Meet Gumbo Chaff, The Ethiopian Flute Instructor, etc., etc.

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1848, a curious little volume of "negro melodies of the day," The Ethiopian Flute Instructor, was published in Boston. Containing ninety-one songs for the flute, including Band of Niggers, Get Along Home Yaller Gals, Jim Crack Corn, Carry Me Back to Old Virginia, Happy Are We Darkies, Jim Crow Polka, De Old Jaw Bone, My Pretty Yaller Gal, Old Zip Coon, Stop Dat Knocking, and many more, it was written by one "Gumbo Chaff."

Who was Gumbo Chaff? He's credited as A. M. A. First Banjo Player to the King of Congo, and author of the Ethiopian Glee Book, Ethiopian Accordeon Instructor, Ethiopian Violin Instructor, Ethiopian Flute Instructor, &c., &.

He wasn't Ethiopian, an upscale American euphemism for a black man. Gumbo Chaff wasn't even a man. He was a folk character who became a song which became a pseudonym.

Gumbo Chaff was one of the earliest black-face characters in America, based upon characters found in tall tales told by river boatmen and frontiersmen during the Jacksonian era. The song Gumbo Chaff merged these frontier elements with stereotypes of black slaves, creating a new character who lived

On de Ohio bluff in de state of Indiana,
Dere's where I live, chock up to de Habbana,
Eb'ry mornin early Massa gib me likker,
I take my net and paddle and I put out de quicker,
I jump into my kiff and I down the river driff,
And I cotch as many cat fish as ever nigger liff.

Gumbo Chaff, the song, was first performed in the early 1830s. It became a standard in the repertoire of early black-face performers such as Thomas Dartmouth Rice and George Washington Dixon. Because of the song's popularity, the contemporary black riverboatman became a popular character in minstrel shows, and black-face singers routinely performed "Gumbo Chaff" with a mock flatboat on stage.  

So it made sense for a publisher in Boston to ascribe authorship of a collection of minstrel songs to Gumbo Chaff. The author was actually Elias Howe Jr., the book's publisher and also author of minstrel song collections for banjo, accordion, voice, and violin. He was - no surprise - a white man.

The Elias Howe Company was a 19th and early 20th century musical firm located in Boston and founded by Elias Howe, Jr. (1820–1895), a fiddler. This Howe was not that Howe, the inventor of the sewing machine, but a contemporary and possibly a distant relative. How many Howes of the same name at the same time could there have been in Massachusetts, one fiddling in Boston, the other sewing across the river in Cambridge? What, you were expecting Minstrel Songs For The Sewing Machine? Tote that barge, lift that bale, sew that hem, mend that seam!

Howe's first collection of songs, for the fiddle, appeared in 1840 as The Musician's Companion. By 1850, Howe had published several other song collections and musical instruction books as noted above. In the same year he sold his copyrights to the Oliver Ditson Company of Boston and, by agreement, refrained from publishing music for ten years, after which he returned to publishing and became one of the country's most prolific music publishers. During the American Civil War Howe expanded his business to include manufacturing drums for the military. He was offered the position of Director of Bands for the United States Army with the rank of Lt. Colonel by President Lincoln but he chose to continue manufacturing drums and fifes and publishing books on their performance by marching bands.

Of note to folk musicologists is that on page forty-two of this volume the music for Stephen Foster's  O! Susanna appears. This was not the first publication of O! Susanna - that occurred in the same year (Cinncinati: W.E. Peters, 1848) - but it seems to be the song's second appearance in print, and its first in a published collection. The first public performance of the song occurred on Saturday, September 11, 1847, when the Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh, PA presented a "Grand Gala Concert." At that performance "Susanna - A new song, never before given to the public," was sung.

Here's a modern perfomance of Gumbo Chaff:

 __________

CHAFF, Gumbo (pseud. of Elias Howe), The Ethiopian Flute Instructor, Containing Full and Complete Instructions, With All the Popular Negro Melodies of the Day, Including Those of the Christy Minstrels. Boston: Published and Sold by Elias Howe, 1848. First edition. Oblong 4to. 6 3/16 x 9 3/4 inches. 48 pp. Quarter cloth over printed wrappers.

__________

Images courtesy of John Howell For Books, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.
__________
__________

Frederick Douglass Gets A Raise, From $1.00 To $31,200

by Stephen J. Gertz

One of only five extant copies.

In 1847, Frederick Douglass, discontent with his fee for the popular articles he wrote for William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, asked for a raise, from $1.00 to $2.50 per piece.

Edmund Quincy, editor of The Liberator in Garrison's absence, wrote of Douglass's request,  "Talking of unconscionable niggers, I wrote to Douglass to ask him what he should consider a fair compensation for the letters [articles] that he proposed he sh'd write for the Standard [The Anti-Slavery Standard]. In due time I rec'd and answer saying he should think two dollars and a half about right. I consulted Wendell [Phillips] about it & he thought we had better not beat him down; but tell him that $1.00 was as much as we could afford." (McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass, page 147).

It was clear to Douglass that there were white abolitionists who placed their own position as the self-appointed standard-bearers of social justice above the interests of the famed African-American fighting for social justice.

And so that fall Douglass moved to upstate New York to publish his own abolitionist newspaper, The North Star. Before leaving his home in Boston, however, Douglass took with him an unknown number of copies of the sheets for the Boston Anti-Slavery Society's 1847 printing of his Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (first edition 1845). Once established in Rochester, he had them bound up with the North Star imprint, as seen above.

Only five copies of Douglass's Narrative with The North Star imprint are known to have survived: two in private collections, a defective copy found in a dealer catalog,  one located at the New York Historical Society, and the present copy recently offered at Swann Galleries Printed & Manuscript African-Americana sale where it was estimated to sell for $18K-$22K.

It sold for $31,200, including premium.

Douglass earned this bonus albeit too late to take to the bank and enjoy it.

__________

DOUGLASS, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: at the Anti-Slavery Office, 1847 - Rochester: Published at the North Star Office, 1848. Demi-8vo. xii, [xiii]-xvi, [1]-125 pp.  Original roan-backed printed paper-covered boards; some discoloration and a few abrasions to the front board tips; considerable foxing throughout; early ownership in pencil of "John H. Jones, 1848" and a few repetitions. Lacking the frontispiece portrait of Douglass, as do all other copies examined.

__________

Image courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.

__________

__________

The First Novel On Free Blacks And Race Relations In The North (1857)

By Stephen J. Gertz

The book which now appears before the public may be of interest in relation to a question which the late agitation of the subject of slavery has raised in many thoughtful minds; viz.--Are the race at present held as slaves capable of freedom, self-government, and progress?

The author is a coloured young man, born and reared in the city of Philadelphia...

Being one of the nearest free cities of any considerable size to the slave territory, it has naturally been a resort of escaping fugitives, or of emancipated slaves...

The author takes pleasure in recommending this simple and truthfully-told story to the attention and interest of the friends of progress and humanity in England.

                                                                                     - H.B. Stowe.
                                                                           

The Garies and Their Friends, by Frank J. Webb, the second novel by an African-American (preceded by Clotel; or, The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown, 1853) and the first to consider the lives of free African Americans in the pre-Civil War North was issued in 1857 - but not in the United States. Published in London, it required an ocean to separate it from its home.

Perhaps the sympathetic mixed-race marriage that forms the center of the book had something to do with it. Or, the violent racism and riots that free Blacks experienced  in the City of Brotherly Love, one of the most racially integrated cities in the nation  but intensely so. Maybe it was the author's satire of benevolent yet patronizing white Philadelphian abolitionists who preferred sentimental tear-jerkers ala Uncle Tom's Cabin and didn't appreciate criticism. Possibly, light-skinned blacks passing as whites inspired the heebie-jeebies in fair-skinned citizens. Perchance the idea that black Americans should become capitalists and gain wealth was too much,  the final Whoa, Nelly!

This was not subject matter that comfortable whites found palatable. Though sentimental in its own right, the novel was not an uplifting experience. It provoked anxiety. It was not a great beach read on American shores; it left too much sand in the shorts.

Moreover, it didn't dwell on slavery and its horrors; it was not an abolitionist tract condemning the moral stain. And it raised questions about whether emancipation would succeed. The novel was, for the most part, given short shrift in America, if noticed at all.

It wasn't published in the U.S. until 112 years after its original appearance, in 1969.

Author Frank J. Webb (1828–1894) was an African-American poet, and essayist. The Garies and Their Friends was his first and only novel.

He was born in Philadelphia and grew to become an active member of the city’s free African American community. He married in 1845, and his wife, Mary, gained admiration for her dramatic readings of works by Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Longfellow. Her work attracted the attention of Harriet Beecher Stowe; Stowe was so impressed by Mary’s readings that she adapted scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin expressly for her to perform.

HBS helped to arrange a transatlantic tour for Mary, and, armed with letters of introduction from Stowe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Frank and Mary traveled to England in 1856. Mary’s readings gained critical acclaim, and the two received a warm welcome from many British nobles, including Lady Noel Byron (Anne Isabella Noel Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and Baroness Byron) to whom Frank dedicated The Garies..., and from Henry, Lord Brougham (1st Baron Brougham and Vaux), who wrote a brief though  enthusiastic introduction for the book.

"According to its many critics...The Garies and Their Friends seems to share [Harriet Beccher Stowe's] doubts concerning the capability of 'the race at present held as slaves" to govern themselves. At least that's one way to read an African American author's frustrating decision to write a novel in 1857 that spends little time detailing the horrors of slavery - a subject that contemporary black writers took pains to elaborate.

"The year that the novel was published, a London Sunday Times reviewer chided Webb for leaving 'untouched' the problem of how emancipation 'is to be effected, without as much injury to slave as slaveowner.' For the most part, time did not change critical attitudes toward the text...More recently, critics...have argued persuasively that the text deserves analysis, not only as the second novel written by an African American, but also as one of the first to deal with volatile questions of identity and loyalty within the black community.

"Yet Webb's text still continues to languish from a general lack of scholarly attention" (Duane, Anna Mae. Remaking Black Motherhood in Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends. African American Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 [Summer 2004], pp. 201-212).

The first edition is scarce, particularly in the original cloth. OCLC notes only a handful of copies in institutional libraries, and no copies of the book, in cloth or its simultaneous issue in wrappers, have come to auction within the last twenty-five years.

The Garies and Their Friends is an extremely important American novel, if for no other reason than it illustrates the question unresolved since Webb  first broached it in fiction: Can American blacks successfully assimilate into the American mainstream without losing themselves and their culture in the quest for the American Dream?

__________

WEBB, Frank J. The Garies and Their Friends. With an Introductory Preface by Harrier Beecher Stowe. London and New York: G. Routledge & Co., 1857. First edition (issued simultaneously in wrappers as a "yellowback"). Octavo. vi, [2], 392 pp. Publisher's original dark blue cloth.

BAL 19392.
__________

Images courtesy of Between The Covers, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
__________
__________