Sheet Music Collection
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Alternate Title
Cover Title: That nigger treated me all right
Preferred Citation
[Physical ID#]: [Title], Charles H. Templeton, Sr. sheet music collection. Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.
Cover Illustration
Photo of Flo Irwin inside a floral border.
First Line of Song
My baby gone and left me and my heart's done broke
First Line of Chorus
Dat [redacted] treated me all right
Subjects
Minstrel Music. ; Songs with piano. ; Popular music United States.
Publication Date
1898
Publisher
[Chicago] : Will Rossiter, ; Will Rossiter (Firm)
Performance Medium
Piano; voice
Music Genre
Minstrel
Object Type
text
Format (Original)
1 score ([4] p.) : 34 cm.
Format (Digital)
Physical ID#
32278009353040
Digital ID#
009353040-1898
Location of Original
Box 9, Folder 3, Piece 5
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] treated me all right](https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/cht-sheet-music/4106/thumbnail.jpg)
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).