Minstrelsy

Minstrelsy was the dominant form of American popular entertainment of the 19th century, a stage tradition of songs, dances, comic sketches and variety turns performed largely by white entertainers in blackface. Its stock characters, including Jim Crow and Zip Coon, were racist caricatures of Black Americans, yet its music, built from the banjo, fiddle, tambourine and bones, fused European song forms with African American practice and created the first mass market for American popular song. Composers such as *Stephen Foster* supplied its standards, and after the Civil War Black troupes entered the profession, working within and against its conventions.