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Born in Kentucky, Ernest Hogan started out as a minstrel in Richard and Pringle's Georgia Minstrels. The song that made him famous, All Coons Look Alike to Me was an enormous hit and highly controversial. All Coons Look Alike to Me (1896) was instrumental in the popularization of the so-called coon song, a genre which combined many of the elements of minstrelsy with the syncopated sound that would become ragtime. The song's ill-conceived title caused a furor among black performers who would sometimes refuse to perform it, as well as in the general black public. According to one music publisher, Edward B. Marks, All Coons Look Alike to Me was construed as a personal insult when whistled by white men. Marks recalled that J. Rosamond Johnson saw two men thrown off a ferry boat in a row over the tune44. Although All Coons Look Alike to Me was a love song, its title and chorus, "All coons look alike to me/I've got another beau, you see/and he's just as good to me/as you, nig! Ever tried to be"45 routinely offended black listeners.
Whether Hogan wrote the "All Coons Look Alike to Me" as a naíve love song or a scathing, subtle exposure of white racism, he was plagued by it for years to come. He went on to tour with the Georgia Graduate Students, and starred in Will Marion Cook's Clorindy. In Clorindy he sang his own composition, "Hottest Coon in Dixie." Hogan became the highest paid performer in vaudeville, earning $300 per week in 1901, while the average salary for top-rate vaudevillians was $12-13 per week. Hogan and his wife Louise staged the first "syncopated music" concert in 190546. He incorporated ragtime sounds in the show, which starred the famous black actress Abbie Mitchell and dancer Ida Forsyne (Hubbard). Ida Forsyne was billed as "Miss Topsy, the girl who was not born, but just growed." The representation of "Topsy" (an atrocious stereotype deriving from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin) in Hogan's play and his landmark song All Coons Look Alike to Me combine to contribute to his controversial, indeed jaundiced legacy. Yet Hogan also repudiated discrimination, reportedly knocking down a white box office attendant who insulted him and dispelling stereotypes that black artists were ignorant, proclaiming in 1896 "In my troupe there is not a man or woman who cannot read and write intelligently and grammatically."47
43 James Weldon Johnson. Along This Way. p. 177.
[this footnote applies to the quote in the image above]
44 Arnold Shaw. Black Popular Music in America: From the Spirituals, Minstrels, and Ragtime to Soul, Disco, and Hip-Hop. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1986), p. 42.
45 William J. Schafer and Johannes Riedel. The Art of Ragtime: Form and Meaning of an Original Black American Art. Baton Rouche: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. p. 26.
46 Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theater, p. 131.
47 Op. Cit.
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