Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents a long excerpt from the 2017 Journal article by Maya Brown about the song "Jim Along Josie" as an example of a black faced minstrel song that became a play party song.
The content of this post is presented for folkloric, cultural, and educational purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Maya Brown for her research and writing and thanks all those who are quoted in this post. Thanks also to the online publisher of this journal article.
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Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2013/08/examples-of-dance-josey-cant-dance.html for the closely related 2013 pancocojams post entitled "Examples of "Dance Josey" & "Can't Dance Josey" Songs".
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JOURNAL ARTICLE EXCERPT
From https://oaks.kent.edu/sites/default/files/journals/2/articles/45/submission/stamped.pdf Excellence In Performing Arts Research, Volume 4, 2017
"Jim Along Josey": Play-Parties and the Survival of a Blackface Minstrel Song
by Maya Brown
Abstract
The play-party was a social activity once practiced in rural America amongst Protestants in the latter half of the nineteenth century. With a desire to circumvent the church’s strict no dancing rules, as well as avoid reprimand, play-party adolescents adapted the lyrics and instrumentation of blackface minstrel songs to create a vocal music to accompany their playparty games. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that play-parties offered the space for the continuation and reinterpretation of minstrel practices, particularly song repertoire.
In this paper, the children’s song “Jim Along Josey” is used as a case study, first to reveal the role of songs in play-parties, and secondly to demonstrate the process of musical reinterpretation that characterized this social event. The study also reveals that minstrel songs such as this have survived within the genre of children’s music due to the reinterpretation conducted by play-party adolescents.
Introduction
Although American blackface minstrelsy is no longer a socially acceptable form of entertainment in the United States, remnants of its musical characteristics linger in the songs frequently taught to children.
Some of the most nostalgic songs in children’s music repertoire— i.e. “Jimmy Crack Corn,” “The Little Brown Jug,” “Camptown Races,” “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me,” “Oh, Susanna,” and “Do Your Ears Hang Low?”—were at one time sung in blackface performance.
All too often, American children encounter former minstrel songs in elementary schools, summer camps, children’s television shows and music albums rarely with the opportunity to know that these songs were once performed on the minstrel stage.
The minstrel show was a popular nineteenth century stage performance, which entertained audiences by exploiting African American stereotypes. These productions contained overtly prejudice themes that were, and continue to be, detrimental to the black individual. The minstrel song was particularly dehumanizing for its derogatory lyrics that aided in the creation of fictitious African American caricatures.
Interestingly, it seems contemporary children’s songs based on this genre have omitted these offenses. Upon comparing the lyrics of the two genres, it is observed that an adaptation, perhaps even an expurgation occurred to render the song appropriate for a child. By tracing the history of the children’s song “Jim Along Josey,” this paper hopes to reveal how the former minstrel song has managed to survive into the modern day.
[...]
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[...]
Amid the folk genres collected throughout America was the children’s song. According to ethnomusicologists Patricia Shehan Campbell and Trevor Wiggins, children’s songs appeared to be of great interest to scholars from the end of the nineteenth century to the last years of the twentieth century, and folklorists valued children’s song as a source of social expression and cultural material much like folk songs.
Benjamin A Botkin And Play-Party Songs
One such folklorist was Benjamin A. Botkin, who in 1937 published his doctoral dissertation about the American play-party.
In this work, Botkin collected over 1,000 variations of 128 play-party songs from students at the University of Oklahoma. Botkin began his research in the early 1930s with the focus of collecting and preserving an oral tradition that was on the verge of dying. After conducting his research, however, it became apparent to him that the playparty was a unique form of social behavior; one that would intrigue scholars for years to come.
[…]
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[…]
Botkin identified the value of collecting play-party songs and believed they provided the key to understanding American rural cultures and communities. As he described in the quote above, play-parties were multilayered social events that included dance-like movements, songs and games. They were exclusive to America, but known to thrive in the frontier and midwestern regions.
It was in these isolated settings where Protestant sects prohibited dancing, yet encouraged play-party activity.
Play-parties are often compared to nineteenth century singing schools or literary societies because they offered families who lived throughout the countryside a sense of community and entertainment. According to Botkin, play-parties would occur in “the front room or yard of the farm or ranch house, though sometimes the school-house or school-yard was used.”
Participants would play-party as an activity; this phrase describes the act of playing party games (i.e., singing, marching, and dancing games). Those who engaged in the play-party games included the “young people of high school and marriageable age and young married couples,” while older people and young children served as spectators.
Individuals of courting age were particularly interested in the games because they wanted to partake in social activities involving physical and social interactions with the opposite sex.
Like many children’s songs of this era, play-party songs were disseminated through oral tradition. Lyrics of the same song were varied depending on where the lyrics were collected.
[…]
Using Botkin’s terms, play-partiers either based their game songs on older traditional pieces (English and Scottish songs) or newer indigenous pieces (American songs).
Participants often used melodies of the most popular vocal tunes of the era, including blackface minstrel tunes, and change the lyrics to describe the games they were playing.
Botkin theorized that play-party teens specifically chose minstrel songs to create their game songs for three reasons: (1) most of them were jovial banjo or fiddle tunes, whose airs were used for dancing, (2) their
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jesting and clowning had an irresistible appeal for the play-party in its mood
of rambling nonsense, with its double taste for silly jingle and
burlesque banter, and (3) they had the advantage of wide diffusion by travelling minstrel-troupes
[in addition to minstrel song sheet music sales]
Once adapted, minstrel songs survived as fragments of choruses and verses, “or crossed and amalgamated with one another with other songs.”
The most notable minstrel songs that were modified into the American play-party songs were “Old Dan Tucker,” “The Little Brown Jug,” “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “Jump Jim Crow,” and “Jim Along Josey.”
American Blackface Minstrel Songs
American blackface minstrelsy was a form of comedic theatrical performance most recognized today for its use of burnt cork make-up, a type of black body paint that white men and women used on their skin to portray demeaning African American stereotypes.
This stage tradition was first performed in the United States as early
as 1822, when British comedian
Charles Mathews created a solo act that parodied his
experience in the South by combining skits, stump speeches and black songs.
By the end of the decade, the American performer Thomas “Daddy” Rice was portraying the character Jim Crow; an uncouth yet happy-go-lucky southern plantation slave. Rice organized the solo act by adding black dialect plantation songs, virtuosic dancing, banjo and fiddle music and crude humor. Another character who appeared on stage during this time an urban freed slave by the name of Zip Coon. The creation of blackface characters such as these, along with Mammy and the picanny, formed pervasive stereotypes often associated with black imagery and behavior.
The classic age of minstrelsy in the United States lasted from the 1840s to the 1870s. The solo act had evolved into duos, trios and eventually quartets that performed during the interludes of theater performances and circus acts. In 1843, The Virginia Minstrels performed the first organized minstrel show and created the standard instrumentation for the quartet ensemble: the fiddle, banjo, bones (castanets constructed from cow bone) and tambourine. Minstrelsy had developed into a full variety show incorporating plantation ballads, instrumental interludes, dance breaks and full chorus numbers.
The music performed on the minstrel stage was catchy to sing, easy to play and fun to dance to. Minstrel songs derived from British dance tunes and resembled songs from the African American tradition. The song form displayed a verse/refrain design where a soloist would sing the verses and a chorus joined in for the refrain. Eventually, the refrain was sung in four party harmony.
The fiddle and banjo eventually became synonymous with the most popular dance crazes of the era; i.e. the Cakewalk, the Walk-Around, the Breakdown, the Buck-And-Wing, the
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Essence Dance, and Jumping Jim Crow.
The irregular rhythms beloved by audiences were created by the animated strumming of the banjo. They enjoyed them so much that minstrel songs often inserted dance breaks at the end of every chorus.
By the mid-1800s, the minstrel entertainment industry noticed a market for selling the minstrel song through music scores. Instrumental parts written for banjo, fiddle and the piano became accessible to people who wanted to sing and dance to their favorite minstrel tune”
[…]
Case Study
By comparing the original lyrics of “Jim Along Josey” with the play-party versions, one can begin to understand why the song adaptation had occurred. The song was originally written in 1838 by the minstrel performer Edward Harper, and became a hit as a popular fiddle and dance tune. In his book Scandalize My Name: Black Imagery in American Popular Music, Sam Dennison suggests the first
performance of “Jim Along Josey” was sung by Harper in a blackface drama called The Free Ni--er*
of New York.
The first music score of the song—written for piano—was published in the same year. As shown in Figure 1, the cover reveals that the song was once sung by the “Eminent Professor” John M. Smith, who marketed himself to his audiences as “the celebrated delineator of Etheopean character.”
Blackface minstrelsy was also commonly referred to as Ethiopian (or in this case spelled Etheopean)
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minstrelsy throughout the course of the nineteenth century. The sheet music publication distributed the song to a wider audience.
[…]
Oral tradition gave rise to the many interpretations of the lyrics over time.
The original lyrics of “Jim Along Josey” contain racial slurs and allusions that are inappropriate for a child today. These African American stereotypes and themes were commonly applied in minstrel songs and sung in what was perceived as an African American dialect:
I’se from Lucianna as you all know,
Dar where Jim along Josey’s all de go,
Dem ni--ars* all rise when de bell does ring,
And dis is de song da dey do sing.
Hey get along, get along Josey,
Hey get along, get along Jo!
The minstrel character, Jim Along Josey, was always represented as a dandy; a Northern freed slave who pretentiously attempted to dress in the latest aristocratic fashion. Additionally, this caricature often attempted to self-identify as whiter than other black individuals.
The second verse describes this character:
Oh! When I gets dat new coat which I expects to hab soon,
Likewise a new pair tight-kneed trousaloon,
Den I walks up and down Broadway wid my Susanna,
And de white folks will take me to be Santa Anna.
Hey get along, get
along Josey,
Hey get along, Jim
along Joe!
According to Botkin, the chorus is using the American slang phrase hey get along which is an instruction for one to move out of the way. This phrase is also synonymous with the expression to move along.
In addition to the provided dance break at the end of the piece, the chorus lyrics instructs the dancer to move. This dance was a form of breakdown which was associated with the African American folk dances that often occurred on plantations.
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Of course, minstrel dances were never to be participated in by the play-party
youth because dance was forbidden amongst rural American
Protestants.
One former play-partier, Vance Randolph, recalled the church’s condemnation for all
dance related activities:
Less than a dozen years ago the people of my own village
refused to allow a children's dancing-class in the town, and I myself heard one of our
leading citizens declare that he would rather see his daughter dead than to have her dance,
even in her own home. But the play-party, it appears, is a different matter altogether,
and even the most fanatical religionists see no particular harm in it. The party-games
are really dances, of course, but there is no orchestra; the players furnish their own simple
music by singing lustily as they go through the intricate figures.
Within the context of
the play-party, these movements were not regarded as sin. This is further highlighted by
former play-party participant Mrs. L. D. Ames:
These play-parties were really dances. The players did not
dance, however, to the music of instruments, but kept time with various steps to their
own singing. But they were not called dances: they were called simply parties. The better
class of people in the country did not believe in dancing. Regular dances, where the music
was furnished by a " fiddler," were held, for the most part, only in the
homes of the rough element.
[…]
The preference for vocal accompaniment at play parties arose from the European and North American history or folklore that associated particular instruments with the Devil and evil spirits. Thus, aside dances, instrumentation in play-party contexts also had negative connotations
In his chapter entitled, “The Devil, the
Fiddle, and Dancing,” folklorist Herbert Halpert describes this ideology:
The Devil is known for his skill in playing the fiddle, an
instrument which some reports say he invented. Sometimes he has contests with human
fiddlers. If he teaches people to
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play, they become superlative performers. When he or his pupils are invited to play at dances, their music may be compulsive; people who hear it are forced to dance. Sometimes they cannot stop dancing until they die—unless the spell is broken, frequently by religious mean. Instruments he or his pupils have played may continue to play themselves after the pupil’s death.
[…]
The fear of the fiddle’s evil connotations engendered a creative space, the play-party, where vocal accompaniment could replace the fiddle’s function. On the performance of dance movements, one play-party version of “Jim Along Josey,” found in Iowa, describes physical movement and the embrace of another participant. Also, notice the use of the spelling “Josie” as opposed to “Josey” and the use of the phrase “Get along,” instead of “Jim along.” This illustrates how this song was orally transmitted and therefore required no universal spelling of the song lyrics:
Hey, come a get along,
Get along, Josie.
Hey, come a get along.
Get along Jo.
If I was single and wanted a beau,
I’d fly to the arms of Jim along Jo.
A very similar version of the song was collected by Botkin in his dissertation. As mentioned before, these lyrics were collected in Oklahoma:
Hey, come a get
along,
Get along, Josie.
Hey, come a get
along.
Get along Jo.
All you girls that
want a beau,
Fall in the arms of
the calico.
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The movements of this next version of “Jim Along Josey ” found in Eastern Illinois, reflect a tag game that results in the male and female hugging as a prize. Also, these lyrics have added reference to animals and nonsense scenarios, which reflect the children’s song aesthetic:
Cat’s in the cream jar,
Run, girls, run!
Fire in the mountains,
Fun, boys, fun!
Hey, Jim along, Jim
along Josie!
Hey, Jim along, Jim
Along, Jo.
For this version, participants form a circle of couples with the boy standing to the rightside of the girl. Once the singing commenced a girl leaves her spot in the circle to run to the other side. As she attempts to return to her original spot, a boy across the circle tries to catch her. If he accomplishes this, he wins the embrace with the girl. This could also be described as a tag game, so therefore the movements in this song could be applied to other play-party tag game games too.
This next set of lyrics is from Western Nebraska and while the song is not titled “Jim Along Josey” it shares a similar chorus with the previous versions. Instead, this song is called “Hi, Come Along!”:
Hitch my oxen to the cart
And go down the hill
to get a load of bark
Hi, come along, Jim along Josie,
Fetch him along, Jim along Jo;
Take him along, Jim along Josie,
Fetch him along, Jim along Jo.
The numerous versions of “Jim Along Josey” were collected at the turn of the twentieth century from different locations across the United States, however, they share similar lyrics.
Whether the lyrics were instructing dance-like movements or
expressing nonsense words, the phrase “Jim Along Josey” persisted. Because play-party songs
used oral tradition, they served as an effective medium for minstrel songs to survive into the
modern day.”…
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*This word is fully spelled out in this article.
The words in italics were written that way in this article.
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