Richard Moody
America Takes the Stage
Romanticism in American Drama and Theatre, 1750-1900
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955

"Jim Crow" song, 34, 38, 57; song and dance, 34-38, 40, 68

suggests jim crow as a song was an old tradition by the time "Daddy" Rice made it famous.

34-35: "In 1828 he transferred to Samuel Drake's company at the Louisville Theatre, and it was probably during this engagement, cast as a cornfield Negro in a loca drama (Solon Robinson's The Rifle), that he sang and jumped "Jim Crow" for the first time.

60-63; looks at the Negro on stage, notes Oroonoko (1696) and the Padlock (1766)

notes the candidates, p. 63, had one negro charactr, Ralpho, 1770, Robert Mumford, but probably not produced.

Uncle Tom's Cabin: 30, 44-45, 50, 70-73, 74, 78, 127-128, 222; 69-70

44: During the first run of the play at Purdy' National Theatre [N.Y.], beginning on August 23, 1852, and continuing for two weeks, T. D. Rice was "engaged to support this pathetic tale of Negro life, with various of his Ethiopian specialties."

one of longest runs, Troy N.Y. Fox Brothers Minstrels, 1853;

69: Purdy's "first time Negroes were presented as the central figures in an American drama.' New York Herald, 9/3 "Here we have nightly represented, at a popular theatre, the most exaggerated enormities of Sourthern Slavery, playing directly into the hands of the abolitionists."

cites Montrose Mosses and John Mason Brown in the American Theatre as Seen by Its Critics, 1752-1934, New York, Norton, 1934, p.75.

not in good taste; not according to good faith to the constitution, "and is calculated, if persisted in, to become a firebrand of the most dangerous character to the peace of the whole country."

NY weekly, The Spirit of the Times: does not approve of spirit, with its crudities, absurdities, but "what little there is to act is well performed. Itis creditably put on the stage, and the little morality which here and there peeps out unexpectedly tells well with the audience." 8/6/1853

73: 300,000 performances; 12 different scripts

1902: 16 companies touring;

see illustrations of stage production of Uncle Tom
 
 

242: n. 1; table taken from Negro Population --1790-1915 (Washington, D. C.: Department of Commerce, 1918):
Number of Negroes per thousand
Date: Total: Whole Country: South:

1800 5,308,483 233 539
1820 9,638,453 225 592
1840 17,069,453 203 613
1860 31,443,321 165 582
1880 50,155,783 152 564

©Ed Papenfuse, 1997