There are certain things in this world that are sure to pique my interest. An 80-minute CD of nothing but Paul Stanley stage banter (the underground AV Club release, “Honey, That Ain’t No Pistol: The Very Best of Paul Stanley’s Onstage Banter Volume 2”), a documentary called, “Zoo” about not one, but two men who died of ruptured colons after having sex with a horse in 2005 and the recent Congressional Report that found that between 1998 and 2005, two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes have all had the magical power to elicit my attention. But when I read that, “today features the most offensive recording I’ve ever posted” as I did recently on the bizarre music blog, Music For Maniacs, I got real excited. I’m not talking about the standard, “this is going to be awesome” kind of excitement that Web surfing can bring, but that special, elusive type of exhilaration that feels like Christmas, Saturday, the last day of school and payday all rolled into one. 
 
The subject of the post was the long and sorted history of the seemingly innocuous tune from yesteryear called, “Chinatown, My Chinatown”, one of the earliest and frequently recorded examples of bigotry ever dedicated to tape.  The song’s origin was inspired by turn-of-the-20th century attitudes toward Chinese immigrants who worked almost exclusively as lower class servants of then mainstream society. The 1901 recording, “Uncle Josh in a Chinese Laundry” (taken from the Archeophone Records release, “The 1890s, Volume 1: Wipe Him Off the Land”) by popular rural comedian Cal Stewart features one of the first recorded snippets of mock Cantonese in his tale of Uncle Josh, told in the first person, as he encounters the perplexing intricacies of a Chinese laundry during one of his infrequent visits to New York City. Though he implies that the likely culprit causing Stewart’s character’s confusion is a white man, his heavily effected Asian impersonations dispel any notion that this tale is embedded with any sense of racial equality. People at the time thought that making fun of Chinese people was funny and Stewart wanted, like musicians and comedians of today, to make a pretty penny by making people laugh. The main difference between then and now beyond the universally reviled practice of promoting and profiting from bigotry is that music wasn’t available to the consumer with the breathtaking scope that it is today. Back then, the mere handful of people who had the time, money and mechanisms to mass-produce vinyl records didn’t release anything unless they were pretty damn sure that it was going to sell.
 
At the beginning of the last century, releasing records mocking the Chinese was a sound business decision. And like anything that is successful, everybody started jumping on the bandwagon.
 
The most popular of these songs, “Chinatown, My Chinatown” (written in 1910 by William Jerome & Jean Schwartz that originally started off with the lyric, “When the town is fast asleep, and it’s midnight in the sky, that’s the time the festive Chink starts to wink his other eye”) was recorded by a who’s who of musical heavyweights over the next 50 years. His post includes mp3’s of the king of blackface, Al Jolson; and his rousing up-tempo rendition as well as Milton Brown & His Brownies western swing version of the tune that everyone from the Mills Brothers to Chet Adkins to Esquivel incorporated into their repertoires. Also included in the entry are Louis Armstrong’s ode to the opium pipe, “Kicking the Gong Around” and the lively novelty hit, “The Yodeling Chinaman” by George van Dusen.
It’s funny to see the evolution of what would now be considered a morally repugnant sentiment against Chinese immigrants to its emergence as a cherished American standard cleansed of its deeply racist beginnings. It gives you hope for the future.

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