Black English in Early Blackface Minstrelsy: A New Interpretation of the Sources of Minstrel Show Dialect

Abstract

MANY EARLY BLACKFACE ENTERTAINERS CLAIMED THAT THEY BORROWED THEIR comic material from black stevedores, preachers, laborers, or ex-slaves. Edwin P. Christy, for example, boasted that he had acquired his superior knowledge of the negro characteristics, traits, humor, and melody which his observant genius has since turned to such golden account while employed as a ropewalk supervisor in New Orleans. Ben Cotton recalled how he had studied the vocal styles of black riverboatmen, and Billy Whitlock, widely acknowledged as the best burntcork entertainer of his day, often told how he would steal off to some negro hut to hear the darkies sing and see them dance.' Playbills heralded the authenticity of popular Negro delineators, and, in the decades (1800-1840) before minstrel shows became paradigms of standardized mass-culture entertainment, theatre critics and magazine writers often praised the mimetic skills of the

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