Disruptive Voices in the American Musical Discourse: Comic Song Performance in the American Parlor, 1865-1917

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the American song sheet industry vastly increased in size. This mass mediated form reached a broad number of consumers, who performed this music in their homes, identified with it, and shaped the new discourse on their identity as they did so. Simultaneously, Americans were re-shaping their cultural conceptions of music, in a process Lawrence Levine chronicled as the emergence of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” distinctions. Performing music in the culturally sacralized space of the parlor was meant to be an edifying experience and a display of genteel, “highbrow” identities. Performing comic songs (comic character pieces, topical songs, and parody pieces), however, presented distinct, subversive, and disruptive voices in this crisis moment of American cultural discourse. In the segmented idealized realms of nineteenth-century music, the performance of comic songs in the American parlor provided a powerful means of embodying “lowbrow” identities, contributing to and challenging the emerging constructions of class.

Working with Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, I examine how late nineteenth-century American song sheets served as the basis for the corporeal signification of identities. Using key examples from song sheets that specify the use of pantomime, dance, costuming, and vocal alterations, I demonstrate how they engaged the body and created physical and verbal performatives that embodied comic “lowbrow” identities. By showing how singers fully engaged their bodies and altered themselves for performance, I argue that their mimetic embodiments of Others entered alternate identities into constructions of their own.