Part 15: The First Bona Fide Show Business

After Jim Crow's transatlantic success, minstrelsy quickly became commercialised.

Stephen Foster made his name writing minstrel songs and became the first composer to receive royalties for hits like "Oh! Susanna" and "Camptown Races".

One-man blackface performances turned into blockbuster Minstrel Shows, arguably the first bona fide "show business"—and a major influence on American vaudeville and British music hall traditions.

Like the manufactured pop bands of today, managers and agents put together troupes of performers to tour internationally, rebranding them as "Minstrels" to make them more respectable (akin to the highbrow European acts that were touring the States at the time, such as The German Minstrels).

The Virginia Minstrels, formed in 1843, advertised their shows as "concerts" and promised that they would be "entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features, which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas".

Whereas the original minstrels hoofed and hollered on the same stages as blacks in mixed ghettoes, their imitators headlined at uptown theatres where blacks were barred. America's showbiz minstrels tended to reinforce black stereotypes by depicting them as stupid, violent and oversexed.

"Nigger minstrel" troupes also made the rounds in Britain, overlapping in some areas with homegrown customs like mumming: a group called The Gowongo Minstrels performed in Padstow just after Boxing Day in 1899, and the first known photo of Padstow's Darkies dates from around the same time.

Nine men and boys pose in front of a stone cottage with accordions, tambourines and drums, dressed like dandified Negroes, sporting tall top hats, frilly collars, oversized buttons and crazy-colour formalwear—and, of course, tar-black faces. At least one man in the picture is a forebear of a current Darkie.

Professional minstrel shows had all but died out in America by the time Al Jolson bawled for his "Mammy" in the 1930 film of the same name (which also featured the song "Yes, We Have No Bananas").

In Britain, however, minstrels remained incredibly popular right up until only a few decades ago.

Unbelievably, The Black and White Minstrel Show ran on TV for more than two decades. In its prime, the variety show won the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux and pulled in 16 to 18 million viewers—roughly one out of every four Britons.

In 1969, the stage version of the show at London's Victoria Palace Theatre broke box office records. To put that into perspective, that same year in the West End, the hippie musical Hair was still shocking audiences with its famous nude scene and songs about peace, love and racial harmony.

The Black and White Minstrel Show didn't cakewalk off the air until 1978, and it had millions of fans right to the bitter end.

Even now, a quick search on the Web pulls up all kinds of nostalgic recollections about the programme and protestations that it wasn't really racist at all, and many performers still have the show on their CVs.

For instance, though he'd probably rather forget it now, Lenny Henry—St. Lenny of Red Nose, CBE—toured with the Black and White Minstrels during the Seventies.

In between jokes, he would wipe the sweat from his face and say it tasted like chocolate.

©J.R. Daeschner

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Part 14: Kwanzaa's Link to Darkie Day

Inevitably, European and African customs intermingled on the plantations of the British West Indies and the American South.

Slaves were allowed time off over Christmas, and they celebrated with processions centred on the towering figure of "John Canoe" or "Jonkonnu"—a man in a tall mask and outlandish clothes.

"John Canoe" may have been a corruption of an African word for "witch doctor", but many celebrations also featured quotes from Shakespeare or characters from European mumming plays.

Sometimes John Canoe and his followers would dress in rags and animal skins; other times, they would poke fun at their masters by wearing fancy European dress—and white makeup with pink Caucasian features.

Jonkonnu extravaganzas still take place in Jamaica and the Bahamas around Christmas and New Year's, though they died out in America after the Civil War.

Meanwhile, Kwanzaa, the US holiday invented during the Black Power movement of the 1960s, runs from December 26th until January 1st, supposedly taking its inspiration from "first-fruits celebrations in ancient Africa".

 

Ironically, though, it coincides precisely with the beginning and end of Padstow's Darkie Days.

In our era, minstrel singers from Jim Crow to Al Jolson tend to be tarred with the same "racist" brush, but connoisseurs increasingly divide minstrelsy into two eras.

As with many creative genres, they distinguish between the movement's pioneers—who often bucked society's norms—and the opportunists who followed, cashing in on the craze by pandering to people's expectations.

Whereas the upper classes viewed Jim Crow and Zip Coon essentially as "niggers" good for a laugh, working-class folks seemed to think they weren't that different from themselves.

The low-rent neighbourhoods of New York and other Northern cities were surprisingly integrated, with whites and blacks singing "Jim Crow" and "Zip Coon" as part of their shared street culture (not unlike rap and hip hop today, which are also notorious for their use of the "n-word").

Paradoxically, both Rice and Dixon spoke out against slavery as their alter egos. After returning to America from his first trip to Britain, which had abolished slavery a few years earlier, Rice added a new verse to "Jim Crow":

De country for me
Is de country whar de people
Hab make poor nigga free.

Given this stance, it's more than a little ironic that the term "Jim Crow" is now most commonly associated with racial segregation laws in the American South.

©J.R. Daeschner

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Part 13: A Filthy Abortion of a Song

However, it wasn't until Rice took his impersonation of a "Kentucky cornfield negro" to New York in 1832 that Jim Crow really began to take flight.

The boys of the Bowery Theater—a venue so rough the patrons often ended up onstage with the actors—demanded Rice do his Jim Crow shtick 20 times a night.

And after conquering the US, Jim Crow jumped the pond in 1836 to begin a yearlong tour of the British Isles, plus a stint in Paris.

Middlebrow critics denounced Rice's "buffo negro songs" as no-class "balderdash": "America has sent us a filthy abortion of a song, with neither talent nor humour," sniffed The London Satirist.

However, Rice found a much wider audience in Britain than America, where his fans were mainly working-class.

"In London, Jim Crow is even more popular than in New York," wrote one US correspondent. "It is heard in every circle, from the soirees of the nobility to the hovels of the street sweepers."

Even a hardened satirist like Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, confessed that minstrel music "moistened (his) spectacles in a most unexpected manner".

Rice made a fortune, married the daughter of a London theatre owner and returned for two more tours of the UK. (To this day, the British Library has one of the most extensive collections of Jim Crow plays in the world.)

"English audiences were in a special position to appreciate minstrelsy: in many ways, it simply brought images, symbols and forms back home," writes American musicologist Dale Cockrell in Demons of Disorder, his study of early blackface performers.

New World minstrels combined the music, masking and drama of traditions like "guising" and mumming that had been imported from the Old World.

Between Christmas and New Year's, folks around Britain—including Cornwall—would "disguise" themselves by blacking their faces and singing, dancing and performing for food or money during the holidays.

An English mummers' play from 1771 even features a black-faced character called Sambo.

Meanwhile, in New England, bands of "callithumpian" rabble-rousers would parade through the streets on New Year's with chimney soot on their faces, banging pots and drums and naming and shaming anyone they didn't like.

In the Old World, this ritual of social commentary was known as charivari, combining abuse and good humour. In fact, Punch, the famous satirical magazine, was originally subtitled The London Charivari.

Part 12: A Fishy Tale

In trying to explain Darkie Day, I don't know which is stranger: the locals' story about dancing slaves, or the fact that many journalists—including defenders like Darcus Howe—swallowed the fishy tale hook, line and sinker.

To my mind, commemorating slaves' suffering by blacking up and singing about "niggers" would seem like more of a sick joke than an honest hommage. And so far as the historical record shows, slave ships never docked at Padstow—and even if they had stopped, it's unlikely the captive men, women and children on board would have been in any condition to sing and dance.

In 1806, a slave ship wrecked just outside Padstow as it was returning to Liverpool, having already sold its cargo of 193 slaves in Barbados. Seven Africans had died in transit from the Cape Coast, most from fever and dysentery.

The true roots of Darkie Day lie in the 19th century "nigger minstrel" craze that swept both sides of the Atlantic—and still echoes through pop music today.

Americans and Europeans—particularly the British—share the blame for mimicking and ridiculing blacks onstage.

In 1799, a German immigrant named Gottlieb Graupner (now regarded as the father of orchestral music in America) entertained Boston as the banjo-strumming Gay Negro Boy.

And two decades later, a famous English actor, Charles Mathews, staged a one-man show in blackface called A Trip to America, lampooning a black production of Hamlet he'd seen in the States. In the middle of the Dane's famous soliloquy, after the line "And by opposing, end them", the black audience would burst into a slave song, "Opossum Up a Gum Tree."

However, the undisputed founding fathers of the minstrel show were a couple of Yankees.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice and George Washington Dixon developed the two black stereotypes that dominated the stage for more than a century: the sympathetic Southern plantation slave (Rice's "Jim Crow" character), and the uppity Northern dandy (Dixon's "Zip Coon")—which also inspired the golliwog, another transatlantic creation.

Rice, a New Yorker of Anglo-American extraction, was a struggling performer touring the US when he heard Dixon sing his hit song, "Coal Black Rose" around 1830.

In Kentucky, he also happened to see an old black stablehand singing and dancing disjointedly (possibly because he was crippled); Rice supposedly borrowed the man's moves and music to create "Jim Crow", the archetypal novelty hit, complete with its own silly dance and catchy chorus:

"Wheel about and turn about, / And jump Jim Crow."

Part 11: Why Didn't It Occur to Us?

"I'd never thought of Darkie Day as being offensive—just because it was part of something that had always gone on in Padstow," says former mayor Keltie Seaber.

"If it would've gone on in London, we would've said, 'Ooh, isn't that terrible?'"

And she would have been among the first to protest: after all, Keltie had the kind of credentials that wannabe liberals only dreamed about.

Her parents had been Communists throughout the Cold War, when there were possibly fewer "Reds" than blacks in Cornwall. The locals gossiped that her family spent Christmas in Russia, and the neighbourhood kids would bang on their door and shout "Commies!" through the letterbox.

Whereas most Cornish Communists tried to keep their politics secret, Keltie's mother was very open about her radical tendencies. She used to order two copies of The Daily Worker from the newsagents, so that one could be kept on display.

"But they said, no, it had to be under the counter, with the dirty magazines—dirty Communist rag," Keltie chuckles.

Her family's B&B, as advertised in The Daily Worker, served as a dacha-by-the-sea for party members, trade unionists and various urban lefties, including some black families.

However, the locals never gave them any trouble for having blacks in the house. "They always thought we were rather eccentric, I think."

Keltie was never a Communist in the strict sense of the term, but when she moved to London to become a teacher, she threw herself into the protests of Seventies, such as the Free Mandela marches in the capital (she still has the badge she used to wear).

"I was dead keen to help anybody who was a slight underdog. I wanted to get out and change the world."

Even so, it wasn't until outsiders objected to Darkie Day that her eyes were opened.

"I had this discussion with mum, when we both decided that—'God how thick were we,'" she laughs. "There we were, liberal, educated people, we thought, politically very correct—not a racist bone in our bodies. And I said to mum, 'Why didn't it occur to us that wandering around, y'know blacking your faces up and dressing as negresses, why didn't it even cross our consciousness that it might be considered racist?'"

Keltie reckoned it was because Darkie Day had always been there.

Although she'd never taken part in it, she knew most of the people who did. And none of them ever went out with the idea of "Oh, I hope I'll see a black person, because it'll really insult them." And knowing Padstow people, they were very… non-racist somehow. They were very inclusive towards people who were down on their luck.

"Down here, race isn't really an issue because we don't have black families," she emphasises. "If you had a black area in the town, with 20 black families, and went round their streets singing these songs, I think it would have dawned on me that yes, it could be construed as perhaps insensitive and intolerant and racist. But they were singing these Darkie Day songs—when there was no race issue in Padstow. It wasn't done to wind anybody up, because there was nobody to wind up. Darkie Day has never ever been malicious, or had any motive, apart from the fact of just going out and having a sing. They do it because they do it."

* * *

Part 10: Which Came First: Blacks or Bigots?

Padstow's merrymakers were also wary of me, but that was only natural—I was a stranger with a videocam.

"Have ya paid for them photos?" an ersatz Aunt Jemima asked me.

Once I put some money in the collection box, though, no one seemed to mind me tagging along.

I decided to return during the summer, when people might be more forthcoming. Even so, I felt self-conscious asking about the event. I tended to mumble the offensive words or bury them under my breath, so that Darkie Day became (Darkie) Day.

However, the locals had no such hang-ups, rattling off the lyrics about "niggers" as if they were just any old words, as innocuous and nonsensical as "polly wolly doodle". You could view this openness as proof that they don't mean to cause offence; on the other hand, you could argue that they're such hard-tack crackers, they don't care who they offend.

Time and again, Padstonians protest their innocence: "How can we be racialist (sic) if we don't have any blacks around to be racialist against?"

This is the racial equivalent of the chicken-and-egg conundrum—which came first: blacks or bigots?

Race-baiters cut their teeth on this question, tearing into it like lions mauling an easy kill.

"This is almost the same as saying that racism only exists where there are significant numbers of black people present, i.e., before 'they' came, 'we' didn't have a problem," wrote the head of the Devon and Exeter Racial Equality Council during the Darkie Day uproar.

"Racism is usually (not always) about white people's attitudes, and that is essentially the problem."

This emphasis on whites' attitudes takes the debate into the realm of Orwellian wrongthink; if you're reckless enough to speak your mind, you might as well stick your face in a cage full of rats.

Of course, it is possible for people living in an all-white society to be racist; but just because they live in an all-white society doesn't make them inherently racist.

To my mind, the true test of whether someone is racist is how he or she treats people of other races when meeting them face-to-face.

Part 9: Bigoted Backwaters?

Despite all the hype about "multicultural Britain", modern Albion remains as overwhelmingly white as the Latin roots of its name suggest.

Living in London or any sizeable city, it's easy to forget just how racially homogenous England is, not to mention Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Although roughly one out of every four people in Greater London is black or Asian, for the UK as a whole—including the capital—that ratio plunges to 8%, most of whom are Asians. Afro-Caribbeans number just one million out of the country's total population of 59 million—around 2%.


From the BBC: Map of people born outside the UK

Map on right shows country as if areas with roughly equal populations were the same size. So, densely populated London takes up much more space than sparsely populated Scottish Highlands.

 Meanwhile, in north Cornwall, minorities make up just 1% of the inhabitants, though barely one person in 1,000 is of African descent—just 0.1% of all locals.

I first visited Padstow with my ex-wife and our first daughter a few days before New Year's. At first, I'd had my doubts about taking them to see Darkie Day. She is Latin and often mistaken for being Asian, while our daughter is decidedly mixed, a cross between a German-Swedish-American and a Spanish-Italian-Inca.

However, I happened to know a couple of people (like Anita and Ian) who had seen Darkie Day, and they assured me there wouldn't be a problem.

We'd also visited Padstow the previous summer, and the locals couldn't have been more welcoming.

Small towns are often portrayed as bigoted backwaters, but in my experience, that ain't necessarily so.

Having lived in Smalltown USA as well as half a dozen world capitals, I've found that city-dwellers can be just as bigoted as villagers, if not more so. It wasn't until I moved to New York that I was called "cracker"—a drive-by insult from a carload of strangers—and I don't remember ever hearing anyone talk about "coloured" people until I came to London—from a freshly-minted Oxford graduate who called himself a liberal (and later worked in Asia).

As for the term "darkie", well, it's like something out of the 19th century. You never hear it nowadays—unless you go to Padstow. Then, boy do you hear it: like stage pirates, the Cornish give r's their full value and then some, so when they say "darrrkie", "colourrred" or "niggerrr", it's all the more jarrrring.

For many Padstonians, "coloured" is still an accepted synonym for "black", while "Negro" also occasionally pops into conversation; "nigger" is only ever used in the context of the Darkie Day songs (at least that I've heard). The first time I witnessed the tradition—not long after the media storm—I managed to interview only one local.

"Because of this—this word, niggerrr, I'm sensitive even talkin' to you about it," he said. "You're arriving at a time when any stranger who asks questions will be viewed with a little bit of suspicion. For all they know, you're writing for The Black Power Journal, and next year, there'll be a hundred heavy guys down here. That's what everyone feared… people waving banners."

Part 8: Judge for Yourself

Bordering the North and the South, Kentucky used to be a slave state, though its sons fought on both sides of the Civil War.

One of Kentucky's most famous adopted sons was Stephen Foster, America's first great songwriter, who made his name writing minstrel songs. Two of them ended up becoming the official anthems of Southern states: "Swanee River" for Florida (which he never visited) and "My Old Kentucky Home" (which he did).

As in Padstow, both songs had to be modified because they contained the word "darkies". Kentucky changed the offending word to "people" in 1986… after a group of Japanese students serenaded the General Assembly with "My Old Kentucky Home".

For most of my youth, I had a black best friend—later my best man—who hailed from the deepest backwoods of Kintuckee: Hazard, to be precise. (TV's Dukes of Hazzard wasn't actually set there, but it could've been.)

Through him and other friends, I learned what it was like to be a member of a minority, albeit in a very limited sense.

Blondish and blue-eyed, I was often the only white in black churches, talent shows and neighbourhoods. My girlfriend and I were the only mixed couple at the prom, and I reciprocated at her predominantly black school.

I left Kentucky to study international relations at a university in Washington, D.C. (aka "Chocolate City"), and during summer breaks, I worked for a newspaper in Indianapolis, where I covered migrant farm workers and the Miss Black America Pageant (the same event where Mike Tyson later earned his rape conviction).

After university, I lived in Peru at the height of a terrorist insurgency, travelling to shantytowns and villages where I was at least a head taller than the locals; an easy target for any would-be yanqui-killers. Instead, I met my ex-wife.

As for my second wife, well, she actually is African, having gone to school with Nelson Mandela's kids and protested against apartheid as a mixed-race citizen of South Africa.

I mention all this knowing that veteran race-baiters will dismiss it as just a longwinded version of the old cri de coeur of a closet racist: "Some of my best friends are black!"

All I can say is: judge for yourself.

In my experience, race relations are never black and white: just when you think you've worked out people's differences, along comes an exception to contradict everything you've ever thought.

So it's with real trepidation that I write about race in the UK…

Part 7: The Secret History of the KKK

When I first read about Darkie Day, I was astounded.

What kinda local yokels would black up and sing racist songs in this day and age—and why in Britain, of all places?! Not even the most country-fried, Confederate-flag-loving hillbillies in the Deep South would do something like that!

Then again, who was I to throw stones? My grandfather was a member of the KKK.

As far as I can tell, though—and as absurd as it sounds—he wasn't a cross-burner or even a racist.

His father, a German immigrant to the Midwest in the 1850s, had joined the Republicans at a time when they were the upstart anti-slavery party led by Abe Lincoln. At just 17, my great-grandfather volunteered for the Civil War, sneaking off in the middle of the night to fight for the Union.

It seems unlikely that a man who had voluntarily risked his life to fight slavery would then indoctrinate his children with racist teachings.

Although it's possible that his son rebelled by joining the redneck group founded by Confederates at the end of the war, from what I can gather, my grandfather wasn't the type: he was a gentle soul, more henpecked than hellraiser. He certainly wasn't overtly racist, and he taught his children to treat blacks as equals.

Without trying to defend the indefensible, I reckon he joined the KKK for one simple reason: everybody else was doing it.

In its heyday, the Klan was very much a mainstream organisation in America (which arguably made it more sinister than its current incarnation on the lunatic fringe).

Although its rhetoric was undoubtedly bigoted, its rank-and-file members didn't hide behind hoods, and they didn't go around burning crosses or lynching people—at least not in Kansas.

The secret history of the KKK seems to be that outside the South, it functioned like any "respectable" social club of the time, hosting picnics, baseball games and fundraisers.

For what it's worth, I was brought up to view people of all races as equals. Not that there were many minorities in the middle of Kansas: no blacks, only one family of Mexicans/Catholics, and just one Asian—my Vietnamese foster brother.

When I entered my teens, we moved to Lexington, Kentucky, a city that prides itself on being part of the Progressive South. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it's true: they don't lynch people anymore; capital punishment is strictly by electrocution.