Black Minstrelsies Essay

Black Minstrelsies were an American made form of entertainment, fueled off the mockery of African Americans in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The performers would wear blackface, sing, dance, perform comedy skits and perform old-time fiddle tunes with rudimentary harmonic progressions . The songs would often have no story of substance and would instead have illogical and aloof lyrics accompanied by a dance-tune based melody. Minstrel performances depicted black people as being feeble-minded simple half-wits as it became centered on the degradation of African Americans. In, addition the characters in these Minstrelsies would often come off as being inhuman. Therefore, the actors’ would sport exaggerated facial features while dressed up
Lemuel had a basic minstrel song form, with lyrics such as “Go down to the cotton field! Go down I say! - We’ll work no more today.” (Oh! Lemuel) making it your average minstrel song and him your average minstrel performer. But with a song such as Oh! Susanna, he used idioms and lyrics that portray a more unbiased stance on the idea of slavery and racism not directly mentioning it. A lot of Foster’s early work showcased the rudimentary harmonies that were ever so popular in minstrels, but he often showed slaves as being happy and it would even humanize them. He felt that “the line that joined black and white – common humanity – was stronger than the line that divided.” (Dale Cockrell) Later on Stephen Foster composed My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night. A song that shows a clear human factor as a black family is torn apart due to the father being sold down river and being worked to death . The song contains one repeating chorus that holds itself as the focus of the song and three verses. His own lyrics and songs have more of a touching, and melodic structure compared to the earlier work he did. At times it may even have an antislavery and anti-racism theme such as My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night. His lyrics and musical idioms really blurred the line between whites and blacks, showing how the two groups have more in common then to what was originally