The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in anteb

"The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular in ante

Beginning in the 1830s and continuing for more than a century, blackface minstrelsy--stage performances that claimed to represent the culture of black Americans

A sourcebook of contemporary and historical commentary on America's first popular mass entertainment.

Theatrical performance, suggest the contributors to this volume, can be an unpredictable, individual experience as well as a communal, institutional or cultural