Once the industry of minstrelsy and tent show entertainment was successfully taken over by black performers, this new generation of artists laid the foundations for modern popular music, starting out with ragtime, blues and early forms of jazz. Nevertheless, the very expression “coon” in connection with variations of those early forms of ragtime, blues, but also comedy lines as well as dancing routines and a music show category, was once a trademark of sorts, drawing audiences to tent shows, theaters and circus side shows since then there was no way of recording the performances. For the majority of the white sheet music buyers and tent show visitors the coon songs and ragtime were the same thing anyway. Two-way traffic between the grass roots and the black professional stage, intensified by the popularity of ragtime coon songs, cleared the way for the ‘original blues’.” While conducting their research over many years, the team found plenty of evidence for one of their key conclusions: that the commercial so-called “coon” songs (a racist term for originally early forms of black folklore and blues performed by either white singers in blackface or as the term was used more frequently, for the performances of artists of African American decent ) “… spilled into turn-of-the-century black vernacular culture, where they seem to have served a transitional function. While Abbott works at Tulane University (at the Hogan Jazz Archive to be more exact,) Doug Seroff is an independent scholar and music researcher from Tennessee.
The beginnings of this art form (that was in parts of the country present until the late 1940s) and its effect on what we today know as either blues, jazz, soul or hip hop lie in this development, and it is fascinating to backtrack this artistic spirit, as done by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff.īoth authors collaborated already back in 2009 when they presented Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895. For several decades, a very distinctive form of African American minstrel show was the most popular form of entertainment for black audiences in the South, its fame covering almost the entire country by and by.
0 kommentar(er)
