ACT II.

THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.

THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.

_Bottom_: "I have a reasonable good ear in music: let's have the tongs and the bones."--_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act iv. Sc. 1.

Shakspere's Moor of Venice was one of the earliest of the stage negroes, as he is one of the best. If the _Account of the Revels_ be not a forgery, he appeared before the court of the first English James in 1604, and he certainly was seen at the Globe Theatre, on the Bankside, on the 30th of April, 1610. Othello is hardly the typical African of the modern drama, although Roderigo speaks of him as having thick lips, and notwithstanding the fact that he himself is made to regret, in the third act of the tragedy, that he is "black, and has not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have." Shakspere unquestionably believed that the Moors were negroes; and as he made Verges and Dogberry cockney watchmen, and altered history, geography, and chronology to suit himself and the requirements of the stage, so he meant to invest his Moorish hero with all of the personal attributes, as well as with all of the moral characteristics, of the negroes as they were known to Englishmen in Shakspere's day.

_Othello_ was followed, in 1696, by _Oroonoko_, a tragedy in five acts, by Thomas Southerne. The real Oroonoko was an African prince stolen from his native kingdom of Angola during the reign of Charles the Second, and sold as a slave in an English settlement in the West Indies. Aphra Behn saw and became intimate with him at Surinam, when her father was Lieutenant-General of the islands, and made him the hero of the tale upon which the dramatist based his once famous play. With the more humble slaves by whom he was surrounded, the stage Oroonoko spoke in the stilted blank-verse of the dramatic literature of that period, and without any of the accent or phraseology of the original West Indian blacks. Mr. Pope was the creator of Oroonoko; and the part was a favorite one of the elder Kean in England and of the elder Booth in this country. It has not been seen upon either stage in many years. Oroonoko, of course, had a black skin and woolly hair. When Jack Bannister, who began his career as a tragic actor, said to Garrick that he proposed to attempt the hero of Southerne's drama, he was told by the great little man that, in view of his extraordinarily thin person, he would "look as much like the character as a chimney-sweep in consumption!" It was to Bannister, on this same occasion, that Garrick uttered the well-known aphorism, "Comedy is a very serious thing!"

Mungo was a stage negro of a very different stamp, and the first of his race. He figured in _The Padlock_, a comic opera, words by Isaac Bickerstaffe, music by Charles Dibdin, first presented at Drury Lane in 1768. Mungo was the slave of Don Diego, a West Indian planter. It was written for and at the suggestion of John Moody, who had been in Barbadoes, where he had studied the dialect and the manners of the blacks. He never played the part, however, which was originally assumed by Dibdin himself. Mungo sang:

"Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led! A dog has a better that's sheltered and fed. Night and day 'tis the same; My pain is deir game; Me wish to de Lord me was dead! Whate'er's to be done Poor black must run. Mungo here, Mungo dere, Mungo everywhere; Above and below, Sirrah, come, sirrah, go; Do so, and do so. Oh! oh! Me wish to de Lord me was dead!"

This is a style of ballad which has been very popular with Mungo's descendants ever since. It may be added that Mungo got drunk in the second act, and was very profane throughout.

The great and original Mungo in America was Lewis Hallam, the younger, who first played the part in New York, and for his own benefit, on the 29th of May, 1769, at the theatre in John Street. Dunlap says, "In _The Padlock_ Mr. Hallam was unrivalled to his death, giving Mungo with a truth derived from the study of the negro slave character which Dibdin, the writer, could not have conceived." Mungo is never seen in the present time. Ira Aldridge, the negro tragedian, played Othello and Mungo occasionally on the same night in his natural skin; but Mungo may be said to have virtually died with Hallam, and to have gone to meet Oroonoko in that land of total oblivion to which Othello is destined to be a stranger for many years to come.

In 1781 a pantomime entitled _Robinson Crusoe_ was presented at Drury Lane. It was believed by the editor of the _Biographia Dramatica_ to have been "contrived by Mr. Sheridan, whose powers, if it really be his performance, do not seem adapted to the production of such kind of entertainments. The scenery, by Loutherbourg, has a very pleasing effect, but, considered in every other light, it is a truly insipid exhibition." Friday, in coffee-colored tights and blackened face, was naturally a prominent figure. The pantomime was produced at the Theatre Royal, Bath, during the next year, when Mr. Henry Siddons appeared as one of the savages. This gentleman, who played Othello on the same boards a few seasons later, is only remembered now as having given his name to the greatest actress who ever spoke the English tongue. This same _Robinson Crusoe and Harlequin Friday_ was seen at the John Street Theatre, New York, on the 11th of January, 1786; while at the Park Theatre on the 11th of September, 1817, Mr. Bancker played Friday in _The Bold Buccaneers; or, The Discovery of Robinson Crusoe_, a melodrama which was very popular in its day.

Charles C. Moreau, of New York, possesses a very curious and almost unique bill of "The African Company," at "The Theatre in Mercer Street, in the rear of the 1 Mile Stone, Broadway." _Tom and Jerry_ was presented by a number of gentlemen and ladies entirely unknown to dramatic fame, and the performance concluded with the pantomime of _Obi: or, Three Finger'd Jack_. Unfortunately the bill is not dated. Mr. Ireland believes this to have been a company of negro amateurs who played in New York about 1820 or 1821, but who have left no other mark upon the history of the stage; and the historians know nothing of the "theatre" they occupied. Broadway at Prince Street is one mile from the City Hall, although the stone recording this fact has long since disappeared.

A number of stage negroes will be remembered by habitual theatre-goers, and students of the drama--two very different things, by-the-way, for the man who sees plays rarely reads them, and _vice versa_: Zeke, in Mrs. Mowatt's _Fashion_; Pete, in _The Octoroon_; Uncle Tom; Topsy, whom Charles Reade called "idiopathic"; a cleverly conceived character in Bronson Howard's _Moorcraft_; and the delightful band of "Full Moons," led for many seasons by "Johnny" Wild at Harrigan and Hart's Theatre, who were so absolutely true to the life of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue.

In the absence of anything like a complete and satisfactory history of negro minstrelsy, it is not possible to discover its genesis, although it is the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly it can claim to be an art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music. Scattered throughout the theatrical literature of the early part of the century are to be found many different accounts of the rise and progress of the African on the stage, each author having his own particular "father of negro song." Charles White, an old Ethiopian comedian and manager, gives the credit to Gottlieb Graupner, who appeared in Boston in 1799, basing his statement upon a copy of Russell's _Boston Gazette_ of the 30th of December of that year, which contains an advertisement of a performance to be given on the date of publication at the Federal Street Theatre. At the end of the second act of _Oroonoko_, according to Mr. White, Mr. Graupner, in character, sang "The Gay Negro Boy," accompanying the air with the banjo; and although the house was draped in mourning for General Washington, such was the enthusiasm of the audience that the performer had to bring his little bench from the wings again and again to sing his song. W. W. Clapp, Jr., in his _History of the Boston Stage_, says that the news of the death of Washington was received in that city on the 24th of December, and that the theatre remained "closed for a week;" and was reopened with "A Monody," in which "Mrs. Barrett, in the character of the Genius of America, appeared weeping over the Tomb of her Beloved Hero"; but there is no mention, then or later, of Mr. Graupner or of "The Gay Negro Boy."

Mr. White says further that "the next popular negro song was 'The Battle of Plattsburg,' sung by an actor vulgarly known as 'Pig-Pie Herbert,' at a theatre in Albany, in 1815"; but H. D. Stone, in a volume called _The Drama_, published in Albany in 1873, credits "a member of the theatrical company of the name of Hop Robinson" as the singer of the song; while "Sol" Smith, an eye-witness of this performance, gives still another and very different account of it. According to Smith's _Autobiography_ published by Messrs. Harper and Brothers in 1868, Andrew Jackson Allen produced at the Green Street Theatre in Albany, in 1815, a drama called _The Battle of Lake Champlain_, the action taking place on real ships floating in real water. "In this piece," says Smith, "Allen played the character of a negro, and sang a song of many verses (being the first negro song, I verily believe, ever heard on the American stage)." Two verses of this ballad, quoted by Smith "from memory," will give a very fair idea of its claims to popularity:

"Backside Albany stan' Lake Champlain-- Little pond half full of water; Plat-te-burg dar too, close 'pon de main: Town small; he grow big, dough, herea'ter.

"On Lake Champlain Uncle Sam set he boat, An' Massa Macdonough he sail 'em; While General Macomb make Plat-te-burg he home, Wid de army whose courage nebber fail 'em."

Andrew Allen was a very quaint character, and he deserves a paragraph to himself. Born in the city of New York in 1776, he appeared, according to his own statement, as a page in _Romeo and Juliet_ at the theatre in John Street in 1786, on the strength of which, as the oldest living actor, he assumed for years before his death the title of "Father of the American Stage." He was more famous as a cook than as a player, however, and he is the subject of innumerable theatrical anecdotes, none of which are greatly to his credit. He was called "Dummy Allen" because he was very deaf and exceedingly loquacious; he adored the hero of New Orleans, whose name he appropriated when Jackson was elected President of the United States; and he was devoted to Edwin Forrest, whose costumer, dresser, and personal slave he was for many years. He invented and patented a silver leather much used in the decoration of stage dresses; and he kept a restaurant in Dean Street, Albany, and later a similar establishment near the Bowery Theatre, New York, being a very familiar figure in the streets of both cities. Mr. Phelps, in his _Players of a Century_ (Albany, New York, 1880), describes him in his later years as tall and erect in person, with firmly compressed features, an eye like a hawk's, nose slightly Romanesque, and hair mottled gray. He wore a fuzzy white hat, a coat of blue with bright brass buttons, and carried a knobby cane. He spoke in a sharp, decisive manner, often giving wrong answers, and invariably mistaking the drift of the person with whom he was conversing. He died in New York in 1853, and Mr. Phelps preserves the inscription upon his monument at Cypress Hills Cemetery, which was evidently his own composition: "From his cradle he was a scholar; exceedingly wise, fair-spoken, and persuading; lofty and sour to them that loved him not, but to those men that sought him sweet as summer."

Apropos of Allen's association with Edwin Forrest, and of Smith's assertion that Allen sang the first negro song ever sung on the American stage, it may not be out of place here to quote W. R. Alger's _Life of Forrest_. Speaking of Forrest's early and checkered experiences as a strolling player in the far West, Mr. Alger says that perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is "that he was the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manner." In 1823, at the Globe Theatre, Cincinnati, Ohio, under the management of "Sol" Smith, Forrest did play a negro in a farce by Smith, called _The Tailor in Distress_, singing and dancing, and winning the compliment from a veritable black in his audience that he was "nigger all ober!" Lawrence Barrett, in his _Life of Forrest_, quotes the bill of this evening, which shows Forrest as a modern dandy in the first play, as Cuffee, a Kentucky negro, in the second, and as Sancho Panza in the pantomime of _Don Quixote_, which closed the evening's entertainment.

Forrest was by no means the only eminent American actor who hid his light behind a black mask. "Sol" Smith himself relates how he became a supernumerary at the Green Street Theatre, in Albany, in his fourteenth year, playing one of the blood-thirsty associates of _Three-fingered Jack_ with a preternaturally smutty face, which he forgot to wash one eventful night, to the astonishment of his own family, who forced him to retire for a time to private life.

At Vauxhall Garden, in the Bowery, a little south of and nearly opposite the site of Cooper Institute, a young lad named Bernard Flaherty, born in Cork, Ireland, is said to have sung negro songs and to have danced negro dances in 1838 to help support a widowed mother, who lived to see him carried to an honored grave in 1876, mourned by the theatre-going population of the whole country. In 1840, as Barney Williams, he made a palpable hit in the character of Pat Rooney, in _The Omnibus_, at the Franklin Theatre, New York. He certainly played "darky parts," such as they were, for a number of years before and after that date; and he is perhaps the one man upon the American stage with whom anything like negro minstrelsy will never be associated, not so much because of his high rank in his profession as on account of the Hibernian style of his later-day performances, and of the strong accent which always clung to him, and which suggested his native city rather than the cork he used to burn to color his face.

In 1850, when Edwin Booth was seventeen, and a year after his _début_ as Tressel at the Boston Museum, he gave an entertainment with John S. Clarke, a youth of the same age, at the court-house in Belair, Maryland. They read selections from _Richelieu_ and _The Stranger_, as well as the quarrel scene from _Julius Cæsar_, singing during the evening (with blackened faces) a number of negro melodies, "using appropriate dialogue"--as Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke records in the memoir of her brother--"and accompanying their vocal attempts with the somewhat inharmonious banjo and bones." Mrs. Clarke reprints the programme of this performance, and pictures the distress of the young tragedians when they discovered, on arriving in the town, that the simon-pure negro they had employed as an advance agent had in every instance posted their bills upsidedown.

Mr. Booth, during his first San Francisco engagement, appeared more than once in the character of what was then termed a "Dandy Nigger;" and he remembers that his father, "some time in the forties," played Sam Johnson in _Bone Squash_ at the Front Street Theatre, Baltimore, for the benefit of an old theatrical acquaintance, and played it with great applause. Lawrence Barrett's negro parts, in the beginning of his career, were George Harris and Uncle Tom himself, in a dramatization of Mrs. Stowe's famous tale.

Among the stage negroes of later years, whom the world is not accustomed to associate with that profession, Ralph Keeler is one of the most prominent. His "Three Years a Negro Minstrel," first published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for July, 1869, and afterwards elaborated in his _Vagabond Adventures_, is very entertaining and instructive reading, and gives an excellent idea of the wandering minstrel life of that period. He began his career at Toledo, Ohio, when he was not more than eleven years of age; and under the management of the celebrated Mr. Booker, the subject of the once famous song, "Meet Johnny Booker on the Bowling-green," he "danced 'Juba'" in small canton-flannel knee-breeches (familiarly known as pants) cheap lace, tarnished gold tinsel, a corked face, and a woolly wig, to the great gratification of the Toledans, who for several months, with pardonable pride, hailed him as their own particular infant phenomenon. At the close of his first engagement he received what was termed a "rousing benefit," the entire proceeds of which, as was the custom of the time, going into the pockets of his enterprising managers. During his short although distinguished professional life he was associated with such artists as "Frank" Lynch, "Mike" Mitchell, "Dave" Reed, and "Professor" Lowe, the balloonist, and he was even offered a position in E. P. Christy's company in New York--the highest compliment which could then be paid to budding talent. Keeler, a brilliant but eccentric writer, whose _Vagabond Adventures_ is too good, in its way, to be forgotten so soon, was a man of decided mark as a journalist. He went to Cuba in 1873 as special correspondent of the New York _Tribune_, and suddenly and absolutely disappeared. He is supposed to have been murdered and thrown into the sea.

Lynch, when Keeler first knew him, had declined into the fat and slippered end man, too gross to dance, who ordinarily played the tambourine and the banjo, but who could, and not infrequently did, perform everything in the orchestra, from a solo on the penny trumpet to an obligato on the double-bass. He had been associated as a boy, in 1839 or 1840, under Barnum's management, with "Jack" Diamond, who was "the best representative of Ethiopian break-downs" in his day, and, according to P. T. Barnum, the prototype of the many performers of that sort who have entertained the public ever since. Lynch asserted that he and Barnum had appeared together in black faces; and Mr. Barnum, in his _Autobiography_, called Mr. Lynch "an orphan vagabond" whom he had picked up on the road; neither statement seeming to be entirely true. Lynch was his own worst enemy, and, like so many of his kind, he died in poverty and obscurity, his most perfect "break-down" being his own!

It is a melancholy fact that George Holland joined Christy and Wood's minstrels in 1857, playing female characters in a blackened face, and dividing with George Christy the honors of a short season. He returned to Wallack's Theatre in 1858. This is a page in dramatic history which old play-goers do not like to read.

The name of John B. Gough, the temperance orator, occurs occasionally in the reminiscences of old minstrels. He certainly did appear upon the stage as a comic singer in New York and elsewhere during his early and dissipated youth, and even gave exhibitions of ventriloquism and the like in low bar-rooms for the sake of the few pennies he could gather to keep himself in liquor, as he himself describes; but there is no hint in his _Autobiography_ of his ever having appeared in a blackened face, and his theatrical life, if it may be so called, was very short.

Joseph Jefferson, the third and present bearer of that honored name, was unquestionably the youngest actor who ever made his mark with a piece of burnt cork. The story of his first appearance is told by William Winter in his volume entitled _The Jeffersons_. Coming from a family of actors, the boy, as was natural, was reared amid theatrical surroundings, and when only four years of age--in 1833--he was brought upon the stage by Thomas D. Rice himself, on a benefit occasion at the Washington Theatre. Little Joe, blackened and arrayed precisely like his senior, was carried onto the stage in a bag upon the shoulders of the shambling Ethiopian, and emptied from it with the appropriate couplet,

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'd have you for to know I's got a little darky here to jump Jim Crow."

Mrs. John Drew, who was present, says that the boy instantly assumed the exact attitude of Jim Crow Rice, and sang and danced in imitation of his sable companion, a perfect miniature likeness of that long, ungainly, grotesque, and exceedingly droll comedian.

Thomas D. Rice is generally conceded to have been the founder of Ethiopian minstrelsy. Although, as has been seen, it did not originate with him, he made it popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and his image deserves an honored niche in its cathedral. The history of "Jim Crow" Rice, as he was affectionately called for many years, has been written by many scribes and in many different ways, the most complete and most truthful account, perhaps, being that of Edmon S. Conner, who described in the columns of the New York _Times_, June 5, 1881, what he saw and remembered of the birth of Jim Crow. Mr. Conner was a member of the company at the Columbia Street Theatre, Cincinnati, in 1828-29, when he first met Rice, "doing little negro bits" between the acts at that house, notably a sketch he had studied from life in Louisville the preceding summer. Back of the Louisville theatre was a livery-stable kept by a man named Crow. The actors could look into the stable-yard from the windows of their dressing-rooms, and were fond of watching the movements of an old and decrepit slave who was employed by the proprietor to do all sorts of odd jobs. As was the custom among the negroes, he had assumed his master's name, and called himself Jim Crow. He was very much deformed--the right shoulder was drawn up high, and the left leg was stiff and crooked at the knee, which gave him a painful but at the same time ludicrous limp. He was in the habit of crooning a queer old tune, to which he had applied words of his own. At the end of each verse he gave a peculiar step, "rocking de heel" in the manner since so general among the many generations of his imitators; and these were the words of his refrain:

"Wheel about, turn about, Do jis so, An' ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow."

Rice closely watched this unconscious performer, and recognized in him a character entirely new to the stage. He wrote a number of verses, quickened and slightly changed the air, made up exactly like the original, and appeared before a Louisville audience, which, as Mr. Conner says, "went mad with delight," recalling him on the first night at least twenty times. And so Jim Crow jumped into fame and something that looks almost like immortality. "Sol" Smith says that the character was first seen in a piece by Solon Robinson, called _The Rifle_, and that he, Smith, "helped Rice a little in fixing the tune."

Other cities besides Louisville claim Jim Crow. Francis Courtney Wemyss, in his _Autobiography_, says he was a native of Pittsburg, whose name was Jim Cuff; while Robert P. Nevin, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for November, 1867, declares that the original was a negro stage-driver of Cincinnati, and that Pittsburg was the scene of Rice's first appearance in the part--a local negro there, whose professional career was confined to holding his mouth open for pennies thrown to him on the docks and the streets, furnishing the wardrobe for the initial performance.

Rice was born in the Seventh Ward of New York in 1808. He was a supernumerary at the Park Theatre, where "Sam" Cowell remembered him in _Bombastes Furioso_ attracting so much attention by his eccentricities that Hilson and Barnes, the leading characters in the cast, made a formal complaint, and had him dismissed from the company Cowell; adding that this man, whose name did not even appear in the bills, was the only actor on the stage whom the audience seemed to notice. Cowell also describes him in Cincinnati, in 1829, as a very unassuming modest young man, who wore "a very queer hat, very much pointed down before and behind, and very much cocked on one side." He went to England in 1836, where he met with great success, laid the foundation of a very comfortable fortune, and professionally he was the Buffalo Bill of the London of half a century ago. Mr. Ireland, speaking of his popularity in this country, says that he drew more money to the Bowery Theatre than any other performer in the same period of time.

Rice was the author of many of his own farces, notably _Bone Squash_ and _The Virginia Mummy_, and he was the veritable originator of the _genus_ known to the stage as the "dandy darky," represented particularly in his creations of "Dandy Jim of Caroline" and "Spruce Pink." He died in 1860, never having forfeited the respect of the public or the good-will of his fellow-men.

There were many lithographed and a few engraved portraits of Rice made during the years of his great popularity, a number of which are still preserved. In Mr. McKee's collection he is to be seen dancing "Jim Crow" in English as well as in American prints--as "Gumbo Chaff," on a flat-boat, and, in character, singing the songs "A Long Time Ago" and "Such a Gettin' Up-stairs." In the same collection, among prints of George Dimond and other half-remembered clog-dancers and singers, is a portrait of John N. Smith as "Jim Along Josey," on a sheet of music published by Firth & Hall in 1840; and, more curious and rare than any of these, upon a musical composition, "on which copyright was secured according to law October 7, 1824," is a picture of Mr. Roberts singing "Massa George Washington and Massa Lafayette" in a Continental uniform and with a blackened face. This would make James Roberts, a Scottish vocalist, who died in 1833, the senior of Jim Crow by a number of years.

George Washington Dixon, whose very name is now almost forgotten, also preceded Rice in this class of entertainment, but without Rice's talent, and with nothing like Rice's success. He sang "Coal Black Rose" and "The Long-tailed Blue" at the old amphitheatre in North Pearl Street, Albany, as early as 1827, and he claimed to have been the author of "Old Zip Coon," which he sang for Allen's benefit in Philadelphia in 1834. He became notorious as a "filibuster" at the time of the troubles in Yucatan, and he made himself particularly offensive to a large portion of the community as the editor of a scurrilous paper called the _Polyanthus_, published in New York. He was caned, shot at, imprisoned for libel, and finally forced to leave the city. He died in the Charity Hospital, New Orleans, in 1861.

Mr. White says that in early days negro songs were sung from the backs of horses in the sawdust ring; that Robert Farrell, "a circus actor," was the original "Zip Coon," and that the first colored gentleman to wear "The Long-tailed Blue" was Barney Burns, who broke his neck on a vaulting board in Cincinnati in 1838. When the historians disagree in this confusing way, who can possibly decide?

Rice very naturally had many imitators, and Jim Crow wheeled about the country with considerable success, particularly when the original was in other lands. In the collection of Mr. Moreau is a bill of "The Theatre" (the Park), dated May 4, 1833, in which Mr. Blakeley was announced to sing the "Comic Extravaganza of Jim Crow" between the comedy of _Laugh When You Can_, in which he played Costly, and the melodrama of _The Floating Beacon_, and preceded by "Signora Adelaide Ferrero in a new ballet dance entitled 'The Festival of Bacchus';" the entertainments in those days being varied and long. Thomas H. Blakeley was a popular representative of what are called "second old men," Mr. Ireland pronouncing him the best Sulky, Rowley, and Humphrey Dobbin ever seen on the New York stage: and the fact that such a man should have appeared at a leading theatre, between the acts, in plantation dress and with blackened face, shows better than anything else, perhaps, the respectable position held by the negro minstrel half a century ago.

Mr. White, so frequently quoted here, is an old minstrel who was part and parcel of what he has more than once described in the public press, and upon his authority the following account of the first _band_ of negro minstrels is given. It was organized in the boarding-house of a Mrs. Brooks, in Catherine Street, New York, late in the winter of 1842, and it consisted of "Dan" Emmett, "Frank" Brower, "Billy" Whitlock, and "Dick" Pelham--the name of the really great negro minstrel being always shortened in this familiar way. According to Mr. White, they made their first appearance in public, for Pelham's benefit, at the Chatham Theatre, New York, on the 17th of February, 1843; later they went to other cities, and even to Europe. This statement was verified by a fragment of autobiography of William Whitlock, given to the New York _Clipper_ by his daughter, Mrs. Edwin Adams, at the time of Whitlock's death. It is worth quoting here in full, although it contains no dates: "The organization of the minstrels I claim to be my own idea, and it cannot be blotted out. One day I asked Dan Emmett, who was in New York at the time, to practise the fiddle and the banjo with me at his boarding-house in Catherine Street. We went down there, and when we had practised Frank Brower called in by accident. He listened to our music, charmed to his soul[!]. I told him to join with the bones, which he did. Presently Dick Pelham came in, also by accident, and looked amazed. I asked him to procure a tambourine, and make one of the party, and he went out and got one. After practising for a while we went to the old resort of the circus crowd--the 'Branch,' in the Bowery--with our instruments, and in Bartlett's billiard-room performed for the first time as the Virginia Minstrels. A programme was made out, and the first time we appeared upon the stage before an audience was for the benefit of Pelham at the Chatham Theatre. The house was crammed and jammed with our friends; and Dick, of course, put ducats in his purse."

Emmett, describing this scene, places the time "in the spring of 1843," and says that they were all of them "end men, and all interlocutors." They sang songs, played their instruments, danced jigs, singly and doubly, and "did 'The Essence of Old Virginia' and the 'Lucy Long Walk Around.'" Emmett remained upon the minstrel stage for many years; he was a member of the Bryant troupe from 1858 to 1865, and he was the composer of many popular songs, including "Old Dan Tucker," "Boatman's Dance," "Walk Along, John," "Early in the Mornin'," and, according to some authorities, he was the author of "Dixie," which afterwards became the war-song of the South.

Mr. White, according to a biographical sketch published in the New York _Clipper_, was born in 1821. He played the accordion--when he was too young to be held responsible for the offence--at Thalian Hall, in Grand Street, New York, as long ago as 1843, and the next year organized what he called "'The Kitchen Minstrels' on the second floor of the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. The first floor was occupied by Tiffany, Young & Ellis, jewellers; the third by the renowned Ottignon as a gymnasium. Here, where the venerable Palmo had introduced to delighted audiences the Italian opera, and regaled them with fragrant Mocha coffee handed around by obsequious waiters, he first came most prominently before the public.... In 1846 he opened the Melodeon at 53 Bowery." Here, as usual, there is a decided confusion of dates and of facts. _Valentine's Manual_ for 1865 says, "Palmo's café, on the corner of Reade Street and Broadway, was a popular resort from 1835 to 1840, at which later period he abandoned his former occupation and erected the opera-house in Chambers Street, afterwards Burton's Theatre." Joseph N. Ireland, in his _Records of the New York Stage_, published in 1867, says--and Mr. Ireland is usually correct--"The fourth attempt to introduce the Italian opera in New York, and the second to give it an individual local habitation, was this season [1843-44], made by Ferdinand Palmo, on the site long previously occupied by Stoppani's Arcade Baths, in Chambers Street (Nos. 39 and 41), and nearly opposite the centre of the building on the north end of the Park originally erected for the city almshouse, and afterwards used for various public offices.... Signor Palmo had been a popular and successful _restaurateur_ in Broadway between the hospital and Duane Street.... Palmo's Opera-house was first opened by its proprietor on the 3d of February, 1844"; while Charles T. Cook, of Tiffany & Co., who has been connected with that house for over forty years, shows by its records that Tiffany, Young & Ellis did not move to 271 Broadway, on the southwest corner of Chambers Street, until 1847, when they occupied the second floor as well as the first. That Sir Walter Raleigh, losing all confidence in the infallibility of human testimony, should have thrown the second part of his _History of the World_ into the flames is not to be wondered at!

Mr. White, nevertheless, was prominently before the public for many years as manager and performer; he was associated with the "Virginia Serenaders," with "The Ethiopian Operatic Brothers" (Operatic Brother Barney Williams playing the tambourine at one end of the line); with "The Sable Sisters and Ethiopian Minstrels;" with "The New York Minstrels," etc. He introduced "Dan" Bryant to the public, and has done other good services in contributing to the healthful, harmless amusement of his fellow-men.

"Christy's Minstrels, organized in 1842," was the legend for a number of years upon the bills and advertisements of the company of E. P. Christy. This would give it precedence of the "Virginia Minstrels" by a few months at least. When the matter was called to the attention of Mr. Emmett, many years later, he wrote from Chicago on the 1st of May, 1877, that after his own band had gone to Europe a number of similar entertainments were given in all parts of the country, and that Enam Dickinson, who had had some experience in that line in other companies, had trained Christy's troupe in Buffalo in all the business of the scenes, Mr. Emmett believing that Mr. Christy simply claimed, and with truth, that he was "the first to harmonize and originate the present style of negro minstrelsy," meaning the singing in concert and the introduction of the various acts, which were universally followed by other bands on both sides of the Atlantic, and which have led our English brethren to give to all Ethiopian entertainments the generic name of "Christy Minstrels," as they call all top-boots "Wellingtons" and all policemen "Bobbies."

Christy's Minstrels proper began their metropolitan career at the hall of the Mechanics' Society, 472 Broadway, near Grand Street, early in 1846, and remained there until the summer of 1854, when Edwin P. Christy, the leader and founder of the company, retired from business. George Christy, who the year before had joined forces with Henry Wood at 444 Broadway, formerly Mitchell's Olympic, took both halls after the abdication of the elder Christy, and rattled the bones at one establishment, "Billy" Birch, afterwards so popular in San Francisco and New York, cutting similar capers at the other, and each performer appearing at both houses on the same evening.

Edwin P. Christy died in May, 1862. George Harrington, known to the stage as George Christy, died in May, 1868; while in April of the latter year Mechanics' Hall, with which in the minds of so many old New-Yorkers they are both so pleasantly associated, was entirely destroyed by fire, never to be rebuilt for minstrel uses.

The contemporaries and successors of the Christys were numerous and various. The air was full of their music, and dozens of halls in the city of New York alone echoed the patter of their clogged feet for years. Among the more famous of them the following may briefly be mentioned: Buckley's "New Orleans Serenaders" were organized in 1843; they consisted of George Swayne, Frederick, and R. Bishop Buckley, and were very popular throughout the country. "White's Serenaders" were at the Melodeon, 53 Bowery, perhaps as early as 1846, and certainly at White's Athenæum, 585 Broadway, opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, as late as 1872. The Harrington Minstrels were at Palmo's Opera-house in 1847 or 1848. Bryant's Minstrels, as their old play-bills show, were organized in 1857, when they occupied Mechanics' Hall; they went to the Tammany Building on Fourteenth Street in 1868, were at 730 Broadway the next year, and opened the hall on Twenty-third Street near Sixth Avenue in 1870, where they remained until Dan Bryant, the last of his race, died in 1875. Wood's Minstrels were at 514 Broadway, opposite the St. Nicholas Hotel, in 1862 and later. "Sam" Sharpley's Minstrels were at 201 Bowery in 1864. "Tony" Pastor's troupe were in the same building in 1865, where they remained two years; they were upon the site of the Metropolitan Theatre--later Winter Garden--for a few seasons, and until they removed to their present cosey home near Tammany Hall. The San Francisco Minstrels were at 585 Broadway in 1865, and in 1874 went to the more familiar hall on Broadway, opposite the Sturtevant House, Budworth's Minstrels opened the Fifth Avenue Hall, where the Madison Square Theatre now stands, in 1866. Kelly and Leon, who were on Broadway on the site of Hope Chapel in 1867, where they were credited with having "Africanized opéra bouffe," followed Budworth to the Twenty-fourth Street house. Besides these were the companies of Morris Brothers, of Cotton and Murphy and Cotton and Reed, of Hooley, of Haverly, of Dockstader, of Pelham, of Pierce, of Campbell, of Pell and Trowbridge, of Thatcher, Primrose and West, of Huntley, and of very many more, to say nothing of the bands of veritable negroes who have endeavored to imitate themselves in imitation of their white brethren in all parts of the land. Brander Matthews, in an article on "Negro Minstrelsy," printed in the London _Saturday Review_ in 1884, and afterwards published as one of the chapters of a volume of _Saturday Review_ essays, entitled _The New Book of Sports_ (London, 1885), describes a "minstrel show" given by the negro waiters of one of the large summer hotels in Saratoga a few summers before, in which, "when the curtains were drawn aside, discovering a row of sable performers, it was perceived, to the great and abiding joy of the spectators, that the musicians were all of a uniform darkness of hue, and that they, genuine negroes as they were, had 'blackened up,' the more closely to resemble the professional negro minstrel."

The dignified and imposing Mr. Johnston has sat during all these years in the centre of a long line of black comedians, which includes such artists as "Eph" Horn, "Dan" Neil, and "Jerry" Bryant--whose real name was O'Brien--Charles H. Fox, "Charley" White, George Christy, "Nelse" Seymour--Thomas Nelson Sanderson--the Buckleys, J. W. Raynor, Birch, Bernard, Wambold, Backus, "Pony" Moore, "Dan" Cotton, "Bob" Hart, "Cool" White, "Dan" Emmett, "Dave" Reed, "Matt" Peel, "Ben" Gardner, Luke Schoolcraft, James H. Budworth, Kelly, Leon, "Frank" Brower, S. C. Campbell, "Gus" Howard, "Billy" Newcomb, "Billy" Gray, Aynsley Cooke, "Hughey" Dougherty, "Tony" Hart, Unsworth, W. H. Delehanty, "Sam" Devere, "Add" Ryman, George Thatcher, "Master Eugene," "Ricardo," "Andy" Leavitt, "Sam" Sanford, "Lew" Benedict, "Harry" Bloodgood, "Cal" Wagner, "Ben" Collins, and "Little Mac."

Nothing like a personal history of any of these men, who have been so prominent upon the negro minstrel stage during the half-century of its existence, can be given here. They have all done much to make the world happier and brighter for a time by their public careers, and they have left a pleasant and a cheerful memory behind them. Their gibes, their gambols, their songs, their flashes of merriment, still linger in our eyes and in our ears; and before many readers scores of quaint figures with blackened faces will no doubt dance to half-forgotten tunes all over these pages, which are too crowded to contain more than the mere mention of their names.

How much of the wonderful success and popularity of the negro minstrel is due to the minstrel, how much to the negro melody he introduced, and how much to the characteristic bones, banjo, and tambourine upon which he accompanied himself, is an open question. It was certainly the song, not the singer, which moved Thackeray to write years ago: "I heard a humorous balladist not long since, a minstrel with wool on his head, and an ultra Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad that I confess moistened these spectacles in a most unexpected manner. I have gazed at thousands of tragedy queens dying on the stage and expiring in appropriate blank-verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. They have looked up, be it said, at many scores of clergymen without being dimmed, and behold! a vagabond with a corked face and a banjo sings a little song, strikes a wild note, which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity."

This ballad perhaps was "Nelly Bly," or "Nelly was a Lady," or "Lucy Long," or "Oh, Susanna," or "Nancy Till," or, better than any of these, Stephen Foster's "Way Down upon the Swanee River," a song that has touched more hearts than "Annie Laurie" itself; for, after all, "The Girl We Left Behind Us" is not more precious in our eyes than "The Old Folks at Home;" and the American has sunk very low indeed of whom it cannot be said that "he never shook his mother." Foster is utterly unappreciated by his fellow-countrymen, who erect all their monuments to the men who make their laws. He was the author of "Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground," "Old Dog Tray," "Old Uncle Ned," "Old Folks at Home," "Old Kentucky Home," "Willie, We have Missed You," and "Come where My Love lies Dreaming." He died as he had lived, in 1864, when he was but thirty-seven years of age, and his "Hard Times Will Come Again No More."

Joel Chandler Harris, who is one of the best friends the plantation negro ever had, and who certainly knows him thoroughly, startled the whole community by writing to the _Critic_, in the autumn of 1883, that he had never seen a banjo or a tambourine or a pair of bones in the hands of the negroes on any of the plantations of middle Georgia with which he is familiar; that they made sweet music with the quills, as Pan did; that they played passably well on the fiddle, the fife, the flute, and the bugle; that they beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but that they knew not at all the instruments tradition had given them. That Uncle Remus, cannot "pick" the banjo, and never even heard it "picked," seems hardly credible; but Mr. Harris knows. Uncle Remus, however, is not a travelled darky, and the existence of the banjo in other parts of the South has been clearly proved. Mr. Cable quotes a creole negro ditty of before the war in which "Musieu Bainjo" is mentioned on every line. Maurice Thompson says the banjo is a common instrument among the field hands in North Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee; and he describes a rude banjo manufactured by its dusky performer out of a flat gourd, strung with horse-hair; while we find in Thomas Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, printed in 1784, the following statement: "In music they [the blacks] are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch." In a foot-note Jefferson adds, "The instrument proper to them is the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa."

The negro minstrel will give up his tambourine, for it is as old as the days of the Exodus, when Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances; and he will give up the bones, for Miss Olive Logan, in _Harper's Magazine_ for April, 1879, traces them back to the reign of Fou Hi, Emperor of China, 3468 B.C., while Shakspere's King of the Fairies, who made an ass of the hard-handed man of Athens, also treated Bottom to the melody of the bones. He will hang up his fiddle and his bow when the time comes, cheerfully enough, for Nero, according to tradition, fiddled for the dancing of the flames that consumed Rome nineteen hundred years ago. None of these are exclusively his own; but it would be very cruel to take from him his banjo, which he evolved if he did not invent, and without which he can be and can do nothing.