"there were black performers who had elements of playing what they thought a white audience would think of as stereotypical black behaviour." At a white-run medicine show selling mostly to whites, for instance, a white or black man might wear blackface and sing material that drew on stereotypes about blacks. That's why there's an important overlap between the lyrics Frank Stokes (probably born 1888) had picked up as an entertainer and the lyrics Chris Bouchillon (born 1893) had picked up as an entertainer, roughly that sort of thing. It's not a verbal coincidence at all that there is a documentary about Peg Leg Sam Jackson called Born For Hard Luck and a Bouchillon recording called "Born In Hard Luck," that stuff was all connected.

Many of the people who simply accepted "coon songs" as such (a fad for a while in the popular sheet music industry, on cylinder, in vaudeville -- much like the mambo was big in the '50s) were roughly the age of songwriter Bob Cole, who was black and born in 1868 (and even he distanced himself from them before his death in 1911).

Then you've got people about the age of Georgia Tom (born 1899) and Bill Broonzy (born 1903), who made "hokum" aimed directly at black consumers around the time of the Depression, hokum that didn't particularly sound like "coon songs" as such. Bob Wills was still wearing blackface on stage when he took an interest in that wave of black entertainment. To understand the era, we have to understand that this was a time when Wills could decide that Bessie Smith in person was definitely "the greatest thing I had ever heard," and go on wearing the blackface. (In fact Roy Acuff, who historically integrated his C&W band by hiring Bobby Hebb in the early '50s, for instance, had worn blackface when he was younger.)

Anyway, to belabor the point, "coon songs" refers to a particular kind of song that had a fad popularity for a while, like the mambo did, and not to the much larger category of entertainment that drew on stereotypes about blacks more generally, both decades before and decades after the "coon songs" fad.