Apologies for those of you with short attention spans, but what follows is a rather long post, beginning with a little required reading:
What a revealing letter: full of prejudices so wholly opposed to our own!
How we recoil from the mention of the ‘coon song’! Yet here they are described in a typically offhand way, as ‘breezy’. In this post, I have tried to counter my own flinch reaction by asking: what was it?
I suppose the short answer is: songs popularised by ‘Black and White Minstrel’ performers. And there goes that flinch again! But how did the songs become known by such a charmless racial term?
Here are a couple of examples of the genre from the white artist G.H. Elliot (pictured in makeup, below), whose records bear the legend, ‘the chocolate-coloured coon’.
Beneath the White Texas Moon - G.H Elliott
I’ve Always Wanted to Call You My Sweetheart - G. H. Elliott
The songs show us what the ‘coon song’ became: folksy music that was - indefensibly - cashing in on the otherness of the black population by borrowing or parodying the mannerisms of black music. Sometimes you can detect in a song the parody of a parody of black music.
That said, it’d be hard to find the music itself offensive, but the pose certainly is - and was - thoughtless, crass and demeaning.
Take the Alexander of Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Alexander was a joke name, a grand name suggesting to white audiences a black man with pretensions above his station.
That said, the topic did inspire some of Berlin’s best early writing (Berlin was always a man quick to commandeer passing bandwagons):
Alexander’s Ragtime Band - Harry Fay (Berlin)
When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam’ - G. H. Elliott (Berlin)
Perhaps the most powerful of all Berlin’s songs written in this mode was made famous by Jolson, notoriously a blackface entertainer:
Let Me Sing and I’m Happy - Al Jolson (Berlin)
As is obvious just from the verse to Let Me Sing, the ‘coon song’, however lightly it traded on the notion, could attain very sophisticated heights.
At the same time, other songs could be very unsophisticated:
Oh You Coon - Billy Murray and Ada Jones
Songs like this are nothing compared to the mainstream presentation of blacks in earlier times; as, for instance, in these four sheet music titles:
I don’t want to portray myself as an apologist for the coon song, but I am curious to find out how these stereotypes softened or, for the most part, became so tabooed that we now shrink from the mere sounds of the words. I sense that this shrinking is one the by-products of political correctness, of our more liberal sensibilities, but there’s also a squeamishness involved - our reluctance to accept that we could have been our more naive not-so-distant ancestors.
Well. Anyway. Here’s another sophisticated song that demonstrates the direction the ‘coon song’ will take, albeit one which belongs to the first phase of whites writing about a particular presentation of blacks. Note that, while the tone may be considered patronising, blacks are the object of veneration:
That’s Why Darkies Were Born - The Hottentots
In an act of what we might now call reclamation, Paul Robeson used to sing the song. It is with mixed feelings that we listen to it now.
In my next instalment I’ll try and give a bit more background to how the racial element was phased or censored out, but also to consider the importance of the black person as an inspiration for popular songwriters in the rather sad history of ‘race records’.
What a revealing letter: full of prejudices so wholly opposed to our own!
How we recoil from the mention of the ‘coon song’! Yet here they are described in a typically offhand way, as ‘breezy’. In this post, I have tried to counter my own flinch reaction by asking: what was it?
I suppose the short answer is: songs popularised by ‘Black and White Minstrel’ performers. And there goes that flinch again! But how did the songs become known by such a charmless racial term?
Here are a couple of examples of the genre from the white artist G.H. Elliot (pictured in makeup, below), whose records bear the legend, ‘the chocolate-coloured coon’.
Beneath the White Texas Moon - G.H Elliott
I’ve Always Wanted to Call You My Sweetheart - G. H. Elliott
The songs show us what the ‘coon song’ became: folksy music that was - indefensibly - cashing in on the otherness of the black population by borrowing or parodying the mannerisms of black music. Sometimes you can detect in a song the parody of a parody of black music.
That said, it’d be hard to find the music itself offensive, but the pose certainly is - and was - thoughtless, crass and demeaning.
Take the Alexander of Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Alexander was a joke name, a grand name suggesting to white audiences a black man with pretensions above his station.
That said, the topic did inspire some of Berlin’s best early writing (Berlin was always a man quick to commandeer passing bandwagons):
Alexander’s Ragtime Band - Harry Fay (Berlin)
When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam’ - G. H. Elliott (Berlin)
Perhaps the most powerful of all Berlin’s songs written in this mode was made famous by Jolson, notoriously a blackface entertainer:
Let Me Sing and I’m Happy - Al Jolson (Berlin)
As is obvious just from the verse to Let Me Sing, the ‘coon song’, however lightly it traded on the notion, could attain very sophisticated heights.
At the same time, other songs could be very unsophisticated:
Oh You Coon - Billy Murray and Ada Jones
Songs like this are nothing compared to the mainstream presentation of blacks in earlier times; as, for instance, in these four sheet music titles:
I don’t want to portray myself as an apologist for the coon song, but I am curious to find out how these stereotypes softened or, for the most part, became so tabooed that we now shrink from the mere sounds of the words. I sense that this shrinking is one the by-products of political correctness, of our more liberal sensibilities, but there’s also a squeamishness involved - our reluctance to accept that we could have been our more naive not-so-distant ancestors.
Well. Anyway. Here’s another sophisticated song that demonstrates the direction the ‘coon song’ will take, albeit one which belongs to the first phase of whites writing about a particular presentation of blacks. Note that, while the tone may be considered patronising, blacks are the object of veneration:
That’s Why Darkies Were Born - The Hottentots
In an act of what we might now call reclamation, Paul Robeson used to sing the song. It is with mixed feelings that we listen to it now.
In my next instalment I’ll try and give a bit more background to how the racial element was phased or censored out, but also to consider the importance of the black person as an inspiration for popular songwriters in the rather sad history of ‘race records’.
3 comments:
You'rer a brave man to square off against the more unsettling elements of this topic. Are you aware of Earl Johnson, a pre-Blues Songster who is black and cut numerous 'nigger' songs during the classic American Blues era...there are two collections on Document Records. I think I still have the link to the blog and will return to forward it to you.
Here's that post, complete with links. Enjoy.
I also have a rather large collection of 78 files which are in the same ballpark from both sides of the aisle. Be glad to talk to you and arrange exchange.
http://onmuddysavariverbank.blogspot.com/2011/03/earl-johnson-earl-johnson-vols-1-2.html
Not sure what happened to the above mentioned blog, but it’s now disappeared! Thanks for your comments, though, Duncanmusic!
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