Reddit mentions of Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot

Really fascinating article, and I can understand why people here haven't commented on it yet -- it's a racially touchy topic, and also the article was more about the "old-timey" minstrel comedic style moreso than music. However, I'd like to comment on a few areas... (I was going to comment at work, but I really wanted to take my time with the article and associated Youtube videos. I'm glad I did.)

First, I don't think we give enough credit to the minstrel show culturally. Many more things originated from the minstrel show than many are aware of; stuff similar to "originating the riddle 'Why did the chicken cross the road?'" Here's a few brief examples:

• Mickey Mouse is a blackface minstrel. Check this out. The more you think about it, the more things you notice. His gloves especially. Why would a mouse be wearing gloves? Sit on it a while.
  
• The "Ba-Dum Tss" when someone makes a lame joke comes from the minstrel show. There used to be two performers on the opposite ends of the show, one called "Mr. Tambo" and the other called "Mr. Bones." Whenever a (slapstick) joke was made, they'd hit their respective instruments in a manner not far from that little rhythm we're so familiar with.
  
• The minstrel show brought us classic country/folk music in some odd way. The banjo was an instrument picked up by white minstrel performers in the middle of the 19th century as a "traditional black instrument" for the minstrel shows. The influence of these shows dispersed into the hills and the rural areas down south, where the blackface and racism eventually faded out, leaving the songs and melodies and instruments via the folk/oral tradition. This happened way faster than you might expect. Listen to this (undeniably catchy but unfortunately played back too fast) minstrel tune from 1902 (Vess Ossman was truly god of the banjo! Also, language warning). Is it too far a stretch to think that this kind of music turned into hillbilly country and also led into ragtime (same banjo player) and jazz (if you listen carefully, you'll find a lot of early jazz features the banjo as a rhythm instrument. I love it!) If you want a more detailed history, I strongly recommend this book (we read it in a class I took on Rock & Roll) -- its first few chapters on minstrelsy and ragtime are fantastic, although it starts to dip in quality a tad in the jazz/blues portion. Its companion CD is pretty interesting too, but most of it's on Youtube anyway.
  
  Anyway, back to the article. I like how it presented a bunch of different viewpoints on why black performers chose to use blackface without necessarily forcing its own view on the reader. We often forget just how prevalent the whole blackface thing was. Here's a clip from "The Jazz Singer," (one of the first "talkies" and just a really good movie) and this is a performance on BROADWAY.
  
  I especially dug that hiphop tune at the end. I find it interesting that this utterly racist form of entertainment has been a force behind American culture even through the 60s and into more modern music that seems to be so far removed from the ideas that originally were behind minstrelsy: notably, the desire for white (Irish)men to emphasize that they were white and not black. In an ironic twist, this has (arguably) been reversed to white teenagers changing their culture to try and be more "black," a trend whose roots begin where the old minstrel show left off.
  
  I'll leave you with one last quote from the book I linked above:
  
  > Although many have tried and oft, none has yet found a way... to escape the plain fact that all that is American in American music, and all that is good, traces its bloodlines through the minstrel show -- an institution through which white Americans stole, plundered, colonized; raped, prostituted, and pimped; contaminated and diluted; misinterpreted and misunderstood; ridiculed, patronized, bucked, scorned and - in some strange way - passionately loved the music and the culture of black America.