Blackface Minstrelsy
Taboo since the early 1950s, blackface minstrelsy developed in the late 1820s just as the young United States was attempting to assert a national identity distinct from Britain's. Many scholars have identi-fied it as the first uniquely American form of popular entertainment. Blackface minstrelsy was a performance style that usually consisted of several white male performers parodying the songs, dances, and speech patterns of Southern blacks. Performers blackened their faces with burnt cork and dressed in rags as they played the banjo, the bone castanets, the fiddle, and the tambourine. They sang, danced, told malapropistic jokes, cross-dressed for "wench" routines, and gave comical stump speeches. From the late 1820s on, blackface minstrelsy dominated American popular entertainment. Americans saw it on the stages of theaters and circuses, read about it in the popular novels of the nineteenth century, heard it over the radio, and viewed it on film and television. Blackface minstrelsy can certainly be viewed as the commodification of racist stereotypes, but it can also be seen as the white fascination with and appropriation of African American cultural traditions that culminated in the popularization of jazz, the blues, rock 'n' roll, and rap music.
While there are accounts of blackface minstrel performances before the American Revolution, the performance style gained widespread appeal in the 1820s with the "Jump Jim Crow" routine of Thomas Dartmouth Rice.
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