This year’s four-part Black History Month blog series is all about community. In previous blogs we have often focused on the stories of Freedom Seekers and their descendants in St. Catharines. We have heard about the incredible journeys these people made to this city, how their lives changed, and how a local faith community was forged. But what is the story of the Black St. Catharines community outside of grand historical moments and formal institutions like work, school, and church? It is often what happens in between all this that really makes a community hum – the joy and laughter, the sadness, the togetherness and fun, the leisure, the weekends, and the warm home-cooked meals. In the hopes of sharing a small glimpse of all this vibrance, this year’s blog series will explore three community cornerstones: sports, music, and food!  

Part 2 of 4

Music is a uniquely compelling marker of a specific cultural community at a given time and place. It is one of the most curiously human things that we do, and it is universal. And though the process of creating, participating in, and enjoying music is shared across the globe, the music itself, as well as the traditions surrounding it, could not be more varied. Music can, therefore, be a vital key to gaining an understanding of and connection with peoples around the world and across time. Music is called upon to profess joy and love, as well as pain and loss. It accompanies everything from birthdays to weddings to picnics to funerals. It can be played on curious inventions called “instruments” or it can simply be made by the pounding of fists or the vibrations of vocal cords. It can be played by professionally trained musicians in orchestras, by community ensembles, or by amateurs in their living rooms. Music tells stories, records memories, and maintains a cultural conversation with its audience and across time. Music can even manifest physically, setting the body into inspired motions we call “dance”. And all of this together says something about a people. 

The Black community in St. Catharines has been making music since its first establishment in the mid 19^th century. This community, like any other in the city, has evolved over time. As history has unfolded, the stories the music tells have changed. As new cultures have arrived and as new generations have added their own perspectives, the sound of the music has changed too. Musical moments point to historical moments, and I will highlight several throughout the remainder of this blog. 

Spirituals and Plantation Songs 

Many of St. Catharines’ Black residents in the mid 19^th century had been enslaved in the southern United States and came here as Freedom Seekers. They brought along with them the spiritual music and plantation songs that helped them survive down south and passed this music on to their children and grandchildren. Plantation songs were call-and-response pieces that were traditionally sung while working in the fields to help keep a steady rhythm, distract from the backbreaking labour, and to ignite a feeling of community in the face of tyranny. It has also been suggested that some of these songs, including Wade in the Water and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, contained coded messages to help guide Freedom Seekers to safety, but supporting evidence is limited. Some pieces in this tradition were also written as reflective pieces in the years following abolition. Their repetitive lyrics, simple structures, rhythmic feel, and sometimes painful subject matter would eventually evolve into blues music, which I will touch on more in the next blog. 

Traditional spirituals and plantation songs were likely sung regularly at the BME and Zion Baptist churches and in their surrounding communities, though the historical records are limited. We do know that Reverend Richard Amos Ball, deacon at the BME in the 1890s, was a well-known singer and musician, and he and his family toured around the area to perform spirituals at various events An 1899 concert at the St. Paul Street Church (now Silver Spire) even included a stereopticon show, a sort of double projector that enabled fading between photographs. Ball was born in St. Catharines in 1845 while slavery was still rampant south of the border. His father was a Freedom Seeker from Virginia who came to this city on the Underground Railroad, and the family may have been associated with Harriett Tubman.  

There was certainly an appetite in late 19^th-century St. Catharines for plantation and spiritual music. In 1883, the Fisk Jubilee Singers graced the stage at the St. Catharines Academy of Music. This wildly popular African American choir was originally formed as a fundraiser for an early all-Black college in Tennessee and toured cities that had been a part of the Underground Railroad, including St. Catharines. A special streetcar run was scheduled to service the event. In 1891, the city’s “Grand Celebration” for Emancipation Day included a full slate of musical performers and highlighted “old plantation sacred melodies.” 

Another, more complicated part of the story of plantation music in St. Catharines was minstrel shows. Minstrelsy, which consisted of variety shows based around African American music and culture, was considered the number one form of American stage entertainment for several decades in the mid 19^th century, and it persisted in one form or another until the 1960s. The reason this part of the story is complicated is because this artform was inherently racist. During their heyday in the decades leading up to the Civil War, minstrel troupes were usually made up of white performers in blackface who would perform often humiliating caricatures based on stereotypes. The troupes did usually perform real African American plantation songs, but with a goal of glorifying Southern ideals, perpetuating stereotypes, and roasting Black people to the uproarious applause of white audiences. However, around the 1870s an important shift began to happen.  

After the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, professional white minstrel troupes and audiences became less interested in directly spoofing enslaved people and more focused on the promotion of Southern values. Many put away or lessened the use of blackface at this time too.¹ There was also a general shift toward vaudeville in white theatre beginning in the 1880s. In response, a movement of new minstrel troupes were able to step in to fill the vacuum, this time featuring real Black people. Though the general premise of the performances was still based on stereotypes, these performers were able to advertise themselves as the only authentic purveyors of spirituals and plantation songs. They also usually skipped the Southern values and featured a religious or abolitionist message.  

This era of minstrelsy was very popular with Black audiences on both sides of the border, and several touring groups made stops in St. Catharines, though it is difficult to determine with certainty whether their members were Black. The genre’s success also led to the development of the first stage musical created and run entirely by Black people. The show, unfortunately titled A Trip to Coontown, showed at St. Catharines’ Grand Opera House during its original tour in 1898. Despite its offensive name, the show was developed by African American composer-playwrights Bob Cole and Billy Johnson and challenged norms by incorporating “white face” and even showing an interracial wedding. The performance also included a “cake walk”, a subtle mockery of rigid white dancing by Black performers. The cake walk was eventually adopted as a dance craze by the very white people it was spoofing. 

It may be difficult for us to understand why Black people in the late 19^th century would participate in a theatrical tradition that was founded on their humiliation and mistreatment, and even go so far as to include racial slurs. It has, however, been common for subjugated peoples throughout history to reclaim the language of oppressors as a means of diffusing its power and transforming its meaning, thereby reaffirming a community’s fellowship and ability to survive. The same process can be seen in the way colonial language and stereotypes are sometimes reclaimed by the hip-hop community, Indigenous persons, and racialized comedians today. It is unlikely that the 1898 St. Catharines Standard reporter understood this subtlety, describing the show simply as a “Black Face Comedy”. To the Black audience members, however, it may have been much more indeed. 

Click here for Part 3.

Sean Dineley is a Public Programmer at the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre.

1. It would still be some 80 years before blackface would fully disappear from common theatrical usage. Professional blackface minstrel groups stuck around until around the 1910s, and blackface minstrelsy remained popular in community theatre, including in St. Catharines, until the 1950s. Additionally, blackface found a second life outside of minstrelsy, being employed by vaudeville and film stars like Al Jolson well into the 1930s.  ↩︎