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Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon

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Sheet music for "Every race has a flag but the coon."[1]

"Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon" was a song written by Will A. Heelan, and J. Fred Helf that was popular in the United States and the United Kingdom. The song followed the previous success of "All Coons Look Alike to Me", written in 1896 by Ernest Hogan. H. L. Mencken cites it as being one of the three coon songs that "firmly established the term coon in the American vocabulary".

The song was a musical hit for A. M. Rothschild and Company in 1901.[2] New York's Siegel Cooper Company referred to it as one of their greatest hits the following April.[3] The next month it was sung during "Music on the Piers" in New York, becoming the first song played at the Metropolitan Avenue pier.[4] In his book The Movies That Changed Us: Reflections on the Screen, Nick Clooney refers to the song as part of the "hit parade" of popular music one could use to measure the temper of the times when The Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915.[5] It was also Marie Dressler's contribution to the 'coon' genre.[6] Lottie Gilson, Williams and Walker, Frances Curran, Hodges and Launchmere, Libby and Bennett, Zoa Matthews, Johnnie Carroll, Clarice Vance, Gerie Gilson, Joe Bonnell, The Eldridges and "100 other artists" sang the song with "overwhelming success", according to its sheet music.

The song motivated the creation of the Pan-African flag in 1920 by the members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League.[7] In a 1927 report of a 1921 speech appearing in the Negro World weekly newspaper, Marcus Garvey was quoted as saying,[8]

Show me the race or the nation without a flag, and I will show you a race of people without any pride. Aye! In song and mimicry they have said, "Every race has a flag but the coon." How true! Aye! But that was said of us four years ago. They can't say it now....

The lyrics to "Every Race Has a Flag but the Coon" include the musical meme "four eleven forty four".


The lyrics to the song are:


The leader of the Blackville Club arose last Labor night

And said, “When we were on parade today

I really felt so much ashamed, I wished I could turn white

‘Cause all the white folks march’d with banners gay

Just at de stand de German band

They waved their flag and played ‘De Wacht am Rhine’

The Scotch Brigade each man arrayed

In new plaid dresses marched to ‘Auld Lang Syne’

Even Spaniards and Sweeds, folks of all kinds and creeds

Had their banner except de coon alone

Ev’ry nation can brag ‘bout some kind of a flag

Why can’t we get an emblem of our own?”

Chorus:

For Ireland has her Harp and Shamrock

England floats her Lion bold

Even China waves a Dragon

Germany an Eagle gold

Bonny Scotland loves a Thistle

Turkey has her Crescent Moon

And what won’t Yankees do for their Red, White and Blue

Every race has a flag but the coon

He says, “Now I’ll suggest a flag that ought to win a prize

Just take a flannel shirt and paint it red

They draw a chicken on it with two poker dice for eyes

An’ have it wavin’ razors ‘round its head

You might also like

To make it quaint, you’ve got to paint

A possum with a pork chop in his teeth

To give it tone, a big hambone

You sketch upon a banjo underneath

And be sure not to skip just a policy slip

Have it marked four eleven forty four

Then them Irish and Dutch, they can’t guy us so much

We should have had this emblem long before”

References

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  1. ^ Heelan, Will. A. (1900). Every race has a flag but the coon. New York: Jos. W. Stern and Co. Retrieved 7 September 2014.
  2. ^ "Display Ad 15 -- No Title". Chicago Daily Tribune. September 15, 1901. p. 45. ProQuest 425880041.
  3. ^ "Display Ad 9 -- No Title". New York Times. April 10, 1902. p. 7. ProQuest 101946057.
  4. ^ "DELAY IN GAMBLING CASES: Moral Value Lost Unless Prosecutions Are Speedy, Jerome Says". New York Times. May 30, 1902. ProQuest 118471848..
  5. ^ The Movies That Changed Us: Reflections on the Screen (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), pp. 285-286.
  6. ^ Marie Dressler: A Biography, With a Listing of Major Stage Performances, a Filmography and a Discography (Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, December 1998).
  7. ^ "New Flag for Afro-Americans". Africa Times and Orient Review. 1 October 1912. p. 134. Cited in RACE FIRST: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 43
  8. ^ Garvey, Marcus (March 19, 1927). "Honorable Marcus Garvey, Gifted Man of Vision, Sets Out In Unanswerable Terms the Reasons Why Negroes Must Build in Africa". Negro World. Vol. XXII, no. 6. Universal Negro Improvement Association.
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