Eugene Stratton and early ragtime in Britain.

Publication: Black Music Research Journal

Publication Date: 22-SEP-00

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COPYRIGHT 2000 Center For Black Music Research

In 1869, the periodical London Society commented, "Good society hates scenes, votes every eccentricity of manners and demonstrativeness of demeanour bad form" (quoted in Cominos 1963, 42). This was a prevalent middle-class view in Victorian Britain. The restless, nervous energies of the industrial age, with its expanding urbanization, mechanization, and mobility, its ever-accelerating pace of change, its rolling back of existing cultural horizons, and its increasing awareness of non-Western cultures and peoples, seemed to many contemporaries to demand an increased control over social manners and morals, a stricter definition of the symbolic boundaries between national civility and order and their perceived opposites. Decorum, respectability, and moderation were bulwarks against the unleashing of newfound passions, pleasures, and aspirations-and the possible lack of self-restraint accompanying them. For "good society," these appeared to pose a formidable threat to the governing conventions of behavior and identity. Yet in one of the most respectable forms of contemporary popular entertainment, enjoyed by many orderly, genteel middle-class people, these conventions were disrupted and upturned.

Blackface minstrelsy in Britain depended for its very source of popular appeal on the opposite of those precepts enshrined in the concept of "good form." Its appeal lay in its garishly spectacular scenes, its eccentricity of manners, and its demonstrativeness of demeanor. "A nigger concert," wrote a correspondent in Dwight's Journal of Music, "without grimace and copious gesticulation would be simply an ill entertainment" ("Negro Minstrelsy" 1859, 68). The nature of English civility and self-restraint, steadfastness and duty, and cultivation and manners was defined in part against an essentialized black nature, a nature still being referred to in the 1930s as "the animal exuberance of the nigger" (Duval 1933, 658). This description was offered not in a far-right or fascist publication but in the official weekly periodical of one of the most respectable of the new media of communications, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), at a time when that stem guardian of morality and decency, Sir John Reith, was still at its helm as director general. The appearance of this description in The Radio Times, the publication listing BBC programs, is a measure of its still-widespread acceptance in Britain in the early twentieth century. "Nigger" minstrelsy had contributed to this acceptance, over a long period of white mediations of "blackness" that had coincided with the development of the British Empire and the "scramble for Africa." Minstrelsy, along with other forms of cultural representation, had established the sense of that "animal exuberance." By and large, the audiences of minstrel shows in Britain had accepted the "exaggerated and farcical antics of the black as authentic" (Lorimer 1975, 42), and to the degree that this was so, such "authenticity" was defined in contradistinction to British national identity and a racially determined British character. This of course raises the question as to why the British racially cross-dressed in blackface, why they put on the "nigger" mask and, having done so, become exhilarated by delight in the kind of "grimace and copious gesticulation" that was by definition so decidedly un-British.

The key to this question lies in how the British came to consider cultural difference, in this case a racialized form of cultural difference, during the process of becoming modern. Modernity as a way of seeing and experiencing the world relied heavily on a sense of contrast between its own orientation and its various exclusions, displacements, and projections of "difference." Strategies of symbolic expulsion, and of rendering inferior what was regarded as different, were integral to national self-definition in societies classifying themselves as modem, civilized, and advanced. In this way, what was construed as "racially" inferior became interior to national identity even as this was hidden behind its exterior front of civility and progress. The civilizing process of modernity required its decivilized counterpart, which a society found in its own racial fantasies. Blackface fantasies were one particular variant of these, built as they were around a theatrical staging of stereotypical black characters who were a peculiar and complex conflation of mimicry and mockery. These fantasies showed at once an ability to imagine and entertain cultural difference and an inability to conceive of such difference in any other terms but those that, in Britain, supported its own limits and legitimations, its own bounded sense of identity in being modem, rational, ordered, civilized, and controlled. These terms demanded, among other things, that difference, in its imaginary blackface versions, be entertaining, that it be made a source of comic and sentimental entertainment. As such, these differences could be kept at a certain distance and so disavowed, while at the same time enjoyed and regaled as a means of diversion from being British, being white, and being modern. Blackface fantasies set up a sense of contrast between the modern sell upright in the prow of its rationality, and a disorderly black low-Other who confirmed white racial superiority and advancement while appearing safe by being made ridiculous, a figure of harmless fun and clownish grotesquerie.

Nowhere was this grotesquerie, in all its deficiency and dysfunction, more apparent than in the construct of the blackface "coon." The "coon" was a particular extension of an earlier blackface stereotype, the uppity, socially pretentious, outlandishly attired "nigger" buck of countless songs from the likes of "Long Tail Blue" onward. The urban "Dandy Jim" figure had been contrasted with the happy-go-lucky Sambo stereotype of plantation backwardness since the pioneer days of the minstrel show in the 1840s and 1850s. The disreputable black fop characterized the corrupting influence of a city lifestyle in grossly exaggerated form, providing an object lesson in overweaning vanity, hedonistic laziness, demonstrativeness of demeanor, and lack of self-restraint, the exact opposite of "good society." The fop's "coon" extension in the early ragtime of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a more narrowly characterized and virulently racist figure. The personae of Eugene Stratton (1861-1918) exemplified this new form of racist stereotyping in British minstrelsy. In this article, I focus on this leading "coon" exponent. There are three reasons in particular why it is important to do this.

First, as well as representing this particular strand within minstrelsy, Stratton's career and repertoire provide a key resource for explaining the broader popularity and appeal of "coon" songs and acts in Britain, not least because he was regarded as having "no rival in his line" (cited in Barker 1980, 114). This appeal has been largely ignored in musical and cultural history. In some ways, such neglect is hardly surprising and can be compared with the historical treatment of one of his contemporaries, the renowned music hall actor, comedian, and singer George Robey (1869-1954). Robey first appeared in London in 1891, one year before Stratton himself switched from the minstrel show to the music hall. Following his debut at the Oxford Music Hall, Robey soon established his reputation as "The Prime Minister of Mirth." Today, his name remains among the best known of music-hall stars. By comparison with Robey's, Stratton's fame has been largely eclipsed, even though in his lifetime he was the "coon" singer par excellence, and both performers were celebrated in pantomime as well as in the halls. In his biography of Robey, James Harding cites an occasion in 1892 when Robey shared the bill with Stratton at the Holborn Empire in London and comments that "today his `black-up' turn would repel, despite the charm of his soft-shoe shuffle" (Harding 1990, 28; see also Wilson 1956; Cotes 1972). Thankfully, this is true. Although the prohibition that prevents contemporary British theatrical performers from blacking up remains controversial--as if it is simply a matter of overzealous "political correctness"--the racism of Stratton and other "coon" performers is now generally regarded as among the most blatant aspects of "bad form" in the musical and theatrical culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the "coon" subgenre of blackface entertainments was at the height of its popularity.

This prohibition goes some way toward explaining the lack of critical attention given to the appeal of the "coon" craze, but it is not adequate in itself, primarily because popular racism in late Victorian Britain has not been neglected in the same way. Stratton as a minstrel and music-hall artist is worth examining because, as the chief exponent of "coon" songs in Britain, he has been credited with helping "to direct the course of public taste for popular syncopated music in its formative years" (Walker 1980, 124-125), ragtime being equated almost exclusively with "coon" songs in Britain in the late 1890s and early 1900s (see also Blesh and Janis 1971, 13; Berlin 1984, 111). Exploring the connections between the "coon" craze and popular racism provides the second reason for focusing on Stratton. The high point of popularity of the "coon" craze in Britain coincided with the period of high imperialism, and British imperialism, along with its attendant forms of racism during this period, has been extensively studied by historians. In view of this, there is a strong case for attending closely to the relations of high imperialist racism and the popular music and theater of the time.

Finally, tracing the "coon" craze in turn-of-the-century minstrelsy through the figure of Stratton should help us overcome propagandist notions of popular culture in relation to imperial ideology. If this subgenre of minstrelsy had existed solely for the dissemination of racist stereotypes and imperialist values, it is unlikely that it would have met with such enormous success. Its widespread appeal certainly should be understood in...

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