One of the great experiences of my time in the graduate program in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research was a class I took with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall on representations of race and gender in American culture. One of the key things to come out of that class was the essay "Peter Williams's Black Humor," which was published in the New Art Examiner (November/December 2001). The following essay from that class was published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, but the link to it no longer works.
In her 1931 classic study, American Humor: A Study of the American Character, Constance Rourke defines the minstrel as one of the three key archetypes of Early American culture. (The others are the Yankee trader and the backwoodsman.) According to Rourke, minstrelsy originates in the trauma of the Black Diaspora as a defense mechanism pitting triumphal humor against the brutal reality of slavery. As with the cakewalk a century later, minstrelsy was a form of “puttin’ on Massah.”(That is, Blacks mimicking white identity as an ironic posture). As Rourke notes, it was not until after the Civil War—when Blacks were ostensibly set free—that white entertainers openly took up the minstrel masquerade as a möbius strip of identity. By taking up Black satire of whiteness, the cultural anxiety of whites toward the perceived threat of unfettered Blacks could be assuaged.
An example of the double mask of minstrelsy is the relationship between the musicians Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima. On one level, the association illustrates the appropriation of a Black expressive form, in this case jazz, by white culture. Equally important, it also reveals how ethnicity serves to sublimate the construction of whiteness in America.
The connection between Armstrong and Prima would seem to be obvious. Although Armstrong was about ten years older than Prima, both were born in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. Both were trumpeters and vocalists, although Armstrong’s stature in the nation’s cultural legacy far and away exceeds Prima’s as well it should. Another similarity is the abundant use of culturally inflected humor by both musicians.
Compare Armstrong’s discography from the “Hot Fives” and “Hot Sevens” period of the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s with Prima’s oeuvre from the 1950s. There is more than coincidental correspondence in repertoire. Armstrong recordings covered by Prima include “Basin Street Blues,” “When It’s Sleepytime Down South,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Lazy River,” “Just a Gigolo,” and “St. Louis Blues.” In addition to filling his songbook with Armstrong tunes, Prima modeled his performance style on his predecessor. This includes direct quotations as in the scat passages of “Lazy River” and the glissandi and smears of the trumpet solo in “Basin Street Blues.” Yet the fact that Prima mimicked Armstrong’s artistic persona generally goes unacknowledged.
Village Voice jazz writer Gary Giddens notes that Armstrong was criticized from certain quarters throughout his career for “playing the clown” onstage, i.e., for performing a kind of minstrel act. Which from a “race pride” perspective has pejorative connotations. In fact, this aspect of Armstrong’s aesthetic is much more complex than essentialist readings, as Rourke's analysis makes clear. But the criticism of Armstrong was especially virulent in the 1950s when Prima’s popularity was at its peak.
As an Italian American in the 1950s, Prima, along with a host of other performers, such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, and Frankie Laine, provided a comfortable model of cultural integration for an increasingly suburbanized white America. This deferral of the “race question” is echoed in the Hollywood westerns of the period, as in the 1950 film Broken Arrow, in which rapprochement between whites and Indians is achieved, albeit fictionally and some six decades after the fact.
Populist hagiography represents the 1950s as a culturally homogenous period, but it was also the decade in which the U.S. Supreme Court rendered the Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down the “separate but equal” doctrine that had been in force in America since the end of Reconstruction. As whites had appropriated the minstrel traditional from a century earlier, so it was again that the reclamation of Amrstrong’s Black "puttin' on" by Prima’s less intimidating Italian American “Other” allayed white anxiety toward a new threat of African American self-determination.
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