Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used predominantly by non-black performers to portray a caricature of a black person.
Spirituals is a genre of music that is "purely and solely the creation" of generations of African Americans, which merged African cultural heritage with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade—the largest and most inhumane forced migration in recorded human history, and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals encompass the "sing songs", work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues, and the gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs. While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s. From its roots in African music, new derivative music genres emerged from the spirituals songcraft.
The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American form of racist entertainment developed in the early 19th century. Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent. The shows were performed by mostly white people in make-up or blackface for the purpose of playing the role of black people. There were also some African-American performers and black-only minstrel groups that formed and toured. Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.
African-American music is an umbrella term covering a diverse range of music and musical genres largely developed by African Americans. Their origins are in musical forms that arose out of the historical condition of slavery that characterized the lives of African Americans prior to the American Civil War.
Robert Allen Cole was an American composer, actor, playwright, and stage producer and director.
A minstrel was a medieval European entertainer. Originally describing any type of entertainer such as a musician, juggler, acrobat, singer or fool, the term later, from the sixteenth century, came to mean a specialist entertainer who sang songs and played musical instruments.
Jubilee quartets were popular African-American religious musical groups in the first half of the 20th century. The name derives from the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group of singers organized by George L. White at Fisk University in 1871 to sing Negro spirituals. The members of the original Fisk Jubilee Quartet (1909–1916) were Alfred G. King, James A. Myers, Noah W. Ryder, and John W. Work II. Students at other historically black schools, such as Hampton Institute, Tuskegee Institute and Wilberforce University, followed suit. Many independent jubilee troupes also found inspiration in the Fisk Jubilee Singers, such as the Original Nashville Students.
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, dubbed "The Black Swan", was an American singer considered the best-known black concert artist of her time. She was lauded by James M. Trotter for her "remarkably sweet tones and wide vocal compass".
Thomas J. Bowers, also known as "The Colored Mario", was an American concert artist. He studied voice with African-American concert artist Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and toured with her troupe for a few years before embarking on his own successful solo career. He was the brother of professional singer Sarah Sedgwick Bowers, known as "the Colored Nightingale", and John C. Bowers, a Philadelphia entrepreneur and church organist.
John Wesley Work III was a composer, educator, choral director, musicologist and scholar of African-American folklore and music.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers are an African-American a cappella ensemble, consisting of students at Fisk University. The first group was organized in 1871 to tour and raise funds for college. Their early repertoire consisted mostly of traditional spirituals, but included some songs by Stephen Foster. The original group toured along the Underground Railroad path in the United States, as well as performing in England and Europe. Later 19th-century groups also toured in Europe.
Sam Lucas was an American actor, comedian, singer, and songwriter. Sam Lucas's exact date of birth is disputed. Lucas's year of birth, to freed former slaves, has also been cited as 1839, 1840, 1841, and 1850.
John "Picayune" Butler was a black French singer and banjo player who lived in New Orleans, Louisiana. He came to New Orleans from the French West Indies in the 1820s. One of his influences was Old Corn Meal, a street vendor who had gained fame as a singer and dancer at the St. Charles Theatre in 1837. By the 1820s, Butler had begun touring the Mississippi Valley performing music and clown acts. His fame grew so that by the 1850s he was known as far north as Cincinnati. In 1857, Butler participated in the first banjo tournament in the United States held at New York City's Chinese Hall, but due to inebriation, he only placed second. Butler is one of the first documented black entertainers to have influenced American popular music. He influenced blackface entertainers most directly. Circus performer George Nichols took his song "Picayune Butler Is Going Away" from him and claimed to have learned "Jump Jim Crow" from Butler. The blackface song "Picayune Butler's Come to Town", published in 1858, was named for him.
Hokum is a particular song type of American blues music—a humorous song which uses extended analogies or euphemistic terms to make sexual innuendos. This trope goes back to early blues recordings and is used from time to time in modern American blues and blues rock.
Ernest Hogan was the first African-American entertainer to produce and star in a Broadway show and helped to popularize the musical genre of ragtime.
John Diamond, aka Jack or Johnny, was an Irish-American dancer and blackface minstrel performer. Diamond entered show business at age 17 and soon came to the attention of circus promoter P. T. Barnum. In less than a year, Diamond and Barnum had a falling-out, and Diamond left to perform with other blackface performers. Diamond's dance style merged elements of English, Irish, and African dance. For the most part, he performed in blackface and sang popular minstrel tunes or accompanied a singer or instrumentalist. Diamond's movements emphasized lower-body movements and rapid footwork with little movement above the waist.
John Thomas Douglass (1847–1886) was an American composer, virtuoso violinist, conductor and teacher. He is best known for composing Virginia's Ball (1868), which is generally regarded as the first opera written by a black composer. The work is now lost, however, and his only extant work is The Pilgrim: Grand Overture (1878) for piano. His biography from James Monroe Trotter's Music and Some Highly Musical People (1878)—from which The Pilgrim survives—suggests that he wrote many now lost pieces for piano, orchestra and particularly guitar, which he was known to play.
This timeline of music in the United States covers the period from 1850 to 1879. It encompasses the California Gold Rush, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and touches on topics related to the intersections of music and law, commerce and industry, religion, race, ethnicity, politics, gender, education, historiography and academics. Subjects include folk, popular, theatrical and classical music, as well as Anglo-American, African American, Native American, Irish American, Arab American, Catholic, Swedish American, Shaker and Chinese American music.
Mary Eliza Walker Crump was an African-American contralto singer and manager, one of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers.
The Original Nashville Students, also referred to as the Original Tennessee Jubilee and Plantation Singers, the Nashville Students, and H. B. Thearle's Nashville Students, were an ensemble of eight or nine African-American jubilee singers. The moniker “jubilee singer” was coined by George White for his a cappella group The Fisk Jubilee Singers. This was primarily a reference to the Jewish year of jubilee described in Leviticus 25. Additionally, jubilation elicits connections with emancipation and liberation, drawing on emotions of nationalist pride from both African American and white audiences. Adopting this title allowed the singers to brand themselves as those who were formerly enslaved, but who had triumphantly risen out of their oppression.
