Sheet Music Collection

Walter Hawley

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Alternate Title

Cover Title: That nigger treated me all right

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)

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#

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

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