It was as if “The Carol Burnett Show” had been performed with everybody corked up.īut what this means is that if there is a reference somewhere to ice cream parlors playing “minstrel songs,” this could easily refer to what a nineteenth-century person would have processed as what we call “pop.” Hardly everything sung in a minstrel show was about “coons” and “prancing”-one also heard sentimental ballads, peppy little marches, and other kinds of songs.
#Ice cream remix song tv#
Audiences got a dose of comedy, dance, song, and much else: the shows occupied roughly the place that TV variety shows did from the fifties through the seventies, but with the blackface business as a foundational, horrific element of it all. We are justifiably appalled at the focus of these shows on caricatures of black people as near-animals, but what makes it worse is that until about 1900, minstrel shows were essentially general entertainment. One source of misinterpretation may be what was meant 100 years ago by “minstrel song.” He notes, almost in passing, “19th century ice cream parlors played the popular minstrel songs of the day.” Is that really true? Johnson gives no evidence, and it sounds like a stretch.
But with “Turkey in the Straw” as a universally beloved lyric at the time, that’s a tough case to make, and he does so with only a single statement. Johnson’s wiser implication is that the “Zip Coon” version was what the trucks were playing. That’s why it’s a rare archival find and historical footnote today. The tune has been set to innumerable verses of various kinds, and this “Watermelon” rendition was, in the grand scheme of things, one of the vast majority of pop songs that comes and goes in a flash. Johnson’s unearthing of the “Nigger Love a Watermelon” song is invaluable as history, but the likelihood that this is what the trucks were playing is negligible. So, what evidence supports the idea that in the 1920s, when these ice cream trucks became established, publicity executives were actually thinking of anti-“darky” doggerel when deciding what song the trucks would play? To grow up watching these cartoons was to have the tune hammered into one’s head, especially by Foghorn (“ I say, that’s a joke, son!”) Leghorn. For example, the man who scored Looney Tunes, Carl Stalling, used “Turkey in the Straw” constantly in scenes on farms and especially with chickens and the like. In pop culture of the early twentieth century, that tune is eternally associated with either its inoffensive, nonsensical lyrics or, when performed instrumentally, with farm animals and rural settings. All evidence points to “Turkey in the Straw” being what the ice cream companies intended. Johnson makes it sound like the “Turkey in the Straw” version vanished in the wake of the racist ones, but it always existed alongside and has outlived them. There is simply no divorcing the song from the dozens of decades it was almost exclusively used for coming up with new ways to ridicule, and profit from, black people.”īut that divorce is indeed possible. “The first and natural inclination, of course, is to assume that the ice cream truck song is simply paying homage to ‘Turkey in the Straw,’” Johnson argues, “but the melody reached the nation only after it was appropriated by traveling blackface minstrel shows.
#Ice cream remix song zip#
Depicting a dancing black man character, the song was called-get ready-” Zip Coon.”Īs interesting as it may be that today’s most popular ice crime truck jingle started out as racist abuse set to music, the facts don’t really support it. Johnson, has unearthed “ Nigger Love a Watermelon, Ha! Ha! Ha!,” a most unfortunate version of the song from 1916, and he also points to a nationally famous version that was practically the theme song of the minstrel show for much of the nineteenth century. This week an NPR blogpost went viral teaching us that “Turkey in the Straw,” an American folk song dating to the early 1800s and played by so many ice cream vans today, is actually a hidden racist taunt.
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