Tag Archives: Zip Coon

Stringbeans May and the Birth of the Blues in Black Vaudeville

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Just before his neck was broken in Jacksonville, Butler “Stringbeans” May was the hottest Black entertainer in the country. He’d just turned 23. Critics called him “eccentric” and “smutty.” It was Stringbeans who made the Blues first rise in Black Vaudeville, but he never recorded and never copyrighted his hits. Details of his death remain a mystery.

Confederate Park’s “In Memory of our Women of the Southland”

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She’s the embodiment of a Romantic concept called the Lost Cause. Her rhetorical strength, as an object of art, is that to stand before her and deny the Lost Cause lie is to look her in her loving and noble face and call her a liar before her tender children.

Unfortunately, for the Lost Cause Romantics, history documents the originating words of the Confederates.