VOL. 3 EPISODE 2: MUSIC & RACE IN THE OLD WEST
The American West was the meeting ground for numerous races and cultures; Native Americans, Hispanics, Anglo Americans, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants. During Westward Expansion, each group brought their own musical tradition and expressed themselves through song. We examine their stories of oppression, resistance, and peace, told through music.
INTRODUCTION [00:00-03:15]
In the 1840s, Mary Eastman lived alongside Native Americans from the Sioux tribe at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. While there, she was on friendly terms with her Native American neighbors. She wrote that their men were handsome, their warriors admirable, and their minds were “of a high order.”1
She also appreciated their music. Many of her contemporaries were dismissive of the musical ability of Native Americans, but Eastman became intent on learning the songs of the Sioux. And so, she began singing lessons with a man named Chief Little Hill. Little Hill, however, was dismissive of her musical ability. Eastman was unable to learn the art of Sioux music, and Little Hill quickly abandoned the lessons. The “low, guttural notes” were too difficult for her, and he grew frustrated that “he could never make [her] sing like a Sioux.”
Eastman then decided to share her music and began to play the piano for him. Again, Little Hill was not impressed. According to Eastman, he “very quickly became tired of [her] piano and singing.”2
The sentiment at the time among Anglo Americans—those of English descent—was that Native Americans were a primitive race, a relic of mankind’s early history that survived to the present while Europeans had progressed and achieved true civilization. And Anglo Americans often cited Native music as evidence of their inferiority.
But with Eastman and Little Hill, the roles were reversed. A Native American was dismissive of the European musical tradition. It was a small but emblematic interaction.
The American West was racially diverse. It’s what made the West unique. Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, Chinese immigrants, and Anglo Americans were all present. The power dynamics between the groups were messy and complicated.
Today we are going to explore the interaction of different races in the American West through their music. Music is a powerful tool for understanding their complex relationships. We’ll see how Anglo Americans used music as a form of oppression, how minorities used music to resist oppression, and how music could bring people across races and cultures together.
Let’s dig in.
—Intro Music—
[Welcome to American History Remix, the podcast about the overlooked and underexplored parts of American history. We’re glad you’re here!]
Oppression
NATIVE AMERICANS [03:16-07:01]
In the 1800s, America was busy conquering and settling the frontier. In nearly constant warfare, the US defeated and displaced Native Americans from their land. It was a bloody process, but violence alone does not capture the whole story.
While the military claimed Native lands, in the second half of the century, the United States government established schools for Native American children to eradicate Native culture. The first of these schools was founded by Henry Pratt in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879. The explicit goal was to indoctrinate Native Americans into Anglo culture.3 Put succinctly, Pratt’s aim was to “kill the Indian and save the man.”4
Following Pratt’s model, the federal government established twenty-four off-reservation boarding schools. Twenty-one of them were located in the American West, and most were run by missionaries. “Killing the Indian,” or the gentler term of “assimilation,” required the systematic deconstruction of a student’s Indian identity.
Educators attempted this in several ways. Upon arrival, a student’s hair was cut in the European fashion, and their birth name was replaced. As Native American Francis LaFlesche recorded in his memoir, “the aboriginal names were considered by the missionaries as heathenish and therefore should be obliterated.” Thus, names like Tae-noó-ga-wa-zhe and Koó-we-ge-ra were replaced by English names like Philip or Alexander.5
Studio portrait of Wounded Yellow Robe (also known as Richard Yellow Robe), Chauncey Yellow Robe (also known as Timber Yellow Robe), and Henry Standing Bear the day after they entered the school on November 15, 1883. John N. Choate, Carlisle, PA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Chauncey Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, and Wounded Yellow Robe photographed in 1892 at Carlisle Indian School after their forced cultural assimilation. John N. Choate, Carlisle, PA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
It wasn’t just names either. Under the threat of physical punishment, boarding schools across the West forbade students from speaking their Native languages at all. For example, the Indian Industrial and Training School in Forest Grove, Oregon, was established in 1880. “The final rule here after cleanliness and obedience,” wrote school founder Melville Cary Wilkinson, “is no Indian talk.”6
No Indian talk meant no Indian songs. Native music was also banned from the schools. It went deeper than avoiding certain melodies. It was about culture. Names and language and music are deeply tied to a person’s identity and heritage. To fully deconstruct an individual’s identity, their language and music needed to be replaced.7
The students instead received lessons on European musical instruments and by extension learned Anglo American culture, especially gender roles. The boys learned to play wind and brass instruments; the girls learned piano. In marching bands, the boys learned to march in tight formation wearing military attire. At formal dances, they learned the rules for appropriate interaction between men and women.8
Missionaries and educators understood the importance of language and music. They touched all facets of a person’s life. Forbidding their songs was therefore a crucial part of “killing the Indian” and giving them a new identity.
BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY [07:02-10:56]
Perhaps the most overt way that Anglo Americans in the nineteenth century exerted their racial superiority through music was in blackface minstrelsy.
In minstrel shows, white musicians covered their faces with burnt cork and performed as “black” characters. The “black” characters popular in the genre were caricatures, created and performed to entertain white audiences while mocking African Americans. The most popular such character was named Jim Crow.9 A name which later became synonymous with racial segregation.10
Detail from cover of The Celebrated Negro Melodies, as Sung by the Virginia Minstrels, arranged by Th. Comer, Boston, 1843. Scanned from Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy by Hans Nathan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Blackface minstrel shows developed in the Northeast among the urban working class, but it became a national art form. Performers drew large crowds all over the country, touring cities in the East and the towns and camps that sprouted up in the West.11
Every night in the gambling halls and saloons throughout California, “Ethiopian melodists,” as they were sometimes called, performed to packed houses. Traveler and author Bayard Taylor claimed the songs were “universally popular” and called them the “national airs of America.”12 Air is an old word for melody.
Lyrics of blackface songs were frequently nonsensical and used an exaggerated African American dialect. Have you ever heard the original lyrics to “Oh Susanna”? Let’s take a listen to the original second verse:*
I jumped aboard de telegraph
An trabbelled down de riber
De Lectric fluid magnified
And killed five hundred Nigger.
De bullgine bust, de horse run off,
I really thought I'd die;
I shut my eyes to hold my breath,
Susanna, don't you cry.13
The lyrics are both nonsensical and violent.
A recurring theme in post-Civil War minstrelsy was a “black” character longing for life on a slave plantation. The song “My Home in Alabam,” published in 1881, is one example. We don’t have an original recording, but the lyrics went:
How the darkies used to sing, and make the banjo ring,
When they’d tire from working in the cane and corn,
But them days won’t come back again, and it fills my heart with pain,
I remember well my good old massa Sam,
And it’s ev’ry night I weep as I lay me down to sleep,
For the dear old home I had in Alabam’.14
The “black” character in the song expresses the views of white slaveowners. They loved their masters, they never wanted to be free, and now, apparently, they missed slavery.15
The song “Car’lina” took the same feelings and applied them to that state.
Down in ole Car'lina,
Oh, lubs Car'lina!
For dar ole massa libs;
God bless his old white head!16
The 1878 version of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” presented the same message only about Virginia.17 This is a pattern.
In essence, the caricature confirmed everything Anglo Americans wanted to believe about African American inferiority, packaged in toe-tapping melodies.
THE BANJO [10:57-13:46]
But there is more to the story, because blackface minstrelsy also helped popularize African American music, especially the banjo.
The story of the banjo is strange and fascinating. It’s an African instrument which developed in the New World. A variety of stringed instruments were used across the cultures of West Africa. Then, through the Atlantic slave trade, Africans from numerous cultures were brought together in the Americas, and their musical traditions converged.18
Out of the numerous prototypes, the banjo emerged. The first illustration of the instrument is from Jamaica in 1701. It’s unclear exactly how, but the instrument arrived in New York by 1736.19
"The Old Plantation", c. 1780s anonymous folk painting. Depicts African-American slaves dancing to banjo and percussion. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In the early 1800s, the instrument was popular among slaves on the plantations but did not yet have wide appeal. Joel Walker Sweeney was the first minstrel performer to embrace the banjo. Raised on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, he learned to play the banjo from those his family enslaved. When he began a career as a blackface entertainer in the 1830s, he introduced the instrument to Anglo-American audiences.20
In general, the Anglo public was intrigued by the banjo, but it also made them uncomfortable. It was an African instrument after all. But blackface minstrelsy, with its racist and derogatory performances, allowed whites to engage with African American culture while also retaining their sense of superiority. They may enjoy African American music, but they’ll do so while making fun of African Americans. So, the banjo caught on.21
Because they were small and portable, banjos, along with guitars and fiddles, were among the first instruments brought by Anglo settlers to the West. There is evidence that the banjo had reached the Southwest as early as the 1830s.22 By the end of the nineteenth century, the banjo was popularly regarded as “America’s instrument.”23
It was the first, but definitely not the last, time that African American music became popular among the general American public.
CHINESE IMMIGRANTS & YELLOWFACE [13:47-17:06]
Blackface minstrelsy developed in the East as a way to entertain the masses, enjoy Black music, and assert Anglo American superiority. Once the genre was in the West, a similar pattern occurred with a new target—Chinese immigrants.
The first wave of Chinese immigrants to the United States came during the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early ‘50s. Another wave arrived in the late 1860s, employed to construct the western side of Transcontinental Railroad.
In the 1870s, minstrel entertainers in California began performing in “yellowface.”24 Like in blackface, Anglo Americans wore makeup and performed as “Chinese” characters with exaggerated mannerisms and dialects, often using nonsensical lyrics. Sound familiar? There is some evidence that yellowface songs were based on older blackface songs.
Whereas the song “Ching a Ring Chaw,” performed in blackface went:
Chinger ringer, ring ching, ching
Ho ah, Dinah ding kom darkee.
The song “The Artful Chinee” performed in yellowface went:
Chingaring chi, and chingaring chee
Chingaring chi for the young Chinee.25
They’re probably related.
The mispronunciations and gibberish in the lyrics were intended to demonstrate the difference between Anglo Americans and Chinese immigrants to comedic effect. The goal was to show their otherness: minorities are strange, they don’t talk like us.26
Like the “black” character Jim Crow, minstrel performers in the far West created an Asian caricature named John Chinaman.
The song “John Chinaman” first appeared in 1855. The white singer spoke directly to John.
I imagined that the truth, John,
You’d speak when under oath,
But I find you’ll lie and steal too-
Yes, John, you’re up to both.
I thought of rats and puppies, John,
You’d eaten your last fill:
But on such slimy pot-pies, John,
I’m told you dinner still.
Oh, John, I’ve been deceived in you,
And in all your thieving clan,
For our gold is all you’re after John,
To get it as you can.27
The song’s meaning is pretty straightforward. Chinese immigrants, collectively represented in the personality of John, were dishonest thieves who ate puppies. There is even a twinge of disappointment in the song. The singer had originally thought John Chinaman could be assimilated into American culture and give up his strange Chinese customs—but no. The singer believes the Chinese had proven they could never truly be American.
CANTONESE OPERA [17:07-19:20]
If Anglo Americans enjoyed Black music through minstrelsy, what about Chinese music? Here the situation was different.
East Asian instruments and musical scales were unfamiliar to the ears of those raised in the European musical tradition. In Western music, we have 12 notes. This is C [PLAYS C]. This is C# [PLAYS C#]. The distance between these notes is the smallest interval we use. But there is space in between those pitches. We call them microtones, and they’re common in non-Western music.
We don’t have recordings from the 1870s, but to give you an idea of what this sounded like, here is a clip of a modern Chinese opera singer.* You can hear the singer use notes outside of the Western tradition.
If you’re not used to music from non-Western traditions, singing like this can sound strange, even out of tune. But it’s not. It takes incredible skill and vocal control to perform. But many Anglo Americans at the time didn’t see it that way. “Unnatural” was one of the most common descriptions. Some refused to call it music at all, describing it as noise or a “racket.”28
Chinese opera actor prepares for his entrance at the theatre. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
At times, they even tried to silence Chinese music. In 1870, the San Francisco police fined a Chinese man $20 for hitting a gong during a performance.29
From the Anglo perspective, Europeans made beautiful music, those from China made noise. This seemed to confirm the superiority of Western civilization and the Anglo-American race.
CHINESE IMMIGRATION [19:21-21:39]
But other songs reveal that Anglo Americans simultaneously felt that their superiority was fragile. They used music to express the fear that Chinese immigrants posed a serious social and economic threat.
The song “Twelve Hundred More,” written around 1870, captures that anxiety. In it, the singer warns of the danger of Chinese immigrants in California and the impact they would have on Anglo workers and their families.
O California’s coming down as you can plainly see;
They are hiring all the Chinamen and discharging you and me.
......................
They come here by the hundreds, the country is o’errun.
And go to work at half the price - by them the labor is done.
Twelve hundred honest laboring men thrown out of work today,
By the landing of these Chinamen in San Francisco Bay.
Twelve Hundred pure and virtuous girls, in the papers I have read,
Must barter away their virtue to get a crust of bread.30
The song is clearly racist, but it does note a real pattern. Chinese workers often immigrated to the United States in order to send money back home to support their families. And they were burdened with repaying the merchants who paid for their journey. Chinese immigrants therefore had little choice but to work for whatever price was offered, no matter how low. But Anglo Americans resented Chinese workers for undercutting their wages and taking their jobs away.31
The fears expressed in songs like this eventually spurred legislative action. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 blocked immigration from China. It was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902.32 This legislation was the first immigration restriction in American history. Well before the act was passed, we can see the social tensions bubbling up through music.
RACIAL HIERARCHY [21:39-23:03]
But the story gets even more complicated. Minstrel music could attack African Americans and Chinese immigrants at the same time. The 1870 song “Niggers vs. Chinese” was written by an Anglo American as a “black” character making fun of Chinese immigrants.
Dey cannot learn to play the fiddle,
Or pick the old banjo
Or stave de head ob de jamborine
Dey are so mighty slow.33
Did you follow that? An Anglo American performing as a “black” character, speaking in broken English while they mocked Chinese immigrants for being unassimilated into American culture because they couldn’t play the banjo, an African instrument. The racial hierarchy in the West was complicated and prejudice could be very fluid.
Oppression Summary
Whether engaging with Native Americans, African Americans, or Chinese immigrants, music was a powerful way in which Anglo Americans attempted to exert their racial and cultural superiority.
Resistance
PAN-INDIAN IDENTITY [23:04-25:02]
Though Anglo Americans did conquer and settle the West, their triumph was far from absolute. In their own ways, the different peoples of the West used music to share their stories, preserve their culture, and resist Anglo American dominance.
Let’s return to the Native American boarding schools.
In the early days of the movement, Native children were often rounded up and taken without explanation. As a boy, Luther Standing Bear was loaded onto a train with other Native children, none of them understanding what was happening. Years later, Luther recalled that the older boys on the train began to sing the death songs of the Sioux Warriors. These were songs traditionally sung before entering a battle. The warriors would sing them to inspire bravery—the children did the same. In the midst of institutional oppression, uncertainty, and separation from their families, the children encouraged themselves by singing the songs of their people, drawing courage from the memory and melodies of the warriors who came before.34
Though the boarding schools attempted to squash Native identity, they couldn’t fully crush it.
Furthermore, boarding schools brought children together from various Native cultures and tribes. In this context, individuals formed bonds with other children that otherwise would not have developed. The Anglo American effort to eradicate Native culture actually fostered the growth of the Pan-Indian movement.35 Rather than emphasizing the differences between the tribes, Natives came to view themselves as a collective group.
GHOST DANCE [25:02-28:29]
This brings us to the Ghost Dance.
The Ghost Dance Movement was a sacred ceremony. It began in 1890 and was led by Wovoka, a member of the Lakota in Nevada.
It evolved out of earlier dances practiced among Native Americans in the West and included elements of shamanism, ceremonial bathing, and body painting. Those who practiced it believed that the sacred dance would initiate a new world, or, we might better say, it would restore the old world.36
As one contemporary summarized, “The great underlying principle of the Ghost Dance doctrine is that the time will come when the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness.”37
The Ghost Dance quickly spread across the West. At the movement’s height, more than thirty tribes practiced the ceremony from California to Texas to Canada.38 Spread over such a large area, Natives practiced the Ghost Dance ceremony according to their own tribal cultures.39 But the structure of the ritual remained relatively similar. Ceremonies began with the purification of the land and a blessing by a medicine man. Participants were purified in sweat lodges, and then their bodies were painted with symbols. Then, they danced in a circle while a singer performed an opening song.40
The Ghost Dance of the Sioux Indians in North America. Gravur artwork. Amédée Forestier (1854-1940), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The songs of the Ghost Dance* were based off of earlier songs but were adapted to address their current situation. The songs expressed feelings of frustration and at times even desperation. As one Ghost Dance song went:
Father, have pity on me,
Father, have pity on me,
I am crying for thirst,
I am crying for thirst,
All is gone—I have nothing to eat,
All is gone—I have nothing to eat.41
Also present were songs of hope. As the people danced, singers sang of a reunion with their deceased relatives.
There is a father coming,
There is a father coming,
The father says this as he comes,
The father says this as he comes,
“You shall live,” he says as he comes,
“You shall live,” he says as he comes.
Other songs contained lyrics such as “The buffalo are coming,” or “Mother, come home.”42 The songs allow us to see the bravery, frustration, and hope of Natives in the West.
Many scholars view the Ghost Dance as a response to the destruction of Native ways of life. The Lakota, for instance, were at war with the US federal government on and off throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.43 Additionally, a severe drought in 1890 left many Natives discouraged and longing for a return to their traditional ways.44
Through dance, ceremony, and song, Native Americans across the West anticipated a day when all the destruction brought by American westward expansion would be undone.
MEXICAN AMERICANS [28:30-30:31]
Those of Mexican descent also used music to speak against America’s westward expansion. At the conclusion of the Mexican American War in 1848, the Mexican government ceded half of its territory to the United States. The war was initiated by the United States’ annexation of Texas. In the end, it also gained the territory of what would become the states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Many Mexican citizens now found themselves suddenly living in the United States.
Map of U.S. Territorial Growth (1850) from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin, via Wikimedia Commons.
At the same time that the Southwest traded hands, gold was discovered in California, further transforming the region. Nearly 200,000 Anglo Americans rushed to California over the following two years. Between 1850 and 1880, the Mexican American population of Los Angeles shrunk from 82% to 20%. The Spanish-speaking population became an ethnic minority in what was once their country.45
Mexican Americans suffered economically as well. In 1850, the California government passed a foreign miner’s tax which charged $20 a month for all non-Anglos to mine for gold. The law even required California-born Mexicans who were now American citizens to pay the tax. Supposedly they were still foreigners. Immigrants from Europe, however, did not have to pay.46 Furthermore, vigilante groups of Anglo Americans often attacked Mexican settlements and sometimes even lynched those of Mexican descent.47
Naturally, Mexican Americans fought back—physically and through song.
CORRIDOS [30:31-33:56]
Corridos are traditional Mexican ballads. Mexican Americans in the Southwest used corridos to express their frustration with Anglo American settlers. One example is the “Corrido de Joaquin Murrieta.”*
Joaquin Murrieta was a real person, but the details of his life are unclear. What we do know is that Murrieta and his family were from the Mexican state of Sonora and came north to seek gold in the mines of the Sierra Nevadas during the Gold Rush.48 They never found gold, but Murrieta found fame as an outlaw.
The Anglo-American version of the story is that Murrieta was a murderous bandit. California newspapers called him a “notorious outlaw.” He and his band robbed and murdered both Anglo and Chinese miners.49
In the hysteria, rumors circulated across the state. If all the attacks attributed to him were true, Murrieta would have been in several places at once. But ultimately, according to the Anglo story, Murrieta was killed by the California Rangers in 1853. His head was cut off, preserved in a jar of alcohol, and displayed to the public in Stockton, California.50
Mexican Americans told another story. In their version, Murrieta’s attacks were not unprovoked. They claimed that Anglo Americans attacked him first. They beat him, killed his brother, and raped and murdered his wife. Murrieta then became an outlaw because he was seeking revenge.
Picture, possibly by Charles Nahl, of "Joaquín Murieta, The California Bandit", from the book "The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. By Yellow Bird" by John Rollin Ridge, 1854 first edition. unknown, possibly Charles Nahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Whatever the truth, Mexican Americans used music to romanticize Murrieta’s life. Written from Murrieta’s perspective, the “Corrido de Joaquin Murrieta” condemned Anglo Americans. Translated into English, it went:
No one cared for me,
They killed my brother
And the cowards murdered
My wife Carmelita.
This is why I set out on the path
To kill Americans
Now my destiny is no other.
Beware, countrymen!51
The song allowed Mexican Americans to vent their frustration with Anglo-American control of California and the Southwest. To justify their expansion, Anglo Americans often claimed that they were bringing civilization to a backwards and uncultured people. But the Anglo Americans in “Corrido de Joaquin Murrieta” did not bring peace and stability—they brought bloodshed and chaos.
Anglo American authorities banned the song. In the mining towns of Arizona, those who sang it could be arrested. Later, in the 20th century, it was banned from radio play. Nevertheless, it remained a favorite among people of Mexican descent.52
CANTONESE SONGS [33:57-36:15]
Native and Hispanic Americans were not alone. Chinese immigrants likewise used music to criticize America. Cantonese songs from San Francisco’s Chinatown offer a wealth of insight into the hearts and minds of Chinese immigrants.53
Common were songs about their homes; about the parents, wives, and children the workers had left behind. Translated into English, one singer lamented, “I have forsaken wife and children to seek my fortune/ Heart bleeds in pain.” The expedition to America had taken too long, he claimed. “Had I known, I wouldn’t have come at all.”54
Chinese Quarter, San Francisco. William Henry Bishop, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
After the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Cantonese songs emphasized American immigration policies. As one song went, “I am jailed unjustly across the bay/Enduring the unendurable tyranny of immigration officials.” The song went on to compare the guards and officials to wolves.55
Of particular irony is that, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Statue of Liberty was inscribed with a poem welcoming foreign immigrants.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
Simultaneously, on the opposite coast, Chinese immigrants were telling a different story about the Nation. One song claimed:
American laws, more ferocious than tigers,
Many are the people jailed inside wooden halls,
Detained, interrogated, tortured.56
Other songs echoed a similar sentiment.
So, liberty is your national principle;
Why do you practice autocracy?
You don’t uphold justice, you Americans.57
These songs shared a different and darker side of American immigration.
IMMIGRATION & SEXUALITY [36:15-38:18]
How then did Chinese immigrants feel about American culture? In the song “Twelve Hundred More,” which we mentioned earlier, Anglo Americans claimed that Chinese immigrants threatened the sexual purity of white women. They said Chinese workers took jobs away from white men, so white women were forced to sell their bodies. Remember?
Well, numerous Cantonese songs worried about the effect of American culture on Chinese women. Western cultural influence, they complained, was eroding traditional Chinese values. One song went:
A Chinese woman follows Western ways,
Accepting none of her husband’s remonstrations,
O, how can there be conjugal harmony?
Such a woman, the song continued, showed no respect for the classics of Chinese literature. She dressed in fancy clothes and would “trade her flesh to make a living.”58 Another song complained, “we may as well forget about eating the roasted pig.” …A roasted pig was the symbol of a bride’s virginity in the Cantonese wedding tradition.59
Turns out, white men don’t have a monopoly on prejudice and misogyny. Anglo Americans emphasized the economic influence of Chinese workers. Chinese immigrants emphasized the cultural influence of Americans. Both groups feared the influence the other had on the sexuality of their women.
In an indirect way, they were arguing with each other through song.
Resistance Summary
In diverse ways, the non-Anglo peoples of the West empowered and expressed themselves through music, telling their side of the story of westward expansion.
Harmony
NATIVES & THE OVERLAND [38:18-42:15]
Music can be used for oppression. It can also be an act of resistance. Finally, it has the power to heal and bring people together.
In the diaries and memoirs of travelers along the overland trails, there are numerous examples of music fostering peaceful relationships between Native and Anglo Americans.
In 1846, Joseph Aram led a group of pioneers across the plains to California. On the journey, they camped outside Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Fort Laramie’s captain recommended the travelers offer a gift to the Sioux Natives as a sign of friendship. So, Aram and his company prepared a meal of biscuits and coffee, enough for two hundred Native Americans. They spread tablecloths across the grass and presented the meal.
The Sioux accepted the food and drink. That evening, to express their gratitude, young Sioux men and women returned to the fort and performed a dance for the pioneers. Aram appreciated the gesture of thanks, but even more telling, he respected their performance. “With their music and singing, there was some degree of refinement in it all, which was more than we expected to find amongst Indians.”60
When he arrived at Fort Laramie, he came with preconceived ideas about Native Americans and their culture. That evening’s performance, however, changed his mind and Aram found that he respected their musical ability.61
Natives too could appreciate Anglo music. In May of 1854, eighteen-year-old Mary Burrell and her brother also arrived at Fort Laramie. One afternoon, a group of Natives entered the camp, and Burrell gave a performance for them on her melodion, a small portable organ. As they listened, Native and Anglo Americans began to dance to the music together.62
In the Spring of 1864, a wagon train stopped along the Platte River in Nebraska near a Pawnee encampment. While the travelers were eating their supper, Native Americans entered the camp offering song and dance in exchange for money or food. The pioneers welcomed the entertainment. One member of the wagon train, named Joseph Warren, wrote that the performance was heartening to the weary travelers.63
William Johnston, another pioneer, anticipated this type of musical interaction. Prior to departing on a journey to California, he packed a bag full of toy instruments, such as small horns, harmonicas, and mouth harps, to trade with the Native Americans he expected to meet.
When the group of travelers halted to ford the South Platte River, a group of Natives approached, and he seized the opportunity. He unpacked the instruments, demonstrated how they worked, and passed them out. The Native Americans were excited by the new instruments. Johnston claimed they “danced about with glee.” The two groups, making music together, secured their friendship.64
Music certainly didn’t erase all prejudice and hostility between Native and Anglo Americans. Yet, in the midst of violence, forced assimilation, and institutional oppression, personal relationships could still be warm and friendly.
INDIANIST MOVEMENT [42:15-44:12]
At the turn of the century, a generation of Anglo-American composers, known as Indianists, engaged with Native music in a more formal way. Popular from around 1890-1925, these composers based their compositions off Native American songs. The origins of the movement are found in the work of Theodore Baker. Baker was the first American of European descent to systematically study Native American music. It was through Baker’s transcriptions that later musicians and composers had access to Native American melodies.65
Piegan Indian, Mountain Chief, listening to recording with ethnologist Frances Densmore. Harris & Ewing, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Another important figure was ethnologist Alice Fletcher, who in 1900 published Indian Story and Song from North America, an in-depth analysis of the music of the Omaha. Fletcher’s transcriptions of Native music also became a source for composers like Arthur Farwell, who used largely unedited and unabridged Native melodies.66
Here is a taste of one of his compositions called “Navajo War Dance No. 2.”*
It’s pretty sweet, right?
Some Anglo Americans viewed Native music as primitive and barbaric, and the Native American boarding schools sought to eradicate it. But others respected, enjoyed, and incorporated Native music into their own songs.
Whatever race relations were, they were not simple.
AFRICAN AMERICAN PERFORMERS [44:12-47:02]
The lives of several African American performers likewise show how oppression and respect could co-exist.
Thomas Wiggins, nicknamed “Blind Tom,” was born into slavery in 1849. Despite his disability, he was a musical prodigy and could master difficult piano pieces by ear. At age eleven, he performed for President James Buchanan in the White House. During the Civil War, his master hired him out to perform for wounded Confederate soldiers. Even after Emancipation, his disability left him in the care of his former owner’s family, who made a fortune serving as his managers.67
Blind Tom was exploited his whole life. But there is more to the story. He also won acclaim from Anglo audiences across the country who recognized his rare gifts. In 1873, he gave a series of performances in San Francisco to packed halls.68 In 1894, he again toured the West. The San Francisco Call newspaper described him as “the Negro wonder” and a “musical genius,” and the newspaper encouraged readers to attend his concert before he left town.69
Despite persistent oppression, African Americans could defy prejudice and sometimes win over Anglo Americans with their musical talent.
Anna and Emma Hyers were African American sisters born in Sacramento, California and serve as another example. The girls were vocal prodigies. In 1867, at the ages of just twelve and ten years old, the sisters made their performance debut at San Francisco’s Metropolitan Theater. The following day, the San Francisco Chronicle gave a raving review: “those who heard them last evening were unanimous in their praises.” The article claimed the girls possessed “rare natural gifts.”70
Anna Madah Hyers dressed as 'Urlina' in the opera Urlina, the African Princess (1879). See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Emma Louise Hyers in a scene identified in some sources as from Out of Bondage and in other sources as from Urlina, the African Princess. Bradley Rulopov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Hyers sisters were born in the West, but they took their talents back East. In 1869, while on tour in Boston, one critic claimed they were among the best singers in the country. They mastered European music and performed songs from Italian operas while also celebrating their own heritage by performing negro spirituals, all to the acclaim of Anglo-American audiences.71
CROSS-RACIAL LOVE [47:03-49:00]
Sometimes, songs explored the personal relationships of those of different races. As we saw before, corridos allowed Hispanic Americans to express their frustration with Anglo control of the West. Other songs reveal a different side to Hispanic and Anglo relationships.
The song “Spanish is the Loving Tongue”* is based upon a poem written in 1907. It tells the story of an Anglo-American cowboy who travels south of the border and falls in love with a Mexican woman.
My heart would nigh stop beating,
When I heard her tender greeting,
Whispered soft for me alone,
“Mi Amor, Mi Corazón.”
Despite the bliss of their love, the story takes a sad turn. The cowboy gets into a “foolish gamblin’” fight and has to flee. Then he found he couldn’t cross the border again and return to her.
Never seen her since that night,
I can’t cross the line, you know.
She was “Mex” and I was white:
Like as not it’s better so.
Yet I’ve always sort of missed her
Since the last wild night I kissed her;
Left her heart and lost my own,
“Adiós, Mi Corazón.”
These lyrics are fascinating. They concede that perhaps the racial divide was too much for their romance to overcome— “she was ‘Mex’, and I was white.” But the singer loved and missed her regardless. This bittersweet ballad was widely popular among the cowboys of the West, showing that there was, at least in theory, an acceptance of interracial love.72
DIVERSITY IN THE WEST [49:01-50:14]
Finally, musical encounters were not always dualistic. They often involved several cultures and races at once.
For example, William Drummond Steward was born in Scotland in 1795, but he traveled to the United States and lived among the Western traders and mountain men from 1833-38. The mountain men used to hold annual trading meetings called rendezvous. At one meeting, in 1833 at Horse Creek, Wyoming, Steward observed a fascinating intersection of musical traditions. While a group of white men sat in a Native American lodge, a Native American woman presented a guitar to the group. One attendee took the instrument and played a Spanish song.73 Amid peaceful trade between Anglo and Native Americans, a Scotsman sat in a Native American lodge and enjoyed Spanish music.
It was a small moment, but it captures the diversity of the West and the power of music to bring people together.
CONCLUSION [50:15-51:54]
The history of westward expansion is complex, diverse, and dynamic. Music is a powerful resource for understanding that history, because it tells a multi-faceted story.
For many Anglo Americans, their music was evidence of their racial superiority, and they often sang songs mocking other races. But African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese immigrants sang their own songs, telling their own stories which resisted the narrative of Anglo supremacy. And music could bring them all together. Despite institutional oppression and culturally engrained prejudice, individuals could sit and enjoy each other’s songs.
The American West was diverse and so was its music.
Thanks for listening.
[American History Remix is written and produced by Will Schneider and Lyndsay Smith. For the latest updates, be sure to follow us on Instagram and Threads. Check out our website for episode transcripts, recommended reading, and resources for teachers. That’s AmericanHistoryRemix.com.]
REFERENCES
Andersson, Rani-Henrik. The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Aram, J. Across the Continent in a Caravan: Recollections of a Journey from New York through the Western Wilderness and Over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific in 1846. Edited by James Tompkins Watson. New Haven: Associated Publishers of American Records, 1907.
Bhandari, Sudhanshu. "Discrimination and Perseverance amongst the Chinese in California in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries.” China Report 47 (2011): 1-24.
Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Browner, Tara. “‘Breathing the Indian Spirit’: Thoughts on Musical Borrowing and the ‘Indianist’ Movement in American Music." American Music 15, (1997): 265-84.
Buckner, Jocelyn L. “‘Spectacular Opacities’: The Hyers Sisters’ Performances of Respectability and Resistance.” African American Review 45 (2012): 309-323.
Christy, Edwin P. Christy's Panorama Songster: Containing the Songs as Sung by the Christy, Campbell, Pierce's Minstrels, and Sable Brothers. New York: William H. Murphy, [1850?]. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t01z42r99.
Dary, David. Seeking Pleasure in the Old West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.
Dubois, Laurent. The Banjo: America's African Instrument. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Eastman, Mary. Dahcotah: or, Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling. New York: J. Wiley, 1849.
Finson, Jon W. The Voices That Are Gone: Themes in 19th-Century American Popular Song. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Gutiérrez, David. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Hom, Marlon K. Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Howe, David Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Jacoby, Karl. Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.
Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
Johnston, WM. G. Overland to California. Oakland, CA: Biobooks, 1948.
LaFlesche, Francis. The Middle Five: Indians Boys at School. Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1909.
Magee, Jeffery. “Ragtime and Early Jazz.” In Cambridge History of American Music, edited by David Nicholls, 388-417. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Martin, Charles W. ed., “Joseph Warren Arnold’s Journal of His Trip to and from Montana, 1864-1866.” Nebraska History 55 (1974): 462-552.
Moon, Krystyn R. Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Paredes, Américo, ed. A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
Parkhurst, Melissa. To Win the Indian Heart: Music at Chemawa Indian School. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2014.
Pierce, Jason. Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016.
Saxton, Alexander. "Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology." American Quarterly 27(1975): 3-28.
Siber, Irwin and Earl Robinson, ed. Songs of the Great American West. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.
Southern, Eileen, ed. “Black Musicians and Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy.” In Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, edited by Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, 43-63. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971.
Taylor, Bayard. Eldorado; or Adventure in the Path of Empire; comprising; a Voyage to California, via Panama; Life in Fan Francisco and Monterey; pictures of the Gold region and Experiences of Mexican Travel. New York: G. P Putnam, 1861.
Vander, Judith. Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
White, Richard. The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Yung, Judy, Gordon H. Chang and H. Mark Lai, ed. Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
MUSIC CREDITS
"Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta" by Luis Méndez and Guadalupe Bracamonte from the recording entitled Raíces Latinas: Smithsonian Folkways Latino Roots Collection, SFW40470, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. (p) 2002. Used by permission.
“Ghost Dance Song” performed by Red Shadow Singers. Used with permission. Turtle Lodge (Sagkeeng First Nation, Manitoba, Canada) and Red Shadow Singers.
“Navajo War Dance no. 2” by Arthur Farwell. Performed by Chris Brewer, 2024. Public Domain.
“Oh! Susanna” By Stephen Foster. Performed by Tom Roush.
“Rosa Cheng Artist Video” by Rosa Cheng, Published 2021. Permission granted by Rosa Cheng, Artistic Director of the Vancouver Cantonese Opera.
“Spanish is the Loving Tongue” by Charles Badger Clark and Billy Simon. Arranged by Lara Randby. Performed by Matt Stutzman. Used with permission.
NOTES
1 Mary Eastman, Dahcotah; or, Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling (New York: J. Wiley, 1849), iv.
2 Eastman, Dahcotah, xii.
3 Melissa Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart: Music at Chemawa Indian School (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2014), 24.
4 Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 604.
5 Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart, 25; Francis LaFlesche, The Middle Five: Indians Boys at School (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1909), xii-xiii.
6 Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart, 32.
7 Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart, 32.
8 LaFlesche, The Middle Five, 26, 28, 33.
9 Alexander Saxton, "Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology," American Quarterly 27 (1975), 5.
10 Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 638-39.
11 Jon W. Finson, The Voices That Are Gone: Themes in 19th-Century American Popular Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 160. Saxton, "Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology," 13.
12 Bayard Taylor, Eldorado; or Adventure in the Path of Empire; comprising; a Voyage to California, via Panama; Life in Fan Francisco and Monterey; pictures of the Gold region and Experiences of Mexican Travel (New York: G. P Putnam, 1861), 275-76.
13 Finson, The Voices That Are Gone, 181-82.
14 Finson, The Voices That Are Gone, 206.
15 Finson, The Voices That Are Gone, 18.
16 Edwin P. Christy, Christy's Panorama Songster: Containing the Songs as Sung by the Christy, Campbell, Pierce's Minstrels, and Sable Brothers (New York: William H. Murphy, [1850?]), 88, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t01z42r99.
17 Christy, Christy's Panorama Songster, 206.
18 Laurent Dubois, The Banjo: America's African Instrument (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 22-23. For more on African musical patterns and their transmission to America, see Richard Cullen Rath, “Hearing American History,” The Journal of American History 95, (2008): 419-20.
19 Dubois, The Banjo, 65, 73.
20 Dubois, The Banjo, 168-69.
21 Jeffery Magee, "Ragtime and Early Jazz," in Cambridge History of American Music, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 389.
22 David Dary, Seeking Pleasure in the Old West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 282, 12-14.
23 Dubois, The Banjo, 213-15.
24 For more on early hostilities towards Chinese, see Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang and H. Mark Lai, ed. Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 2-4.
25 Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 40-42.
26 Moon, Yellowface, 42-43.
27 Moon, Yellowface, 36-37.
28 Moon, Yellowface, 12-13.
29 “Chinese Musical Art,” Daily Evening Bulletin, April, 26, 1870, 3. “Chinese Music,” Daily Evening Bulletin, April 27, 1870, 3.
30 Irwin Siber and Earl Robinson, ed. Songs of the Great American West (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 140-41.
31 “Chinese Immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Acts.” Office of the Historian, accessed September 11, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigration. Yung, Chang and Lai, ed., Chinese American Voices, 4.
32 “Chinese Immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Acts.”
33 Moon, Yellowface, 48.
34 Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart, 25.
35 Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart, 32.
36 Judith Vander, Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 8.
37 Vander, Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion, 9.
38 Rani-Henrik Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 28.
39 Vander, Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion, 10.
40 Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, 54-56.
41 Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, 44.
42 Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, 59-60.
43 Andersson, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, 5-17.
44 Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 119-120. For a critique of this perspective, see Raymond DeMallie, "The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account," Pacific Historical Review 51 (1982): 385-89.
45 David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 19, 21.
46 Jason Pierce, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016), 232-33.
47 Peirce, Making the White Man's West, 233-34.
48 Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 29-30.
49 Américo Paredes, ed. A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 34.
50 Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, 38-39.
51 Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 216-19.
52 Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, 216-19.
53 Sudhanshu Bhandari, "Discrimination and Perseverance amongst the Chinese in California in the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries,” China Report 47 (2011): 9.
54 Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 157.
55 Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain, 83.
56 Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain, 84.
57 Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain, 85.
58 Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain, 218.
59 Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain, 216.
60 J. Aram, Across the Continent in a Caravan: Recollections of a Journey from New York through the Western Wilderness and Over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific in 1846, ed. James Tompkins Watson (New Haven: Associated Publishers of American Records, 1907), 623.
61 Aram, Across the Continent in a Caravan, 623.
62 Dary, Seeking Pleasure in the Old West, 6-7.
63 Charles W. Martin, ed., “Joseph Warren Arnold’s Journal of His Trip to and from Montana, 1864-1866,” Nebraska History 55 (1974), 472.
64 WM. G. Johnston, Overland to California (Oakland: Biobooks, 1948), 64-66.
65 Tara Browner, “‘Breathing the Indian Spirit’: Thoughts on Musical Borrowing and the ‘Indianist’ Movement in American Music,” American Music 15 (1997): 265. Philip Joseph Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 74.
66 Browner, “‘Breathing the Indian Spirit,” 273-74, 277.
67 Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971), 251-254. “Wiggins, Thomas “Blind Tom” (1849-1908),” Black Past, accessed August 29, 2024, http://www.blackpast.org/aah/wiggins-thomas-blind-tom-1849-1908. “Blind Piano Prodigy Thomas Greene Bethune,” The White House Historical Association, accessed August 29, 2024, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/blind-piano-prodigy-thomas-greene-bethune.
68 “Blind ‘Tom,’” Pacific Appeal, May 3, 1873, 2.
69 “Blind Tom’s Last,” San Francisco Call, November 11, 1894, 5.
70 Jocelyn L. Buckner, “‘Spectacular Opacities’: The Hyers Sisters' Performances of Respectability and Resistance,” African American Review 45, (2012): 311.
71 Eileen Southern, ed, “Black Musicians and Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean et al. (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 254-55. Buckner, “‘Spectacular Opacities,’” 311.
72 Siber and Robinson, Songs of the Great American West, 203-5.
73 Dary, Seeking Pleasure in the Old West, 28-29.