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Dec 10, 2025
Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrels (1844–1860)
Summary
Minstrelsy is often called the first American popular entertainment form. Minstrel shows presented musical, dance, and entertainment styles that continue to resonate in US culture and they also reflected the complex, contradictory, deeply prejudiced attitudes towards race that characterized antebellum America, which are still part of American political and cultural discourses. Despite the voluminous scholarship on minstrel shows, there is relatively little work that deeply investigates the music of minstrelsy. Renee Lapp Norris’s critical edition called Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrelsy (1844–1860) (A-R Editions, 2025) published as part of the Music of the United States of America series (A-R Editions, 2025) aims to help remedy this absence. In this volume, Norris gathers forty opera parody songs originally published as sheet music that illustrate different approaches to opera parodies taken by minstrel performers. She analyzes how minstrels parodied opera, what political and cultural agendas the music supported, and contextualizes the parodies within the history of antebellum minstrel shows.
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Kristen Turner
Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century.
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