Papers by Christopher Smith
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines the material culture of blackface minstrelsy, and particularly of instrumen... more This chapter examines the material culture of blackface minstrelsy, and particularly of instrumental dance music in the “creole synthesis,” using evidence drawn from William Sidney Mount's four paintings: Just in Tune (1849), Right and Left (1850), Just in Tune () and The Banjo Player and The Bone Player (1856). Three of the four images in the portraits are most likely of dance musicians (both fiddlers and the bones player), while the fourth (the banjo player) could be imagined to accompany singing but equally likely completes the dance-band instrumentation—fiddle, banjo, and bones representing three-fourths of the iconic ensemble of minstrelsy. All of these works provide confirmation of Mount's expertise in and admiration for the details of African American vernacular music. This chapter analyzes the relationship between Mount's “private” pencil sketching and his “public” oil painting, as well as the complex layers of racial, economic, and political symbolism in his work. It also explores the musical detail of each of the four paintings and their significance to our understanding of the roots of minstrelsy.
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines the creolizing maritime cultures of Long Island and Manhattan, two New York... more This chapter examines the creolizing maritime cultures of Long Island and Manhattan, two New York islands that directly shaped William Sidney Mount's personal and musical world. It reconstructs the environments that Mount knew and by which he was shaped, as a child and young adult in antebellum America. To this end, the chapter considers how influences from Long Island and Manhattan play out in the life of Mount, in that of his uncle and musical mentor Micah Hawkins, and in Hawkins's 1824 ballad opera The Saw-Mill, or, A Yankee Trick. It begins with a discussion of evidence of blackface minstrelsy's creole synthesis in the antebellum period by describing two festival performances, Pinkster and 'Lection Day, and during the Federalist period. It then assesses the creole synthesis in black Manhattan by focusing on the “African Grove” Theater, along with Mount's first works and new career path following the death of Hawkins. It concludes with a review of Mount's scenic painting Rustic Dance after a Sleigh Ride.
Journal of American Folklore, Jul 1, 2012
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This book traces the roots of blackface minstrelsy—and the creole sounds, practices, and procedur... more This book traces the roots of blackface minstrelsy—and the creole sounds, practices, and procedures that made minstrelsy possible—by analyzing the artworks, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, ephemera, and biography of William Sidney Mount, together with similar materials from some of his predecessors and contemporaries. It argues that nineteenth-century blackface is not a radical new invention, but rather the codification and theatricalization of a cluster of working-class performance idioms that were already familiar from the boundary zones of streets, wharves, decks, and fairgrounds. It also uses ethnography and ethnochoreology to reconstruct the behavioral contexts in which minstrelsy took place, along with its creole synthesis of music-and-movement, sound, and the body across boundaries of race, class, geography, and time. This chapter looks at a few preliminary examples that confirm Mount's relevance as a visual source for minstrelsy's musicological reconstruction, including information that he provides on musical instruments and techniques in the period, as well as attitudes about class, race, and gender.
American Music, 2015
Dale Cockrell’s seminal blackface study Demons of Disorder begins with workingclass street dance,... more Dale Cockrell’s seminal blackface study Demons of Disorder begins with workingclass street dance, an 1842 account from the flash paper the Libertine describing a gladiatorial contest between two prostitutes, Nance holmes and suse bryant, on boston’s long Wharf.1 Cockrell unpacks this event as iconic of antebellum street culture’s challenge to existing power, class, and economics. Public music and noise, its close cousin, have often exhibited contested, gendered, or sexualized associations, particularly when in the hands of marginalized social groups. We may think of the charivari of medieval weddings and “shivaree” of the American south, the masked and costumed noise of Carnivale, the gongs and firecrackers of China’s Taiping rebellion, even the vuvuzelas of twentyfirstcentury sporting events; in each case, “noise” becomes a tool for simultaneously creating subaltern group cohesion and contesting economic or political regulation. between the revolution and the Civil War, the louisiana Purchase (1803) nearly doubled the nation’s territory; the development of navigable waterways, culminating with the opening of the erie Canal in 1826, accelerated economic activity and westward expansion; urbanization drove economic rifts between agrarian, slaveholding south and industrializing, freemarket North (exemplified by the missouri
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines the physical and participatory implications of blackface dance, and the dan... more This chapter examines the physical and participatory implications of blackface dance, and the dance cultures more generally, depicted by William Sidney Mount. It also uses the evidence drawn from Mount's visual depictions to locate prototypical blackface dance vocabularies and rhythmic practices in vernacular art works of the earlier nineteenth century. The chapter first considers the resources for recovering the kinesics of minstrelsy, along with visible evidence of Afro-Caribbean influence on bodily kinesics, before turning to juba and the aesthetics of African movement. It then analyzes Mount's choreological evidence to illustrate the consistency with which he records and manipulates the cultural associations of body vocabulary, as well as his integration of the creole synthesis in his works. It argues that it was rhythm and dance that accounts for minstrelsy's remarkably immediate yet enduring popularity and influence. It shows that, in addition to the symbolic transgression of bourgeois grace implicit in Jim Crow's akimbo representation, the images' anatomical distortions also capture movement, not stasis. The chapter concludes by looking at the so-called “bending knee-bone” in blackface performance.
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines the musical repertoires collected by William Sidney Mount in order to under... more This chapter examines the musical repertoires collected by William Sidney Mount in order to understand early minstrelsy's melodic imagination and polyrhythmic style as well as its creole synthesis. It situates Mount's melodic repertoire within the wider context of contemporaneous rhythm and dance repertoires, including the ongoing resources represented by Anglo-Celtic music and dance; the newer dance-types of the polka, quadrille, and cotillion; and the already-creolized tunes explicitly associated with blackface minstrelsy and New York comic theatricals. The chapter suggests that the black–white exchange of the creole synthesis can be traced in movement vocabularies and that the creole synthesis was as present a factor in dance musicians' tune repertoires as it was in dance rhythms. The contents of Mount's musical collection and recollections provide evidence that he was a major participant in social and dance music making.
University of Illinois Press eBooks, Apr 20, 2017
This chapter examines the musical, cultural, and sociological elements of blackface minstrelsy&am... more This chapter examines the musical, cultural, and sociological elements of blackface minstrelsy's “creole synthesis” throughout the Caribbean and the British colonies of North America. It argues that the conditions for the creole synthesis were present virtually from the first encounters of Anglo-Europeans and Africans in the New World. The chapter discusses the riverine, maritime, and frontier social contexts that shaped the music of blackface's African American sources and their Anglo-Celtic imitators. In particular, it considers creole synthesis in the Caribbean and in frontiers such as New Orleans and the Ohio. It also looks at a preliminary example of iconographic analysis that reflects the riverine and maritime creole synthesis: James Henry Beard's 1846 painting Western Raftsmen. The chapter contends that blackface minstrelsy was pioneered by George Washington Dixon and Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the 1830s and codified by Joel Walker Sweeney and Daniel Decatur Emmett (and the blackface troupes they founded) in the early 1840s, and thus represents the earliest comparatively accurate and extensive observation, description, and imitation of African American performance in the New World.
Dancing Revolution
This chapter steps away from the others’ central focus upon movement, particularly the movement o... more This chapter steps away from the others’ central focus upon movement, particularly the movement of multiple subaltern bodies in contested public spaces, to link the idea of sounding “noise”--irruptive, contested, politicized--to that of visual noise, including transgressive movement, but also other forms as well. It situates graffiti, street cries, and other public sounding and visual expressions as emblematic of subaltern identity and prone to hegemonic restriction. While there is a body of literature on “noise” as a social phenomenon, that phenomenon has seldom been linked to movement.
<p>This book is a social history, theorizing participatory dance in New World public spaces... more <p>This book is a social history, theorizing participatory dance in New World public spaces as a tool that has enabled subaltern communities' political resistance to hegemonic control. Drawing upon musicology, ethnomusicology, iconography, anthropology, dance studies, and folklore, and spanning examples from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, it identifies recurrent strategic patterns in the music, movement, and "noise" that political minorities--including persons of color, economic underclasses, women, gays, and other resistance movements--have employed to oppose, contest, and transgress dominant cultures' social control. The book applies multidisciplinary analytical practices to movement and sound in historical idioms, little documented by period scholarship, whose data are indirect, inferential, and reconstructive. Case studies include frontier Pentecostalism; Native American resistance; Shakerism; African American communities; the English- and French-speaking Caribbean; film and theatrical dance; the Stonewall Uprising and Chicago 1968 protests; twentieth-century noise ordinances; and punk-rock, hip hop, and twenty-first-century global protest movements. Examples in diverse media, from prose description to watercolor to film, are selected in order to showcase the consistency of these political understandings across diverse situations and to demonstrate the synthesis of analytical approaches, which this topic mandates. The book argues for understanding participatory music and motion--bodies and sound interacting in contested public spaces--as a central, intentional, effective, and recurrent resistance strategy in American social history.</p>
Southern Cultures, 2011
nvironments-geographical, demographic, historical, and contextual-have played a key role in Ameri... more nvironments-geographical, demographic, historical, and contextual-have played a key role in American popular music, particularly in the case of minstrelsy, the nineteenthcentury black/white synthesis that lies at the root of vaudeville, tap-dance, Tin Pan Alley, and musical comedy. Scholars have identified the role played by shifting antebellum conceptions of class, race, and politics in the creation of blackface minstrelsy, and the way the idiom ritualized or contested these conceptions, but, with a few brief exceptions, they have neglected the physical environments-the contested public spaces-in which the blackface synthesis first occurred. Place-particularly the boundary spaces of maritime and riverine environments on the southern and western frontiers of antebellum North America-was a key element in shaping the Anglo-Irish/ African American cultural collaboration that made blackface minstrelsy possible. Received musicological history has depicted blackface as a phenomenon of northern urban environments, but this is to neglect the frontier contexts that both enabled black-white-creole cultural contact and provided inspiration for the first generation of blackface practitioners. As in the urban North (on the wharves of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and the rivers and new canals of the Northeast and the "Old Frontier"), so on the landings and in the markets of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and harbor towns like Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans: slaves, free blacks, and poor whites came together in a mutable, fluid, working-class environment in which tunes and dances, gestural and verbal languages could be-and were-borrowed, stolen, and combined. Blackface minstrelsy, as pioneered in the 1830s and codified in the early 1840s, represents the earliest comparatively accurate description and imitationspecifically by Anglo-Irish observers-of African American performance. These early blackface minstrel performers were involved in what would later be called participant-observation ethnomusicology: they went out to the wharves, docks, canals, and frontier towns; they watched, learned from, and imitated black players; and they brought those observations back for an urban working-class audience. While imitations of Africans had been a staple of Anglo-American popular theater since the mid-eighteenth century, these early caricatures seem to have been based verbally and visually upon loose evocations of those colonial Africansfrom Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti-most familiar to British audiences. Changes in early nineteenth-century characterizations reveal a shift of sources: it is evident that, by the time New Yorker Micah Hawkins performed "Backside Albany" in the 1815 production of The Siege of Plattsburgh (set in upstate New York), the African American sources being imitated had shifted to North America. Dialect, names, costume, and body language all reflected a new, black-white-creole mixture emerging in North American urban and frontier contexts. The rightful condemnation of blackface's racist caricature sometimes has ne-
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Papers by Christopher Smith