“Jim Crow,” or “Jump Jim Crow,” is a piece of popular music that originated in 1828 and was published as sheet music in 1832. The songand- dance routine was a caricature of Blacks performed by a white actor, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, who painted his face with burnt cork, costumed himself as a plantation slave named Jim Crow, and won nationwide fame performing in theaters across America. Several sources recount that Rice was probably inspired by an elderly Black stableman working in one of the river towns where Rice was performing. The man—with a crooked leg and deformed shoulder, according to some accounts—was singing about “Jim Crow” and punctuating each stanza with a little jump. A more likely explanation is that Rice had observed and absorbed African American traditional song and dance over many years, first while growing up in a racially integrated neighborhood in New York City and later while touring the southern slave states. African folktales of trickster birds, such as crows and buzzards, may also have influenced the vernacular traditions observed by Rice.