[Dixielandjazz] For those interested in "Pre-Jazz" History - book review

[David Richoux]

This was posted on another list I am on - (currently reading the  
sequel to this book - "Ragged But Right" that I am finding quite  
interesting! )


Dave Richoux
================================


[IN] Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889 -  
1895
By Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
University of Mississippi Press (Jackson, MS), 2002, ISBN 1578064996,  
432
pages, hbk., $75.00

Out of Sight is the first book to comprehensively examine the burgeoning
African American cultural milieu, emerging shortly after Reconstruction,
which resulted in nearly every American popular music genre. The years
encompassed were some of the worst ever as far as race relations
nationwide, but, somehow, the diversely tentacled development of black
music during this brief span of years engendered not only the birth of
vaudeville and the cross-racial ragtime craze but resulted in the  
emergence
of an entire African American entertainment industry. Such
taken-for-granteds as barbershop quartets, brass and cornet bands,
burlesque, mandolin clubs, stand-up comedians and circus sideshow
performers all had their origins during this fin de seicle period.
Clever authors Abbott and Seroff have assembled, in diary with  
commentary
style, a cornerstone study based on thousands of contemporaneous, music
locused press commentaries. These are preponderantly from such colorful
African American community newspapers as Indianapolis’s Freeman, New
Orleans’s Weekly Pelican and the long lived Detroit Plaindealer. They  
offer
not only eye-witness accounts but attach faces and personalities to the
superstars of the day: the various concert diva Black Patti’s, sightless
pre-ragtime pianists Blind Tom and Blind Boone, Frederick Loudin and his
influential Fisk sanctified singers and pioneering circus carnival owner
Eph Williams all come to life.
This heretofore totally neglected slice of history (presented in
year-by-year overview) reveals, often in caricature-driven fashion, the
origins of everything from jubilee singing, cakewalkers and coon  
shows to
pickaninny or kid groups and street singers to string bands and
“exotic”dances like the hully gully.
The uproar caused by the extravagant 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, with its
controversial “Colored Folks Day,” and 1895’s sensational “Black  
America”
(an outdoor theme-park in Brooklyn, New York comprised of “500 Southern
Colored People in a typical plantation village of 150 cabins” along with
the saga of the genesis of black Gospel music make for particularly
fascinating reading.
Likewise, the tale of the permutation of African American minstrel  
troupes
into more modern, “authentic” aggregations such as the Rabbit Foot
Minstrels and “Silas Green from New Orleans” that actually traversed the
South into the 1950s. They presented a wide variety of pre-ragtime  
sounds
that morphed into vaudeville, musical comedy, rural blues, “folk” music
and, eventually, the Jazz Age. Accompanying the text are 168 halftone
photos, offering visual snapshots that further open the door into the  
roots
of Twentieth century black music.
Incidentally, the book’s title refers not only to the actual 1890  
origin of
that presumed bebop generated expression (when sheet music publisher  
Will
Rossiter introduced his latest bid for fame, “It’s ‘Way Out of  
Sight”) but,
more importantly, to the buried history, with attendant cultural
surroundings, that Abbott and Seroff explicate so well.  
Indispensable. — GvonT

Sule Greg Wilson
www.myspace.com/sulegwilson