Cross-posted at The Daily Music Break. Visit to hear great music, regardless of era or genre.
There are indelible links between race, the Civil Rights Movement and music. One of those relationships is blackface, the entertainment form in which white actors darkened their faces to sing, dance and act as African Americans, who were portrayed in a demeaning and stereotyped manner.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a good time to look at this. Blair L. M. Kelley, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, offers an insightful and informative essay at The Grio.
Here is her description of its roots:
Blackface minstrelsy first became nationally popular in the late 1820s when white male performers portrayed African-American characters using burnt cork to blacken their skin. Wearing tattered clothes, the performances mocked black behavior, playing racial stereotypes for laughs. Although Jim Crow was probably born in the folklore of the enslaved in the Georgia Sea Islands, one of the most famous minstrel performers, a white man named Thomas “Daddy” Rice brought the character to the stage for the first time. Rice said that on a trip through the South he met a runaway slave, who performed a signature song and dance called jump Jim Crow. Rice’s performances, with skin blackened and drawn on distended blood red lips surrounded by white paint, were said to be just Rice’s attempt to depict the realities of black life. (Continue Reading...)
Unfortunately, America didn't get smarter during the following century:
Blackface became a mainstay of stage and later film performance in the twentieth century. Most often blackface was used as a comic device that played on the stereotypes of black laziness, ignorance, or crass behavior for laughs. Sometimes blackface was used simply to portray black characters. The 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, the first feature film to be shown in the White House, used blackface to portray Reconstruction era black legislators as incompetent and to paint all black men as threatening to rape white women. The first talking picture, 1927’s The Jazz Singer starred Al Jolson, one of the most famous American performers of his day, in blackface. Even America’s sweetheart, Shirley Temple, donned blackface in 1935 film The Littlest Rebel. While none of the black actors in The Littlest Rebel film wore blackface, they performed in a style first created on the minstrel stage one hundred years earlier. (Continue Reading...)
The long history of blackface in America now is represented today by one person: Al Jolson. It's unfortunate that the association mars the legacy of a supremely talented and important entertainer:
According to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, "Jolson was to jazz, blues, and ragtime what Elvis Presley was to rock 'n' roll." Being the first popular singer to make a spectacular "event" out of singing a song, he became a “rock star” before the dawn of rock music. His specialty was performing on stage runways extending out into the audience. He would run up and down the runway and across the stage, "teasing, cajoling, and thrilling the audience," often stopping to sing to individual members; all the while the "perspiration would be pouring from his face, and the entire audience would get caught up in the ecstasy of his performance." According to music historian Larry Stempel, "No one had heard anything quite like it before on Broadway." Author Stephen Banfield agreed, writing that Jolson's style was "arguably the single most important factor in defining the modern musical...."[6]
He enjoyed performing in blackface makeup, a theatrical convention since the mid 19th century. With his unique and dynamic style of singing black music, such as jazz and blues, he was later credited with single-handedly introducing African-American music to white audiences.[1] As early as 1911 he became known for fighting against anti-black discrimination on Broadway.(Continue Reading...)
Above is the famous version of "Mammy" from "The Jazz Singer," the first feature with full sound. It wasn't the first time sound was heard in movies, however. Shorter films already had been released with audio tracks. One of those, "A Plantation Act," was released the year before. This is what Jolson looked like when performing
without blackface.