THE JUBA PROJECT
Featured Performers and Documents
Juba and the Ethiopian Serenaders in the UK
Who were they?

The early blackface minstrels came from a wide range of backgrounds and points of origin, though most were white working-class Anglo-Americans.  One of the goals of The Juba Project is to re-examine the backgrounds of the men who took to this kind of make-up during its first years of widespread popularity.  The answer for the Ethiopian Serenaders:  they were a very American group, advertising (falsely) their authentic re-creation of an American culture--the songs, dances and other entertainments of plantation slavery.  They were working class, and they were white--with the extraordinary exception of William Lane, 'Juba,' a dancer of colour in a segregated business.

Here are three sample biographies of representative performers in the Ethiopian Serenaders--a clown, a banjo player, and a dancer.  They knew each other well--for a while they toured alone, as a trio.  They may be seen to represent different strains of minstrelsy.

G. W. Pell  (Gilbert Pelham), a master bones player and clown.  Pell clearly exhibits minstrelsy's roots in circus and street performance, with his too-wide collar, his perpetual motion and his inability to behave. 

T. F. Briggs  (Thomas F. Briggs), an important early innovator on the banjo.  Briggs appears to have been a serious and committed student of the banjo, wrote one of its first instruction manuals, and otherwise bears more of a resemblance to (much) later folk musicians like Pete Seeger than to the circus culture that produced Pell.

Juba, or Boz's Juba  (William Henry Lane), was by all accounts an extraordinary dancer, an early master of what became 'tap,' and the first performer of colour on the minstrel stage.  More than one recent writer has suggested that he provided an authentic connection between the black culture of slave and free blacks in the 1840s, and a unique American idiom of music and movement.

These links take you to entries in the Juba Project's database, and provide examples of further research you could do yourself.