ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 18, 1997 TAG: 9702180061
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
James Bland was a 19th-century superstar.
An entertainer whose name headlined theater bills in America and Europe, he performed for royalty, made celebrity endorsements, inspired imitators who took his name in tribute, and earned the "astronomical" sum of $10,000 a year - no small feat for a black man in the years following the Civil War.
More significantly, members of white society embraced the songs he wrote as their own, a breakthrough that historians say helped change the course of American show business and pave the way for other black songwriters.
Yet he died poor and forgotten, buried in an unmarked grave, his undertaker stuck with an unpaid bill even as his songs sold millions of copies.
His career went downhill even from there.
Today James Bland is worse than forgotten; he is remembered not for racial pioneering in a difficult era, but for the racist lyrics of Virginia's state song, an anthem that glorifies slavery from the point of view of "this old darkey" who longs to be reunited with "massa."
This week, as the General Assembly appears on the verge of "retiring" "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia" as the state's official anthem, perhaps it's time to revisit, one last time, the ambiguous legacy of its author.
When Bland's name is invoked in connection with "Carry Me Back," it's usually with the brief, dismissive description of "minstrel singer," as if he were some itinerant folkie with a banjo on his knee.
Music historians know better. "James Bland's place in American music history is extraordinarily significant," says Dale Cockrell, professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.
Taking to the stage after the Civil War, Bland was part of the first generation of black Americans to work professionally in entertainment, says Robert Toll, a California historian who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject. "This was a pioneering role."
Often called "the black Stephen Foster," Bland was a celebrated stage figure who is credited with writing more than 700 songs during his heyday from the 1870s until the turn of the 20th century. He was, Toll says, "the most prolific, famous and influential black minstrel songwriter." Bland's signature tune was "Carry Me Back." Other hits included "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers," "In the Evening by the Moonlight," "Hand Me Down My Walking Stick" and "The Golden Wedding."
Yet Bland's importance goes beyond simply being prolific, or even popular. "James Bland was the first African-American to receive credit as a creator of popular musical culture," Cockrell says. Bland's likeness even adorned the covers of his sheet music. "By breaking through on the production side of culture, Bland is a figure who deserves a higher place in the pantheon of important African-Americans," Cockrell says. "The problem, of course is that Bland was trapped by the conventions of his day."
The dilemma Bland and other black entertainers faced was that the dominant form of the day - and the only one open to them - was the minstrel show, in which whites in blackface (and later blacks in blackface) parodied Southern blacks and offered nostalgic remembrances of antebellum life on the plantation.
"White people were paying the tab, and white people wanted to see this kind of entertainment," Toll says. A talented black musician like Bland faced a choice: "He could write popular songs using the idioms of the time," Cockrell says, "or he could write songs that would never be heard. He chose to write within the idioms, hence the language we object to in 'Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.'''
Black artists labored under the same marketing restrictions in other fields. "Paul Lawrence Dunbar couldn't publish a poem unless it was written in dialect," says Lucious Edwards, the archivist at Virginia State University near Petersburg. "They had to write or perform in a certain style or they couldn't work."
Minstrel promoters of that era also liked to advertise their black performers as presenting authentic "slave experiences," a particularly cruel irony for Bland, who was never a slave or even a Southerner.
There's no evidence of how Bland himself felt about these demeaning racial stereotypes. Toll points out that some black singers, such as Sam Lucas, worked occasional references to the joys of freedom into their material; Bland never did. Yet his sister, Irene, reportedly once told an interviewer after his death that "he hated this thing from the bottom of his heart. After all, he was an educated man."
Bland - born in 1854, six years before the start of the Civil War - grew up in a family of middle-class free blacks from Long Island. His father, Allen, is described in various historical accounts with a string of "firsts" - one of the first blacks in America to receive a college education, the first black appointed an examiner in the U.S. Patent Office, eventually the first black man to hold a college presidency, at Wilberforce University in Ohio.
As a youth, James was regarded as "a musical prodigy," according to a biographical sketch in a 1939 issue of The Etude, a music magazine. "At an early age, he organized a glee club which gave frequent concerts and was noted for serenading hotel guests and other distinguished residents of the national capital."
For a time, Bland worked as a page in the U.S. House of Representatives, and later studied at Howard University - at the same time that his patent examiner father was moonlighting there for a law degree. "But that left him little time for his much loved banjo," The Etude recounted, and at age 19, Bland dropped out.
Bland's ambition was the stage, but he was initially unable to find work in a field still largely reserved for whites. Not until two years later, in 1875, was he able to break the color barrier, signing up with an all-black minstrel company headed by Billy Kersands, then the top black performer.
Bland's star rose quickly, and within three years music publishers were printing his sheet music. Bland moved on to other minstrel troupes, and traveled widely in Europe - some say he stayed abroad for most of the next 20 years. There he abandoned "all the accoutrements of the minstrel show," in effect, becoming what we'd know today as a crossover hit. Besides singing and songwriting, he was considered "a refined comedian," with a trademark bow in which he touched his head to the floor.
His greatest success came in Britain, where he was known as "the prince of Negro songwriters." A London stage company paid him as much as $10,000 per year, and Bland delivered command performances for Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, who "on many occasions honored him."
Bland also developed a following in Germany, where, according to the reference book "American Songwriters," "his popularity rivaled that of Stephen Foster and John Philip Sousa." In America, Bland inspired imitators who took the name "Bland" to capitalize on his fame. And W.C. Handy, the future "father of the blues," remembered in his autobiography the "thrill it gave me to shake the hand of this truly great minstrel."
Bland lived well. He "cleverly got his large wardrobe in exchange for free plugs he gave tailors from the stage," according to "Blacking Up," Toll's book on the minstrel era. And Bland reportedly "purchased the largest diamond ever worn" at the time by a black performer, weighing in at 43/4 carats.
But Bland failed to copyright most of his songs, losing out on precious royalties. His money slipped away, and then his career followed. "No one knows why this strange genius turned his back on a lucrative career in Europe," the Virginia Cavalcade magazine wrote in 1952. But in 1901, Bland returned to America to find that the popularity of the minstrel show was fading. Yet here he stayed. A friend found him "a menial desk job," and Bland tried his hand at writing a stage musical, then the rage. It was a box office disaster.
He moved to Philadelphia and died in 1911, in such obscurity that no newspaper carried an an obituary and in such poverty that only one-fifth of the burial expenses were paid. At the same time Alma Gluck, a prominent concert singer, was selling an "unprecedented" 2 million copies of her recording of Bland's "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny."
In death, that song - one of his first - defined him. In 1939, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers located Bland's grave, landscaped it, and erected a headstone commemorating his achievements. In Virginia, the Lions Clubs mounted a campaign to have "Carry Me Back" declared the state anthem; the General Assembly agreed in 1940, but insisted on correcting the spelling of "Virginny." In 1946, Gov. Bill Tuck led a delegation to dedicate a granite monument on Bland's grave in the Merion Memorial Park.
Today, Bland's song "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" remains the anthem of the annual Mummers Parade in Philadelphia and Virginia Lions sponsor the annual Bland Music Scholarship Contest in his name. At Virginia State University, Bland's music to "Carry Me Back" - renamed "Evening Song," and with completely different words - is a standard at Founders Day and other campus ceremonies. But the "Carry Me Back" that Bland wrote appears on the way out as Virginia's state anthem, a casualty of the minstrel lyrics.
How should Bland be remembered? "For African Americans, it's easy to look back on these people as `Toms,' but they are the ones who paid the price and laid the groundwork and they deserve some recognition," says Toll, the California historian.
Edwards, the Virginia State archivist, has this take on Bland: "He was a victim of history."
LENGTH: Long : 157 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The Library of Virginia. James Bland.by CNB