Lectures in Musicology: Elea Proctor, The Ohio State University

Elea Proctor, assistant professor, Department of African American and African Studies at Ohio State, presents “Black Women and Blackface Minstrelsy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” This lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Music and The Ohio State University Libraries.

The first form of popular entertainment in the United States began in the early nineteenth century, when white men blackened their faces to sing and dance in disorderly minstrel shows. From the ongoing use of blackface in contemporary productions (such as at the Metropolitan Opera until 2015) to recurring debates over cultural appropriation, it is clear that this tradition has not left us. While the profound and enduring influence of minstrelsy is now becoming more widely acknowledged, too often our discussions reduce minstrelsy to the sole domain of white men. This talk centralizes Black life and performance in the history of minstrelsy, building on scholarship that highlights the efforts of Black artists, particularly after the U.S. Civil War, to resist and redefine racist performance conventions despite widespread legal and societal restrictions (Sampson 1980; Riis 1989; Chude-Sokei 2005; Abbott and Seroff 2009; Morrison 2024). Nevertheless, the contributions of Black women remain underacknowledged, in part due to the archival silence (and silencing) surrounding their work. In this presentation, Proctor asks what the archive can still tell us about the forms of resistance, acquiescence, and pleasure the tropes of blackface minstrelsy may have offered to Black women performing on the early musical theater stage.

This talk focuses on one of the most salient examples of minstrel tropes in popular music at the turn of the twentieth century: ragtime “coon songs.” Typically performed by white women — the most famous “coon shouters” of the day — the genre traded on anti-Black characterizations that worked to reinforce the brutality of the Jim Crow era. When performed by Black women, however, the meanings of “coon songs” could be manipulated, subverted, and reappropriated. Proctor makes the case that Black women developed their own strategies of musical performance to successfully navigate stereotypes of femininity, sexuality, and morality in their performances of “coon songs.”

Elea Proctor is an assistant professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research examines Black women’s musical performance and the blackface minstrelsy tradition.