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The Long Life of Orra's Songs: The Legacy of Charles Dibdin's The Islanders and West Indian Stage Pidgin

Abstract:Little known or studied today, Charles Dibdin was a performer, composer, and lyricist who did more than any other single person to popularize stylized West Indian stage pidgin as a voice of both comedic entertainment and criticism of slavery and racism. Before blackface minstrelsy re-articulated pidgin as racist mockery, it was the voice of the common, not noble, slave figure with whom listeners/audiences were invited to sympathize. Dibdin developed a winning formula in the opera The Islanders (1780) with the pidgin-speaking Orra and her standard English-speaking husband the Caribbean chief Yanko, a formula that was popularized by George Colman and others through the early nineteenth century.