[Interesting snippets of the secret histories of drag in African-American performance traditions. -egg]<\/p>\n
How much deeper it goes depends on how many hours you have. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff\u2019s 2007 study Ragged but Right: Black Travelling Shows, \u201cCoon Songs\u201d and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz documents female impersonators in African-American tent shows back into the late 19th century. In New York meanwhile there was Frankie \u201cHalf-Pint\u201d Jaxon, the Harlem drag balls, the \u201cmannish acting women\u201d among the early blues queens (Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, also minstrel and tent-show veterans) and all the gender nonconformists of the jazz age and Harlem Renaissance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
…<\/p>\n
That ambivalence hints at the multitudinous duplicities of crossdressing in African-American history. It\u2019s difficult to separate it, for example, from the legacy of minstrelsy: Blackfaced white minstrel troupes were as a rule all-male, and so would include performers who specialized in female characters, mostly degrading archetypes such as the Mammy and the Wench (plantation madonnas and whores). When black-run minstrel tent shows and their female impersonators took over, they sometimes perpetuated those characters, though they also added more dignified ones, just as they sang some of the \u201ccoon\u201d songs and re-enacted jokes and scenarios from that ugly past. Scholar J.T. Lhamon reads Little Richard\u2019s act as a \u201cSambo\u201d figure mutated, made a \u201ctrickster,\u201d by its acceleration through rapidfire postwar social modes\u2014sum that up as \u201cwoo!\u201d or \u201cA-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-boom!\u201d (those last couple of syllables were originally \u201cgoddamn!\u201d).<\/p>\n
Minstrelsy might be reclaimed and reconfigured, but its uneasy inheritance is everywhere, in American black and white.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n