaries, as a lens through which to see the multiethnic antebellum world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy, and to recover the roots, sound and impact of that popular music idiom in performance. I argue that the resources, demographics, and conditions for a unique black-white cultural exchange, a "creole synthesis," existed widely across riverine and maritime antebellum United States. Finally, I suggest that, though Mount in his local environments of Long Island and the Lower East Side was uniquely situated to accurately observe and report the creole synthesis, analogous contextual factors and music results were present throughout early-nineteenth-century America. Mount was a man of his times: his family background, professional experience, political and cultural convictions, and overall life trajectory were shared by thousands of other young men born around or just after 1800—including, as we shall see, by seminal blackface architects such as George Washington Dixon (b. 1801?) and Thomas Dartmouth Rice (b. 1808).1 His experience was thus consistent with that of others of his age, ethnicity, class, gender, and background, and may legitimately be regarded as representative of the wider experience of the first blackface audiences.
However, what sets Mount apart from his contemporaries, vernacular artists such as James Goodwyn Clonney (1812–1867), George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879), and James Henry Beard (1812–1893), is the range and precision of his musical observation. An avid fiddle and flute player and tune collector, and a meticulous visual reporter, Mount was also a close observer at a crucial moment in blackface history. Because of this felicitous combination of aptitude, skills, and timing, the record of Mount's paintings, letters, music manuscripts, and sketchbooks, in its breadth of detail and demonstrable accuracy, opens a musicological window on the first flowerings of antebellum popular music. Looking at Mount's works helps us to recover not only the semiotic meanings but also the performance practices and sounding processes of minstrelsy's Anglo-Celtic and African American synthesis. These materials thus repay elements of ethnomusicological and iconographic interpretation, and such interpretation in turn allows a fundamental revision in our understanding of how and when that creole synthesis came into being.
RECOVERING MINSTRELSY
Dale Cockrell, Eric Lott, William Mahar, Hans Nathan, W T. Lhamon Jr., and other scholars have documented minstrelsy's urban contexts, published texts, and working-class semiotics, but their work has tended to focus on unpacking cultural meaning, and, in some cases, to depend on the prose record. This has meant, with a few exceptions noted ahead, comparatively little examination of performance practice (both African American and Anglo-Celtic), improvisation, the cross-fertilization of diverse music-and-dance traditions, and, especially, the ways that iconography can help to reconstruct the idiom.
W. S. Mount's life experience, ephemera, and artworks provide contemporaneous, precisely observed documentation on the blackface experience, particularly as regards its constituent performance practice traditions and the ways that those source traditions shaped the music's sound. This integration of diverse-sounding traditions is demonstrated, through the contextualization and analysis of Mount's work, to be far more geographically ubiquitous, far more stylistically distinctive, and far more influential on the wider sound and practice of American dance music, than has been remarked. Mount is of course not the only useful source—similar analysis of works depicting music by other vernacular painters is also productive—but by dint of timing, geography and proximity, personal biography and musical inclinations, and the caliber of his observation and depiction, he is particularly valuable. Recognizing Mount as a useful reliable reporter on antebellum vernacular music helps us situate his precisely observed rural laborers and wandering musicians as part of, not separate from, the urban contexts that have been more commonly and exclusively understood as minstrelsy's birthplace.
EXAMPLES
A few preliminary examples, of the sort to be discussed in detail throughout this book, will confirm Mount's relevance as a visual source for minstrelsy's musicological reconstruction. While he certainly held high ambitions as a portraitist, Mount was also a pragmatic commercial painter, and an inveterate pencil sketcher from life. Those sketches were typically employed, deployed, and transformed in subsequent oils in consideration of his commercial market, but—as with his music manuscripts, his letters, and the oils themselves—they also represent valuable period observation of musical practice.
The earliest biographical anecdotes confirm the reliability of Mount's sketches as precise reportage: "A lady told the tale of his coming into her room while she was amusing herself with a spaniel she had taught to sit upright. Mount took out his sketchbook and essayed to sketch him. Just as he had completed all but the position of one leg, the animal dropped. As he could not be induced to sit again, Mount declared his sketch spoiled. It was in vain that the lady urged him to add the little required from memory. He would not risk falsehood in a line or a hair." Mount continued this habit long after his career as a portraitist was essentially over: as his health and eyesight eroded in the 1860s, his painting slowed down and deteriorated, but he never stopped sketching. Mount himself clearly viewed these drawings as essential field notes for later paintings, even prior to those oils having been commissioned or conceived: he often appended notes, initials, and dates to pencil sketches as aide-memoire: "May 1864.—From Ranney. Dear skin Gloves—yellow vest, blue coat, yellow blanket, buffbritches." Linkages between Mount's sketches and final paintings help illuminate the creole synthesis, not only as he observed it, but also as it was transformed within his own visual imagination. Despite the tendency among art historians to focus on the allegorical and narrative content of Mount's paintings, those works contain valuable musicological information, as well. The following demonstrate the immediacy of the linkages between sketches and oils and of Mount's potential for recovering the creole synthesis.
A young African American fiddler in Boy Playing Violin, a Mount sketch (image 1), depicted sitting on a tavern bench, wearing an agricultural laborer's smock and a rakish slouch hat, is transformed into an Anglo-American fiddler playing for country dancing in Dancing on the Barn Floor from 1831 (see plate 1).
Elements of this transracial fiddler may also recur in the iconic African American fiddler in Right and Left (1850; discussed in chapter 4, see plate 6).
Two Men Dancing, a sketch of an African American dancer accompanied by a (possible) Anglo-American "patting juba" (supplying body percussion), both observed by an Anglo-American listener (image 2), is transformed in Dance of the Haymakers (see plate 3) and The Power of Music, where the dancer is Anglo-American (Haymakers), the musician becomes an Anglo-Celtic fiddler (both paintings), and the listener becomes African American (both).
An interim watercolor study for a painting on a similar topic, Dance of the Haymakers (see plates 2 and 3) contains an adolescent African American dancing a caricatured "Jim Crow," who in the final oil is transformed to an African American drummer, while the Jim Crow akimbo body vocabulary is transferred to the white dancers.
The creole synthesis can be located in works by other artists of the period, who can sometimes be linked to Mount: the African American "jumping Jim Crow" in an anonymous sketch labeled Dancing for Eels, 1820 Catharine Market, subjected to an effective semiotic analysis in Lhamon's Raising Cain, is troped in later lithographs (discussed by Eric Lott in Love and Theft), and in a number of images not identified by previous scholarship (see chapter 6). But that same dancer, or a shared model, also influences art by caricaturist David Claypoole Johnston illustrating Mount's uncle Micah Hawkins's 1824 "Backside Albany," the first blackface song published in the United States.
Art historians have recognized Mount as a central figure in the foundation of a U.S. vernacular school. Conversely, musicology has mapped minstrelsy's urban synthesis and its semiotic meaning and recurrence in American popular music, but has not addressed Mount's work in a full-length monograph. Recovering Mount's evidence reveals the ready and extensive musical exchange between rural and urban regions such as Long Island and the Lower East Side, as elsewhere across the States; also, the extensive geographic distribution of specific conditions that made the blackface synthesis possible; and the unexpectedly wide range of "creolizing" activities in the period of the 'teens and '20s, before blackface had ever made its way from the street to the stage. Moreover, we can find in Mount examples of the actual processes by which young white musicians, engaged in a kind of participant observation, learned and replicated African American performance practices, and the degree to which borrowing, appropriation, imitation, and the creole synthesis implicated musical influences traveling between all ethnic groups, both white to black and black to white. Mount is thus a key witness to the roots of American popular music, and his visual testimony transforms our understanding of that music.
AGENCY
Before Hans Nathan's major 1962 work, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy, blackface was underexamined in the serious study of American music history, in part because of the idiom's ubiquitous and noxious racist caricature. More recent scholarship has helped to nuance our understanding of nineteenth-century white-against-black racism, to demonstrate its varying character and severity in different periods, to reveal the social, cultural, and historical factors that impacted that severity, and to demonstrate the cultural exchange that went on despite it. Beginning approximately with Lott's Love and Theft (1993) and Cockrell's Demons of Disorder (1997), and continuing with Lhamon's Raising Cain (1998) and Mahar's Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (1998), this scholarship has usefully complicated monolithic presumptions about what blackface "was," "did," and "meant." These scholars have shown the idiom's piebald roots in European carnivale, Afro-Caribbean festival traditions, and U.S. comic theater, and its semiotic strategies of transgression, resistance, and working-class solidarity. Their work has gone a long way toward "rehabilitating" minstrelsy: not disavowing the idiom's racist component, yet also recognizing its significant musical and historical impact.
Not so completely recovered has been agency on the part of the African American musicians who were the source and subject of imitation by white blackface minstrels, or the widespread creolized exchange of which minstrelsy was only the theatricalized, commodified, visible tip of a much larger iceberg of idioms mostly submerged below the horizon of middle-class experience. Some modern analyses of blackface have tended to prioritize unpacking the signification intended by white performers and understood by white audiences; sometimes neglected have been African American perspectives, traditions and performance practice—and thus African American contributions. The creole sounds, practices, and procedures that made minstrelsy possible are the focus of this book.
Scholarly avoidance of blackface at one point led to a simplistic tendency to presume that, because antebellum African American musicians' economic, social, and creative choices were severely limited by discriminatory laws and customs, the musicians must therefore have been "only" the passive victims of white exploitation. Such a presumption misunderstood the sophistication with which disenfranchised creative artists sometimes respond to social or economic restrictions. Emphasis on white intentions and understanding underestimated African American musicians' own agency, when many were in fact skilled negotiators of the boundaries of ethics, economics, and social expectations.
This is precisely why European devotees of carnivale, charivari, and rough music, like their counterparts among Afro-Caribbean singers, dancers, and magicians, were regarded as marginal members of society: because, for the duration of their performances, they engaged and subverted social boundaries. As so often in the human history of performance, this was typically done in service of creating, in a festival, dance party, political rally, or worship ceremony, a temporary environment of liminality: that is, an "in-between" cognitive space in which existing social pressures could be mitigated or alternate social behaviors tried on. Cockrell, especially, has laid the groundwork for thus understanding minstrelsy as recalling liminality in European carnival behaviors. Similarly, Shane White cites the "striking dynamism and cultural fluidity" of Anglo-African cross-cultural festivals, describing Pinkster, Negro 'Lection Day, Militia Training Day, and (by implication) blackface theater as "a time for excess, for release from the rigors of a northern winter and the everyday exigencies of a slave regime, [adding that] the exuberance exhibited by the slaves—in their clothing, feasting, music, and dance—made the African American participants seems larger than life." Antebellum African American musicians, though disenfranchised by law and custom, were "larger-than-life" symbolic inspirations, and, as a result, were observed, learned from, and (on occasion) imitated by the blackface architects. Certainly unequal treatment was part of the antebellum experience for both slaves and free blacks. It is quite another thing, and an indefensible analytical presumption, to conclude that, because African American musicians were denied power, they were unable to identify, analyze, respond to, and symbolically contest racist strictures.
Like all performers, musicians in both Anglo-Celtic and African American traditions, though marginalized as individuals, wielded considerable powers of signification. As professional singers, players, dancers, and "ritual makers," they understood the semiotics and social psychology of their environments and were capable of manipulating creative arts to negotiate those situations. Presuming their passivity fundamentally misunderstands the ability to symbolically comment on and manipulate social expectations—in Gates's famed locution, "signifyin'"—which is fundamental to the African American tradition. And it ignores the sophisticated symbolic and musical vocabularies, of imitation, caricature, "double-consciousness," and stylistic synthesis, that such musicians employed. African American musicians developed strategies of adoption, assimilation, accommodation, and creative adaptation. If the young white musicians who were the first blackface stars—the prototypical "white boys playing the blues"—intentionally observed, adopted, and adapted alien performance idioms to create economic opportunities, we can insist that black musicians did the same.
We can prove that black musicians observed and imitated white musicians, just as whites did blacks; the exchange that yielded the "creole synthesis" moved in both (indeed, multiple) cross-cultural directions. The evidence begins with the well-documented ubiquity of black musicians, especially fiddlers, playing for white dancing, in all regions and eras of the British colonies and the young republic. Both economy (the ability to get jobs playing for white folks) and aesthetics (the magpie adoption, typical to all vernacular musicians, of useful new sounds) suggest that black musicians were just as much active agents, even if vastly disadvantaged ones, in minstrelsy's creole synthesis, as were white "appropriators." Thus in the antebellum period we find black styles influencing white idioms, and white styles influencing black. Both previous scholarship and Mount's visual evidence demonstrate the back-and-forth nature of this musical interaction, and confirm that the breadth, depth, and distribution of the creative synthesis were much more extensive than has been presumed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Creolization of American Culture by Christopher J. Smith. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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