Sheet Music Collection
![[Redacted] War Bride Blues](https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cht-sheet-music/13361/thumbnail.jpg)
Files
Download Full Text (1.5 MB)
Alternate Title
Original Title: Nigger War Bride Blues
Preferred Citation
[Physical ID#]: [Title], Charles H. Templeton, Sr. sheet music collection. Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.
Cover Illustration
Photograph of Billie O'Brien; African American soldiers marching and bride crying
First Line of Song
Listen folks I'm goin' to tell to you
First Line of Chorus
Easy greasy breezy John
Lyricist
Marten, Jimmie
Lithographer/Printer
Houston: Thos. Goggan and Bro.
Publication Date
1917
Publisher
Houston: Thos. Goggan and Bro.
Performance Medium
Piano; voice
Object Type
text
Format (Original)
1 score; (4 p.); 34.5 cm.
Format (Digital)
Physical ID#
32278009346168
Digital ID#
009346168_1917
Location of Original
Box 4; Folder 2; Piece 5
Repository
Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries.
Digital Publisher
Mississippi State University Libraries (electronic version)
Rights Management
This material may be protected by U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code), which governs reproduction, distribution, display, and certain other uses of protected works. The user of this material is responsible for compliance with the law.
Contact Information
For more information about the contents of this collection, e-mail sp_coll@library.msstate.edu.
Notes
This song includes one or more elements of “blackface.” With theatrical roots in the West as far back as the 15th century, blackface entertainment “[displays] Blackness for the enjoyment and edification" of non-Black audiences, through racially insensitive means (Strausbaugh, Black Like You, 2006). Common features of blackface songs were racist titles and lyrics. Songs borrowed from and reorganized African American vernacular to depict racial difference through lyrics “authentic” to African American dialect (Mahar, “Black English in Earyl Blackface Minstrelsy,” 1985). These lyrics combined with titles that used common epithets like “coon” and “darky,” to correspond with wider social understandings of African Americans as “ignorant and indolent, but also devoid of honesty or personal honor, given to drunkenness and gambling, utterly without ambition, sensuous, libidinous, even lascivious” (Dormon, “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks,” 1988).