[ 15O ] VERA BRODSKY LAWRENCE Then Setauket—be ever Setauket— (Where nature knows little of art, Save the using it as a chaste locket To hang on its goodness of heart!) Be thee prosperous in thy Publick weal— Even throwing discord to the wind,— That thy sons and thy daughters may feel Ever happy, and ever incuned To sing, "la, sol, fa, etc!' The two surviving examples of Hawkins' popular patriotic-cum- comic songs in "Negro" dialect are of great musicological interest, not for their intrinsic merit but because they are among the earliest dialect songs to have been sung in blackface on the American stage, many years before the arrival of the two most widely celebrated pioneering practitioners of burnt cork, George Washington Dixon in the late 1820s and Thomas Dartmouth ("Daddy" or "Jim Crow") Bice in the early '30s.24 In 1815, when War of 1812 songs were still of absorbing topical interest, the New York Columbian advertised (on June 13 and 14) a special attraction at the actor James Pritchard's benefit at the Park Theatre on June 14. His popular colleague Mr. Bobertson (his real name was Hopkins Bobinson, but for some idiosyncratic reason his public had dubbed him "Bobertson") had "kindly consented" to sing, "in the character of a Negro Sailor, the patriotic song of 'Cham- plain and Plattsburgh!" This was not Mr. Bobertson's first performance of the song, nor was it even the first theatrical representation of the recent victory at Lake Champlain (the battle had occurred on September 11, 1814). As early as November 18, 1814, New York theatergoers were treated, "Between the play and the farce" at the Park, to the "interlude of Champlain and Plattsburgh, or, The Army and the Navy"25 a spectacle that appears to have originated even earlier in Albany, where the battle was a source of great local pride and frequent celebration. Some chroniclers of early minstrelsy have claimed that the song—also called "The Siege of Plattsburgh" and, more vividly, "Backside Albany" (from its opening words)—was originally pre- 2*The first ensemble minstrel show seen in New York was presented in 1843 by Daniel Decatur Emmett and the Virginia Minstrels. For information on early minstrels see Gilbert Chase, America's Music (New York, Revised Second Edition, 1966), 259-82. 25 Advertised in the Evening Post, November 17, 1814.