Probably the important generalization about the impact of the minstrel songs is that it was huge and prolonged, from the late 1820's to well into the early 1900's, and evidently worldwide from Australia to Europe to the West Indies.

Charley, you forgot South Africa.

See this excerpt from:


CROSSROADS
From Homeland to Township
Rap Music and South African Choral Tradition
Sandra Jackson-Opoku and Michael West


"A cappella communal singing has long been central to southern African music. Long before European contact, traditional Nguni choruses sang in complicated call-and-response polyphony, usually accompanied by dance movements. A Christianized, westernized version of this music emerged during the nineteenth-century missionary period. And then, around the turn of the twentieth century, the "coon" shows came to town. The music would never be the same.

Both black and "blackface" minstrel troupes toured South Africa. None were more popular than the renowned McAdoo Jubilee Singers. Their performances had an electrifying effect on black South Africa. The troupe was led by Orpheus McAdoo, an ex-slave who had broken away from the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1890. In the 1870s the Fisk singers had been the first African American choral group to undertake a worldwide tour.

Imagine the scene: The curtains are closed as the audience waits. Word has spread from Cape Town and Kimberly about these amazing black singers from across the Atlantic. The crowd is an eclectic mix: cattle keepers from the villages, migrant workers from the townships, and mission-educated wage earners from the cities. A few mixed-race people, "Cape coloreds" who have come east in the wake of the white Voertrekker migrations, are scattered among them. A handful of whites occupy choice seats in the front rows. Strains of music are heard, and every black, brown, and white face turns toward the stage.

The curtain opens. The McAdoo Singers take the stage, opening their concert of African American minstrel and plantation songs as they usually do with a choral performance of "Negro spirituals." The audience is captivated by a music that is at once foreign and familiar. "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" seems to speak to their souls.

McAdoo's group was enjoyed immensely by segregated audiences wherever it sang: from the urban areas of Cape Town and Durban to the diamond-mining center of Kimberly and the gold-rush boomtown of Johannesburg to rural areas like Zululand. But the minstrel and spiritual tunes the McAdoo Singers specialized in found most fertile ground among the country's black population. One simplistic explanation offered in Eric Rosenthal's 1938 book The Stars and Stripes in Africa was that "the simple-minded black from the kraal was immensely impressed by the sophisticated dress of his brother from the far side of the Atlantic."

But sympathies actually ran far deeper. In African Stars (1991), German ethnomusicologist Veit Erhlmann writes of modern South African music: "The numerous parallels between Black American and Black South African humor, folklore, and popular culture were not only the result of concrete historic contact over a period of more than one hundred years. They were also based on similar experiences of racial discrimination and prejudice."

Taking the "coon" stereotype and turning it on its head, Zulu choirs reworked the crudely drawn racial images and infused them with elements of traditional and mission music to create a choral tradition they proudly called isikhunzi, the core word coon becoming a synonym for style and sophistication. Nattily dressed in high Harlem style, groups like the Pirate Coons and AmaNigel Coons sang minstrel favorites like "Oh Dem Golden Slippers" and also wrote their own tunes. Over the years this developed into the mbube style popularized by Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds. Mbube is Zulu for "lion," and Linda penned "Wimoweh," the definitive mbube classic, popularized in the United States by Pete Seeger and the Weavers"...

http://www.worldandi.com/public/1994/april/cl1.cfm
Issue Date: APRIL 1994 Volume: 09 Page: 229

-snip-

I was fortunate enough to find the book African Stars in my local public library. I really didn't want to give it back. This excerpt reminded me that this is one book that I've got to buy-if any copies of it are still available at a reasonable price.