003 Early Blackface Minstrelsy and the Racialized Other

This episode covers a difficult but central part of the history of American popular music: the rise of blackface minstrelsy in the late 1820s and early 1830s. In order to come to grips with the emergence of what was widely considered the first truly "American" form of music and theatrical entertainment, this episode explores the contradictory ways of understanding Blackness that suffused the practice of African transatlantic slavery, discusses the political and social situation of working-class Whites and free Blacks, the role of Irish immigration in early minstrelsy, and the formation of two American minstrel archetypes: Jim Crow and Zip Coon.