In trying to explain Darkie Day, I don't know which is stranger: the locals' story about dancing slaves, or the fact that many journalists—including defenders like Darcus Howe—swallowed the fishy tale hook, line and sinker.
To my mind, commemorating slaves' suffering by blacking up and singing about "niggers" would seem like more of a sick joke than an honest hommage. And so far as the historical record shows, slave ships never docked at Padstow—and even if they had stopped, it's unlikely the captive men, women and children on board would have been in any condition to sing and dance.
In 1806, a slave ship wrecked just outside Padstow as it was returning to Liverpool, having already sold its cargo of 193 slaves in Barbados. Seven Africans had died in transit from the Cape Coast, most from fever and dysentery.
The true roots of Darkie Day lie in the 19th century "nigger minstrel" craze that swept both sides of the Atlantic—and still echoes through pop music today.
Americans and Europeans—particularly the British—share the blame for mimicking and ridiculing blacks onstage.
In 1799, a German immigrant named Gottlieb Graupner (now regarded as the father of orchestral music in America) entertained Boston as the banjo-strumming Gay Negro Boy.
And two decades later, a famous English actor, Charles Mathews, staged a one-man show in blackface called A Trip to America, lampooning a black production of Hamlet he'd seen in the States. In the middle of the Dane's famous soliloquy, after the line "And by opposing, end them", the black audience would burst into a slave song, "Opossum Up a Gum Tree."
However, the undisputed founding fathers of the minstrel show were a couple of Yankees.
Thomas Dartmouth Rice and George Washington Dixon developed the two black stereotypes that dominated the stage for more than a century: the sympathetic Southern plantation slave (Rice's "Jim Crow" character), and the uppity Northern dandy (Dixon's "Zip Coon")—which also inspired the golliwog, another transatlantic creation.
Rice, a New Yorker of Anglo-American extraction, was a struggling performer touring the US when he heard Dixon sing his hit song, "Coal Black Rose" around 1830.
In Kentucky, he also happened to see an old black stablehand singing and dancing disjointedly (possibly because he was crippled); Rice supposedly borrowed the man's moves and music to create "Jim Crow", the archetypal novelty hit, complete with its own silly dance and catchy chorus:
"Wheel about and turn about, / And jump Jim Crow."
To my mind, commemorating slaves' suffering by blacking up and singing about "niggers" would seem like more of a sick joke than an honest hommage. And so far as the historical record shows, slave ships never docked at Padstow—and even if they had stopped, it's unlikely the captive men, women and children on board would have been in any condition to sing and dance.
In 1806, a slave ship wrecked just outside Padstow as it was returning to Liverpool, having already sold its cargo of 193 slaves in Barbados. Seven Africans had died in transit from the Cape Coast, most from fever and dysentery.
The true roots of Darkie Day lie in the 19th century "nigger minstrel" craze that swept both sides of the Atlantic—and still echoes through pop music today.
Americans and Europeans—particularly the British—share the blame for mimicking and ridiculing blacks onstage.
In 1799, a German immigrant named Gottlieb Graupner (now regarded as the father of orchestral music in America) entertained Boston as the banjo-strumming Gay Negro Boy.
And two decades later, a famous English actor, Charles Mathews, staged a one-man show in blackface called A Trip to America, lampooning a black production of Hamlet he'd seen in the States. In the middle of the Dane's famous soliloquy, after the line "And by opposing, end them", the black audience would burst into a slave song, "Opossum Up a Gum Tree."
However, the undisputed founding fathers of the minstrel show were a couple of Yankees.
Thomas Dartmouth Rice and George Washington Dixon developed the two black stereotypes that dominated the stage for more than a century: the sympathetic Southern plantation slave (Rice's "Jim Crow" character), and the uppity Northern dandy (Dixon's "Zip Coon")—which also inspired the golliwog, another transatlantic creation.
Rice, a New Yorker of Anglo-American extraction, was a struggling performer touring the US when he heard Dixon sing his hit song, "Coal Black Rose" around 1830.
In Kentucky, he also happened to see an old black stablehand singing and dancing disjointedly (possibly because he was crippled); Rice supposedly borrowed the man's moves and music to create "Jim Crow", the archetypal novelty hit, complete with its own silly dance and catchy chorus:
"Wheel about and turn about, / And jump Jim Crow."
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