Music, Muscle, and Masterful Arts: Black and Indigenous Performers of the Circus Age

In Music, Muscle, and Masterful Arts: Black and Indigenous Performers of the Circus Age, Sakina M. Hughes reckons with a history of the circus through an often-overlooked part of its workforce. Black and Indigenous workers populated most of the big tent shows and, as Hughes shows, quickly moved across entertainment landscapes in the decades that the circus dominated the popular culture landscape. Hughes does not offer temporal boundaries for this book, but the chapters are rooted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.As the subtitle of the book indicates, the performers in Hughes’s study move well beyond the actual circus lot. Framing this in the “circus age,” a time period where traveling entertainments were central to popular culture, rather than staying on the circus lot offers Hughes a wider scope to understand how Black circus workers impacted other entertainment stages. Blues clubs, minstrel plays, and a variety of tented and mobile entertainments all encompass the circus age, a phrase borrowed from Janet Davis, a cultural historian cited throughout the book.The history of Black circus workers, especially those with performer contracts, forms the backbone of the work and is where Hughes offers her largest interventions. Previous studies centered on Black circus workers have also turned their attention to performers. Vanessa Toulin, Beth Macy, and Jacob Doman have each examined prominent Black performers on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Hughes does not engage in conversation with these studies, Music, Muscle, and Masterful Arts sits alongside these other works as examples of Black experiences in the tented entertainment landscape.Hughes artfully balances examining the lived experiences of Black workers with grasping the impact of their presence during the circus age. Hughes offers glimpses into labor history with snapshots that will hopefully spur more research on Black and Indigenous circus workers. Her strongest point comes from a look at how sideshow bandleader P. J. Lowery negotiated his contract and aided in the formation of a Black showman alliance. Through this story, Hughes illuminates the larger organizing principles that were often at play in the circus, like leveraging mobility between various shows. Lowery’s demands centered on the practice of double canvassing, which meant his musicians would be both performing music and performing manual labor (41). Similarly, Hughes later discusses Zulu tickets as a work assignment that an African American man would get after doing manual labor (70). This literal second shift assigned to Black workers is necessary for understanding how racial dynamics often determined how and what labor was required. Sometimes the writing leaves the reader wanting specific examples of really sharp arguments. Hughes argues that minstrel shows capitalized on the representation of non-American Black characters, but without any specific examples from the shows, she leans on generalizations from secondary sources on the history of minstrelsy (26).Hughes’s best use of sources is her analysis of Black newspapers throughout the book. By centering her gaze on Black circus audiences, Hughes shows how Black workers under the tents and on stages had cultivated a celebrity identity outside of publications put out by the big top shows themselves (58). The aforementioned Lowery negotiations are a prime example, as Hughes shows how this moment played out in the public eye. Hughes does offer insights into real lived experiences of Black and Indigenous workers, but her biggest interventions involve the impact of identity on their performances. In many ways, her work echoes Tobias Higbie’s in Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1848–1882, which is concerned with Progressive Era reformers’ conceptions of transient people.To a lesser extent, Hughes situates her work within the field of Indigenous workers in circus-adjacent Wild West shows. Here the book enters a well-developed historiography of Indigenous performers during the circus age. Hughes notes early on that most of the book centers on Black workers, with the exception of chapter 4, where Hughes centers Indigenous people. She organizes this chapter differently, as many of the subsections are profiles of individual performers. She also uses this space to examine stereotypes and tropes of women in the shows.Although Hughes did not set out to write a labor history, the book grapples frequently with the experience and image of workers. Hughes provides ample examples of the exploitative labor practices employed by circuses, especially within the performances outside the big top tent. One might, however, critique the dichotomy Hughes creates between good and bad jobs in the shows when she describes some Black artists’ workplace mobility. To be sure, Hughes makes a strong argument for the ways that Black musicians in the sideshow revolutionized the larger landscape of American music, especially through blues. Perhaps, though, a stronger labor story would not simply note that performers escaped the sideshow but instead explain how workers there continued to shape their labor and workplace.While labor historians might find the third chapter the most useful as an in-depth list of job categories, the high point of the book is chapter 5, where Hughes offers the most grounded analysis of the circus winter quarters as a workplace. The two winter quarters profiled are apt choices. The Great Wallace and Sells Brothers Circus winter quarters give Hughes space to explore Indigenous histories of land ownership and examine the largest workforce of Black manual laborers in the tented shows. Here in the fifth chapter and throughout the book, Hughes shows that Black and Indigenous workers brought their knowledge, talents, and resources to stages throughout the circus age.