Oh! oh!
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!

The depreciation of the race that Mungo started continued, and when in
1781 _Robinson Crusoe_ was given as a pantomime at Drury Lane, Friday
was represented as a Negro. The exact origins of Negro minstrelsy
are not altogether clear; there have been many claimants, and it is
interesting to note in passing that there was an "African Company"
playing in New York in the early twenties, though this was probably
nothing more than a small group of amateurs. Whatever may have been
the beginning, it was Thomas D. Rice who brought the form to genuine
popularity. In Louisville in the summer of 1828, looking from one of the
back windows of a theater, he was attracted by an old and decrepit slave
who did odd jobs about a livery stable. The slave's master was named
Crow and he called himself Jim Crow. His right shoulder was drawn up
high and his left leg was stiff at the knee, but he took his deformity
lightly, singing as he worked. He had one favorite tune to which he
had fitted words of his own, and at the end of each verse he made a
ludicrous step which in time came to be known as "rocking the heel." His
refrain consisted of the words:

Wheel about, turn about,
Do jis so,
An' ebery time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow.

Rice, who was a clever and versatile performer, caught the air, made up
like the Negro, and in the course of the next season introduced Jim Crow
and his step to the stage, and so successful was he in his performance
that on his first night in the part he was encored twenty times.[1] Rice
had many imitators among the white comedians of the country, some of
whom indeed claimed priority in opening up the new field, and along with
their burlesque these men actually touched upon the possibilities of
plaintive Negro melodies, which they of course capitalized. In New York
late in 1842 four men--"Dan" Emmett, Frank Brower, "Billy" Whitlock, and
"Dick" Pelham--practiced together with fiddle and banjo, "bones"
and tambourine, and thus was born the first company, the "Virginia
Minstrels," which made its formal debut in New York February 17, 1843.
Its members produced in connection with their work all sorts of popular
songs, one of Emmett's being "Dixie," which, introduced by Mrs. John
Wood in a burlesque in New Orleans at the outbreak of the Civil War,
leaped into popularity and became the war-song of the Confederacy.
Companies multipled apace. "Christy's Minstrel