![]() The first part ended with an upbeat song and dance. This new fastpaced verbal humor later matured in vaudeville and radio. Wearing flashy clothes and exaggerated black makeup, and speaking in heavy dialects laden with humorous malapropisms, the endmen traded puns, riddles, and jokes with the interlocutor (sitting between them). Bones," who were named after their instruments, the tambourine and the rhythm clacker bones (various performers assumed these two roles). On the ends of the semicircle sat the most popular minstrels, the comedians, "Mr. In his string of minstrel hits, including "Old Folks at Home," "Oh Susanna," "My Old Kentucky Home," and "Old Black Joe," Foster was a pioneer of a new eclectic American popular music, blending European parlor music he heard at home, frontier music he heard in Cincinnati theaters, and African-American music he heard in a servant's church. Flanking him, holding instruments such as banjos and fiddles, were entertainers who performed the musical numbers, most notably the songs of Stephen Foster. The dignified man in the middle, the interlocutor, used a commanding voice and precise, pompous language as the master of ceremonies. Then the minstrels sat in a semicircle facing the audience. The first opened with a rousing group song and dance. In fact, when Commodore Perry's fleet entered Japan in 1853-1854, the sailors put on a blackfaced minstrel show for the Japanese. ![]() Although it was centered in the big cities of the North, it was performed almost everywhere, from frontier camps to the White House. Within a year, the minstrel show became a separate entertainment form that audiences loved. In 1843 in New York City, four of these blackfaced entertainers, calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels, staged the first full evening of what they billed as "the oddities, peculiarities, eccentricities, and comicalities of that Sable Genus of Humanity." The Virginia Minstrels were a great hit. After that, blackfaced whites became more and more popular on America's stages. Rice bought the man's clothes, learned the routine, and became a stage star with his "Jump Jim Crow" act. Rice, saw a crippled African-American stablehand named Jim Crow doing an unusual song and dance. But in the 1820s -when American show business was in its infancy, and audiences demanded stage shows about American, not European, characters and themes -some white performers began to specialize in blackfaced acts they called "Ethiopian Delineation." In 1828 in Louisville, Kentucky, one of these "Delineators," Thomas D. White men in blackface had portrayed black people almost since the first contact of the races. It dominated American show business until the 1890s, and had profound and enduring impacts on show business, racial stereotypes, and African Americans in the performing arts. Begun by white performers using black makeup and dialect to portray African Americans, the minstrel show was a popular sensation in the 1840s. The minstrel show was the first uniquely American form of stage entertainment.
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