Henry's Songbook

        Lay me down, Carolina, lay me down
        Don't wanna wake up in the morning no more
        Sing me one slow sad song for this one last old time
        Before they close the minstrel show

Poster's peeling underneath
Last summer's morning glory vine
Old white hat and a stump o' cigar
An empty bottle o' wine

Banjo's got a broken string
Don't 'spect I'll get to fix it now
There won't be no more chance to sing
Well I'm rusty anyhow

Daddy Bones is dead, I guess
You probably don't know or care
Frank and Archie's gone away
Somewhere, I don't know where

The money and the crowd ran out
Before we left the last town
This old show done played its round
Run the curtain down

I don't know where we go from here
Comes to that I just don't care
Maybe we'll go to a better place
And the minstrel show'll be there

(as sung by Jean Redpath)

[1985:] [Banjo:] Egyptian dancers played similar instruments for pharaohs. Slaves brought banjos to America from West Africa, and Thomas Jefferson described the "banjar" as a chief instrument among Negroes in the 1700s. The fifth string [was] developed in the 1800s and gave the banjo a Scottish drone, integrating British and African heritages into a truly American instrument. (Dunaway, Seeger 49f)

[1995:] The minstrel show suddenly appeared in the 1840s, and was the first entirely American musical form to become internationally popular. [...] minstrelsy was essentially black music, while the most successful acts were white, so that songs and dances of black origin were imitated by white performers and then taken up by black performers, who thus to some extent ended up imitating themselves. [...] The affectionate, patronizing vision of plantation life conveyed by minstrelsy was similar to the simplistic and idealized depiction of family life in the television sitcoms of a hundred years later.

The phenomenon of black culture was widely and often sympathetically discussed. Blacks sang the watered-down songs of minstrelsy, as well as their own, and critics noticed the difference: there was a flavour of sadness in their own songs that was absent from the 'Ethiopian' songs that were all the rage. [...]

Much of minstrelsy's material was copied from the songs and dances of slavery and many minstrels visited plantations in search of ideas. In 1829 Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice struck it rich with his Jim Crow song and dance, copied from a crippled stable-hand named Jim who worked for a white Crow family. [...] "Jim Crow" later became the stock plantation slave [...].

The word 'minstrel' had applied to any professional entertainer since the twelfth century in Europe, but the Virginia Minstrels, who toured for only a few months before breaking up, tied the word for ever to black-face [entertainment]. The shows were in three parts. For the songs and jokes in the first part the performers stood in a semicircle; the comic endmen 'Tambo' and 'Bones' were distinguished by their tambourine and bone clackers [...]. Another principal was a singer of sentimental ballads. The similar but less formal second part was made up of a string of speciality acts and novelties, called the olio. [...] Last came a walk-around finale, with dances, which became more and more of a spectacle. The 'Ethiopian' dances [...] and instrumentation (especially the banjo) were more or less authentic, and profoundly influential. The ancestors of the banjo are thought to have been the stringed instruments of the Wolof, of what are now Senegal and Gambia in West Africa, and may be as ancient as Mesopotamia. (Clarke, Rise 21ff)