Sheet music cover for songs by the blackface Christy Minstrels, 1847
21 June 2020
Shameful aspects of history that we like to think are long past us sometimes continue to reverberate today. Such is the case with the word minstrel, which in the American context acquired a racist association whose legacy continues to haunt us.
The word minstrel comes to us from the Medieval Latin ministrallus, meaning an official or lieutenant. It comes from the same root that gives us minister and is recorded in Anglo-Latin texts (i.e., Latin texts written in England) written prior to 1227. By 1266 the Latin word had acquired the sense of a servant, and by 1330 it was being used in the specific sense of a servant who entertained with music or song.
Use of minstrel in English follows the same path, but unusually the English words are recorded before the Anglo-Latin ones. The sense of an official or functionary of a lord appears in the text Ancrene Riwle, a guide for anchoresses, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, written sometime before 1200, with the manuscript from c.1230
Neomeð nu ȝeme of hwucche twa meosters þes twa menestraws seruið hare lauerd, þe deouel of helle.
(Now take heed of these two offices, these two minstrels serve their lord, the devil in hell.)
The sense of a musician or entertainer can be found as early as 1300 in the poem Iacob and Iosep:
Hem oftok a menestral, his harpe he bar arugge.
(He was taken for a minstrel, his harp he bore on his back.)
This medieval sense of minstrel continues to this day, and this usage remains unproblematic. But in the American context, minstrel has become associated with blackface performers, presenting a positive image of slavery in the antebellum American South.
Minstrel was applied to black, often enslaved, performers from early in the nineteenth century. In an 1812 poem supporting abolition of the slave trade, George Dyer refers to black musicians as a minstrel band:
And, hark! I hear a minstrel band.
The negro-slaves, now slaves no more,
Have struck a chord untouch’d before.
Of Afric’s wrongs, and Afric’s pains,
Oft had they sigh’d in lonely strains.
A note in the text says that this poem had been printed “many years before” in the Morning Chronicle, but I have been unable to find this earlier publication.
And a story by a Miss Leslie from January 1832 refers to a black musician as a sable minstrel. Given the story is set in antebellum Virginia, the man and the boy who accompanies him are almost certainly slaves, but the text does not call this fact out:
The two musicians—a black man who played on the violin, and a mulatto-boy with a tambourine [...] he called to the musicians to cease, much to the vexation of the unfashionable portion of the party, and greatly to the discomfiture of the sable minstrel and his assistant, neither of whom, however, could refrain, as the sleigh wafted them along, from giving an occasional scrape on the fiddle, or a thump on the tambourine.
In both of these instances, the word minstrel itself carries no racial implications; it simply means musician. And the 1832 instance has to use the modifier sable to emphasize the musician’s race. But these instances show the chain of semantic association beginning to form. And by 1840, minstrel was being used to refer to white musicians and singers who performed in blackface. Here is a notice of performance by William M. “Billy” Whitlock, a blackface performer in the Atlas from 22 November 1840:
Long island and Old Wirginny Melodies, accompanied on the Banjo, by the inimitable Ethiopian Minstrel, Whitlock.
And there is this 19 December 1842 notice in the New York Herald that mentions Daniel Emmett, the blackface performer who is traditionally claimed to be the composer of Dixie:
Besides the classic performances in the arena this evening, the renowned Ethiopian Minstrel of the South, Mr. Emmit [sic] and his pupil, Master Pierce, will add to the merriment of the occasion.
Blackface minstrelsy would continue to be acceptable to American whites through to the late twentieth century, but it is rightly dead as a continuing tradition of performance.
Sources:
The Atlas (New York), 22 November 1840, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Dyer, George. “Ode 9: On Considering the Unsettled State of Europe, and the Opposition Which Had Been Made to Attempts for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Poetics. London: J. Johnson and Co., 1812, 132. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, 2013, s.v. ministrallus.
Miss Leslie. “Frank Finlay.” Lady’s Book, January 1832, 53. ProQuest.
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. minstral n.
Napier, Arthur, ed. Iacob and Iosep. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916, 360.
New York Herald, 19 December 1842, 2. ProQuest Civil War Era.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. minstrel, n.
Image credit: Boston Public Library, 2007.