[Alternately: “Coloured Fancy Ball,” “De Coloured Fancy Ball,” “Our Colored Fancy Ball”]

To listen to this song (and others) on the Artists Respond to Juba Site, Click Here and/or Here.

The music is from the song “Through the Halls Resounding,” a part of Fry’s opera Leonora (1845). The work is considered to be the first “grand opera” written by an American. There are multiple published versions of this song during the period, going as far back as 1848. Of the versions surveyed, there is some variation in the lyrical settings, particularly in the B and repeating A sections. Generally, the melody and song structure is consistent. For a full consideration of the form and structure of the song, as well as its possible subjects of critique, see Mahar pp.126-35.

If the number of published editions of the song during the period can be taken as evidence, it would have been more popular in the United Kingdom than in the United States. At the time of the writing of this article, the only known edition published in America during the period is the above mentioned William Hall version of 1848. In the UK, however, the song was published at least three times, once as part of “The Ethiopian Waltzes,” a medley of minstrel songs. Neither its, nor its predecessor’s popularity endured into the twentieth century. There are no recorded versions of the song.

Works Cited:

Mahar, William J. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. Chicago: Illinois UP, 1999.

Mark Turner