At some point in the 1830s, Rice began to appropriate aspects of the musical and dance traditions that had developed among the enslaved people of the Southern states. He had assembled these cultural fragments and added his own distortions to black speech patterns and exaggerations of black dancing, and created the stage character Jim Crow, an enslaved man dressed in rags and faded finery who sang songs, danced and told jokes. To complete the persona, Rice blackened his face and hands, as earlier minstrel performers had done. In 1836, at the height of British abolitionism, three years after the
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