At various times I acted as usher and lithographer at the Park, Walnut and Arch Street Theatres in Philadelphia; Columbus Theatre, New York City, and the Park in Brooklyn.
In July, 1907, I conceived the idea of appearing daily at the ball games in New York City, and in the following afternoon’s paper give an accurate account of the conversations entered into, together with the description of the parties spoken to; in addition having my own features reproduced daily together with an accurate description of myself; to any party who could single me out was given a free pass to all the ball games on the ground where I was detected.
Under the title of the “Man in the Bleachers” I ran those on the New York Evening World with great success for five weeks.
Then came the idea of giving to the world the lives and careers of the minstrels, thus “presenting to the public and preserving to posterity the peculiarities and personalities of prominent performers of the past and present;” and here it is, after three years’ exhaustive and patient labor. Now for the big show.
THE FIRST BLACK-FACE PERFORMER.
The late Laurence Hutton in “The Negro on the Stage,” states that Shakespeare’s Othello was one of the earliest black-face stage characters; giving the date of the appearance at the Globe Theatre, London, England, on April 30, 1610; Oronoko followed in 1696. But several hundred years before the jealous Moor’s appearance, a couple of young men, named Cain and Abel respectively, did a brother act, though not necessarily a brotherly act, for the first-named gentleman one day in a fit of peevishness did smite Master Abel with such force that the breath did leave his body; Cain was punished, as he should have been; his complexion was changed from Caucasian to Ethiopian; this was the first black face turn. Anyway, that’s how the story runs. With the reader’s permission we will skip about 1,700 years, and come down to the comparative present.
The late Charles T. White, who made a study of minstrelsy all his life and was himself contemporaneous with it from its inception, stated that according to Russell’s Boston Gazette of December 30, 1799, at the Federal Theatre, Boston, a Mr. Graupner sang a song called “The Negro Boy.”
Federal Theatre, Boston, Mass.
The First Recorded Black-Face Act Was Given Here December 30, 1799.
W. W. Clapp, Jr., in his “History of the Boston Stage,” avers that this would be impossible, as the news of George Washington’s death, December 14, 1799, did not reach Boston until December 24, and that the theatre was closed a week in consequence thereof. Granting this, six days would have elapsed, and the performance undoubtedly was given, for had it not, the advertisement which was inserted announcing the performance for that evening, would not under any circumstances have been printed. However, for the sake of argument, let us concede that the first black-face appearance (the term black-face as used here has reference to a single performer doing a specialty) was not on the date specified.