Blackface and Romance: Computing Cultural Change in 19th-Century Sheet Music

During the nineteenth century, American entertainment was defined by Blackface minstrelsy. A baleful style of racial imposture that channeled tensions of class and gender, minstrelsy was virtually synonymous with popular culture in the rapidly growing nation, shaping everything from theater and politics to literature and visual art. Nowhere was this influence more obvious than in music, which relied on Blackface for the development of the distinctive, homegrown style epitomized by the work of composers such as Steven Foster. While the compositions most clearly related to minstrelsy have been the object of extensive analysis, the broader outlines of the form’s impact have been harder to trace. Far from being restricted to a specific style or genre, the racialized tropes developed around Blackface were notable for their ability to cross boundaries of class, culture, and geography, appearing in places far from the minstrel shows that make up the core of most research on the topic. Indeed, the very ubiquity of these tropes helps to explain their enormous power on American life and thought.

While previous scholarship on Blackface has tended to focus on specific cohorts of artists, locations, or performance styles, computational methods make it possible to more effectively grapple with the vast amount of musical material produced during minstrelsy’s heyday. Built on digitized resources from Johns Hopkins’ Lester S. Levy collection, “Blackface and Romance” uses machine learning methods to produce a large-scale analysis of orthographical irregularities within the lyrics of this 30,000+ piece collection of 19^th century sheet music—specifically, the faux dialects and irregular spellings used by songwriters to gesture towards race within the Blackface tradition. Employing these tools makes tracking consistencies and divergences in dialect usage possible across a vast swathe of seemingly unconnected publications. This in turn provides the ability to uncover how the language of minstrelsy varied over time, region and subject position, all while enjoying immense and consistent popularity in both music and the cultural discourse at large.

While scholars have long attempted to discern distinct phases within the evolution of Blackface, periodization has always been a topic of substantial debate. By focusing on the relationship between minstrelsy and other discourses within sheet music lyrics, these methods make it possible to point to previously overlooked moments within the evolution of the genre. The implications of this are clearest towards the ends of the 19^th century, when gifted Black composers such as Will Marion Cook or Ernest Hogan began to undermine the minstrel tradition from within, modifying long-standing language by linking it to new themes of romance and freedom. Analyzed within the broad linguistic framework of the project, the fuller outlines—and cultural impact—of this revolutionary aesthetic is revealed with a new clarity. Using a set of graphic materials to clearly distill the insights gathered from its computational methods, “Blackface and Romance” aims to both demonstrate the potential of this digitally informed approach to cultural change and to provide new insight into a crucial phenomenon in American history.