Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Gabriella Varró: The Theme of Comic Love in Blackface Minstrelsy: The Anatomy of the Grotesque

The minstrel show, however, had no interest in reality, or the actual reasons for historical conditioning, it wanted to entertain successfully, and to reach the goal the first thing it had to do was to turn its back on reality. The shows tried to justify the inhumanities of slavery (breaking up of families, selling married slaves to different owners, divorcing the child from the parents, etc.) by picturing the black as perfectly unfit for marriage. Slave marriages were pictured on the stage either as absolutely ridiculous, or disrupted by some grotesque disaster. In "The Yaller Gal With a Josey On,"

1

2 for instance, the songwriter expressed the black man's happiness over the elopement of his wife with a cattle driver. "Lucy Long,"

1

3 a popular minstrel song, remembered by Edward LeRoy Rice

1

4 as a tune "still is to be heard in remote hill-billy regions" (12), represented the black male as joyously expressing his willingness to get rid of his would-be wife: If I had a scolding wife, As sure as she was born, I'd tote her down to New Orleans, And trade her off for corn. /Starr/ Another minstrel air, 'Will No Yaller Gal Marry Me?" declared the young husband's preference for a life-time bondage in slavery over the hardships of his marriage ("Help! oh, help me, Mister Lawyer, cut the 1

2 'The Yaller Gal With A Josey On" quoted in Dennison 120. "Lucy Long" Brown University, Harris Collection, no. 31. In Stair. M1.S8, AfroAmericans before 1863. The song was also identified in some minstrel repertories as 'Take Your Time Miss Lucy," and what critics regard as the original version of the song came to be published in 1842. The Brown University notes for the text claim that in one of the many variants of the song "Miss Lucy crosses the color line and becomes wholly white" (Brown Notes). 1

4 Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy from "Daddy" Rice to Date a collection of biographical sketches of the most famous minstrels. 105