The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in antebellum America. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask not only explores the racist practices of these entertainers but considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century. William J. Mahar's unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music engages new sources previously not considered in twentieth-century scholarship. More than any other study of its kind, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask investigates the relationships between blackface comedy and other Western genres and traditions; between the music of minstrel shows and its European sources; and between "popular" and "elite" constructions of culture. By locating minstrel performances within their complex sites of production, Mahar offers a significant reassessment of the historiography of the field. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask promises to redefine the study of blackface minstrelsy, charting new directions for future inquiries by scholars in American studies, popular culture, and musicology.
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This monograph, part of the distinguished "Music in American Life" series, is an interdisciplinary study drawing on music, performance, and theater history to examine the beginnings of an influential entertainment medium. Mahar (humanities/ music, Pennsylvania State Univ.) uses the study of blackface minstrelsy from 1843 to 1860 as a way to examine the formation and effect of much late 19th-century American popular culture. He provides generous samples of playbills, sheet music, lyrics, selections from comic sketches, and photographs as evidence for his argument. Mahar shows that the minstrel show made fun of formal speech and rhetoric, satirized opera for popular consumption, and provided a mirror for the polarities of contemporary American life, social rituals, and sexual roles. It prepared the way for melodrama, burlesque, vaudeville, and the musical comedy, all of which extended those functions. Recommended for scholars.?Thomas E. Luddy, Salem State Coll., MA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Make[s] available much valuable and fascinating material found nowhere else in the literature on blackface minstrelsy, so much so that Behind the Burnt Cork Mask can itself serve as a primary source for further research." -- Charles Hamm, Journal of the American Musicological Society
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First Sentence:
Blackface minstrelsy was "the national art of its moment ... the soundtrack for the American 1848." Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
chalk ginger blue, period playbills, wid horns, fosco cielo, burlesque lecture, mischievous nigger, minstrel ensembles, minstrelsy studies, minstrel repertory, old jaw bone, wild goose nation, burnt cork comedians, den farewell, other minstrel songs, boatmen dance, typical minstrel show, sheet music edition, blackface burlesques, minstrel comedians, early minstrelsy, blackface comedians, neber tire, burlesque sermons, minstrel show music, luoghi ameni Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, African American, Mary Blane, Lucy Long, Chorus Verse, Wood's Minstrels, Miss Lucy, Uncle Gabriel, United States, Corn Cob, George Christy, Ole Bull, Old Dan Tucker, Ethiopian Serenaders, Bone Squash, Jim Brown, Buckley's Serenaders, White's Serenaders Odell, Black English, Charles White, Virginia Minstrels, Christy's Minstrels, Dan Emmett, Phantom Chorus, Boatman's Dance New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Blackface minstrelsy was "the national art of its moment ... the soundtrack for the American 1848." Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
chalk ginger blue, period playbills, wid horns, fosco cielo, burlesque lecture, mischievous nigger, minstrel ensembles, minstrelsy studies, minstrel repertory, old jaw bone, wild goose nation, burnt cork comedians, den farewell, other minstrel songs, boatmen dance, typical minstrel show, sheet music edition, blackface burlesques, minstrel comedians, early minstrelsy, blackface comedians, neber tire, burlesque sermons, minstrel show music, luoghi ameni Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, African American, Mary Blane, Lucy Long, Chorus Verse, Wood's Minstrels, Miss Lucy, Uncle Gabriel, United States, Corn Cob, George Christy, Ole Bull, Old Dan Tucker, Ethiopian Serenaders, Bone Squash, Jim Brown, Buckley's Serenaders, White's Serenaders Odell, Black English, Charles White, Virginia Minstrels, Christy's Minstrels, Dan Emmett, Phantom Chorus, Boatman's Dance New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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47
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- From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830-1910 by Robert M. Lewis on page 353, page 357, and page 367
- Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Quartet (American Musicspheres) by Gage Averill in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War by Shirley Samuels in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Coal & Culture: Opera Houses In Appalachia by William Faricy Condee in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Bound for America: THREE BRITISH COMPOSERS (Music in American Life) by Nicholas Temperley in Back Matter
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