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This chapter examines the creolizing maritime cultures of Long Island and Manhattan, two New York islands that directly shaped William Sidney Mount's personal and musical world. It reconstructs the environments that Mount knew and by which he was shaped, as a child and young adult in antebellum America. To this end, the chapter considers how influences from Long Island and Manhattan play out in the life of Mount, in that of his uncle and musical mentor Micah Hawkins, and in Hawkins's 1824 ballad opera The Saw-Mill, or, A Yankee Trick. It begins with a discussion of evidence of blackface minstrelsy's creole synthesis in the antebellum period by describing two festival performances, Pinkster and 'Lection Day, and during the Federalist period. It then assesses the creole synthesis in black Manhattan by focusing on the “African Grove” Theater, along with Mount's first works and new career path following the death of Hawkins. It concludes with a review of Mount's scenic painting Rustic Dance after a Sleigh Ride.

This chapter illuminates how the compositional logic of American genre painting strategically organized zones in terms of centers and margins in various settings as different as parlors, fields, and post offices as a means to illustrate the forms of national belonging. In works by William Sidney Mount, Richard Caton Woodville, Eastman Johnson, and Winslow Homer, it analyzes the depiction of written notices, furniture, and attire as political devices that materialize space as a social domain. It pays particular attention to the ways that African American subjects are literalized as shadows in many of these paintings, tucked away into corners of parlors or hovering on the outskirts of scenes of entertainment, through an analytic of what it theorizes as “the social logic of spatial forms”.

This chapter examines the material culture of blackface minstrelsy, and particularly of instrumental dance music in the “creole synthesis,” using evidence drawn from William Sidney Mount's four paintings: Just in Tune (1849), Right and Left (1850), Just in Tune () and The Banjo Player and The Bone Player (1856). Three of the four images in the portraits are most likely of dance musicians (both fiddlers and the bones player), while the fourth (the banjo player) could be imagined to accompany singing but equally likely completes the dance-band instrumentation—fiddle, banjo, and bones representing three-fourths of the iconic ensemble of minstrelsy. All of these works provide confirmation of Mount's expertise in and admiration for the details of African American vernacular music. This chapter analyzes the relationship between Mount's “private” pencil sketching and his “public” oil painting, as well as the complex layers of racial, economic, and political symbolism in his work. It also explores the musical detail of each of the four paintings and their significance to our understanding of the roots of minstrelsy.

This book traces the roots of blackface minstrelsy—and the creole sounds, practices, and procedures that made minstrelsy possible—by analyzing the artworks, letters, sketchbooks, music collection, ephemera, and biography of William Sidney Mount, together with similar materials from some of his predecessors and contemporaries. It argues that nineteenth-century blackface is not a radical new invention, but rather the codification and theatricalization of a cluster of working-class performance idioms that were already familiar from the boundary zones of streets, wharves, decks, and fairgrounds. It also uses ethnography and ethnochoreology to reconstruct the behavioral contexts in which minstrelsy took place, along with its creole synthesis of music-and-movement, sound, and the body across boundaries of race, class, geography, and time. This chapter looks at a few preliminary examples that confirm Mount's relevance as a visual source for minstrelsy's musicological reconstruction, including information that he provides on musical instruments and techniques in the period, as well as attitudes about class, race, and gender.

This chapter examines the musical repertoires collected by William Sidney Mount in order to understand early minstrelsy's melodic imagination and polyrhythmic style as well as its creole synthesis. It situates Mount's melodic repertoire within the wider context of contemporaneous rhythm and dance repertoires, including the ongoing resources represented by Anglo-Celtic music and dance; the newer dance-types of the polka, quadrille, and cotillion; and the already-creolized tunes explicitly associated with blackface minstrelsy and New York comic theatricals. The chapter suggests that the black–white exchange of the creole synthesis can be traced in movement vocabularies and that the creole synthesis was as present a factor in dance musicians' tune repertoires as it was in dance rhythms. The contents of Mount's musical collection and recollections provide evidence that he was a major participant in social and dance music making.

This chapter examines the physical and participatory implications of blackface dance, and the dance cultures more generally, depicted by William Sidney Mount. It also uses the evidence drawn from Mount's visual depictions to locate prototypical blackface dance vocabularies and rhythmic practices in vernacular art works of the earlier nineteenth century. The chapter first considers the resources for recovering the kinesics of minstrelsy, along with visible evidence of Afro-Caribbean influence on bodily kinesics, before turning to juba and the aesthetics of African movement. It then analyzes Mount's choreological evidence to illustrate the consistency with which he records and manipulates the cultural associations of body vocabulary, as well as his integration of the creole synthesis in his works. It argues that it was rhythm and dance that accounts for minstrelsy's remarkably immediate yet enduring popularity and influence. It shows that, in addition to the symbolic transgression of bourgeois grace implicit in Jim Crow's akimbo representation, the images' anatomical distortions also capture movement, not stasis. The chapter concludes by looking at the so-called “bending knee-bone” in blackface performance.

This book has constructed a portrait of the multiethnic nineteenth-century world that gave birth to blackface minstrelsy using primary sources such as demographics, tune repertoires, archival materials, and most especially iconography. Drawing on evidence from the biographical experience and visual reporting of William Sidney Mount, it has also presented a more expansive history than blackface scholarship has formerly recognized. It has argued that the resources and conditions for the creole synthesis existed across the riverine and maritime zones of North America, and that these conditions produced the creole street-performance idioms that were the sources of blackface theatrics. In investigating the riverine and maritime, geographic, demographic, ethnic, and musical roots of blackface minstrelsy, the book has elucidated the processes of cross-cultural encounter, collision, and piebald synthesis by which American popular culture has always been and is still defined.