The Minstrel Show Gets Religion

After the Civil War, blackface minstrels found in religion a steady stream of subject matter tailor-made for comedic treatment. This chapter examines three songs that nicely illustrate the postwar phenomenon of religious parody in its infancy and its evolution toward slave-themed entertainment: “Carry the News! We Are All Surrounded” (1870), “Rock’a My Soul” (1871), and “Contraband Children” (1872). Performed initially by whites in blackface, these songs replicate the musical style of black folk spirituals in their parody of a camp meeting. The story of “Carry the News” in particular shows how blackface entertainers were already drawing on musical styles and themes loosely related to those of spirituals, and how the public easily confused newly created popular songs with traditional folk songs. When the vogue of jubilee singing began to spread a few years later, minstrelsy was primed for a convergence and eventual merger with jubilee song. As black minstrel entertainers multiplied, white minstrels increasingly found that they had to cede their plantation-themed material to them.

The ‘Chaldee Manuscript’, William Hone, and Late Georgian Religious Parody

This article analyses Blackwood's notorious ‘Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript’ (1817), contextualising the satire in the light of religious parody, ancient and modern – but in particular the latter – and arguing that there were specific reasons why a post-Napoleonic magazine might have used this particular form at this particular moment. It examines the publication, publicity, and purposes of the ‘Chaldee’, a key part of William Blackwood's reboot of his failing magazine in October 1817, and the contemporary religious parody of the radical pressman William Hone, which led, three times, to his prosecution and acquittal, and which directly informed that most famous part of Blackwood's succès de scandale.