Can dese tings be, an we lookin right squarr at 'ern?"' Some of the original broadsides and playbills used by American "Negro" minstrels often made outrageous claims. Among the more dubious exaggerations is the playbill for the British premier performance of the then new Virginia Minstrels on which figures of black men were contorted to the various shapes of capital letters to spell "ETHIOPIAN CONCERT" as the main words. Of course most American blacks in 1843 were natives of descendants of west coast Africans, and thus "Ethiopian" was a gross misnomer-as it was for any group advertising its "Ethiopian delineation."Z The cover of T h e Celebrated Negro Melodies asSung by the Virginia Minstrels shows four white men in burnt-cork.3 Many of the enclosed "Negro Melodies" were written by one of the men depicted, Dan Emmett.4 Since theatric hyperbole costumed the truth for many such groups, it is perhaps no wonder that some scholars have doubted that performers who were predominantly white men and who acted the part of black persons actually presented authentic black culture, language and rhetoric.Before many of the major studieson Negro minstrelsy were published, Richard Moody claimed "the burnt-cork Negro was largely a romantic inuention of Northern whites. The minstrel performer was primarily attempting to contriue a lucratiue f o r m of entertainment, irrespective of any archeological (sic) authenticity."5 Though Moody's scholarship early documents numerous and significant features of minstrelsy, he fails to provide evidence to support his contention that it lacked "authenticity." Sixty years earlier in the introduction to Uncle R e m u s , Joel Chandler Harris claimed that the minstrel dialect was not genuine. With reference to his own dialect, he said "the dialect, it will be observed, is wholly different from that of the Hon. Pompey Smash and his literary descendants, and different also from the intolerable misrepresentations of the minstrel stage.'I6 Gary D. Engle claims "there is no real evidence to support the popular notion that the minstrel dialect was a reflection of black speech 27
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