Minstrel Banjo

For enthusiasts of early banjo

Minstrel repertoire, before Sweeney or somebody invented it

We've discussed this before, on this list and its predecessor (sort of), the "Tom Briggs Minstrel Banjo" Google group.  One of the better threads that still exists is this one:

http://minstrelbanjo.ning.com/forum/topics/jump-jim-crow-request?id...

And there were others, about Gumbo Chaff, and whatnot.

In the context of my recent thread about "Ching a Ring Chaw," I was looking at this Library of Congress site (a subset of "American Memory"):

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sm2html/sm2great.html

I can recommend it as an interesting (if slightly unscientific, and thus slightly flawed) approach to the question of what pieces became popular in America, and when.  But for our little group, the most interesting parts would I suppose be the minstrel tunes.  Most of them were cited in the "Jump Jim Crow" thread I just linked -- especially by John Masciale.  But in the interest of completeness, here they are -- with the caveat that this list (based on a study by Julius Mattfeld, published in 1971) begins in 1820; and "Back Side Albany," at least, was in the repertoire before 1820.

The Coal Black Rose, 1827

My Long-Tail Blue, 1827

Jim Crow, 1830

Ching A Ring Chaw, aka Sambo's Address to His Bred'ren, 1833

Long Time Ago, 1833

Zip Coon, 1834

Clare de Kitchen or, De Kentucky Screamer 1835

And I think I have at least one more of these piano settings that dates from the 1830s in my collection, but I'll have to look for its title.  Anyway, this is a start -- just in case anyone else has to do a dated reenactment that antedates Sweeney's or Rice's invention of the genre, some Yankee's invention of the minstrel line, some French cabinetmaker's mass production in Baltimore of a commercially successful 5-string banjo, etc.

I'm actually partial to less well-documented banjo moments, such as Monkey Simon's put-down of Andrew Jackson.  And I think these early northeastern examples are probably a little late, for describing the development of this tradition and repertoire.  But they are what we have, at the moment.

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I wonder how Coal Black Rose and Long Tail Blue were presented originally.

The Racoon Hunt (Settin' on a Rail) was 1837 (my copy).  Would you include the repertoire of Joel Walker Sweeney as preminstrel era?  He was playing a lot of music prior to the explosion of the Virginia Minstrels. (I realize you said pre sweeney in the title, I'm just curious about what you are thinking here).

Actually I was thinking about songs in what purports to be black dialect, sung for comic effect, and in print with a tune (in these early cases, I believe, all in settings for piano). I'm fairly sure there was a much broader repertoire in songsters (words only) before the banjo tutors and similar banjo-friendly sources began to be published in the late 1840s.  I have some of those songsters, and they have been studied to some extent as a genre of popular literature, but not so much as sources for singers.  Which is probably for the best.  It's just that it was cheaper to print words (songsters and broadsides) than music (for piano, voice, or anything else); and it could be done in many more places (printers didn't normally own fonts for music, and engravers weren't thick on the ground).  So the earliest good evidence about the minstrel tradition doesn't arrive in a neat package, with music, and with engravings that show the minstrel line in costume, holding their instruments.  Even that shows up by the late 1830s, though.

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