From these scholarly books a reader can gather insight into the early minstrels, their music, and the era in which they lived. This is why I recommend them. However, I add the following caveat lector. *

These performers created a multifarious form of entertainment that combined dance, comedy, costuming, makeup, and miscellaneous high jinks with a polyglot music played on a new combination of instruments: Celtic fiddle and African banjo. The entertainment of the minstrel stage was not black and white. It was as complex as the society that so enthusiastically embraced it. This is why it is still important today.

When this music is authentically performed a part of antebellum society is described. Add a few historical quips and stories, as I do when I perform, and the light is turned up on that gas-lit era.

Whereas academic research can be useful to understanding this music, academic thinking is usually of not much use. Careful research and ineffectual thought are both found in the books on this list. As the writer and cultural critic Nick Tosches said, “All these books have value, albeit not always equal to their list prices, but in every case that value is undermined by specious theory and academic gibberish” (Where Dead Voices Gather. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001, p. 13).

Bean, Annemarie, ed. Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
A gathering of rare primary materials--including firsthand accounts of minstrel shows, minstrelsy guides, jokes, sketches, sheet music, nineteenth century accounts of blackface shows, and modern accounts of the meaning of minstrelsy.

Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
A musicologist studies issues of race and class by analyzing their cultural expressions, and investigates the roots of songs such as "Jim Crow," "Zip Coon," and "Old Dan Tucker."

Henderson, Clayton W. The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. Volume 3. New York: Groves Dictionaries Inc., 1986. 245-247.
A history of blackface minstrelsy including the people who played a significant role in it, pertinent dates, and names of important minstrel groups and performers.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
From the book’s back cover: “Love and Theft argues that blackface minstrelsy both embodied and disrupted the racial tendencies of its largely white, male, working-class audiences. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identification as well as fear—a dialectic of ‘love and theft’—the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it enabled the formation of a self-consciously white working class.”

Mahar, William J. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Publisher’s Weekly says: “William J. Mahar delves into one of the hottest issues in cultural studies, the meaning of blackface in American culture. Using a wealth of archival research, including newspaper ads and playbills, he argues for a complex understanding of minstrelsy as a meeting ground of many cultures; it was not only the contact point between European- and African-Americans, he asserts, but a place through which the songs of Italian and English opera, for instance, could enter into American popular awareness.”

Nathan, Hans. Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.
I recommend this biography of Dan Emmett because it is much more than a mere biography. As the title indicates, it also traces the beginnings of minstrelsy. Nathan discovered an uncataloged collection of the papers of Dan Emmett in a bureau at the Ohio Historical Society. From this treasure he assembled the book. It contains the music of many of Emmett’s songs, illustrations, and scripts of skits. Though out-of-print, this book is a necessity for anyone interested in the history of Amercian music and performance.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.
This is a study by a leftist labor scholar of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. I list it here because in chapter 6, “White Skins, Black Masks: Minstrelsy and White Working Class Formation before the Civil War,” the author provides a view of minstrelsy different than that of musicologists and folklorists.

Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
A detailed academic study of the minstrel show and its history.

* Caveat lector is Latin meaning let the reader beware.