Precursors of Ragtime 3
In the 1890s, the best-known performers of coon songs were generally White, and many important twentieth-century performers began their show business careers singing them. For example, May Irwin and Sophie Tucker established careers in vaudeville as "coon shouters," so-called because of their style of vocal delivery. In addition, May Irwin made several recordings of coon songs, and early recording artists such as Len Spencer and Silas Leachman, both White, made them something of a specialty.
Len Spencer - You've Been A Good Old Wagon But You Done Broke Down
Listen to a brief history of Hogan's ragtime song "Silas Leachman - Go Way Back and Sit Down."
Silas Leachman - Go Way Back And Sit Down
Eventually, the songs written and performed by Blacks became cleverer, downplaying or ironizing the violent or criminal attributions of the earlier pieces. This tendency is apparent, for example, in "The Phrenologist Coon" with the lyric "by just feeling in your pocket I can tell what's in your head." The extreme racism of the 1890s is less evident in later works. Listen to " If I'm Going to Die I'm Going to Have Some Fun" by George M. Cohan and "What You Going to Do When the Rent Comes Round?" by Harry Von Tilzer. Notice that while they are more toned down in their characterizations, they are still clearly about African Americans. Some coon songs are still popular today, such as " Hello, Ma Baby " and "Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home?"
Emerging at a time when African Americans struggled not only against entrenched racism but against White exploitation, as they tried to establish themselves as professionals, the unfortunate and unfair construction of the stereotyped stage coon articulated White fears and resentment. Lemons, for example, has argued that the distorted, negative image of Blacks in "coon songs" and other media at this time "reflected the scientific racism that argued that non-Whites, especially Blacks, were less than human" (1977, 105). Likewise, Dormon has written that the coon song "was a manifestation of a peculiar form of the will to believe-to believe in the signified 'coon' as represented in the songs-as a necessary socio-psychological mechanism for justifying segregation and subordination" (1988, 466).