Bob Carlin, The Birth of the Banjo: Joel Walker Sweeney and Early Minstrelsy (Jefferson, North Carolina, & London, England: McFarland, 2007) ("Joe Sweeney was the Elvis Presley of this time, a white man who could sing like a blackman, to borrow and paraphrase the words of Elvis Presley's mentor Sam Phillips. Sweeney served a parallel role in the 1840s to Jimmie Rodgers in the 1920s, Bill Monroe in the 1940s, and to Hank Williams or Elvis in the 1950s. In their heydays, these men of Anglo-American heritage 'crossed the tracks' to sample African American music, adding to it white sounds of previous and current generations, and therefore creating something new and unusual out of their personal musical consciousness. At a time when African American music and musicians were unacceptable or inaccessible to main street America, these players provided a suitable version of black music for most listeners." Id. at 1.).
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, with a foreword by Greil Marcus (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 2013) (From the back cover: "Taking up white America's long fraught relationship with African American culture, Love & Theft examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the years leading up to the Civil War.").
William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum America Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2005) ("In California I nearly starved to death in the streets, singing and dancing and begging people for money, and then I stole a banjo. The face of the man I took it from is a sleeping face. Did I really steal a banjo from a sleeping man? But I could play the instrument, and owning a banjo made it easier to loiter on the street corners and try to earn pennies from passersby who felt sorry for me. Easier than it was to beg the managers of the various theaters for work. All the way from Kansas and I had been reduced to a banjo-stealing, banjo-playing beggar. I know full well that what I did was wrong." Id. at 161.).
Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character, introduction by Greil Marcus (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1931, 2004) ("[F]or the rise of the Negro minstrel coincided with a marked change in his place within the nation. Little Jim Crow appeared at almost the precise moment when The Liberator was founded; and minstrelsy spread over the land and grew in popularity as the struggle for emancipation gained in power through the '40's and '50's. The Negro minstrel joined with the Yankee and backwoodsman to make a comic trio, appearing in the same era, with the same timely intensity. The era of course was the turbulent era of the Jacksonian democracy, that stormy time when the whole mixed population of the United States seemed to pour into the streets of Washington and when many basic elements in the national character seemed to come to the surface. The Negro minstrel was deeply grounded in reality, even through the impersonators were white, even though the figure was a myth." Id. at 85-86.).
