Sheet Music Collection

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Alternate Title

Unredacted Title: Nigger-Toe Rag

Cover Illustration

Illustration of African American in hat sitting with nuts in his hands and feet extended in front of house

Illustrator/Artist

Buck, Gene

Subjects

Piano music.; Ragtime Music; Popular music United States.

Publication Date

1910

Publisher

Williamsport, PA : Vandersloot Music Pub. Co.

Performance Medium

Piano

Music Genre

Rags

Object Type

text

Format (Original)

1 score (5p.); 27 x 34.5cm

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#

32278009984802

Digital ID#

009984802-1910

Location of Original

Box 139, Folder 2

Repository

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

Digital Publisher

Mississippi State University Libraries (electronic version)

Contact Information

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

[Redacted] Rag

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