Word: minstrelling
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...latest work Jumpers. Jumpers is now being produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where the current Boston production also originated. There is a question of what was observed by several individuals at the scene of a crime, and the discussion of whether it was, say, a black minstrel with one leg or a white-bearded old man with a "seeing-eye tortoise" is pursued in tightly logical but ridiculous dialogue at which Robert Vaughn and Katherine McGrath, as a pair of entertainers just back from an exhibit of Magritte paintings, excel. It is, of course, a theatrical equivalent...
Liberia's ramshackle capital of Monrovia used to look a little like a gigantic Mississippi riverboat minstrel show. The men at the Masonic Lodge dressed in top hats and black morning coats; the ladies at the Baptist church wore flowing skirts and bandannas; and everybody spoke in an exaggerated Deep South drawl. In these mannerisms they imitated both their forebears, freedmen who returned from the U.S. in 1822 and subsequently founded Africa's first republic, and their president, William Vacanarat Shadrach ("Uncle Shad") Tubman, who ran the country with a kind of dandified despotism from 1944 until...
...revival, Nonesuch now appears to be trying the same trick for the composer of Old Black Joe and Old Folks at Home. The company deserves to succeed. Foster (1826-64) was America's first great songwriter, and there is much more in his song bag than just the minstrel ballads with Uncle Tomish lyrics by which he is usually remembered. There is, for example, the sprightly If You've Only Got a Moustache, which could have been written by Schubert. Also Wilt Thou Be Gone, Love?, an Italianate duet for Romeo and Juliet. And many more, including...
Married. James Taylor, 24, minstrel of rock music who helped lead devotees of the high-decibel '60s toward gentler sounds in the '70s (Sweet Baby James, Fire and Rain, Mud Slide Slim); and Carly Simon, 27, leggy singer of the slick-folk, gutsy-ballad school (That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be, Anticipation) and offspring of the publishing Simon (& Schuster); both for the first time; in Manhattan...
...shirring of their own, white scholars have concocted a variety of theories to explain the speech patterns of Afro-Americans H. L. Mencken wrote in his influential The American Language. "The Negro dialect as we know it today seems to have been formulated by the songwriters for the minstrel shows." Mencken, in his typically culturally-biased manner, simply assumed that blacks were incapable of constructing their own language, and were only able to mimic what they heard in traveling sideshows. But Mencken's theory is generous in comparison with the racist assertions of some of his white colleagues. One school...