| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. By W. T. Lhamon Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. xiv, 459 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-01062-0.)

Students of the nineteenth-century blackface performer T. D. (Thomas Dartmouth) Rice have long acknowledged the phenomenal success of his "Jim Crow" songs, dances, skits, and plays but seldom because they have read them, sung them, danced them, or seen them performed. In Jump Jim Crow, W. T. Lhamon Jr. offers readers thirteen of Rice's songs from the Harvard Theatre Collection (of an unknown number written, performed, and/or published), eight edited prompt scripts from the British Library (of twenty-two different plays Lhamon verifies Rice performed between 1836 and 1844), the burlesque opera Otello (discovered in the New York Public Library by Julian Mates in 1985), and two biographies of Jim Crow (an American version from 1835 and a British one from 1840). To these, Lhamon adds a substantial introduction reclaiming the Jim Crow character as a transgressive figure, "what the political regime of Jim Crow laws in the South projected on all African Americans, of every class, and ... used to contain them" (p. 37). This Jim Crow "jumped" for both white and black audiences, chiefly, Lhamon argues, the "'mobility'" rather than the "nobility" (ibid.).

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