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BEHIND THE BURNT CORKMASK EARLY BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY AND ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE. By William J. Mahar. Music in American Life Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; 444 pp. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
The publication of Behind the Burnt Cork Mask was long awaited by scholars who have thought, taught, and written about nineteenth-century American blackface minstrelsy. William J. Mahar's previous articles on the subject have been wellresearched, meticulous in detail, and invaluable in their presentation of primary source material such as song sheets and playbills. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask does not disappoint in its continuation of Mahar's past scholarship. This time, however, Mahar's intent behind his thoroughness moves into the foreground. In his introduction, Mahar states that he has sought to bring an element of careful study to the field, "clarifying the role of the African and European American styles that entered mainstream pop culture [via minstrelsy], interrogat[ing] texts whose surface meanings are all too easily lost when their antebellum contexts are ignored," and examining what Mahar marks as "musical theatre" through the lens of a music historian (8). In other words, Mahar intends to revisit minstrelsy's history because some previous scholars were not as careful, meticulous, or exacting as they should have been. The minstrelsy scholarship battle lines drawn by Mahar are clear: on one side, non-music historians, and on the other, music historians....