THE JUBA PROJECT
Featured Performers and Documents
These pages of The Juba Project introduce you to some of the performers, troupes, venues and songs of early minstrelsy in Britain, and provide you with examples of the kind of research that we are doing into the history of popular performance--and that you also might be interested in doing.
'Juba & the Ethiopian Serenaders in the UK' provides a range of primary materials organized around the British tours of the Ethiopian Serenaders. You will find brief biographies of some of the performers, records related to their tours and the venues in which they played, and reviews of their performances. This is an example of the kind of information you can find on the database.
‘Parsing the Documents' takes a number of specific documents and examines them in detail, taking them apart piece by piece looking for anything they might tell us about the complex culture of 'blacking up'--images and descriptions of dance, two strange sad deaths, and more. Traditional articles are here, but the visitor may particularly enjoy our 'hyperdocs'. We hope this will provide a guide for examining other documents you will find in the database, and in other research.
‘Blackface Minstrelsy in Context' provides information for further reading on blackface and minstrelsy, and something of its persistence today.
The focus here will be on the documentary evidence--advertisements, reviews, playbills, sheet music, and visual imagery--and how to read them. Many documents are reproduced here for you to examine, and wherever possible we link across to our database of performances. There, in that database, you can continue the kind of research we introduce here, and perhaps add to the information it contains. One of the positive values of a web project such as this is that it does not have to wait until some artificial 'completion' to be presented for public use; this site has been accessible throughout the research (and has changed a great deal). In fact, by its nature a project such as this does not have to 'end' at all; though our grant is finished and our own research is winding down, the database can be added to at any time. If you find something of interest, contact us.