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Finding A Trip to Coontown, by Krystyn R. Moon
By 1897, most American audiences had had an opportunity to see African Americans perform on the stage during the previous thirty years. Hired by European American agents and managers, they were expected to reproduce many of the songs and skits that had been made famous in blackface minstrelsy in new theatrical genres, such as variety and vaudeville. Others were forming their own concert companies to do a variety of popular and high-art music, and writing and singing ersatz spirituals, "coon songs" (i.e., black dialect numbers), and sentimental Victorian tear-jerkers. These had all become popular thanks to writers/performers such as Ernest Hogan, Sam Lucas, and Gussie Davis, among others.1 It is within this context that Bob Cole and Billy Johnson's A Trip to Coontown first appeared on the stage during the 1897-98 season. Although African Americans had written numerous short theatrical and musical works, none had written a full-length musical production. To add to its historical significance, A Trip to Coontown was performed, directed, and produced by African Americans, an astounding feat in an era where few independent theaters could even consider taking a chance on such a production. Unfortunately, the play-like so many other nineteenth-century African American documents and artifacts-was lost, and scholars could only make conjectures (based mainly on newspaper reviews) about what it looked and sounded like.
My interest in finding A Trip to Coontown began when Jack Tchen, director of Asian/Pacific/American Studies at New York University, contacted me about writing a short essay on "The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon" (1897), a song that was originally written for the play. My own research on the dynamics of American Orientalism had uncovered the practice of African Americans in yellowface starting in the late nineteenth century, but I had not thoroughly explored this particular song. "The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon" is an extraordinary piece of music about a series of comedic mishaps during a wedding of a Chinese immigrant woman and an African American man. Because the song was written and performed by African Americans, it was more than a comedic ditty that perpetuated African American and Chinese immigrant stereotypes. To address interracial marriage in a period when African American...