Heading: (African American, 1895)
Author: Zickel, Harry H.
Title: Black America, A Negro Oddity, March and Two-Step.
Place Published: Detroit, Michigan
Publisher:W.C.Broadwell
Date Published: 1895
Description:

3 pp. of music and lyrics + printed covers. 11x14". "Respectfully dedicated to Mr. Nate Salsbury."

Written in rag time rhythm, it was intended to be the opening march of the first African American entertainment extravaganza which dramatized slave life of the old South, as its impresario, Nate Salsbury, had successfully dramatized myths of Western frontier life in "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show". A scarce title not found in the comprehensive Levy sheet music collection.

While evoking popular nostalgia for a romanticized view of the antebellum slave system, "Black America", first staged in Brooklyn in 1895, featured 500 freedmen of the South, Black men, women and children employed as actors, singers and dancers, who marched in, singing Negro spirituals in a massive chorus. This "Panorama of the Negro, from the Jungles of Africa to the Civilization of America", recreated, as an outdoor "theme park", the "likeness of a southern plantation", complete with blossoming cotton bushes, bales of cotton, poultry and livestock, and even a working cotton gin. It was an immediate sensation in New York and then went on the road to thrill audiences of thousands in cities throughout the northern United States. Considering the production in the historical context of rigidly segregated entertainment, "Black America" may be considered a minor milestone in the annals of African American show business.

Small marginal tears and darkening; good to very good.