Music
According to the humor of the time, Pastor wrote several songs that negatively portrayed ethnic stereotypes, such as The Contraband's Adventures, the story of a freed slave. After the slave is set free by Union soldiers, he attends an anti-slavery meeting where the abolitionists try to scrub off his dark pigment. The slave concludes by singing...
...De nigger will be nigger till de day of jubilee
For he never was intended for a white man.
Den just skedaddle home-leave de colored man alone;
For you're only making trouble for de nation;
You may fight and you may fuss
But you never will make tings right
Until you all agree for to let de nigger be
For you'll neber, neber, neber wash him white!
Though he separated some ethnic groups in his music, he also intended to unite the lower and middle classes. In songs like The Upper and Lower Ten Thousand, he defended the common man of the Bowery in lyrics like...
If an Upper-Ten fellow a swindler should be
And with thousands of dollars of others make free
Should he get into court, why, without any doubt,
The matter's hushed up and they'll let him step out.
If a Lower-Ten Thousand chap happens to steal,
For to keep him from starving, the price of a meal,
Why the law will declare it's a different thing-
For they call him a thief, and he's sent to Sing-Sing!
Read more about this topic: Tony Pastor
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“When we are in health, all sounds fife and drum for us; we hear the notes of music in the air, or catch its echoes dying away when we awake in the dawn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The dignity of art probably appears most eminently with music since it does not have any material that needs to be discounted. Music is all form and content and elevates and ennobles everything that it expresses.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)