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This chapter starts with Dvorák's witnessing of the exuberant festivities for the 400th anniversary of Columbusás landing in the New World only a few days after his arrival and his first concert appearance. It is here that Dvorák often hears Negro Spirituals sung by his new assistant, Harry T. Burleigh, as he composes a new Symphony. Dvorák explicitly announces that his “newly completed symphony reflects the Negro melodies, upon which ... the coming American school must be based ... will be a surprise to the world”. He carefully signs his completed score and dates it, “Fine, Praised be to God! May 24, 1893, at nine in the morning”. In an unusual gesture, Dvorák returns to the score later that day to add a euphoric note, “Family arrives at Southhampton! (telegram l:33)”. Famous American and European musicians react to Dvorák's “negro music idea”. After that, the Dvoráks leave by train for their summer vacation in a small Czech speaking farm community in Spillville, Iowa. En route they stop in Chicago to visit the Fair.

Author Edna Ferber's inspiration and research methods while writing Show Boat are put in context with the vogue for Negro spirituals in 1920s Manhattan. The plot of the novel is situated within Ferber's previous work and the central character of Magnolia Hawkes Ravenal is compared to other Ferber heroines. Ferber's use of Negro spirituals to define Magnolia's identity and lay out the book's principal theme is critiqued from the perspective of popular entertainment history. Oscar Hammerstein II's alterations to Ferber's story, in particular his realignment of white characters' reactions to racial questions, are considered.

Paul Robeson was the primary inspiration for the song “Ol' Man River.” This chapter details Robeson's mid-Twenties career as a dramatic actor and singer of concert spirituals and describes how Kern and Hammerstein sought to lodge Robeson's persona in Show Boat on several levels. An important source for the tune to “Ol' Man River” from the 1926 show Deep River is reprinted for the first time. Robeson's resistance to Hammerstein, Kern, and producer Florenz Ziegfeld's plans is explained by way of the singer's experiences in Greenwich Village and London and his desire to use his career to shape the white public's perception of African Americans.

The State Department used America’s predominantly Christian religion as part of its cultural presentations strategy. Many musical performers, including African American, white, and mixed choirs and even opera singers, performed Negro spirituals at the Department’s request. American musicians sang in Protestant churches and taught Christian music to choral groups, thereby supporting anti-Communist activity in Asia.

The ever-growing success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers attracted widespread notice, and by 1873–1874 the troupe was facing a field of competitors, some of whom made innovations to the concert presentation of spirituals and others of whom were content to imitate the Fisk Jubilee Singers in style and repertory. Among the innovators were the Hampton Institute Singers, directed by Thomas P. Fenner. Their repertory was largely distinct from that of the Fisk singers, and they sang in a more folk-oriented performance style, as evidenced by the fact that they had a “shout leader” and sang in dialect. Another group of innovators was the Tennesseans (1874), directed by John Wesley Donavin, who sang in support of Central Tennessee College in Nashville. Their popularity rested on the supposed authenticity of what they billed as their “slave cabin concerts”—not a Fisk service of song but meant to be a naturalistic representation of slave life. The Tennesseans’ bass singer Leroy Pickett made many of their arrangements, becoming one of the earliest black arrangers of concert spirituals; later he became acting musical director. Imitators, on the other hand, reproduced the repertory and aesthetic of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They included the Hyers sisters, who reoriented their programming of art songs to include spirituals so that they could complete with other black singers at the time, as well as the Shaw Jubilee Singers, New Orleans Jubilee Singers, Jackson Jubilee Singers, Old Original North Carolinians (managed by T. H. Brand), and Sheppard’s Colored Jubilee Singers. With all of these groups, a jubilee entertainment industry began to take shape in 1872 to 1874, as performance norms were established and as organizations like lyceum bureaus began to add jubilee troupes to their roster.

Paul Robeson played Joe for just over a decade, appearing in the first London production in 1928, the 1932 Broadway revival, the 1936 Universal Pictures film, and a 1940 Los Angeles production. All these versions altered Show Boat to accommodate Robeson's presence. He was particularly important to Show Boat's success in London. Morgan remained the show's signature personality in the United States. The role of Queenie was definitively passed to black performers with the casting of Alberta Hunter in the part. In addition to the above versions, the 1929 Universal film is also discussed in this chapter, which focuses more generally on how the show's presentation of black performance and performers was adjusted in its first decade of remaking and how individual performers used Show Boat to further their larger careers.

The American myth of the Chosen Nation has its deepest roots in the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and the English Reformation, on the other. William Tyndale, through his 1534 translation of the New Testament, popularized the notion that England was a chosen nation. Convinced that England had broken its covenant with God, the New England Puritans applied that myth to themselves. In their hands, the chosen people myth became a tool that justified oppression of both native people and enslaved Africans. By the revolutionary period, this myth had become a staple of the American imagination, accepted and used even by America’s founders. The myth of the Chosen Nation assumed both the objective reality of “white people” and the superiority of “white people” over people of color. In the Negro spirituals, enslaved blacks turned the American myth of chosenness upside down, claiming that they were God’s chosen people, suffering in an American Egypt, and waiting for God to deliver them out of American bondage into a promised land, a story to which Martin Luther King Jr. appealed on the eve of his assassination in 1968. Other blacks developed countermyths such as “Yacub’s History,” related by Malcolm X.

The defining aspect of Edna Ferber's heroine Magnolia in the 1926 novel Show Boat was the phenomenon of a white girl singing with a black voice. The introduction locates Ferber's narrative within the history of American popular music and culture and lays out the scope of this study of Show Boat on the musical stage and screen in the twentieth century. Show Boat's place in the separately-written histories of the black-cast and white-cast musical is also assessed, on the way to situating the show at the intersection of racial performance in the American musical. The book's reliance on archival research is put into historiographical perspective.

This chapter focuses on Antonín Dvořák's “New World Symphony,” and the colonialist nationalism ingrained within it. He composed music in New York during his first year as the director of Jeannette Thurber's National Conservatory of Music and it was intended as an objective lesson for his American pupils with the aim to achieve an authentic American school of composition. According to Henry Krehbiel, Dvořák urged the Americans to submit their indigenous music, such as Indian melodies and Negro spirituals, to the “beautiful treatment in the higher forms of art.” According to this chapter, this “higher forms of art” referred to German music, which was promoted by Thurber's conservatory, and Dvořák, according to him, was appointed as the director to promote this German musical colonialism.