THE OLD CABIN HOME, by T. Paine Minstrel Songs & Negro Melodies from the Sunny South (Cleveland: S. Brainard's Sons, 1885) As you can gather from the long list of song titles on the image above, this cover was used generically for dozens of "Negro Melodies" published by Brainard's. In other words, what we see here is the literal "stereotype" of slavery that minstrely provided -- this same image of a "happy darky" fit all these titles. At least during the 1840s and 1850s, when blackface minstrelsy first appeared, the Abolitionists provided a contrasting set of images in their anti-slavery propaganda: slaves being overworked, starved, beaten and even tortured, slave families being torn apart, and so on. By the 1880s, that competing re-presentation of slavery had, for all purposes, disappeared from the cultural scene. Courtesy Sheet Music Collection Brown University Library