The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy Christopher J. Smith. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy Christopher J. Smith. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013.The performance of blackface minstrel music and dance on stage in the 1840s in the United States and Britain has a shameful, racist history that fills most of us with such revulsion that it prohibits us from giving serious thought to the African-American origins and sources that prompted the movement that has been described as America's first popular music. Indeed, Christopher J. Smith is one of only a handful of scholars who has taken on this much reviled form of music and dance. Smith's argument in The Creolizalion of American Culture, is that by dismissing minstrel music and dance out-of-hand, we lose not just the degraded, racist form of the performance, but the rich, complex, and deep history of its roots and origins in a multi-ethnic, multiracial, multiclass, and varied geographic milieu. It also takes a scholar of some fortitude to wade through the walls of prejudices, both contemporaneous with the performances and since then, to discover the threads of reality and actual pre-history of the minstrel movement and to try to discover some meaningful and positive lessons from that history, especially as it relates to the ways in which African-American musicians and dancers contributed to the construction and core of what it means to be an American.This book has the weight and heft of superbly researched scholarship that supports a razor-sharp and compelling argument; it is presented in crystal-clear language with confidence and authority. Smith manages to make active use of several different disciplines in weaving his argument, from musicology to art history and visual culture, to anthropology and sociology, to social geography, to dance history and theory, to a close and detailed examination of historical archival and visual materials-all of which are employed with the kind of skill and exacting ability that it leaves the reader breathless.Smith's detailed analysis ranges from broad and widely ranging topics such as analyses of population studies, migration patterns, class studies, living-andmoving social patterns within and among races and classes around the young United States, to localized studies of communities of African American, AngloCeltic and transplanted Caribbean communities in the United States in the cities and towns along the southern and then northern east coast, as well as along the river and canal cultures of the United States. His purpose is to study how music, song, and dance moved, changed, spread, and became creolized as it traveled among the African-American and later to the Anglo-Celtic working class communities of sailors, canal workers, and laborers of New York City's Lower East side.Yet the book also includes an incredibly focused investigation into the life and work of the artist William Sidney Mount. Smith makes extensive use of Mount's written papers and more especially his paintings and drawings of musicians and dancers to reveal a wholly new side of Mount as a person and artist, particularly with regard to his professional interest in both music and dance. …