Chapter 2: American Popular Music in the Nineteenth Century Pt.1
Popular songs such as “Old Folks at Home” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” were premiered by Christy’s Minstrels and soon became widely known through sheet music sales. For audiences, hearing a catchy or moving new song during a show often inspired them to purchase the sheet music to perform at home. This practice directly connected live performance to the growing commercial sheet music industry.
Although the songs performed in minstrel shows were often marketed as “Ethiopian songs” or “plantation melodies,” these compositions were neither authentically African nor genuinely African American. Instead, they were white interpretations of what audiences imagined Black music to sound like, filtered through stereotypes and often exaggerated for comedic or theatrical effect.
Musically, most minstrel songs followed a verse-chorus form, a structure that would later become standard in popular music. In this format, the verse section features new lyrics each time but repeats the same melody, while the chorus remains both musically and lyrically consistent. The chorus was typically lively and memorable, designed to stick in the audience’s ear and often encourage audience participation through call-and-response or sing-alongs.
Minstrel performances used a distinct set of instruments that helped shape the genre’s sound. These included:
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a drum-head, or animal skin stretched across the body for resonance which creates a twangy, percussive tone. It was adapted and reimagined by enslaved Africans in the United States and became a signature sound in early American folk and minstrel music.
The fiddle, a colloquial term for the violin, was commonly used in both European and American folk traditions
The tambourine is a small handheld frame drum with jingles, often shaken or struck to add rhythmic accent.
Bones are pairs of animal bones or wooden slats that are held in one hand and clicked together
Other small percussion instruments, such as shakers (small containers filled with beads or pellets) and the jaw harp (a plucked idiophone held to the mouth)
These instruments created an energetic, percussive sound that contributed to the popularity of minstrel songs on stage. However, when the songs were published as sheet music, they were arranged for solo voice and piano accompaniment. This adaptation made the music accessible for home performance, as most middle-class American families owned a piano, but not a banjo or bones. The arrangements often lost much of the rhythmic vitality and distinctive tone of the live performances, but they preserved the melody and lyrics.
One of the best-known examples of this style is Stephen Foster’s "De Camptown Races" (1850). The song’s lively melody and catchy chorus, with its repeated phrase “Doo-dah! Doo-dah!”, made it instantly memorable. The lyrics are written in a stylized dialect intended to imitate African American vernacular, a common feature in minstrel songs that exaggerated speech patterns for comedic effect. The structure of the song also includes interactions between a soloist and a chorus, adding to its theatrical and participatory appeal.
Although widely popular in its time, the song and others like it reflected and reinforced harmful racial stereotypes. Understanding its musical structure and commercial function helps us examine how popular music can entertain and marginalize simultaneously.