I mean, Buck Owens sort of did the same thing with Hee Haw and the Buck Owens Show. It's a cartoon version of a stereotype. The musicians playing were completely competent studio musicians and not some honkeytonk rednecks trying to catch the pig or whatever it is they do down in the south all day. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Dave Chapelle had a moral dilemma with his show because it was ostensibly making white people quote things like "I'm rich beeatch" that were eventually exchanged for "sup my nigga," ostensibly morphing his own show into a neo-minstrel show, especially for drunk frat boys, who were probably its core audience.

I'd hate to be one of those musicians. Shit like this actually makes slavery look like a better option: Play, smile, laugh at your kind and get out before the crowd starts to wind down. Here's 20 dollars. Goddamnit.

I imagine this was/is utterly loathsome to blacks. There's a description somewhere regarding Cotton Watts as one of the most offensive of the blackface performers - I don't see anything in this video that refutes that.

Eric Lott (a blackface historian!) claims that blackface performance arose from Whitey's physical lust for Darkie. I don't know if he's right, but it's a nice thought.

I remember one day my parents and me were with my Grandmother going through some really old memorabilia of hers and we stumbled upon a newspaper clipping announcing a Minstrel Show that her and one of her sisters would be doing a skit in. I believe they were 13 or 14 at the time.

Grandmother was completely appalled that she ever took part in something like that. She once told me she never even saw a black person until she was a young adult, and after many years growing up, she realized what she did was completely unforgivable.

She asked my parents to throw that clipping in the trash, glad they didn't hesitate.

Well the worst thing IS the time, for me at least. I guess I wasn't thinking with my history cap and didnt read the whole description, but I kinda thought this was from the 20s or 30s, not the 50s.

I looked it up and it does look like it might have been more satirical, kind of like Spike Lee's Bamboozled. Basically a boy finds himself at an old folks home for people who used to perform in Minstrel shows, and it's all flashbacks to those days of what they had to endure. I'll have to see the movie to make a clear judgement, but it's very hard to believe that a movie like this wouldn't be social commentary six years before Sidney Poitier won a BAFTA.