Tommy performed in the blackface minstrel show and was one of only two known black people to perform with white minstrels before the American Civil War.Japanese Tommy's Reel
Played by: Greg C. Adams Source: YouTube Image: The American minstrel performer Japanese Tommy (Library of Congress description) aka Thomas Dilward (circa 1860. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection 1840–1902).
American, Reel. A Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB.
The name of this minstrel performer was perhaps inspired by the phenomenon of The Japanese Embassy to the United States in 1860.
Primarily a trade embassy, its purpose was to ratify the new Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation, and followed on Commodore Matthew Perry's opening of Japan in 1854.
It was Japan's first diplomatic mission tho the United States. Arriving at San Francisco, the three-man Japanese delegation crossed the Isthmus of Panama by rail, and sailed for Washington D.C., where they were received at the White House by President James Buchanan.
After numerous receptions and a grand parade in New York City from up Broadway, the diplomats returned to Japan via the circumnavigation route.
Although we are not trained musicologists and make no pretense to the profession, we have tried to apply such professional rigors to this Semantic Abc Web as we have internalized through our own formal and informal education.
This demands the gathering of as much information as possible about folk pieces to attempt to trace tune families, determine origins, influences and patterns of aural/oral transmittal, and to study individual and regional styles of performance.
Many musicians, like ourselves, are simply curious about titles, origins, sources and anecdotes regarding the music they play. Who, for example, can resist the urge to know where the title Blowzabella came from or what it means, or speculating on the motivations for naming a perfectly respectable tune Bloody Oul' Hag, is it Tay Ye Want?
Knowing the history of the melody we play, or at least to have a sense of its historical and social context, makes the tune 'present' in the here and now, and enhances our rendering of it.
Andrew Kuntz & Valerio Pelliccioni
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