Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

12 With Amusement for Allwell as the upheaval of the emerging market economy. And each helped putin motion trends and patterns that continued to play out generations later. 2In the late 1820s, even before T. D. Rice took his little song anddance to what he described as “unsophisticated” Bowery audiences, afriend of the fledgling songwriter Stephen Foster observed that “Jim Crowwas on everybody’s tongue.” Its popularity had spread after Rice first introducedhis Jim Crow steps and little tune in Louisville, when he was actingin a play, The Rifle. He reportedly did so after observing a slave, whowas cleaning a stable, do the odd, jerky movements, hunching his shoulders,shuffling, spinning around on his heel, and singing. In fact, however,according to one minstrel scholar: “No single stable hand made up ortaught the song. Instead there was a widespread African-American folkdance impersonating—delineating—crows, based in agricultural ritual and,some say, ‘magical in character.’” Whether or not Rice realized that he wasadapting a regional folklore character, he soon added, between acts of TheRifle, other “Negro” performances. Singing “Me and My Shadow,” for example,he danced while a child actor in blackface mimicked his steps. Bythe time Rice took his talents to New York City, he enjoyed a popular stagereputation as “the negro, par excellence.” 3Although “jumping Jim Crow” elevated Rice from obscurity and madehim one of the best-known actors of his era, blackface performances werefar from new. Indeed, they were deeply rooted in the carnivals and festivalsof early modern Europe. A carnival served as “an anti-holiday (literally anunholy feast),” and the line between celebration and criminality or violencewas thin. Rowdy celebrants, often hiding their identities behind costumesand masks, defied propriety and traditional roles and assumed the identitiesof other people. Centuries later, during Mardi Gras in New Orleans,participants continued to carry that tradition into the streets, momentarilycelebrating disorder and reversing roles. Similarly, in Finland, citizensstaged an annual revelry—Vappu—by donning masks, parading throughthe streets with drinks in their hands, ringing doorbells, and urinating inpublic. During these “inversion rituals,” as scholars would later describethem, boisterous, sometimes riotous participants momentarily turned theexisting social order upside down, switching roles, repudiating decorum,and threatening traditional authority figures. 4Sometimes during such carnivals, a commoner would become “Kingfor a Day,” or a “Lord of Misrule,” briefly playing out a charade in whichthe subjects took charge while the obliging ruling classes allowed their “inferiors”to unleash grievances and blow off steam. One such Europeanritual was mumming, when costumed young men, singing, drinking, andmaking all kinds of noise, demanded food and beverages from owners ofwealthy homes and businesses. During some of these inversion rituals,