Tony Pastor - Music

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!