What makes Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, and Slappy White black comedians? Why do black musicians from Louis Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie to NWA combine antics and clowning with their serious artistry? How is it that O. J. Simpson and Tupac Shakur, and to a lesser extent Michael Jackson, draw at least as much sympathy from the black community as John Henry and Joe Louis? Why are rap music and the hip-hop lifestyle so prominent in popular culture today?

One of the most important figures in the black folk tradition is the trickster. Such figures appear in many cultures around the world, of course—think of the Norse Loki and the Native American Coyote, for example—and the black trickster may owe something to specifically African traditions, but in the context of North American slavery he developed a life of his own, a special prominence. His character exhibited a dialectic, combining apparent opposites. He could sing both sacred and profane music, gospel and blues, sometimes combining them in ways that defied convention. His ethic was somehow good but also bad, combining the hero and the villain.

At one level the trickster was (and is) simply a survivor. Belonging to an oppressed group in America, where can one find recognition? Among other places, in the entertainment world. It's a place for a double life. African Americans were considered exotic, comical, different. So they often learned how to please the crowd with exaggerated frolics and expected caricatures. Under the surface, though, many of them developed a level of freedom—freedom simply to exist, and freedom for artistic development.

The greatest of the early 20th century black comedians was Bert Williams. Born in Nassau, in 1874, Egbert Austin Williams spent most of his life on the stage. He could sing, he could dance, and he was a marvelous banjo-player. In addition, he told stories. One of his best known tales was "You Can't Do Nothing Till Martin Gets Here," a wild story of a black preacher in a haunted house full of cats. The way he told it, however, had less to do with the stand-up comedian than with the raconteur of ghost stories. He longed to be taken seriously, and he constructed his narratives with extraordinary imagery and timing. Perhaps his most famous song was "Nobody," written with his friend Alex Rogers and published in 1905. For the rest of his life, Williams was not allowed to leave the stage without performing it. The song was a story, which he spoke, and the timing was excruciating. Try as he might to catch up with a slide trombone, he couldn't, and the delay was tragic. Although the band behind him played in a slow ragtime style, the song was mournful:

When life seems full of clouds and rain,
And I am full of nothin' and pain,
Who soothes my thumpin', bumpin' brain?
Nobody.

When winter comes with snow and sleet,
And me with hunger and cold feet,
Who says, "Here's twenty-five cents, go
get somethin' to eat?"
 Nobody.

It is almost impossible to imagine the poignancy of this song without hearing it live. Fortunately, we can do this, or almost, thanks to the extraordinary perseverance of Archeophone Records, in St. Joseph, Illinois, who have found and republished Williams' very rare Victor Monarch recordings, beginning in 1901 and ending with his final releases in 1922, the year of his death at the age of forty-six. [1]

In 1893, Williams teamed up with George Walker, and began what would become the best black comedy act on Broadway. They made the Cakewalk an internationally famous dance. Though the titles and plots make us wince today, Williams and Walker were pioneers in artistic and racial advancement. A large part of their vision involved reclaiming black entertainment from its white imitators. Minstrel shows were very popular at the time, involving white actors who painted their faces black, and billed themselves as "coons." Williams and Walker believed this art form "belonged to us by the laws of nature," and so they created an act to be called Two Real Coons. They helped young talent to develop onstage, the place where the "character of the African race can be studied from a real artistic point of view." [2] This meant staging plays such as In Dahomey, with a nostalgic trip "home" to Africa.

Walker, alas, became seriously ill with a disease then known as "paresis," which gradually paralyzed him until he was no longer able to perform with Williams, who reluctantly branched out on his own. Known as the "personification of comic woe," Williams sang the blues before Ma Rainey. He loved to mock ridiculous pastors and their preaching, as well as the black church community, though underneath he had a deep affection for both. Jelly Roll Morton celebrated him, as did Perry Como and Ben Vereen. He was the supreme example of "signifying," in the long and still vital tradition traced by Henry Louis Gates, speaking a double language: to white people, he delivered the required stereotype and got lots of laughter; to blacks, he made coded in-jokes which signified, "We shall overcome someday." [3]

Another one of Bert Williams' admirers was Duke Ellington, who liked to perform arrangements of some of the "Elder Eatmore" sermons. This most urbane trickster found many ways to become clandestinely creative. In a famous example from the history of early jazz, it is known that Ellington accepted the otherwise humiliating genre of "jungle music" during his stint at the Cotton Club (1927-31) while he simultaneously developed his extraordinary artistic skills in the jazz medium, using the club as a sort of laboratory for musical experimentation. He too was signifying.

One of the defining trickster characters to emerge early in the African American experience was the so-called "bad nigger." On the surface, he was a threat to the surrounding legitimate society, because he was free to defy his oppressors with unruly behavior. Yet, as John Roberts argues in Trickster to Badman, the "bad nigger" is not a bad person in any traditional sense. His goal is neither destructive nor deviant. He is a hero because he is able to challenge the solidarity required for white dominance to succeed. He finds a wedge to pry open the paternalism of his oppressors. [4]

By the 1890s, at the height of the Reconstruction era, the "badman" was a fixture in black popular culture. He could trick the sheriff and outwit the judge. He could manipulate his adjudicators and defy their laws. Singers and storytellers attributed near supernatural powers to this trickster, making him into a conjuror of freedom. One of the most emulated of such heroes was Railroad Bill, a character who seduced another man's wife. Minstrels who sang about him would often personalize the story, having Railroad Bill trying to steal away their own woman. Will Bennett sang a blues about Bill seducing his wife, justifying Bennett's declared promise to go on a rampage of revenge against everyone that ever betrayed him. Here, the singer out-tricks the trickster.

The legendary 1930s blues musician Robert Johnson was a badman of mythic proportions. Some thought he had made a pact with the Devil—that's what enabled him to play the guitar so well. He had to keep moving around in order to stave off the inevitable payoff, his own death. This story is passionately told in Johnson's own song, "Hell Hound on My Trail." He did die mysteriously at the age of thirty-six. Legend has it he was poisoned by a jealous husband. Although the facts are unclear, the emerging folklore suggested that Johnson triumphed over all his oppressors by some sort of conjuration. Eric Clapton copied Johnson's solos to furnish music for Cream in the 1960s (and issued a recording of covers, Me and Mr. Johnson, in 2004). Mick Jagger believed he was reviving the true spirit of the blues by imitating John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. Recent research is demonstrating that there is a considerable gap between the quietly powerful folk music of the Delta in the 1930s and what rock 'n' roll artists made of it. But this merely testifies to the ongoing power of the trickster mythos. [5]

Undoubtedly the most popular African American badman was Stagolee. Hailed by writers from Carl Sandburg to Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, and by musicians as various as Ma Rainey, Sidney Bechet, Bo Diddley, Bob Dylan, and the Clash, Stagolee is a folk hero whose story amounts to nothing short of a defining social drama. In his penetrating book Stagolee Shot Billy, Cecil Brown goes far beyond anyone hitherto in tracking down the factual basis of the story. By painstaking work, Brown discovered that the original event took place Christmas night in 1895 at the Bill Curtis Saloon, on Morgan Street in St. Louis. This particular watering hole was in the center of Deep Morgan, St. Louis' toughest section. A group of twenty or so was there having a good time. Billy Lyons was drinking his beer with them, enjoying the ragtime music from the piano, when everyone turned around toward the door. Lee Shelton, known as "Stack Lee," walked into the place. He was one of the town's most prominent pimps (or "macks," as they were known). Dressed to the hilt with a red vest and dove-colored spats over his shoes, Lee went over to drink and laugh with Billy. But then the conversation turned sour, and they came to blows.

It all came to a head over the hats they were wearing. Lee Shelton grabbed Billy's derby and damaged it. Billy demanded "six bits" for the hat's repair, and when that was refused he grabbed Stack Lee's Stetson. When Lyons wouldn't give it back, Shelton smacked him on the head with his .44 Smith & Wesson revolver, knocking him to the ground. Lyons got up and pulled out a knife, saying, "I'm going to make you kill me." Shelton aimed the gun and shot him. He stood over the dying man and said, "Nigger, I told you to give me my hat!" With that he walked home. Billy Lyons died in the hospital early the next morning. Lee was then arrested, and taken to the dismal Four Courts detention center. For a high fee, he hired a flamboyant lawyer, the famous Nat Dryden, to defend him. There had to be two trials because of a hung jury in the first. Dryden died before the second trial, his drug addictions and alcohol abuse having overtaken him. Although no record survives of the second trial, we know that on October 7, 1899, Stack Lee Shelton was condemned to serve twenty-five years in the state penitentiary at Jefferson City. Paroled in 1909, he got into trouble again and went back to prison, where he died of tuberculosis on March 11, 1912.

How did this confrontation—mundane, sordid, and seemingly pointless—assume mythic proportions? The great virtue of Brown's study, apart from his remarkable historical detective work, is that it offers a hermeneutic that makes sense of the rapid emergence of all the ballads and the champions. He argues that while justice was eventually done, Stagolee became a folk hero because he was provoked, and because Billy, something of a lout himself, lacked the cleverness of a "real man." Brown traces the background to the culture of St. Louis in an era when the steamboat was phasing out and the modern world was emerging. The decades of the late 19th century on the Mississippi were filled with commerce, colorful characters, seedy roustabouts, and, above all, fresh and authentic music. This was the birthplace of ragtime, and of the blues. As Nathan B. Young puts it, "Out of the 'Chestnut Valley' came the most beautiful music. Out of the green scum and muck grow the fairest lilies and valuable hardwood trees; out of old Chestnut valley sprang the stock of popular American music, nurtured and flavored by Negro musicians … American ragtime, out of which the blues and swing music evolved, should have a St. Louis label on it." [6]

In 1896, St. Louis hosted the Republican national convention. Originally loyal to the party of Lincoln, by this time blacks felt betrayed by the Republicans for various reasons. For example, blacks had made a deal with the white restaurateurs of the city to the effect that if the convention were held there they would allow black patrons to eat their meals in their establishments. The white restaurateurs agreed, and then reneged. James Milton Turner, former ambassador to Liberia, told his people that the Republicans had in effect enslaved blacks politically, using their votes but never letting them hold office. St. Louis was more of a political feudal system than a democracy. Each segment of society had its de facto mayor (characters from Little Italy, Kelly Patch, etc.). The bartenders and macks of Deep Morgan were the unofficial mayors of the black working class. It was at this time that pimps began to be glamorized as sporting confidence-men admired for their freedom from convention. Lee Shelton was no doubt one of those. And so, the feeling of having been betrayed by the false promises of politicians fed into the folk elaboration of the killing, justifying the violence. Many ballads of the period stress the theme of justified vengeance.

There are deep and in some respects tragic ironies to the formation of this myth that don't much occupy Brown—ironies all too resonant more than a century after that confrontation in a St. Louis bar. The glorification of the pimp, for example, suggests how easily the figure of the badman as a sort of latterday Robin Hood can be distorted, grotesquely exploiting a genuine sense of injustice. But as an act of retrieval, showing the imagination at work, Brown's study is exceptional.

Combing through many fugitive sources, he brings to light the popular poetry of the 1890s in which the Stagolee myth developed. Many variations on Stagolee's name are to be found, along with a cast of supporting characters who take on their own significance in the drama. Nellie is his prostitute girlfriend, quite the trickster in her own right, always "out here hustlin' for my sweet papa Stackerlee." The graveside is a place of high drama, including mourners smoking opium or injecting cocaine in Stack's memory. Billy Lyons has his own story. He was known to the police as "Billy the bully," and some variant lines recount how "Stagolee shot bully." Billy's wife is portrayed as a pitiable lady who instructs her son to take revenge against Stack. (On the shelf next to Brown's book, leave room for Stack Lee, a graphic novel published in 2006, written by Derek McCulloch and drawn by Shepherd Hendrix, which likewise traces the way in which the originating event ramified into countless variants.)

One of Brown's most moving chapters is entitled "Stagolee in a World Full of Trouble." It discusses the work of John and Alan Lomax, who were among the greatest song collectors of the 20th century. They published a series of prison songs from the South which are full of pathos and hardship. An accordion playing singer named Jesse Harris performed a version of the Stagolee ballad with these lines:

Stagolee says to Billy Lyons, "Come and
   drink with me.
I'm in a world full of trouble and I'm out
on a drinking spree."

Stopping to record at Parchman Farm in Mississippi, the Lomaxes got a rare glimpse of a system that was "worse than slavery." The farm was nothing more than a plantation using convicts as laborers. With no concern for their health, and no termination of any sentence, the bosses required the heaviest labor until these workers expired. The songs they sang were mostly about their misery. But there were always one or two about Stagolee.

Blues specialist Jon Michael Spencer goes so far as to argue that black ballads were not simply "sinful tunes," even less the "devil's music," but rather reflections on theodicy, the problem of God's relation to evil in the world he created. [7] Against the views of various scholars, mostly white, Spencer understands the African American folk ballad to be profoundly theological. In some ways, the blues are very close to spirituals. Blues are preached. They identify the problem of mankind with the fall, leading to sinful rebellion. The blues singer is a prodigal son, looking for justification. He will not blame God for the "bad luck" we have here on earth. At the same time, something can and must be done. "I didn't build this world but I sure can tear it down," sings Pleasant Joe in the "Sawmill Blues." Spencer believes that there is a close parallel between the blues and a biblical theodicy, in that the real problem is not God but rather the racist white oppressor, who looks very much like the devil himself. Only thing to do: leave town, or become violent.

From ballads and blues the Stagolee myth wanders through Langston Hughes and James Baldwin and takes us on to Malcolm X—but also to rock 'n' roll, followed by hip-hop. Along with many others, Brown believes that oral tradition is the most liberating of all cultural forms. Music, especially when it is rhythmically strong, has a powerful way of being both descriptive and prescriptive. "Music is a microcosm of life," John Coltrane once declared. As the ultimate badman symbol of protest against an oppressive environment, Stagolee's influence is especially clear in the development of rap music.

During the early 1960s Stagolee became visible, as it were. The civil rights movement was underway, and gradually "whites only" signs were removed from water fountains and hotel lobbies. Musicians such as James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and the Isley Brothers recorded versions of the story that reflected new power among black males. Cecil Brown reminds us of the form of storytelling known as the "toast," where the performer inhabits the hero's character as he tells the story (often without musical accompaniment). The ancient form came into its own in the 1960s, enabling young black men freely to assert themselves as badmen and tricksters. The toast is in rhyming couplets, each line having four strong stresses. One Stagolee toast begins:

Back in '32 when times was hard
I had a sawed-off shotgun and a crooked
deck of cards
Pin-striped suit, f***ed-up hat
T-model Ford, didn't even have a
payment on that

It then draws on an African American ritual of insult, using the theme, "Don't you know who I am?" [8] The protagonist of such a toast is almost always a "bad nigger," the consummate trickster. In contemporary rap and hip-hop, the language becomes more explicit, and often humor gives way to a mean spirit.

Much of hip-hop certainly qualifies as toast narrative. In this most recent metamorphosis of the Stagolee story, Brown suggests, whites look somewhat enviously at black criminality (hence the popularity of the music in the white suburbs). Blacks reply with a ritual that becomes a culture, a "hip form to immunize the white." Indeed, Brown goes so far as to claim that this is the very essence of what it means to be an African American—a radically truncated view that leaves much of black history and black life today unaccounted for. We can be thankful that he is wrong

Indeed, for all of his remarkable research, Brown has left out, or seriously slighted, an element that has been at least as powerful in giving African Americans dignity and vindication: the Christian church. Despite the great failings and shameful compromises of white Christians, distorting the gospel witness, the Christian faith that came to the black community in various ways and at various times throughout and beyond slavery provided not only a great ideology of resistance but also the candor to recognize that sin is an equal-opportunity disease. Bert Williams was remarkably balanced on that score, aiming his sarcasm at both blacks and whites. And speaking of equal opportunity, the same faith proclaims the reality of grace, enabling forgiveness and healing to overcome the understandable hatred. Indeed, there is a fascinating "trickster" element emerging from a specifically Christian African American culture. In a line from Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, a protagonist is asked, "Hickman, are you a minister man or a minstrel man?" The answer: "I'm both, I'm afraid." And then, this addendum: "But remember, the Word is tricky!" That says it all.

 Many accounts from African American history are surfacing which make a direct connection between the gospel as a power to resist injustice and the subversive traits of the trickster. Strange and wonderful tales are being recalled. Consider the following account. Robert Henry was a Scottish missionary who arrived in Cub Creek, Virginia, in the mid-18th century. His "besetting sin was in exciting levity in others by his humor and eccentricity." Yet, as a pastor of the Presbyterian church his "vehement manner, and vein of humor rendered him peculiarly acceptable to the African race, among whom he gathered many converts." This phenomenon was observed by Samuel Davies, whose efforts among the slaves in Virginia during the Great Awakening were quite remarkable. Davies keenly observed the tension in black people between needed salvation and needing equality and emancipation. [9] Christian slaves often learned how to undermine the system by a surface compliance with its rules. As they imitated the Robert Henrys they raised the trickster to new heights. Sometimes that was done through humor, sometimes with deadly subversion.

It would have enhanced Cecil Brown's account to have given more credence to the Christian element in good subversion. Not that this factor should be overstressed. Nor did Brown set out to document religiously driven resistance. Yet surely mention of Christian rebels from Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King, Jr., would have rendered more explanatory power to his report.

This same lacuna characterizes another extraordinary work published by Harvard University Press, Jump Jim Crow, by W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Intentionally more limited in scope than Brown's book, Jump Jim Crow focuses on 19th-century minstrelsy, and in particular on T. D. Rice, one of the first white actors to paint his face with burnt cork to promote the "blackface" genre. From an English immigrant background in Lower Manhattan, Rice joined one of the first traveling theatrical groups, performing a mostly English repertoire. He often performed Shakespearean roles. As it happens, he came upon a black folk legend about a runaway slave named Jim Crow, and discovered the extent of his popularity in African American society. Collecting songs and stories about this impudent, maddening, endearing character, Rice wrote a series of plays based on the trickster theme.

What he started became nothing short of a popular culture craze. From the stages of America his plays traveled to Great Britain to great acclaim, as well as severe criticism. Audiences were usually of mixed race. "Jump Jim Crow" was a song, with a dance, which gradually morphed into a famous stage performance, including carefully planned "interruptions," comic interludes, and improvised endings. T. D. Rice not only sang the song but worked this one and many others like it into his plays. Lhamon has done us the enormous service of gathering and ordering the handwritten prompt scripts for nine of the plays, as well as thirteen of the song variants, and two biographies of Jim Crow from the street prose of the 1830s.

It is difficult for us today to grasp the enormous popularity of early blackface minstrelsy. It certainly was dreadfully racist. At the same time it provided visibility for oppressed people, making stereotypes into admired characters. Not unlike the commedia dell' arte tradition, these plays and songs conferred legitimacy on officially forbidden views. Attraction across racial boundaries, social equality because of common human traits, and, of course, the creative trickster overcoming oppression: are all represented and validated here.

Many of the plays have Shakespearean overtones. One of the most popular was called Otello: A Burlesque Opera. In Rice's version, set in New York, the Moor and Desdemona have a baby, Otello, whose face is black on one side, white on the other. Unlike the original tragedy, Otello ends happily for everyone (except for Brabantio, who represents the state governor). Iago is less an evil man than a social necessity. Like Jim Crow, Otello has learned both to live within the system and to rise above it.

Lhamon's thesis is provocative, not to say wildly overstated. He argues that the imitation of blacks, literally and metaphorically, is at the core of what it means to be an American. This is because slavery is the central trauma of American life. For the moment, we are still Otello, with dual colors. We feel guilty. We laugh at the trickster but then ignore him. What is at stake is the conflict between racial identity and human solidarity. Can human brotherhood triumph over racial inequality? Can Jim Crow lead us to the Promised Land, where at last there will be no respect of persons?

The trickster is but an imperfect messiah. Jesus, the "myth come true," forges authentic equality because he actually died to atone for our sins. The God-man, the true good Samaritan (the creator-become-outsider), Christ is the archetype of which the trickster is an earthly simulation. Humiliated like the slave, powerful like the conjuror, Jesus Christ is the author and finisher of liberating faith. Though he is the real thing, we do learn something important about his person and work from human tricksters like Bert Williams, Stagolee, and Jim Crow. They suffer, they are clever, they outwit the really bad persons, and pay a price for it. Most of all, they take part in the messiness of our history. They are fools, in the best sense of the term. Should we not go and do likewise?

William Edgar is professor of apologetics and director of the Gospel and Culture Project at  Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. His books include The Face of Truth: Lifting the Veil (P&R). He plays piano in a jazz band.

1. Bert Williams: The Early Years, 1901-1909, Archeophone 5004; Bert Williams: The Middle Years, 1910-1918, Archeophone 5003; Bert Williams: His Final Releases, 1919-1922, Archeophone 5002. "Nobody" is track 17 from the first collection, recorded April, 1906.

2. George W. Walker, "The Real 'Coon' on the American Stage," in The Theatre Magazine, August 1906, p. ii.

3. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey (Oxford Univ. Press, 1988).

4. John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 176-180.

5. See, for example, Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 242-249.

6. Nathan B. Young, "Some Basic Cultural Developments," in Ain't But a Place, Gerald Early, ed. (St. Louis Historical Society, 1999), p. 339.

7. Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1993), esp. pp. 68-98.

8. Quoted in Bruce Jackson, "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim like Me" : Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition (Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), p. 136.

9. Cited in Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Univ.of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 95-99.

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