'Minstrel in the Gallery,' Jethro Tull's eighth LP, is being remastered and expanded for its 40th birthday. The band's fifth consecutive U.S. Top 10 album -- and the last to feature the longtime ...

One year after The Minstrel Show, what’s next for the Hall of Justus? For our Oct. 5, 2005 issue, Grayson Currin joined Little Brother and their Hall of Justus entourage–L.E.G.A.C.Y., The Away Team, ...

The new book “Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop,” by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, explores the history of minstrelsy, dissecting how it became the most popular form of ...

Before the 1830s, when blackface minstrelsy begins formally, African Americans, people whom we today would call African Americans, have been involved in local entertainment. They are the fiddlers at ...

Jo Ellen Bickmeier was Jo Ellen Sylvester back then, a sixth-grader at Bloomington’s Arlington Heights Elementary School appearing in a 90-minute Friday evening minstrel show called “The Darktown ...

Sheet music cover for 'James Bland's 3 Great Songs, 1879. Scanned from Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America by Robert Toll. From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and ...

Back then, it was still thought ok to blacken your face, whiten your lips, talk in exaggerated accents, play music and tell jokes about how lazy and carefree black folks were. How their main ...

Nearly every '70s Jethro Tull LP is a direct reaction to what preceded it. On Sept. 4, 1975, Ian Anderson stopped worrying about the larger trajectory and, simply put, wrote music. The resulting ...

If U Black Niggas Network, the satirical television station at the center of the 2005 Atlantic Records debut by Durham’s Little Brother, had been a real cable network, the tone of the broadcast would ...