In 1897 an African American stage singer named Bessie Gillam, on the road with P. T. Wright’s Nashville Students, drew praise from a black entertainment reporter for her “artistic rendition of coon songs.” The writer took stock of Bessie Gillam’s situation: “Being a young lady she has a bright future and we look forward to see her hold positions among the many bright lights now lighting the dark pathway on to the road of success for the colored race.”¹

To the modern ear, the phrase “artistic rendition of coon songs” is oxymoronic, but in context it speaks to a compelling...

In the late 1890s, ragtime sung and performed by black musicians reached the mainstream popular stage in a form ignobly dubbed the “coon song.” Coon songs, with their ugly name, typically featured lyrics in Negro dialect, caricaturing African American life, set to the melodious strains of ragtime music. The designation first took hold during the 1880s, under the in uence of such por - tentous hits as “The Alabama Coon,” “I’m the Father of a Little Black Coon,” and “New Coon in Town,” but the real “craze” commenced in 1897 with the inception of the “ragtime coon song.”

As ragtime...

The comedian-producers of the big shows weaned mainstream audiences away from the crude character delineations of nineteenth-century minstrelsy and conditioned them to appreciate verisimilitude in black comedy representation. “Natural expression” in racial caricature became the cutting edge of black comedy. Still in blackface makeup, black comedians dared to bring forth modern, recognizable characters who spoke more directly to black audiences, creating a revolutionary dynamic that became a cornerstone of twentieth-century African American minstrelsy and vaudeville.

The Smart Set Company was a singular vehicle for constructive change on the American stage. The originators of the Smart Set were comedian-producers Ernest Hogan...

Only since the 1980s has there been any significant representation of African American circus performers under the big top. In his 1990 study,The American Circus: An Illustrated History, John Culhane reveals that in 1968, “Irvin Feld introduced to the circus a troupe of basketball-playing unicycle riders, the King Charles Troupe, and proudly billed them as ‘the first all-black circus in America’ . . . When he hired the King Charles Troupe, Feld told me, ‘there wasn’t a black person in the circus.’ One of his executives . . . said, ‘Kid, you’re gonna have total rebellion...

The great African American minstrel companies of the 1890s—Mahara’s Minstrels, Isham’s Octoroons, the Black Patti Troubadours, Richards and Pringle’s Georgia Minstrels, etc.—all held forth in mainstream theaters. The onset of ragtime made possible the full realization of “genuine” African American minstrelsy; by the turn of the century, black minstrel performers had seriously undermined their white counterparts, especially in the South. In response, the powers that be attempted to choke off access to mainstream theaters in the southern states. Richards and Pringle’s Georgia Minstrels were traveling in Alabama in 1903 when theirFreemancorrespondent reported: “I hear of late...