Minstrel show

The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, is an indigenous form of American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, usually performed by white people in blackface. Although blackface dates back to at least 1769, the minstrel show as such has later origins. It began with brief burlesques and comic entr'actes in the early 1830s and emerged as a full-fledged form in the next decade. In the 1850s, minstrelsy was at least partially absorbed into the many "Tom shows", melodramas based at least loosely on Uncle Tom's Cabin. By the end of that decade, minstrel shows as such had become a "lifeless… profitable" institution{{ref|Lott-intro}}, which lingered on for several decades and largely faded out before the turn of the century. Blackface survived minstrelsy by some decades, as it had preceded it.

Legacy

Even as the minstrel show was dying out, blackface performers became common acts on vaudeville stages. These entertainers kept the familiar songs, dances, and pseudo-black dialect. The most famous of these performers is probably Al Jolson, who took blackface to the big screen in the 1920s in films such as The Jazz Singer (1927).

Related Topics:
Vaudeville - Al Jolson - 1920s - The Jazz Singer - 1927

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Minstrel-show stock characters played a powerful role in shaping assumptions about African-Americans. Popular entertainment perpetuated the racist minstrel-show stereotype of the uneducated, ever-cheerful, and highly musical black well into the 1950s. The character Buckwheat from the Our Gang series of films is one example. Likewise, when the sound era of cartoons began in the late 1920s, early animators such as Walt Disney gave characters like Mickey Mouse (who already resembled blackface performers) a minstrel-show personality as well; the early Mickey is constantly singing and dancing and smiling. Radio shows also got into the act, a fact perhaps best exemplified by the popular Amos & Andy program. As recently as the mid-1970s the BBC was screening The Black and White Minstrel Show on television, starring the George Mitchell Minstrels. The racist archetypes that blackface minstrelsy helped to create still persist to this day; some argue that this is even true in hip-hop culture and movies. The 2000 Spike Lee movie Bamboozled alleges that modern black entertainment is nothing more than an outgrowth of the minstrel shows of a century past, for example.

Related Topics:
African-American - 1950s - Buckwheat - Our Gang - Walt Disney - Mickey Mouse - Amos & Andy - 1970s - BBC - The Black and White Minstrel Show - George Mitchell Minstrels - Hip-hop - 2000 - Spike Lee - Bamboozled

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Another important legacy of minstrelsy is its music. Many minstrel songs are still popular folk songs sung today. Most have been expunged of the exaggerated black dialect and the overt references to blacks. "Dixie", for example, was adopted by the Confederacy as its national anthem and remains popular today, and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" was sanitized and made the state song of Virginia{{ref|Scheytt-Virginia}}. The instruments of the minstrel show were also largely kept on, especially in the South. Minstrel performers from the last days of the shows, such as Uncle Dave Macon, helped popularize instruments such as the banjo and fiddle in modern Country-Western music.

Related Topics:
Dixie - Confederacy - Carry Me Back to Old Virginny - Virginia - Uncle Dave Macon - Country-Western music

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