Sheet Music Collection

Lasses White

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Alternate Title

Unredacted title: Nigger Blues

Cover Illustration

Photograph of man in black face on blue background

First Line of Song

Oh! The blues aint nothing,

Lyricist

White, Lasses, 1888-1949

Lithographer/Printer

Dallas: Bush and Gerts

Publication Date

1913

Publisher

Dallas: Bush and Gerts

Performance Medium

Piano; voice

Object Type

text

Format (Original)

1 score; (6 p.); 34.5 cm.

Format (Digital)

PDF

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).

Physical ID#

32278009346150

Digital ID#

009346150_1913

Location of Original

Box 4; Folder 2; Piece 4

Repository

Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries.

Digital Publisher

Mississippi State University Libraries (electronic version)

Rights Management

Item Unavailable Due to Copyright Restrictions

Contact Information

For more information about the contents of this collection, e-mail sp_coll@library.msstate.edu.

[Redacted] Blues

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