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Transcription: [00:45:26]
{SPEAKER name="Willie"}
That's a--that's dumb thing--that's a little rope, dividin' ye.
[00:45:30]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
The uh, a question we often get on the stage when we discuss this, has to do with the use of cork.
[00:45:37]

Now, clearly, when the whites did Minstrel shows, they were mocking Black performance forms,
[00:45:45]

and they were doing so by putting burnt cork on their faces and hands to darken their skin.
[00:45:51]

In the black community, the performance tradition that extended, I guess well into the 1940s, probably, also called--

[[Cross-talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Willie"}
Oh yeah, to the early 50s, some of it.
[00:46:02]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
also called for the use of cork; though it was black performers showing, at least on the Minstrel stage to all-black audiences, the cork was still used.
[00:46:12]

Willy, could you talk a little bit about that? First, maybe why it was done, and then -- how it was that it came to change?
[00:46:19]

{SPEAKER name="Willie"}
Well I can't tell you exactly how it was done, but it was a tradition we saw other people do it
[00:46:28]

and when we started the show, we had -- we did that to start the show off.
[00:46:32]

You know, start off having our own show, because it was owned by somebody else before, and they, and uh, a lot of people don't know even uh, that the white show was black -- was white people.
[00:46:45]

How many here know that Amos and Andy was white?

[[Cross-talk]]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
This is the Amos and Andy Radio Team

{SPEAKER name="Willie"}
A lot of people didn't know it.
[00:46:53]

Amos and Andy was white. The two black crows was white.
[00:46:58]

But now, Amos and Andy's show after television, they turned it back over to us because uh --
[00:47:05]

they couldn't show it on television like that, and they had so many squa [[sqabbles]] --.
[00:47:09]

They had made enough money. They was millionaires, that's why, and they gave it back to us.
[00:47:13]

But they had made their money mocking us all the time,
[00:47:18]

and a lot of people didn't know; I didn't know it till' last week, that so many people didn't know that they wasn't-- they was white.
[00:47:25]

I thought everybody knew they was white. So many people told me they didn't know it. They thought they was always colored, but they wasn't.
[00:47:31]

So, so that's why we used the makeup, I used the makeup. I used the makeup; put a big lip on and everything,
[00:47:38]

and uh-- in the early 50s, uh-- late 40s, they start to gettin' away from it.
[00:47:46]

Nobody -- You didn't have to -- Why should you black up to be yourself?
[00:47:52]

Didn't have to black up to be yourself. So I stopped blackin' up. I still went to -- still kept putting the big lips on to make my mouth wider,
[00:48:00]

and I was workin' with a lady, and she said to me "Why you make your mouth wider?" I told her. She say "Your lips big enough without that then."
[[laughter]]
[00:48:09]

Transcription Notes:
The first person we hear is Willie. On all other tapes of his interview, I have put "Willie", not "Speaker 2". The moderator in all the tapes is Speaker 1, concerning Willie's interview. Don't know his name.