Buckley's Serenaders

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Detail from a playbill for Buckley's Serenaders, 16 December 1853.
Detail from a playbill for Buckley's Serenaders, 16 December 1853.

Buckley's Serenaders was an American blackface minstrel troupe, headed by James Buckley. They were an influential troupe in the United States; while they toured England from 1846 to 1848, their absence allowed Edwin Christy's troupe to gain popularity and influence the development of the minstrel genre.[1] Back in the States, the Buckleys became one of the two most popular companies from the mid-1850s to the 1860s (the other being the Christy and Wood Minstrels).[2] By the 1853–4 season, the Buckleys began to burlesque popular operas and boasted of their ability to reproduce such works.[3] Some of these were Cinderella, La Sonnambula, and Don(e) Juan; or, A Ghost on a High horse (Don Giovanni).[4] Another popular act involved Bishop Buckley's trained horse, Mazeppa. G. Swaine Buckley was another member of the company.[5]

In 1853, they leased a New York City theatre at 539 Broadway, a hall they called Buckley's Opera House, the Ethiopian Opera House, and the American Opera House.[6] In 1856, they moved to 585 Broadway. By 1857, they were spending as much as six months there between tours. They also gave regular Sunday-evening concerts in whiteface at this location.

However, like other minstrel companies, the Buckleys toured extensively. Upon their return to New York after a late 1857 tour, they published this advertisement:

Although we look ragged and black are our faces.
As free and as fair as the best we are found;
And our hearts are as white as those in fine places,
Although we're poor niggers dat travel around.[7]

Charles Dickens wrote of the Buckleys during an 1861 trip to the United States:

Wilkie and I . . . went to the Buckley's last night. They do the most preposterous things, in the way of Violin Solos, Deeply Sentimental Songs, and Lucrezia Borgia music, sung by a majestic female in black velvet and jewels with a blackened face! All that part of it, is intolerably bad. But the real Nigger things are very good; and there is one man—the tambourine—who attempts to do things with chairs, in remembrance of an acrobat he has seen, which is the most genuinely ludicrous thing of its kind, I ever beheld. Nor have I ever seen so good a presentation as his, of the real Negro.[8]

The troupe roster stayed relatively consistent until 1855, with only non-mebers of the Buckley family coming or going.[9] The Buckleys closed the Opera House when the Concert Hall Act of 1862 forbade the sale of alcohol in theatres.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Mahar 22.
  2. ^ Lawrence 95–6.
  3. ^ Mahar 34–5.
  4. ^ Lawrence 95.
  5. ^ Lawrence 190.
  6. ^ Henderson 93.
  7. ^ Quoted in Lawrence 96.
  8. ^ 2 January 1861. Letter from Charles Dickens to Georgina Hogarth. Reprinted in Dickens 359. Emphasis in original.
  9. ^ Mahar 35.

[edit] References

  • Dickens, Charles. (1997). The Letters of Charles Dickens. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Henderson, Mary C. (2004). The City and the Theatre. New York: Back Stage Books.
  • Lawrence, Vera Brodsky (1995). Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong. Volume II: Reverberations, 1850-1856. The University of Chigcago Press.
  • Lawrence, Vera Brodsky (1999). Strong on Music: The New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong. Volume III: Repercussions, 1857-1862. The University of Chicago Press.
  • Mahar, William J. (1999). Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0252066960.
  • Tompkins, Eugene (1908). The History of the Boston Theatre, 1854-1901. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.