First given as a paper at a joint conference of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the American branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, held in Chicago in the fall of 1991, this essay brings my work back home. After years of trying to understand the context of popular music from the past, and in such remote parts of the world (for me) as South Africa and the People's Republic of China, I set out to examine the meaning of a contemporary musical event in a small village near my home in Vermont.

Even though the minstrel show is thought to have died out by the middle of the twentieth century, the Civic Club of Tunbridge, a small town in central Vermont, has produced one every year for the last four decades. It may be the last minstrel show.

Why has even one minstrel show survived to the present day? Why here, in a village in northern New England? How is this show related, dramatically and musically, to the nineteenth-century minstrel stage? What is its meaning in the contemporary world? These are questions to be explored in this paper, based on an analysis of the 39th annual show given in March of 1991.

Description of the show

The Tunbridge minstrel show is held in late winter in the auditorium of the town hall, seating some 200 people.