ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ...

Marionettes did not adopt any of the preeminent nineteenth-century American
composer’s actual songs. However, they did apply the essence of Foster’s technique by
portraying a tamer, more sentimental version of “Negro music.”
To the twenty-first century scholar, the first two seem like sterilized versions of
minstrel songs. They deal with the same subjects as their counterparts: courtship, love,
and ostensibly black life. Yet they deal with them without many of the more scandalous
qualities exhibited by other troupes. In “Hunkey Dorum” and “Sweet Belle Mahone,”
references to female subjects only vaguely suggest the “comic obsession with […]
woman’s physical qualities” noted by scholars. 57 The refrain emphasizes Ms. Brown’s
“frizzed” hair, and suggests that her morals are looser than she otherwise proclaims. She
accepts the young man’s offer to walk her home and they walk all night. She tells him
she “must leave” him outside her home, and the young man submits his skepticism.
Yet this single, ambiguous suggestion of sexual availability, and the references to
hair, hardly compare to the far more explicit depictions in many minstrel selections. In
songs like “Miss Lucy Neal,” Sambo discusses the taste of his lady’s lips and, when
taking her home, discovers she is engaged to another man when the unnamed suitor
thrashes the unwitting Sambo. Though both songs end in marriage, “Hunkey Dorum”
ends in a happy one, with the protagonist “settling down.” “Miss Lucy Neal’s” marriage
ends with Sambo abandoning her, when Sambo sees that her first child looks like the
unnamed suitor. 58
57 William J. Mahar, Behind the Burt Cork Mask (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999), 302.
58 Ibid., 305.
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