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Musicologist Dale Cockrell sees echoes of European Mumming traditions in "Clare de Kitchen". In traditional mumming plays, the participants first entered a private household. One mummer, usually with a broom and sometimes with blackened face, would then clear an area and declare the space to now be public, for the use of the players.Cockrell 47, 49. "Clare de Kitchen", Cockrell argues, moves this public/private space to the theatre.Cockrell 50. The first verse reflects this relationship to mumming:

:In old Kentuck in de arternoon,
:We sweep de floor wid a bran new broom,
:And dis de song dat we do sing,
:Oh! Clare de kitchen old folks young folks
:Clare de kitchen old folks young folks
:Old Virginny never tire.Quoted in Cockrell 50.

The line "I wish I was back in old Kentuck" is one of the earliest examples of "I wish I was in" from blackface minstrelsy. This line eventually became the famous " I Wish I Was In Dixie " in 1859.Nathan 260.


NOTES



REFERENCES


  • Cockrell, Dale (1997). ''Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World''. Cambridge University Press.

  • Goldberg, Isaac (2005). ''Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket''. Kessinger Publishing.

  • Mahar, William J. (1999). ''Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture''. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

  • Nathan, Hans (1962). ''Dam Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.