The depiction of African Americans and rasism in early 20th century music

Understanding African American Racism through Black Music

Black Music in the backdrop of White Music

During the late Victorian era , American culture all but demanded that African American musicians re-evaluate their place in society and decide how best to position themselves for the future . The post-emancipation era scramble to dominate new representations of the meaning of blackness and whiteness would ensure that any attempt by black musicians to nurture their personal commitments to their art would involve public negotiation with various pre-conceived notions of the meaning of black bodies , black culture

, black art and black entertainment

In this era , when the very notion of an American ' national style of music was in its infancy , the prevailing American image of African Americans ' musical culture derived from several unflattering stereotypes , all of which involved white re-affirmations of racial hierarchy . On the blackface minstrel stage , grotesquely caricatured depictions of failed black manhood were presented in comic sketches which served to assure working class white audiences that blacks ' dreams of equality as freedmen would surely be unfulfilled (Mahar 62 . In the realm of popular song , the Ethiopian Songs ' of Stephen Foster , with their dark subjects pining for the antebellum plantation South , remained a dominant source of white Americans ' image of black culture throughout the century . Both blackface minstrelsy and Stephen Foster 's melodies originated primarily within northern white antebellum working-class culture . After the Civil War , however , African American performers blackened their own faces and toured in minstrel troupes whose repertoires only gradually featured less stereotypical routines (Wondrich 21 . Meanwhile , African American songsuch as James Bland proved adept at writing songs in Foster 's vein . When African Americans did receive an opportunity to perform on the concert stage , as was the case with the Fisk Jubilee singers and antebellum sensations Blind Tom ' Bethune and Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield , white Americans generally received them as curiosities whose talents for music were seen as an uncanny ' natural phenomenon rather than as harbingers of future African American artistry (Southern , 103-106 "Sticking with the Music of My Own People : Manhattan Ragtime and the Quest for Racial Authenticity in Black Musicianship

African-American popular composers shared the ambition of rising above the coon song ' genre . Among them was Scott Joplin , a Midwestern composer billed as the King of Ragtime . In May 1903 , Will Monroe Cook was in London touring with his musical Joplin was in St . Louis rehearsing a 32-member cast for a production of the first genuine ragtime opera . While news advertisements and sheet music covers of the era frequently touted coon songs ' with the facetious label of ragtime opera , Joplin 's A Guest of Honor was the genuine article While the libretto and most of the music from this opera has been lost Joplin 's biographer has established that the Guest of Honor ' of the title was most likely Booker T . Washington , and his celebrated 1901 White House dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt was most likely the subject of the libretto . Unfortunately , despite hints in a Sedalia Missouri news...