Body and Soul

The minstrel show and striptease played an indelible role in early mass culture and influenced the popular culture that followed. Peter Stanfield focuses on Hollywood to explore this phenomenon. The movies used blackface minstrelsy to represent an emerging urban American theatrical history while American film at the end of the studio era used the image of the burlesque dancer and stripper to represent urban decay. Stanfield considers the representation of American urban life in jazz, blues, ballads, and sin-songs and the ways film studios exploited this range of so-called scandalous music. Stanfield’s analyses of standards like "Frankie and Johnny” and "St. Louis Blues” stand beside original thinking on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, burlesque and strippers, the noir cityscape, the Hollywood Left, and hot jazz.