Coon Song

Coon songs were a commercially dominant category of American popular song from the 1890s to the 1910s: comic songs in stage dialect built on crude caricatures of Black life, performed in vaudeville and minstrel shows and sold as sheet music and early recordings. Set usually in 2/4 with syncopated refrains, the songs were the first publications marketed as ragtime, and both Black and white writers, including *Ernest Hogan*, *Bert Williams* and *Bob Cole*, worked in the idiom despite its degrading stereotypes. The category faded by the late 1910s as ragtime song and blues absorbed its market, leaving a repertory now studied as evidence of American racism.