The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy

353 Pages·2013·5.222 MB·English

by  Christopher J Smith

christopher j. smith
The Creolization
of American Culture
william sidney mount and the roots
of blackface minstrelsy
The Creolization of American Culture

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music in american life
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.
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The Creolization
of American
Culture
William Sidney Mount
and the Roots of
Blackface Minstrelsy
Christopher J. Smith
university of illinois press
urbana, chicago, and springfield

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Publication supported by the Barry and Claire Brook Endowment of the
American Musicological Society and by the H. Earle Johnson Fund of the
Society for American Music.
© 2013 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Christopher J. (Christopher John), 1959-
The creolization of American culture: William Sidney Mount and the roots of
blackface minstrelsy / Christopher J. Smith.
pages cm. — (Music in American life)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03776-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-252-09504-7 (e-book)
1. Minstrel music—United States—History and criticism.
2. Minstrel shows—United States—History.
3. Blackface entertainers—United States.
4. Mount, William Sidney, 1807–1868.
I. Title.
ml1711.s63 2013
781.640973'09034—dc23 2012050436
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This book is dedicated to Old Corn Meal,
“Bobolink Bob” Rawley, Juba Lane, John J. “Juba” Clark,
John “Picayune” Butler, Banjo Joe Sweeney,
Thomas “Daddy” Rice, George Dixon, Dan Emmett, Shep Jones,
Robert Nelson Mount, “Ferguson,” “Pot Pie” Herbert, Bob Farrell,
Joe Blackburn, John Diamond . . . and all the rest of them.
In memory of Bobby Smith Thomas.
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Contents
preface ix
acknowledgments xv
1 Recovering the Creole Synthesis:
The Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy 1
2 The Creole Synthesis in the New World:
Cultures in Contact 28
3 Long Island and the Lower East Side:
Mount’s Background, Youth,
and Apprenticeships 79
4 Minstrelsy’s Material Culture:
The Evidence of Mount’s Portraiture 122
5 Melody’s Polyrhythmic Polysemic Possibilities:
The Bodily Evidence of Mount’s Music 148
6 Akimbo Culture: Dance and
the Participatory Pleasures of the Body 173
Conclusion: The Creole Synthesis
in American Culture 210
Appendix: Blackface Scholarship 217
notes 235
index 299
Illustrations follow page 124.
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Preface
The creolization in the title of this book connotes a process of
cultural exchange identifiable in many aspects of antebellum life. In the early-
nineteenth-century United States, this exchange was particularly rich and par-
ticularly visible in the expressive arts; most specifically, in the sounding and
bodily performance genres of participatory Anglo-African music-and-dance.
While black-white exchange has long been recognized as a major element in
shaping North American vernacular music, the extent, geographic distribu-
tion, breadth of time span, diversity, and terminus post quem of that exchange
have sometimes been misunderstood. Minstrelsy, conventionally understood
since the 1840s as a significantly new synthesis of vernacular forms, was in
fact not the inception but rather the culmination of an exchange, rooted
in the combination of culture-crossing vernacular idioms that significantly
predate the first theatrical blackface performances.
The Afro-Caribbean elements whose entry into Anglo-American music-
and-dance made both blackface minstrelsy and the creole synthesis possible
in the United States can be identified not only in textual descriptions or music
notations, but also through reconstruction of performances and in the body
vocabularies depicted in a range of iconography. The paintings and drawings
of William Sidney Mount, the eponymous focus of this book, present particu-
larly rich, detailed, and reliable portrayals of instrumental music making and
dance, and as a result provide particularly solid and comprehensive evidence
for the presence of the creole synthesis among the African American and
Anglo-Celtic populations he represented.
But Mount’s evidence, especially considered in light of parallels between
his life experience and those of his musician and artist contemporaries, also
confirms the presence of the creole synthesis beyond his own localities of
Long Island and of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Contemporaneous demo-
graphics, iconography, biography, and other data reveal that analogous con-
ditions, conducive to the creole synthesis, existed in riverine and maritime
contexts all over the early-nineteenth-century United States. Evidence for
such conditions can be identified from New York, Albany, and Boston in the
North; Charleston and Savannah in the Southeast; Cincinnati and Louisville
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