'Clar de Kitchen' -- notes on a minstrel tune

A popular song by minstrel showman and singer "Daddy Rice," dated in 1832, was parodied -- apparently pretty well -- in the spring of that year when a steamboat made it up the Sangamon River within hailing distance of Springfield. Printed in The Sangamo Journal, it was to be sung to the melody of "Clar de Kitchen" (minstrel-show dialect for "Clear the Kitchen"). I found enough material on line to get a good start at learning the song, with a little help from Interlibrary Loan and ordering a CD from Amazon.com.

It's on a collection of minstrel tunes by contemporary drop-thumb banjo players Joe Ayers, Clarke Buehling, Bobby Winans, Bob Flesher, Bob Carlin, and Tony Trischka on the Rounder label.

The 2nd South Carolina String Band also has a version, a little livelier to judge by the mp3 snippets available on the Internet. Apparently it went into oral tradition, too, since the Ben Gray Lumpkin Digital Folk Music Collection at the University of Colorado has a field recording collected in 1962.

The lyrics and a MIDI file are linked to Benjamin Robert Tubb's "Music from 1800-1860" page (incidentally a handy year-by-year source for minstrel songs and parlor music of the day) in the Public Domain Music website. Tubb also has listings for hymns, spirituals and Sacred Harp songs.

The blurb on Basinstreet.com has this to say:

Popularized by Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice, the text is close to the tradition of Negro humor. In a succession of nonsense verses we meet various animals, an old blind horse; a joy bird sitting on a hickory limb; a bull frog dressed in soldier's clothes; and a little whip-poor-will whose sad fate is to be eaten. The tag "I wish I was" was destined to become a stock item in minstrel songs and folk music.

George Nichols was the first to sing "Clare" in public and is said to have adapted it from a melody which Nichols had heard sung by Negro fireman on the Miss. River. Stephen Foster's family musical group, the "Thespian Company" sang this on their programs. The song uses the cakewalk rhythm in its melody.

Unless I'm missing something, I'd guess the cakewalk was a later development that no doubt came down from earlier songs like "Clar de Kitchen." It sounds like a jig to me.

Steve Leggett's All Music Guide says in a review of the Rounder album excerpted on the Yahoo! shopping guide the "tunes are pleasant enough sounding on the surface, the banjo tones are round and gentle, ... if one can set aside the ugly racial problems in America that really drove the minstrel phenomenon," but the lyrics are "are layered with subliminal cultural baggage and cruel ironies that are difficult to set aside even all these years later." This song isn't as bad as some of the others, though, and, as the folks at Basinstreet.com suggest, the talking animals might -- possibly -- suggest a derivation, however indirect, from African American folklore of the day.

The music is printed in The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, at pp. 277-78. under XII, Blackface Minstrel and Negro Songs; and in The Voices that Are Gone by Jon Finson, at pp 173-174.