By Bailey Lodge, Irene Spiridanov, and Dakota Urban
While researching Black music culture in Guelph’s archives, we were startled by the lack of information on Black music and musicians and the abundance of information of white musicians imitating black music. This post will discuss the absence-presence of Black musicians in the local archives through examining minstrelsy, specifically minstrel music. We seek to explain why a seemingly insignificant children’s antique toy, a “Black Minstrel Doll,” in the Guelph Museum Archive exposes a hidden narrative of anti-Black racism that denigrated Black culture and people. Through this presence of the “Black Minstrel Doll” and other archival documents of minstrelsy, we suggest that Guelph white audiences’ enjoyment of Black song and dance came at the erasure of “authentic” Black music created and performed by Black musicians. Overall, we seek to express through the use of various readings and local archive materials what the Minstrel Doll has to say about the historical appreciation and celebration of Black culture and music in Canada.
The Guelph Civic Museum dates the “Black Minstrel Doll” (image above) to the the turn of the twentieth century. The small antique figurine has a black painted bisque face and hands, a bright red painted mouth, and brown glass eyes. The wooden doll holds a white and brown guitar. Moreover, there is a music box inside its body frame. The doll is dressed in traditional minstrel clothing: “Padded white shirt, brown corded velvet jacket with gold braid trim. Red, white, and blue trousers.” The “Black Minstrel Doll” found in the Guelph Civic Museum was among many toys and dolls created for children that referenced North American enjoyment of minstrel show. Modelled after the minstrels popular near the end of the nineteenth century, the “Negro Dude” was part of Schoenhut’s “Humpty- Dumpty Circus Set.” Similar to the “Black Minstrel Doll,” the “Negro Dude” is dated to circa. 1904. The dating of the “Black Minstrel Doll” to 1904 in the Guelph Civic Museum is due to a photograph of the Bond family, which features a young white girl holding the doll.
What we can see from the doll’s appearance in the archives is that there was some sort of white interest in black culture and music in Guelph. While the “Black Minstrel Doll” may seem an innocuous possession of a young white girl, it references and recalls a long practised tradition of blackface minstrel shows. Minstrelsy can be defined as the “white imitation of Black music” (Womack 85); this cultural form takes from and reframes authentic Black music. Minstrelsy was inspired by songs sung by slaves on southern plantations (“Minstrel Show”). However, these slave songs once translated by white musicians were turned into cheery and comedic songs valorizing and romanticizing plantation life. These minstrel songs of “happy go-lucky slaves” convey the Black experience of slavery as joyful and content; thus, “enact[ing] racial stereotypes” (“Minstrel Show”) of Black people as simple, lazy, and foolish, as seen through a white-supremacist lens.
Richard Hughes communicates better what minstrelsy is and the idyllic representation of plantation life it attempts to create (1). Hughes explains that minstrel shows have been practised and performed by white people for comedic enjoyment in the United States (and Canada) since the early nineteenth century century. Minstrel songs performed included ‘Massa’s in de cold cold ground,” which described a slave mourning his master (1). The depiction of a slave being sad over their master’s death portrays slavery as a benevolent, familial institution for Black people. This is just one of the multiple reasons why minstrelsy is offensive. Other examples include the exaggerated features painted on performers’ faces. For example, Hughes describes their mouths painted red to look like they had eaten copious amounts of watermelon slices (1). Similarly, the “Black Minstrel Doll’s” mouth is painted bright red.
We know minstrelsy was practiced in Guelph from our retrieval of various ephemeral documents of minstrelsy in this city. They provide ample proof of white enjoyment of blackface minstrel shows found in the Guelph Museums Archive. One example is a photograph of “The City Jazz Club” standing on City Hall’s steps. The photo’s description mentions they are dressed in “Minstrel Carnival Costumes”; some of the members have their faces painted entirely black, while others wear masks (1927). The doll and the photograph provide evidence of the circulation of minstrel shows and its racist depiction of Black culture and people; even though plantation slavery was not practiced in Canada, the archival evidence of minstrel shows as a form of entertainment for adults and children suggests an acceptance of the anti-Black racial ideologies depicted in and by blackface minstrelsy’s representation of slavery.
As explained by Phanual Antwi and David Chariandy in their introduction to Writing Black Canadas, there is an ongoing and immensely distributed myth that Canada is a “racism-free space” and “white space,” devoid of Black people entirely (32). From the findings of our research on Black culture and music, Guelph is no exception to these false claims. However, the abundance of blackface minstrelsy in the archives reminds us that Canada may be more influenced by the United States than one would like to believe. The Black Minstrel Doll represents just one of Guelph’s connection to larger engagement with minstrel shows as entertainment. Therefore, it signifies how black music and people were represented in a demeaning and degrading manner through and by white culture.
As far as music created by actual local black musicians, it appears that while the documents of minstrel shows are quite abundant, documents of black music and musical acts are impressively difficult to find in the Guelph Archives. Perhaps, this represents the erasure of “authentic” black music by a white parody of black music. However, the Guelph Museum archives do include some documentation of black musicians, including Patricia and Melba Jewell, who were in a trio girl band “The Fabulous PJs” in the the 1960s. Regardless, finding further information on their accomplishments, or that of other Guelph-based black musicians, proved to be difficult. This further strengthened our impression that black music was not as well celebrated as its satirized version.
Black musicians and their accomplishments should be better documented; it should be as easy to find in the archives as blackface minstrelsy. Music Festivals like the Guelph District Multicultural Festival, which includes Afro-Centric dancing and music, and the Guelph Jazz Festival, which includes black artists, foreground the significance of black musical traditions. However, more engagement with these traditions in Guelph by local black musicians, such as the Patricia and Melba Jewell, would be another step to celebrate “authentic” forms black culture and music that can speak to and against the distortion of black culture and music in the minstrel show. Our final thought on blackface minstrelsy is that it aided in controlling and repressing Black culture and music. Minstrelsy absented Black musicians and musical traditions. The “Black Minstrel Doll” is a reminder that a child’s wooden doll can tell us much about the racial climate of Guelph and beyond.
