Margo Jefferson PERFORMING ARTS RIPPING OFF BLACK MUSIC From Thomas "Daddy" Rice to Jimi Hendrix Part the First: Being an Exposition Crow," buttressed with ragged clothes for a time as "The Two Real Coons" on the Development of the Myth of and blackface makeup, was acclaimed by managers anxious to distinguish Rock Music as Viewed hy Antagonis. the comic performance of the Louis- them from numerous noncoon rivals. tic Participants, and Containing as ville season; within weeks Daddy was And James Weldon Johnson writes Much of the History of the Minstrel the toast of New York, and eight years about the famous New York producer Show as Is Necessary for the Read- er's Understanding. later the toast of London. who gained a reputation for inven- Naturally, minstrel shows grew like tiveness by studying the Will Cook- LVIS PRESLEY was the greatest Topsy, playing to the highborn and Paul Lawrence Dunbar show, Clor- E minstrel America ever spawned, the lowly across the land. With indy-the Origin 0/ the Cakewalk, and he appeared in bold whiteface. their Irrepressible High Spirits they and learning from it that choruses He sang like a nigger, danced like a cheered the South through the Civil might be taught to sing and dance nigger, walked like a nigger, and War, and managed to create such simultaneously, and that a certain talked like a nigger. Chuck Berry, un- goodwill in their audiences that by syncopated beat was very catchy when fortunately, was a nigger. They are the late 1860s even Negro performers applied to orchestral music. As radio two of the more splendid beings in were in demand. Negro minstrels, took its place in the entertainment the Great Chain of Minstrelsy that though, were accorded no special pantheon, minstrels began to call stretches from the start of the nine- privileges, the assumption being that themselves Amos'n' Andy; and when teenth century to the present, encom- none had a patent on the "pathos and the first talkie musical film opened, passing circuses, medicine shows, humor," the "artless philosophy," or no one was surprised to see veteran Broadway, the Fillmore East, night- the "plaintive and hilarious melo- vaudeviller Al Jolson enter in black- clubs, concert halls, television, and dies" of Negro life once it became face, prance down a runway, fall on Las Vegas. public entertainment. Like their white one knee and cry "Mammy!" while co-workers, black minstrels wore the orchestra played "Swanee" furi- burnt cork makeup and colorful rags ously in the background. (as country bumpkin Jim Crow) or The white minstrel has an endless white gloves and tails (as city dandy supply of incarnations: playing nig- Zip Coon). Once these Ethiopian gel' is first-rate theater. It has laughs, bards overcame some prejudice, par- tears, cheap thrills--a bargain cathar- ticularly among Southern audiences, sis. The performer's white skin, like they were said to be very funny in- an actor's curtain call, is an ingenious deed. safety device, signaling that the show Secession, abolition, the Civil War, is over and nothing has changed. and Reconstruction passed: the min- Aristotle neglected to mention that strel remained. When the form itself the aftermath of a catharsis is the faded toward the century's end (la- viewer's smug satisfaction with the mented by song publisher E.B. Marks capacity for feeling, a satisfaction as a sign that manners no longer that permits a swift and comfortable flourished in America), its clowning return to business as usual. You can't and soft-shoe routines trotted into lose playing the White Negro, because vaudeville and its songs drifted into you are in the unique position of re- Tin Pan Alley and musical comedy. taining the material benefits of being The patriarch of the minstrel show Songs by black writers were placed white while sampling the mythologi- was Thomas "Daddy" Rice, a white in white shows, serving as vehicles cal ones of being black. gentleman who, with a keen eye for for white stars and as best sellers entertainment, based his 1829 debut for white publishers. White com- on the antics of a deformed and rheu- posers, updating Stephen Foster's UCH HAS BEEN MADE of the matic ex-slave. The ex-slave made a habit of borrowing melodies from M 1950s, when America's teen- few pennies a day performing a neces- black churchgoers and boatmen, agers thrilled to the sounds of rhythm sarily limited but appealing song and spent hours in black clubrooms writ- and blues. It began, so they say, with dance he called "Jump Jim Crow"; ing down the tunes they heard and a small group, first listening to the copyrighting them as their own. charmed with it, Daddy studied, re- Margo Jefferson, a free-lance writer living in hearsed, and in a short time made Song-and-dance comics George New York, graduated from Columbia Univer- 40 show-business history. His "Jump Jim Walker and Bert Williams were billed sity School of Journalism in 1971. PERFORMING ARTS fugitive sounds on black radio sta- because "I am the King, the King of tirely exempt from the vulgarities tions, then venturing into black clubs Rock and Rhythm. I am the only one which have hitherto characterized ne- and theaters. White disc jockeys took allowed to be pretty." gro extravaganzas." * When Chuck notice, white record producers and There was Fats Domino too, and Berry sings, "Roll Over Beethoven/ radio station owners took action, and Jackie Wilson and Chuck Willis: also Dig these rhythm 'n' blues!" it is an faster than you could say "Zip Coon" Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis,' and outlaw's challenge to white culture. the country's youth was dancing to Bobby Darin; there was LaVern When the Beatles sing their version, the sounds of Elvis Presley and Chuck Baker, minstrelized by Theresa it has the sweet naughtiness of Peter Berry. Brewer, and Etta James, Jane Crowed Pan crowing "I Won't Grow Up." by Georgia Gibbs. There were many The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the others too, like Big Maybelle, Ruth Animals, and others sparked a jubi- Brown, the Chantels, and the Jesters, lee. In news conferences they boldly who stayed in the rhythm and blues announced that they listened to Chuck market, with their unpalatably ethnic Jackson, Smokey Robinson, and Sol- voices and rhythms, and were rarely omon Burke; white fans listened too, heard of by whites until the 1950s re- or at least memorized the names. The vival nearly twenty years later, when Stones pronounced Wilson Pickett's no one cared to spoil the nostalgia by "Midnight Hour" the best record of remembering whom they had or the year; "Midnight Hour" became hadn't grown up listening to. Peter the hit record of the year. ;u o Townsend of the Who has written Far from breaking ground, these » about those days: groups were the inheritors of a tradi- tion that began in England with the I'm a substitute [or another guy, 1 look pretty tall but my heels are eighteenth century, when "Negro high. songs" were first performed on the The simple things you see are all concert stage. In 1866 a black min- complicated, strel troupe visited London, and the 1 look pretty young but I'm just local streetsingers began to blacken backdated. their faces; English music-hall stars It's a substitute lies [or jact . • were soon crossing the Atlantic to f:!v':s Presley 1 look all white but my dad was popularize black-inspired American black ..• In fact, one portion of America songs with white American audiences. chose Elvis, son of Daddy Rice, and Elvis and his contemporaries During the 1920s small groups of the other opted for Chuck, bastard of shocked and thrilled because they English people began to cultivate the Jim Crow. Elvis was a good boy. In were hybrids. What had taken place jazz styles that black creators had addition to appearing on The Ed Sul- was a kind of Immaculate Miscegena- abandoned, collecting records, bring- livan Show, he made movies in Holly- tion, resulting in a creature who was ing performers to Europe, and form- wood with scrubbed starlets and at once a Prancing Nigger and a Blue- ing their own bands. stage-set teenagers who bopped like Eyed Boy. the Peter Gennaro Dancers. Chuck Berry remained in rock shows and black theaters, complaining about HE BEATLES emerged before courts and car salesmen, mocking T American audiences in 1963, with high school, and begging rock and a varied assortment of songs, some roll to deliver him from the days of clever updatings of the Everly Broth- old. Elvis lived quietly in Hollywood ers sort, some new versions of old with his mother while Chuck tried to black rock hits by the Isley Brothers, smuggle a child bride across the the Shirelles, Little Richard, the Mir- Georgia state line, and when Elvis acles, and Chuck Berry. According to went into the Army, Chuck went to rock and roll chroniclers, the Beatles jail. "revolutionized rock and roll by Then there was Bo Diddley, Chi- bringing it back to its original sources cago follower of Howlin' Wolf and and traditions" -in other words, Muddy Waters, who declared that he they brought Us together. It would be had a tombstone hand and a grave- more accurate to say that the Beatles yard mind, a taste for diamond rings, seasoned, cooked, and served some of barbed wire, and cobra snakes; he Us up to others of Us with appropri- warned, prophetically, that you can't ate garnishing. They refined and ex- Houilin' Wolf Muddy Warers judge a book by looking at its cover.