AT THE CHATHAM THEATER

AT THE CHATHAM THEATER

 Chatham Theater, New York City (c. 1850) 

A benefit for Dick Pehlam, featuring, "The Virginia Minstrels."

Four musicians formed a band.   Frank Brower played the "bones," (sticks) Dan Emmett, the violin, Billy Whitlock, the banjo, and R. W. Pelham, the tambourine.   They opened the show with, "De Boatman Dance."    They played a lively, newly style of music, loosely based on what was perceived to be the music of the Southern black slave.  They danced, told jokes, interacted with the audience, sang songs of great wit and pathos.   It was exotic and intoxicating, thrilling and moving, and in the end, caused a sensation that would last fifty or so years in one form or another, and the musical styles that descended from their music are still with us to this day.  They called themselves, The Virginia Minstrels.  Oh, and they wore burnt cork to darken their skin so as to appear to be black.  

That was the evening of January 31, 1843, at the Chatham Theater on Chatham Street in New York City and a completely new form of entertainment, and of style and ethos of music, known collectively as, "Blackface Minstrelsy," was born.   The result was that American popular music would take a turn that would determine and effect its very nature through to the present day.  For without the creative genius of these "minstrels," Scott Joplin does not write "The Maple Leaf Rag," or any other "ragtime" piece, as ragtime would not exist.  Nor, then, would there be any Dixieland Jazz out of New Orleans and Kansas City,  mainstream jazz  would never have evolved, no Rhythm n' Blues, no Country or Country Western as we know it, or even, later on, Rock and Roll.   It was the inventive genius of the early 19th century minstrel band that set all this in motion, that allowed these musical styles to exist.  

That night, on Chatham Street in what is now Chinatown in New York City, a new course for American popular music, what it would become, and how it would sound, was established, and music would be forever changed.

* * *

It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to fully understand the overwhelming success and popularity of what had been established that night on Chatham Street.   If we can put aside for a moment the revulsion we feel today toward the words,  "Negro Minstrelsy,"  we might begin to grasp that it was, for the audience of the time, a nation-wide (with the exception of the deep South) sensation, and it was the music that was the primary cause of that sensation. No one had heard such exciting and infectious music before. For an idea of just how much of sensation The Virginia Minstrels made that night, consider that in six months they were performing on the London stage and touring England.

Completely reviled today, minstrelsy as a whole, is completely misunderstood.   I will not attempt to set the record straight here.   Suffice it to say, there is something to be reviled.  But there is much, much more to be admired.  At its best a blackface minstrel show offered an evening featuring the nation's finest and most talented performers of both the white and black races.   On display was comedic genius (at times), high tragedy and low comedy, and best of all, wonderful and thrilling musical performers.   These were the staples of the original Minstrel "tradition," all forgotten today, as is so much of the past, particularly when it comes to popular culture, its musicians, singers and its various stylistic manifestations. 

*  *  *

As successful as minstrelsy was in the latter half of the 19th century it did not last with any success into the 20th.   Vaudeville had, by the 1890's, established itself as the "new" most popular form of entertainment.  And why not? It had a distinct advantage over the minstrel show:  it had girls!    (And I use the word, "girls,"  instead of, "women," not out of disrespect for the female gender, but because many of these ladies were, indeed, below legal age.   They just lied about their ages in order to work, a practice that continued well into the 20th century).  

The minstrel show was a exclusively a male-only endeavor.   Plus, minstrelsy had begun to grow bigger than its own audiences could relate to: by the 1880's many complained that it had lost it's charm and unique attractiveness, that it became bloated and overblown with huge casts, and sumptuous sets.   (But isn't that the fate of so many things that are successful in America?)    Lost were the "charm," of the "Negro melody," the many characters, portrayed therein, and the humor associated with those characters.  Characters of Irish, Italian, or German origins began to show up on the Minstrel stage in blackface!   This, of course, made no sense to traditionalists, but to newer audiences, the "burnt cork," was merely a mask, a convention of theatricality and entertainment, not a depiction of any race.    Please recall that the African-American was rarely seen by Northerners, and was considered something of an "exotic," not to mocked and derided but to be used as a vehicle for both comedy and melodramatic pathos.  Minstrelsy was a "northern," phenomenon which may explain why there was equally as much material devoted to the awful plight of the Southern black, as to "Jim Crow" characterizations.   Consider that most of those lovely and poignant songs by Stephen Foster about the cruelty of life for the Southern black, ("My Old Kentucky Home," for example) were written specifically for the Minstrel stage.   

By the turn of the 20th century minstrelsy so fallen out of popular tastes that when George M. Cohan himself attempted a revival of the minstrel show in 1908 with lavish sets, great and talented performers such as George "Honeyboy" Evans and Eddie Leonard, well-established, top vaudeville stars of the time, the show failed miserably.

And so, blackface minstrelsy passed, albeit slowly, into oblivion.  

But the music it established and help evolve continued on with it's snappy, syncopations, its unpredictable rhythms, and the melodic contours that contained the wailing of the south, (in the form of "blue" notes) carried on and flourished.   And there is not a single performer of any style of popular music today that does not directly come from out of these traditions.  

* * *

Today the Chatham Theater is a distant memory, if remembered at all; built in 1839 on Chatham Street between Roosevelt and James Streets the theater survived several fires and several name changes, but it was for a while one of New York City's most popular venues for live entertainment.   In 1862 it was finally demolished, though parts remained for a time to be used as storefronts by various shopkeepers.

* * *

Americans, by nature, do not like, "looking backward."  Everything, especially popular culture is aimed at youth and the present moment, as if nothing important happened before they were born.  We have become a myopic and deeply narcissistic society.  And history is something to be studied by "other people," specialists, not something that can speak to each of us, something to be held sacred,  as it holds within it the seeds of who were are today.  No, there is nothing to be learned by looking backward.

Chatham Street has been renamed, "Park Row," Roosevelt and James Street no longer exist at all.  No one, or very few at least, even know that there was once a hugely popular theater there.   Names such as Joel Sweeney,  Dan Emmett, Jack Diamond, even Lew Dockstader, truly household names, names that evoked feelings of joy and the excitement of live entertainment, are now known only to the rare scholar.  And even their numbers are dwindling.

The memory of that night in 1843 has long faded;  those in attendance, both on stage and in the audience, were probably long dead by the turn of the last century.  But what those four men in blackface accomplished that night lives on, through the years, (now over one-hundred and seventy) through wars and drought and depressions, and changing ethnic populations. Who could have predicted all this on that cold January night when four gifted entertainers donned burnt cork at the Chatham?   Who could have known that these four stage professionals experimenting with a new sound, who sang, danced and told jokes, would create a new form of musical expression and expressiveness  that would resonate around the world, in us all, forever?  

No one cares, or can even appreciate the import of that night.

And so, there is nothing, not a sign, or a plaque, or anything, to mark the spot upon which that event, without question the single most important night in the history of American popular music, occurred.