Dance, Noise, and Transgression: Musical Creolization in 19th century British Maritime Culture Christopher J Smith (christopher.smith@ttu.

edu) Vernacular Music Center, Texas Tech University School of Music In the 19th century, modernizing trade, communications, and geopolitics expanded and diversified the ranks of those who worked the windjammers and steamers which accelerated the resulting global consciousness. Sailors, pilots, masters, and harbor workers tended toward much greater diversity of ethnicity and experience than more land-bound populations, and the Caribbean, the South Seas, and the Far East were especially highly represented amongst these maritime communities. On deck and docks, inshore racial and social strata were contested, conflicted, blurred, and sometimes subverted: black slave or free pilots and captains commanded white or mixed-race crews; deckhands and officers exchanged songs, tunes, stories, handcrafts, and a wide array of expressive culture; and these more egalitarian maritime perspectives came ashore to influence and mutate social conduct in port and river cities. Musicparticularly the music of African Caribbean / creole cultureswas an especially portable, influential, and ubiquitous material for such exchange, and these creolizing music and dance behaviors spread widely, both more and less visibly or publically. Hence, the frenzied cultural popularity that followed New Yorks blackface troupe the Virginia Minstrels on their first 1843 tour of Britainduring which they played Liverpool, Manchester, and London, paved the way for future tours by other American troupes, and left a host of banjo-strumming imitators in their wake, before disbanding unexpectedlywas not an entirely new thing under the sun.

This is a very preliminary investigation, which follows on from a book-length research project that focused upon the creole synthesis in riverine and maritime zones of antebellum North America. From that long-term study emerged the realization that theatrical minstrelsys seemingly-instantaneous mass popularity in the young United States was a product not of novelty, but rather of the response, by the mechanics, apprentices, and working-class young men who were its first audiences, to music and

dance forms they knew from the street, newly legitimized on the theatrical stage. This accounts for the tumultuous responses of working-class audiences to Tom Rices and George Dixons first solo turns on the stages of the Lower East Sides Bowery and Chatham Theatres in the 1830s and the immediate and immense popularity of Dan Emmetts Virginia Minstrels, formed in the winter of 1842-43, who were the first widely-recognized blackface troupe offering a full evenings entertainment, driven by the iconic instrumentation of banjo, fiddle, tambourine, and bones. The idiom was a cornerstone of music publishing and promotions as well as performance, and provided the inspiration for vaudeville, tapdance, and much American slapstick comedy; Americas first successful pop songwriter, Stephen Foster, drew heavily upon minstrelsy styles for compositions and minstrel troupes (Christys principle among them) for promotion. The Minstrels toured the U.K. in 1844 (?) and were nearly as popular as they had been at home; in their wake, homegrown blackface troupes and banjo-strumming soloists sprang up in imitation, and minstrelsy is widely credited with providing the first introduction of the five-string banjo in English and Irish traditional musics as well.

This paper seeks to identify parallels and distinctions between the reception of blackface in America and in the UK and Ireland. However, as in the US study, documentation on the lives, music, and careers of blackface minstrels decreases in inverse proportion to historical proximity: the earlier the documented players or performers, the sparser the available informationparticularly as regards musical practices. Dance music, dancing, song, and comic improvisation are least documented of all, so the evidence for their existence and inspiration must be sought in other places than the theatrical prints.

In the American project, those sources included census data, maps, travelers reports, and, most centrally iconography, in the sketches and vernacular paintings of amateur and professional artists. The American book focuses upon one such artist: the Long Island New York painter William Sidney Mount,

in order to seek in his visual arts confirmation of data regarding cross-cultural musical exchange implicit in census data, maps, and prose sources.

Unfortunately, Anglo-Celtic and Afro-Caribbean musical exchange in Britain and Ireland is even less well documented. A few preliminary insights, gleaned from this sparse data, may serve to frame todays discussion. First: minstrelsy, when it came to Britain in the form of the touring troupes of the 40s, carried a strong whiff of exotica, familiar in the English theatrical tradition at least since Shakespeares day. Second, the colonial trades in indentured servants (17th and 18th centuries), sugar (18th and 19th), and slaves (18th and 19th) made first Bristol, and then Liverpool, key zones for cross-cultural contact and expressive performance. Though both cities commerce was dominated by British merchant houses, the crews of their vessels employed in the various triangular trades (Britain to West Africa, West Africa to the British Caribbean, the British Caribbean to New England, and then back to Britain) were, as in the west Atlantic, atypically and demonstrably multi-ethnic sites for cultural exchange.

Third: cities with large transient, maritime, and working-class populations, including London, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, Dublin, and Belfast, were loci of blackface performance. This is consistent with the American situation: theatrical minstrelsy, and the solo idioms that were its earliest manifestations, were originally working-class idioms. In both cases, the minstrel mask (Mahar) was a useful tool for crossclass critique: adoption of the caricatured personae of the black minstrel permitted the white apprentice or mechanic a guise from which to mock social classes both below and above him. This is confirmed by the genres swift adoption in Britaina kind of forerunner of the 1950s skiffle boom.

But how to recover, or at least to infer the circumstances of, the creole forerunners of theatrical minstrelsy? In part, I will address this question through a fundamental premise: that there was an

Atlantic creole culture, carried by water, whose inhabitants, regardless of their original ethnicity, shared expressive experiences. This is confirmed by both the American project and parallel, later cycles of exchange: land-bound rules simply dont fully explain what went on in these zones.1 These cycles of immigration or exchange, and the impact of New World creole influence, were especially significant in cities involved in the Caribbean trades of sugar, tobacco, and slaves: Bristol, Glasgow, and Liverpool were particularly fertile sites for cultural exchange. Afro-Caribbean expressive culture could be especially influential in these cities even if they contained only a relative minimal permanent immigrant population: the Atlantic creole community could exert significant impact upon those cities expressive street cultures even only as visitors; as a parallel example, we may think of the black sailors, stewards, and servicemen who powerfully influenced Liverpools Merseybeat explosion in the late 1950s.

This project thus began as a fishing expedition: I wanted to test the hypothesis that the creole synthesis, which I have situated in riverine and maritime environments in the west Atlantic and Caribbean, might have been at play in other Atlantic locations as well. I chose to focus upon cities directly touched by the triangular trade but which were otherwise not particularly cosmopolitan or multinational. London was preeminently a site for multi-cultural exchange, of course, but the very diversity of its emigr populations origins impedes identifying particular patterns of uniquely trans-Atlantic interaction. So I narrowed my focus to three citiesBristol, Liverpool, and Dublinwhich exemplify three different economic, sociological, and cultural profiles: Bristols maritime sugar trade, Liverpools explosive growth at the height of the slave trade, and Dublins role (like Cork and Wexford) as a point of departure for persons exiled due to political or economic misfortune. In the end, I chose to focus upon creole culture and creolizing persons in the streets, counting houses, and stages of the city of Bristol, not at all far from

See Paul Gilroys theory of the black Atlantic in this context.

where we find ourselves today, for reasons which I hope will become clear. This is thus a story of a city, a time period, a cluster of performance idioms and their semiotic meanings, of a culture-crossing individual, and of a trans-Atlantic, mobile community which was both the source and also the conduit for the worldwide emigration of the creole synthesis.

To tell the English story of the African American actor Ira F Aldridge, and explain what it reveals about the Atlantic maritime community that was the crucible of the creole synthesis, it is necessary to understand something not only of the street musics and sociology which were the raw materials for blackface performance, but also of Bristols role in the Atlantic trade. Losing economic power later in the 19th century to Liverpool, whose wealth arose from her essential role in the Middle Passage which brought slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean and the American southeast coast, in the late 18th century Bristol still retained the central role in Atlantic commerce it had held ever since the days of John Cabot and the North Atlantic salt cod trade. Bristols merchant houses and shipping linessome owned by the same trading familieshad been the foundation of the British sugar trade, which took millions out of Jamaica and Barbados, sent thousands of indentured servants from southwest England and Ireland to the Colonies, andmost crucially for our present purposesprovided employment for captains, pilots, crews, and harbor workers whose geographic origin and polyglot linguistic experience made Atlantic culture a zone for creolization. Sons of Bristol went out to apprentice in the Islands, daughters of wealthy planters married into Bristol trading families, mixed-race colonists children were educated in Europe, and Caribbean-born colonials, their fortunes made, retired to landed estates in the Severn valley. As a result, music, dance, and expressive topics from the British Caribbean were well known both on Bristols docks and in her dance salons.

The Sugar Colonies likewise saw the rise of Caribbean syncretic religions, observances, and festivals which combined African and European influences: voudou and santeria in the French and Spanish colonies; Jonkonnu and Obeah in the English-speaking islands. These religions, whose beliefs and practices represent a very complex melange of cultural sources, shaped the experience of slaves and freemen in the Caribbean but also those of audiences in New York, London, and Bristol: some of the first integrated theatrical events in each of these cities involved the participation of blacks or whites in blackface, Afro-Caribbean sources, Anglo-American actors or entrepreneurs or musicians, working-class audiences, creole crews. Atlantic maritime culture in this period was mixing, amalgamating, and evolving very swiftly, most often in socially unregarded and/or uncontrollable ways. When, in a famous incident during the War of 1812, an American privateers integrated crew trooped into a Lower Manhattan theater, they were told that the whites in the crew could sit in the orchestra, but blacks would have to sit in the third tier, with other blacks and prostitutes. The crew, as a whole, responded by threatening to tear the theater apart.

The first component of our discussion, then, is a theater. The African Grove had been founded in 1817 as a pleasure garden, akin to Londons Vauxhall, by William Brown, a black ex-ships steward who had been born in Haiti and sailed on liners out of Liverpool. Originally congregating in the back house behind 38 Thompson Street, by 1820 the dandies and dandizettes of the Grove had become an item for the flash press, street newspapers aimed at working-class single young white men, and a also favored destination for whites with a taste for exotica (and probably erotica). Within just a few years the Groves success led to more ambitious programming (in September 1821 Brown staged Richard III) and new quarters at Mercer & Bleecker, a few blocks west of the Lower East Side Catherine Wharf where ferries docked and black fishermen selling fried eels danced on the wharves to attract trade. This is precisely the period in which the Bowery and Chatham Theaters, which would become the homes of

blackface minstrelsy in the second half of the decade, opened a few blocks eastwhich may have led to commercial competition between black and white theater owners. According to period sources, Browns productions, Shakespearian and otherwise, were a fluid gumbo of singing, dancing, topical airs, physical comedy, and both serious and parodic monologs. By January 1822, Brown was staging his own fulllength King Shotaway, a melodrama with songs, dancing, and music that related a 1795 rebellion by Black Caribs on the British island of St Vincent. In March 1823, a New York production of the English street opera Tom and Jerry opened at the Park Theater, whose most popular feature...proved to be the descent into Londons working class East End. *McAllister 281+ For his own production at the Grove, William Brown is reported to have imported transvestism (a Mr Jackson danced the characteristic African Sal), and in June Brown replaced the East End scene with one set in a slave market, in which, a white actor was employed to auction off the cast. *Odell 3:70+

Beyond its crucial role as a very early model for the fluid interaction of black and white theatrical personnel and properties which would inspire minstrelsys theatrics, the Grove is important for another reason: because it provided some of the first training for the most famous African American actor in the mid-nineteenth century world. Ira F Aldridge was born in New York City in 1807, the same year that the painter William Sidney Mount was born on the North Shore of Long Island, just east of the City, and coincidentally the year that Parliament abolished the British slave trade. As a child, Aldridge attended the African Free School in its second location on Mulberry Street in what is now Chinatown, and received his first training in performance there and at the African Grove Theater. The Grove was visited by the British comic actor Charles Mathews in 1822 (when he claimed to have heard and learned the iconic blackface tune Possum up a Gum Tree/Stump) and from which he said he had become rich in black fun; Aldridge later claimed, rather persuasively, that Mathews had got Possum from Aldridges

performances.2 Aldridge also appears to have recognized, like a later generation of New Orleans and Chicago jazzmen, that opportunities for African American performers might be greater, and prejudice less impediment, abroadparticularly after he and several other Grove personnel were assaulted by a white mob. At the age of 17, he sailed for England, earning his passage as a ships steward; by 1825 had become a noted interpreter of both African and whiteface roles: archetypal noble savage figures such as Oroonoko in A Slaves Revenge, Gambia in The Slave, Mungo in The Padlock; and the aforementioned Othello, Richard III, and Shylock. He played widely in Britain and Ireland, and eventuallyin the 1850stook both Europe and Russia by storm. He died on tour in 1867 and is buried in Lodz, in Poland. Aldridge is the second character in our story.

The third element is another theater. There are many avenues through which we could tell this story: but for reasons of brevity, primacy, and our present locale, I am going to focus upon the concatenation of events that brought Ira Aldridge from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to London, Manchester, and eventually Bristol (2x), where in 1830 he starred at the Theater Royale in a newly-authored pantomime version of a theatrical property. That melodrama, itself based in the 1780s career of a notorious Jamaican bandit and freedom fighter, Jack Mansong or Three-Fingerd Jack, is shot through with the complex political implications of the Jamaican supernatural system called Obeah. First mythologized in the Jamaican physician Benjamin Moseleys 1799 A Treatise on Sugar, Jacks tale had proven both remarkably durable and remarkably flexible: because it played into archetypes of savagery or nobility which had been part of English colonial perceptions ever since Elizabethan drama (The Tempest after all was itself inspired by reports of a shipwreck on the coast of Elizabethan Virginia), it had inspired both a massively popular serio-pantomime which took Haymarket by storm in 1800, as well as subsequent chapbooks, newspaper reports, and an epistolary novel.
2

McAllister, Marvin Edward. "'White people do not know how to behave at entertainments designed for ladies and gentlemen of colour': A History of New York's African Grove/African Theatre." Diss. Northwestern University, 1997.

Obi, or Three-Fingerd Jack theatricalized savagery and nobility, but, as various scholars have shown, also provided a way to act out rebellion in a fashion that vented working-class tension, a mask for cultural critique much like the slightly later blackface theatrics of Jim Crow and Zip Coon. The show marked a brief period, between the French Revolution (including the Haitian rebellion of 1799-1804) and the outlawing of the slave trade, in which were brought to a head British sensations of fear and allure regarding Caribbean slavery and the sugar trade which slavery made possible; regarding the republican furor of revolutionary France and English rural rebellion; and regarding the twin cults of Libert and Obi and the lumpenproletariaten they were taken to symbolize. As with the later embourgeoisement of blackface, all these could be sanitized and semiotically controlled by their scripted portrayal on stage. As Richardson comments, literary exoticism cannot easily be disentangled from political and economic developments, and Obi carried similar revolutionary connotations in British colonies as voodoo did in French.3

Yet, like William Browns rewriting of Tom and Jerry to replace the exoticism of Londons East End with that of a fish market on the Lower East Side or a slave market in South Carolina, Obis appeal to middleclass white voyeurism also enacted remarkably precise renditions of Afro-Caribbean folkways on the English theatrical stage: not only the gothic slander with which the Jamaican syncretic religion was portrayed, but also the allure of Afro-Anglo festival: Obi contains a scene (I/vi) depicting a Jamaican slave celebration of Junkanoo (John Canoe), the syncretic night-visiting festival in which a costumed
3

Richardson, Alan. Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797-1807. Studies in Romanticism 32/1 (Spring 1993), 4. De Quincey, Coleridge, Maria Edgeworth, and Wordsworth all wrote poems or essays on Caribbean topics, especially including portrayals of creole characters (Edgeworth even employs the iconic name of Juba for one) and of Obi rituals. Ironically, Bristol, because its connections to the Caribbean involved investing in and shipping sugar, rather than Liverpools more direct involvement in shipping slaves, became a cent er for abolitionismso much so, that by 1800 there was literature which explicitly linked sugar to the traffic in human chattel. Moseleys 1799 Treatise in fact was a convoluted, pseudo-scientific attempt to justify sugar as a source of physical health and wellbeing.

and masked band of dancers travel from house to house, singing and dancing in return for rewards of money and drink.4

What lay, in part, beneath the exoticist voyeurism of Zip Coon, as with Three-Fingerd Jack, white responses to the African Grove or to blackface theatrics, and even to Aldridges Shylock or Othello, was fearthe subconscious but nevertheless very real fear felt by a white colonial minority toward a marginalized, exploited, and vast underclass. In America, the minstrel mask permitted carnivalesque transgression: the opportunity for working-class young men to simultaneously mock the urban free blacks with whom they competed for work, and the white bourgeois who, in the first half of the 19th century, were rapidly distancing themselveseconomically, professionally, and/or geographicallyfrom the street life of cities. Bristol depended upon the triangular trade, but in contrast to Liverpool the trades victimsthe indentured or Barbadozd poor and Irish workers and West African slaveslay mostly and conveniently over the western Atlantic horizon: Bristol saw the profits from, but not the dayto-day human cost of the sugar trade. This left space for both exotica and ennoblement.

Yet the same period also saw the growth, in the Sugar Islands, of a planter class whose language, diets, entertainments, even offspring and digestive bacteria, were already creolizingthat is, already reflective of the multi-ethnic mixing the Atlantic creole culture made possible and even inevitable. When those young scions of Bristol houses returned from their Caribbean apprenticeships, sometimes bringing with them the daughters of wealthy planters; when the integrated crews of the triangle trades Bristolregistered ships hove anchor in the channel and debarked for shore leave; when the young Ira Aldridge left the ship on which hed been steward to try his luck as an actor in England: all these brought with them the seeds of the creole synthesis. Aldridges performances in England and eventually Europe
4

The parallels to both English & North European mumming traditions, and to European & Caribbean carnivalesque behaviors, are obvious.

would be received in a very different semiotic environment, one that partook in part of the English tradition for theatricalized exotica, but contrasting receptions could not entirely erase its creole origins and expressive contentin the Black Atlantic culture which touched actors and audiences at the African Grove, on the decks of Bermuda privateersmen, in the West Indian wind bands recruited for colonial armies, and in the working class streets and theatres of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Severn wharves.

Between 1825 and his debut at Covent Garden in 1833 (the same year that the Emancipation Act was passed), Aldridge toured widely in Ireland and the British Isles, developing a wide repertoire which included both period and contemporary and both serious and comic roles (everything from Mungo in Dibdins venerable The Padlock to the title character in Othello), which particularly drew upon his ability to sing, dance, and play the guitar. In 1830, he played and sang Possum Up a Gum Stump, the iconic minstrel tune which Mathews appears to have stolen at the African Grove, as part of a performance of Obi at Bristols Theatre Royal.5 What this means is that regardless of the theatricality of exoticist voyeurism, and for at least the minutes of his performances in regional and provincial theatres, Aldridge reenacted the polyglot, creole environment of Lower Manhattan and the African Grove, in the first decades of the century, when a new expressive culture, what W. T. Lahmon has called The First Atlantic Popular Culture.

Playing a Jamaican character in a melodrama based upon (relatively recent) Caribbean historical events, which dramatized the political and economic paradoxes of the sugar trade, in a cityand a theater built upon the profits of that trade, and singing a song which was already emblematic of cross-dressing, blackface and whiteface ethnic exchange, twelve to thirteen years before Dan Emmetts Virginia

Marshall 1844. See Buckley, Peter. Obi in New York: Aldridge and the African Grove. Obi, Praxis Series, Romantic Circles.

Minstrels were founded or made their first European tour, Ira Aldridge embodied the creole synthesis. Certainly the reception to his Mungo, Othello, Richard III, or Three-Fingerd Jack mapped onto earlier British theatrical archetypes of the noble- or otherwise savage. Hence, one element of the blackface synthesis which would come to fuller flower in the full evening entertainments by the seminal blackface quartets like the Virginia or Christy minstrels was in fact a Euro-centric recognition of the venerable, transgressive harlequinade of masked performance. Yet we must also acknowledge a second factor, previously significantly under-reported, which shaped the blackface synthesis and in the reception of that synthesis in England over a decade later. Regardless of the complexity of the sugarslaves profitsabolition dynamics which obtained in Englands great shipping cities in the first third of the nineteenth century, these Theatre Royal performances, seven years after, and in direct competition to, Charles Mathewss 1823 blackface characters in A Trip To America, given Ira Aldridges background, experience, and skills, took English experience of Afro-Caribbean performance, and the creole Atlantic culture out of which it arose, one step closer to realityand to the creole synthesis.