The eternal awkwardness of the minstrelsy legacy, or, opportunity knocks

I haven’t posted here in ages. I have a backlog of topics, but I’ve been overwhelmed by other aspects of the project. And by the larger things happening the last 10 months, which make it feel small and challenging to post about the trials and triumphs of my little endeavor. But it’s time. Here’s a bagatelle that’s maybe obliquely timely in this moment when many of our leaders are dedicating themselves to making racism great again.

I was telling my son about one of the town-themed pieces for my Norwich concert. Norwich is home to the King Arthur Baking Company. So I found a piece from 1896, the year the brand was launched: the aptly but cringily titled “Remus Takes the Cake”, a turn-of-the-century cakewalk, complete with a thick-lipped caricature on the sheet music cover. 

My son said “well that’s not at all problematic”. 

Now, cakewalk has a troubling resonance, above all here in Vermont. But music professor that I am, I had to expound on its complex cultural connotations. The dance originated on Southern plantations, where enslaved Africans saw the whites opening their soirees with a “grand march” and were inspired to parody the very proper and very simple dance of their oppressors. Dressed in the finest clothes they could manage, they mimicked the two-by-two parade-style dance, mocking the basic and formal steps of the white folks while simultaneously jazzing them up with virtuosic flourishes. And they turned it into a competition, with the winner of course “taking the cake”.

Before long the white folks witnessed these satires, and rather than take offense, they sponsored and then imitated the slaves’ spoof of their own dance, in turn caricaturing the ragtag “formal” clothing and (notoriously) the stereotypical African physiognomy as well by making themselves up in blackface. The reflections don’t stop there: when the minstrel show came into being in the 19th century, traveling Black performers bizarrely adopted one aspect of the white owners’ imitation of their slaves’ satire of their masters’ formal dance: they performed in blackface themselves. And this is the iteration that white fraternity and sorority students were emulating when they performed in UVM’s annual Kake Walk, one of the most lavish, elaborate, and long-lasting instances of the tradition, which continued—in blackface—under increasing protest until finally abandoned in 1970.

So that, I concluded, is the nuanced history of the genre, one of many instances where cultural exchange, no matter how involuntary, brutal, and violent, has borne rich and often wonderful fruit; whatever its origins and its latter connotations, a cakewalk is not in and of itself undilutedly racist.

“And a Jewish guy playing a cakewalk in 2025? How do you fit in?”

Dude—I replied—there’s a freaking cakewalk with cake in the title written the year King Arthur Flour was launched. I’m giving a concert in the town where King Arthur is based. I’m gonna play it!

“Ah, a pragmatist.”