The Banjo- Ringing Back From the Upland South and the Appalachian Mountains (Part 6)

By the mid- twentieth century, the five-string banjo had become the symbol of Appalachia and the south. At the turn of the twentieth century, local styles of old-time Appalachian string music rang out from nearly every holler and crossroads community. In the 1910's and into the 20's, with the widespread availability of 78 records, all America could hear the old mountain fiddle tunes as well as the more recent lyric guitar songs popular in the Upland South. In these two decades, record companies and radio stations showed little interest in the old-world ballads or old-time banjo playing also common in the region. In the late 1920's, after southern musicians had enjoyed access to inexpensive mail-order guitars for almost a generation, groups like the Carter Family emerged. They led groups of singers that specialized in traditional music of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Soon after, country music emerged, and the guitar took center stage.

It wasn’t until the early 1940s and 50‘s, when the intense rhythms of bluegrass captured America's ear, that this hard-driving music reasserted the banjo with brashness and a fast-paced pushing of the beat. Helping this along was the phenomenal success of the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly American radio program featuring live country and western music. The nation's oldest continuous radio show, it was first broadcast in 1925 on Nashville's WSM as an amateur showcase. This Tennessee city eventually became the performance and recording center for country music. The banjo became tied to this music through the years. And now, even at the dawning of the twenty-first century, the five-string banjo continues to symbolize the people of the south and the Appalachian region. Let’s look at the history and progression of these events:

During the eighteenth century, when the banjo first appeared in North America, Ulster Scot, Scottish, and Irish immigrants began moving in large numbers and traveling west on the Old Pike or south down the Great Wagon Road. These were Colonial American thoroughfares from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and from there to Georgia. It was the heavily traveled main route for settlement of the Southern United States, particularly the 'back country'. Also, moving to North Carolina or western Virginia from east Virginia was a migration route for many of these families, so descendants of these families were pioneers in Kentucky, Tennessee and other frontier states. The population of the mountain frontier included slaves, freed slaves, indentured servants and servants free of indenture. Many were musicians who carried their recently standardized fiddles with them.
Many African American freed slaves followed the waterways and traces years after the initial push by European settlers into this area. There were a number of slave families who should be counted among the early settlers, although few have found their way into the historical record. For instance, slaves made up 10 per cent of Kentucky's early settler population. Slaves were fewer in the mountains, but were not as separated from their owners as was possible on the large plantations in east Virginia. As it was, freed slaves were welcomed by many displaced Native American communities and European families as well on a frontier where neighbor had to depend on neighbor. Beyond that, many mixed race individuals married into white families. So there would have been no class inhibition for exchanging cultural traditions, including banjo playing, among the members of these frontier families.


The cultural exchange that eventually led to the banjo becoming a symbol for Appalachia began on the coastal plain and moved along the waterways into the Piedmont. African musicians introduced African culture to the settlers as settlement progressed across the mountain traces. Musical exchange between Africans and whites, especially the Irish and the Scots, intensified as settlement continued, inspiring whites to learn to play the banjo. The names of only a few black banjo mentors are known, but their stories illuminate how African and white contact and exchange occurred in and through the mountains from the time of settlement into the nineteenth century. The gourd banjo was just one of several contributions African Americans made to mountain folk life. Others are the songbow, gourd fiddles and early fiddle music, dance, patting for dance and possibly puzzles. As a whole, it was a uniquely American amalgamation of African and European folkways and music.


Dr. Combs has the following to say in 'Folk Songs of the Southern United States' regarding banjo songs: “The Highlanders have adopted a considerable number of songs belonging to or originating among the Negroes. Some of these songs have long been current in the Highlands, from the days prior to the Civil War, and include banjo songs, besides some spirituals and songs of the British type... Since the Civil War a number of Negro occupational songs have crept in, notably such well-known ones as 'John Hardy,' 'John Henry,' the 'Yew-Pine Mountain,' 'Frankie,' 'Lynchburg Town,' 'The Kicking Mule,' 'Turkey in the Straw,' and others.' Later, he makes a more specific statement regarding this subject: 'The Highlander has adopted many banjo airs from the Negroes, although the Negro population of the Highlands has never been extensive. Such airs came into the Highlands prior to the Civil War, while the Negro railroad songs came in afterwards, largely during the past twenty-five years [1900-1925]. The tunes of 'Lynchburg Town,' 'Shortnin' Bread,' 'Raccoon,' Shady Grove,' 'Hook and Line,' 'Houn' Dog,' 'Ida Red,' 'Little Gray Mule,' 'Big Stone Gap,' and numerous others, are from the Negroes.'
It’s important to note that Dr. Combs is specific in stating that banjo songs came in long before the Civil War.


While late nineteenth-century northern urbanites played their dandified pearl-inlayed banjos, an unbroken tradition of finger styles, plus clawhammer and frailing styles continued on in the rural areas of the Upland South and the hills of the Appalachia range. The transfer of banjo playing from black to white musicians was direct and that isolation kept the playing styles relatively free of interpretation. In rural communities, fiddle and banjo were the mainstay of rural dance.
The traditional music and dance of the Southern Appalachians evolved from a coming together - some might say a collision - of British Isles and African cultures. Flatfooting, clawhammer banjo playing, fiddling, square dancing, sacred harp singing, story telling, honky-tonk songs, balladry, and clogging were the elements of this old-time music and dance. The gourd banjo, along with the fiddle, was the instrumentation to these dances and traditions. The players used common methods to entertain, which of course varied from region to region.
For instance, dancing in east Kentucky was associated with the banjo - most dances in the Knott County area featured a lone banjo player with observers patting to help keep time.
The favored tune for square dancing in the Knott County area was Hook and Line. Lee Sexton, from Letcher County, Kentucky, states in the liner notes to his CD, 'Whoa Mule':
"We'd go to square dances and bean stringings, corn shuckings, just things like that … We'd hoedown then, the old hoedown dance, just flatfoot you know. And it started from that to square dancing…They didn't have no guitar or fiddle. I'd sit right there and play the banjo all night 'til the blood would run from my fingers. Hook and Line was the tune I played all the time." Hook and Line is just one example, but it is believed to be one of the oldest banjo tunes that came with early settlers into east Kentucky.
Manufactured banjos supplanted gourd banjos in urban areas by the 1860s. But gourd banjos were still being used in the Kentucky mountains, for example, as late as 1950. Leonard Roberts published a 1950's interview with an east Kentucky family in Up Cutshin & Down Greasy: Jim Couch related, 'My grandfather made one banjo that lasted for years. The box of it was made outten an old gourd.” Jim's father, Tom Couch, a banjo player born in 1860, said one of his forbears started the tradition of picking and singing by making himself a banjo from an old gourd.

In the cities and in popular music going into the 20th century, the banjo was going through an image change. It was growing out of the effects of the minstrel show, into the post civil war era of classical banjo fads, all the way to the jazz driven rythyms of ragtime. It also went from a 5 string instrument to a 4 string one. It had a part to play in all these popular forms of entertainment, but then was either eclipsed by other more suitable instruments in a particular genre, or the genre itself died out. But in the Appalachian mountains and farming communities of the South, the banjo was an integral part of undying traditions. It was depended on for the musical accompaniment to dances and songs that told of these peoples’ joys and troubles. And it survived because it was so inexorably tied to these traditions. So when recorded music started to become more readily available with advances in recording and the widespread distribution of records, it was only a matter of time until these incredible songs became known to a wider audience.
Rural string bands recorded in the 1920s and 1930s played a mix of traditional fiddle tunes, ballads, country blues, and ragtime-influenced compositions. This new mixture proved popular and created a new genre of “hillbilly” offerings. By the 1930s, record labels such as Brunswick sought out rural talent recording string bands with exceptional talent.

Among the successful recording artists of the 1930s was a young man named Bill Monroe who recorded as a duet with his brother Charlie. In the 1940s, Bill Monroe remade the rural string band format into the driving sound later called bluegrass in honor of his native Kentucky. Monroe was a master mandolin player and surrounded himself with the best talent of his day. One of these people was a young and shy North Carolinian, Earl Scruggs. Scruggs’ style is based on rapid picking of the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of the right hand and employs metal picks for the fingers and a plastic thumb pick. Scruggs had predecessors in the three-finger style and may have inherited some concepts from artists such as “Snuffy” Jenkins, but Scruggs’ sublime mastery of the style set him apart and completed the bluegrass formula. Variations on Scruggs’ pioneering work soon followed. The next two decades saw a new generation of bluegrass players, some of them born and bred in the suburbs and the city.

Minstrel stereotyping, harsh memories of slavery, urbanization, industrialization, and especially the increasingly restrictive Jim Crow laws led black singers to refashion their lyric songs with an assertive social commentary that laid the foundation for the emergence of the blues. Into the 20th century, black banjo players became obscure as they had begun to put down their banjos. By the 1920s it was more common to hear African American songs set to the then-inexpensive and readily available mail-order guitar. This guitar driven blues expression was the next major musical movement in the United States, and it made it’s way from the mainly black communities of the deep south and emigrated with them on their search for better lives in the northern cities. This blues emigration caught the country’s ear and made possible all the quintessential American music like ragtime, jazz, country, rock and roll, among other more current forms.

The folk boom of the 1950s and 1960s brought old time players and the black folk music tradition back to the attention of young players. Urban players adopted an almost parallel course to rural instrument style. This time, recordings and performances such as the Newport Folk Festival featured diverse banjo styles including bluegrass, clawhammer, and the styles of Pete Seeger and George Grove of the Kingston Trio. Through the 70’s and 80’s, the banjo can be heard on countless country albums. And from bluegrass’s beginnings in the 40’s, it has never let up, being driven by the ringing 5 string banjo. And although the banjo is not the guitar of the day, crossing all genres as it did in the past, it still retains it’s American essence with the ties it has to the past and the new music being created on it today.

The Banjo- Into the 20th Century (Part 5)

The Civil War was a major force in the evolution of the banjo, with banjo players of all backgrounds - North and South, black and white, coming together and ultimately sharing knowledge and appreciation of the instrument. With the war fought and emancipation won, soldiers returned home, spreading this newfound banjo knowledge throughout the growing United States. Along with the physical changes, the sociological changes resulting from the coincidental cultural exchange during the Civil War led to “proper” society elevating the banjo from its earlier perceived place among the “lower classes” to a position of acceptance and respectability. Soon to be gone was the low comedy associated with the minstrel show. The stage was set for a new age of refinement in banjo performance and design.

As the banjo took its place as an icon of American popular music during the minstrel age, it evolved physically to reflect the advances in banjo making and the needs of its players. The rustic appearance of primitive banjos was replaced with the familiar round bodied instrument which, by the 1870s, had acquired a fretted fingerboard as well. Manufacturers added frets to banjos to make them easier to play for beginners, and these became a standard part for most manufactured banjos while people continued to make their own fretless and gourd banjos at home. In the same years, banjo based instruments aimed at taking the place of various orchestra mainstays. Instruments such as the banjo cello, banjo-bass, mandolin banjo, and banjo mandolin flourished for a while as banjo orchestras became popular particularly among college students.

Banjo playing expanded in the late 19th Century when classic banjo finger-picking styles made the banjo a popular instrument among the upper classes and social elites of the US and Britain. The classical style featured right hand technique similar to classical guitar in which the fingertips pluck the strings upward. Efforts were made to distance the banjo from its African origins and its continued popularity among some rural whites and blacks. Nevertheless the outstanding players of the period were men like Horace Weston and Gus Cannon, African-Americans who excelled at the classic, ragtime, and traditional African-American banjo styles.













By the late nineteenth century the banjo had become a popular parlor instrument. A new class of banjo players emerged, including middle and upper-middle class ladies. Banjo manufacturers, eager to supply this market began to produce ornate instruments of more delicate proportions that included ebony fingerboards with engraved mother of pearl and necks with carved floral patterns.
Between 1890 and 1920 the popularity of minstrel music was eclipsed by early jazz forms, such as ragtime. The popularity of the banjo as a parlor instrument fell into decline. The features that made the banjo ideal for minstrel music became liabilities when attempting the complex chord structures of jazz. These include a reliance on “open” tunings (strings tuned to a note in a chord being played) and the drone string which plays at a constant pitch.

Prior to the jazz age of the 1920s, the banjo - by definition - was an instrument with five strings. Those strings, made of natural fiber, were plucked with the bare fingers to play the refined dance and light classical music heard in America's parlors and concert halls of the time. However, as ragtime music prepared proper society for the dramatic changes about to occur in the dance music of America, the banjo experienced an extraordinary and rapid evolution as well.
In the early 1900s, this new craze, centering around the latin tango and pulling from African American blues song structures, coincided with the introduction of brass and reed instruments in the typical Ragtime dance orchestra.


In an effort to simply be heard, classic five-string banjo players began experimenting, often removing the fifth string altogether and replacing the remaining four natural fiber strings with strings made of steel. For additional volume, rather than plucking the steel strings with bare fingers in the traditional manner, they were strummed with a plectrum or pick. As the long neck of the classic five-string banjo was not made to support the tension of steel strings without warping, banjo designers tried a shorter neck, similar in length to the mandolin. That connection was taken a step further by tuning the four strings of the short neck banjos in musical intervals identical those used on the mandolin. All of these experiments came together with the 1907 introduction of the banjorine by the J.B. Schall Company of Chicago - the first true jazz age banjo.


Just as the Civil War was a turning point in the development of the banjo, World War I played a similar role. American soldiers, turning their back on European culture, favored American jazz, craving its upbeat and carefree feel both as they fought on foreign soil as well as when they returned to the U.S. following the war's end in 1918. The music of the jazz age became synonymous with the sound of the new four-string tenor and plectrum banjos.

The Charleston-esque rhythm of the era made the banjo the most popular instrument in country and its players the mainstream pop music icons. These stars fit right into Vaudeville, a form of variety show which featured many different kinds of entertainment, depending on the town and theater and type of crowd. The "banjo entertainer" was very popular in these shows and on early radio, in which the banjo was used by singers who told jokes, did comic songs, and generally "cut up." While difficult to comprehend, vaudeville banjo stars such as Eddie Peabody and Roy Smeck were every bit as popular as any of today's entertainment superstars. So during the 1920s, the banjo reached a level in design and manufacture that it would never reach again. With the demand for ten of thousands of instruments, manufacturers dedicated all of their resources to banjo design and production. In addition to perfecting the banjo as a musical instrument, the ornate decoration adorning the instruments reflects the artistry of their creators as well as the demand to produce a dynamic visual impact on a large theater audience in that era before television and sound films.

The 1920's are fondly remembered for the carefree attitude that prevailed through the decade, but it was also a somewhat lawless time in which many widely accepted social, business and political values were cast aside in the midst of post-W.W. I euphoria. The resulting catastrophic collapse of the stock market and Great Depression which followed marked the end of the jazz age- the final years in which the banjo held a place of prominence in American popular music. By 1940, the banjo in the jazz and popular music format could not be found. But it was time for the traditional banjo music of the Upland South and Appalachian mountains to be heard again.

The Banjo- Changes, Travels and Traditions in the 19th Century- (Part 4)

The 5-string banjo started to take prominence in minstrel shows along with the fiddle, bones, and tambourine. And because of the popularity of the minstrel show, banjo playing became widely popular among the white European working class and poor people both urban and rural. These European whites now became the fans, makers and manufacturers of the banjo. Banjos began to be built by fine instrument makers, factory scaled manufacturers, as well as working people and farmers who worked with home-made materials. Gradually, the drum head style of banjo began to replace the gourd banjos. The new drum head, or "tack-head" banjo had a circular body made from a thin wooden stave bent to form a hoop, which was often characterized as a "cheese-box" rim. At first, the 5-string banjo's synthetic drum skin head was attached to the wooden rim with metal tacks, giving it the name "tack- head" banjo. By the mid-1840s, the head was affixed to the rim with modern drum fixtures, a metal hoop held in place by bracket tension hooks and tightening screws. On through the 1880s, the prevalent style of banjo neck continued to be fretless. However, as early as the 1850s, a few makers began to experiment with the use of frets on their instruments' fingerboards in an effort to make the banjo more guitar-like. This fretted banjo gained popularity over time, becoming the most popular going into the 20th century, because it made playing more complex sounds and songs easier. Along with these new techniques came other changes in the look and production of banjos during and after the minstrel craze.


A man on the minstrel circuit named Joel Walker Sweeney is often incorrectly given credit for the appearance of the 5th drone string in this period. As mentioned before (Part 1), the banjo’s drone string is a characteristic that can be traced back to the western African region around Mali, Guinea, Senegal, Gambia, and the griot tradition found in these countries for hundreds of years. Instead, if anything, it is more likely that Sweeney added an additional thick bass melody string, the 4th string on the 5-string banjo. This would parallel the development of the banjo elsewhere, for example in England, where the tendency was to add more of the long strings, with upwards of seven strings being common. Sweeney, who was immensely popular, was partly responsible for the rapid spread of the banjo and contracted with a drum maker in Baltimore, William Boucher, to start producing banjos for public sales. Other makers, like Jacobs of New York, or Morrell who moved his shop to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, helped to supply the growing demand for the instrument in the mid-1840s, as the minstrel shows traveled westward to entertain the gold diggers.

Simultaneously, major changes to the banjo were happening elsewhere. Having had much success in America, the minstrel performers of the 1830's, 40's and 50's traveled over to Europe and the British Isles. As the popularity of the banjo spread there, novel approaches to the instrument were developed. By the early 20th Century, these changes had taken hold both in Europe and in America. The most important invention was the use of metal strings and a plectrum, or pick. The new banjos were made with the same neck length, but with only four strings. This came to be known as the Plectrum Banjo. With the use of a pick on metal strings, the banjo was now able to fit into different styles of music, and the fifth string was not as needed in these different forms of music. The Plectrum Banjo gained great popularity among American Jazz players and Vaudeville entertainers in the early 20th Century.
Another spin-off of the plectrum banjo was developed in the early 20th Century. This was known as the Tenor Banjo. The need for this instrument arose from the plectrum players who desired an instrument that catered more to the styles played at the time in Ireland and England. As a result, the length of the neck was shortened and the tuning was altered to something akin to the fiddle.

Also, as the Civil War rolled around, some musicians- probably influenced by the guitar- turned away from the old, African based clawhammer style of playing and started finger-picking the banjo. Players such as Frank Converse started publishing instructional books in this new style and it gained great popularity rather quickly. Of course, the people isolated in the Appalachian Mountains and parts of the rural south were not privy to this new technique and information, and as a result, these areas kept and maintained the old African style of playing represented in clawhammer or frailing techniques.

Because the rise of blackface minstrelsy coincided with the rise of virulent racism in the United States, black banjo players in the eastern and southern valleys, as well as the northern cities, would have been aware of the racial stereotyping and low comedy that connected the slave with the banjo. Mostly because of this, the 5 string banjo started to fall out of favor for accompaniment to the music played in these black communities. By the turn of the 20th century, the guitar became an easily accessible instrument and took over the banjo’s former role for music in most of these areas. This coincided with a move towards more blues rooted music in these communities (a topic worth pages on its own), but in mainstream American music as well, the 5- string banjo music was heard less and less.
The black, 5- string banjo tradition kept it’s influence in some farming communities of the south and the mountain areas of the Appalachia range, mostly because of the isolation of these areas. Here, the fads and culture of the coast and cities of the east and north were a world away, so this banjo tradition was passed on and maintained by both black and white cultures. This heritage, after disappearing from popular American music for quite a while, would eventually become popular again in the mid 20th century.

The Banjo- From the Valley to the City, Riding the Minstrel Wave (Part 3)

The banjo would eventually make it’s way from the plantations of the valley to the major cities of the east, south and north, and on later to mining and frontier towns of the west. If a traveler made their way to a town that was large enough to have a theater or a population with money, they would most likely hear the banjo. But it was not as much for an appreciation of the banjo, than for the show it was a part of that led to it’s rapid spread and popularity across the country. The minstrel show, playing the popular music of the day, was definitely a far reaching influence on the popularity of the banjo, not only in this country, but in England and Australia as well. But it was the instrument of choice to portray racist and degrading stereotypes of blacks, and was only playing a role in the dissemination of this ugly pastime. That it caught the ear of countless thousands of people in that time is testament to it’s sound and legacy, but it was this show that helped it reach those ears. The most popular minstrel troupes, like Christy’s Minstrels, Buckley’s Serenaders, The Congo Melodists and The Virginia Minstrels, made their fame in the major cities. A few of them toured to San Francisco during the height of the Gold Rush, but they mostly stayed where the money was in the eastern coast and northern cities. Lesser known minstrel troupes had to travel to smaller towns and territories to make a living. These troupes could be seen in all of the railhead towns in Kansas, as well as the mining communities in Colorado and the Dakotas. This new phenomenon literally swept across this country, then on to others.

Although white theatrical portrayals of black characters date back to as early as 1604, the minstrel show has later origins. By the late 17th century, blackface characters began appearing on the American stage, usually as "servant” types whose roles did little more than provide some element of comic relief. But only later, in the early 1800’s, did this form of entertainment take on it’s truly sinister form and popularity. The popularity of minstrel shows in major northern cities emerged just as social changes in these cities were occurring. Up until the early 19th century, it had been common for Europeans and African Americans to participate in celebrations together. Laws began to discourage biracial celebrations and blacks were driven from festivities. By the 1830s, common celebrations had been eliminated. It was just as African American performers and celebrations disappeared that blackface became a prevalent pastime.

The stock-in-trade of the minstrel show was the parody of the lifestyles of slaves and free African Americans. These savage caricatures of the lives of African Americans were met with overwhelming approbation among white audiences. Stereotyped blackface characters developed: buffoonish, lazy, superstitious, cowardly, and lascivious characters; who stole, lied pathologically, and mangled the English language. Stock characters of the minstrel show included Jim Crow, Mr. Tambo, a joyous musician, and Zip Coon, a free black attempting to put on airs in imitation of white gentry. Skits and satirical speeches were delivered in stylized black dialect. Early blackface minstrels were all male, so cross-dressing white men also played black women who were often portrayed either as unappealingly and grotesquely mannish; either in the matronly, mammy mold; or highly sexually provocative. To put this entertainment form into context, the 1830s American stage, where blackface first rose to prominence, featured similarly comic stereotypes of the clever Yankee and the larger-than-life Frontiersman; the late 19th- and early 20th-century American and British stage where it last prospered featured many other, mostly ethnically-based, comic stereotypes: conniving, venal Jews, drunken brawling Irishmen with blarney at the ready; oily Italians, stodgy Germans and gullible rural rubes.

Into this volatile and superficial, yet immensely popular scene came the minstrel show. As a result, the genre played an important role in shaping perceptions and prejudices about African Americans. Some social commentators have stated that blackface provided an outlet for whites' fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar, and a way of expressing their feelings and fears about race and control. Writes Eric Lott in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, "The black mask offered a way to play with the collective fears of a degraded and threatening other. While at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them.” These shows gave the American audience a place to concentrate their viewed superiority and frustration with troublesome new immigrants and slaves. The objectification of African American culture denigrated that culture, while providing entertainment using that same culture. The weird spectacle of it had to be the draw to some people. It would occur in smoky saloons, small theaters in railroad towns and in traveling circus acts. It initially attracted younger whites who sometimes competed with African Americans for jobs, or who just viewed themselves as superior. And so at first, these minstrel shows were rowdy and an outlet for this young set.
Again, Eric Lott says- “In the 1830s and into the 1840s, it was for a quite localized and specific working class, lower middle-class, mostly male audience that responded very vocally to the kinds of syncopated, pre-rock and roll sounds that were put forward on the minstrel stage. It was a rousing event, and at a time in theater history when it was typical and more or less sanctioned for men to rush the stage. It was rowdy, people collecting right in front of the footlights, spitting tobacco on the floor in the theatre. These men would dance around, and people called for their favorites and booed things they didn't want to hear. They spit upon the stage, they threw peanut shells on the stage, and the jumpy quality that the music exemplified was right up their alley.”

It was Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice who first popularized the crude blackface show in 1828 with his performance that became known as “Jim Crow”. Rice's character was a crippled plantation slave who danced and sang. The name Jim Crow later became attached to statutes that codified the reinstitution of segregation and discrimination after Reconstruction. Rice and other performers also used this forum to respond to the anti-slavery movement with proslavery renditions about happy-go-lucky slaves. They also criticized emancipation, civil rights, and the Freedmen's Bureau activities. For most white audiences, these viewpoints were easy to accept. It's not really a coincidence that T. D. Rice and the so-called Ethiopian Delineators got going in the early 1830s. That's precisely when issues around slavery and abolition begin to heat up- not at the center of American politics but certainly at its margins and increasingly moving towards the center. In 1831 there was the Nat Turner rebellion. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began his newspaper, The Liberator, in Boston, proclaiming the cause of immediate abolition. By the middle of the 1830s there are tense riots directed against abolitionists in the North and in the South.
Eventually, performers like T.D. Rice appeared in entr’actes in New York theaters and other venues such as taverns and circuses. Blackface soon found a home in the taverns of New York's less respectable precincts of Lower Broadway, the Bowery, and Chatham Street. It also invaded the more respectable stage as part of the era's general stratification of theaters. These upper-class houses at first limited the number of such acts they would show, but beginning in 1841, blackface performers frequently took to the stage at even the classy Park Theater, much to the dismay of some patrons. Theater was a participatory activity, and the lower classes came to dominate the playhouse. They threw things at actors or orchestras who performed unpopular material, and rowdy audiences eventually prevented the Bowery Theatre from staging high drama at all.

But as blackface shows gained popularity, and started to make their way into the nicer venues, the entertainment and musical aspect became more refined, and the form took on a pattern. 1830s and early 1840s blackface performers performed solo or duos, with the occasional trio; but the traveling troupes that would later characterize blackface performance arise with the minstrel show.

The staging of Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels at New York’s Bowery Theatre on February 6th, 1843 marks the beginning of the full-blown minstrel show in which the entire cast “blackened up”. Emmett’s core group included a banjo, a fiddle, a tambourine player, and a bones player. These instruments constituted the basic minstrel ensemble and this formula was imitated by professional and amateur musicians alike.
So the banjo and fiddle combo, with tambourine and bones accompaniment, became the outfit of choice to portray the culture of African Americans to this white crowd. Because the banjo and fiddle were commonly and widely used on the plantations by the African Americans there, they were the highlighted instruments in the minstrel show. That black musicians used these instruments was true, but in a different context. On the plantations, it was rare to hear these two instruments together. There would usually be one player or singer on either banjo or fiddle. They could keep the room or party entertained or dancing by themselves, occasionally accompanied by a fife or a bones player. Because the blacks on the plantation commonly used these instruments for their rituals and get-togethers, the southern whites who wished to copy or emulate this music naturally used these instruments in their routines. They had learned this music from interaction with slaves on the plantations or in areas surrounding them. Some grew up around plantations, or in towns where former slaves and indentured servants lived as well, and picked up the music from interaction or simply observing. So although the context in which this music was presented was racist and not truly representative of black culture, the whites who learned this African-American music did popularize the clawhammer or frailing styles that blacks had brought from Africa. In that sense, the playing styles presented were traditional techniques, only presented as a lowly, simplified and denigrated cultural form. (I will expand on these styles and their cultural context in Part 6)

Some black minstrel performers emerged during the Civil War, but they became more prevalent after 1865. Black performers rose in popularity and they formed into troupes. Unlike white performers, black entertainers did not always perform in blackface, but by the late 19th century, white audiences insisted on it.
Walter Thompson writes about the black minstrels of San Francisco in his 1916 article “Among the Merry Men of Minstrelsy“. He remembers the talent of those that formed into the San Francisco Minstrels, but he especially admires the greater talent that came later. The emergence of Billy Emerson, a talented singer and dancer, brought life to a new minstrel character, the dandy. It replaced the Jim Crow plantation slave with a character that sang new songs, which provided a new kind of rhythm for dancing. Thompson also remembers Charley Reed, Emerson's partner, who brought a comic flair to the stage; Tommy Dixon, a talented singer; and several other minstrels who were gifted comedians, singers, and dancers. It is important to note that blacks’ participation in the minstrel show was regarded with high caution by other blacks. Some despised the black performers, some were indifferent. Although all involved knew the degrading nature of the entertainment, some black leaders considered it a good sign if blacks were allowed to perform in front of white audiences and garner decent wages for it. But almost all blacks knew that whatever form their participation was, it was degrading all the same, as it showed their culture in a simplified and utterly disrespectful way.

Some blacks owned and managed troupes, but they were often limited to performances in smaller towns and cities. Billy Emerson was one of the few who owned and managed his own theater, which became a popular entertainment spot in San Francisco. However, in general, whites owned and managed the most prosperous troupes. By the 1870s, white ownership was dominant. It was also the white owned troupes that traveled throughout the United States and around the world. So it was for a white, European, ethnically biased audience that these shows were performed, and the popularity of these shows affected popular music and entertainment in this country for decades. Even in some ways affecting how entertainment, specifically African American entertainment, was viewed across the world.