Media, 20th century performances on radio, records, film, and television recently published by mcfarland. Among his many accomplishments is a grammy award which he received for a double cd and bro book titled lost sounds. 1890 to 1919. Tim will then be joined in a conversation by fellow historian bill dugget. Our program will conclude with tim and bill taking questions from you, our live audience. Now, please turn off the sounds of your phones, and join me in welcoming historian and author tim brooks. [ applause ] well, thank you. Later on as he mentioned, there will be time for questions. And i hope we have some good ones coming up at the end of this conversation and presentation. But i would like to start with a question for you, the audience. How many people have seen a minstrel show . A live minstrel show. Anybody . Interesting. How many have seen one on film prap . Remember, im talking about a whole minstrel show, not a clip from somewhere, but a full show. Anybody . Okay. If i had asked that question 100 years ago, every hand in the audience would have gone up. It was a basic part of American Culture at the time. Widely seen by everybody. There are reasons for that and just what it was that were seeing, but it was on radio, it was on television when television came along, it was in movies, it was on records. And while a lot has been written about the very little has been written about the later years and why it was not only a product of the 19th century, but it lasted well into, halfway through the 20th century as well. So, a lot of i want to explore, i wanted to explore with brook why it lasted more than a century here right into the beginning of the Civil Rights Era, how it changed over that time, and finally what brought about its downfall. Thats basically what the book is about and thats fairly new to studies of this field. Now, we have to start though with where they come from ins first place. In the 1830s there were individual entertainers, white men, always men, who would black up their faces and did dances and songs and so forth. This was in the 1830s. In 1843, four of these performers out of work at the time decided to get together and put on a show in which they interacted with each other. They called themselves the junior minute strels. This was an unexpected success. It was the talk of new york where it was launched. And it resulted, it attracted a lot of imitators, as you might imagine. What these shows did was to this was all in the northeast, by the way. And many of these were irish immigrants putting these on. The groups were small, usually four to eight men. This one is five men. This is the virginia serenaders. Their instrumentation, the instruments were simple. They had tambourines, bones for clicking cast net sound, a banjo, a fiddle. So its small. And they basically were doing parodies of every con seefbable group in society. Not just blacks, but other immigrant groups, all sort of rich, also politicians. It was parody. It is the middle and lower classes of america, basically making fun of pretension and the eccentricities of all kinds of groups, although they did it, as you can see, in black face. It was very populist. Thats important. It was kind of like i call it the saturday night live of its time. It was very populist and it was very american. You have to remember at this time in 1840s, what americans were used to were imports from britain. Almost all plays, many of the actors and comedians, drinking songs, all those things came from england. We were still culturally very much under the english umbrella at that time even though we were an independent country, and there was a populist movement to assert something more american. This is the jacksonian era, the area of changed politics as well. So, the minstrel show was the first really that grew out of that. It was very popular, as i say, and quickly began to evolve. The costumes, which were rough at the beginning, turned into their tuxedos or an exaggerated parody of text eid owes, which well see later on. Edwin christie, christies minstrels, was a promoter at the time. He developed what was essentially a threeact format for these shows as they grew in popularity. The first act, which was called the minstrel first part, which where all of them were on stage at once like the original crew. Acting with each other joking back and forth. The second was the olio, and that was a succession of individual acts on stage much like vaudeville later on, and many argue thats where vaudeville came from. And the third eact was an extended parody of a play or an opera, especially something pretentious to make fun of. So the three acts. Also, later on an interlock ter was added. An opposing man would sit in the middle of this group and serve as the emcee of it and go back and forth. A lot is said about the fact that he was the boss, the straw boss or something. Actually in the recordings you hear later, who might be that, he also might be one of the gang, just the person that organizes and keeps it going and he might not be in black face, or he might. A lot is said about minstrel songs and songs that came out of the minstrel show. Actually, the minstrel show, throughout history, was a reflection of whatever the popular music was of america at that time. In the 1840s and 1850s it was Stephen Foster because he was writing enormously popular songs of that time. Later on it became songs of the late 1800s or ragtime when that came in. Some of the late minstrel shows in the 1940s and 50s featured big band songs, even rock and roll. Whatever was popular at the time. Some songs were written for the minstrel show, but mostly a reflection of the current popular music. And very important part of it is that it was sold as clean entertainment. Entertainment for the family. That may sound strange considering what they are doing up here, but in fact there was never any window in minstrel shows. There was never sexual innuendo which appeared in other kinds of performances at the time, plays and things, and that means you could bring the family and kids. It was also very upbeat. Many of the songs were upbeat songs, a happy laughing thing. And it was a party like atmosphere, particularly in the opening minstrel first part where they were all together and it was like a party going on on stage that the audience felt they were part of. So that is what sold it originally. Now, just jumping ahead, this is very interesting picture of four or five, rather, black minstrels entertaining union troops during the civil war. During the 1860s, 50s and 60s, they continued to morph and get bigger, and black minstrels began to be seen. We will see more about those in a moment. And, in fact, during the late 1800s, kind of jumping to get to the media, the minstrel shows got much bigger and much more elaborate and they started using names like mega therriens and giantians to emphasize how many people were up there. It was a spectacle at that time. Some were integrated like this, primrose and west minstrels with white performers and black performs in the same show. Not interacting with each other, but alternating during the course of the show. A lot of black characters, of course. Okay. So, thats the late 1800s. These big troops, some as many as 100, drew big audiences, too. These big shows primrose and others traveled around the country. They were no longer in the northeast. They were appearing in cities big and small. They had tents sometimes, big theaters, and there auto wouwou hundreds, up to 1,000 people watching. It was a very prominent kind of entertainment in the late 1800s. It was also very significantly the time that black minstrel shows began to gain traction. Shows put on by africanamericans themselves. I alluded to that before. They were a few before the civil war. But after the civil war, troops of blacks putting on minstrel shows began to become popular with white audiences, and they produced their own stars like this gentleman here, billy crist. They are often called georgia minstrels. Thats one of the first black troops, was from georgia. But during the late 1800s, 1870s, 80s, 90s, alongside the white troops began to become bigger and much more prominent. That is significant because this was the first time, if you think about it, in American History that africanamericans nearly freed from slavery had an opportunity to bring their talents to a stage before a general audience. Naturally, they would tone down some of the racism of it and introduce some of the kind of music that they made and introduce america eventually to blues and to jazz and things that were enormously influential in this country in the 20th century. And this was an open door for them. And that was in the late 1800s. Usually, these troops were managed by whites, hirbut not a. Charles hicks was a pioneer, black minstrel manager who managed many troops and promoted these shows himself. Now, mass media of, the modern mass media came around in the early 1890s. 1890 was the year, actually, that the edison phonograph was the first of the new modern technological media, became well enough developed to be sold to the public. The man on the right there is named spencer. He was a performer who came up with the idea and really perfected the idea of making recreations of the minstrel first part on a record. So an audio version as true to life as possible of the minstrel show, which everybody was familiar with at that time. And to produce these things. It was a troop of four people, including himself. The man at the left was a member of that troop who was the most popular black recording artist of the 1890s. So it was an integrated troop. Three of the four, including spencer himself, had experience in stage minstrel shows at the time. So they knew what they were recreating. And these records of minstrel shows produced not only by spencers group, which he acall imperial minstrels, but others who came later became a very popular type of recording for the next 20 years, basically from the mid 1890s to the mid 1910s, and hundreds of them were made. They are found in collections of old records now. Not much has been written about them, but they countrecreate wh minstrel show sounded like at that time. They lasted about 20 years. This is an edison ad from 1904 showing the family, you know, an idealized family laughing and be dancing, kids dancing through the minstrel show coming out of edison phone graph that is on the righthand side there. It lasted into the lp era. These are some 1950s lps with the stars of that era. Bill cullen, milton borough, jack bennie, oldtimers who made comebacks like eddie foy maybe minstrel recordings in the 1950s, so it lasted quite a while on record. Now, what about radio . Well, radio came on the scene rather quickly as the as the audience saw it in the 1920s with the earliest stations, commercial stations, widelyheard stations launching in 21, 22, 23, that era, and from the start they started putting on minstrel shows. This man, dailey patrickmandail. He felt there was this veracious need to programming and he wanted more comedy, too. Which wasnt much of it on television. So he put together his own minstrel troupe in 1925 and had them get experienced with it on radio. And put on a weekly or biweekly show. That show from 1925 to 1928 was very popular. And was heard throughout the northeast because stations got a very wide range at that time. And it was in new york city based, although it was heard in the northeast, as i say. And the radio networks, which were just Getting Started at that time heard this and saw the success he was having with this permanent troupe of minstrels he had on his radio network. Abc and nbc as they were launching their networks said, well, maybe we should do some of that and formed their own minstrel troupes, particularly nbc, just starting to spread across the country in 1926 and slowly spread out. So they organized a Dutch Masters minstrel troupe, which was a networklevel production with a big orchestra and with writers and with the, you know, whole thing that a network could bring to it, and that show which ran from 1928 to 1932 on nbc was one of the early hits over radio. When it started on many of the artists who are in this troupe, by the way, were taken by the record industry. Al bernard who had recorded a lot in the 1920s was the star end man. Steve porter, who had been the interlocutor on many of those records that i talked about earlier on was the interlocutor. They raided the record industry for some of their talent. Interestingly, in the studio they wore minstrel costumes. As you can see. Particularly the two end men on the ends there, the two men in blackface, tambo and bones. It was radio. Nobody could see them out there, but it was felt it would be a more authentic performance if they formed a traditional minstrel troupe. So in their publicity shots they also, of course, wore that. By this time, there were no racial jokes. The networks censors saw to that, although they did wear blackface, as i say, especially in publicity. The jokes were about marriage. They were about insult humor. That kind of humor at that time. When Dutch Masters began to wind down in the early 1930s, nbc looked around for a replacement for the successful show and found that its chicago affiliate wenr was producing a very successful show of that type, so that became on the network the sinclair minstrel sponsored by the sinclair oil company, and that had a big studio audience. 500 people for a live broadcast. The minstrels are actually in the background here. Theyre kind of hard to see. The audience is turning around looking at the camera behind them. The minstrels are in full minstrel regalia up there for this live performance, which was broadcast over nbc. That show, the sinclair minstrels, was actually one of the most popular programs of the 1930s. Its not written about much. It was the there were some primitive audience measurements at that time. It was in the top five shows right up there with jack bennie and the big stars of the day, and the audience could accommodate 500 people. Nbc said it had 20,000 people on a waiting list to get tickets to see this. It ran from 1932 to 39 and was extremely successful. Also, many other shows featured minstrel segments in them, like the theyd devote an episode to it. This is the Maxwell House show boat which ran from 1932 to 37, i believe. On the two ends were pick and pat. They were two of the most popular blackface minstrel performers of the 1930s on radio and on film as well. Pick malone and pat pageant. They were also episodes of the jack bennie show. Episodes of the bing crosby show that were minstrel shows. Even perry como, who had a very suave, sophisticated musical show in the 1940s called the Chesterfield Supper Club put on a minstrel show and mr. Como was the interlocutor of all things. Its bizarre to hear today. And amos and andy which was not itself a minstrel show, it was a serialized comedy. They too staged a minstrel show. So it was heard on radio, the minstrel show, quite a bit, not only as a standalone but as part of all popular shows. Well, what about movies . Well move quickly through this. Movies were silent, originally, of course. How do you have a minstrel show on a silent film . Well, they tried. In 1913, edison introduced a primitive kind of sound system, and one of the movies he produced, a sixminute film, was called the edison minstrels and its recently been restored. It was lost for a long time, but its been restored, and you can see here the minstrel outfits of the two end men on the left and right, tambo and bones. The interlocutor in the middle looking rather stiff and everybody else is in whiteface and what appears to be 18th Century Court costumes from england, surgeomething like tha. Minstrel shows did perform differently, and some of them had that kind of performance as well in different kind of costumes like this. Kind of odd that the orchestra leader stands with his back to the camera in most of it. Thats movies in 1913, i guess. When sound came in, of course, the music, the minstrel show was too much to resist. This is 1930 with his minstrels behind him. And even little Shirley Temple got into the act and dimples in 1936. Shes singing and dancing and told a joke. Big stars were in minstrel shows. It wasnt just old folks either. Two of the most popular youthful stars of the 30s, hard to believe they were once young, but they were, Mickey Rooney and judy garland put on a fullfledged minstrel show in babes in arms in 1939. It was enormously successful at the time. So much so they made one on broadway. Garland here is in what was called brownface, which was the kind of subdued blackface that was often used for women in the later periods. There are also a lot of biographical movies. Maybe some of you remember this. In the 30s and 40s, including three different films about Stephen Foster, and they all dealt with his relationship with Edwin Christie who had hired him to write songs. In this one, joelson plays christie, really over the top, too. So you would see minstrel shows recreated in those. You would also see them in westerns. And this hasnt been recognized very widely, but, in fact, that was a plot device. I can get in later how they used this as a plot device, if you want, but they would stage a minstrel show. These would be smaller minstrel shows, smaller budgets for these movies, generally, and they would arrive in the mining camp or Something Like that. Thats actually what happened in the 1800s. So these were actually more realistic recreations of some of the more big elaborate things produced with the aerial shots and platoons of dancing girls. This is pretty much what minstrel shows were like. You see the costumes of the wide lapels and sort of exaggerated tuxedo kind of outfits that they had. And simpler instruments, too. Now, television arrived in the late 1940s. There were minstrel shows there as well. Even on the networks. On Cbs Television in 1950. He produced three minstrel shows on the Cbs Television network, believe it or not, between 1950 and 1953. His pennsylvanians, his chorus, as you see in the background in blackface, to me, looking a little uncomfortable, but who knows what they were thinking at the time. There were no jokes about song or race at this time. Everything was made proper in terms of the lyrics and the jokes and so forth, but they were still using blackface and to some extent die elect alect. Ed sullivan staged they also tried to make these authentic. They had academic experts advising them how a minstrel show was staged. Which wearing did a lot for different kind of music. In this case it looks bizarre to see it today. Ed sullivan also staged a minstrel show on cbs in 1953 for the 50th anniversary of the ford motor company, which was that year. Local stations also put on minstrel shows, usuall