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10/21/14

Somerset Records Presents: A Minstrel Show- Perhaps The Least Offensive On You May Possibly Hear (But Only Maybe)



This is about as politically correct as a minstrel show can get. This album was released in 1959, a few years before the Civil Rights Movement, so these kinds of albums were still somewhat marketable. This album reminds me of an album released by Crown Records released around the same time, "Songs Al Jolson Made Famous," which featured a man in black face. I have that posted on YouTube, just in case you wanted to see or hear it. This album's political incorrectness is obvious. The artist credits the illustration of a man in black face to the negative stereotypes of African Americans used in the comedic interludes. When I was younger, I did not find this record particularly offensive, but now I understand why these sorts of albums fell by the wayside into the dustbin of history; for excellent reasons, popular opinion shifted for the better as racial equality became more commonly accepted among the general public. This is merely an artifact of a time when a large segment of the white/caucasian population harbored in organized openness the erroneous belief that one phenotype was inherently superior to all others in every way. The "us versus them" mentality continues with our society today, but at least we actively try to subvert it overall as a society these days. In short, this album shows us how far we have come as a society, from a time this was something one could sell at a supermarket without public outrage, to where no commercial record label would dare put anything even close to something like this out on a large scale to the general public.

With all this in mind, in my opinion, the audio engineering is flawless. The numbers featured on this record are nothing short of awe-inspiring. This is truly an album that you must hear in its entirety. So I hope you have some time to spare for this amazing budget record release!

From the back cover: "A complete. Old-time minstrel show in your living room tonight! Through brilliant performances and sparkling stereophonic recordings, you can sit down in your armchair and avoid the hard seats and the drafty old town hall where grandpa got the "Boot" out of the opening march and all the acts that followed, None of the great color or hilarity is missing! It's all here, the band, chorus, and banjo and bones, all the great solos and the comedy between Mr. Interlocutor and his end men. This is American entertainment at its best- Circa 1890......." There are more liner notes; however, the rest of it explains the boring technical details of this album's production.

I hope you will enjoy "A Complete Minstrel Show!" But, remember, this is a historical artifact, a product of an age long gone by. 

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