BARACK OBAMA: Hello, Ireland.

My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas.

MICK MOLONEY: Up to 22% of African-Americans have Irish DNA.

LENWOOD SLOAN: You had a lot of Irish men and a lot of African-American women.

MICK MOLONEY: The origins of the banjo are in West Africa.

LENWOOD SLOAN: They brought with them the memories of the place that they left.

CHEICK HAMALA: We learned from the family, from grandfather, to father, to the son.

LENWOOD SLOAN: But you need to look at this conflict between Blacks and Irish, which is about work.

It's about land.

It's about status.

MICK MOLONEY: What you should listen to is the melody of the Anglo-Celtic world and the backbeat of Africa in the banjo.

LENWOOD SLOAN: This is The Two Roads.

[upbeat music] [non-english singing] MICK MOLONEY: Well, I'm Mick Moloney, and I come from County Limerick in the Southwest of Ireland, where, on average, it rains about 376 and 1/2 days every year.

And I spend most of my time teaching a bit and playing music and doing some serious global rambling.

LENWOOD SLOAN: And I'm Lenwood Leni Sloan.

I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but my spirit rises in New Orleans, the most northern city in the Caribbean ring, with its back door to America and its front porch to the Caribbean, where almost any day is the day where you can dance in the streets.

[upbeat music] My training was in classical and modern dance.

I studied at the Martha Graham school and at the Joffrey Ballet and at the Ailey Company.

My spirit is as a dancer.

It's always been the heartbeat of my life.

My goal is to connect people and be a catalyst for change.

MICK MOLONEY: The musical instrument that I play mostly is the tenor banjo.

And I was attracted to the wild sound of it by a street musician whose name was Dunne, and he played with a brother of his, who was a fiddle player.

And they used to stand on the side of the street in O'Connell Street in Limerick, near the Augustinian church.

I was in rapt attention, listening to the wild sound of the banjo, usually under soft mist, with these two beautifully dignified, almost Victorian-style gentlemen with their heads bowed, playing this music which soared off into that lonely place between the Earth and the sky.

And it captivated me then, and ever since those years in my mid-teens, I have been a banjo driver, as we call it in Ireland.

And this is the sort of music that I heard and that I play.

[playing banjo] The '60s was a very exciting time for music in Ireland.

It was a fine time being a professional musician.

And the Johnston family, they asked me to join the group, and I was very honored and delighted to do so.

[music] (SINGING) The bravo start was a walk in the lane.

Oh, but our love was an easy one.

We share the same love of creating harmonies.

And I think the thing we were best known for is the four-part harmonies.

When you sing with somebody in front of one microphone or two microphones, there's a kind of a bond.

It's a physical bond.

It's hard to put in words, when you have the four heads are together and the sound is resonating, the close harmonies.

It was very, very, very, very close and very tight and very special.

We started to become an international group, really, when we moved to England and signed up a contract with Transatlantic Records.

And we started to do well in the American charts, so we went and toured America in 1971.

And at that point, I left the group.

We were going in different directions musically and personally.

And I ended up then coming to Philadelphia in 1973 and living there for the next 28 years.

LENWOOD SLOAN: My father was a bricklayer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He was a crew chief, and every morning, he would go around the neighborhood and gather German men, Italian men, Irish men, and they would go off to work.

And they would sing their songs together and mix their tunes and their cultures like one great gumbo.

And I began to fall in love with Irish tunes.

(SINGING) Oh, I am a rambling Irish man, and I've traveled this country o'er In search of an occupation, as I've often done before While I made a resolution, and I think it a very good plan For to travel across the ocean and view a foreign land.

JEAN BUTLER: Many people know Mick as a champion of Irish music, a musician and educator, a folklorist, and a cultural catalyst.

I know him also as a champion of Irish Dance.

[upbeat music] My first time on stage was with Greenfields, and it was a Friday night, as far as I can remember.

And I'll never forget Donny and myself coming on stage.

I just knew right then and there that this was brilliant and the audience reaction.

And we were very good together, very good dancing together.

And I was quite nervous.

And at the end of it, Mick just said, well, welcome to the group.

[upbeat music] MICK MOLONEY: I lived, from the very start, in an African-American neighborhood.

95% of the people in Germantown, Philadelphia, were African-American.

And having been an Irish person in London at a time when it wasn't at all popular to be in England as an Irish person, I found instant common cause with my African-American neighbors in the Germantown area and realized all the indignities that, on a daily level, had to be suffered by that community.

LENWOOD SLOAN: When I was a young boy, my mother and father would say to me, never work for a white man if you do not get paid because you are not enslaved.

But there was one exception.

There was this old man who lived at the end of an alley in our neighborhood, and my brother and I were required to go to his house, shovel his coal, empty his chamber pots, clean out his refrigerator, do his laundry, and he never gave us anything except a kick in the pants.

So I asked my parents one day, why?

And I was sent to my father's room, and on his dresser, I found a picture of this man, a younger man, with a family full of children with different shades of Brown, cream, Black, and White, and it turned out to be the man at the end of the alley.

Thomas Moore, born in Kilkenny, who came to America and moved to Minneapolis.

And it was then that I discovered that that man was my great grandfather.

And that's where I began this quest about the mixed-race child.

BARACK OBAMA: Hello, Ireland.

My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas.

[cheering] And I've come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.

MICK MOLONEY: And it was you, Lenny, that introduced me to the astonishing statistic, which is still pretty much unknown among most Americans, most Irish-Americans, and, certainly, people living in Ireland, that it's estimated that up to 22% of African-Americans have Irish DNA.

LENWOOD SLOAN: If such a large percentage of African-Americans have Irish DNA, then X percent of Irishmen have African-American DNA.

And so I say, welcome, cousins, to this conversation, where you find me and you as I am seeking to find you and me.

[music] When enslaved people came into the Americas in the Middle Passage, they were first brought to the Caribbean, and they were naturalized, it was referred to.

MICK MOLONEY: Well, these enslaved people came from West Africa.

Irish and English and other European people came as indentured servants.

And today, Leni, as we both know, various people for various motives are trying to equate the Irish, especially among Irish-Americans, who are promoting the narrative that we had to suffer the very same fate as enslaved people from Africa in the early years in the Caribbean, And, they're often referred to as Irish slaves.

They were actually indentured.

There's a big difference, isn't there, between indentureship and slavery?

LENWOOD SLOAN: Now, the majority of the Irish who came to America during the famine came as ballast, meaning that they were given free passage on a ship in exchange for the weight of their body, for balance in the bow of the ship.

But they had to pay the captain for their food and for their fresh water.

So often, they were in debt by the time they got here, and then the captain was able to indenture them.

We know that enslaved people came in chains in those same ships.

[music] You did it.

You did it.

You did it.

You did it to us.

You did it.

You did it.

Why do you hate the Black race so much You took US from Africa into the Caribbean You took us for granted You took us for granted You took us from-- The period that the enslaved spent in the Caribbean was designed to remove them from their religion, from their cultures, from their memories, and from their mores, and to anglicize them or to Christianize them.

And I believe-- it is not scientific, and I'm a humanist, not a scholar, that two new people were born.

They were not the people who left their homes, and they did not know who they were to become when they got here.

But they brought with them the memories of the place that they left, which is what we refer to as epic memory.

The songs, the images, the colors, the rituals, the stories, and the dances were in their DNA.

And they mutated and amalgamated to begin to form a new culture.

MICK MOLONEY: And we talk about epic memory, and the memory of a particular instrument that eventually was to lead to the evolution of the banjo, becomes crucial to the story of American art, American music, and, indeed, world music.

And we've invited some of our favorite artists to join us here on the beautiful stage at the Irish Repertory Theater.

NORA BROWN: Here's a little Last Chance from the great Hobart Smith.

[playing banjo] Now, there are over 10,000 tenor banjo players in Ireland.

And as far as I know, we're the only country in the world apart from America where the Indigenous folk music is played on this old, venerable instrument, the tenor banjo.

I didn't know it at the time, but the origins of this instrument are in West Africa.

LENWOOD SLOAN: The curious journey of the banjo and how it wound up in the arms of a master Irish musician is one story that we love to tell, starting from that journey in Africa.

[upbeat music] [non-english singing] MICK MOLONEY: One of the most enjoyable tours I ever did explored how American music developed from various influences from Ireland, from England, from Scotland, from Native Americans, and also, of course, from West Africa.

And one of the many precursors to the banjo found in the music of West Africa is the ngoni.

[playing ngoni] [non-english singing] Thank you very much.

MICK MOLONEY: Now, when the people came, enslaved people from Africa, they brought nothing with them.

But they brought the memory.

CHEICK HAMALA: Yes.

MICK MOLONEY: They brought stories.

They brought a sense of who they were and who they might be.

And obviously, they didn't bring this instrument or other instruments like the akonting with them, but they recreated that sort of idea, didn't they, in the plantations in the Caribbean and in the Southern states?

TRACY NEWMAN: The strings on the banjo are made of steel, and this part is made of parchment, which is the paper that many of our first books were written on.

[banjo playing] MICK MOLONEY: The Irish need not be minimized, suffered a level of privation and punishment and deprivation to the same extent, oftentimes, as the enslaved people.

They were flogged.

They were executed.

They were treated badly, but there was never that situation, what we call chattel slavery, where the body and the progeny were owned.

LENWOOD SLOAN: But you need to look at this conflict between Blacks and Irish, which is about work.

It's about land.

It's about jobs.

It's about status.

And the status of an Irishman, their body wasn't worth as much as an enslaved person.

MICK MOLONEY: Tell me about that, Leni.

LENWOOD SLOAN: If you purchase an enslaved person at the market, it was $300 to $500.

$300 for a child, $500 for an adult.

It could be as much as $1,000 for a childbearing woman.

And you have to put it into context that a well-bred lawyer made $560 a year.

That was a wealthy man.

So if you had paid for this enslaved person for $500, you were required to protect your commodity.

But the Irishman had no real value as a commodity.

Then you begin, the Irishman despising the enslaved man and the enslaved man despising the Irishman because he's free.

MICK MOLONEY: Well, in our discussions, Leni, over the last 30 years or so, we have tried to interrogate the whole idea of how so much intermingling of DNA could have taken place.

There were so many drastic laws against cohabitation of white people and African-Americans, and yet those laws were broken all the time.

LENWOOD SLOAN: Well, the thing about a law is it has to be enacted.

And so the laws work in urban cities, but the further you get out into the country or to what was American wilderness, the laws didn't matter, and they didn't make sense.

The average life expectancy of an Irish man between 1790 and 1840 was 36 years old.

The average life expectancy of an Irish woman in that period was 18.

The average life expectancy of an African-American man in that period was only 22 years.

That's a shocking statistic.

But the average life expectancy of an African-American woman was 40.

So in the wilderness, between 1790 and 1840, you had a lot of Irish men and a lot of African-American women, and they amalgamated.

There are two terms, amalgamation, which is the natural and spontaneous integration of the races, and miscegenation, which is the legal enforcement, forbidding that spontaneous amalgamation.

Now, the numbers change after 1840 with the famine years, and it actually reverses.

After the famine years, you begin to have a larger number of Irish women who come to follow their families first or to seek their own liberties and a large number of freed men.

So suddenly, an Irish woman prefers a Black man who has a job as a tailor, as a coachman, as a cook, as a waiter, because these are referred to as clean jobs, to an Irishman who is working in a coal mine or on a steel mill.

Between 1840 and 1880, you have Irish women and Black men amalgamating.

MICK MOLONEY: I think it's important to address the question of power imbalance.

You go to great pains to say that not all unions were the result of the slave master raping the enslaved woman or girl, that it's more complicated than that.

But nevertheless, there is the issue of the power imbalance to look at.

I mean, how free were people to enter into these relationships?

You have to look at, how could a young African-American girl of 14 resist the power of, say, even an indentured servant who's white?

LENWOOD SLOAN: It's very complicated.

I'm not being facetious when I say it's not simply black and white.

MICK MOLONEY: I think we know today, Leni, that racial categories are more social constructs than anything got to do with genetics, and it's very complicated.

We've come quite a ways from our understanding of this, but we're really in the infancy of studying all these distinctions that emerged in American history.

[upbeat music] People often ask, what's the difference between a violin and a fiddle?

The answer is, there's no difference at all.

It's the same instrument that emerged and was known in European classical music circles as the violin and diffused into folk traditions and was known there as the fiddle.

And the fiddle, or the violin, take your pick of the terms, was brought to America by Scottish, English, and particularly Irish musicians from the northern part of the country.

This was a profound early influence on the evolution of what's now called American old-time or Bluegrass or country music.

Leni, it just wasn't fiddlers from Europe.

There were also Black fiddlers that were a very important part of Southern culture.

LENWOOD SLOAN: The banjo, an African instrument, was taken up by Irish musicians.

And the violin and the fiddle, a European instrument, was taken up by African-American musicians.

[fiddle playing] [non-english singing] And the violin and the fiddle became a passport from the fields to the ballrooms in many plantations, where the Black fiddler was elevated to the social class to play for parties, for weddings, for balls, for revels.

And he would play and sing at the same time.

He played the fiddle against his chest so that he could sing out the songs and the steps at the same time.

He'd go-- (SINGING) Why don't you join hands Circle, eight hands, eight hands round Eight, stop Swing your partner Swing round and round Promenade your pretty little lady Serenade your pretty little lady Open up your heart and let's be friends People say, who is he?

I want him at my party next week.

And pretty soon, they started tipping him.

He had to give 70% of his tips to his master, but with the rest of his money, he could slowly save up to purchase his freedom.

MICK MOLONEY: We'll never know the full story.

We can never know the full story of how the banjo and the fiddle became an integral part of Appalachian music, and are still an integral part of American music in Irish music, a very important part of that, as well.

JERRON PAXTON: 1, 2.

[upbeat music] MICK MOLONEY: What you should listen to is the melody of the Anglo-Celtic world and the backbeat of Africa in the banjo.

LENWOOD SLOAN: This is The Two Roads.

[upbeat music] MICK MOLONEY: Well, I first came across your name, Leni, in that article you wrote about Irish mornings and African afternoons, and it was the story of minstrelsy.

LENWOOD SLOAN: It starts with Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who is known as Jim Crow.

Jim Crow, before it was a stereotype and a political paradigm, was a folk dance.

(SINGING) I went down to the river I didn't mean to stay, but there, I saw so many gals I couldn't get away Wheel about and turn about and do just so Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow Wheel about and jump about and jump just so.

Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.

The arrogant hare, the sly fox, the clever crow, these were all animals that came out of the tradition of Aesop's Fables, of using an animal to personify a human characteristics.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice was from Virginia.

He went to New York City.

He advertised that he was an Ethiopian delineator, an Irishman who had studied the ways of African-Americans.

His ad said the sable genius of humanity.

And he got hired to perform, in tent shows, on wooden stages, and in concert halls, this dance called the Jim Crow.

He was mimicking, at this point, not mocking.

It has nothing to do with African-Americans, with the exception of the blackface.

His trousers are the European clown.

His coat, which is called a cutaway, is a joke, like a Saturday Night Live, about these dandies who had gone to the New York opera, and they cut their coats away.

The cutaway became a fashion style.

If you notice, in his hat, he has a clay pipe to remind his audience that he is an Irishman.

He was encapsulating American folk culture and using blackface as a medium of saying things to the audience and shocking them.

But they didn't come out of a white man's mouth.

They came out of a Black man's mouth.

What Daddy Rice did was he inculturated dance that has been passed down in Black culture.

This is balling the Jack.

[upbeat music] This is the Suzie Q.

MAN: 1, 2, 3, 4, boom, boom, pa. LENWOOD SLOAN: This is the jitterbug.

[music] This is the Charleston.

[music] This is the body of movement that is taught at every Saturday night dance and emulated, simulated, and passed down through Black culture.

MICK MOLONEY: I see.

Ethiopian delineators were people who copied as best they could, and some of them were very immersed in African-American culture.

And out of that mimicry, mockery, what some people call love and theft, appropriation-- LENWOOD SLOAN: Appropriation, yes.

MICK MOLONEY: Came minstrelsy.

And the first group of minstrels were the Virginia Minstrels formed in New York in 1843.

And the leader was a man called Dan Emmett from Ohio.

LENWOOD SLOAN: And what Dan Emmett was exceptional at doing is listening to Black dialect, the music, the vernacular, the syntax of Black language.

Now, we know that the first enslavers in America were the Dutch.

And so we know that the first tongue that African-Americans spoke, other than the language of the land they came from, was Dutch.

The Dutch word for this is dis.

And the Dutch word for that is dat.

The Dutch word for them is dem.

The Dutch word for those is doze.

In Dutch, you invert the to-be verb.

She be always doing dat.

Why she be doing dat?

Which are thought of as malaprops, but which are actually old Dutch words.

MICK MOLONEY: Well, the Virginia Minstrels gave their first public performance on the Bowery, and it was a sensation.

People went nuts.

The big question that's always been debated in folklore circles-- for my sins, I went and got a degree in folklore, is, how much were they making up?

How much were they copying?

How much were they representing?

How much were they appropriating?

How real was it, Leni?

LENWOOD SLOAN: It's very hard to distinguish who was copying who.

They were emulating the African-Americans who they heard singing in the fields, in the kitchen, in the workplace.

But those African-Americans were emulating the songs that they had heard their masters sing.

And so you get this echo chamber that is beginning to form American Vernacular Music.

MICK MOLONEY: And it's very ironic that this is considered the first form of American popular culture, that minstrelsy.

White people, a lot of them are Irish American.

The most famous ones certainly were people like Dan Emmett and Joel Walker Sweeney.

They're associated with minstrelsy and the misrepresentation of African-American culture.

And the minstrels exports, the first imagined form of American popular culture, abroad.

They go to all the English-speaking countries, Australia and New Zealand, they go to England.

And it was the Virginia minstrels that introduced the banjo, Leni, to Ireland, my instrument, in an earlier form in 1844, when they toured in Cork and Belfast and Dublin.

And this is the image of African-Americans that was introduced abroad, the only image they really knew.

Minstrel troupes proliferated after the Virginia Minstrels were formed.

There was a flood-- the floodgates opened and minstrel troupes toured all over America, performed everywhere.

Not all of them were Irish-Americans who-- there seemed to be an awful lot of people from other ethnicities, as well, but the most famous ones of all, I suppose, were Irish.

And they introduced two master dancers onto the American stage, Master Juba and John Diamond.

[upbeat music] GREGORY HINES: These two men blended their styles together, got together, and they would travel around the country, challenging each other in front of audiences, delighting audiences, showing those two different styles of dancing.

And it was great.

Just a little challenge between Juba and John Diamond.

Juba first.

[tapping] John Diamond.

[tapping] LENWOOD SLOAN: They left us the DNA, which would become American tap dance, the syncopation of Africa and the melodic striking of Irish dancing formed to create what I refer to as the consecration of tap dance.

[tapping] Now, we've been fighting in America to see which culture invented tap.

And I say both, that it's shared custody.

Proof-positive that American tap dance and American stage dance is the grandchild of the African and the Irish dancing of the 19th century is the incredible and world-renowned Riverdance.

It is in their performances that we see this child of both cultures, and the joy and expression of the epic memory of those two great diasporas.

MICK MOLONEY: It closes the circle, and it does so in a very good-humored, good-natured way, and shows that art, in the end, can win out.

LENWOOD SLOAN: And when you close your eyes, Mick, you don't see colors.

You only hear a joyful noise.

KAITLYN SARDIN: I've been dancing since I was three, and I started Irish dancing when I was six.

I was actually a ballet dancer first, and when I went to a recital, they had Irish dancing for the intermission, and ever since then, I was hooked.

I started mixing Irish dancing with other styles in 2015.

I mixed it with hip hop, African, dance hall, Vogue, and whatever I could figure out.

There was something about the music that really made me realize everything is so connected.

So whenever I turn on a song, I think about the Irish dance rhythm first, and then I'm like, this is really similar to the African rhythm or a Vogue rhythm.

And then I slowly put those pieces together, and I create a dance.

[upbeat music] MICK MOLONEY: There were times before the Civil War where the Irish and African-Americans got together unexpectedly.

They're kind of unheralded chapters in American history that have sort of fallen between the cracks.

During the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Black and Irish Americans fought for the Union, but not side by side because they were segregated.

When the war ends in April 1865, the grimmest chapter in the history of relations between Irish Americans and African-Americans takes place.

There was a battle for every right.

The Irish pulled away deliberately from African-Americans through the formation of labor unions, hence a lot of exclusion and the Irish distancing themselves and the whole history of us being victims really changes.

LENWOOD SLOAN: There are 22 documented race riots about labor and jobs between 1865 and 1876, which is the end of Reconstruction.

By then, we had the segregated system, which we now refer to as Jim Crow.

Those divisions persisted, driving a wedge between us for generations.

WOMAN 1: All I want is a seat in that stool.

Nothing else.

WOMAN 2: Let us go to our neighborhoods, where our kids are safe.

We want our kids safe.

BERNADETTE DEVLIN: There is nothing sadder to people struggling against oppression in Ireland to look towards Boston City and see our people.

We know how they got here.

We know the oppression they fled from Ireland in various generations to get to this city, being used to oppress the Black people of this city.

People tell me I don't understand the situation.

They tell me Blacks are lazy.

They don't want to work.

They want to lower the standard of education.

In fact, they tell me all the things I was brought up to hear about myself, things Protestant people said about Catholic people in Belfast, as we identify very closely in our struggle for equality and our struggle against oppression.

In fact, the whole inspiration of our civil rights movement 10 years ago came from the Black movement of America.

(SINGING) Freedom Reaching out For the freedom and survive Freedom Freedom Freedom We're free, yeah Let them me free Free with the lives Free with the lives LENWOOD SLOAN: Meanwhile, back in the cities of America, the minstrel explosion had built into a multi-million dollar industry, Mick.

And now, minstrel companies were 40 to 50, sometimes 100, performers on the stage.

They called themselves Mastodon minstrels and giant minstrels.

And I'm always really interested in your stories about Harrigan and Hart because they kind of galvanized the success of these large companies.

MICK MOLONEY: Well, Harrigan and Hart, was Ned Harrigan was born in New York City in 1844, the year before the Irish famine, who became, by any standards, the inventor of musical theater, a continuous action of characters with music and dance, representing a continuous plot with recognizable characters.

By any definition, that's musical theater or musical revue.

And along with David Braham, his partner in writing the songs, and along with Tony Hart, who was Anthony Cannon, they, between them, created musical theater.

The most recognizable was the Mulligan Guard series.

And a lot of the members of the cast blacked up and created a parallel minstrel troupe called The Skidmore Guards.

So minstrelsy lived on in many different ways, and the songs were performed long after the Civil War ended, perpetuating the image.

LENWOOD SLOAN: I have to always ensorcell you into singing one of my favorite Harrigan and Hart songs, McNally's Row of Flats, because it, again, incorporates this notion of all these people, all these immigrant, African, and working people.

MICK MOLONEY: Well, it's one of the most colorful songs written by Ned Harrigan and David Braham.

(SINGING) Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany, Chinese and Africans, and a paradise for rats All jumbled up together in the snow and rainy weather They constitute the tenants in McNally's row of flats And I love the verse.

(SINGING) That great conglomeration of men from every nation The Tower of Babylonian, it couldn't equal that A peculiar institution Where the brogues, without dilution They rattled on together in McNally's row of flats LENWOOD SLOAN: And there were-- (SINGING) Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany, Chinese and Africans, and a paradise for rats All jumbled up together in the snow and rainy weather They constitute the tenants in McNally's row of flats.

[upbeat music] MICK MOLONEY: Now, I'd like to introduce the man for all seasons, Jerron Paxton.

JERRON PAXTON: Hey, hey.

What's happening, Mick?

LENWOOD SLOAN: Great to be with you.

It's great to talk to you about a kind of-- what I would refer to as a Straits of Magellan in this story.

And that is the years between 1870 and 1900, in which they produced over 600 songs in the Sunday supplements of newspapers, which were formerly called Coon songs.

This is also the period of the rise of the Klan, DW Griffith's racist film Birth of a Nation, and the anti-lynching campaign of the fearless newspaper publisher, Ida B Wells.

We're looking at an image of a man who is both a hero and a tragic figure.

His name was Reuben Crowder.

He comes from Saint Louis to New York City.

By the time he gets there, Black men are coming to the American stage, but they have to perform in blackface, and they have to take on Irish names.

So he changes his name to Ernest Hogan.

I wanted to ask you about Ernest Hogan and how you felt about his humor, his impact, his music.

JERRON PAXTON: Hogan had the same load to bear that everybody had to bear at that time.

Just like you said, he had to perform material that was sort of beneath him and beneath the people.

But that was only lyrically.

LENWOOD SLOAN: There is the music and there's the lyrics.

The music is deeply intoxicating, but the lyrics are dangerous.

Thank god the words of Ernest Hogan's, All Coons Look Alike To Me, fell away by the turn of the century.

And what was left was one grand cakewalk for cakewalk competitions from Boston to Atlanta and New York to San Francisco.

[upbeat music] But thank god we had men like Egbert Austin Williams, Bert Williams, from the British Antigua, who was a gentleman, spoke four languages.

Was the first African-American to be accepted into the Masonic Lodge in London.

Had a company called Williams and Walker.

Employed 150 Black artists and musicians, all who performed in Blackface.

But Bert Williams said that he fed the families of Harlem with a can of black paint.

(SINGING) When life seems full of clouds and rain And I am full of nothing and pain Who soothes my thumping, bumping brain Nobody.

WC Fields said that Bert Williams was the funniest man he'd ever seen and the saddest man he'd ever met.

Well, we're ready for this great song.

It was written at a time of temperance.

Bert was ambivalent about temperance because he liked whiskey.

In Gaelic, it means water of life.

And so he wrote-- JERRON PAXTON: [inaudible].

LENWOOD SLOAN: Yes.

He wrote this comic song, Key to my Cellar, which we would love you to perform now.

[JERRON PAXTON, "EVERYBODY WANTS A KEY TO MY CELLAR] (SINGING) Down in my cellar My sweet little cellar I've been moving everything around I've got secrets hidden there I'll guard them with my life Only one mistake I made I told them to my wife Now, everybody wants the key that opens my cellar, my cellar, my cellar Folks who never even gave me a tumble Even perfect strangers, they're beginning to grumble Cause they all want the key that opens my cellar I'll be wet when they are dry You can have my money You can have my car Heck, you can have my baby if you want to go that far But nix on the key that opens my cellar For I'll be wet when they are dry Everybody wants the key that opens my cellar I'd like to see them get it Let them try Oh, you can have my money You can have my car You can have my wife if you want to go that far But nix on the key that opens my cellar If the whole darn world goes dry I don't care if the whole darn world goes dry Yeah.

MICK MOLONEY: When did minstrelsy end?

LENWOOD SLOAN: We're still struggling with the blackface in our society.

But it doesn't matter if you drop the blackface, but you don't drop the caricature.

I'm always reminded by a quote of Bert Williams where he says, it takes forever to get blackface makeup off you.

And it takes forever for America to remove the stain of the mimicry and the mockery.

JEAN BUTLER: In this film, Mick and Leni talk so much about the past into the present, and I think what you represent is the present straight into the future.

And I think there's something about the individual freedom that you allow yourself when you're dancing.

KAITLYN SARDIN: For me, it's my way to speak to the world.

It's the easiest way for me to talk to people.

I just find that I'm able to show my emotions through dance.

JEAN BUTLER: I think in some ways, when I look at you, you are the epitome of what he imagined the world would be in many ways, and that's just a wonderful thing.

MICK MOLONEY: Well, one of the reasons we do these presentations, Leni, and that we continue to do them, is an often very harrowing story of relations between Irish and African-Americans, is to punctuate that story with transcendental moments of celebration.

They often come in the arts.

They involve people meeting one another, getting to know one another.

LENWOOD SLOAN: What I like about our work, Mick, is no matter who you think you are, you are free from the bondage of that in the music and the dance.

MICK MOLONEY: Art is often unstoppable by even the worst proscriptions against it.

The art will endure.

The artist will survive.

I think we're done.

OK, cut.

PRODUCER: And we'll cut.

MICK MOLONEY: That was great, Leni.

[theme music]