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Real Men Don't Sing
Crooning in American Culture
By Allison McCracken Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7532-6
CHAPTER 1
PUTTING OVER A SONG
Crooning, Performance, and Audience in the Acoustic Era, 1880– 1920
An excerpt from the 1884 song "Crooning to the Baby" conveys the way the word croon originally evoked a comforting maternal figure, typically the soothing black mammy of the antebellum South, and an idealized state of childhood:
'Cross de path of time I see her still
Hush de piccaninny off to rest
Still I hear her voice so soft and low
Croon, croon, crooning to de baby
Backward along de years I seem to go
To de little cotton farm 'way West.
Twenty years later the term connoted romantic vocal address:
Each day they spoon to the engine's tune
Their honeymoon will happen soon
He'll win Lucile with his Oldsmobile
And then he'll fondly croon:
"Come Away with me Lucile
In my merry Oldsmobile
Down the road of life we'll fly
Automo-bubbling you and I."
Although in both cases croon describes singing within an intimate relationship, the term broadened from the exclusively nostalgic associations of minstrel shows to modern courtship. The industrial developments and social dynamics that enabled and accompanied crooning's evolution — changes in popular song texts and publishing, performers and venues, and audiences — are the subject of this chapter.
Standard histories of popular music have addressed these developments in partial ways, through minstrelsy, ragtime, coon songs, jazz, and blues. Yet the evolution of popular crooning love songs has remained little more than a footnote, despite their great popularity. Minstrelsy, for example, is primarily known for its syncopated comic and dance songs, despite the importance of sentimental songs to its repertoire beginning in the 1830s. Likewise female blackface singers of the 1890s are better remembered for their "coon shouting" than for their performances as crooning mammies. This emphasis is commonly attributed to the fact that crooning songs are not genuinely "American" music because they are based in European-derived musical traditions. But all American popular music is fundamentally hybrid, the product of a variety of different stylistic, cultural, and social influences. Mainstream love songs have been neglected historically because they are "feminine": sentimental, emotional. American popular music is typically celebrated for its "masculine" energy, the rhythms that encourage listeners to dance, jump, and wail. In contrast, crooning songs activate passions that are more internalized, focusing on private, intimate relations, whether between mother and child or two lovers, comforting listeners or inviting them to empathize. All these features — comfort, intimacy, privacy, emotionality — are associated with the cultural feminine; indeed what uniquely defines crooning songs is their grounding in gender difference. Perceived femininity, both real and representational, lies at the core of crooning, its significance in the history of American popular song, and its historical marginalization.
In the beginning the "women" were men. The story of crooning begins, as does so much of American popular music, with blackface minstrelsy. Minstrelsy was a product of northern, urban, white male working-class culture of the 1830s, but troupes dominated American popular culture generally from the 1840s through the rise of vaudeville in the 1880s and 1890s. Minstrel singers, overwhelmingly Irish, first employed the British-derived term croon in the 1870s to describe the soothing sound of a plantation mammy singing a lullaby to her charges. The mammy figure was primarily employed to comfort white audiences unnerved by post–Civil War social change; she represented an idealized agrarian southern past in which social divisions of race, class, and gender were naturalized and harmonious. By the 1890s mammies were being regularly embodied by black and white female minstrel performers, known as "coon-shouters." Although the crooning mammy figure tells us little about the historical conditions of actual black women or their children, her growing popularity reveals the white male's need for reassurance amid anxieties in the postbellum world.
Between 1880 and 1920 the public sphere in northern American cities was transformed by rapid urbanization, an emergent mass culture, loosening sexual mores, and the increasing public presence of immigrants, independent working women, non-Anglos, and same-sex-oriented groups. The consumer products and targets of the new entertainment industries transgressed established Victorian divisions between high and low culture (with all the attached ethnic and racial hierarchies and assumptions) and between public male and private female cultures. By contrast, prewar minstrelsy had worked within Victorian social conventions as their abject counterpoint: vulgar and erotic pleasures of the poor and socially marginalized. Because minstrels wore blackface and projected their transgressions onto society's others — primarily blacks and women — such performances preserved racial and gender hierarchies while still giving performers access to expressions of emotional intensity and sensuality. These qualities were still associated with many immigrant groups not yet considered white, such as the Irish, but blackface allowed Irish players to displace them onto other groups. Minstrelsy had also been protected from criticism by the nature of its audience; particularly in urban areas, minstrelsy was largely a male preserve until the 1870s. Minstrels themselves, however, were never completely assimilable; their status as entertainers in working-class culture automatically put them beyond the pale of respectable middle-class society, in which actors of any kind were looked upon with suspicion.
As popular culture became increasingly corporatized in the late nineteenth century, however, new leisure industries such as burlesque, musical comedy, the circus, vaudeville, and cabaret targeted a much broader audience that included wives and often children, thrived on novelty and variety, and allowed more social interaction between performers and audience members. Women's presence as performers exponentially increased beginning in the late 1800s, as did the presence of non-Anglos and gender variants, such as male and female impersonators and "sissy" characters. Vaudeville offered a variety of acts on a single bill, and replaced minstrelsy as the most popular entertainment form in America from the 1890s until the 1920s. Blackface began to fade by the 1910s and shifted from troupes to solo performers and duos as vaudeville and the music industry increasingly relied on the appeal of singular star personalities or teams to "put over" a song. While traditional minstrelsy made concessions to compete with these new family-friendly industries, minstrel songs continued to express disappointment with and resentment of social changes. The two dominant minstrel song styles of the era expressed feelings of both grief and anger: plantation songs focusing on the crooning mammy that wailed and waxed nostalgic for an idealized past and coon songs that ridiculed the public presence of freed blacks, immigrants, and women.
Ironically, by the turn of the century minstrel songwriters often hailed from the very social groups critiqued in the songs. The rise of Tin Pan Alley centered the popular song business in multicultural New York City, where new immigrant songwriters, composers, and entrepreneurs, predominantly Jewish, spearheaded the modernization of popular song. Like many of the Irish minstrel immigrants a generation or two before them, discrimination and a lack of resources meant that Jewish men could work in only a very few industries, including entertainment. Tin Pan Alley writers drew on a variety of influences, both past and present, and often worked closely with black musicians. They created a new urban songscape that collapsed aspects of high and low, sentimental and sensual music in a standardized song form. The shift in performance from groups to individuals also shaped Tin Pan Alley songs, as writers moved to identify their songs with particular singers. The cultural meanings of coon and crooning songs became more complex and moved away from their racialized roots. Our concept of the modern pop song — its romanticism and intimacy, its standard form, and its association with a particular star or group — is a consequence of these song publishers, who broadened the appeal of crooning songs by moving away from racial, ethnic, or political content and instead stressed romantic narratives and emotional stakes.
This new emphasis on intimate relationships in popular music can also be attributed in large part to the new public presence of women as performers, consumers, and audience members. Female performers in burlesques and vaudeville remained disreputable throughout this period, yet their presence gave voice to female points of view. Popular singers such as the white Sophie Tucker and Mae Irwin and the black Bessie Gillam and Belle Davis were admired; their songs often critiqued male behavior and foregrounded female desires. While scholarship on these women has focused on their roles as coon-shouters in minstrel ragtime songs, they also reshaped the sentiments of crooning ballads, both as mammy figures and increasingly as pragmatic lovers. Beginning in the 1890s, female performers, both white and nonwhite, were the primary portrayers of the crooning mammy, and their renditions refocused attention from the child to the concerned parent. As crooning songs broadened to include lovers who crooned to each other, female points of view emphasized anxieties about fidelity and the desire for emotional intimacy that anticipated the blues, torch, and crooning singers of the 1920s.
Women had their greatest impact as visible, active audience members. They had always been the target audience for and the biggest consumers of sheet music, and the industry increasingly targeted them by selling music in both large department stores and neighborhood five-and-ten-cent shops. Although histories of popular amusements always acknowledge the way entrepreneurs "cleaned up" performance content in the late nineteenth century to attract middle-class women, less attention has been paid to how the desires of female audiences affected the content of popular entertainment and changed the social dynamics of performance, both literally and ideologically. Female audiences helped drive the rise of star culture, they identified with female singers and points of view, and they openly appreciated male singers as objects of desire. As a result this transitional era generated the context for the gendered tensions about male voices and female fandom that climaxed in the crooning controversies of the early 1930s. This chapter thus testifies to the actual cultural heft of what has always been considered the fluffiest of mainstream music.
MINSTRELS AND THEIR MAMMIES: THE PLANTATION CROON, 1890S–1910
Mammies were the first and best-known crooners in American popular song. The crooning mammy song was part of the "plantation song" tradition of late nineteenth- century blackface minstrelsy. Also known as the song of southern nostalgia, the plantation song was a staple of American minstrelsy from its earliest days on the New York City stages of the 1820s and 1830s because it appealed to a wide audience of uprooted groups, immigrants as well as migrants. In these songs the South represented a romanticized version of the minstrels' rural childhood home, recalled and celebrated for an infantile state of happiness and simplicity. While plantation songs faded during the Civil War, the minstrels revived and revised them in the 1870s as a reaction to the social changes brought about by Reconstruction and urbanization, especially the public presence of women and free blacks. Faced with changes they could not control but could certainly comment on, minstrels took refuge in nostalgia. These working-class, white men promoted songs that contrasted the alienation and amorality produced by urban life with the comforting fictional world of the Old South as an example of a preindustrialized society with a secure social fabric.
The postbellum minstrels developed new characters for the plantation songs of this era that represented this idealized white view of black lives under slavery, most prominently the "old darky" and the "mammy." The old darky is a freed male slave who has left the South but longs to return to his antebellum life on his master's plantation; James Bland's 1878 song, "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny" was one of the first big hits in this vein. The character became a popular figure in minstrel shows well beyond the turn of the century, most famously in Al Jolson's impersonations of the 1910s and 1920s. Displaced migrant and immigrant audiences could enjoy their own memories of home through the old darky character, envying and enjoying his "carefree life of perpetual childhood" while continuing to feel safely racially superior to him. While the old darky's longing for his master and the "old folks" dominated the plantation songs of the 1870s and 1880s, the mammy began to emerge as a specific object of his longing in the 1880s. By the mid-1890s she had become the central figure in plantation nostalgia and had been given her own voice; female minstrels largely replaced the male performers, directly impersonating the mammy character and singing lullabies onstage, often to black "pickaninny" dolls in cradles. The term crooning was first employed in relation to this mammy character as a descriptor for the soothing sound she made as she sang her lullaby to him. The word croon was also employed in a generic sense in song marketing as a way to distinguish these minstrel songs from white lullabies: "Darky Crooning Songs," "Southern Croons," and "Plantation Croons."
Both mammy and croon were of English, Scottish, and Irish derivation, like much minstrel music and many of the early minstrels themselves (the word mammy is still used by many Irish as a term for "mother"). While the iconic American mammy figure is a fictional creation of the postbellum period, a minstrel imagining of the ideal mother and nurse, the first appearance of a historical mammy is not precisely known. The Oxford English Dictionary places the first use of the British-derived term mammy in the United States in 1837 to connote "a black woman with the responsibility for the care of white children." References to devoted female house slaves called mammies emerge in southern writings from the same decade. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in Scotland the term was commonly used to describe servant wet nurses, and it seems to have been first used in the southern United States to describe slave women, "wet mammies," who performed similar duties for white children. However, it is difficult to know precisely whether it was American slave owners or the minstrels singing about slaves who first began using the descriptor. Given that Irish and Scottish ethnic affiliations were almost as common among southern planters as among northern minstrels, the term could easily have been popularized by either group.
One of the mammy's defining characteristics was her crooning sound. The Scottish vernacular poet Robert Burns brought the word croon into the English language from the German croyn, meaning "murmur," in the late eighteenth century; Burns employed it to describe private, reflective moments in which individuals crooned to themselves or listened to their cattle or "the waters" croon. Minstrels' use of the term to describe the mammy's sound identified her with an intimate, soft utterance and with the natural world, making her representative of stable racial and gender hierarchies and therefore a very comforting figure. The earliest minstrel mammy songs reference her soft crooning to children, and sheet music covers of mammies invariably picture them singing a lullaby to a child on their lap or in a crib.
As a racially inferior mother figure in a rural setting, the crooning mammy personified benevolent nature. Thus she was the least threatening of minstrel characters, since her sex, domestic duties, and location prevented her from any movement into public or urban life. Minstrel coon songs, crooning's more vicious cousins, warned specifically of the dangers represented by free urban black men, their syncopated ragtime rhythms replicating the urgent pulse of the city. The musicologist Ronald Radano views the rise of rhythmic black music in the 1890s as a metaphor for the actual movement of blacks into northern urban spaces, movement that minstrels and other whites found threatening. Even the minstrel's comparatively benign male old darky character has roamed far and wide before turning back home. His mammy counterpart, in contrast, has never moved off the plantation.
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Excerpted from Real Men Don't Sing by Allison McCracken. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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