He used to do exhibitions during galas and he enjoyed making the kids laugh by sitting on the bottom of the baths with a bucket on his head singing songs like Oh My Darling Clementine and Jerusalem.
— Description of James Clarke, swimmer and vocalist, who arrived in Liverpool from Jamaica in 1900.
When dey hear dem ragtime tunes
White fo’ks try to pass fo’ coons
— Will Marion Cook’s In Dahomey, Shaftesbury Theatre, London, 1903.
The rise of Liverpool from 18th century port whose consignments were mainly domestic to a lucrative 19th century international thoroughfare was a pivotal development in British mercantile history. No greater sign of the status of the city could be found than at the prestigious Great Exhibition of Crystal Palace in 1851. On display to visitors was a scale model of Albert Dock, Liverpool. Its five miles of wharfs were squeezed into a pen of 40 feet and its 1,600 ships replicated with meticulous accuracy in order to convey the grand sweep of commerce through that city, then known as “the New York of Europe”.1
Changed too was the complexion of its population. Liverpool, which had played a leading role in the slave trade, launching ships to Africa since 1699, also saw the growth of a black population. This included the descendants of freed slaves, African students, some the sons of wealthy traders who were sent to Europe to further their education, and a large number of black sailors, a good many of whom put down roots, often marrying white women. This gave rise to a substantial black and mixed-race community centred on the inner city area of Toxteth.
Blacks were highly valued in the British merchant navy because they were thought to be better equipped to stand the blistering heat of the engine room on the latest steamships, and West Africans, particularly the Kru, were in demand as “stokers”. There were also Arabs, East Indians, commonly known as lascars, and West Indians, for whom life in the colonies had not become any less arduous following abolition in 1838. As noted earlier, the British government’s free trade policy exacerbated the financial crisis that engulfed the colonies as the plantation system collapsed, but without freeing land for the independent settlement of ex-slaves. This created a free, impoverished and disenfranchised black working class that jumped at labour opportunities abroad, primarily to Cuba and Panama. Others emigrated to America and Europe, though these were difficult territories to reach for those of limited financial means. Signing on as a seaman was one way to get to Britain; a few took the risk to travel illegally as stowaways.2
What we gather from the life stories of early black Liverpudlians is that they were resourceful and talented individuals. As Ray Costello, the great Liverpool historian, has pointed out, they also knew how to spring surprises, none more so than James Clarke (1886-1946), who arrived as a 14 year-old stowaway from British Guiana in 1900. An exceptionally strong swimmer, he represented the Everton Swimming club which won the North Lancashire League cup several times. More impressive was Clarke’s feats as a lifesaver. He became known locally for rescuing people from the canal that connected Athol Street to Burlington Street in the city. He also taught many children to swim at Burrough Gardens swimming baths, which involved some showmanship, which can only be described as novel, as his son Vincent later recalled.
He used to do exhibitions during galas and he enjoyed making the kids laugh by sitting on the bottom of the baths with a bucket on his head singing songs like Oh My Darling, Clementine and Jerusalem.3
The repertoire was completely in step with the times. “Oh My Darling, Clementine”, a country and western folk ballad attributed to Percy Montrose, was one of the great popular songs of the 19th century, with its references to the gold rush and America as the land of opportunity, and with the kind of rousing chorus that suited audience participation in the music hall or family gatherings around a piano. The sight of a black swimmer belting out a tune for school children at the local baths is the kind of novel spectacle that enriched Liverpool’s folklore.
Clarke was thus an immigrant singing a song that framed a movement of mass migration triggered by the desire to escape economic hardship. The involvement of a West Indian singer, who was also an accomplished sportsman, in popular culture, was a forerunner of what was to come.
Little is known about James Clarke’s personal circumstances in British Guiana prior to his arrival in England, but chances are that he was from an impoverished background. As a stowaway he ran the kind of risks that are taken by people with very little to lose; the punishment for those who were caught could be a lengthy jail term, if not immediate repatriation
Liverpool further enhanced its national and international status by hosting the Colonial Products Exhibition of 1906. This grand fête put the spotlight on the luxurious output of the overseas territories, such as New Zealand kauri gum, African fabrics and West Indian fruits, but it also made the point that maintaining this rich harvest left no room for complacency in a competitive world. At the opening ceremony, Sir Alfred Jones warned UK merchants, such as the powerful British Cotton Growing Association, that if it did not “look after” production in the colonies, then it would find the high yields of America hard to match. The colonies, exciting as they might be in “the eyes and imagination”, to be a worthwhile enterprise had to be prosperous too.
The other dynamic was the “sentimental, the patriotic”, the putative sense of kinship and belonging, of ties that bound the Mother Country to the children of the dominions, something encapsulated by Empire Day in schools where pupils donned the national dresses of the dominions and gathered around a little girl dressed as Britannia, all shiny helmet and sharpened trident. Hence the idea of presenting colonial people alongside colonial products struck a chord with Sir Alfred. He invited the Kingston Choral Union from Jamaica. Singing subjects would reflect well on the Crown and to make that colonial position clear, Jones renamed the choir the “Native Choir from Jamaica”.4
After arriving in England in late January, the group made its debut at St. George’s Hall for a short run of performances from the 30th of that month until February 8. The company was ten strong, one of whom Harry Nation, the pianist, accompanied the singers on pieces such as “Motherland” and “Climb Up Ye Little Children”, as well as the British national anthem. Over the next two years the group went on to enjoy considerable success, appearing in Whitby, Bridlington, Wrexham, Tynemouth, Plymouth, Dundee, Waterford, Londonderry, Kilkenny, Ennis and Dublin. The press reports noted the “good English” and “quaint enunciation” of the vocalists. It is evident that many Britons, in an era before mass tourism, did not realize that West Indians spoke English.
The other aspect of the choir that deserves attention was the reported ability of one of the singers, Carlton Bryan, to make people laugh. He was described in several newspaper reports as an “amusing comedian” and a “humorist” who would launch into rib-tickling skits before the much more serious business of singing got underway. The humour appears incongruous in the context of the dress of the choir, as revealed in the surviving photographs. Clad in severely pressed tuxedos, bow-ties and evening dresses, T. Ellis Jackson, Connie Coverley, J. Packer Ramsay, Evelyn Gordon, Louis George Drysdale, J.T Loncke, Adeline McDermott, Marie Lawrence and Bryan look far too much like symphony hall artists for them to indulge in anything that could be regarded as trifling. Yet the fact that there was an element of humour in the performances underlines both the eclectic nature of many black stage presentations of the period and the proximity between accomplished artistry and “lighter” entertainment. Tomfoolery did not preclude technical excellence in the worlds of minstrelsy and music hall, and this duality seems to have been part of the Jamaican performances, where a concert delivered with great gravitas might have an interlude that had a distinct touch of levity. Indeed, Bryan’s antics connected to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They too initially had a young singer who was known for his comic verve: 8 year-old George ‘Little Georgie’ Wells who “often amused audiences with improvised songs, dances and humorous recitations.”5
For the most part, it appears the Jamaican singers enjoyed their time in England, and their positive impressions may have prompted some of them to wonder whether they might be better off actually taking up permanent residence in a country that had been sufficiently liberal to pass a law that made primary school education compulsory.
Thomas Rutling,6 a Fisk Jubilee singer, did indeed decide to make England his home. He took part in the group’s last tour of Europe in 1878, after which he stayed on the continent before moving to England in 1890. It is not clear what he did upon arrival but it is known that he lived and taught singing in Manchester in 1901 before settling in Harrogate, north Yorkshire in 1905. In the same year he performed solo at Crystal Palace in London but struggled for concert work in the period that followed. He fell back on voice tuition and also wrote his autobiography,Tom, which was published in 1907. Rutling started to tour again, singing a repertoire of classic spirituals, no doubt to the delight of Fisk fans. However, in 1909 he suffered a stroke in Morecambe, was admitted to a nursing home in his adopted Harrogate and died in 1915. Although largely a footnote in British history, Rutling is nonetheless a notable name in the history of black music in Britain, not only as a member of a pioneering group, but because he published an autobiographical record of his experiences. If he ever felt like a lone Christian soldier, he could have taken heart from the knowledge that his arrival in England coincided with the establishment of the first black Pentecostal church in England. It was set up in Peckham, south London by a Ghanaian, T. Brem Wilson.7
Other late nineteenth century Black arrivals in London from North America were the Bohee brothers, James (1844-1897)and George (1857-c1905). In 1891, at 7a Coventry Street, London W1 they started a school for students of the banjo, the instrument that the Canadian-born brothers had played when they formed the Bohee Minstrels in 1876. Thereafter they joined two other popular minstrel troupes, Callender’s Georgia and Haverly’s Genuine Colored Minstrels whose founder was James Bland, parodic composer of “Oh Dem Golden Slippers”. In 1881 the Bohee brothers travelled to England with Haverly’s and toured extensively, with George singing tenor as well as dancing, before they opted to make London their home. With its “frying pan” body, broom-handle neck and steel strings, the banjo caused quite a stir when it was handled with dexterity and technical flourish by the Bohees, and the Coventry Street studio that they founded soon became something of a focal point for aspiring banjo players, and the instrument’s standing was given a significant boost among high society types when the Bohee brothers took on the most privileged kind of celebrity imaginable – the Prince of Wales. Now, playing the banjo became eminently fashionable. As Catherine Parsonage points out, its attraction maintained stereotypes: “The continued appeal of the banjo as representative of a sentimental, exotic, primitive alternative to ‘official’ culture, led to banjo music becoming an important musical craze in Britain in the 1880s.”8
Articles that appeared in the British press reveal the fascination the banjo exerted as well as the persistence of the overarching notion of what constituted music in a polite society. The Bristol Times and Mirror of 20th November 1888 reported:
Readers of newspapers, and particularly society journals, will remember that some time ago there was much discussion about the merits of the banjo as a drawing room instrument, and many illustrations were given in the comic serials of the effect its introduction into society could, would and should produce. Well, with such performers as the Bohee brothers [from whose entertainment there is an entire absence of everything unseemly] the banjo would not be out of place at social gatherings at the West-End, and indeed so long as the novelty lasted it would be a welcome change at those assemblies where the difficulty is to find something new. Their playing of the instrument which they have made their study was the most perfect ever. There was a considerable amount of artistic excellence about their manipulation.
Between 1890 and 1892, the Bohee brothers made wax cylinder recordings of duets in London, and George went on to cut at least 11 banjo solos without his brother. Although this music is not widely available today it was made at the cutting edge of Victorian technology and marked the transition of the Bohees from performers to recording artists which, at the time, was something of a rarefied status.
The Bohees undoubtedly brought an enrichment of the sounds available to Victorian Britain and it is clear from the Bristol Times and Mirror review that its writer did not take for granted the general public’s familiarity with the instrument, speculating on “the effect its introduction into society could, would and should produce.” The banjo was a new thing.
*
By the 1890s, a new and most significant strand in the development of African American music began to emerge – ragtime. Most significant because it led to jazz, the music that changed popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic. The key instrument here was the piano, made possible by the growth of substantial Black urban communities and the social venues that went with them – from the bordellos of New Orleans to the drinking clubs whose clientele was black. Black pianists were developing ragtime’s percussive, propulsive way of playing. Between the 1890s and 1920s, it enjoyed enormous popularity throughout America and thereafter in Europe.
SOUTHERN SYNCOPATED ORCHESTRA
The term was a diminutive of “raggedy time”, an approach to the metre of a song characterized by punchy, vigorous syncopation. Instead of the accents falling squarely on the strong or “on” beat, they would also fall on the weak or “off” beat, the effect of which was to evoke a flitting, wavering sense of time that suited dancers doing the cakewalk who shuffled, strutted and bent, instead of moving in a “straight”, stiff manner. The whole point was to create irregular and far less predictable notes over a regular underlying pulse. It was the resulting tension that captured the imagination of new listeners.
Ragtime’s great composers such as Tom Turpin and Scott Joplin showed that when rich melodic and rhythmic lines were imbued with a playful, see-saw-like character they could be deeply engaging. The beat acted as an infectious energy. It made people want to move. Although often overlooked, the other significant thing about ragtime is its linguistic reach. The word became a generic term, a suffix that could be joined to any subject, from an animal – Tiger – to a city – Harlem – to nature – Maple Leaf – and this meant that composers could apply their syncopation to whatever inspired them. But whatever the range of the music, it was invariably seen through a racial prism.
In A New History Of Jazz, Alyn Shipton quotes the view expressed in The New York Age that, in 1912, “Syncopation is truly a native product – a style of music of which the Negro is the originator, but which is generally popular with all Americans.”9 Perhaps inevitably, there was also a white moral panic around ragtime, as reports in papers like The Musical Courier decried a “primitive morality” and “lack of sexual restraint” that attended the music, or more pertinently, “the Negro type”.10
Although ragtime’s original exponents were pianists such as Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin, who became immensely popular, the music was also played by different kinds of bands, such as string and brass ensembles. These laid the foundation for the trend of the “Syncopated Orchestra” around 1910, which was a prototype for the jazz big band that would achieve commercial success in the decades to come.
Will Marion Cook, one of Dvorak’s several African-American students, emerged as a significant composer of the ragtime era, and he went on to bring his own Southern Syncopated Orchestra to Britain in 1919. Long before this, in 1903, Cook’s production In Dahomey, a collaboration with writer Jesse A. Shipp and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar had been a remarkable success; it was the first all-Black show to open on New York’s Broadway and it enjoyed a lengthy run at London’s Shaftesbury theatre after its American première. As such it was a landmark, “black Atlantic” phenomenon, which highlighted the paradox of being an artistically ambitious African-American composer in the early 20th century. Driven by the desire to create a “Negro opera”, in part under the influence of what Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had achieved in the late 19th century, Cook incorporated classical elements into the production alongside not only passages of ragtime, but elements of blackface entertainment, in particular “coon songs” and cakewalks. It is not clear whether Cook regarded these as “authentic” Negro forms; certainly, the cakewalk had to be danced because of the prevailing expectations of white audiences.
The plot of In Dahomey was picaresque, focusing on the misadventures of two African-American detectives whose sleuthing leads them to West Africa where they seek to outwit colonisers. While the character of the ruler they encounter, King Eat-Em-All, displays the stereotypes of the uncivilised buffoonery associated with Africans, the show also presented African-Americans as people who had a degree of self-respect and aspiration. This gap between African American racial pride and negative views of Africa was by no means uncommon, and it was not until the emergence of Marcus Garvey in the 1920s that this dichotomy was addressed – and even Garvey was not immune to the idea that the New World Negro would bring civilisation to continental Africa.
In Dahomey was written primarily for the black comedian-dancers George Walker and Bert Williams, and was performed by a fifty strong troupe that had other dancers and musicians on horns, strings and percussion. If the music in the production was striking, the libretto was remarkable for moments of audacity in its references to social and political issues. For example, the following couplet, from the song “On Emancipation Day”, identifies one of the key socio-cultural phenomena of the 20th century that continues into the 21st: the shaping impact of black culture on the mainstream: “When dey hear dem ragtime tunes/ White fo’ks try to pass fo’ coons.”11 For black artists of the 1900s to recognize their own worth in so forthright a manner, asserting their position as leaders and not followers, innovators not imitators, was remarkable. Given the phenomenon of light-skinned Blacks being able to “pass” for white, here were the tables being turned through the allocation of that same verb “pass” to white people. They have no choice but to go in the opposite direction and “pass” for black because of the irresistible nature of Negro culture. Ragtime will make them do it. In Dahomey thus celebrates the empowerment of African-Americans, even as it has to make artistic compromises for its white audience. The simple yet important “when” adds weight to the claim; it is not if white fo’ks hear dem ragtime tunes. This degree of confidence is all the more remarkable given the lack of status that Negroes had in a segregated society where the careful avoidance of direct eye contact with the white man was in counterpoint to the wild dilation of minstrels’ pupils on stage, where, as In Dahomey states, “darkies eyes look jes like moons.”
These lyrics are significant because they introduce several currents that become more pronounced in black popular culture in the decades to come: confidence, conviction, challenge, humour and irony. Explicit in the championing of ragtime is the notion that Negro music can affect change, and, more impressively, cut across racial lines in terms of audience appeal, hence the phrase is really a call to arms that can be heard in a wide range of future tropes. It is the blues artist who dares to say “what I got is what you need”, and his successors in soul, funk and hip-hop who warn “let the beat hit ’em”, which basically means that there can be no resistance to the all-conquering energy in black music.
Whether white audiences, comfortable with coon songs and comedy, picked any of this up is moot. For the most part UK audiences probably still viewed black composers like Cook, regardless of their ambition, through the reductive prism of minstrelsy. There is no evidence of a different response to that made to earlier acts such as the Ethiopian Serenaders and Master Juba in the 1850s, but the success of the production gave further credence to the notion that African-Americans had sufficient verve in the field of popular entertainment to enjoy mass appeal. After the run in the Shaftesbury theatre in London, the musical toured the provinces before a performance for the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace.
In Dahomey stands as a milestone in the history of early black music in Britain because of the scale and ambition of the production as well as the impact that it made on audiences who were charmed by song and dance in a story set in distant, exotic lands from a vibrant all-coloured cast. Its success in Britain was partly due to the fact that it was presented at a time when musical theatre was beginning to replace music hall as the dominant popular entertainment, though In Dahomey is also a reminder that several of the precursors of what would become known as jazz were very active on the theatre circuit.
The other importance of In Dahomey was the fact that some cast members chose to settle here permanently, just as Thomas Rutling of the Fisk Jubilee singers had done several years before. As will be discussed in the next chapter, these settlers fed into the emergence in 1921 of a versatile, hugely talented band that played a range of music that included an early manifestation of jazz, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, another brainchild of Will Marion Cook.
Chief among the In Dahomey émigrés was Pete George Hampton. He had been a member of a banjo playing, singing group that toured with various minstrel troupes in America before coming to the attention of Bert Williams and George Walker, the show’s two star comedian-dancers who, in turn, introduced him to the composer Will Marion Cook.12
Despite its association with country & western, the banjo is one of the oldest African-musical instruments, and its origins can be traced back to West African precursors such as the n’goni.13 Relatively easy to make and transport, the banjo was a vital musical device for slaves on plantations and subsequently took its place alongside the violin, tambourine and bones in minstrel shows. The African-American banjo player who loudly “tapped” his foot to set a steady pulse for his vigorous rhythmic strumming became a key element of blackface entertainment. Hampton played an “authentically Negro” instrument. The banjo was not the only weapon in the black musician’s armoury. There was also the smaller, more transportable but no less potent device called the harmonica or mouth organ. Like the banjo, this was an instrument that had non-western origins. It is widely acknowledged that the Chinese sheng, a semi-circular construction of bamboo pipes, was its precursor (and early blues musicians such as Henry Thomas played a version of the panpipes), but the western mouth organ was invented by Christian Buchmann in 1821, before another version, offering chromatic possibilities, was manufactured by the German instrument maker Hohner in 1857. Hence the “pocket piano” was in its infancy when Hampton brought it to British audiences.
After settling in London, Hampton became a prolific recording artist, cutting dozens of plantation melodies on wax cylinders, the new means of capturing audio. What we recognize today as the modern format of vinyl albums (returning to favour in the digital download age), had its forerunner in shellac, a bio-adhesive polymer used to manufacture 78 rpm discs in the 1890s. These pioneering devices, although crude and cumbersome by today’s standards, pointed the way towards the mass production of audio and the real possibility of reaching consumers in their homes. (In addition, Marconi’s first radio in 1897, pointed to a future in which recordings of Hampton’s songs could reach audiences around the whole world.) The scholar Rainer E Lotz, fortunate enough to have heard Hampton’s wax cylinder recordings, such as “Dat Mouth Organ Coon”, describes him thus:
Hampton’s specialty was playing the organ through his nose, but on this cylinder, after stating the melody, he performs at such breakneck speed that it is hard to believe. He bends the melody, adds blue notes, produces all sorts of strange sounds that must have made Ireland’s national poet Thomas Moore – who wrote The Last Rose of Summer – turn in his grave, and composer Friedrich von Flotow as well.14
There were other black performers active in Edwardian Britain. During the First World War, musicians like Dan Kildare brought banjo ensembles to London. There was an eager audience and a vast network of theatres as well as assembly rooms and civic halls staging shows in which the boundaries between music, dance, comedy and spectacle in the general sense, although not as ghastly as the Victorian freak show, was blurred.
At the dawn of the 20th century, black entertainers plying their trade in Britain were industrious and energetic individuals who made a living on a circuit that involved multiple performances on a nightly basis, all over Britain. Jeffrey Green, author of Black Edwardians, sets the scene with a description of the realities of the world in which they operated:
Urban theatres throughout the United Kingdom had two – sometimes three – shows, each of two hours, six days a week. Acts toured from town to town, appearing in these new and grand halls seating over one thousand, providing glamour, thrills, music, humour and song. In cities some acts rushed, by cab, to another theatre and thus could make four appearances nightly.13
To make the most of professional opportunities, performers had to travel. Brighton, Bristol, Hastings, Leeds, Leicester, Manchester, Glasgow and Swansea were just a few of the cities in which performers, largely African-Americans and occasionally Africans, were known to appear and the billing of a show as “all coloured”, “creole” or “all black” was a common occurrence. Among other explicit racial terms in newspaper pieces were nigger, ebony, picaninny and dusky. There were lots of ways of identifying non-whites. Green argues that the terms Negro, coloured, black or African when they appeared in press coverage of events did not necessarily mean that these were black performers because of the phenomenon of whites in “blackface”. Even so, there is ample documented evidence, especially photographic, to confirm the substantial activity of people of colour on stage.
Those whose lives were defined by the rigours of tough touring schedules included Billy McClain who led a “smart, colored sextette” and Smith and Johnson, a lively song-and-dance act that worked extensively between 1902 and 1905. Their appearance at the Royal Hippodrome in Salford made the pages of the leading entertainment trade paper of the day, Era. Perhaps the black doyenne of the circuit was Belle Davis. After arriving from America in June 1901, she sang at various venues in London accompanied by two “Senegambian picaninnies” who were reported to dance in a very acrobatic style. Regional gigs in Bradford, Sheffield, Hull, Edinburgh, Glasgow and South Shields followed, before returning to London – and then Dublin. According to Green they also “made gramophone records” and “in June 1903 Belle Davis was still performing in British theatres; the following year she married, in London, Henry Troy – another American entertainer of African descent.”16
The description of Davis’ two young accompanists as “Senegambian” relates to the ferocious competition between Britain and France for dominance in West Africa, the outcome of which was that the formerly British controlled Senegambia was divided between British Gambia and French Senegal, with destructive consequences for families divided by colonial boundaries.17
It is not hard to account for the increasing flow of African American musicians and entertainers settling in Britain given the continuing inhumanity of life in America for Blacks. Emancipation may have come in 1863, but the period of so-called Reconstruction saw segregation enshrined in law and backed by lynch-mob violence when whole white families attended the ritual slaughter of black men and sometimes women – and were later invited to purchase souvenir-photographs of the event. Britain was no racial utopia, but despite occasions of mob violence, despite the underlying prejudice, there was undoubtedly more civil space for black talents.18
Even so, alongside the acceptance of African American performers was the existence of the kind of human zoos featured at various Imperial Exhibitions. Content included anything from the re-enactment of battles, to reconstructions of African villages complete with genuine natives, so that the daily routines of a black family, from eating to washing, socializing to working, could be observed at close quarters. But while reporters were busy describing the ebony skin and long slender limbs of Senegalese natives in their transplanted dwellings, few sought to enquire what imperial competition was doing to their lives.
The most remarkable of these Imperial Exhibits was the group of Congolese pygmies who spent two years in Britain (1905-07), touring up and down the country appearing at numerous garden fêtes, halls, hippodromes, Empires and the obligatory stop at Buckingham Palace. The most significant legacy of the “Pygmies”, who were in the charge of a Yorkshire landowner, James Jonathan Harrison,19 with an interest in globetrotting and big game hunting, was a recording that they made for the Gramophone Company in 1905. This was the first commercially available disc made by Africans in Britain. The recording features a member of the group called Matuka and the chief Bokani singing while others play drums and two women talk in Swahili. For fans of “anthropological entertainment” the recording was designed to meet the growing interest that had been shown in the tribe of “dwarf savages”. The record label identifies the content as: Conversation Between Bokani the Chief of the Pygmies, and Mongongo With Interpreter. How is this classified by the record label? As Oriental Talking. In other words, Africans were seen as part of a wider world that stood in opposition to the western world. In the Edwardian mindset, this was synonymous with degeneracy and a lack of moral rectitude. The “tricky Chinaman” was as marked a stereotype as the “noble savage”, so it is no surprise that the two were somehow confused by dint of the fact that they both spoke languages that the British, a few missionaries apart, could not understand.
1. Michael Leapman, The World For a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation (Faber & Faber, 2011) p. 18
2. Liberal estimates of those who sneaked on to ships bound for Europe from the West Indies in the late 19th century run into thousands. It was an extremely hazardous undertaking with the threat of imprisonment and deportation hanging over those who were caught, not to mention a serious risk of ill health during the voyage.
3. Ray Costello, Black Liverpool: The Early History of Britain’s Oldest Black Community 1730-1918 (Picton, 2001) p. 33
4. Online, Famousjamaicachoirweebly.com
5. Ibid.
6. Jeffrey Green, Black Edwardians, Black People in Britain 1901-1914 (Cass, 1998), p. 83.
7. Steve Smith, British Black Gospel (Monarch, 2009) p. 46.
8. Catherine Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz In Britain, 1880-1935 (Ashgate, 2005) p. 111.
9. Alyn Shipton, A New History of Jazz (Continuum) p. 32.
10. Ibid. p. 37
11. Rainer E. Lotz, “Cross-Cultural Links, Black Minstrels, Cakewalks and Ragtime” in Eurojazzland (Northwestern University Press, 2012), pp. 147-167.
12. Ibid.
13. The roots of the banjo in the African n’goni were well established, and by credible ethnomusicologists such as Paul Oliver.
14. Lotz, op. cit.
15. Jeffrey Green, Black Edwardians, Black People In Britain 1901-1914 (Frank Cass, 1998) p. 50.
16. Green, op. cit., pp. 81-82, 138.
17. See James M. Campbell and Rebecca J. Fraser, Reconstruction: People and Perspectives (ABC-Clio, 2008).
18. The tragedy of the division of Senegal and Gambia was brought home to me when I taught English in Dakar in the early 90s. Senegalese students sneered at the “strange Wolof” of the Gambians but recognized they “came from the same family”.
19. Green, op. cit., pp. 81-82, 138