One of the things that made the use of blackface so humiliating (When black is white, G2, 22 June) was that it wasn’t just whites who blacked up, sometimes black people were obliged to do so too. In the early decades of the 20th century many African American entertainers with travelling minstrel shows in the Deep South had to adorn themselves in ways that they found distressing. Gus Cannon, the great banjo-playing blues singer, whom we filmed in Memphis for the BBC in 1976, often had to further darken his face with burnt cork and paint his mouth white to make his lips look bigger, in keeping with the demeaning stereotypes of the day. As with others we filmed who’d performed in tent shows, Gus was justly proud of his accomplishments as a band leader and recording artist. But regarding the blackface, he once summed up his attitude in a word: “shit”.
Giles Oakley
London
