As the first published collection of early blackface-performance texts, W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture provides scholars of American popular entertainment with a much-needed sourcebook. These texts are collected in service of the book's larger purpose of evaluating the career of Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the first superstar of blackface performance, who became synonymous with his most popular character, Jim Crow. All the songs and plays gathered in Jump Jim Crow were performed by Rice (with the exception of the “street prose” section, which includes two contemporary, pamphlet biographies of Rice). The texts work with Lhamon's introduction to tell the story of Rice's career, which is a case study of the larger topic: the history of blackface performance before the rise of the minstrel show in the mid-1840s. As the plays collected here reveal, Rice's performance of blackface was fundamentally different from minstrel-show performance on many levels. The most important difference, Lhamon argues in his introduction, is that Rice's performances encouraged the white audience to identify with his blackface character, to laugh with him rather than at him.
