A mainstay of Bowery life after the 1820s was the theater. It started out as "legitimate," but it soon became fallow ground for developing native forms of entertainment for a very diverse audience. From the book Gotham, this period in the Bowery neighborhood is described:
Taverns and small hotels provided free entertainment to draw in drinkers. These venues - known as "free and easies" or "varieties" or "vaudevilles" - offered an everchanging if incoherent assortment of music, dance, magic, ventriloquism, comedy, skits and tall tales, frequently provided by the audience itself. [Thomas] Hamblin discovered that his Bowery Theater [several doors away from the North American and Branch Hotels]...did best when it ran circus shows, comic routines and low budget acts appropriated from the streets and marketplaces...Shipbuilders and cartment, butchers and firemen, tradesmen and laborers, domestics and launderers - the vast numbers of single men (and growing numbers of single women) who lived in nearby boardinghouses - began picking their way into such shows. The plebeian fare fit comfortably into the expanding spectrum of Bowery entertainments, which included scores of cheap dance halls, dime museums, brothels, billiard rooms, bowling alleys, saloons, oysterhouses and amphitheaters offering bare-knuckle prizefights or cockfights."1
Performing in black-face was well-established by this time, but actors usually appeared alone and as entre-acts within a larger theatrical context, including the circuses run by Jonas and his partners. During a depression that lasted from 1837 into the 1840s, "while literate drama held its own, the most surprising growth occurred in the poor audience - who were spending their money to discover their identity on the stage. Blackface was the first Atlantic mass culture...American performers trained in the circus rather than in English theatrical conventions successfully shouldered their rougher performance tradition into the established patterns of tragedy, entr'acte, and farce...The depression was important...not for its affordable theatre tickets but because it so drastically increased the critical mass of people aware of their community and their lack of cultural franchise. The depression focused the formation of a new working class that would seek images of itself chiefly on the stage."2
From another source: "It was at the Chatham Theater that the first blackface minstrel troupe in history, a quartette, made its first paid appearance in 1843. There had been single blackface acts...but this was the first attempt at choral and orchestral work. The four pioneers were all small-time singers, dancers, and musicians..." William Whitlock was one of the four and played the banjo. In his own words, he said that "One day I asked Dan Emmett, who was in New York at the time, to practice the fiddle and the banjo with me at his boarding-house in Catherine Street. We went down there, and when we had practiced, Frank Brower called in by accident. He listened to our music, charmed to his soul! I told him to join with the bones, which he did. Presently Dick Pelham came in, also by accident, and looked amazed. I asked him to procure a tambourine and make one of the party, and he went out and got one. After practicing for a while we went to the old resort of the circus crowd - the 'Branch,' in the Bowery - with our instruments, and in Bartlett's billiard-room performed for the first time as the Virginia Mistrels.
Here is a modern reference to Dan Emmett: "Dan is best remembered today as one of the pioneers of the early Minstrel Shows. His own company was instrumental in establishing many of the early minstrel routines and rituals, including the traditional costume of blue, swallow tail coat, striped calico shirt, and the white pantaloons. A large group of minstrel show competitors were formed due to the great success of his shows. Dan learned to play the violin, as a lad. He worked in his father's blacksmith shop. He enlisted in the Army, at an underage, and was brought back by his dad. But he ran away, this time as a drummer in the Spalding and Rogers circus. He got a job with the Thomas 'Daddy' Rice minstrel troupe, in which he played the banjo, and also sang. As a result of this job, Dan started writing "Negro" songs, which he would sing with the Rice troupe. In 1843, Emmett formed his own Virginia Minstrels Troupe, making their debut in New York City's Chatham Square theater, after first trying out the act in a local billiard parlor. This was the troupe that set the standards for all the troupes to follow."5 Their immediate success led quickly to shows elsewhere. The first was at the Bowery Amphitheater,6 billed as "the novel, grotesque, original and surpassingly melodious ethiopian band." The New York Evening Post had an advertisement for the Minstrels later that year:
The Virginia Minstrels, Being an exclusively musical entertainment combining the banjo, violin, bone castanetts and the tambourine, and entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas.7
Numerous erroneous references in print and on the internet have been made to the earliest performances of the Virginia Minstrels. It is widely stated that the first public performance was at the Bowery Theater. The "try-out" at the Branch Hotel was the first public appearance of the Virginia Minstrels. The first performance on stage before a paying crowd was at the Chatham, and the second theater to showcase the troupe was the Bowery Amphitheater - not the nearby Bowery Theater.
Modern minds should recoil at the idea that any such performance could be called "exempt from vulgarities and other objectionable features," but the minstrel show as a featured performance by a troupe became a major and international form of popular entertainment and thus has a place in musical and cultural history. And we are left with such presumed Emmett tunes as "Dixie" and "Jimmie Cracked Corn."
Jonas was well aware of minstrel performances. They were a part of his circus rosters. Several of the Virginia Minstrels had perfomed alone in his troupes, so going to Jonas with the idea of trying out their act at his hotel isn't surprising. Having catered to and been involved with the entertainment industry in the heart of the Bowery for ten years, the fact that he said yes isn't surprising either.
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