Sometime in the 1950s, the mainstream saw its last great gasp of this habit. This was how we reckoned with our melting pot: crudely, obliviously, maybe with a nice tune and a beat you could dance to. And of course there were the minstrel shows, in which people with mocking, cork-painted faces sang what they pretended were the songs of Southern former slaves. Some were sung in a spirit of abuse others were written or performed by members of those groups themselves. Vaudeville acts, for instance, had tunes for just about every major immigrant group: the Italian number, the Yiddish number, the Irish one, the Chinese.
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