The Gilded Age

by Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner

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Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age

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SOURCE: “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age,” in American Quarterly, Vol. 40, No 4, December, 1988, pp. 450-71.

[In the following essay, Dormon examines the popularity during the Gilded Age of ‘coon songs’ (songs about, and many times by, black Americans). Dormon suggests that the songs disseminated racist images and language in order to justify continued segregation and discrimination.]

On the occasion of the celebrated “Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment” in 1977, the performer-scholar Max Morath noted, with reference to the “coon song craze” of the 1890s, that the phenomenon “right now resides exactly where it should—on the back shelves of the pop museum collecting dust. it’s a sociological curiosity and nothing more.”1 While one might well sympathize with the liberality of Mr. Morath's sentiment in his consignment of a major pop culture phenomenon to the dustbin of long dead, distasteful exotica, it has become clear that few contemporary students of American culture accept the implication that because racist phenomena are distasteful they are no longer important. It may even be said that the ongoing reassessment of the meaning of the coon song “craze” (of which this essay is a part) would suggest that the national fascination with coon songs between circa 1890 and 1910 underlay a major shift in white perception of blacks; a shift whereby existing stereotypes came to be either confirmed or embellished and indelibly encoded as part of the semiotic system of the period.2

The stereotyping of black Americans in the popular culture did not, of course, begin with coon songs. The British music halls of the eighteenth century occasionally introduced comic black figures, some of which were exported to Colonial America where, through the process of “ascription,” a set of assumptions about black characters would come to be accepted as a form of reality.3 Incidentally, the first English ballad opera to be published in America, Andrew Barton's The Disappointment; or the Force of Credulity [1767], featured a black character—notably, he was called “Raccoon”—who sang a version of what would become our own “Yankee Doodle.”4 Within two years a second black character role—that of “Mungo” in Isaac Bickerstaff's The Padlock—afforded a rather different image of blacks: that of the suffering slave.5

It was not until the late 1820s, however, that a true stereotype began to develop on the American stage: the comic rustic song and dance figure introduced by Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the form of the character known as “Jim Crow.”6 Rice's enormous success with the Jim Crow character quickly gave rise to several imitators, including George Washington Dixon and Bob Farrel, both of whom claimed to have created a second major black stage figure: the ubiquitous “Zip Coon,” who was to be rendered immortal by way of the song bearing his name sung to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw.”7 Zip Coon also introduced another dimension of black stage caricature: the character of the black dandy, sporting his flashy attire and projecting a slick, urbane persona, (this, of course, within the overall demeanor of the ignorant black buffoon mimicking the manners of sophisticated white folks). In essence, Jim Crow and Zip Coon provided the outlines of the two dominant caricatures that would become fixed in the popular imagination by way of the minstrel show, thus providing the two fully developed stereotypes of Afro-Americans that came to prevail by the outbreak of the American Civil War.8

While this essay is not the place for a detailed examination of the minstrel tradition, it is important to emphasize that the minstrel black was represented as an essentially unthreatening figure. He (or, less frequently, she) was unquestionably ignorant (though not always stupid: the minstrel blacks could be wily and even sage), maladroit, and outlandish in his misuses of the forms and substance of white culture. While they were normally portrayed as happy-go-lucky dancing, singing, joking buffoons, they were above all either humorous or pathetic. In either case they were safe figures. And as the accepted version of what was commonly perceived to be the “real” American black (accepted as such at least by the enchanted white audiences of the day), they stood as personifications of a type of humanity not to be taken seriously. Above all, implicitly at least, they were not to be afforded any form of equality in a social order ultimately based in a system of race relations shaped by chattel slavery. The minstrel black was a living adjunct of the proslavery argument and functioned as such until emancipation so drastically altered the foundation of the existing order.9

So much, then, for the antecedents. What of the “coon songs” of the post-reconstruction era? While their provenance is as yet not entirely clear, one clue to their advent lies in an essentially new etymological departure: the pervasive use of the word “coon” as a designation for “Afro-American.” It was a usage that came into the language with such speed and such immutability as to constitute a linguistic coup. American blacks had long been popularly associated with the raccoon, but the association was largely by way of the ascribed affection of blacks for the amiable and tasty little beasts. By ascription, blacks loved hunting, trapping, and eating raccoons. Moreover, the minstrel figure “Zip Coon” (as noted) had come to be symbolically identified with blacks in general. Nonetheless, the term “coon” as a nominative designation for “black” did not come into widespread use until the early 1880s.10 Rather, it would appear that the usage was introduced and rendered pervasive by way of the songs that came to be called “coon songs,” even as, reciprocally, blacks became “coons.”

The first coon song, if indeed such a “first” can be established—surely an early prototype at least—appeared in 1880 with the publication of J. P. Skelly's “The Dandy Coon's Parade.”11 The second (or another prototype) may have been a number called “The Coons are on Parade,” the lyrics of which describe in circumspect Victorian restraint what would within a decade become the orgiastic “coon balls” of the fully developed coon song phenomenon.12 The year 1883 saw publication of J. S. Putnam's “New Coon in Town,” which also achieved a measure of popularity. The lyrics featured the latest incarnation of the black dandy of the minstrel show tradition:

There’s a bran new coon in town,
He came de other day,
A reg’lar la-de-dah,
Dat's what de girls all say.(13)

Sam Lucas's “Coon's Salvation Army” of 1884 employed another theme closely associated with the older minstrel tradition: The black as chicken-and-watermelon-thief. In describing a large black social convocation, Lucas's lyrics observe:

De melon patch am safe today,
No Coons am dar in sight,
De chickens dey may roost in peace
Wid in der coops tonight.(14)

The same year saw the publication of William Dressler's “Coon Schottische,” placing the black participants in the said “Schottische” in a ludicrous version of the popular white dance form.15 It is notable that Sam Lucas, author of what was by modern standards the most racially offensive of these early coon songs, was himself black. The term “coon” had by then taken on its accepted secondary meaning. “Coon” clearly and unmistakably meant “black” in the vernacular of Gilded Age America. Coon songs were thus songs about, and often enough by, blacks; they were songs that featured in their lyrics the ascriptive qualities associated with black life and character. Moreover, by the mid 1880s the coon song phenomenon was well on its way to becoming a national fad, a veritable “craze” as it was so often described.

There can be no doubt, then, that something in this formula appealed enormously to the American public, and coon songs proliferated in music hall and vaudeville performances and in sheet music form. Over six hundred of them were published during the decade of the 1890s, and the more successful efforts sold in the millions of copies. To take but a single example, Fred Fisher's “If the Man in the Moon were a Coon” sold over three million copies in sheet music form, and this was not exceptional. One song publisher aptly described his latest sheet music collection (“May Irwin's New Coon Song Hits”) as “All the Rage in the Rage of Coon Songs.” But perhaps most compelling of all in suggesting the dimension of the fad was a remark in 1899 by another publisher who chose to tout his newest song with the promise “This is Not a Coon Song.16

The question, however, remains: why did these songs become so popular as to constitute a national craze that lasted fully a decade? And what does their popularity suggest about the mentality and the social psychology of the era? In pursuit of answers, it might be useful at this juncture to delve a bit further into the songs themselves, and their place in the history of American popular music.

Almost without exception coon songs were calculated to be hilariously funny. Overwhelmingly they were based in caricature. Over time they also came to share another notable quality. They tended to feature syncopated rhythmic structures—“catchy” rhythms—formerly associated with minstrel material but also with performance styles characteristic of black American folk music. The degree of syncopation varied from song to song, but the syncopated style was a constant in the coon song genre, and was perceived (correctly) to be a form of “black music,” hence identified with black life.17 The rhythmic structure suggests that the music originated as dance music, offered in a form essentially new to whites, though of course not to blacks, and this rhythmic dimension of the music was clearly a part of its appeal. Appearing initially in the form of two-steps, cakewalks, or even marches (the parade theme was common), the coon song featured appealing, foot-tapping, time-clapping rhythms accompanying the ostensibly funny descriptive lyrics.18 This was in a word happy music, despite the grossly offensive lyrics as judged by modern sensibilities.

Moreover, the coon song craze occurred at precisely the same time as the popular music business reached its fullest development to date; indeed, the songs provided impetus to that development. This was the age of “Tin Pan Alley,” and coon songs lent themselves to the development of the vaudeville and burlesque stage, providing entertainers not only with the songs but also with ample “coon” comedy material as well. Both soon became staples of the music hall stage, performed by whites primarily, but with some important exceptions.19 In some respects, the coon song phenomenon may be viewed as yet another phase in the history of black caricature on the American stage, as vaudeville came to replace minstrelsy as the dominant form of popular theater in the United States.

All of these factors were doubtless important in accounting for the popularity of the coon songs in the 1890s. But the dimensions of the fad would suggest that the response was a manifestation of something that lay buried more deeply in the collective psyche of white bourgeois America, something that found expression in the popular response to these songs. In 1896, at the time that the coon songs were at the peak of their popularity, the comedy song and dance team of Bert Williams and George Walker opened at Koster and Bail's Music hall in New York, advertised as the “Two Real Coons.” The variety critic for the New York Dramatic Mirror reviewed the show favorably, observing (within the context of the realism of the performers) that “the common every-day Nigger has only to open his mouth to bring laughs.”20 It was a significant comment, particularly so in that Williams and Walker were, of course, blacks who performed in blackface, thus maintaining the older minstrel blackface persona. They were blacks playing whites playing blacks, but were nonetheless accepted by the Dramatic Mirror critic as projecting a form of reality, the reality of the ludicrous “coon.”

Eleven years later, in December of 1907, in a rather apologetic article entitled “The Stage Negro,” Variety magazine noted that successful entertainers and producers must offer the public what the public wants—in this instance comic stage caricatures of black Americans and black American life. To do so, the account continued, they must also “give the public what the public will recognize21 (emphasis mine). That is to say, the features of the stage character, or those suggested by the song lyrics, must be features recognizable by the audiences. In the language of semiotics, they must be the features that had come to be accepted collectively as constituting the signified black; the features that had to be suggested, even by black performers playing black caricatures, or by the song lyrics evoking black types. The caricature, in order to be acceptable and effective, had to fit within the stereotype, which was itself essentially a codified cluster of signs. In this manner the caricature became the stereotype; the stereotype the caricature. Consequently, analysis of the features of blacks as portrayed in the coon songs provides us with a description of that which was accepted as the “real coon” in the vernacular—the codified Black. So what were the primary features of the “reality” as projected in the songs?

In order to synthesize the caricature/stereotype I have examined the lyrics of approximately one hundred of the most popular coon songs, whenever possible in the original sheet music (thus rendering it possible to combine the visual images of the sheet music covers with the lyrics that evoked the visuals). I have then established categories of the particular features emphasized in the lyrics such that a reasonably accurate count might be made of the repetitions of each feature, thus rendering generalization somewhat less impressionistic than might otherwise be the case. I have also quoted liberally from the lyrics for purposes of illustration. On the basis of this analysis, the primary features of American blacks and black American life are portrayed in the songs that follow.

First, there were clear similarities between the “coon” of the coon song and the minstrel blacks. There were still two fundamental types, with some variants between male and female.22 But what of the differences between the minstrel “darky” of yore and the new “coon?” While they were in some cases differences of degree and emphasis, they were nonetheless significant and surely revealing. In the songs, for example, blacks began to appear as not only ignorant and indolent, but also devoid of honesty or personal honor, given to drunkenness and gambling, utterly without ambition, sensuous, libidinous, even lascivious. “Coons” were, in addition to all of these things, razor-wielding savages, routinely attacking one another at the slightest provocation as a normal function of their uninhibited social lives. The razor—the flashing steel straight razor—became in the songs the dominant symbol of black violence, while the “coon” himself became that which was signified by this terrible weapon. The subliminal message was clear and clearly part of the connotative code: Blacks are potentially dangerous; they must be controlled and subordinated by whatever means necessary.23 They must also be segregated; set apart, for it was also clear in the evidence of the coon songs that they wanted to be white—to break down the most important barrier of all—the boundary separating “us” from “them.”

Consider the following examples: By way of continuity with the older minstrel image, coon songs naturally featured the watermelon- and chicken-loving rural buffoon. “My Watermelon Boy,” by Malcolm Williams begins:

He’s a common nigger of a very common kind …
And he loves a melon from the heart right to the rind.

qualities which only endear him all the more to his sweetheart, who

… loves to see him roll up his eyes,
When watermelon that boy does spy,
No coon can win me, no use to try,
Cause I love my watermelon boy.(24)

As for chickens, “coons” crave them too, as in Elmer Bowman's “I’ve Got Chicken on the Brain”:

There’s coons ’round town, they ain’t hard to find,
Would rather have a poke chop than have their right mind;
But I likes my chicken, and I likes ’em fried. … (25)

Watermelons, chickens, pork chops—all familiar enough—but also razors. Williams and Walker provided the full panoply of post-minstrel black semiosis in their song entitled “The Coon's Trade Mark”:

As certain and sure as Holy Writ,
And not a coon's exempt from it,
Four things you’ll always find together,
Regardless of condition of sun and moon—
A watermelon, a razor, a chicken and a coon!(26)

A second major carry over from the older tradition that provided a slight switch (by way of emphasis) may be found in the pervasive suggestion in the songs that blacks were indolent and unambitious, devoid of the work ethic or internalized bourgeois values. They made their livings and gained their subsistence either by gambling or, more often, by stealing. Virtually all “coons” stole chickens and watermelons, of course; this was perhaps the single most enjoyable and profitable enterprise they shared. But the presumption is that they had also stolen whatever else they happened to possess. In “Any Rags,” for example (the comparison with Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick—the archetypal bourgeois success story—is irresistible), it is claimed of the protagonist:

He stole all his furniture, he stole his wife,
If he’d steal from his friend he’d steal yer life.(27)

But if “coons” did not make their way in the world by stealing—if they acquired anything in the way of personal fortune by some other means—it was inevitably by gambling or hustling, and the gambler/hustler coon figures prominently in the song lyrics. In Nathan Bivins's “Gimme Ma Money,” for instance, the narrator relates his tale:

Last night I went to a big Crap game,
How dem coons did gamble wuz a sin and a shame. …

But he joins the game and wins, proclaiming by way of justification

I’m gambling for my Sadie,
Cause she’s my lady,
I’m hustling coon, … dat's just what I am.(28)

As was the case here, the gambler/hustler frequently became involved in the trade in order to support a female friend in decent style. Indeed, the ladies in coon songs tend to be fairly avaricious, hardhearted sorts. In “I’m Always Glad to See You When You’ll Buy,” the story line reveals a prime example:

A coon once had a ladyfriend,
A black gal from Kentucky.
His money she would help him spend,
Whenever he was lucky.
But when dis colored man was broke, she’d shake him mighty soon.
She seemed to think it was a joke to tantalize dis coon.(29)

On the other hand, the “honey” in such a relationship could provide financial benefits too. In “I’ve just received a Telegram from Baby,” a down-on-his-luck gambler finds himself jailed for disorderly conduct. His “honey,” however, sends him money to make bail, so that:

Next day, just at noon-time, he was singing songs in coon-time,

and he was back with his lady friend by evening.30

When the gambler/hustler was in the money, however, he knew how to spend it. Despite the misleading title, the song “I’ve Got Money Locked up in a Vault” is concerned with a successful gambler who hires poor blacks (designated “coons” in the lyrics) to shine his shoes, to fetch and carry, and to serve as his bodyguard. He boasts of his success:

I’ve got money now to throw to the birds,
I buy my chickens by the herds—(31)

There is, of course, nothing resembling thrift or frugality in lifestyle when the gambler coon is on a successful roll. “When a Nigger Makes a Hundred,” observed one song title, “Ninety-nine Goes on His Back”; that is, he will spend it all on flashy clothes. In the domestic scenario that constitutes the body of the lyrics, the hustler, down on his luck and broke (having blown his bankroll), is spurned by his “honey”:

I had lots of coons but for your sake
I gave them all the sack,
Now you haven’t got a dollar, its no wonder that I holler,
If a nigger makes a hundred, ninety-nine goes on his back.(32)

And in the most famous episode involving the profligate gambler and his impatient “honey,” the latter cries out in total exasperation:

Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown
What you goin’ to do when the rent comes ’round?
What you goin’ to say, how you goin’ to pay;
You’ll never have a bit of sense till judgment day,
You know, I know, rent means dough,
Landlord's goin’ to put us out in the snow
Rufus Rastus Johnson Brown,
What you goin’ to do when the rent comes ’round?(33)

Other coon songs posited the whole spectrum of ascribed qualities associated with the coon stereotype. Possibly the most revealing of these full-dress portraits in caricature was Will Heehan's “Every Race has a Flag but the Coon.” In this fullscale exercise in ethno/racial ascription, Heehan has the leader of the “Blackville Club,” a social-marching organization, bemoaning the lack of an emblem under which to march in club outings. To meet this perceived need, he suggests a flag that would serve all blacks:

Just take a flannel shirt and paint it red,
Then draw a chicken on it, with two poker-dice for eyes,
An have it wav-in’ razors ’round its head;
To make it quaint, you’ve got to paint
A possum with a pork chop in its teeth;
To give it tone, a big ham-bone
You sketch upon a banjo underneath,
And be sure not to skip just a policy slip,
Have it marked four-eleven-forty-four.

This is a flag to inspire pride in any “coon,” Heehan suggests—one wholly representative of the “race.”34

Lurking always near the surface of the ascribed character of black Americans was their sensuous nature and the unrestrained quality of their sexuality. What has come to be known in our time as the “living together arrangement”—the “honey” relationship in the coon songs—was commonly believed to be the typical form of black domesticity, as opposed to marriage and the nuclear family of the white norm. Such would naturally be the case with a people who knew only temporary sexual relationships, shifting and ephemeral, responding to the momentary requirements of their unrestrained libidos. The common designation for this feature of black character was “hot.” A “Red Hot Coon,” for example, features a “honey” proclaiming the virtues of her paramour:

… he spends all his money on me—
Dat's right, I'se his Lady you see;
He am my honey ba—by.(35)

And from the male viewpoint, “De Swellest Ladies' Coon in Town” boasts (with reference to his prowess with females):

… dey all know dat I’m a hot potato,
Wid a razor, playing cards, or shooting dice.(36)

It bears repeating that black song writers and performers contributed their share to a primary feature of the “coon” image. Williams and Walker appeared in 1899 in an important all-black show called “Senegambian Carnival,” with book and lyrics by Paul Lawrence Dunbar; music by Will Marion Cook. The hit song of the show was a number performed by George Walker entitled “The Hottest Coon in Dixie,” a song that gained national exposure through a large sheet music sale.37 The song, of course, featured the “hot coon” theme, this time provided by a group of black writers and performers who clearly represented the finest talent the period could offer.

Perhaps the best known of all coon songs, and surely the most controversial (in that it was the work of a black songwriter), was Ernest Hogan's “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” the message of which was clear:

All coons look alike to me
I’ve got another beau, you see
And he’s just as good to me as you, Nig! ever tried to be.
He spends his money free …
So I don’t like you no-how.
All coons look alike to me.(38)

Clearly the love lives of these exotic, sensuous people were marked by considerable turbulence, and relationships were often anguished and normally short-lived. In “No Coon can come too Black for Me,” a lascivious lady proclaims her taste for black lovers:

No Coon can come too Black for me,
I cert’ny love those dark men's ’ciety. … (39)

But the turbulent relationships often gave rise to domestic strife. “You’re alright but you don’t get in,” insisted one offended lady:

Better jus go back to where you have been,
You comes a rollin’ home ’bout half past four …

and this was simply not acceptable.40 Normally, however, the anguish was also short-lived. There were always new conquests to be made, always another “honey” to be had, and even more than one at a time. The “Mormon Coon” was especially well-endowed with ladies:

I’ve got a big brunette, and a blonde to pet,
I’ve got ’em short, fat, thin, and tall,
I’ve got a Cuban gal, and a Zulu Pal,
They come in bunches when I call. … (41)

Despite the superficially good-natured quality of the lyrics, “The Mormon Coon” hints at a darker theme, one of several such dangerous topics potentially threatening to white society. This polygamous “coon” claims a white woman (or perhaps even two) among his conquests. The threat of miscegenation had long represented the ultimate threat to the white ruling order, and most especially so in the matter of the black male/white female version of race mixing. And here we find a libidinous black boasting of his prowess with “blondes” as well as a variety of brunettes. The threat is palpable, albeit hidden beneath the veneer of the comical coon character.

A second threat, similarly disguised in the songs' comic mode, was the threat of violence. We have already noted the razor/signifier as a manifestation of potential black violence, and the razor was unquestionably the key symbolic element transcending the comic veneer to evoke the pervasive threat. In “Leave Your Razors at the Door,” one “big burly nigger by de name of Brown,”

Gave a rag-time reception in dis here town.
All his friends and relations with their blades came down
For to mingle in de grand sasshay. … (42)

In that the razor was the inevitable adjunct of any social occasion, it was clearly recognized that “blades” and “sasshays” were part of the same function: black social life and black violence were inextricable. In truth, this particular affair was exceptional in that all the razors were confiscated by the doorman, who then absconded with the collected steel, necessitating the revellers' fighting bare-handed. But far more typical was the ball scene in the song “Ma Angeline,” which describes the inevitable brawl:

Razzers got a flyin’, Nigs and wenches cryin’
Guns an’ buns an’ coons flew in de air …,
De Niggers dey wer’ slashin’,
Steel dey wer ’a clashin’,
Coons were scrapin’ all aroun de floor.”(43)

Although black violence lay somewhere near the surface of virtually every episode or event described in coon songs, notably, the violence was uniformly perpetrated by blacks on blacks. Whites were never directly involved. To involve whites would eliminate the comic veneer altogether, and one simply did not write or perform comic songs about race riots. The black threat remained a subliminal threat, and “coons” remained hilariously funny.

But there were still other coded messages in the songs, messages that were transmitted and subliminally recorded. The “toughest” and “meanest” coon—the “bully coon”—was another stock figure prominent among the characters about whom coon songs were written. “I’m the Toughest, Toughest Coon” is typical of the sub-genre:

I’m the toughest, toughest coon that walks the street;
You may search the wide, wide world, my equal never meet;
I got a razor in my boot, I got a gun with which to shoot,
I’m the toughest, toughest coon that walks the street.(44)

Another case in point: “De Blue Gum Nigger”:

I'se a blue gum nigger
You don’t want to fool wid me,
I'se as bad a nigger as a nigger man can be.(45)

And yet another (this one by another black songwriter, Edward Furber, with music by Bert Williams): “He’s Up Against the Real Thing Now”:

A real bad coon once came to town, ev’ry body he met he’d knock down;
At last he came across a coon bad as himself,
Says he ‘You may be warm, but I'se pretty hot myself …
Den dis coon pulled a gun, and aimed it at his head;
An de bad man, he threw up both his hands and said,
I’m up against the real thing now,
I’m up against the real thing now,
I carved dem in de East, and I shot dem in de West,
But I’m up against the real thing now.(46)

For all this carving, slashing, shooting, and other forms of mayhem the “coon” was prone to committing, and for all the implied danger of this sort of potential and actual violence, perhaps the single most threatening feature of the new ascriptive “coon” stereotype was the implied threat to the hallowed racial caste system protected in the past by slavery and now, in the early 1890s, devoid of clear sanction in law. This most threatening of all themes—threatening at least in its encoded subliminal message—was the theme of the black who wants to become white.

The “passing” phenomenon is, of course, an old theme in American literature and lore (and in reality as well). Not surprisingly, it became part of the subliminal message of many coon songs. Ernest Hogan's “No More Will I Ever be Your Baby,” for example, is the lament of a spurned lover whose “honey” has hit on a policy number and gone “high-toned.” She moves “up-town,” and her estranged lover observes:

She wants all the nigs to let her alone,
She looks on them with a frown …
She won’t have anything to do with coons any more …
She says she’s got money and she’s goin’ to pass for white.

Her parting words to him are perfectly to the point:

No more will I ever be your baby …
Kase [sic] you’re too black.(47)

Her lighter color and newfound fortune presumably enable her to pass. But the passing theme takes yet other forms in the coon songs. “Got Your Habits On,” for example, suggests that education gives blacks pretensions with regard to the established racial order:

And when dey learn how to read and write,
Why most of dem niggers just think they’re white.(48)

Money, too, produces dangerous pretensions in blacks. Andrew Sterling's “I’ve Got a White Man Working for Me” offers perhaps the ultimate in black pretensions to forms of power normally associated only with whites. In this scenario, a “coon” gets a little money and hires a white man to work for him shoveling coal. A group of other blacks gathers to watch the bizarre phenomenon, and the “coon” boasts:

I’ve got a white man working for me,
I’m going to keep him busy you see,
Don’t care what it costs,
I’ll stand all the loss,
It’s worth twice the money for to be a boss …
Don’t you dare to talk ’bout the white ’bove the black,
I’ve got a white man working for me.(49)

Not only do they want the status of whites, then; they also want the power associated with white status. In that power and whiteness are so clearly related, however, a common motif of the coon songs was the transmutation theme. This theme occurs in several forms, one of which concerns the presumed relationship between whiteness and the moon. In “Only a Little Yaller Coon,” for instance, one black baby appears to lighten in color when exposed to moonlight. A group of “darkies” gathers to witness this intriguing spectacle:

And dey rolled dere eyes to heaben and declared he would be white,
When his skin changed at the full-ness ob de moon.(50)

Alas, he does not turn completely white—only “yellow”—and that is not sufficient to allow him to “pass.” Similarly, the inordinately popular (even by coon song standards) “If the Man in the Moon were a Coon”—advertised as “the Biggest ‘Hit’ in 20 Years”—suggested that should this phenomenon come to pass, the man in the moon coon would first turn white; he would blanch out to match his luminous surroundings. Then he would extinguish the light of the moon so that the earthbound blacks could safely proceed, under cover of the dark night, to steal chickens (in that “chicken is a coon's delight”).51

Perhaps the fullest development of the black-who-would-be-white theme appeared in another best-selling song entitled simply “Coon! Coon! Coon!” Touted as “The Most Successful Song Hit of 1901,” it was another lament of a spurned lover, this one cast off because of his excessively dark complexion:

Though its not my color, I’m feeling mighty blue;
I’ve got a lot of trouble, I’ll tell it all to you;
I’m cert’nly clean disgusted with life and that’s a fact,
Because my hair is wooly and because my color's black.

To remedy the situation, he takes extreme measures:

I had my face enameled, I had my hair made straight;
I dressed up like a white man, and cert’nly did look great. …

He then proceeds to stroll through the park, where he is spotted by two doves who observe him closely, then croon in unison: “Coo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oon.” Devastated, he sings the chorus:

Coon! Coon! Coon!
I wish my color would fade:
Coon! Coon! Coon!
I’d like a different shade.
Coon! Coon! Coon! Morning, night, and noon.
I wish I was a white man!
'Stead of a Coon! Coon! Coon!(52)

Although this theme was pervasive in the songs, it should be noted that rarely if ever, except in dream sequences, did blacks ever actually become white: They only aspired to do so (though the aspiration itself would surely have been disturbing to whites). But the song that most accurately described the actual racial ordering of the day was doubtless the Bob Cole/Billy Johnson number entitled “No Coons Allowed”:

No coons allowed,—no coons allowed,
This place is meant for white folks. … (53)

Cole and Johnson, both black, had experienced hard reality.

In yet another song—a variant form of “coon song” sometimes termed a “coon lament”—the message was equally clear. The song was a sentimental ballad out of the minstrel tradition entitled “Stay in your Own Back Yard.” The lyrics tell of a small black child who is rejected by the white children with whom she tries to play. Her mother speaks:

Now honey, you stay in yo’ own back yard,
Doan min’ what dem white chiles do;
What show yo’ suppose dey's a gwine to gib
A black little coon like yo’?
So stay on dis side ob de high boahd fence,
An honey, doan cry so hard,
Go out an’ play, jes as much as yo’ please,
But stay in yo’ own back yard. … (54)

Here, in effect, was the answer to all suggestions that the racial order might be changed: “stay in your own back yard.” It constituted a pop music affirmation of Jim Crow segregation, the institutionalized system of race relations then in the process of enactment in the states of the South.

In the larger sense, then, it would appear that the coon song phenomenon manifested a sociopsychological response to the need for addressing the “race question” so central and so troubling to the times. In order to pursue the matter further, however, we must abandon the relatively well-marked course afforded by traditional historical documentation and sail into the largely uncharted waters of interpretation. To begin this effort we might go back to the music historian Sam Dennison, compiler of a major collection of material relating to the black image in popular song, who refers to “the sea of musical invective” that inundated the late nineteenth-century popular media. Dennison concludes that “songs about the black were more brutally insulting than at any time following the advent of minstrelsy.”55 The imagery of the coon songs, he suggests further, was based in “a peculiarly American form of misoxeny”; that is, in a thoroughgoing unfamiliarity with “real” blacks, and the acceptance of stereotypes developed out of racial prejudice. With none of these conclusions have I any fundamental disagreement. But I would like to advance the argument beyond this point.

It was the black historian Rayford W. Logan who once referred to the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the “nadir” of black fortunes in American history. Following the Civil War and emancipation, the country faced the necessity of reestablishing a system of race relations—a new social order in reality—in which the “place” of black Americans was to be determined and institutionalized within the larger culture. During this time of trial and uncertainty the black population suffered the brunt of rampant violence and intimidation, most of it directed against any sign of black pretension to civil and social equality or the exercise of political power.56 Violence and oppression were simply part of the readjustment process, deemed imperative by those who would maintain the caste orientation of American race relations. The wartime promise of a more equitable order proved empty. Ultimately the fate of the black population was left to be determined by southern whites.

In the South, the white Redeemers (having assumed control of the mechanics of state government in the 1880s) were by 1890 on the verge of a solution to their “Race Problem.” The solution was to involve the subordination, disfranchisement, and ultimately the legal segregation of blacks by way of the Jim Crow laws. Black subordination would be enforced by law where possible, and by way of violence and intimidation where law proved inadequate. Violent forms of intimidation, including physical and psychological abuse—the notorious “bulldozing” tactics of the post-Reconstruction South—included lynching where extreme measures were deemed necessary, and lynching, sometimes preceded by unspeakably grisly forms of torture, grew ever more commonplace as the nineteenth century closed. Such violence was an accepted concomitant of black subordination, perpetrated usually in the interest of demonstrating the certain result of any violation of “place” (by whatever means) on the part of blacks.57

Outside the South, the new order of southern race relations had by the 1890s come to be generally accepted. While the old “radical” Republicans had held out for black civil and political rights throughout Reconstruction, their energies had perceptibly flagged by 1890, and the reigning attitude in the North and West was one quite willing to accept Jim Crow as the basis of the new southern social system. Besides, relatively few northern and western whites had ever been truly committed to the concept of black equality, and had clearly manifested their racism (and even their negrophobia) throughout the antebellum years and beyond.58 The immense popularity of the “coon” image nationwide merely reflected the ongoing commitment to racist assumptions that underlay the system of American apartheid in which blacks were maintained in subordinate and subservient roles.

In order to justify the realities of the new order, the dominant whites had to find serviceable forms of rationalization to quell the psychic disturbance known to social psychology as “cognitive dissonance.”59 This they were quick to do. They found ample justification, for example, in the New Anthropology, in Social Darwinism (and in Biological Darwinism as well), and in the sort of “racial radicalism” (the term is that of Joel Williamson) represented by Charles Carroll's The Negro a Beast (1900) and Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots (1902).60 The white mentality adjusted readily to such blandishments. The segregation of blacks, black subordination and subservience, enforced when necessary by violence and murder, were found to be justifiable, indeed right.

It is within this historical context that the ultimate explanation of the coon song craze must be sought. And to guide the quest, one must make choices among the various interpretative models available to the cultural historian; either that, or attempt to create an all-encompassing eclectic model that subsumes all variables. The problem with this latter approach, tempting as it may be to those of us who lack absolute commitment to (and faith in) any one of the several alternatives, is that, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz has observed, eclecticism is “self-defeating”; not, he insists, “because there is only one direction in which to move, but because there are so many. …”61 We must choose that model of cultural process which lends itself most persuasively to the analysis of the specific case at hand, he says. And I have been convinced by the arguments of Geertz and others who perceive the need to sort out the “structures of signification”; those “piled up structures of inference and implication that are part of any symbolic act.”62 The coon song phenomenon, I contend, was ultimately a manifestation of a complex code of signification central to the entire racial discourse of late nineteenth-century America.

As a symbol-system, the coon songs constituted a multilayered set of meanings and images, at times shifting and even contradictory in its implications. There can be no doubt, however, of certain of its primary dimensions. As heretofore noted, all of the songs' lyrics suggested the qualities ascribed to blacks by their authors—collectively, the signified “coon.” And if the complex of symbols operating at the conscious, cognitive level were to be construed as a symbolic statement, the songs themselves may be said to have constituted a form of rhetoric encompassing a true ideology, that is, a belief system reflecting the social needs of bourgeois America. As such they provided, in the way of all ideologies, “matrices for the creation of collective conscience” and ultimately the “interworking” of social reality and rhetoric (in Geertz's terminology).63 It is at the point of this juncture of social reality and ideological commitment that one must seek the ultimate meaning of the coon song phenomenon.

The coon song craze in its full frenzy was a manifestation of a peculiar form of the will to believe—to believe in the signified “coon” as represented in the songs—as a necessary sociopsychological mechanism for justifying segregation and subordination. The process of symbolic formulation was doubtless complex: recall that the signified creatures who constitute the subjects of the coon songs often comprised unlikely combinations of qualities which, taken to their extreme forms, would suggest the characters of both “Stepin’ Fetchit” and “Sportin’ Life.” It was by fulfilling the need for rationalizations on the part of the dominant population that the coon songs gained and maintained their inordinate popularity. Over and over the dominant themes were repeated and reiterated until the variant images were rendered indelible, at least in their primary forms. Blacks were not only the simple-minded comic buffoons of the minstrel tradition; they were also potentially dangerous. They were dangerous not only in the way that animals are dangerous if allowed to roam unrestrained, but dangerous as well to white bourgeois culture itself. They constituted a threat to the American social order. For this reason, they had to be controlled and subordinated by whatever means, so the coon songs signalled. The songs also argued, implicitly at least, for coercion, for lynching if necessary, to maintain control and the domination of white over black. Such was their connoted message (Roland Barthes has referred to such connotation as “what-goes-without-saying,” suggesting that it often masks “ideological abuse.”)64 And the songs argued far more effectively than did the rationalist racial effusions of the Carrolls and the Dixons. They did so because they spoke through symbols directly to their listeners, without need for cognition or analysis. The coon songs were as popular as they were because they provided psychic balms by way of justifying the unjustifiable to white Americans who were as delighted with “coons” as they were determined to believe in them.

Yet the ironies abound. In their very willingness to participate in the coon song phenomenon, black performers and song writers were able to profit commercially and to produce, among other things, an entirely new black musical theater based, at least in part, in authentically black musical materials.65 Certain lyrics of the songs influenced the development of the black blues tradition that may be said to have culminated with Bessie Smith in the 1920s (one thinks of the unforgettable “Gimme a Pig's Foot”). Moreover, the tremendous popularity of the songs provided the means whereby ragtime as a musical genre in its own right gained an element of acceptance by whites who in the past were unaware of and unconcerned with black culture. Though ragtime had to overcome the stigma of its origins, the popularity of the coon songs cleared the way for its acceptance, and ultimately its popularity.66 Finally, the ragtime genre, the roots of which lay in black folk music, provided the necessary bridge to the popular performance style that came to be called “jazz” in the early twentieth century. The coon song craze thus contributed to the development of America's only truly endemic musical form, even as the sentimental ballad associated with the minstrel tradition provided material for Al Jolson and the other blackface performers of the same period. Later still, film and the electronic media would feature entertainers of the Amos and Andy variety who served to perpetuate the “coon” character as a function of ethnic semiosis long after the sociopsychological need for the “coon” had ceased to exist in white America. By then whites had moved into a comfortable acceptance of the new racial order based in American apartheid, and the laughable “coon” was nothing more than a happy reminder of how right the system was.

Notes

  1. Max Morath, “The Vocal and Theatrical Music of Bert Williams and His Associates” in American Popular Entertainment, ed. Myron Matlow (Westport, Conn., 1979), 112.

  2. The ongoing assessment would include such recent works as follow: J. Stanley Lemons, “Black Stereotypes as Reflected in Popular Culture, 1880-1920,” American Quarterly 29 (Spring 1977): 102-16; Janet Brown, “The ‘Coon-Singer’ and the ‘Coon-Song:’ A Case Study of the Performance-Character Relationship,” Journal of American Culture 7 (Spring/Summer 1984): 1-8; Berndt Ostendorf, Black Literature in White America (Sussex, 1982); and especially Sam Dennison, Scandalize My Name: Black Imagery in American Popular Music (N.Y., 1982). The Dennison work constitutes a major compilation of black imagery in popular song from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth century, and provides the essential foundation for anyone examining the subject.

  3. Dennison, Black Imagery, 7; James H. Dormon, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow Rice (With Apologies to Professor Woodward),” Journal of Social History 3 (Winter 1970): 109-22. On the matter of ethnic ascription (and other theoretical notions), see Frederick Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston, 1969), 12-18; James H. Dormon, “Ethnic Groups and ‘Ethnicity:’ Some Theoretical Considerations,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 7 (Winter 1980): 23-36.

  4. Dennison, Black Imagery, 8. Dennison notes that “Andrew Barton” was possibly a pseudonym of Thomas Forrest.

  5. Ibid., 9; Dormon, “Jim Crow Rice,” 113-14.

  6. On the appearance of the new caricature see Dennison, 36-58.

  7. “Zip Coon” was published in several editions, the best known of which was probably that of Atwill's Music Saloon (N.Y., [1835]).

  8. Dennison, Black Imagery, 87-156; Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up; The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (N.Y., 1974). On the development of black stereotypes in American popular culture, see Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York, 1986). William F. Stowe and David Grimsted have made a strong case for the multidimensionality of the traditional minstrel figure. See Stowe and Grimsted, “White-Black Humor,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 2 (Summner 1975): 82.

  9. Ibid.; Dormon, “Jim Crow Rice,” 120-22.

  10. A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, s.v. “coon”; locates the earliest reference to “coon” as “A Negro. Often contemptuous …” in 1887. Dictionary of American Slang, s.v. “coon”; lists same date, 1887, as earliest reference.

  11. J. P. Skelly, “The Dandy Coon's Parade” (N.Y., 1880). Dennison claims this to be the first of the songs to use “the term ‘coon’ to signify black.” Black Imagery, 281.

  12. Louis Bodecker, “The Coons are on Parade” (Chicago, 1882); cited in Dennison, Black Imagery, 282.

  13. J. S. Putnam, “New Coon in Town” (Cleveland and Chicago, 1883.)

  14. Sam Lucas, “The Coon's Salvation Army” (Boston, 1884).

  15. William Dressler, “The Coon Schottische” (Cleveland and Chicago, 1884).

  16. “May Irwin's New Coon Song Hits,” (N.Y., [1896 or 1897]); George M. Cohan, “San Francisco Sadie” (N.Y., 1899). For additional material on the popularity of coon songs see David Ewen, American Popular Songs: From the Revolutionary War to the Present (N.Y., 1966), 164; Edward B. Marks, They All Sang: From Tony Pastor to Rudy Vallee (N.Y., 1934), 91-92; Russell B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (N.Y., 1970), 317. Although the center of popular music production and distribution was clearly in the urban Northeast, the popularity of the coon songs was national in scope. The “coon” routine invaded the vaudeville houses and music halls of all parts of the country, and coon songs were available in sheet music form nationwide.

  17. See Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (N.Y., 1971), 314; Robert C. Toll, On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America (N.Y., 1976), 118; Brown, “Coon-Singer,” 2.

  18. Etude Magazine in 1898 associated the rhythms of the then emergent ragtime style with the “rhythmic features of the popular ‘coon song.’” The article continues “It has a powerfully stimulating effect, setting the nerves and muscles tingling with excitement. Its esthetic element is the same as that in the monotonous, recurring rhythmic chant of barbarous races.” The lyrics are normally, we are informed, “decidedly vulgar, so that its present great favor is somewhat to be deplored.” Quoted in William J. Schafer and Johannes Reidel, The Art of Ragtime: Form and Meaning of an Original Black American Art (Baton Rouge, 1973), xix.

  19. Ibid., 29. Schafer and Reidel refer to the “popular rage” for coon songs on the stage and in the music halls of the 1890s, while David A. Jasen and Trebor Jay Tichenor write that coon songs “became a craze” in 1896 and “remained standard fare in vaudeville and musical revues throughout the early 1900s.” See Jasen and Tichenor, Rags and Ragtime. A Musical History (N.Y., 1978), 12.

  20. Dramatic Mirror (N.Y., [1896]), quoted in Toll, Show, 124.

  21. “The Stage Negro,” Variety, 14 Dec. 1907, 53. Ironically, the reference was to blacks performing blackface roles.

  22. On the old stereotype and its sociopsychological functions, see Dennison, Black Imagery, 101-10; Dormon, “Jim Crow Rice,” 120-22; and Toll, Blacking Up, 75-79. Brown suggests that the “coon” type was an extension of the “classical fool.” Brown, “Coon-Singer,” 2.

  23. For an analogue of the razor/signifier-black/signified equation, see William Boelhower, “Describing the Italian-American Self: Type-Scene and Encyclopedia,” In Their Own Words 2 (Winter 1984): 37-48. My thanks to Professor Werner Sollors for guiding me to this important article.

  24. Malcolm Williams, “My Watermelon Boy” (N.Y., 1899).

  25. “I’ve Got Chicken on the Brain,” words by Elmer Bowman; music by Al Johns (N.Y., 1899).

  26. Bert Williams and George Walker, “The Coon's Trade Mark” n.p., n.d., quoted in Lemons, “Black Stereotypes,” 107. Williams and Walker were not only performers of “coon” material but prolific writers of the material as well.

  27. Thomas S. Allen, “Any Rags” (Boston, 1902); cited in Dennison, Black Imagery, 367-68.

  28. Nathan Bivins, “Gimme Ma Money” (N.Y., 1898); cited in Dennison, 364.

  29. “I’m Always Glad to See You When You’ll Buy,” words by George Totten Smith; music by A. B. Sloan (N.Y., 1899).

  30. “I’ve Just Received a Telegram from Baby,” words by Will A. Heehan; music by Harry von Tilzer (N.Y., 1899). Von Tilzer was, of course, author of such period standards as “Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie” (1905); “I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl (that Married Dear Old Dad)” (1910); and “In the Evening by the Moonlight” (1912). His coon song phase produced one of the most popular of that genre, too: “What You Goin’ to do When the Rent Comes ’Round?” (See below, note 33).

  31. Irving Jones, “I’ve Got Money Locked up in a Vault”; revised by Bert Williams and George Walker (N.Y., 1899).

  32. “When a Nigger Makes a Hundred …” words by Charles A. Wilson; music by Leo E. Berliner (N.Y., 1899).

  33. Harry von Tilzer and Andrew B. Sterling, “What You Goin’ to do when the Rent Comes ’Round?” (N.Y., n.d.).

  34. Will A. Heehan and J. Fredrick Helf, “Every Race has a Flag but the Coon” (N.Y., 1901). The combination “four-eleven-forty-four” was in the lore of the numbers game believed to have a near-mystical promise of a big win, or at least such was reputedly the case among black players. Heehan and Helf later composed a second song based on the flag theme, apparently responding to protests over the assertion that American blacks had no emblem. They called it “The Emblem of an Independent Coon” (N.Y., [1902]), and designed it as a patriotic riposte to their own earlier effusion. The song featured musical quotations from “Hail, Columbia,” “Marching through Georgia,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and Ernest Hogan's “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” The lyrics read, in part:

    Some folks say the coons have got no emblem,
    They forget Abe Lincoln mighty soon.
    Remember, he unfurled the Stars and Stripes to all the world,
    As the emblem of an independent coon. …
    No coons should be neglected ‘cause no other race it bars;
    For ev’ry man on earth, of ev’ry shade and birth,
    Is welcomed and protected ’neath the noble Stripes and Stars. …
  35. Lu Senareus, “A Red Hot Coon” (N.Y., 1899).

  36. Harry von Tilzer, “De Swellest Ladie's Coon in Town” (N.Y., 1897). It is tempting to conclude from the popularity of the “coon” material that white audiences subliminally envied the carefree, uninhibited, unrestrained “coon,” and especially so during an era of Victorian restraint. White entertainers relished the “coon” role, even as whites had obviously enjoyed blacking up for minstrel shows. But whether or not white envy of black “freedom” lay behind the coon craze, it is clear that whites saw the unrestrained, lascivious “coon” as fundamentally lacking in the requisite forms of civility and intelligence to be conceded equality within the hegemonic social order.

  37. “The Hottest Coon in Dixie,” quoted in Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface: A Source Book on Early Black Musical Shows (Metuchen, N.J., 1980), 79.

  38. Ernest Hogan, “All Coons Look Alike to Me” (N.Y., 1896). The song became controversial when, near the end of the century, some blacks began to condemn it as demeaning and refused to perform it. But despite the controversy, the song was deemed to be a gem of ragtime piano composition. See Lemons, “Black Stereotypes,” 107.

  39. Elmer Bowman, “No Coon Can Come too Black for Me” in New Darkey Songs of the Era (N.Y., 1899).

  40. Jess Danzig, “You’re Alright but you Don’t Get In,” in ibid., n.p.

  41. “The Mormon Coon,” words by Raymond A. Browne; music by Henry Clay Smith (N.Y., 1905), cited in Dennison, Black Imagery, 357.

  42. “Leave Your Razors at the Door,” words by Dave Reed, Jr.; music by Charles B. Ward (n.d., [ca. 1900]).

  43. Charles S. O’Brien, “Ma Angeline” (N.Y., 1896).

  44. “I’m the Toughest, Toughest Coon,” words by Carl Stowe; music by L. Mauran Bloodgood (Boston, 1904), cited in Dennison, Black Imagery, 375.

  45. A. B. Sloane, “De Blue Gum Nigger” (N.Y., 1899).

  46. “He’s Up Against the Real Thing Now,” words by Edward Furber; music by Bert Williams, in Ragtime Folio #2 (N.Y., n.d.).

  47. Ernest Hogan, “No More Will I Ever Be Your Baby” (n.p., [ca. 1897]).

  48. John Queen, “Got Your Habits On” (Chicago, 1899).

  49. Andrew Sterling, “I’ve Got a White Man Working for Me” (N.Y., 1899).

  50. Charles Shackford, “Only a Little Yaller Coon” (N.Y., 1896).

  51. Fred Fisher, “If the Man in the Moon were a Coon” (Chicago, 1905). The “Coon-Moon” rhyme lent itself to many other coon-moon associations; for example Jake Cline's “The Coon from the Moon,” which opens “I’m a Nigger, I’m a Coon, and I fell down from the Moon/Don’t You Know …” (N.Y., 1894).

  52. “Coon! Coon! Coon!” words by Gene Jefferson; music by Leo Friedman (N.Y., 1901). On the extraordinary popularity of the song, see Ewen, Popular Songs, 73.

  53. Bob Cole and Billy Johnson, “No Coons Allowed!” (N.Y., 1899).

  54. “Stay in Your Own Back Yard,” words by Karl Kennett; music by Lyn Udall (N.Y., 1899).

  55. Dennison, Black Imagery, 423-24. Joel Williamson, whose work represents the most important recent consideration of race relations in the period, echoes Dennison in noting that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were “marked by a racist rhetoric never equalled in virulence in America. …” Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (N.Y., 1984), 311-12.

  56. See Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901 (N.Y., 1954).

  57. There were at least 1,665 lynchings in the United States between 1890 and 1900. Most of the victims were black. See Sig Synnestvedt, The White Response to Black Emancipation (N.Y., 1972), 56. The historical literature pertaining to black intimidation, depoliticization, subordination, and segregation is immense, commencing with C. Vann Woodward's seminal works: Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (N.Y., 1955). Joel Williamson has provided the most recent version of the story in Crucible of Race, cited above. On the process of black disfranchisement, see especially J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1890-1910 (New Haven, 1974). On the segregation process, see John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (N.Y. and London, 1982), 82-191.

  58. On northern racial attitudes and the ultimate capitulation to southern Jim Crow see Williamson, Crucible of Race, 339-41. See also Idus A. Newby, Jim Crow's Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America (Baton Rouge, 1965) for a good discussion of the pervasive racism in the nation at large by the end of the nineteenth century.

  59. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (N.Y., 1944), 1:106. For a good brief discussion of cognitive dissonance, see Harry C. Triandis, Attitude and Attitude Change (N.Y., 1971), 78-84.

  60. Charles Carroll, The Negro a Beast; or, in the Image of God (St. Louis, 1900); Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden (N.Y., 1902). Dixon was also the author of a second bestseller, The Clansman (N.Y., 1905), which provided the story line for the controversial film, Birth of a Nation in 1915. The subject of racial attitudes and ideologies in the late nineteenth-century United States has attracted a considerable scholarly interest. Representative works include Newby, Jim Crow's Defense; August Meir, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, 1968); Lawrence J. Friedman, The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970); John S. Haller, Jr., Outcasts From Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900 (Urbana, Ill., 1971); George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (N.Y., 1971); Bruce Clayton, The Savage Ideal: Intolerance and Intellectual Leadership in the South, 1890-1914 (Baltimore, 1972); Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (N.Y., 1982), 143-77; Williamson, The Crucible of Race.

  61. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (N.Y., 1973), 5.

  62. Ibid., 7, 9.

  63. Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, 213, 220.

  64. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (N.Y., 1974), 9. Italics in the original. The phrase is from the “Preface” to the 1970 edition, which opens with the announcement that the book “has a double theoretical framework: On the one hand, an ideological critique bearing on the language of so-called mass-culture; on the other, a first attempt to analyze semiologically the mechanics of this language.” The same might be said of my efforts to assess the meaning of the Coon Song Phenomenon.

  65. See, e.g., Ann Charters, “Negro Folk Elements in Classic Ragtime,” Ethnomusicology 5 (Sept. 1961): 174-83.

  66. On the origins of ragtime and its popular reception, see Jasen and Tichenor, Rags and Ragtime, and Schafer and Riedel, Art of Ragtime.

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