Grammy Nominee Tim Brooks Interview (Liner notes to Various Artists - "At the Minstrel Show)
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. If you’re not familiar with the newsletter already, click here to find out more.
I’m constantly trying to think about unexpected places where music journalism happens. For those who grew up in a completely digital world, you wouldn’t expect liner notes to be a place for it. But I’ve often found great writing and information you can’t get anywhere else printed on the back of an LP or stuffed into a jewel case. Each year, the Grammys highlights a fraction of this writing in their Best Liner Notes category. I reached out to all of the nominees this year to chat about their work. Tim Brooks wrote the notes to Various Artists, "At the Minstrel Show."
Can you please briefly describe the release for those that may not be familiar with it?
"At the Minstrel Show" (Archeophone) is a companion to my recent book The Minstrel Show in Mass Media (McFarland), which describes how the minstrel show, the most popular form of entertainment of the 19th century, moved into the 20th century mass media with which we are familiar—records, movies, radio, and television. It thrived there as well, lasting right up until the 1950s, a run of more than 110 years. Then it was suddenly banished.
The double-CD focuses on recorded recreations of minstrel shows made between the 1890s and 1920s. These records were extremely popular during the early years of the industry, and demonstrate what professional "big time" minstrel shows actually sounded like at the time. Included are two full 30-minute shows, originally issued on multi-disc sets in 1903. They are not at all what you might expect, which provides a clue as to why this type of entertainment was so widely accepted for so long, even by many African Americans.
Have you done much writing like this before? How did you get into it?
Yes, this project grew out of my research for an earlier book, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry: 1890-1919 (University of Illinois Press, 2004), which told the stories of the very first African American recording artists. That award-winning book also had a companion CD on Archeophone which I helped create, and which won a Grammy Award in 2006. During my research in the black and white press of the early 1900s I noticed that the professional minstrel show, which most modern books claimed was "dead" by that time, was in fact thriving. As I began to "pull on this thread" I uncovered more and more examples in radio, motion pictures, and even early television. I have written several books and many articles about the history of the recording industry, so I began there.
What sort of primary material did you have to work with to write the liner notes?
Besides researching period newspapers and magazines I needed to hear the recordings. To understand the “modern” minstrel show, and why it was considered so acceptable by so many for so long, you need to actually hear the shows, their tone and atmosphere, not just read somebody’s description. No archive or individual had a very complete collection of these recordings, so I set about building one myself, which took many years and help from collectors around the world. Based on these recordings, which appeared on early Edison cylinders (the original consumer format), 78 rpm discs, and later LPs, I wrote the chapter on minstrel recordings and the in-depth notes for "At the Minstrel Show." About half of the recordings on the CDs come from my collection, and the rest from generous collectors who had better quality copies than I had.
What’s the most interesting thing that you learned while researching this music?
Several. First, the minstrel show changed greatly over its history, with many later examples making no reference at all to race, either in song or dialogue. This is one the reasons it lasted for more than one hundred years, during changing times. Second, I was surprised that it was so widely embraced by African Americans; it was in fact the first major venue by which African Americans themselves (presented as "the real thing") were able to bring their talents to the stage before the mass public, leading to much broader acceptance in the fields of jazz, blues, etc. Several of the recordings include Black talent, usually in integrated settings. Also, that the minstrel show was the breeding ground for much that we now consider folk and roots music, and modern comedy tropes.
What's next for you?
I've written nine books and notes for a number of CDs relating to the history of media. Most of them grew out of earlier projects. "Pulling on threads" and turning over stones, especially in an area that no one else has explored, is far more interesting to me than working on the n-th reissue of a familiar subject. I'm interested in exploring the unexplored.
This can have its dangers. There was much nervousness about this project from some people in the publishing chain. “It’s too controversial!” they said. But Archeophone was very supportive and hopefully readers of these notes (and book) will appreciate the opportunity to learn something new and more nuanced than the casual dismissals so common for subjects that are clearly important, but which make us uncomfortable.
Hopefully we can learn something about why this form of entertainment, now understandably considered offensive, was so widely accepted, and thus help us better understand our own day. I hope that “At the Minstrel Show” will add to that conversation.
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