John "Picayune" Butler
Birth nameJohn Butler
Also known asPicayune Butler[1]
BornFrench West Indies
Died18 November 1864[2][1]
New York City[1]
Occupation(s)Stage actor, singer, instrumentalist
Instrument(s)banjo,[1] bones[1]

John "Picayune" Butler (died 1864) was a black French singer and banjo player who lived in New Orleans, Louisiana. He came to New Orleans from the French West Indies in the 1820s.[3] One of his influences was Old Corn Meal, a street vendor who had gained fame as a singer and dancer at the St. Charles Theatre in 1837. By the 1820s, Butler had begun touring the Mississippi Valley performing music and clown acts. His fame grew so that by the 1850s he was known as far north as Cincinnati.[4] In 1857, Butler participated in the first banjo tournament in the United States held at New York City's Chinese Hall, but due to inebriation, he only placed second.[5]

Butler is one of the first documented black entertainers to have influenced American popular music, through the blackface song "Picayune Butler's Come to Town", published in 1858, and named for him.[6] His performance with the song influenced one blackface entertainer directly; circus performer George Nichols took his song "Picayune Butler Is Going Away" from him[7] and claimed to have learned "Jump Jim Crow" from Butler (saying he was performing the song years before Rice).[8] In the New York Clipper, an article claimed that Nichols saw John Picayune Butler imitating the character in the song, and got the idea to do the same thing when he sang Jim Crow; at first he had sung it as a clown, but after seeing Butler, he began to sing it in blackface.[9] The man "Corn Meal" also influenced Nichols, just as he had Butler.[9]

In the early 1850s, Butler was one of three people who formed a rivalry, the best professional banjo performers of the day, according to Frank B. Converse.[2] The other two were white blackface minstrel players, Tom Briggs (author of the Briggs Banjo Instructor, 1855) and Hiram Rumsey.[2] Converse was himself a banjo performer and author of several banjo instruction books.[2] In the early 1850s when he was about 14 years old, Converse saw Butler perform.[2] He paid attention and later used his observations of Butler in formulating a standard system to teach the stroke or clawhammer style of playing.[2] Converse noted that Butler used a banjo thimble[2] (metal covers that go over the fingernails, to use with the clawhammer/stroke style).[10]

Multiple people use name

The oldest known banjo, c. 1770–1777, from the Surinamese Creole culture. Gourd body, carved stick or plank for a neck, three strings.

Music historian Lowell H. Schreyer has brought up the possibility that more than one person may be incorporated in the name Picayune Butler, some possibly inspired by popularity of the minstrel song Picayune Butler's Come to Town.[2] One was the original person, the subject of the 1845 song who would have been playing in about 1825.[2] This player is interesting, in that he is described as using a 3-string gourd banjo,[2] which is a banjo type found among descendants of African people in the Caribbean Islands and parts of North America, from the 1600s into the 1800s.[11]

"Picayune Butler's Come To Town

About some twenty years ago,
Old Butler reigned wid his ol Banjo...

Twas a gourd, three stringed, and an ol pine stick
But when he hit it, he made it speak"[12]

The name was also listed in November 1845 for a possible second performer with the "Eagle Circus," touring in Louisville, Kentucky, Indiana and Cincinnati, Ohio.[2] A possible third performer is the main subject of this article, from New Orleans, listed in the New York Clipper on 24 November 1860 and 18 November 1864; he was "copper colored" and played a four-string banjo.[2] Additionally, the name is reported to have been the stage name for a fourth performer, William Coleman (1829-1867).[2]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "City Summary". New York Clipper. December 10, 1864. p. 278. [transcribists note: column 2], republished in Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Lowell H. Schreyer (2007). The Banjo Entertainers: Roots to Ragtime. Mankato, Minnesota: Minnesota Heritage Publishing. pp. 57–58, 70–72, 148. ISBN 978-0-9713168-9-8.
  3. ↑ Southern 43.
  4. ↑ Watkins 106–107.
  5. ↑ Meredith 106–110, 246–248.
  6. ↑ Southern 43–44.
  7. ↑ Toll, Robert C. (1974). Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-century America. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 45. ISBN 0-19-501820-6. George Nichols, a blackface circus clown who was one of the pioneers of minstrelsy...from two New Orleans Negro singer, Picayune Butler and "Old Corn Meal." Little is known of Butler, from whom Nichols got "Picayune Butler Is Going Away"...
  8. ↑ Knowles, Mark (2002). Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Publishers. p. 228. ISBN 0-7864-1267-4. [note 14] Nichols, a circus clown...claimed to have first introduced "Jim Crow" years before Thomas Rice...learned it from a black banjo player named Picayune Butler...
  9. 1 2 "The Dramatic Chip Basket". New York Clipper. November 24, 1860. p. 256. [transcribers note: column 2[ Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections
  10. ↑ "Hooks' Electric Banjo Thimbles". in many forms and called by many names, clawhammer, stroke style, frailing, etc., the movement is the same... strike the strings down with the nail of the finger and pull with the thumb...They [the thimbles] ...increase volume and clarity...they protect the fingernail from damage...
  11. ↑ Gaddy, Kristina R. (October 4, 2022). Well of Souls. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393866803.
  12. ↑ Phil Rice's Correct Method for the Banjo: With or Without a Master. Boston: Ditson Company. 1858. p. 33.

References

  • Meredith, Sarah (2003). With a Banjo On Her Knee: Gender, Race, Class, and the American Classical Banjo Tradition. Florida State University.
  • Southern, Eileen (1996). "Black Musicians and Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy", Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Modern Minstrelsy. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6300-5.
  • Watkins, Mel (1999). On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock. Chicago, Illinois: Lawrence Hill Books. ISBN 1-55652-351-3.


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