African American Songwriters and Performers in the Coon Song Era: Black Innovation and American Popular Music James M. Salem
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Notes
1. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford UP, 1955; reprint, 1974), 70 (page citation is to the reprint edition).
2. Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1993), 143.
3. James H. Dormon, "Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The 'Coon Song' Phenomenon of the Gilded Age, American Quarterly 40 (December 1988): 453-65.
4. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, vol. 2, From 1790 to 1909 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 279.
5. Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated History of American Words and Phrases (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976; reprint, Touchstone, 1979), 54 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
6. Dorman, 451.
7. Flexner, 54.
8. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, eds., Dictionary of American Slang, 2d supp. ed. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1975), 122.
9. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 98.
10. See http://parlorsongs.com/insearch/coonsongs/coonsongs.asp (accessed 16 April 2007).
11. Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 322.
12. Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974; reprint, 1977), 195 (page citation is to the reprint edition).
13. Alec Wilder, American Popular Songs: The Great Innovators 1900-1950, ed. James T. Maher (New York: Oxford UP, 1972), 5.
14. Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Songs in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979; reprint, 1983) 268 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
15. Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001; Norton paperback, 2005), 487 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
16. Robert C. Toll, On With the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), 118.
17. Hamm, 321.
18. David Ewen, All the Years of American Popular Music (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 117.
19. See University of Colorado Digital Sheet Music Collection, http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/cgi-bin/sheetmusic.pl?RagBully&Rag&main (accessed 16 April 2007).
20. Sanjek, 291.
21. Ewen, 117.
22. Wilder, xxix.
23. Ian Whitcomb, After the Ball: Pop Music from Rag to Rock (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 4-6.
24. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 238.
25. Ewen, 50.
26. Oliver Ditson of Boston seems to have been the main publisher of James Bland songs if extent versions in the Sheet Music Collection at the John Hay Library at Brown University are any indication.
27. Wilder, 6.
28. Ewen, 103-104.
29. Sanjek, 401.
30. Southern, 489-90.
31. Jonathan Gill, "Hogan, Ernest (Crowders, Reuben)," Encylopedia of African-American Culture and History, ed. Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 1288.
32. Sanjek, 278-80.
33. Southern, 320.
34. Sanjek, 279.
35. My source for the cover was an E-Bay auction site, which pictured several pages of the sheet music (the seller was asking $295).
36. Sanjek, 291.
37. Playing the numbers was popular in Harlem and other black communities at the time. Considered the "poor man's stock market," correctly picking one number in a series of three digits brought an 8-to-1 return on investment. Hitting the number straight (all three digits) brought a 600-to-1 return. See http://www.numbersandyou.com/default.asp?S=E3&Document=Harlem&NID=2302948 (accessed 16 April 2007).
38. Crawford, 490.
39. Sanjek, 281.
40. Ibid., 283.
41. Ewen, 112.
42. Southern, 242.
43. See the Historic Sheet Music Collection at Duke University: http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/sheetmusic/n/n05/n0572.9/ (accessed 16 April 2007).
44. Whitburn, Joel. Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, 1986), 360.
45. Sanjek, 283.
46. Whitburn, 643.
47. Ibid., 402.
48. Sanjek, 284.
49. Southern, 302-03.
50. Toll, On With the Show, 121.
51. Sanjek, 285.
52. Southern, 311.
53. Jim Walsh, "George Washington Johnson," Hobbies, September 1944, 27.
54. Whitburn, 232.
55. Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Urbana: Illinois UP, 2004), 17-30.
56. Jim Walsh's papers and his collection of early discs, cylinders, and phonographs of the acoustical era are at the Library of Congress. See http://www.loc.gov/rr/record/Walshtoc.html (accessed 16 April 2007).
57. Whitburn, 642.
58. Ibid., 402-04.
59. Wilder, 6-7.
60. Brooks, 31-32.
61. Whitburn, 232.
62. Jim Walsh, "In Justice to George Washington Johnson, Part I," Hobbies, January 1971, 91.
63. Walsh, "George Washington Johnson," 27.
64. Brooks, 1-2.
65. Ibid., 32-33.
66. Jim Walsh, "In Justice to George Washington Johnson, Part II," Hobbies, February 1971, 37.
67. Brooks, 35-40.
68. Walsh, "In Justice to George Washington Johnson, Part I," 38-9.
69. Brooks, 66.
70. Eric Ledell Smith, Bert Williams: A Biography of the Pioneer Black Comedian (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1992), xi.
71. Ann Charters, Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (New York: Macmillan, 1970; reprint, Da Capo Press, 1983), 27 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
72. Ibid., 9.
73. Bert Williams, "The Comic Side of Trouble," American Magazine, January 1918, 34.
74. Booker T. Washington, "Bert Williams," American Magazine 70 (1910): 601.
75. Charters, 138.
76. "Genius Defeated By Race," Literary Digest, 25 March 1922, 29.
77. Charters, 11.
78. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of Lowly Life, with an Introduction by W. D. Howells (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1898), 167.
79. Arnold Shaw, Black Popular Music in America (New York: Schirmer, 1986), 44-45.
80. Hamm, 320-21.
81. Southern, 319.
82. Quoted in Whitcomb, 16.
83. Crawford, 549.
84. Whitcomb, 25.
James M. Salem is Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama.