James Cummins Bookseller

Philadelphia: Published and sold at No. 9 North Eighth St, [1830s].

Price: $22,500.00

About the item

Double sheet broadside with vignette images. Folio (18 x 21 inches). UNRECORDED DOUBLE BROADSIDE, JIM CROW & DINAH CROW. Creased, folded, minor marginal losses at edges.

Item #334847

"Jump Jim Crow" is believed to have originated in the late 1820s by a blackface minstrel performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice. The earliest known broadside songsheets were published in the 1830s, with the racist genre peaking in popularity over the next three decades prior to the Civil War.

"Images of black identity created by minstrel shows satirized blacks as singing, dancing, grinning fools. Actors/musicians blackened their faces with burnt cork and used other make-up material that demeaned African Americans for the pleasure of the viewing audience. It was the first example of the way American popular culture would exploit and manipulate blacks and their culture to entertain and benefit whites ... Within ten years of the character’s creation, the term Jim Crow was used as a negative nickname for African Americans" (The History of Minstrel Shows and Jim Crow, https://glc.yale.edu/outreach/teaching-resources/teacher-professional-development-programs/past-teacher-development-15)

Printed together on a single large sheet, the imprints at the bottom of each side suggests that the print was made to be separated into two broadsides, though are here still joined together. Neither broadside is recorded.

The broadside at the left, titled 110 verses Jim Crow still alive includes two woodcut vignettes of Jim Crow, at work cutting fire wood with a bucksaw and dressed as a gentleman. The verses begin: "De way to bake a hoe cake / Ol Virginny nebber tire / Stick the hee cake on the foot / and hold it to de fire"; and with the repeating chorus: "So I wheel about / I turn about / I do just so / And ebery time I wheel about / I jump Jim Crow."

The broadside on the right, titled New Verses Dinah Crow, includes three woodcut vignettes of a well-dressed Dinah Crow with well-dressed Jim Crows on either side of her. The verses begin: "O gentlemen an ladies / I'd hab you all to know / Dat here is Miss Dinah / A full sister to Jim Crow"; and with the repeating chorus: "I wink and smile / and play o just so / And ebery one dat see me / Admire Miss Crow."

Although no printer is identified on this broadside, newspaper advertisements for the imprint address suggest the work to have been a promotional piece produced by sundries store in the 1830s. The May 17, 1836 issue of the Public Ledger notes a robbery at the store of Emily Hopkins, No. 9 North Eighth street, where she was "robbed of a large quantity of goods, consisting of handkerchiefs, shirts, laces, bobbinets, collars, bosoms, Ladies' caps, gloves, prints of various description..." By the early 1840s the address was noted as a wholesale and retail jobbing store and dry goods business of Lawrence B. Connoly (or Connelly); by 1845 the address was a dry goods store belonging to M. Egolf; and two years later was a lamp establishment belonging to H. Fairbank. It would therefore seem likely that the broadside was printed for and sold by Emily Hopkins sometime prior to 1840.