This is the splendidly named and mustachioed Orpheus McAdoo, American-born touring minstrel and jubilee singer with a renowned bass voice, a visitor to and resident in Australia. He was born into slavery, the ‘possession’ of a man in Nth Carolina. Mr McAdoo died in Sydney in 1900. He died young (42) as did so many of his theatrical colleagues of the day. He began his career as a school teacher but as a manager and singer, he toured South Africa England, India and Australia. His troupes usually presented a ‘cakewalk’, a sort of show-off series of cameo struts and dances by members of the company gussied up in fine and frilly outfits. White people tended to see these as hilarious humiliations of slaves with pretensions and 'ideas above their station’, whereas black performers often secretly saw them as parodies and send-ups of white plantation owners giving themselves airs. A whole other literal layer of meaning and problematic assumptions could be added when white performers 'blacked up’ to pretend to be cakewalking black people … pretending to be the white people … Here, in the late 1890s, he wears the theatrical fashion of the day - a most definite buttoniere, and a silk tie with a tie pin. His wife Mattie Allen was a 'lady tenor’. I think Mr McAdoo’s daughter, Violet, a rare 'lady baritone’, ended up owning a frock salon in Fairfield. #Ozhistory #blackface #minstrels #singers #moustache #buttoniere #cakewalk #orpheousmcadoo