Buckley's Serenaders

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]

Overview

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-members of the Buckley family coming or going.^[9] The Buckleys closed the Opera House when the Concert Saloon Bill of 1862 forbade the combination of stage entertainment, female waitresses and sale of alcohol and in New York theaters and saloons.

Notes

Advertisement for performance by Buckley's Serenaders at Boston's Beethoven Hall, 1875

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 0-252-06696-0.
• Tompkins, Eugene (1908). The History of the Boston Theatre, 1854-1901. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.