SOURCE: “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks: The ‘Coon Song’ Phenomenon of the Gilded Age,” in American Quarterly, Vol. 40, No 4, December, 1988, pp. 450-71.

In the following essay, Dormon examines the popularity during the Gilded Age of ‘coon songs’ (songs about, and many times by, black Americans). Dormon suggests that the songs disseminated racist images and language in order to justify continued segregation and discrimination.

On the occasion of the celebrated “Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment” in 1977, the performer-scholar Max Morath noted, with reference to the “coon song craze” of the 1890s, that the phenomenon “right now resides exactly where it should—on the back shelves of the pop museum collecting dust. it’s a sociological curiosity and nothing more.”¹ While one might well sympathize with the liberality of Mr. Morath's sentiment in his consignment of a major pop culture phenomenon to the dustbin...