From the liner notes to “Oh, My Little Darling,” (New World Records 80245):
However insulting we may find the blacked faces and parodied diction of the minstrel show, the minstrel stage was a locus of creative American art and the source of innovations that shaped the popular art of our own century. Beginning in the 1820s, the minstrel show introduced a new and distinctively American song, dance, comedy, and performing style. Through the minstrel show syncopated music, both from black folk sources and from white composers such as Stephen Foster, became the dominant form of American popular music.
About the turn of the century, the minstrel show, which had entertained rural and urban Americans alike, yielded the city stage to vaudeville, but minstrel elements lingered in the rural South in the traveling medicine show. This often consisted of the “doctor” who peddled “Indianherb” cure-alls from a wagon or auto, and one or more musician-comedians who drew and entertained the crowd. Some of the white medicineshow musicians, such as Tom Ashley, continued the black-face tradition of the minstrel stage; some shows featured black talent of the caliber of Willie McTell or Pink Anderson.
Arthur Tanner, of Georgia, a member of the Gid Tanner-Clayton McMichen Skillet Licker string bands centered in Atlanta, likely had such medicine-show experience. In 1929 members of the Skillet Lickers recorded an authentic-sounding skit of blackface comedy and music,“The Kickapoo Medicine Show” (Columbia 15482). Tanner’s “Dr. Ginger Blue” descends from an actual minstrel recitation, one version of which was published in 1854. The performance here provides a microcosm of American humorous entertainment: the antic nonsense of the first two spoken stanzas looks forward to the surrealistic action of the Walt Disney animated cartoon; the elevated metaphors of the fourth hark back to the poetry of Mark Twain’s tall tales; and the fifth stanza anticipates the verbal non sequitur insults of Groucho Marx. The minstrel recitation to a musical accompaniment may also be the source of the “talking blues” popularized by Woody Guthrie.
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