African American Songwriters and Performers in the Coon Song Era: Black Innovation and American Popular Music

Transcription

1 African American Songwriters and Performers in the Coon Song Era: Black Innovation and American Popular Music James M. Salem The first influence of African American music on American mainstream culture was the minstrel show, which was inspired by black music. Before the popularity of jazz in the 1920s, when African American music exploded on the scene to more widely influence American popular music, a holdover from the minstrel show the coon song presents an interesting case study in the role of African American culture's impact on the mainstream. The coon song emerged as a popular musical phenomenon in the decade of the 1890s, widely considered the nadir of the black experience in America. C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow chronicles the "cumulative weakening of resistance to racism" in the decade. [1] In the so-called Gay Nineties southern states disenfranchised black voters with literacy tests and poll taxes, a wave of race violence swept the nation, Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the concept of separate but equal, Jim Crow material culture became part of the American mainstream, and black players were purged from professional baseball. All of this was, historian Nina Silber would say, part of the "1890s cult of Anglo-Saxonism." [2] It is not surprising that this era would find the "coon song" so enjoyable. The coon image (blacks as comic, ignorant, lawless, and uninhibited) confirmed in the minds of white Americans after Reconstruction the position of blacks as inferior and subservient. James H. Dorman says in American Quarterly that coon songs featured blacks "as not only ignorant and indolent, but also devoid of honesty or personal honor, given to drunkenness and gambling, utterly without ambition, sensuous, libidinous, even lascivious." Generally performed in dialect, coon songs employed "catchy' rhythms," and were meant to be "hilariously funny." [3] Russell Sanjeck dates the first use of the term coon "the now distasteful word in popular music" as 1834, with the publication of banjo-playing minstrel performer George Washington Dixon's song "Old Zip Coon." [4] As a character, Zip Coon was a somewhat scary citified dandy in stark contrast to his more innocent rural counterpart, Jim Crow. The word coon as a short form for raccoon dates from 1741, and before Dixon's use of coon it meant a "frontier rustic." [5] In 1767, a black character named "Raccoon" sang a version of "Yankee Doodle Dandy" in the first British opera published in America. [6] Several generations later in 1840, the Whig party (established to counter the strong presidency exerted by Andrew Jackson) used the raccoon as its political symbol. Coon songs in the 1840s and 50s were merely Whig political songs, but by 1862 the term "had come to mean a Black." [7] One explanation for this is, according to the American Dictionary of English (1944), that it denoted "the name of the animal which Southern Negroes were supposed to enjoy hunting and eating." [8] In The Wages of Whiteness, David R. Roediger argues that the term coon, like "buck" and "Mose," became a racial slur only "gradually." [9] The Parlor Songs Association also insists that the term was not a racial slur originally but rather "evolved into that" with some additional confusion: some contemporary composers who didn't know better confused the raccoon with the possum, often using the two animals interchangeably. There is, however, no existing legacy for the "possum song." [10] Within the context of the cultural racism of the period, however, is this contradictory fact: in the world of American popular music black performers and songwriters were accomplishing racial border crossings that were unprecedented. Black performers were appearing more and more before white audiences. Black songwriters were succeeding not only in the kind of Negro genre music that may have been predictable but in the realm of sentimental white popular music as well. And finally, in the emerging field of acoustically recorded music, black performers came to represent notable leaders in this new technology. In an era of such severe racism, how were African American performers able to cross the color line to white

2 audiences? Where did African American songwriters learn their craft? How were African American writers and performers, in spite of their personal feelings and beliefs, an integral part of the coon song tradition? When were African American songwriters finally free of white cultural expectations of black life and experience? Why was the popular music business both traditional and emerging more open to African American participation than other enterprises? To what extent was the coon song an important interface between the music of the old minstrel show and that of the new ragtime era? Who were the African American pioneers, and why are they so forgotten today? I wish to tell three stories associated with African American writers and performers in the coon song era. The first attempts to explain the importance of the role of the minstrel show as a vehicle to launch black performers before white audiences, but with a concomitant demand for traditional minstrel character types thus the coon song. The second centers on the late nineteenth century American popular music business (primarily song writing, song plugging, and song publishing) and the mechanical royalty income it produced: sheet music. The third story focuses on the emergence of commercial musical recordings in the 1890s. Once the technology existed for the manufacture of first cylinders and then records, the coon song represented a popular genre of recorded music that was quickly connected to the next wave of African American contribution to mainstream popular music: ragtime and the syncopated song. Interestingly, the success of the coon song on recordings the new technology was concurrent with the success of the coon song in printed sheet music the old delivery system, probably because the consumption of recorded songs was disproportionately male, while sheet music was primarily marketed to females. Sentimental parlor songs dominated the sheet music business during the 1890s, but sound recordings broadened the boundaries of American popular music. In addition, Russel Nye points out that the displacement caused by this new novelty almost ruined both the sheet music business and the piano business itself. [11] Blackface minstrelsy, in which white performers caricatured Negroes and Negro life, made possible black minstrelsy, which Robert C. Toll calls for African American professionals the "first large-scale entrance into American show business." Virtually all black composers, writers, singers, and performers of the time emerged through the minstrel show. [12] After the Civil War blacks organized minstrel companies in imitation of white minstrel shows that is, black imitations of white imitations of black music and dancing. [13] The important result, Charles Hamm argues, was that black performers were able to take the stage in front of white audiences, so that when the minstrel show died out at the end of the nineteenth century black professionals in live theater were "firmly established through the minstrel show," paving the way for African American performers. [14] Though black performers and writers constituted "a new generation who brought fresh energy and subject matter to the music of Tin Pan Alley," Richard Crawford observes that those emerging at the end of the nineteenth century in New York were put "in a bind" by the minstrel tradition. Certainly the tradition was too restrictive for their full talents, but the minstrel character types were too established and conventional for black entertainers to disregard. On one hand, it was necessary to give audiences what they wanted, but on the other hand "many standard crowd-pleasing devices reinforced the racial divide." This was especially true when the character of the coon ("a shiftless black male who could be dangerous") emerged in the 1880s. This black stereotype, Crawford says, "made some older stereotypes seem almost benign." [15] The next decade was even worse. The new songs of the 1890s "ridiculed Negroes with a new vehemence," Robert Toll suggests. "Besides continuing minstrel stereotypes of blacks as watermelon- and chicken-eating mindless fools, these new 'coon songs' emphasized grotesque physical caricatures of big-lipped, pop-eyed black people and added the menacing image of razor-toting, violent black men. These lyrics almost made the romanticized plantation stereotypes seem good." [16] While the lyrical content of the coon song was mostly old and tired, it should be noted that musically it was

3 cutting edge, employing the verse-chorus structure of the modern Tin Pan Alley song (emphasis on the chorus), sung up-tempo with syncopation. [17] The coon song as we know it today was introduced to live audiences in the 1880s. Many of the songs had the word in the title ("New Coon in Town," "Whistling Coon," and "Little Alabama Coon"), [18] but some did not ("The Bully," in which two black rivals settle their claims with razors: "When I got through with bully, a doctor and a nurse/wan't no good to dat nigger, so they put him in a hearse"). [19] The coon song genre apparently came directly out of urban America's tenderloin districts saloons, bars, and brothels where songwriters and professional entertainers first heard them. More than the lyrical content, it was the syncopated rhythm that created the excitement. Sanjek believes this syncopated popular music "began to change the character of American songs" even before the famous Chicago World's Fair in Afterward, he says, the new music was "being described as the 'coon song.'" [20] Popular music historian David Ewen credits May Irwin, a white songwriter/performer, as the "first outstanding exponent of coon songs" and the one who developed the singing style in live venues. [21] If so, the fact merely mirrors the general history of American popular music African American innovation covered by white appropriation. It was, after all, black minstrel performers who first sang their own coon songs on stage. James T. Maher, in his introduction to Wilder's American Popular Song speaks of the late 1880s and early 1890s as the years "that the Americanization of our popular song gathered momentum that was to carry the process forward to World War I, by which time a native matrix, generous in its confines, had been established." He says we know the white songs and performers of the day but not the "anonymous pioneers, probably Negro musicians for the most part, who gave impetus to the Americanization process remain silvery shadows on the daguerreotypes that have yielded their images to time. They are of a period of popular music, and popular dance, that deserves the sort of contemplative study that would go beyond research to imaginative reconstruction based upon archeological analogy." [22] Ernest Hogan, Gussie Davis, and George Washington Johnson still remain, in spite of their successes, silvery shadows in the daguerreotype that purports to illuminate the history of American popular music in the 1890s. The 1890s is the era in which popular music became big business through the sale of sheet music. Before this period, a successful song like Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home" ("Way down upon the Sewanee River"), introduced in 1851 by the Christy Minstrels, was able to sell "a very slow million." But in 1892, Ian Whitcomb says, Charles K. Harris's "After the Ball" became "the first million seller to be conceived as a million seller, and marketed as a million seller." Harris advertised "SONGS WRITTEN TO ORDER," and he aggressively pushed to have "After the Ball" interpolated (inserted) in the Broadway musical A Trip to Chinatown. The song was a sentimental ballad about lost love that had nothing to do with Chinatown, but it struck a chord with the public. The song portrays an old man answering his young niece's questions about why he has no wife or children or home. Long ago, he says, he witnessed his sweetheart kissing another man after the ball. He could neither forgive her nor permit her to explain her behavior. Many years later, after her death (presumably of a broken heart) he received a letter explaining that the man she was kissing was her brother. The maudlin song virtually exploded on the scene. "Within a year," Whitcomb observes, "'Ball' was bringing in 25,000 dollars a week; within twenty years sheet sales topped ten million. It was translated into every known language." The songwriter's "head was in the twentieth century," Whitcomb says, "but his heart was in the nineteenth." [23] African American songwriters who came out of the minstrel show may have known that other black and white minstrel performers were not only singing their songs but publishing them under their own names as well. It was a "common practice" at the time, Eileen Southern

4 says, along with selling compositions "outright for ten or fifteen dollars each." A writer had to be prolific, like James Bland, to be properly noticed. Bland, a northern Negro whose "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" and "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" are probably the best known of his 700 songs, mostly wrote conventional minstrel songs, plantation songs, and sentimental ballads. Everyone sang his songs: black minstrels, white minstrels, college students, and regular people at home and on the street. He was "The World's Greatest Minstrel Man" and "The Idol of the Music Halls." He toured Europe in the early 1880s with Haverly's Genuine Colored Minstrels but stayed in England to perform as a singer/banjo player without blackface. [24] Appearing as "The Prince of Negro Songwriters," Ewen reports that he was invited to give command performances for Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, and that after Stephen Foster Bland is "the most distinguished creator of sentimental songs about the Negro and the South" and the "first major black popular song composer" to emerge from the black minstrel show. [25] He appears to have had multiple sheet music publishers in New York and Boston, [26] which is why Eric Wilder calls Bland the black writer who "broke down the barriers to white music publishers' offices" before [27] In terms of music publishing after 1880, the establishment of M. Witmark & Sons in 1886 was important in the development of the coon song. The firm was, incredibly, founded by three teen and preteen brothers Witmark: Isadore, 17; Jay, 13; and Julius, 11 with the "M" denoting the first letter of their father's name, who had no financial interest in the firm but who could sign contracts. [28]According to Sanjeck, it was, in fact, the move of M. Witmark & Sons from Union Square to West 28th Street in 1893 that began the era of the supremacy of the American popular song named for this new section of New York City: Tin Pan Alley. [29] Probably best known for such American pop standards as "When You Were Sweet Sixteen" (1898) and "Sweet Adeline" (1903), M. Witmark & Sons was one of the first firms to sell sheet music of verse/chorus ragtime songs to both black and white Americans an instance of racial democratization of the music business at the turn of the century. [30] M. Witmark's was "the most prominent of the new breed of music houses" in the "vogue for coon songs." It's most famous product of the genre, "All Coons Look Alike to Me" (1896) was written by the black entertainer Ernest Hogan. Hogan was a professional black songwriter/entertainer who performed his compositions onstage as a member of the Black Patti Troupadours, where he was billed as the "Unbleached American." [31] He was "a veteran minstrel quartet singer and end man" who turned into a "national figure as a result of the song's popularity." [32] The publication of "All Coons Look Alike To Me" also represents the "earliest association of the word rag with instrumental music." [33] On page five of the sheet music, the second chorus of the song notes "Choice Chorus, with Negro 'rag' Accompaniment. Arr. By MAX HOFFMAN." The "rag" (short for ragtime) arrangement by this Witmark employee was "the first of its kind to be published and did much to make the song famous internationally." Hoffman so successfully brought out the "inherent musical qualities" of the song that "in 1900, when an international ragtime pianist championship was held in New York, those who reached the semifinal level were required to perform it in original variations." [34] At the top of the three-color cover of this striking first edition sheet music of "All Coons Look Alike To Me," [35] (a "Witmark Popular Publication") the song is promoted as "By the Composer of the Famous 'Pas-Ma-La'" a song that Hogan published the year before. Sanjek says the origin of this "jig-time dance melody" was the "Streets of Cairo" sideshow on the midway of the Chicago World's Fair. [36] At the time, "Pas-Ma-La" may have been called an animal dance probably a Turkey Trot. Underneath and at the top are two stereotypical minstrel end men near the corners. In a banner, the song is presented as "The New Sensation." The large font for "All Coons Look Alike To Me" is black, ribbed in red, appearing to be made of letters roughly hand-cut from wood a visual reminder, perhaps of the essential primitiveness being communicated. In the center, four Zip Coon comic figures are lined up, vying for the attention of the lone female. The men are all ostentatiously dressed in

5 jackets and ties, affecting civility, but actually advertising personal wealth. All of them have diamonds glistening from their ties or shirt buttons. Two have canes, one has spectacles that highlight his bug-like eyes, and one is portrayed as more primate than human. For her part, the woman is a seductive Jezebel figure, dressed stylishly with her own diamonds: a broach the size of the men's diamonds as well as a hair ornament with more bling than all of theirs put together. She seems to be waiting patiently while they practically drool over her. All of the figures appear to be made up in blackface; their huge and distended lips are dark red, lined with white. "A Darkey Misunderstanding" is suggested as the subtitle of the song, "Written & Composed by Ernest Hogan." His name is presented in the same font as the song title. The persona in "All Coons Look Alike to Me" is a black barber whose "honey gal," the properly named Lucy Jane Stubbles, has dumped him for "another coon barber from Virgina" who is more socially important. Though he always treated her right, was sensitive to her feelings, and bought her "presents by the score," about the only way he believes he can win her back is to achieve great wealth by playing the numbers (policy gambling). [37] He's been "Jonahed," he says, "abused" and "confused" because of what she told him (her words constitute the chorus): All coons look alike to me I've got another beau, you see And he's just as good to me as you, nig! Ever tried to be He spends his money free, I know we can't agree So I don't like you no how All coons look alike to me Richard Crawford says that Lucy Jane's "sneering dismissal in the chorus mocks the very idea of love, except perhaps as a ploy to corral a partner for display in public and sex in private." He correctly observes that the men portrayed on the cover look entirely different from one other, so it is obvious that all coons don't look alike, and Lucy Jane can tell them apart. What she is really interested in is finding the one who will spend his money her way. "In an era when songs tended to idealize, sometimes even spiritualize, romance," Crawford argues, "an outlook like this, no matter how thickly layered with irony, allowed sheet-music buyers to glimpse a realm of male-female relations beyond the limits that Tin Pan Alley had explored." It was, of course, not so much the song that took America by storm, but the hook line that started and finished the chorus "a title line that, detached from the song, could be turned into a racial slur, dismissing a whole people in one jeering epithet." [38] When Hogan died, Sanjek believes, "he was acknowledged to have been the greatest performer ever seen in the American black theater." Only in his forties, his death may have been "hastened by despair over the scorn shown him by members of this own race" because of the song most associated with coon songs. "When pressed, Hogan had always argued that the song had come along at a time when music needed a new direction, and, as a result of it success, the way was made easier for blacks to find a place in the world from which they had long been barred." Unfortunately, the song's success with a white audience did nothing

6 to endear the black songwriter personally. In a race riot in New York City in 1900, white mobs searched for black writers, including Ernest Hogan, to lynch. [39] Another black songwriter had a different kind of success in Gussie Davis, now largely forgotten, may have been the most published black songwriter of the1880s and 1890s, having written as many as 300 compositions, including minstrel songs ("Dance, Picaninnies, Dance"), coon songs ("The Coon I Suspected"), and sentimental ballads ("In the Baggage Coach Ahead"). In 1895, he won a second place ($500) award in a newspaper competition for America's best songwriter. [40] In 1896, Davis sold "In the Baggage Coach Ahead" to Howley, Haviland & Co. outright "for a few dollars." The firm offered it to "the queen of song" Imogene Comer, who used it on stage as a "show stopper" for the next three years. [41] It was also published in sheet music that year, and recorded. Southern calls Davis the "first black songwriter to succeed on Tin Pan Alley." [42] Like the sentimental mega hit "After the Ball," "Baggage Coach" features a pitiable male figure this one is a young man with a baby in his arms. It is, literally, "a dark stormy night" in which all the rail passengers have gone to bed except for the young man, whose head is "bowed-down." When the baby starts to cry "as though its poor heart would break," the other passengers begin to complain. "Stop its noise," an angry man demands. "Put it out," says another. Finally, a woman passenger asks where the mother is. "She's dead in the coach ahead," he replies sadly. Given the pathetic story, the song inexplicably moves into a refrain in which the music rolls and dances as if it were celebrating a wedding party (in the sentimental ballad the music is often at odds with lyrical content). In the third verse, he tells the story of the happy life he built with his "faithful and true" wife and how she died shortly after giving birth to their baby. "Every eye is filled with tears," now, and since there were "mothers and wives on that train," by the end of the song "Every woman arose to assist with the child." The sheet music cover for "Baggage Coach" [43] stands in marked contrast to "All Coons Look Alike." The title and the author's credit is in elegant red type decorated with white pearls with no textual or graphic information about the composer's race. The main image is a photograph of a passenger train traveling west with a baggage coach immediately behind the locomotive. In an insert, there is a photograph of a white vocalist with the caption "Sung by Jeremy Mahoney." Presumably the publishers permitted Mahoney to record the song first, but he did not have a hit with it. However, Dan Quinn, who "recorded some 2,500 titles in his 20-year career" did have a hit with "In the Baggage Coach Ahead" number 1 for five weeks beginning November 7, [44] "Most of Davis's songs during this time were waltzes which were featured by white minstrel singers around the United States, none of whom knew the writer's color," Sanjek says. One of his waltzes, "Irene, Goodnight," may be the original of the American standard said to have come from folk tradition. [45] In addition, according to a methodology devised by popular music chart authority Joel Whitburn, "Baggage Coach" ranked as the number 6 song for the entire year of [46] It is worth pointing out that "All Coons Look Alike To Me" was also recorded in 1896 by Len Spencer, a pioneer of the early recording era with some 65 hit songs. "Coons," however, charted for only three weeks with a peak position of number 2. [47] In terms of music publishing and songwriting, it appears that Gussie Davis is the final interface between the old-fashioned minstrel show on its way out and the vibrant black musical theater on its way in. Indeed, as Sanjek suggests, Gussie Davis's position as "America's top professional black songwriter" was soon replaced by the team of Bob Cole, J. Rosamund Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson. [48] Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook constituted another team. Within a three month period in 1898, Cole and Billy Johnson, his first collaborator, launched the historic A Trip To Coontown (an Off Broadway offering representing the first successful "full-length musical play written and produced by blacks"), and Cook and Dunbar produced Clorindy: The Origin Of The Cakewalk (a musical revue that opened "in a major house on Broadway"). [49] Coontown "represented a total break from the disjointed, plotless minstrel show," Toll says, and Clorindy "set

7 precedents" for ragtime rhythms, big choruses, and flamboyant dancing. [50] As the result of this musical theater success, Cole and the Johnson brothers entered into a multi-year exclusive contract with major publishers (Joseph W. Stern and Edward B. Marks) the first such contract ever signed between a New York publisher and black songwriters. [51] Not all racial barriers for African Americans were falling in the world of music publishing, of course. When the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) organized in 1914, the membership requirements were so rigorous that out of 170 eligible writers only one was African American: James Weldon Johnson. [52] In terms of the traditional music business (sheet music), the success of African Americans in the coon song era began with writers who were primarily professional live performers who came out of the minstrel show, such as James Bland and Ernest Hogan. By the mid-1890s, however, it was an occasional live performer who was primarily a writer that enjoyed the greatest success: Gussie Davis. By the end of the decade, the new generation of black musical talent tended to be dedicated writers: Cole, the Johnson brothers, Dunbar, and Cook. In the emerging new music business (sound recording), the seminal figure turned out to be an amateur performer who became, at best, an accidental writer named George Washington Johnson. Almost forgotten today by both music and African American historians, Johnson is not only "the first Negro to become widely known because of his recordings" [53] but "the recording industry's first widely-known star." [54] George Washington Johnson was born a slave in 1846 in Virginia. His parents were illiterate teenagers, but he was raised by a prosperous farmer's family as the servant and companion to their son. Johnson learned to read and write along with "Master Samuel," though this was clearly illegal, and when Samuel learned to play the flute George became an expert whistler of every tune he heard. Within the context of antebellum slavery he was treated very well. Johnson's father was set free when the boy was seven years old, making him free as well. He may have taught school after the War, but in the mid 1870s, when he was in his late twenties, he moved north. He appears in the New York City census of 1880, listing his occupation as "musician" and his residence in the Hell's Kitchen section of the city. He was a "street artist" who sang at ferryboat terminals, Tim Brooks says in Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, , "a poor black man who whistled and sang jaunty tunes for coins of passersby." Luckily for him, his whistling was the perfect talent for the early recording business. Stringed instruments, pianos, and women's voices recorded poorly given the primitive technology of the time, but brass instruments, flutes, and whistlers recorded well. Another element to his advantage was his race. The recording industry believed that Negro voices transcribed better than whites because there was a "certain sharpness or harshness about them." [55] The concept of a popular music chart was not developed by Billboard until the 1930s, but there are ways of deducing the popularity of recorded songs as early as Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories : The History of American Popular Music employs record industry periodicals (primarily Phonogram, Phonoscope, and Talking Machine World), sheet music sales figures, ASCAP and other lists of top songs, record label catalogs, and the research of Jim Walsh to establish an early pop chart. For more than forty years, Walsh wrote a monthly column called "Favorite Pioneer Recording Artists" that appeared in Hobbies Magazine. Still considered the authority on the acoustical era, Walsh focused first on popular recordings made before 1909 and later on all artists who recorded before [56] According to Whitburn, the first three number one hits in 1890 were instrumental recordings of Sousa marches by the Marine Band: "Semper Fidelis," "Washington Post," and "The Thunderer." The first number one song with lyrics was a coon song sung by a white

8 performer. [57] Len Spencer's "(Little) Liza Loves You," charted at number one for four weeks in March and April, 1891 the first of his forty-five solo hit records between 1890 and 1910 (he had an additional twenty comedy hits with his partner Ada Jones). [58] The second and third hit songs with lyrics (also coon songs) came a few months later from George Washington Johnson. "The Laughing Song" was the number one record for ten weeks in April, May, and June 1891, and "The Whistling Coon" was the number one record for five weeks in July and August. These songs marked the beginning of white America's prolonged fascination with Negro recorded musical talent. Alec Wilder suggests that black music "had to wait its opportunity to come directly to white audiences through Negro performers," and it was not until the late nineteenth century that this was possible. But when it happened, Negro music "truly got loose." [59] In "The Laughing Song," Johnson laughs infectiously in time with the music. The persona in the song is a "dandy darky" with "snowplow" heels and a mouth "like a trap." He could be the "King of Africa," he is told, but that remark makes him laugh until he cries. The repeated refrain is: Then I laugh ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, I couldn't stop my laughing ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, Ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, I couldn't stop my laughing ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. There are two historic firsts involved in Johnson's "The Laughing Song": it was the first appearance on the chart by an African American performer, and, since Johnson copyrighted the song, the first appearance on the chart by an African American composer. For many years there was doubt that a former slave like Johnson could have written "The Laughing Song," but Tim Brooks suggests that he had the necessary literacy. He believes the copyrighted song indicates "a talented, literate writer or someone who had a lot of help," but he notes that it also incorporates the same "'coon song' mockery of the black man." The laughter was an excellent hook, however, and the recording "quickly became the rage on coin machines around New York." [60] Whitburn says Johnson "reportedly recorded his famous infectious laugh some 40,000 times" before mass production was possible. [61] This is probably the song referred to in 1906 by Music Trades Review as the one he performed fifty-six times in a single day. [62] Talking Machine News, in an article titled "Laughing for a Living the Jolly John Nash of the States," claimed that Johnson had "the most infectious laughter in the country." He was the "original 'haw-haw' man, and practically every laughing song heard on the phonograph is sung by him. He even figures in some songs, which have only a few bars of laughing chorus or a laughing line." [63] Besides laughing, Johnson's other specialty was whistling. "The Whistling Coon," a conventional coon song with lyrics such as "funny queer old coon," "liver" lips, and "cranium like a big baboon" was a hit song interpolated into the play The Inspector, performed by Johnson himself for $25 a week. The hit song got interpolated into the play The Inspector, performed by Johnson himself for $25 a week. (He was able to get the generous salary because he said he could make $15 singing for the boats plus his recording money.) Unlike the debatable authorship of "The Laughing Song," "The Whistling Coon," is known to have been written by black minstrel Sam Devere, making George Washington Johnson the first black performer on the (white) pop chart and the first performer of any color to record material written by an African American. Brooks points out that in American race relations

9 "one agent of change that has been little recognized was the early recording industry." The new technology, he says, "provided opportunities for a minority that was excluded from other fields of endeavor" and was run by young, white entrepreneurs who "did not have the luxury of enforcing irrational social conventions like 'the color line.'" [64] The Columbia Phonograph Company of Washington covered "The Whistling Coon" with a U.S. Marine Band instrumental, with a white "artistic whistler," and then with another white performer, though no other versions succeeded like Johnson's originals. In the 1890s, songs were not yet associated with particular performances by a singer, so any company that was first to the market, or cheapest, had the advantage. Brooks calls the manner in which the New Jersey company fought off competition for Johnson's songs "a daring strategy in those race-conscious days. It not only publicized the fact that Johnson was black but even printed pictures revealing his very dark complexion. Johnson's obvious good nature (he was a 'safe Negro'), and the comedy of a black man mocking his own race, won over listeners everywhere." Johnson's two specialties "became instant standards, closely identified with the emerging entertainment phonograph. They never failed to entertain and their novelty never seemed to wear out; anyone operating a phonograph parlor had to have them." [65] George Washington Johnson may have done his first recording work in Newark, New Jersey for the United State Phonograph Company (New Jersey Records), or it could have been in Washington, D.C. for Columbia. He "seems to have been available equally" to the New Jersey Company in Newark, to the Edison Company in West Orange, to Victor in Philadelphia or Camden, and for the Columbia operation in New York. His records were also listed in catalogs by the Bettini Company, Kansas City Talking Machine Company, the Talking Company of Chicago, Edison, U.S. Everlasting Company, Berliners, Wonder Bell, and Zonophone. Though he recorded many songs, his "Two Great Specialties" were "Whistling Coon" and "Laughing Song." By 1894, the Edison catalog alone estimated the sales of these songs at "over 25,000." As Jim Walsh says, "And Johnson had made those records, remember, by singing them over and over, with not more than five copies turned out at a time!" [66] Brooks estimates that Johnson might have been able to produce sixty to one hundred "saleable cylinders" in an afternoon and that he must have done eighty sessions a year at four dollars per session ($320 per year) to get the 25,000 figure over 3 1/2 years. "References in ," he says, "suggest that Johnson was then earning from ten to one hundred dollars per week for his phonographic work" plus cash from his street singing. The average white worker at the time was making five hundred dollars per year. Other artists had larger bodies of work (Len Spencer had 140 titles in the 1892 New Jersey catalog, including minstrel records with Johnson's laughter), but no one sold so many copies of a single title. "His fame," Brooks says, "was based on two numbers. By the end of the decade, the sheet music for "The Laughing Song" claimed more than 50,000 records sold. By that time Len Spencer had sold 62,000 records, but he had released an astonishing 600 titles in a variety of styles that diluted his influence. [67] Johnson thrived in the 1890s, becoming famous as a hit-producing recording artist. If there were a "Pioneer Recording Artists' Hall of Fame," Walsh believes, George Washington Johnson should be in it. [68] However, his career declined in the 1900s, and he died destitute in His hit songs on America's pop chart may have been groundbreaking, but he has all but been forgotten as America's first black recording artist. For one thing, his two hits pale in comparison to Bert Williams' thirty-three hits from 1904 to Moreover, his career seems a clear illustration of how narrow the parameters were for professional black musicians in the early recording era. After all, the success he enjoyed must be measured by the mainstream audience's insistence that he play to the crude racial stereotypes that it demanded. His

10 successor, Bert Williams, a light-skinned, urbane, and sophisticated West Indian who spoke flawless English, could not expand the parameters either. In 1910, as Johnson's life began a serious slide, Bert Williams had already registered fifteen pop hits. While there is no trace of Johnson in the New York City census of 1910 (Brooks believes he was probably sleeping in the backroom of Len Spencer's office building), [69] Bert Williams could be found nightly at the Ziegfeld Follies, becoming Broadway's first "regularly featured" black performer. [70] There are, however, some similarities. Like Johnson, Williams emerged through the coon song: he and his partner George Walker came to popularity by billing themselves as "The Two Real Coons." [71] There was also commonality in terms of the performers' repertoire deemed acceptable by the mainstream audience. Johnson's "Laughing Song" and "Whistling Coon" were his only recordings to succeed, and Williams' "Nobody" a more dignified song lyrically but a coon song nonetheless eclipsed every other song he recorded or performed. "Nobody" became a hit in 1905, biographer Ann Charters explains, "and audiences responded so enthusiastically that he was forced to include it for the next seventeen years in nearly every stage appearance." [72] Late in his career, Williams wrote in American Magazine that before he got through with "Nobody" he wished those who had written the words and music (he had written the music himself) "had been strangled or drowned or talked to death." He had tried to replace the song, he said, but "audiences seemed to want nothing else." [73] There is no question that Williams had the greater success and made considerably more money. In 1910 his annual earnings were estimated at $25,000 to $40,000, [74] but after shaking hands with his white fans and accommodating their autograph requests, he still could not ride the elevator at his hotel or enter the dining room. [75] "I am often treated with an air of personal and social condescension by the gentleman who sweeps out my dressingroom," he told a reporter, observing that America was "the only civilization in all the world where a man's color makes a difference, other matters being regarded as equal." [76] As a stage performer he was never "able to leave off the burnt cork mask, the make-up he hated," one reason that fellow Follies star W. C. Fields observed, "Bert Williams is the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew." [77] Though the 1890s was an era of severe limits for African Americans, whose social and civil rights were rapidly shrinking, aspiring black songwriters and performers did enjoy some notable measure of professional successes. Black performers, we have seen, were more of less obligated to perpetuate the racial conventions of the minstrel tradition that white audiences expected and demanded, but they established their permanent presence on the white stage. The extent to which the consuming public knew the ethnicity of songwriters seems to have depended on the racial content of the song itself. If an African American created a "dignified" work (by the Victorian standards of the day), race was virtually erased from public view: the sheet music cover of Gussie Davis' sentimental "Baggage Coach Ahead" featured, besides a train, a photograph of a white vocalist. When a songwriter's race was identified to the consuming public, blackness was exaggerated in cartoonish and degrading ways. Ernest Hogan's career as a performer and the gross caricatures on the sheet music of "All Coons Look Alike To Me" provide examples. In the new field of recorded music, the ethnicity of the black songwriter was consciously used to verify authenticity, as in the case of George Washington Johnson's "The Whistling Coon" and "The Laughing Song." Johnson may have been "the original haw-haw man" and the "Jolly John Nash of the States," but he seems also to have been the poster child for Paul Laurence Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask":

11 We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. [78] Nevertheless, Arnold Shaw concludes that musically the coon song was "a positive influence in popular music." Unlike the sentimental ballads of the time ("smaltzy" waltzes like "After the Ball" and "The Baggage Coach Ahead"), coon songs had "verve, drive, buoyancy, humor, and syncopation." They were a "phase" of Ragtime songs, contributing "excitement and fresh, vibrant sound to popular music." [79] Indeed, Charles Hamm writes of the "difficulty in separating songs now thought of as ragtime songs from 'coon' songs." [80] Even the instrumental ragtime song of the era was of mixed origin. "It might represent a piano arrangement of a coon song or the 'ragging' of a nonsyncopated piece (vocal or instrumental)," Southern says, "or it might be an original composition." [81] It was also, according to some mainstream critics, abominable and outrageous. In 1899 the Musical Courier editorialized: "A wave of vulgar, filthy and suggestive music has inundated the land. The pabulum of theatre and summer hotel orchestras is coon music. Nothing but ragtime prevails and the cakewalk with its obscene posturings, its lewd gestures. It is artistically and morally depressing and should be suppressed by press and pulpit." [82] Finally and this might represent a kind of cultural progress by the twentieth century coon song lyrics broadened and became more democratic. When World War I began, Tin Pan Alley popular songs had expanded the number of ethnic groups to ridicule and exploit. Besides African Americans, the new songs featured stereotypical protagonists who were Irish, Italian, German, Jewish, or merely country "rubes." [83] By that time the coon song craze was clearly over, and ragtime, initially an African American innovation, had become, according to Whitcomb, "white-faced in both song and dance." [84] More importantly, however, the musical excitement, syncopation, and dance rhythms of the coon song and ragtime served to inform the African American contribution to the jazz age that was just around the corner. Notes 1. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford UP, 1955; reprint, 1974), 70 (page citation is to the reprint edition). 2. Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1993), James H. Dormon, "Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The 'Coon Song' Phenomenon of the Gilded Age, American Quarterly 40 (December 1988): Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, vol. 2, From 1790 to 1909 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 279.

12 5. Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated History of American Words and Phrases (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976; reprint, Touchstone, 1979), 54 (page citations are to the reprint edition). 6. Dorman, Flexner, Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang, 2d supp. ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1975), David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), See (accessed 16 April 2007). 11. Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse (New York: Dial Press, 1970), Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974; reprint, 1977), 195 (page citation is to the reprint edition). 13. Alec Wilder, American Popular Songs: The Great Innovators , ed. James T. Maher (New York: Oxford UP, 1972), Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Songs in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979; reprint, 1983) 268 (page citations are to the reprint edition). 15. Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001; Norton paperback, 2005), 487 (page citations are to the reprint edition). 16. Robert C. Toll, On With the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), Hamm, David Ewen, All the Years of American Popular Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1977), See University of Colorado Digital Sheet Music Collection, (accessed 16 April 2007). 20. Sanjek, Ewen, Wilder, xxix. 23. Ian Whitcomb, After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 4-6.

13 24. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), Ewen, Oliver Ditson of Boston seems to have been the main publisher of James Bland songs if extent versions in the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University are any indication. 27. Wilder, Ewen, Sanjek, Southern, Jonathan Gill, "Hogan, Ernest (Crowders, Reuben)," Encylopedia of African-American Culture and History, ed. Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), Sanjek, Southern, Sanjek, My source for the cover was an E-Bay auction site, which pictured several pages of the sheet music (the seller was asking $295). 36. Sanjek, Playing the numbers was popular in Harlem and other black communities at the time. Considered the "poor man's stock market," correctly picking one number in a series of three digits brought an 8-to-1 return on investment. Hitting the number straight (all three digits) brought a 600-to-1 return. See (accessed 16 April 2007). 38. Crawford, Sanjek, Ibid., Ewen, Southern, See the Historic Sheet Music Collection at Duke University: (accessed 16 April 2007).

14 44. Whitburn, Joel. Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories : The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, 1986), Sanjek, Whitburn, Ibid., Sanjek, Southern, Toll, On With the Show, Sanjek, Southern, Jim Walsh, "George Washington Johnson," Hobbies, September 1944, Whitburn, Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, (Urbana: Illinois UP, 2004), Jim Walsh's papers and his collection of early discs, cylinders, and phonographs of the acoustical era are at the Library of Congress. See (accessed 16 April 2007). 57. Whitburn, Ibid., Wilder, Brooks, Whitburn, Jim Walsh, "In Justice to George Washington Johnson, Part I," Hobbies, January 1971, Walsh, "George Washington Johnson," Brooks, Ibid., Jim Walsh, "In Justice to George Washington Johnson, Part II," Hobbies, February 1971, 37.

15 67. Brooks, Walsh, "In Justice to George Washington Johnson, Part I," Brooks, Eric Ledell Smith, Bert Williams: A Biography of the Pioneer Black Comedian (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992), xi. 71. Ann Charters, Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (New York: Macmillan, 1970; reprint, Da Capo Press, 1983), 27 (page citations are to the reprint edition). 72. Ibid., Bert Williams, "The Comic Side of Trouble," American Magazine, January 1918, Booker T. Washington, "Bert Williams," American Magazine 70 (1910): Charters, "Genius Defeated By Race," Literary Digest, 25 March 1922, Charters, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life, with an Introduction by W. D. Howells (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1898), Arnold Shaw, Black Popular Music in America (New York: Schirmer, 1986), Hamm, Southern, Quoted in Whitcomb, Crawford, Whitcomb, 25.