Cheryl Thompson, "Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict and Freedom, 1812-1895" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. One of the first cultural events to take place at the barracks of the Northwest Mounted Police, the forerunner of the Mounties near Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1879, was a minstrel show. How is it the Mounted Police even knew minstrel songs such as those written by Stephen Foster, the founder of American minstrel music?

How did Foster's music travel to Canada's West at a time when there was no popular radio or reliable communication networks? Not only are many of Foster's songs still known today, but there are also songs many people of a certain age group grew up singing. Foster composed a string of popular songs in the late 1840s and early 1850s, such as "Oh Susanna," "Camp Town Races," and "Old Folks at Home," also known as "Swanny River."

Two of the first songs I learned to play on the piano were Oh Susanna and Swanee River, writes Dr. Cheryl Thompson, Canada Research Chair in Black Expressive Culture and Creativity at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Her latest book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic, Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812 to 1897, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, asks these questions about the spread of Stephen Foster's music and many others. Dr. Thompson, welcome to the New Books Network. Thank you so much for having me. So the book begins in 1812, right?

And you write that the War of 1812 has typically been remembered in Canadian history as the conflict that firmly established Canada as part of the British Empire. But it also needs to be understood as the moment that gave birth to America's popular culture. As an American myself, I don't know that I think of the War of 1812 as being the moment that gave birth to American popular culture. Can you talk about that?

Yes, because that particular war is the first war, really battle, I'd say, like international battle after the Revolutionary War, which would have been like roughly, I guess, like 30 or 40 years before then.

And if you don't study the 19th century, you don't realize how things had really changed by then in terms of just things that now we wouldn't consider to be modern. But by 19th century terms, like there were newspapers. They might not have been dailies, but they had like weekly newspapers. At that time, they would have been mostly subscription based, but they still existed. You had a little bit more better networks, right?

of like being able to move things around compared to the 18th century. And so by the time the War of 1812, at the same time, the American nation kind of has a sense of itself, you know, more than it would have had in the Revolutionary War.

Even though there were songs of the Revolutionary War, a lot of those songs were like British songs that Americans would have been singing to. So the War of 1812 is the first time that you have Americans writing the American canon. So Francis Scott Key, for example, right, is like writing, what is really poems that are being taken up into song. So it's kind of the first battle. And it's interesting from this vantage point now, I can look back and say, so that's why...

musicians always go and entertain the troops. Like they still do that, right? And they did that through World War I and World War II. We just don't realize that it started in the War of 1812, this idea of battle and music culture and entertainment culture being interwoven. So wherever there's a military base or a military conflict,

there's probably some kind of entertainment that's tied up into that conflict. And it's the War of 1812 where that really sort of begins. And you could almost trace directly back certain songs that became canonical songs that, like you mentioned in the intro, if you're taking piano, some of these might be the songs that you learn because they're very simple in their melodic structure. So when you're learning a new instrument,

Those are the songs that they go back to for that reason. They have very simple melodies. You just talked about, you know, entertaining the troops, for example, and I'm picturing people listening to this and their minds already being blown a little bit by what you're suggesting. This book, there is this very strong thread through the entirety of it of things that I know I grew up with that it never occurred to me.

started or would have started not just in the 19th century, but in these very key moments that you talk about in the book. And we're talking about performance culture, of course, but I think the term performance culture, it feels like a very academic word. We're talking about pop culture. Also, we're talking about 19th century pop culture throughout this book, which I think is one of the

It was fun, but interesting and eye-opening also to read throughout. Yes, and I should say that I have taken a particular stance to performance culture and writing these histories where I am interested in the popular culture, not necessarily the theatrical culture. So what we would consider to be the legitimate drama culture.

I'm not like the way I write these histories. I'm interested in what becomes part of the everyday and what is sort of responding to things that are happening. And as you study sort of 19th century North American history till today, the truth is it's always the popular culture that's speaking to the people.

That's speaking to things that are happening. That's really responding. Whereas the legitimate or the high culture is still clinging to certain traditions or certain things, values that they think we need to

to the people. So there's always like that high, low culture. And I don't know, I mean, there's probably something in my bio or maybe a psychologist would have to come in and do a test to say like, why is it that I'm drawn to thinking about performance really that's happening on the streets and then how that ends up on the stage. I've just always been really fascinated with that. And when you start to study the 19th century, you realize that that is something

In modern history, in my opinion, the most impactful century for the development of that shift from the legitimate to the popular, because it doesn't happen in the 18th century. It really happens in the 19th century. And by the century's end, it's kind of a given that the stage is looking to the street and

to innovate. It just sort of becomes part of everything. And then obviously in our lifetime, it is the sauce. Like there really is no dividing line at all. You wouldn't even know, like you said in the beginning, you wouldn't even know where it really came from because it's just been what it is. But when you go to the 19th century, you're able to trace when it actually started.

One of these connections that you make and that you trace throughout the book is performance as a migration story. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah. And I mean, that's another thing, because so much of performance culture, even in the present, really diminishes folk cultures.

So especially in dance studies. So dance studies will tend to focus on choreography and the sort of the legitimized dances of modern dance and other kinds of contemporary dance. But if you're a people coming from especially island cultures or like, you know, pre-industrial cultures, you have folk cultures that are just passed on through the centuries,

Right. Folk dances or even if you come from especially island cultures, you might sing certain songs. You don't even know why you're singing it. All you know is your mother sang it, grandmother sang it, and then they pass it on. All of those same practices happened in the 19th century again when North America had its immigration wave.

It really begins in the 18th century, but in the 19th century, there's many moments of widespread immigration. 1830s is a moment because of the potato famine, and also there were cholera outbreaks throughout Europe that

that sent people into the new world through migration. And then it happens again, sort of in the late 19th century through the chain industrialization and obviously the building of the North and the realization that you need workers. So there was this double moment of immigration. And while those people brought their folk cultures with them, they brought certain forms of dance. They brought certain singing. They brought certain ways of,

entertaining themselves really through song and dance. And again, I think in the intro, you made the point before we had mass communication as a form of entertainment. So you could just turn on the radio and hear music, or you could turn on your TV and see people dancing, or you can go to a movie and see people singing and dancing. Well, people did that for themselves, right? Like that, like

It's really at the end of the 19th century why the idea of what they called song sheets, where you could buy the sheet music of your favorite musical or whatever it is. People started buying those song sheets and piano sales were never at their highest like they were in the early 20th century, like 1900 to like 1920. Everybody was learning piano because they wanted to play the songs at home.

And I only say this now and I kind of laugh because I think back to a lot of old movies that you might watch and they depict. So I say you watch an old movie from like the 1940s and it's really set in the turn of the 20th century. If they're not always playing a piano and singing songs.

But we just, we don't know that that's representative of the times. Like everybody who would have been of middle class, really, because you needed some income to buy the piano and have a home for it, would have learned the piano, would have bought the songs. And a lot of those songs were folk songs that became some of the first songs that were published.

So that's why I say that the entertainment culture of the 19th century is really an immigration story, because so much of what we call the North American experience or the American experience is really an innovated experience of the European immigrant. You innovated when you got to the new world, air quotes, what was already learned in the old country.

And you just took a little, so you take, for example, you know, we think about what we call tap dance today. It's like the perfect example of that. It's a little Irish clogging. It's a little English clogging. Sorry. It's a little Irish jig. It's a little of the African Juba and some of the African dances of enslaved people that were brought into the new world. Well, by the sort of

1870s, 1880s, you have all of these Irish people, English people, Black people, Jewish people living in the same communities.

And just like today, when you step out of your house and you see people doing things that are outside of your own culture, you're curious about them. You're like, oh, that's interesting. Well, I always like to say when I teach histories is that, well, people did the same thing. All of a sudden you see a Black person dancing a certain way. You're like, oh, that looks like the jig I do, but it's a little different. Let me take a little of that. And next thing you know, people are kind of like taking each from each other.

different elements to the point now where we don't, you know, different groups will claim ownership, but it's really hard to claim ownership to any performance style born of the new quote unquote new world because so many of those styles are taking from other roots. Okay. Yeah.

Well, so the book is organized chronologically. We talked about 1812. And in fact, your first chapter covers 1812 to 1839. And it's in the first chapter that we get the first captioned illustration. And in fact, this book is full of illustrations and photographs as well. And, you know, I...

I struggled in trying to think about how to describe them for people who haven't seen them. Because what I want to say is they're gorgeous. They're so beautiful. I mean, there's one shot of Ira Aldridge that I'm like... I've been to his house. That's my favorite image. Like, I want to know that person. To me, they are the template for so many things in fashion. Like...

I love that image, yes, but they are beautiful. And yeah, I know. But you don't know how to feel about it. I don't know how to feel about that. Well, because something like a portrait of Ira Aldridge, which for people for whom that name is not familiar, why don't you just say a few words about who Ira Aldridge was?

I mean, really, I guess most people would say like he's really the first Black actor who was performing Shakespeare. So like legitimate drama as a quote unquote Black American at the time that he was performing early 19th century and then he moved to Europe, to England and was performing on these stages. I mean, I just want to, the biggest thing about Ira Eldridge that I wish, I want to know what he, how he spoke. Yeah.

Right. Because we don't have an audio. We have no way of knowing how this person would have spoken because we only have the image of the enslaved person's voice through Hollywood films from the 19th century. We don't know how anyone actually spoke in their natural voice. So you can imagine someone like him on stage as a counter to what would have been the minstrel show. Right.

and people wearing blackface and all this mimicry, and now you have a person who can do Shakespeare on the legitimate stage? Like, I'm just thinking, why hasn't his story been told, to be honest? Because it is so extraordinary. And he was also part of, I can't remember the name right now, but in New York, in the first decades of the 19th century, there was actually a theatrical school. Like, there was a black theater school. And he came out of that school, and...

And there's not a lot of details about the school because obviously funding is very difficult. A lot of racism. People were, you know, there was a it was actually a revolutionary act to even have a black theater school at that time. So there's just not a lot of information. But he really is an iconic figure in the history of North American black performance. Mm hmm.

I'm realizing because the book is so rich and it's so much fun to talk about these things. I'm noting myself off.

Oh, we're going to go down a lot of rabbit holes. Okay, that's okay. Yeah, there's some dark stuff. There's some dark stuff in there too. Yes. Okay, so Ira, are we talking about, there's a photo of Ira Aldridge in the book, which I think we can say is gorgeous. I mean, it's a portrait. It's a portrait, right? It's a portrait. It's beautiful. It's portraiture. But there's also drawings of minstrel performers that are...

artistically... I hate to call... I don't know what to call them because they're just... You can't look away from them. Yes. And I mean, I like to call them renderings. We don't really know... We don't know who wrote this. Was it off memory? Was the person actually in front of you dancing and you're sketching? We have no idea how any of these depictions were actually drawn.

And from what they were drawn from, because we're pre-photography, which is another thing that I think most people don't realize that we don't have the photographic image until the 1840s. It's like 1839, but it's really the 1840s. So anything before 1840 is,

you really don't know what it's based on. Like, we actually don't know if it's even real. Like, did that person actually even look like that? Or was it decided that they wanted to draw it a particular way? The only way we know that, I'm putting on my quasi-art historian hat now, is by looking at multiple renditions of the person. And then if you see the same similar likeness, then you can reasonably speculate that, oh, this is probably what they look like because it's not a one-off. Mm.

So in the Mungo character, for example, there's a few other renderings where it's like, okay, they all kind of seem to look like that. So it's fair to assume that this is how the character dressed. This is maybe a movement that the character might have had on stage. Like you can kind of make, that's what historians do. We make, you know, educated assumptions based on looking at multiple versions of something. Mm-hmm.

And you just mentioned one of them who was Mongo. There's also Long Tail Blue, Zip Coon, Jim Crow, and others. Talk about the visuals. And what I mean by that is there are people that would have been sitting in a theater watching live performance of these characters and

I'm guessing there are a lot more people that would have seen the renderings of them, whether they were on advertisements or what have you, that may not have been sitting in the theater. And talk about, you know, the impact of those images. Well, it's interesting. It's almost hard to really say. And I say that because we have always lived in a photographic world, right?

where if we see an image, we can look at the real person and then we could go back to the image. Right. So we're always able to like double check in a pre-photographic world. If that's not even yet in people's consciousness, you don't really know if it was something of importance to them. Like it's, it's, it's, it's actually really hard to say if, if they were

sort of comparing the rendering to the thing that they saw on the stage or... Right? For me, I find it hard to speculate about that. But what I can say is that this probably would have been one of the few depictions of a Black person that many of these audiences saw in their day-to-day. If they did not live in a major port... Again, in today's world, we don't really...

We see the port in any port city, especially in North America. We're thinking about the beach. We're thinking about, you know, creating a restaurant to have that nice sunset view. We're not thinking about the port as like commerce and there's like shipments coming through and things coming through. Right. So in the 19th century, if you lived in a port city, it would have been more likely for you to have an interaction with a non-white person.

through the movement of transatlantic slavery, through just the general movement of merchants coming from all over the place, not just from Europe, but, you know, the movement of Black people in general coming from different places. Whereas if you live outside of a port city,

That could be your only representation. Like you don't have anything else to go off of. You just know you have this rendering that you saw on a poster, whatever it was, and then you go to the show and now you're seeing this character act a particular way. And I think there is no group in North America who has been more typecast, to use that word. I have to separate it because there are actually two separate words that have different meaning than the Black person.

And we have been typecast the most because of our low population, but high volume in the sort of the representational culture. So I could just say that again if that was confusing. Confusing. We are highly represented in the visual culture, like overrepresented. But in actual population size, not making up much of the population.

So a white person is more likely to have seen an image of a Black person than to have met them in person. And I would say in the 21st century, in some places, that still is true. Yes, I agree. So we've started to touch on this already. I want to go a little bit deeper. In the 1840s and 50s, we see the growth of a thriving Blackface minstrelsy.

And can you talk about this period, both on stage and then also what was happening in the U.S. and Canada that coincided to make that so? Yeah. So before I get to that, talk about like 1800, 1810, 1820. That's really the beginning of the circus. The circus that we know of, it starts in those periods. Right.

And in those decades before the minstrel show really takes off, you sort of have the beginnings of minstrel characters. So in the circus, there'll be like one character, maybe in Blackface, who's like a clown. Like the Blackface clown was very popular. And then they might also have a horse act, which...

Like it was just like a hodgepodge of things going on. And then they might have like, I think they call it the hornpipe dancer, which is a kind of like English dissented dance that people would do. And it's all this stuff, jugglers, all this stuff happening. And it's really at the end of the 1820s, there was actually an economic downturn at the end of the 1820s, just like in the 1920s.

And into the 1830s, the circus performers are like, what are we going to do? You know, like the opportunities to do that kind of performance were actually starting to dwindle a bit. And it was really the...

sort of that performer who was pushed out of the circus who said, okay, well, let's go on the road. And so they start doing these little one-nighters all over the place. And in the one-nighters, like the story goes that Daddy Rice, I'm

Of course, I can't forget his, remember his first name now. But he sees someone in Louisville, Kentucky, an enslaved Black person dancing with a, he probably had a disability. So it was like an off kilter kind of dance. And his name actually was Jim.

And Jim was enslaved to a person named Crow. So Jim Crow was actually a real person, a composite person that this person just takes on and he goes on stage dressed as the slave hand. And in the context of America, that was really the first Black slave person.

Like no one had ever seen anyone mimic the enslaved person that obviously people had seen. They just didn't see it on stage. And for whatever reason, you know, like it's almost like trying to figure out, well, why are things popular today? Sometimes you just don't know.

Like all you know is it's like people really liked this image of dancing. It went viral in 1832, right? It's like the dancing Jim Crow slave outfit, singing the song Dance Jim Crow. And they called this the first Atlantic world sensation.

So it traveled to Britain almost immediately, blew up the London stage. It came to Canada around 1836. So it's a few, about three or four years later, becomes a Canadian sensation. All of a sudden, everybody wants Jim Crow. And it just blew up. Even though there had been minstrel songs and individual kind of acts in the 1820s, it's for whatever reason, it just, 1832, it's like,

That was just the moment for this to become a thing. And by the 1840s, you have people realizing that one character, because Jim Crow is soon met with Zip Croon, who is essentially the Northern Dandy that's being mimicked. And this is where that dichotomy really starts, that there is a Southern Black and a Northern Black. They dress different. They talk different. They are different.

It starts in the minstrel performance where they start to create this dichotomy that there's just two people. Like we are basically two archetypes. Right. And it's like, so if you're not fitting one of those two archetypes, any Black person listening to this right now would be like, someone has said to you, I don't understand you.

Or you're different. I mean, what they're really saying is you don't match the two archetypes that have never left us since the 1830s. But it's really into the 1840s where the ensemble...

like the minstrel troupe that is like specific characters. And there's like a, there's, you know, the lead, the end man, there's the interlocutor, there's like all these like main characters. And then you have sort of the, the chorus, if you want to call them that. And they have these different settings in the plantation or they're on the Southern Levy. They start to create what I would call like vignettes that you start to expect out of a minstrel show. So if you know, if you're in the North and,

and the minstrel troop is coming to town, you're going to get a slice of the South. It's always going to be some vignette from the South. And so...

it was actually through this genre of performance that, you know, I kind of laugh now having written these books when people complain about all the slave movies in Hollywood. And I'm like, oh, they didn't start it though. They just learned from history because the slavery was the topic of the stage really from the 1830s, I would say until the 1890s. That's when it changed. So for 60 years,

If you went to a minstrel show, you were learning about slavery. I mean, I have to put learning in air quotes. Well, yeah. And that's I mean, it's a perfect segue because something else that you talked about. And again, you've touched on this already, but I want to go a little bit deeper. That so struck me is you said you talk about that. These stories on the stage did not require Canadians to reflect on their own racial attitudes or.

Even as racial hostilities were on the rise south of the border in America. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah. I mean, it still happens today because the narratives were not narratives that Canadians would have recognized as being about racism.

Canada. Right. So when the American minstrel show came to town, they were talking about it was set in the Mississippi Delta somewhere. Right. Or it was on the southern levee or it's in Alabama somewhere. It was always in some off distant place in the American South. And again, we're talking about the 19th century. Who's been to the American South?

Canadians are really not going there unless they're in the cotton business, unless they're a banker and they might have some interests in the cotton plantation in the South. But the general Canadian is not going to the South. The only thing they're doing is consuming stories of the South. And for a lot of these people, I think they would have found them very romanticized stories because again,

It's really important, I think, for American listeners to understand sort of, let me demythologize the Underground Railroad. Basically, that's what I'm saying. Because the mythology of the Underground Railroad, as it's even told in movies, is that the Americans, they came to Canada, these enslaved Black Americans, and now they were free.

Okay, but what did they look like? They still looked like they were enslaved, generally speaking. So that means Canadians were seeing the archetype of Jim Crow cross the border. And then over time, that same person became the archetype of sort of the zip-coon character.

They were not that character, obviously, but suddenly they dressed well. They maybe spoke better because they started reading and accessing information. And now the Canadians think about what Zip Coon is. Zip Coon is actually not a nice character in the minstrel show. He's the one that they make fun of. Like, what's wrong with you? Canadians start to think, huh, I think we're getting too many of these uppity Negroes coming north.

So they actually don't like that character. They're literate. They're demanding rights. You know, when Mary Ann Shad Carey lived in Canada in what was then Sandwich, now Windsor, she started a newspaper. That was like, right? She was her and a bunch of other African-Americans who were in Windsor. They were newspaper editors. They were political. They started the schools themselves.

Canadians liked when they were just coming and they needed help. So I think it was the benevolence part that they really liked. But when they saw that people were organizing, building newspapers, schools, at a general store, it was like building almost like a new Black America. That's where things took a different kind of turn.

And those were the types of people that were kind of discouraged from heading north. So that's why the Underground Railroad story really ends at the end of the American Civil War. 90% of those people came right back.

They'd rather live in Jim Crow America than stay in Canada. I mean, some of the reason was family reunification, and we can all understand that. They had fled. They had kinfolk they wanted to get back to. But some of it really was the conditions that they were experiencing in Canada. They just felt like, well, I might as well just go home if I'm going to experience the same level of racial intolerance. So in the introduction, I talked a bit about Stephen Foster and

And I do want to talk a little bit more about Stephen Foster as, as, as someone, as someone whose work really permeated at the time. And honestly, I'm less, I'm less interested in Stephen Foster in the 19th century than I am as Stephen Foster in the 21st century, because he's, because he's still here. So talk a little bit, talk a little bit about Stephen Foster. Yeah.

I guess that then and now, Stephen Foster then and now. Yeah, then and now. I mean, we have to realize this is a prolific songwriter because Stephen Foster died at like 30. He died really young of like, like it was like a hemorrhage or something like he just, so he's not like he lived this really long life. He was just extremely prolific for like a set period of time. And every minstrel show really from the 1850s on there,

there's some Stephen Foster song on the song list. Like it's just, he just, his music was just everywhere and it became part of everything. And I think it was sort of in the 1930s. I actually have, I actually located this book. So in the 19, it's really beginning in the 1930s. That's why Hollywood now for me in the 1930s, like I almost, I almost want to write a book about Hollywood in the 1930s because I've, I've realized something. Yeah.

And what I realized is like, that's the decade that they started to go back and tell the stories from the 1860s and 70s.

That's why we get the Gone with the Wind and we get all these movies. But also publishers in the 1930s started to publish the music and songs of 19th century songwriters. So there was actually a book that I have. It's called The Treasures of Stephen Foster. I think it was published in like 1938 or 7. And it's...

Yeah, the treasures. And it was like beautifully illustrated in color. So all his songs were matched to an illustration. And it's basically just the song sheets of Stephen Foster with the illustrations to match. So you're thinking, why the 1930s? Well, the 1930s was enough of a generational gap that people had already started to forget about.

Civil War folks, they were old or dead. So people had pretty much forgot. And by then, Stephen Foster's memory as a person, nobody remembers Stephen Foster as a person. They only know his music. And the reality of Stephen Foster's music is, like I said at the very beginning, simple melody structures and so easy to learn and just so catchy. Even

Even as I'm talking to you right now, I hear Camp Town races in my head. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's just like, it's just in there because it's just so indelible. And like it captures, I would say, you know, when a lot of, especially British people, when they make movies of the 19th century, it's like nothing's happening. The world was so still. Yeah.

You know, they're walking through that grassy field and there's like, and meanwhile, that's obviously not true because if that was true, I couldn't have written my book. It's just that at that time you could create these, I would call real silos.

And his music is kind of like that. It's like he created vignettes. And I would say he was the template for doing that. And I think that's why his music has never gone away. It really hits on that nostalgia button.

And it sort of takes you back, you know, even Swanee River. It's like, I hear that too. And in the 20th century, so many people sang that song in movies. Right. And it's like, you don't even realize that it's the 19th century that's still with us. And I think that's the reason why.

I just loved writing this book and even the work that I'm doing now. It's discovering how the 19th century is still with us. I think that's kind of my big grand revelation. There's so many ways that that century just gave us life.

the templates that in the 20th century, they turned into an industry. That's the difference. I always say the 20th century actually didn't really make anything. It just turned everything into a business that could be commodified. And then once it became commodified in the 20th century, it became something that we see as a given, a standard. Imagine walking into a house that doesn't have a fridge. You would be like, how are you living? Right?

Meanwhile, that's a very mid-20th century reality. Before the 1950s, not everybody had a fridge in their house. Nobody would have thought twice if you didn't have a fridge. Now it's just a basic commodity that we expect in a home. And I think when you study the 19th century, you realize that that was the century where even something like refrigeration, well, they actually had the technology for that in the 19th century. It was beginning.

the idea of it. So it's the century of ideas. And I think Stephen Foster's music, if you really listen to it, it's a lot about ideas.

It's like the ideas of a town, the ideas of a river, the ideas of a person. I think he has a song called Old Black Joe. It's like the ideas of being elderly. I think he also writes my old Kentucky home goodnight. His ideas about place and how place is about memory and family. He just really knew how to mix that sauce together together.

And they've just never gone away. That, that recipe has never gone away. And I should say, I don't want to meet Stephen Foster because he was probably racist. I need to just add that in. Like he probably did not like black people. Okay. Oh,

Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, he was writing... Like, I don't want to romanticize too much, right? Like, we have to be clear that this is also a very heightenly racist time, right? Like, just in case anyone's like, oh, does she like Stephen Foster? No, it's not about like. It's about seeing the reality of things that are really tough to make sense of sometimes. Well, I think... But I'm glad that you said that because...

One of the things I find really interesting that your book brought forward to me was, you know, you are an academic, you're a scholar, you study this, you can make these very nuanced separations in your mind around this man, highly racist, wrote minstrel music.

and the enduring impact of it and all the things that you talked about it. I think most people, myself included, you know, until relatively recently, I also grew up learning to play. My Casio keyboard that I got for Christmas one year came with old folks at home, Swanee River installed in it. Oh, man, that's deep. Installed in it. Oh, man. And I had never,

idea. But the nostalgia and the feel good, and even though I was not around in the 19th century, this nostalgia for this music and everything that you described, I absolutely felt hearing that song over and over and over again. And it wasn't until way later into adulthood that I learned that

more about the song and the music that it comes from. And so I think there's this separation there. But it's the reason when Black scholars, critical race scholars say that racism is a structure, people like they don't understand what you mean by that. They think it's always experienced interpersonally. But if you're buying a keyboard and it comes already, like,

The songs are already in the keyboard that are actually racist songs when you know the origin. It means that you're internalizing all of this. You're not aware of it. It's just completely subliminal.

But you're just reproducing the same structure that somebody 100 years before you would have done the same thing. And that's when people say, like, why isn't racism going away? It only seems to be getting worse. I don't actually think it's getting worse. It's just doing what it's doing.

You know, it's here because we're not seeing the ways that it's built into these structures. And often, I don't know if this is someone's term. If it isn't, I'm coining it. It's really structures of pleasure. That's why it's tough. It's tough. It's things that you probably really like and enjoy. And you have a hard time believing the thing you like and enjoy could be racist. That's a hard thing for people to grasp. Yeah.

So, I mean, we can move away from Stephen Foster now. Stephen Foster was an American, although his music, as you said, made its way around. But let's talk about some of the homegrown Canadians, because you had homegrown Canadian minstrels, too, Burgess and Lavallee.

And you write in the book that they are rarely discussed as part of a larger narrative that connects their blackface performances as a form of anti-blackness.

Talk about that. That's tough. That's a tough line. Because, well, first of all, I always say, you know, one of the things in Canada that we have not spent enough time critiquing is the lore that America has had on us as Canadians to kind of become a part of. Right. In the 20th century, we understand it. There are so many beloved Canadian actors in Hollywood.

That most people are like, oh, he's Canadian? Oh, he's actually Canadian? Yeah. And why are they Canadian? I always say Martin Short is the best one of them all. It's like, actually, he's very Canadian. But he's been an American for probably most of his adult life. That's where he went. John Candy, also Canadian. Mike Myers. I can go through a list of them. They're all Canadian. Why did they go to the United States? Because the United States, in the context of North America, has...

from the 19th century been the place that has made entertainment an industry. See, Canada has always had entertainment. We just didn't know how to make it an industry. We're still figuring it out. You know, like we really didn't start to do it. And I would say TIFF,

1975, when we got the Toronto International Film Festival. Since then, that internationalization has started to happen where we kind of have a real industry. Before really the 1970s, we just never really had an industry. So you had to go to America if you wanted to be a star of the stage. So now let's go back to the 19th century. In the case of

Burgess. Of course, I can't remember his first name now. That always happens when you're doing this live. And same thing with Lavallee. Lavallee's coming from Quebec. Burgess comes from Ontario. Like you said, there's no radio. There's no TV. There's no promotional industry of like a publicist and a manager. All those things don't exist. But what they do know exists is the stories of America.

And I think Americans often don't know this about themselves, maybe. But it's true. When you're outside of the machine, you actually can see the making of the American dream.

When you're in the machine, you only know that you want it. You only know that you want to attain it. You actually can't tell me what it is. You just know that you want it. When you're outside of it, I could see how it's actually made and produced. And that's why so many Canadians are like, oh, I want some of that because we don't have that in Canada. And they know that we don't have that. And what is that? That is the ability to take an unknown person and turn them into a star overnight. Right.

To be honest, America is still the only place that can do that. You can become a star in other countries, but it's not going to be overnight. It's going to take, you're going to have to do a lot of stuff and you're going to have to be there like 20, 30 years. And then finally you get your dues. You could be eating a bag of chips at a bus stop in America and next week you're on every screen. Right?

I mean, that mythology has just always been there. And as a Canadian, the lore has always been, if you want to be in the entertainment industry, that you need to get in on that. And so these two individuals did that. But what happened?

always challenged me when I learned of them is how somehow in the Canadian imagination, we're not, we're saying that they, you know, they'll say that these people were in minstrel shows, but they will never say that, dare say that they wore blackface. But how is that possible? Yeah.

Or in the case of Lavallee, he fought for the Union Army during the Civil War. A lot of people don't realize the American Civil War, Canadians could enlist in the Union Army if they showed some kind of connection. He was part of the Union Army, played in the military band. The band traveled the South, and yet you're reading biographies about him, and they don't mention whether or not he saw slaves. All they say is that it must have been really hard for him being down there. Well, why would it have been?

Like, why would this one person feel bad, but everyone else doesn't? It doesn't make any sense. So I think the Canadian imagination is always just, and this is, this is outside of America. I think what I, what I know to be true is that these sort of nation states that have ties to slavery are,

often disconnect those ties. And if there is something racist that happens in their country, they assume that it was an American import. So it was just, it was brought here by an American. That's why we have this now.

They have a hard time grappling with their own structures of racism that really have nothing to do with America. So when Lavallee went down into the U.S. to perform in the minstrel show, he already had conceptions of who he was as a person vis-a-vis the Black person. Same thing with Burgess. He had a conception of himself, of who he was vis-a-vis the Black person. And by the way, these two performers also performed in minstrel-type shows

theater in Canada. So it's not like they went to America to learn it. They started in Canada and they wanted to be stars. So they joined the American industry because that would, that was the only way. And I would say it still is in some way, the only way to really become a famous person in the English speaking world, you have to cross the border. It just, it just is the case.

So now it seems like a good time now to talk about Sean National. Did I say it right? Yeah. Okay. You can fix my pronunciation. No, that's perfect. That's good. That's good. Talk about Sean National. Yes. I mean, in other, in English, that's O Canada for those who don't know what was our national anthem, but our national anthem was actually written by a French person, right? So a French Canadian, right?

and i should be clear because he composed the music so lavalier was a composer the lyrics for o canada as it became were written during world war one by an english canadian person who wrote the lyrics

So we kind of have this duality to our national anthem. But just as a fun fact, the American national anthem is like that too, because, you know, Francis Scott Key composed the music, but the lyrics to the American, I think he, no, he wrote the song, the lyrics. It was the opposite, but the composition,

composing of the music actually happened over the course of that time. And in the 1920s, you actually have the musical component to go to the lyrics of the American National Anthem. So it's the same idea. And I bring that up to say, we often don't think of history as happening in stages, just like I just described. Like the idea that you would have someone write the, compose the music to a national anthem,

But it really wasn't thought to be a national anthem at that time. It was really in celebration of what is today Jean-Baptiste Day in Quebec. It was actually in celebration of that. And then decades later, somebody take up that composition and then write lyrics about

because the First World War was really Canada's moment as a nation to prove itself as a nation in this military conflict, would then compose lyrics to it. And now we have these two blending. That's why the Canadian National Anthem is sung partially in English and partially in French. That actually was decided upon in the 1980s. Before then, it was always in English.

And then we had our moment and they said, no, no, no. We have to acknowledge the duality to our country and speak a version, sing a version in French. And I think there's like two bars in French and then it goes back into English.

for those in English Canada. But why I put that into the book, it's just to demonstrate the distance of how things get taken up and how just like those born of the 20th century can now look back and say, oh, when we see young kids today wearing certain clothes, we're like, oh my gosh, the 70s are back again. Like we have that flashback of like, oh, something from 50 years ago is returning. What's that?

What's going on? Like I saw a girl with leg warmers. I'm like, is it 1986 again? Like it's just stuff like that, right? I write to show people that that's not new to us. That is a multi-generational centuries of people doing that. And in the 19th century, it happened. Somebody wrote the lyrics. 50, 60 years later, somebody added the composition and vice versa. But things didn't just happen all at one time.

And to understand how that music then, you know, the music for Sean National is written by who was really a minstrel performer.

He changed over time and started to do different kinds of compositions. But to think that that's like the origin of the song. And then you would have so many years later during World War I that somebody would then write the lyrics to Oh Canada. And there was a sister always tell me about this comedian who's like Canadians always seem so insecure. Like they're like, Oh Canada? Like it sounds like we're asking a question. Yeah.

And I'm like, well, again, maybe from today's vantage point, but if you go back to the early 20th century when there was a lot more Irish songs around that had O, like I think it's coming out of that origin of like always putting an O to something. But I just thought it was funny when that comedian made that joke. Yeah. So in the timeline, now we sort of come through...

Mid-19th century, we talked a bit about the Civil War. We've been talking about minstrelsy and we've been talking about really white people in blackface performing on stage. But at some point that changes. Talk about that change. Yeah.

Post-Civil War. Yeah, and I think that's tough for a lot of people to really grasp. Like, why would you do that? And it's the reason why if you watch documentaries about Black performance, they will talk about the enslaved moment, and then we jump to the 1920s.

There's a reason they kind of skip like a lot of decades because it gets really complicated when, you know, because the logic would be how could something be racist if black people are doing it to themselves? Like you're putting on blackface and pretending to be black when you're black. Why would you do that? But what I always like to say is, well, let's let's peel back the curtain.

And look at the wider lens. So the first Black minstrel troupe is literally formed in 1865. It was almost like, okay, Civil War's over the next week. The same enslaved people were on stage performing as enslaved people by white managers. So again, in the American spirit, there's always been this sense of, man, we could turn that into a business. Right.

You know, there's always a sense of we could turn it into a commodity. And that's essentially what happened because they realized the branding opportunity, although they wouldn't have called it branding back then. But the branding opportunity for audiences was come and see real slaves on stage. I mean, it sounds horrible, but it's like that was the draw. And if you're the black person, what are your options post-slavery in the American context? You go into sharecropping. You are cook or cleaner.

shoeshine boy, grown man, but they're going to call you a boy, or you are a sleeping car porter. Like these are literally the employment options. The employment options are not, oh, come join us on Wall Street, like become a stockbroker or join the law firm, go to law school. No, no, no. The options are still take on a servile role.

And we'll pay you a pittance for it. So of those options, if you are a person who maybe just always loved acting, because we have to remember, just because you're enslaved, it doesn't mean you don't have joy and that they didn't have aspirations for their lives, that they weren't interested in things like they didn't want to paint or they didn't want to sing or they didn't want to dance. Right. Like there's always going to be people in the in communities that are just naturally born as entertainers.

You don't know why, right? I always hear the stories of people who are like, I don't know why my daughter just always wanted to dance. Or my son just picked up that guitar and he just never stopped playing. So there's always going to be people like that. And so I always say, well, now imagine if you're an enslaved person with those desires and now you're free.

What are you going to do? You're going to want to pursue those desires because now for the first time in your life, you actually can pursue them. It just so happens that you're born of a certain time where the only way that you can get on the stage and pursue them is to assume the mask of minstrelsy. It is the only option at that time. It changes in the 18...

Really around the 1890s, it changes. But for the first 25 or so years of the stage, the Black actor really was left with those options. That was it. Before I want to go further down that thread to where things truly start to change for the Black performers. But before we do, I want to stay on the Blackface performance for one more minute because I want you to talk about the cover of the book.

Because that is another, we talked about illustrations earlier. And, you know, people are listening to this. So I would encourage them to go and click. There'll be a link in the show notes where they can go and buy the book and see the cover. But I encourage people to go look at the cover. But can you, I mean, this cover is arresting the cover of this book. I mean, it is a conversation. I mean, it was a conversation to even get it onto the cover. Oh, can you tell the story? Tell us the story.

Can you describe the cover and then also tell us the story of the cover of this book? Yes, because the cover was, that was a bit of a fight. I had to kind of fight for that cover. But the cover is essentially a dummy Lincoln. So it's not a real person. People don't, I always describe it like this and people are like, oh, I didn't realize that Lincoln was a dummy. It's like, yeah, Lincoln's not real, but on the, on Lincoln's on skates.

And on Lincoln, piggybacking Lincoln is the real person who is in blackface, has the word civil rights on the side of their arm. And I think there's a they're holding a banjo and there's something on the banjo. But we could never figure out what the word it was really hard in the image to know what's being what's written on the actual banjo.

And anyway, so the long-term story, this is the long tale of that image. I first discovered that image back in 2012 when I was a grad student. I was at McGill University as a grad student, and I won an award at the McCord Stewart Museum, which is a big museum in Montreal, to look through the William Notman for photographic archives. So William Notman, one of the most prolific 19th century photographers, not just in Canada, but in the world, and he was a

And he had a studio in Montreal. And he took pictures of people, obviously portraits. But he also had a business where he would take the photographic...

images of people who just wanted to dress up. Like they're not necessarily in the theater, but they wanted to like have a vignette. So there's a lot of, so I had the rare opportunity to look through his entire collection. So this is before this book was even in my mind. Cause this is like 13 years ago. I remember seeing this image on microfilm and,

So I was looking through microfilm, like the little screen. And I was like, I was scrolling through and I was like, oh, what is that? So then I asked them to digitize that image. It's like, I need to see this image. And then when I saw it, I was like, this image don't add up. Like in the context of Montreal, I know this image was taken in Montreal at William Notman Studios. So that's first. That is an image that was taken in Montreal, Canada, would have been in the 1860s at some time. And then I thought,

what? Why is the dummy all the stuff? It just didn't make any sense. So let's flash forward. I still couldn't figure out the image, but when the conversation about what are we going to put on the cover of the book comes up,

Those authors out there, you know, that conversation happened so much earlier than people would believe. Like, you haven't even finished the book and they're like, okay, what are we going to put on the cover? And I don't really have a say in the cover. Authors don't have a say, but a good publisher gets your input.

So I had given a bunch of images, but I said, this is really my favorite. And I remember there was a slight pushback because the thought was, is it going to be read as American?

Because it's Lincoln. You know, are people going to think that that's a Canadian image or is it American? And I'm like, but that's the point. The fact that this is a Canadian image, but it's picturing the U.S. Civil War. I think that tension, it speaks. It's amazing.

Anyway, I won out, obviously, but I didn't know that I did because it was sent to a graphic designer as book covers are. And when the graphic designer came back with that cover, I was like, oh my gosh, they saw what I saw. Because it's, I can't even fully, I can't fully come to terms with the image. That's why I love it so much, right? It's like, every time I look at it, I'm like, you're seeing something else.

Like it took me a while to realize that Lincoln was on skates. I was like, I didn't see that. Same. You're like, why, why is he skating? It's so bizarre. And like the whole civil rights and, and then somebody was like,

Somebody didn't realize, somebody didn't know that Lincoln was a dummy. They thought the Lincoln was real and that the black face person was the dummy. I'm like, no, look at the features. The black, that's a real person. Now, is that a child? Is that like just an adult? Who, who, why, why is the piggybacking? And then the piggyback, I sort of interpreted as the, oh, what's his name? The actual Lincoln Memorial statue.

where you have the African-American kneeling in front, that kneeling image, it's like an iconographic image of a Black male in slavery where they were always kneeling. I

I sort of took that as a play on that. Like the piggyback backing someone is kind of the same thing. Like you're on their back or you need them. Like Lincoln has to carry. Yeah. Lincoln has to carry the black. Yeah, literally. Right. Literally got you on his back. Like I sort of took it as that.

Yeah. Well, and I think the other thing, and hopefully people are listening and they finally get to the point where like, I have to see this thing for themselves. The other thing about it is the costume of it, the full body costume, the way that I read it anyway, is one of those costumes where, you know, if I were to put it on,

The real person, it's my upper body and it's my lower body. But the second, like the blackface person is the person on the back, but it's actually his legs in Lincoln's, right? Like, so the person, so the dummy is,

Lincoln's torso and the black man's legs and the real person is the person in blackface's torso and his leg. And so it's all mushed together. It's all mushed together and why I love the image because it speaks to the reality. This is why anyone who thinks that you can get rid of

of a black person or that you're white, that you don't have any... No. If you are a white or a black person of the Americas, I love that image because it says our stories are actually intertwined and our stories are complicated.

Like you actually cannot separate. You want to try to separate, but usually that separation is a response to something that we've done. Like it's not in isolation. You're doing that because you want, you're reacting to something, I should say, not responding, reacting to something, right?

People have used this theory to describe white flight to the suburbs post the civil rights movement. That wasn't just white people deciding they wanted to get a house out in the middle of nowhere. They thought they were leaving something only to discover how many decades later that is just going to catch right back up to you because you can't run from the interconnection. Like I love that image because it is also the book.

minstrelsy is as much about the white performer and sort of whiteness on stage as it is about the Black experience in the Americas as interpreted through the stage, right? It's like you really cannot separate them out. And I think the topic of minstrelsy has been so framed in the contemporary through anti-Black racism, right?

which it is, but it's so much more complex than that. It's like, that is what it's become when we see it today. But what we should really be asking ourselves is what is the root, the roots of these issues? And I would say to anyone listening, I think my book explains the roots. Yeah. Yeah. So as we're coming to the end, you know, we talked about, um,

Blackface Menstrualcy. We talked about Black people in Blackface. But again, as time moves on, at some point, Black folks are able to take the stage as themselves, truly, truly as themselves. And talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. I mean, I say that's still an asterisk. Okay. So talk about that. Talk about that too. Yeah. I mean, I don't think Black people took to the stage as ourselves until Shaft, you know, like 1970, sweet back, like 1970. Like, I don't think we really got to the, what we consider to be maybe more authentic in the Black expressive culture till really the 1970s. Before then,

It's an asterisk because they would still market themselves as like the unbleached American. Like there was a lot of like black performers who said I'm unbleached as opposed to selling themselves as being black. They sold themselves as being unbleached, which was like another play on, you know, this app, this idea of absence, which I think has been so associated with the black performer. Somehow there's always a lack and they're trying to restore something. Um,

But yeah, in the 1890s, you have Black performers that are deciding not to wear the Blackface mask. But what they are deciding to do in the alternative is to really sing a genre of music that became known as coon music. So it's through the lyrics that they are still assuming a kind of racial mimicry of themselves, but they're doing it without the Blackface. And on one...

On one hand, that's a liberatory moment of not having to go on stage and in like sort of the body, assume the mask of minstrelsy in your body. But on the other hand, it actually created the same problem that we're dealing with today. And it said, oh, they really do. Now that they're not wearing the mask, audiences were like, oh, so they really are like that.

It wasn't just the mask. They really do talk that way. They really do move that way. So in a weird twist, the minstrel mask that they had been wearing was kind of protecting them from the caricature.

Because the audience could understand that they were doing what the white performer was doing all the same. Everyone was performing the black caricature. But when you remove the mask from the black character, but they are still performing the caricature, then it starts to become real. So what you have at the turn of the 20th century is like the Burt Williams and the George Walkers and a lot of these...

Black actors, Burt Williams, I cannot call him American because he was born in the Bahamas. So you have even the non-American Black can now come and assume the Black caricature in and out of Blackface. So now you're just assuming this thing that is still not authentically Black, but it can be done without the mask, essentially. And, you know, I always like to say,

But, you know, the experience of Blackness in the Western world is really a trial and error because I think people would have seen that as such a liberatory moment to not take to the stage and assume those kinds of roles. But in the same instance, it created a different cage.

that people were then placed in. And I would say we're still struggling. Black representation is still struggling with that cage. And I'm not going to get too political, but just watch any Tyler Perry movie and you know what I mean. And the discourse on the last one is already telling us that we're still here in that cage.

Yeah. And it's hard. It's hard because as I alluded to earlier, the idea of type casting,

You know, why does it work? Why do they cast to type? Because they understand that audiences have expectations when they go and watch something, theater or on the screen. We have expectations of how the woman's going to act, how the man's going to act. This is why it's also difficult for queerness to be represented on screen because we just assume what is a couple going to do? How are their children going to look? All those assumptions, even if you're not thinking it in your conscious mind,

People who produce entertainment know that audiences do do that. So they type, they cast type or typecast, I could invert it. It doesn't even really matter. They cast a type and they typecast because those formulas work and they have worked since the 19th century and

And they keep working. And I think, you know, one of the things I always say, people are like, well, why are you so excited talking about this? You're talking about like really heavy things. You should be so downtrodden. And I'm like, no, absolutely not. It means that I can make such conscious choices now when I sit down to watch something as opposed to the person who's just passively absorbing. And then they can't understand why they're depressed after they watched a movie.

And it's because they don't know what they're seeing, but somewhere in the psyche knows what you're seeing. And it's bringing your energy down. So to me, that's how I see the work that I do. It's really to give people the tools. It's not to make anyone depressed.

To know what they're actually looking at and to also know where it came from. If someone should ask you the question of like, oh, they see a character and they're like, why does Kevin Hart always talk like that? Not to pick on him, but you know what I'm saying.

Well, you have given us so many of those tools here in this conversation. The book is Canada and the Blackface Atlantic, Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812 to 1897 by Dr. Cheryl Thompson. You can find Dr. Thompson online at drcherylthompson.com and mobaprojects.ca.

on Blue Sky at Dr. Cheryl T, and on Substack at Dr. Cheryl's Corner. And I am your host, Sullivan Summer. You can find me online at Sullivan Summer, on Instagram at TheSullivanSummer, and on Substack at Sullivan Summer, where Dr. Thompson and I are headed right now to continue our conversation. Thank you for listening to the New Books Network.