Professor discusses the history of minstrelsy

04/22/05 - University of Rhode Island assistant professor of English Stephanie Dunson enlightened a room of people yesterday about the history of 19th century sheet music and the blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was perhaps the most popular form of entertainment in the 1800s.

Dunson showed a series of pictures of 19th century parlors and explained how music differed greatly between the parlors and the minstrelsy. She explained the parlors as being about "refinement" while the minstrelsy was about "physicality and bodily taboos."

Dunson said sheet music played and sang in the parlors was a means of entertainment and for the minstrelsy it was a means of performance involving bodily routines and raunchy songs.

Dunson also showed pictures of a minstrel show and explained the emotion that was displayed at such events. She said that most often the audience members would become so enthralled with the music they would frequently rush the stage in a mosh-pit style.

"It was rock music at its most insane," Dunson said.

The interesting instruments such as the banjo and tambourine as well as the humorous yet meaningful lyrics are what made the music so innovative at the time.

Dunson described the music as "slightly altered versions of Irish jigs."

One very apparent aspect of minstrel music was its sexual encoded sheet music covers, Dunson said. Most of the covers of the music had caricatures of men in sexually encoded stances with suggestive objects surrounding them.

Dunson then played clips of a minstrel song entitled "Jim Along Josey" in several versions. The Americanized version of the song shows how sexuality plays a big role in the music.

Rather then a man being on the cover in ragged clothes, a clean woman in a beautiful dress is there instead, and the song was entitled "Get Along Rosey." Dunson described this difference in perspective as similar to the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" and how a woman turns a cursed monster into a prince.

Minstrel music was also said to reproduce what was going on in the streets. One such instance was when a performer known as T.D. Rice saw a crippled black man on the street performing a song and dance. Rice asked the man to teach him the skit, and portrayed it on stage exactly as the crippled man did. Dunson said that Rice even asked to borrow the crippled man's clothes to reenact it perfectly.

Dunson said, white men would paint their faces black to perform minstrel music. She went on to explain that this type of entertainment is similar in today's society to Eminem. Dunson explained that this type of cross-racial interest has brought the white culture into a new type of entertainment.

Dunson said she was always interested in 19th century pop culture. She said it gives suggestions as to why America's culture is the way it is today.

Dunson said she became interested in minstrel music and began creating a catalog of sheet music, which after completing she had put away for a year.

"I didn't think to work on it because it was too interesting," she said.

Although Dunson graduated with a Ph.D. in English and American Studies, she studied music as well and found minstrelsy very interesting.

"I wanted to learn what was behind the pages," she said. "Anyone can get a piece of sheet music and hear it."

Dunson said she also played some of the music on the piano. In fact, she said she learned how to play banjo and other instruments in order to play it well.

Dunson said minstrel music holds with its fascinating imagery about women's sexuality. She said that there is not much written about women sexuality in the 19th century, which is why she finds it in music.