Haircuts and Cake-Walks: The Forgotten Black Minstrels of Kingston's Musical Past

Event Description

Kingston’s music scene has a long and rich history. At the turn of the last century it was swept up in the then new sounds of Ragtime and Broadway show tunes performed in theatrical settings by Minstrel shows. Queen’s University professor Gordon Dueck has extensively researched Kingston’s cultural history and is presenting a talk on this controversial era when the birth of jazz was struggling to reach a wider audience and overcome the barriers of racism and historical biases that were prevalent at that time. This promises to be a fascinating discussion of a period that started a transformation of our cultural community that is still being felt a century later.