Passing for Black: Coon Songs and the Performance of Race

Until recently, scholars exploring blackface minstrelsy or the accompanying "coon song craze" of the 1890s have felt the need to apologize, either for the demeaning stereotypes of African Americans embedded in the art forms or for their own interest in studying the phenomena. Robert Toll, one of the first critics to examine minstrelsy seriously, was so appalled by its inherent racism that he focused his 1 974 work primarily on debunking the stereotypes; Sam Dennison, another pioneer, did likewise with coon songs. Richard Martin and David Wondrich claim of minstrelsy that "the roots of every strain of American music- ragtime, jazz, the blues, country music, soul, rock and roll, even hip-hop - reach down through its reeking soil" (5). Marshall Wyatt opines that "most coon songs rate scant attention" (9). Even Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, compilers of a large and extremely useful volume on black traveling shows and coon songs, are careful to mention that they "take no pleasure" in the repeated use of the word coon in the "ignobly dubbed" coon songs (3-4). When I mentioned to an African-American friend that I was writing an essay on black performers of coon songs, he offered to find me a bodyguard. In the past decade, however, thanks in large part to groundbreaking research on the AfricanAmerican musical theater and blackface performers like Bert Williams and George Walker, scholars have come to recognize that blackface and coon song performances by African Americans signify in rich and complex ways. In the decision by Bert Williams to perform with Walker as one of "Two Real Coons," for example, one finds a West Indian man performing a white-created racial caricature of an African- American person and billing it as "real" (Chude-Sokei 5-8). Authenticity evaporates. What might at first seem to be a mere reiteration of the deplorable history of racism becomes a profound challenge to its foundational parameters. Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, and Karen Sotiropoulos are among those recent scholars who have argued persuasively that coon songs as performed by black Americans constituted not simple minstrelsy or a capitulation to the forces popular consumer culture, but a form of political activism, a way for young, cosmopolitan black musicians and performers of the 1890s and earlytwentieth century to challenge the racial status quo and thus participate in the creation of modern discourse. Recognizing the multiple levels of signification in play when African Americans performed in blackface in front of racially mixed authences, Sotiropoulos finds that the performers "manipulated the stage mask in innovative ways that helped them forge a space for dialogue with their black authence- dialogue that included both assertions of black nationhood and critique of the racism that perpetuated stereotypical imagery" (2). These performers also represented a new generation of African- American artists, who "had to negotiate nineteenth-century notions of morality and middle-class ideas of respectability" (97) held by their parents, while seeking ways to participate in the lively, urban theatrical culture of which they were a part. For Sotiropoulos, "This generation of black artists celebrated black communities, denounced Jim Crow, and critiqued black elite pretension- all behind the minstrel mask" (4). Daphne Brooks similarly contends that Walker and Williams and their peers created a black musical theater that "contested the cultural legibility of racial representations and the black musical form itself" (40). Perhaps T. H. Lhamon best sums up this newer, twenty-first century response to minstrelsy in his discussion of "Two Real Coons." By using this billing, Williams and Walker "held open season on conceptual coons" both on and off the stage, and "eviscerated whatever 'coon' resided in the imagination of their diverse authences" (7-8). For scholars like these, coon songs thus deserve study not just as a transitional moment between minstrel shows and jazz or blues, but in their own right, as indispensable to our understanding of a American popular music, the larger cultural forces that produce it, and the sophisticated racial commentary of the talented artists who crafted and performed the songs. …