Sheet Music Collection
![[Redacted] you won't do](https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cht-sheet-music/3764/thumbnail.jpg)
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Alternate Title
Unredacted title: Nigger you won't do
Preferred Citation
[Physical ID#]: [Title], Charles H. Templeton, Sr. sheet music collection. Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.
Cover Illustration
Missing cover
First Line of Song
They say that a boy who resembles his ma
First Line of Chorus
[Redacted], [redacted] you won't do
Subjects
Minstrel Music. ; Songs with piano. ; Popular music United States.
Publication Date
1897
Publisher
New York : Howley, Haviland & Co.,
Howley, Haviland & Co.
Performance Medium
Piano; voice
Music Genre
Minstrel
Object Type
text
Format (Original)
1 score ([3] p.) ; 31 cm.
Format (Digital)
Alternate Print Versions
9437413
Physical ID#
32278009352687
Digital ID#
009352687-1887
Location of Original
Box 9, Folder 1, Piece 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.
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).