Obi

Obi in New York: Aldridge and the African Grove

Peter Buckley, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Notes

¹ John Collins has observed that the Obi revivals of that year might have been especially resonant in the immediate political circumstances since the Charleston slave rebellion found a notorious leader in a man named "Gullah Jack."
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² This appropriation is part of a much larger story concerning the birth of minstrelsy in New York and the role of local black culture. See the author's "The Place to Make an Artist Work: William Sidney Mount and New York City." The most comprehensive study of early minstrelsy remains Hans Nathan's Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy. However, William J. Mahar's Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture certainly includes much new material.
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³ For a detailed account of the text versions of Mathews's black delineations see Hodge.
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⁴ Some parts of the fabrication remain standing since some scholars believe Mathews was personally attentive to local black dialect rather than merely picking up ideas from existing written forms. Part of the debate is in Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America, Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy, and James Hatch, "Here Comes Everybody: Scholarship and Black Theatre History."
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