Thomas D. Rice

Thomas Dartmouth Rice as "Jim Crow" 1832

Thomas Dartmouth Rice (May 20, 1808 – September 19, 1860) was an American performer and playwright who appropriated African-American vernacular speech, song, and dance to become one of the most popular minstrel show entertainers of his time. Though his act drew on aspects of African American culture and popularized them with a national, and later international, audience, Rice’s “Jim Crow" persona was a racial caricature contrived to flatter contemporary belief in white superiority. The "father of American minstrelsy" was Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice (1808–60), who in 1828, in a New York City theatre, performed a song-and-dance routine in blackface and tattered clothes. Rice's character was based on a folk trickster persona named Jim Crow that was long popular among black slaves. Rice also adapted and popularized a traditional slave song called Jump Jim Crow.^[1]

Biography

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was born in the lower east side of Manhattan, New York. His family resided in the commercial district near the East River docks. Rice received some formal education in his youth, but ceased in his teenage years when he acquired an apprenticeship with a woodcarver named Dodge. Despite his occupational training, Rice quickly made a career as a performer. By 1827, he was a traveling actor, appearing not only as a stock player in several New York theaters, but also performing on frontier stages in the coastal South and the Ohio River valley. According to a former stage colleague Rice was "tall and wiry, and a great deal on the build of Bob Fitzsimmons, the prizefighter." According to another account he was at least six foot tall.^[2] He frequently told stories of George Washington, whom he claimed had been a friend of his father.^[3]

Character

The actual origin of the Jim Crow character has been lost to legend. Several sources describe a tale of Rice encountering an elderly black stableman working in one of the river towns where Rice was performing. According to some accounts the man had a crooked leg and deformed shoulder. He was singing about Jim Crow, and punctuating each stanza with a little jump.^[4] A more likely explanation behind the origin of the character is that Rice had observed and absorbed African American traditional song and dance over many years. He grew up in a racially integrated Manhattan neighborhood, and later Rice toured the Southern slave states. According to the reminiscences of Isaac Odell, a former minstrel who described the development of the genre in an interview given in 1907, Rice appeared onstage at Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1830s and learned there to mimic local black speech: "Coming to New York he opened up at the old Park Theatre, where he introduced his Jim Crow act, impersonating a negro slave. He sang a song, 'I Turn About and Wheel About', and each night composed new verses for it, catching on with the public and making a great name for himself."^[5]

The character dressed in rags, battered hat and torn shoes. Rice blackened his face and hands and impersonated a very nimble and irreverently witty African American field hand who sang, "Turn about and wheel about, and do just so. And every time I turn about I Jump Jim Crow."

Career

Rice had made the Jim Crow character his signature act by 1830.^[6] Rice went from one theater to another, singing his Jim Crow Song. He became known as "Jim Crow Rice." There had been other blackface performers before Rice, and there were many more afterwards. But it was “Daddy Rice" who became so indelibly associated with a single character and routine.

Rice's greatest prominence came in the 1830s, before the rise of full-blown blackface minstrel shows, when blackface performances were typically part of a variety show or as an entr'acte in another play.^[7]

During the years of his peak popularity, from roughly 1832 to 1844, Rice often encountered sold-out houses, with audiences demanding numerous encores.^[7] In 1836 he popularized blackface entertainment with English audiences when he appeared in London,^[8] although he and his character were known there by reputation at least by 1833.^[7] Rice not only performed in more than 100 plays, but also created plays of his own, providing himself slight variants on the Jim Crow persona—as Cuff in Oh, Hush! (1833), Ginger Blue in Virginia Mummy (1835), and Bone Squash in Bone Squash Diavolo (1835). Shortly after making his first hit in London in Oh, Hush, Rice starred in a more prestigious production, a three-act play at the Adelphi Theatre there.^[9] Moreover, Rice wrote and starred in Otello (1844), he also played the title character in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Starting in 1854 he played in one of the more prominent (and one of the least abolitionist) "Tom shows", loosely based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's book. (Lott, 1993, 211).

"The Virginny Cupids" was an operatic olio and the most popular of the time. It is centered on a song "Coal Black Rose", which predated the playlet. Rice played Cuff, boss of the bootblacks, and he wins the girl, Rose, away from the black dandy Sambo Johnson, a former bootblack who made money by winning a lottery. (Lott, 1993, 133)

According to Broadbent,^[10] T.D Rice, “the celebrated negro comedian" performed ‘Jump Jim Crow’ “with witty local allusions" at Ducrow's Royal Amphitheatre (now The Royal Court Theatre), Liverpool, England, as late as 1840.

Jim Crow laws

At least initially, blackface could also give voice to an oppositional dynamic that was prohibited by society. As early as 1832, Ricewas singing, "An' I caution all white dandies not to come in my way, / For if dey insult me, dey'll in de gutter lay." It also on occasion equated lower-class white and lower-class black audiences; while parodying Shakespeare, Rice sang, "Aldough I'm a black man, de white is call'd my broder."^[11]

But as minstrel shows gained wider international acceptance, blackface's more subversive qualities were downplayed or eliminated in favor of mocking black people as uneducated, thieving and lazy. Rice's famous stage persona eventually lent its name to a generalized negative and stereotypical view of black people. The shows peaked in the 1850s, and after Rice's death in 1860 interest in them faded. There was still some memory of them in the 1870s however, just as the "Jim Crow" segregation laws were surfacing in the United States. The Jim Crow period, which started when segregation rules, laws and customs surfaced after Reconstruction era ended in the 1870s, existed until the mid-1960s when the struggle for civil rights in the United States gained national attention.

Personal life and death

On one of his stage tours in England, Rice married Charlotte Bridgett Gladstone in 1837. She died in 1847, and none of their children survived infancy.

Rice enjoyed displaying his wealth, and on his return from London wore a blue dress coat with gold guineas for buttons, and a vest on which each gold button bore a solitaire diamond.^[2]

As early as 1840 Rice suffered from a type of paralysis which began to limit his speech and movements, and eventually led to his death on September 19, 1860. He is interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York in what is now an unmarked grave. A reminiscence of him in the New York Times suggests his death was alcohol-related, and states that although he had made a considerable fortune in his time, his later years were spent in a liquor saloon and his burial was paid for by public subscription.^[2]

Popular culture

For some years in the latter half of the 19th century a wooden statue of Rice in his 'Jim Crow' character stood in various New York locations, including outside the Chatham Garden Theatre.^[12] It was painted and made in four pieces, with both arms and the right leg below the knee being separate parts screwed to the trunk.^[13] Prior to at least 1871 it had stood on Broadway outside 'a well-known resort of actors and showmen'.^[13] According to an article in the New York Times it had apparently been carved by Rice himself in 1833,^[13] although a different account in the same paper says it had been carved by a celebrated figurehead carver called Weeden,^[2] and yet another article attributes it to Rice's former employer 'Charley' Dodge.^[14] It had long been used by Rice as an advertizing feature and accompanied him on his successful tour of London.^[2]

Notes

References

Further reading

• Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507832-2.

External links

• Dance History Archives by Street Swing
• NYPL image of Thomas D. Rice