10.5.1 Minstrelsy and Reproduction of Controlling Images

Figure 10.7. This optional video (24:31 min) “Blackface: The Roots of a Racist Art Form [Youtube Video]” describes the racist legacy of minstrel shows, and also places them within the larger context of a rich tradition of African American theater and music. If you can only watch part of this video, the section between 5:37 and 9:20 gives a solid overview of minstrelsy.

Until the mid 19th Century, the only way to enjoy music was to listen to someone making music, or to make music oneself. The first platform for the mass distribution of popular music was the sheet music industry. Much like today, enthusiastic audiences could take home the music they enjoyed at concerts and theaters, but in those days they were singing and playing the songs themselves. It was a profitable industry for music publishers, venue owners and music promoters who not only made money from the sale of sheet music, but also from the sale of advertising space on the back of the music. Performers generally made money from ticket sales at live events, but not from the distribution of the songs they sang.

Songwriters sold their music to publishing companies, and some, like Steven Foster, a white man made by appropriating and reworking popular folk songs, including the songs about the experience of enslaved black people and their descendants. For example, Oh Sussanah! Tells the story of an enslaved man separated from his grieving spouse and promising to return to her (Vanguard 2021). Recall from Chapter 5, that “cultural appropriation is a practice of domination in which the cultural artifacts, including intellectual property and traditional knowledge of a subjugated society are first marginalized, then exoticized, and finally taken out of context to be repurposed for the benefit of the dominant group.” The practice of cultural appropriation showed up early in popular music.

The most popular genre of sheet music during this era was the music of Minstrel Shows. Unlike African American music and theater, which has always been a rich part of American culture, minstrel shows were variety shows created by white people for white audiences. These popular touring productions featured white actors and singers who pretended to be Black while mocking and ridiculing Black people by portraying them as foolish, simple, dishonest, and lazy.

Eventually, some Black artists began to participate in minstrel shows and built successful careers by performing characterization of black people that white audiences expected. The optional video in figure 10.7 describes the racist legacy of minstrel shows. The controlling images of Black women that Patricia Hill Collins described were firmly embedded in American popular culture by way of minstrel shows. The white male gaze was defined and refined in minstrelsy.

10.5.2 Blues Women, the Blues and an Oppositional Gaze

Figure 10.8. Like many Blues women of the 1920’s Gladys Bently sometimes performed in masculine drag and sang of queer desire.

In the early by the 1920’s Women in the U.S. were finding new economic and political power. The Suffrage Movement won a 40 year battle to grant women the right to vote, although for a long time this was mostly a win for White women, since only White people and the descendants of slaves could be U.S. Citizens (Haney-Lopez, 2006), and since Black women faced severe barriers to voting in southern states until the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965.

Depending on their means, more women were in cities and working away from home, or attending college. Fashions were changing to reflect more modern attitudes about women. Flappers, the term assigned to fashionable young women of the era, were known by their skimpy dresses, bobbed hair, provocative dance moves and modern attitudes, Flappers became icons of the Jazz Age and signified a new social freedom for women.

Jazz emerged into the popular music from New Orleans as an improvisational blend of rural southern blues and other African American musical influences. As jazz artists made their way north to nightclubs in Chicago and New York during the great migration, jazz became the music of modern urban life in the roaring 20’s. Jazz recordings and night clubs featuring Black artists were popular with white audiences. It wasn’t long before white songwriters and musicians began producing and performing jazz. At its best, the early Jazz scene was a site of multiracial collaboration, but segregation, and the institutional racism of the Jim Crow Era were significant barriers for Black artists In terms of who made profit, the predominantly white male recording industry was the big winner. A few white blues artists, like Sophie Tucker, found commercial success with segregated audiences, but unlike jazz, blues remained a genre that was mostly produced by and for Black people until it was “discovered” by working class youth in post-war Great Britain.

Segregation in the music industry also gave rise to so-called, race records, which were marketed specifically to Black audiences. In 1920, Mamie Smith, released Crazy Blues on Okeh Records. The record sold more that 75,000 copies, worth more than a million dollars (Brooks 2020) and woke record companies up to the reality that not only were Black women making good popular music, they were buying it, that other record companies scrambled to get in on the action. Artists like Ma Rainey, Albertina Hunter, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith created music for and about Black women that laid the foundation for women’s music as a site of opposition to the white male gaze.

Blues women during this era sang songs about the everyday concerns of women, describing a full range of relationships that women had with each other, as well as with men, in terms of friendship, love, sex, rivalry, violence, money and loyalty. They sang more about divorce, domestic violence and infidelity than marriage, and they rarely mentioned children. They sang openly about queer desire (Davis, 1999). Many, including Gladys Bently, performed in masculine drag (figure 10.8).

The emergent social freedom women found in the 20’s was met with reactionary backlash in subsequent decades. The end of prohibition saw increased government regulation of nightclubs, which became more segregated and less tolerant of queerness and gender expansive performances. By the conservative 1950’s, Bently was forced to renounce her non-binary gender expression in order to continue working. In a 1953 essay for Ebony Magazine (1953), she describes an experience similar to conversion therapy, in which she took hormones, adopted a more feminine gender presentation, and married a man. In 1958, she performed “Them There Eyes” on Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life. In a satin dress and pearls, with her hair modest updo, her physical transition was convincing, but it became less clear that her desire had really shifted away from the feminine when she rapped out an assertive boogie-woogie on the piano and sang in a confident gravelly voice,

“I loved you the first time I looked into them there eyes,
That cute little way of flirting with them there eyes…”

Angela Davis, whose scholarship on the intersectional feminist legacy of the early 20th century blues women informs this section, wrote that “freedom is a constant struggle”(Davis, 2016). A hundred years later, we can see and hear the echo of these pioneering blues legends in the empowered work of powerful artists like Janel Monet and Toshi Reagon who continue to cultivate an oppositional gaze in music.