Coal Black Rose

Coal Black Rose began on the American stage in the late 1820s as one of the first hit songs sung in blackface, well before the minstrel show took shape in the 1840s. The earliest dated sheet music, entered for copyright in Philadelphia on May 12, 1829, credits the words to White Snyder and says it was “sung with unbounded applause by Mr. W. Kelley.” That July George Washington Dixon sang it in blackface at the Bowery, Chatham Garden and Park theatres in New York, and it made him a star.

The song is a comic courtship in mock dialect. Sambo comes with his banjo to serenade Rose, she keeps him waiting, and it ends in a fight with his rival Cuffee. The story was soon made into stage farces, including Dixon’s Love in a Cloud (1829) and Thomas D. Rice’s Oh, Hush! or, The Virginny Cupids, and the song stayed in print for decades. The text here is from The Ethiopian Glee Book (1848), and the stage tune is from Elias Howe’s Musician’s Companion (1843).

Sailors kept only a scrap of it. Frank Bullen printed it as a halyard shanty in Songs of Sea Labour (1914), and its refrain joins two lines from different parts of the stage song: the chorus line “Oh Rose, de coal black Rose” and the verse line “Don’t you hear de banjo, tum, tum, tum,” with the banjo now going “pink a pong a pong.” Bullen’s tune is not the stage melody. Stan Hugill learned the shanty from Harding, a sailor from Barbados, who told him the crew sang and pulled only on the last line, and printed it in Shanties From the Seven Seas.