Two Excerpts from 1978 Black And White Minsterel Show and some questions

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

some questions for the britshes:

1) is this really what punk was working against? because if this went out to 18m homes, and sold number ones, that is the story of punk defeating traditional middle class culture? i dont have my reynolds with me, but i do not remember he mentioning this?
2) why are the men blacked up and not the women?
3) Why was this so popular, between the stage shows, the traveling revue, the tv show, the singles, the albums, the charting--this was a massive success.
4) How do critics of pop integrate this kind of material into the narrative of the UK? If we are poptimists, is there a way of redeeming this? I mean Where Dead Voices Gather by Tosches has a connoisseur's taste, a crate digger's sense of history, and founding mythology to rest his rennovation of Emmet Miller on, if one was going to write about this, what lens would you use?

I am mostly thinking of Tom's upcoming entries on early 70s pop on poptimist, an the comments about the history of UK no. 1s, but anyone can pop in.

Comments

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

I know very little about this subject (I was born in '74), but I thought the heyday of the minstrels in the UK (when they got 18 million viewers & had the number ones) was the early 60s - I know they limped on into the 70s but surely they were already dead effectively long before punk arrived?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

There was a discussion of the Minstrels in a recent Popular thread (the one on Typically Tropical would be the logical place but Popular is rarely logical).

To answer the questions:

1. Lockedintheatti is right I think - they're a 60s phenomenon which lingered into the 70s rather than something which was in full cry when punk started. I don't doubt that several of the people who hated swearing on the telly were also Minstrels watchers. The second clip above is actually from the last ever programme!

2. I suspect the answer is that the women are generally in skimpy outfits and you'd need full-body make-up to do it.

3. There was a big audience for old-timey music - musical numbers, song-and-dance, music hall, trad jazz - and this was the only real vehicle for it. So it's more a by-product of the PREVIOUS rock revolutions (56 amd 63/4) which marginalised the music on it. I think, bizarre as it may seem, for the first decade or so of the show's life the people behind it simply didn't realise it was racist! And obviously the show's core audience either didn't realise or didn't care.

4. I think you'd use the lens of "what happens to pop audiences as they age?" - the Minstrels were definitely a show your grandma watched. You could also put them into the narrative of changing race relations in the UK of course! (Something that always annoyed me a bit on ILX (and does when it happens on Popular) is American posters treating UK attitudes to race as equivalent to American ones: the causes and manifestations of racism in a society where a large black population has been there for 300 years but enslaved or legally oppressed for the majority of that time are going to be very different from those in a society where a smaller black population arrived rapidly over a 10-20 year period as full citizens.) You could take a variety of political lines on the Minstrels - they were an expression of fear about black immigration; they were a manifestation of Imperial nostalgia; they were a way for older people to cope with immigration; and so on. None of them quite ring true though - I think the old-timeyness of the Minstrels is the key to why their presentation in blackface was so enduring.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Something that always annoyed me a bit on ILX (and does when it happens on Popular) is American posters treating UK attitudes to race as equivalent to American ones

It was always the other way round for me! I always got so infuriated with the UK posters just seeming...disingenuous and blinkered and ignorant when it came to matters of race, eg on that fucking Ronaldinho thread or whatever it was.

In many ways it's a huge shame that the UK has never had to question itself in ways that other countries, with huge and obvious sources of 'national shame' (slavery, Nazism, whatever), have had to do; because sweeping bad shit under the carpet, or just not even realising it's there, is really endemic to British culture.

As for minstrelsy I didn't even realise it was all that popular in the UK. My parents seem to take it for granted that minstrelsy = racist (and they're pretty conservative themselves). I don't think my grandmother would have watched it, though less for enlightened reasons than pure snobbery.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Oh the other way around annoys me too! The specific example I was thinking of was the ideas of "home" in 70s US and UK race relations. In the US with the huge success of Roots there was an idea of Africa as a homeland in the sense of a birthplace of culture, a strong ground for an individual identity. In the UK "home" had a very different meaning because the black community had so recently arrived - it was a place they were constantly told by whites to go back to. (Of course these meanings weren't exclusive within or to each culture). So (for instance) a song by white guys about a Brixton bus driver's yearning to go home has the potential to be coded VERY differently in Britain than in America.

The story of the Minstrels is the story of *everyone* collectively realising that minstrelsy=racist!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

there's an interesting story, i think in will freidwald's book on jazz singers, where someone (possibly freidwald himself) is nervously broaching to the jazz figure they're interviewing the idea that eddie cantor, a singer who blacked up a la jolson, was nevertheless an awesomely talented popular performer, and the (black) jazzman in question somewhat testily agrees, saying "yes, you know, black folks aren't idiots, we ARE able to spot talent beneath silly greasepaint ..."

bcz blacking up was so widespread in a particular era -- including a handful of black performers who felt they had no option but to black up -- it became the repository for a wide range of elements of pop culture, good AND bad, and there's a bit of a pushback argument that its banishment has meant that some of these good elements were lost with the bad

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

In many ways it's a huge shame that the UK has never had to question itself in ways that other countries, with huge and obvious sources of 'national shame' (slavery, Nazism, whatever), have had to do; because sweeping bad shit under the carpet, or just not even realising it's there, is really endemic to British culture.

Yes! There's the weird self-congratulatory thing about Britain being 'tolerant' that is wheeled out all the ruddy time, often in support of doing something *intolerant*.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

in the abstract i know that the BaWMS was still on the TV as punk emerged, but it feels like something from an utterly different age -- as if it had ended, yes, a decade before

i assume i must have seen it now and then -- certainly i never watched it, and have it filed in my youngster head as incomprehensible and boring rather than any kind of cultural foe... it wasn't in any sense aimed at me, and no one was hectoring me for not being interested

(there was another show which i forget the name of at the moment, where the audience dressed up as edwardians: it was entirely repro music-hall from 70-odd years before, ie pre-1910 -- this too appeared to be enormously popular in the sense that old people were in the audience massively enjoying themselves, but to anyone under 16 it was total wtf-time)

(and besides, no old people i knew liked it: my grandparents were pretty rigorously high-culture oriented, tho my mum's mum adored morecambe and wise; to the extent that i absorbed my mum and dad's tastes, they were also simply bored by this species of light entertainment -- they were groovy young things, beatles fans!)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha the edwardian music-hall show was of course called "THE GOOD OLD DAYS" <--- plz to find youtubes of this also anthony! even this -- which is far more obviously in-island-nostalgic -- is only very marginally to do with imperial nostalgia, i would say: imperial nostalgia was explicitly about BEING ELSEWHERE, under other hotter suns

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

This was v popular on Norwegian TV as well when I was little! Round 1976, I guess? It may well be that "lol englishes" was a sizeable part of the appeal btw.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

minstrelsy sat within UK popular culture as a marker of american entertainment (of the days of yore), and as such had been succeeded -- in uk taste waves -- by several pre-rock shifts as well: after all, the first popular wave of global touring minstrelsy predates the jazz age (the jubilee singers were i think a hit in the uk in the 1870s); and jolsonism (which i'm gnna call the second wave) predates teadance jazz and croon and swing, and trad (which slightly counter-intuitively only hit big in the uk AFTER swing, as a retro return to the good old days): post-war there was also the fads for big broadway musicals (my dad and his dad loved oklahoma!) (absoltely anything that becomes a marker for gay taste my dad loves) (hmmmm) and -- to a lesser extent in terms of impact on light entertainment, but not utterly absent, cool and modern jazz

ALL of these are pop spasms that predate rock'n'roll: most of them would have fashioned a taste community who found minstrelsy at best bizarre and dated, and -- often -- to be disdained and disapproved, for a bunch of reasons, some at least relating to basic racial decency

(the first race riots taken as significant in the uk were in notting hill, london, in 1958: mum wd have been 23, dad 28 -- years later i remember the riots being part of a TV drama series and mum and dad talking very earnestly about how they'd felt about them abt the time, though they lived far far away in the country, nowhere near the violence)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

But in the clips above those pop spasms - broadway musical numbers and trad jazz - are exactly what the B&WMS is offering. I think the specificity of previous spasms had got a bit compressed by the most recent biggest one.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

youtube causes my computer to freeze so i couldn't watch it

but yes, i think by the late 70s this is exactly what was happening, you were getting a kind of one-stop shop for pop fads before c.1940 say (musicals have a bit of a long tailer tail) and within that, a complex -- and contradictory -- setting aside of ways in which this terrain had earlier been a kind of salad of all the ethical battles, when all concerned were a lot younger

of course this is the same as troll-you-come-to-love dynamic, isn't it? modern vs trad jazz being a battle so whiskered by then that really the combatants HAD long ago Got a Room, and that room turned out to be the BaWMS ---:o

so yes: there was also -- maybe -- in the fandom for this type of show a tolerance (by trad fans, say) of minstrelsy, despite its still seeming stupid and dated, bcz where else could they enjoy trad on telly? and the degree to which trad fandom had once (long ago) also functioned as a kind of symbolic anti-racism for a particular half-generation, was somehow dovetailed into this love-to-hate odd-couple deal?

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

was there a (very late) period where the show remained exactly the same but with no blackface, or am i imagining it? i guess it kind of segues into summertime special in my head at this point...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes I half remember that too!

[koganbot]

Gapes!

OK, I had no idea that this existed.

Most of what I'll say just repeats what you guys have said, but anyway:

(a) The music on those two clips is pure Broadway. Or so it seems to me.
(b) But the visuals code as "tropics" (this and #1 are not mutually exclusive, of course).
(c) So even if there's an element of nostalgia (return to the mores that were in effect when one was young) or age (persistence of old patterns despite their general obsolescence in modern world), there's a foreign element built in. Entertainment doesn't just come from the past, it comes from somewhere that isn't Britain.
(d) Er, but what is Britain's attitude to Broadway? Did this sort of show music register as American?
(e) What about Anthony's phrase "traditional middle-class culture"? Is it viable? (Compare: "traditional suburban culture.") I think discussion of "class" tends to underestimate the extent to which the conventional class designations (working, middle, upper) refer to cultures, even though the acting out of the class conflicts often seem to be as cultural rather than economic conflicts (except during actual strikes). So it's possible to talk about middle-class traditions. But in general hasn't it been the middle class's role to adopt to and promulgate new social conditions?
(f) So, to the extent that something's being swept away, who's doing the sweeping?
(g) And what's being swept? To the extent that a class is taking it on the chin from punk, are working and upper being whomped any less than the middle?
(h) Greg Ginn, interviewed in New York Rocker, 1982: "Isn't that a limited view of rock and roll - to say you're rebelling against some class?" (Greg Ginn was the guitarist for Black Flag, who btw named themselves after the flag of anarchy [I was disappointed when I found they weren't named after the roach killer])

Proofreading (belated)

[koganbot]

adopt to = adapt to

[koganbot]

So, when someone middle class is being "traditional," isn't there at least some elements in the "tradition" being invoked that are seen as different from (and maybe antithetical to) the middle-class present?

(Both past and future are coded as "Not middle class." To some extent. And so "middle class" codes as "fake." To some extent.)

[koganbot]

when someone middle class is being "traditional" = when someone [in the] middle class is being "traditional"

[koganbot]

And if one is thinking of punk as a "sweeping away" (should one think of this), isn't this an acting out of imperatives within the culture? Isn't it part of the middle class "tradition" (or whatever) to sweep things away?

(Also, why associate the Black-And-White Minstrel show with the middle class in particular?)

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

It reminds me of Lawerence Welk, more then anything, like Lawerence Welk with black face--and Welk is not only v. much pop music, he is nostalgic pop music, he is unfashionable pop music, and he is ignored...(or Liberace, really)

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

I actually watched an episode or two in 77 or 78 at my grandparents' house, although I have no memories of what I thought of it, other than it was dull. Interestingly enough, my grandparents – who at that point were hitting their eighties – were very progressive people with a lifelong commitment to social justice, the anti-nuclear movement, family planning, and assorted strange proto-ecological things (my poor dad was brought up on soya – and found the later outbreak of vegetarianism in his own children very distressing). They were thrilled when my sister brought some African friends home, and late in her life my grandmother was great mates with the local constable, who presumably was the only black copper in Devon. But I believe they would have found nothing untoward about the B&W Minstrels, any more than they would have regarded Little Black Sambo or a certain Agatha Christie title as problematic.
[During the recent unfortunate London mayoral election, my father was winding me up by defending Johnson's use of the word "picaninny" on the grounds that it was an acceptable term when he was young – to which I pointed out that the new mayor comes from my generation, not his, whatever his ridiculous image is intended to suggest).
My grandparents refused to let us watch Doctor Who or Top Of The Pops. My grandfather I don't think like TV much at all, but my granny absolutely loved Bergerac and Lovejoy.