Programme / Donavin’s Original Tennesseans / Colored Concert Company (Delaware, Ohio, undated, ca. 1882) 4pp. 3 x 5.75 ins. Drawing of Donavin on front cover. Printed on very fragile paper.

One of the few troupes of Black minstrels that was popular after the Civil War, when American minstrelsy would continue to be dominated by white singers in blackface. Program lists the nine members of the company, 4 men and five women, under the direction of L.N.D.Pickett  (a undeservedly forgotten African-American composer at Wilberforce University). The group sang a dozen songs, only one of which was a famous slave-era hymn. The rear cover notes the group was “controlled” by white entrepreneur John W. Donavin since 1873, originally called “Slave Cabin Singers”, but softened to “Colored Concert Company” by the 1880s. (See also the 1891 listing below for the same group under Black management in San Francisco) This fragile imprint is more rare than the group’s earlier programs, WorldCat showing only one institutional holding, at the University of Mississippi.