Daniel Decatur Emmett's Stump Sermons: Genuine Afro‐American Culture, Language and Rhetoric in the Negro Minstrel Show

Abstract

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

Performing blackness, forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film1

“…As staged performance, minstrelsy centrally involves language, yet most scholars who engage with questions of blackface focus mainly on the content of songs and performances as well as their broader social and political context, considering linguistic aspects secondarily if at all (but see Holmberg and Schneider 1986; Mahar 1985). Meanwhile, the majority of research on white appropriations of AAE considers literary rather than performance‐based forms of cultural production (e.g.…”

From Blackface to ‘Genuine Negroes’: Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy and the Icon of the ‘Negro’

“…4 As Carl Bryan Holmberg and Gilbert D. Schneider note, the staging used by the Virginia Minstrels was remarkably similar to a funeral ritual from Cameroon; they also find Afro-American rhetorical forms included in some of the white-in-blackface minstrelsy. 5 The earliest forms of the white minstrel show included few musical instruments; while the troupe sat in a semi-circle, two players on either end played the tambourine and 'bones', a percussion instrument, creating the characters Tambo (or simply Tarn) and Bones. Later, other instruments were added, specifically the fiddle and banjo.…”