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"Gumbo Chaff", also spelled "'''Gombo Chaff'''", is an American Song , first performed in the early 1830s. It was part of the repertoire of early Blackface performers, including Thomas D. Rice and George Washington Dixon .

The title character was one of the earliest blackface characters in the United States. He was based largely on the Tall-tale Riverboat smen and Frontiersmen characters that were popular in fiction during the Jacksonian Era . "Gumbo Chaff" merged these frontier elements with Stereotype s of black Slaves , creating a new character who lives "On de Ohio bluff in de state of Indiana" and who "jump into {Link without Title} kiff / And . . . down de river driff, / And . . . cotch as many cat fish as ever nigger liff."Quoted in Nathan 173. Due to this song's popularity, the black riverboatsman (usually named "Gumbo Chaff") became a popular character in minstrelsy for a time. Blackface singers would often perform "Gumbo Chaff" with a mock Flatboat on stage.

The song's Melody seems to be at least partially based on an older English song called " Bow Wow Wow ".Nathan 173. " Wild Goose Nation ", a blackface song written by Dan Emmett in 1844, adapted the tune to "Gumbo Chaff", possibly with Parodic intent.


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REFERENCES


  • Gura, Philip F. (1999). ''America's Instrument: The Bajo in the Nineteenth-century''. The University of North Carolina Press.

  • Hutton, Lawrence (1891). ''Curiosities of the American Stage''. New York: Harber & Brothers.

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

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