Chapter 1
The Meat in a Humbug Sandwich: The Irony of Want in California Gold Rush Music
Meredith Eliassen
Sharp irony thrived within minstrel songs that entertained hard-working miners during the California gold rush (1848â1855) in a demanding, hazardous environment that inspired a dream but offered real prosperity to few. Wandering from camp to camp in the Sierras during the boom and in urban centers in its waning, Mart Taylor (1824â1894) traveled with his âOriginal Companyâ whistling popular minstrel tunes and then embellishing them with his own words. The former tavern owner with a gift for rhymed improvisation came out West as a strolling player in 1853 or 1854 and earned his keep by performing music for the working class at a time when a national third party called the âKnow Nothingsâ held sway in California.1 When the amenable showman announced his companyâs arrival, beating a drum, the miners gathered to hear new songs and see a local girl, Charlotte âLottaâ Crabtree (1847â1924), dance jigs. Taylorâs savvy act launched the career of this American comedic superstar as he wielded a sword of righteous incongruity about the harsh realities of life in the mining camps, communicated with trendy music that cut through the romanticized malarkey found in minstrel music of the era.2
Amidst a recently pristine, breathtakingly beautiful and abundant land, the belief in want became the most toxic contagion in the camps and cities that bent men to plunder the earth and each other. Taylorâs role as an ironist was intentional. Immersed in a working manâs world in remote mining camps, he appeared to be detached from the minerâs inherent economic and cultural prejudices when in fact he was deeply enmeshed in the cultures of both. His physical style was directâTaylor altered his appearance only to destabilize stereotypes relating to miners of colorâwhile his poetic style was fashionable in the Victorian tradition of literary embellishment; his vivid verses punctuated with the slang of the day deconstructed established hierarchies. Taylorâs transient audiences seemed to accept the implicit difference between his situational irony (the capacity to discern deliberate contrasts between implicit meanings based on explicit shared values) and the vulgarity (crudeness that offended propriety) so often exhibited by other performers. City-dwelling humbugs were the âvictimsâ of his ironic jabs; Taylor, along with his audiencesâthe long-suffering, ever-toiling miners in the boondocksâcondemned their greed by accepting his rough rhetorical aesthetic of irony culled from newspapers and present in the camps.
Although seemingly transient, provincial, and possibly embodying dissimulation in the remote mining camps, Taylor demonstrated musically how anybody could be the meat in somebodyâs sandwich by describing a variety of situations in which men plundered others for profitâconsuming everything they had. Taylor dedicated his first anthology of songs, The Gold Diggerâs Song Book (1856), to his audienceâthe âMiners of California.â3 In this collection he included a song called âCalifornia Humbugsâ which captured the essence of ordinary men caught in boom-time entrapments. This chapter will consider ironies embedded in Taylorâs performance style and lyrics, demonstrating the cultural milieu of gold-rush camps and the irony of want embedded in minersâ daily experiences of living in abject poverty even as they extracted abundant wealth from the earth.
Miners carried Taylorâs ephemeral lyrics in their pockets and saddlebags. âCalifornia Humbugsâ lingered within the collective consciousness just long enough to enter folk-music repertoires. The collection featured fashionable call-and-response songs and Chinese melodies utilizing the popular pentatonic scale. Taylor also crafted clever puns and embellished well-known tunes by Stephen Foster (1826â1864) and Daniel Decatur âDanâ Emmett (1815â1904) with contrafactum, appropriating the hopes and struggles of his particular audience. Minstrel music, carrying political messages to working-class communities, was the vector for spreading gold fever to Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The genreâs great international success during the gold rush was in fact tied to the fates of those very communities.
As the worldâs jettisoned poor flooded into California seeking quick riches, they surveyed each other and found that their similaritiesâdespite racial, cultural, and religious diversityâoutweighed their differences. They all wanted economic prosperity. Taylorâs lyrics differed from stereotypical minstrel parodies in part because he personalized his rhetoric to suit small, educated and politically engaged African-American communities found in the urban areas of San Francisco and Sacramento, who most likely would not attend his performances but would hear about them from black miners.4 Taylor exploited minstrel musicâs popularity and inherent prejudices to toy with minersâ perceptions and undermine their perceived oppressors, the California humbugs.5
Even before he opened his mouth to perform, Taylor non-verbally advertised his affinity with ethnic âothersâ in the mining camps.6 So tall and imposing that he often had to crouch during indoor performances, Taylor would dress in the Chinese tradition and wear a long single braid down his back to sing his signature song about the plight of Chinese miners in the camps.7 Exploitation, corruption, deception, and contemporary political nonsense provided rich fodder for Taylor to ply white male audiences with mindless tunes revamped with his edgy words.
As the gold boom ebbed, Taylorâs primary audience moved from the rural camps to urban areas. Taylor soon followed and adapted his rhetoric to interject dissenting sarcasm with a second anthology of songs called Local Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems (1858). In his preface, Taylor demarcated a local lexicon of seasoned sarcasm understood by urban audiences that included more self-deprecation; he sold himself by claiming not to be any good at what he did best, asserting, âThe Local Lyrics contained in this volume, although sung by myself at the Melodeon and Lyceum in San Francisco, as well to the only tune I ever knew, and in a style I have never heard recommended ⌠â8 Through irony, Taylor set up his audiences to address their pervasive double-dealing and double-crossing by employing double entendre. Here, Taylorâs form of irony suggests a double audience: the first hears but does not comprehend the bite of the double meaning because he is perhaps too much of a humbug. The second hears and is aware of the ironistâs double meaning more because he hears it within Taylorâs cultural construct of the miner as âotherâ (or enlightened common man) justified in toiling in the humbugâs world in order to seek a fortune for the family back home.
Humbug is certainly the go,
It seems to me surprising
That some new humbug every day
Some one is advertising;
âTis sadly true, Iâll prove to you,
La bagatelle is courted,
The greater now the humbug is
The better it is supported.9
Webster defines a humbug as âa person who usually willfully deceives or misleads others as to his true condition, qualities, or attitudes ⌠â or âsomething empty of sense or meaning: drivel, nonsense.â10 Here, humbug means double-dealers of worthless products taking advantage of would-be gamblers. As the pun in the last line asserts: the greater the humbug, the more elaborate his support mechanisms become. Poker was more than the âcredit gameâ described in the verse below; it was analogous to humbug tactics designed to ensnare, entrap, and addict minersâpokerâs strategies of âtightâ (conservative betting) and âlooseâ (risk-taking) could be applied respectively to politics and finance in San Francisco. The player (whether cheating or honest) utilized a poker bluff (a wagered bet with a losing hand) to predict the level of his opponentâs aversion to risk and bets to take the pot regardless of the quality of his hand. The humbugâs game depended on having miners surrender hard-earned wealthâfor la bagatelle, or small triflesâand thus, the humbug entangled the working man in an economic interdependence in which the player (the miner) always lost to the (humbug) house.
A humbug could come in many guises: the shop-owner, the landlord, and politician, even the seemingly innocuous immigrant. The Daily Alta California on November 11, 1851 chronicled an exotic female humbug offering temptation in exchange for gold dust, advertising âa number of valuable Chinese curiosities which caused a crowd ⌠which necessarily causes a row, so that the neighborhood is [sic] disturbed.â When Chinese sex icon Madame Ah Toy (1829â1928) set up âhouseâ across from the post office in San Francisco, miners picking up their mail were enticed to see her âcuriosities,â or private parts, to compare with those of American women. The tall and beautiful Ah Toy was likely advertising the more expensive services of prostitutes under her control, âcourtingâ the miners so that she might be âbetter supported.â11 The plethora of humbuggery was reflected everywhere through inflated prices, cheap merchandise, jerry-rigged services, and certain risky entertainmentsâall subjects rife for a song-wordsmith. Taylor loaded lyrics with meaningâeven verbal doodles used like improvised scatting in jazz.12 But he was also a humbug of sorts, selling deceptively simple rhymes to earn his keep.
The credit game is quite played out,
And landlords donât feel able,13
In these hard times, to have a lot
Of âdead headsâ at the table,
But bless my stars, we neednât starve,
If we are but half-witted
Weâve got âfree lunchesâ through the town,
Where dead heads are admitted.14
Here, Taylor commented on the lure of gambling establishments offering free spreads of oysters and crab to hungry miners with gold dust to spill at the tables. It could be argued that the ever-toiling gold producers needed to blow off steam on weekends so that they could continue harsh production processes during the week. But how could working men with gold dust in their pockets be âdead headsâ? The phrase referred to debtors who did not honor credit arrangements, the most dire form of want.
The ladies, I am glad to say,
God bless their lovely features,
Cannot with much consistency,
Be called humbuging [sic] creatures,
For any girlâs a fortune now,
And worthy our caresses,
For if you are deceived in her,
Sheâll make it up in dresses.15
In the absence of good women, men were easily seduced by their counterfeitsâprostitutes who had the same outward body parts as wives but ingrained cultural mindsets that were diametrically different. âLadiesâ did not overtly appear in Taylorâs spectrum of humbuggery (apart from exceptions like Madam Toy); when a respectable woman entered a public gathering place, vulgar language and raucous behavior immediately ceased. Although many families were reunited when wives and children made it out West, divorce rates skyrocketed which clogged the legislature and courts. Communities established clinics to care for wives infected with sexually transmitted diseases from wayward husbands, and, in order to attend services on Sundays, churchgoing families navigated bustling âred lightâ districts where prostitutes openly advertised their wares.16 On May 25, 1855 the California legislature attempted to curb more dangerous and obnoxious entertainments, including cock, be...