In the absence of anything like a complete and satisfactory history of negro minstrelsy, it is not possible to discover its genesis, although it is the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly it can claim to be an art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music. Scattered throughout the theatrical literature of the early part of the century are to be found many different accounts of the rise and progress of the African on the stage, each author having his own particular “father of negro song.” Charles White, an old Ethiopian comedian and manager, gives the credit to Gottlieb Graupner, who appeared in Boston in 1799, basing his statement upon a copy of Russell’s Boston Gazette of the 30th of December of that year, which contains an advertisement of a performance to be given on the date of publication at the Federal Street Theatre. At the end of the second act of Oroonoko, according to Mr. White, Mr. Graupner, in character, sang “The Gay Negro Boy,” accompanying the air with the banjo; and although the house was draped in mourning for General Washington, such was the enthusiasm of the audience that the performer had to bring his little bench from the wings again and again to sing his song. W. W. Clapp, Jr., in his History of the Boston Stage, says that the news of the death of Washington was received in that city on the 24th of December, and that the theatre remained “closed for a week;” and was reopened with “A Monody,” in which “Mrs. Barrett, in the character of the Genius of America, appeared weeping over the Tomb of her Beloved Hero”; but there is no mention, then or later, of Mr. Graupner or of “The Gay Negro Boy.”
Mr. White says further that “the next popular negro song was ‘The Battle of Plattsburg,’ sung by an actor vulgarly known as ‘Pig-Pie Herbert,’ at a theatre in Albany, in 1815”; but H. D. Stone, in a volume called The Drama, published in Albany in 1873, credits “a member of the theatrical company of the name of Hop Robinson” as the singer of the song; while “Sol” Smith, an eye-witness of this performance, gives still another and very different account of it. According to Smith’s Autobiography published by Messrs. Harper and Brothers in 1868, Andrew Jackson Allen produced at the Green Street Theatre in Albany, in 1815, a drama called The Battle of Lake Champlain, the action taking place on real ships floating in real water. “In this piece,” says Smith, “Allen played the character of a negro, and sang a song of many verses (being the first negro song, I verily believe, ever heard on the American stage).” Two verses of this ballad, quoted by Smith “from memory,” will give a very fair idea of its claims to popularity:
“Backside Albany stan’ Lake Champlain—
Little pond half full of water;
Plat-te-burg dar too, close ’pon de main:
Town small; he grow big, dough, herea’ter.
“On Lake Champlain Uncle Sam set he boat,
An’ Massa Macdonough he sail ’em;
While General Macomb make Plat-te-burg he home,
Wid de army whose courage nebber fail ’em.”
Andrew Allen was a very quaint character, and he deserves a paragraph to himself. Born in the city of New York in 1776, he appeared, according to his own statement, as a page in Romeo and Juliet at the theatre in John Street in 1786, on the strength of which, as the oldest living actor, he assumed for years before his death the title of “Father of the American Stage.” He was more famous as a cook than as a player, however, and he is the subject of innumerable theatrical anecdotes, none of which are greatly to his credit. He was called “Dummy Allen” because he was very deaf and exceedingly loquacious; he adored the hero of New Orleans, whose name he appropriated when Jackson was elected President of the United States; and he was devoted to Edwin Forrest, whose costumer, dresser, and personal slave he was for many years. He invented and patented a silver leather much used in the decoration of stage dresses; and he kept a restaurant in Dean Street, Albany, and later a similar establishment near the Bowery Theatre, New York, being a very familiar figure in the streets of both cities. Mr. Phelps, in his Players of a Century (Albany, New York, 1880), describes him in his later years as tall and erect in person, with firmly compressed features, an eye like a hawk’s, nose slightly Romanesque, and hair mottled gray. He wore a fuzzy white hat, a coat of blue with bright brass buttons, and carried a knobby cane. He spoke in a sharp, decisive manner, often giving wrong answers, and invariably mistaking the drift of the person with whom he was conversing. He died in New York in 1853, and Mr. Phelps preserves the inscription upon his monument at Cypress Hills Cemetery, which was evidently his own composition: “From his cradle he was a scholar; exceedingly wise, fair-spoken, and persuading; lofty and sour to them that loved him not, but to those men that sought him sweet as summer.”
ANDREW JACKSON ALLEN.
Apropos of Allen’s association with Edwin Forrest, and of Smith’s assertion that Allen sang the first negro song ever sung on the American stage, it may not be out of place here to quote W. R. Alger’s Life of Forrest. Speaking of Forrest’s early and checkered experiences as a strolling player in the far West, Mr. Alger says that perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is “that he was the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manner.” In 1823, at the Globe Theatre, Cincinnati, Ohio, under the management of “Sol” Smith, Forrest did play a negro in a farce by Smith, called The Tailor in Distress, singing and dancing, and winning the compliment from a veritable black in his audience that he was “nigger all ober!” Lawrence Barrett, in his Life of Forrest, quotes the bill of this evening, which shows Forrest as a modern dandy in the first play, as Cuffee, a Kentucky negro, in the second, and as Sancho Panza in the pantomime of Don Quixote, which closed the evening’s entertainment.
Forrest was by no means the only eminent American actor who hid his light behind a black mask. “Sol” Smith himself relates how he became a supernumerary at the Green Street Theatre, in Albany, in his fourteenth year, playing one of the blood-thirsty associates of Three-fingered Jack with a preternaturally smutty face, which he forgot to wash one eventful night, to the astonishment of his own family, who forced him to retire for a time to private life.
At Vauxhall Garden, in the Bowery, a little south of and nearly opposite the site of Cooper Institute, a young lad named Bernard Flaherty, born in Cork, Ireland, is said to have sung negro songs and to have danced negro dances in 1838 to help support a widowed mother, who lived to see him carried to an honored grave in 1876, mourned by the theatre-going population of the whole country. In 1840, as Barney Williams, he made a palpable hit in the character of Pat Rooney, in The Omnibus, at the Franklin Theatre, New York. He certainly played “darky parts,” such as they were, for a number of years before and after that date; and he is perhaps the one man upon the American stage with whom anything like negro minstrelsy will never be associated, not so much because of his high rank in his profession as on account of the Hibernian style of his later-day performances, and of the strong accent which always clung to him, and which suggested his native city rather than the cork he used to burn to color his face.