Part 3.
Before we get a little more into the individual songs on the album, I'd like to ask you about your name. Is there some secret meaning behind it? Did you name yourself after Bones McCoy, the Star Trek character?
Oh no, not at all. That connection actually never occured to me. I didn't watch a lot of Star Trek when I was a kid. No, the original Bones was a 19th century minstrel show character. You know, blackface minstrelsy was America's chief popular mass entertainment at the time and extremely significant in shaping American ideas about race, class, and gender. Continuing to this day, actually.
What were those shows about?
Well, white performers wearing blackface and ill-fitting, kind of ragtag clothes, imitated and in fact appropriated black folk culture. They spoke in some sort of fake black accent, sang songs - mostly plantation songs like "Swanee River" - delivered funny stump speeches and so on. Those "darkie shows," as they were sometimes called, created kind of a national clown: the dancing, careless, happy-go-lucky plantation Sambo. In the 1830s, they were formalized into several different parts, one of which was usually a comic routine with a white genteel interlocutor and two blackface endmen. One of those endmen was called "Bones," or "Mr. Bones," after the instrument he played, a kind of castanets. In the early days of the minstrel show he was sometimes the master of ceremonies as well.
Sounds like a terribly racist thing to me. Why do you want to be perceived in that tradition?
The shows were racist to some extent, no doubt. But the cultural work they performed was far more complex than that. After all, blackface minstrelsy was also the first prolonged, featured appearance of black culture on the American stage, if only in this painfully distorted manner. What's important to be aware of, though, is the enormous impact the minstrel show had on vaudeville, burlesque, musical and most of all on our ideas of American folklife. I guess it wouldn't go too far to claim that it created that folklife in the first place. You know, the cabins, cottonbales, wagons, steamboats, railfences, the harvest moons, the barefooted children, the magnolia, honeysuckle and wisteria vine, all the longing songs addressed to them - the very "South" itself! And these images continue through today in albums, catalogues, advertisements, product packaging, toys, as well as films, radio, television and now even music videos. All sorts of modern masks hiding an old tradition, you know? In the early 90s, Michelle Shocked recorded an album called Arkansas Traveler. That's where "Blackberry Blossom" is from, by the way. In the notes to that album, she explains that her original intention was to put a picture of herself wearing blackface on the cover, with the intention of pointing to the real roots of many of the tunes included, which the white mainstream believes were somehow immaculately conceived in Las Vegas or Tin Pan Alley. She says that "blacking up" should be done correctly, in a context of genuine respect for the cultures we ape. I like that. So Bones is kind of a subversive gesture of respect, not at all of mockery or derision.
