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Sam Lucas’ Careful Man Songster.
Chicago & Boston: White, Smith & Co., 1881. 16mo (6.25” x 4.125”), illustrated yellow wrappers. 48 pp., including illustrated title page (repeating cover illustration). CONDITION: Very good, wrappers lightly soiled with a few small stains, half inch tear in fore-edge of front wrapper, contents clean throughout. A rare songster comprising songs performed, and many of them written, by singer and actor Sam Lucas, one of the greatest of all nineteenth-century Black stage personalities. The volume opens with a biographical sketch of Lucas, followed by thirty-nine songs, among them “Uncle Tom’s G’wine to Stay,” “I’m Grant and I’ve Travelled ‘Round the World,” “Shivering and Shaking Out in the Cold,” “I Hope I May Jine de Band,” “You Will Never Miss the Water Till the Well Runs Dry,” and the titular, and quite comical, “Sam Lucas’ Careful Man,” which reads in part: There was a man who boasted that from trouble he could keep, CHORUS He was a careful fellow; In June he wore an overcoat to guard aganst a storm, Some of the songs are asterisked and carry footnotes indicating that they are “published in sheet form by White, Smith & Co.” and are available for 30, 35, or 40 cents. Born in Ohio to free Black parents, Sam Lucas (1848–1916) was an actor, comedian, singer, and composer, whom James Weldon Johnson dubbed the “Grand Old Man of the Negro Stage.” In 1858, Lucas began his performing career with traveling Black minstrel groups. Inventing ways to integrate Black roots into the predominately white form of minstrelsy, he became one of Black minstrelsy’s first stars as it grew popular. While never leading his own troupe, he performed with some of the preeminent Black minstrel groups of his day, including Lew Johnson’s Plantation Minstrels, Callender’s Georgia Minstrels, and Sprague’s Georgia Minstrels (which performed in Cuba). After his work in minstrelsy, he entered vaudeville, performing with his second wife, Carrie Melvin, before their divorce in 1899. Their daughter, Marie, later worked with him. In 1898, Lucas appeared in a production of A Trip to Coontown in Boston, the first Black production to use only Black writers, directors, and producers, which is “often cited as the first Black production to show signs of breaking the links to minstrelsy” (“Sam Lucas”). Lucas also performed in Sam T. Jack’s vaudeville production The Creole Show, and musicals such as Rufus Rastus, The Shoe-Fly Regiment, and The Red Moon. He is generally considered to be the first Black man to portray Uncle Tom, a character usually played by white actors in blackface. He reprised this role in the 1914 film adaptation of the book. He died from pneumonia in 1916. According to the biographical sketch included in this volume, Lucas was a member of the C.H. Smith Uncle Tom’s Cabin Co. at the time of publication. OCLC records just four copies, at UC California, Harvard, Brown and the University of Tennessee. REFERENCES: “Sam Lucas, Stage Actor born” at African American Registry online; “Local Notes,” The Clinton Public (Clinton, Illinois), October 28, 1881, p. 5; Lena Star (Lena, Illinois), Feb. 1, 1883.
He always followed out the motto, “Look before you leap.”
He took such strong precautions that the nation soon began
To own there never was, nor could be, such a careful man.
He was a careful man.
Where’er he went ‘twas his intent,
To be a careful man.
And left it off in winter in case it should turn warm;
He never went in Hansom cabs for fear the horses kicked;
He always sewed his pockets up to stop them being picked…
Item #10490
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Price: $2,500.00
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