"Clare de Kitchen" is an American

Music of the United States

The music of the United States reflects the country's multi-ethnic population through a diverse array of styles. Among the country's most internationally-renowned genres are hip hop, blues, country, rhythm and blues, jazz, barbershop, pop, techno, and rock and roll. The United States has the...

 song

Song

In music, a song is a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing.A song may be accompanied by musical instruments, or it may be unaccompanied, as in the case of a cappella songs...

 from the blackface

Blackface

Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used in minstrel shows, and later vaudeville, in which performers create a stereotyped caricature of a black person. The practice gained popularity during the 19th century and contributed to the proliferation of stereotypes such as the "happy-go-lucky darky...

 minstrel

Minstrel show

The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American entertainment consisting of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the Civil War, black people in blackface....

 tradition. It dates to 1832, when blackface performers such as George Nichols

George Nichols

Blessed George Nichols was an English Catholic martyr.-Education:Born at Oxford in 1550, George Nichols entered Brasenose College, a constituent college of the University of Oxford, in 1564 or 1565 where he received his B.A. degree in 1571. He went on to become an usher and a teacher at St...

, Thomas D. Rice

Thomas D. Rice

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a white performer and playwright who used African American vernacular speech, song, and dance to become one of the most popular minstrel show entertainers of his time.-Background:...

, and George Washington Dixon

George Washington Dixon

George Washington Dixon was an American singer, stage actor, and newspaper editor. He rose to prominence as a blackface performer after performing "Coal Black Rose", "Zip Coon", and similar songs...

 began to sing it. These performers and American writers such as T. Allston Brown

T. Allston Brown

Thomas Allston Brown was an American theater critic, newspaper editor, talent agent and manager, and theater historian, best known for his History of the American Stage, published in 1872. Brown was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts...

 traced the song's origins to black riverboatsmen. "Clare de Kitchen" became very popular, and performers sometimes sang the lyrics of "Blue Tail Fly

Blue Tail Fly

"Blue Tail Fly", "De Blue Tail Fly", or "Jimmy Crack Corn" is thought to be a blackface minstrel song, first performed in the United States in the 1840s that remains a popular children's song today....

" to its tune.

Musicologist

Musicology

Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture...

 Dale Cockrell sees echoes of European mumming traditions in "Clare de Kitchen". In traditional mumming plays, the participants first entered a private household. One mummer, usually with a broom and sometimes with blackened face, would then clear an area and declare the space to now be public, for the use of the players. "Clare de Kitchen", Cockrell argues, moves this public/private space to the theatre. The first verse reflects this relationship to mumming:

In old Kentuck in de arternoon,

We sweep de floor wid a bran new broom,

And dis de song dat we do sing,

Oh! Clare de kitchen old folks young folks

Clare de kitchen old folks young folks

Old Virginny never tire.

The line "I wish I was back in old Kentuck" is one of the earliest examples of "I wish I was in" from blackface minstrelsy. This line eventually became the famous "I Wish I Was in Dixie

Dixie (song)

Countless lyrical variants of "Dixie" exist, but the version attributed to Dan Emmett and its variations are the most popular. Emmett's lyrics as they were originally intended reflect the mood of the United States in the late 1850s toward growing abolitionist sentiment. The song presented the point...

" in 1859.

An alternate set of lyrics, sung by Thomas D. Rice

Thomas D. Rice

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a white performer and playwright who used African American vernacular speech, song, and dance to become one of the most popular minstrel show entertainers of his time.-Background:...

in the mid-1830s, may reflect the input or influence of American blacks. This version features animal characters and trickster figures triumphing over larger animals in the same way that such figures do in African folktales:

A jay bird sot on a hickory limb,

He wink'd at me and I wink'd at him,

I pick'd up a stone and I hit his shin,

Says he you better not do dat agin.

A Bull frog dress'd sogers close,

Went in de field to shoot some crows;

De crows smell powder and fly away,

De Bull frog mighty mad dat day.