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Until recently, scholars exploring blackface minstrelsy or the accompanying "coon song craze" of the 1890s have felt the need to apologize, either for the demeaning stereotypes of African Americans embedded in the art forms or for their own interest in studying the phenomena. Robert Toll, one of the first critics to examine minstrelsy seriously, was so appalled by its inherent racism that he focused his 1 974 work primarily on debunking the stereotypes; Sam Dennison, another pioneer, did likewise with coon songs. Richard Martin and David Wondrich claim of minstrelsy that "the roots of every strain of American music- ragtime, jazz, the blues, country music, soul, rock and roll, even hip-hop - reach down through its reeking soil" (5). Marshall Wyatt opines that "most coon songs rate scant attention" (9). Even Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, compilers of a large and extremely useful volume on black traveling shows and coon songs, are careful to mention that they "take no pleasure" in the repeated use of the word coon in the "ignobly dubbed" coon songs (3-4). When I mentioned to an African-American friend that I was writing an essay on black performers of coon songs, he offered to find me a bodyguard.
In the past decade, however, thanks in large part to groundbreaking research on the AfricanAmerican musical theater and blackface performers like Bert Williams and George Walker, scholars have come to recognize that blackface and coon song performances by African Americans signify in rich and complex ways. In the decision by Bert Williams to perform with Walker as one of "Two Real Coons," for example, one finds a West Indian man performing a white-created racial caricature of an African- American person and billing it as "real" (Chude-Sokei 5-8). Authenticity evaporates. What might at first seem to be a mere reiteration of the deplorable history of racism becomes a profound challenge to its foundational parameters.
Louis Chude-Sokei, W. T. Lhamon, and Karen Sotiropoulos are among those recent scholars who have argued persuasively that coon songs as performed by black Americans constituted not simple minstrelsy or a capitulation to the forces popular consumer culture, but a form of political activism, a way for young, cosmopolitan black musicians and performers of the 1890s and earlytwentieth century to challenge...