AN AMERICAN MUSICIAN
Born free in Baton Rouge LA around 1842, Billy Kersands became enslaved as a child when the family moved to Kentucky. He got early experience in minstrel shows around the start of the Civil War, when African-Americans were being recruited to replace white performers in blackface acts. Billy worked as a dancer, comic, acrobat, musician, singer, director, writer, and songwriter (he’s credited with the song ‘Old Aunt Jemima’ which inspired the pancake-brand). Noted for his huge smile (to go with his 200 pound body), he based a famous comic turn around putting several billiard-balls in his mouth at once.
He became a favorite of African-American minstrel-show manager Charles Hicks, who worked for the white owners of several of the most-famous troupes. In the mid 1860s Hicks hired Kersands for the Georgia Minstrels, where he became a headline name. The Minstrels toured Europe in the 1870s, and on their return the show was bought by tavern-owner Charles Callender.
In 1875 Billy and a number of the other Georgia Minstrels - rebuffed in their attempts to get better pay - left to form an all-black troupe headed by Hicks. Callender publicly labelled them 'thieves' (as if he owned them), but he immediately leapt to accept Billy and others back when their undercapitalized group folded.
Ten years after that, though, Billy again started his own company as “Kersands Minstrels,” hiring Hicks as the manager. It was known for its' marching band styled on military ensembles, and led the 1886 New Orleans Mardi Gras parade. The Kersands troupe - and the Kersands Vaudeville Company which succeeded it - played throughout the South for more than a quarter century.
Despite playing to white audiences' negative stereotypes of blacks' worship practices, speech, and appearance, Kersands was very popular with black audiences. He usually appeared as a poor, ignorant, and mentally-slow caricature of a country farmhand, but used his wide knowledge of black folkways and jargon to slyly mock those who looked-down on such a character. He used his enormous mouth and lips to convey visual messages that often were at odds with the words being said. And - despite his size - his acrobatic dancing (he introduced the soft-shoe style) were used by later performers for the stage and movies.
The seventy three year old Kersands died of a heart attack following a performance in New Mexico in 1915.

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The video below mis-attributes "Old Aunt Jemima" to Messers Grace and Dobson: