Structure and Performance
"Miss Lucy Long" is a comic banjo tune, and there is little melodic variation between published versions. Nevertheless, the tune is well-suited to embellishment and improvisation. The verses and refrain use almost identical music, which enabled troupes to vary the verse/chorus structure and to add play-like segments. A repeated couplet binds the piece together and gives it a musical center around which these embellishments can occur.
Minstrels usually performed the song as part of a sketch in which one minstrel cross dressed to play Lucy Long. The blackface players danced and sang with regular interruptions of comic dialogue. The part of Lucy was probably not a speaking role and relied entirely on pantomime.
For example, in 1846, Dan Emmett and Frank Brower added these lines to a "Miss Lucy Long" sketch:
FRANK She had a ticklar gagement to go to camp metin wid dis child.
DAN hah! You went down to de fish Market to daunce arter eels. mity cureous kind ob camp meetin dat!
FRANK I wasn't eels, it was a big cat fish.
DAN What chune did you dance?
Chorus .
-
- Take your time Miss Lucy
- Take your time Miss Lucy Long
- Rock de cradle Lucy
- Take your time my dear.
FRANK I trade her off for bean soup.
DAN Well, you is hungryest nigger eber I saw. You'r neber satisfied widout your tinken bout bean soup all de time.
Chorus .
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