"Darkest America," by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen A few years ago, while I was teaching a graduate seminar, the subject turned to blackface minstrelsy, one of America's first popular art forms. We were very likely in a discussion of the long poems of T. S. Eliot ("The Waste Land" had originally been called "He Do the Police in Different Voices," and his "Sweeney Agonistes" includes blackface) or of John Berryman (who used minstrel show structures and dialect in "The Dream Songs" as late as 1969). One student, shocked by the persistence of minstrelsy, said another of her professors had insisted that blackface died with the 19th century. Only showing her a picture of Judy Garland in blackface convinced her otherwise. Jake Austen A poster for a black tent-show revue that was popular in the early 20th century. Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop By Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. I'm not sure what rattled the student more: that scholars can sometimes get it wrong, or that blackface continued well into the 20th century. Both are at stake in the mixed bag that is Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen's "Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy From Slavery to Hip-Hop." I began to think if the two were a minstrel act they should be named Hit-and-Miss. The book begins well enough, with a retelling of minstrelsy's history, white and black (or should I say, white, then black). If the popularity of the minstrel show with its three-part structure had indeed waned by the turn of the 20th century, minstrelsy shaped that century, and our own time, whether in forms of racial parody or in the very variety-show culture that still dominates our airwaves. Blackface too held on: Bugs Bunny blacked up, and white high schools were putting on minstrel shows as late as the 1960s. Only the black power movement put an end to the mugging. Or did it? While the authors of "Darkest America" seek to trace this tradition - or bad habit - from its inception all the way to the present, they set out to examine its influence not on American culture but on the African-American culture it originally mocked. Their boldest choice comes early on, without fanfare: to refer to minstrelsy as "black," losing the "blackface" that usually precedes it. While Taylor, a co-author of "Faking It," and Austen, the author of "Flying Saucers Rock "n" Roll," don't mention this change, it allows them to talk about minstrelsy both as a blackface phenomenon - started onstage by white minstrels in the 1820s and then later adopted and adapted by African-Americans in and out of blackface in the late 19th century - and as a force in plain-faced comedy. The authors provocatively contend that African-Americans have adopted black minstrelsy as a form of liberation: "It must have been a great joy to act silly, lazy, foolish and free while contributing to a tradition widely viewed as their greatest gift to American entertainment." To Taylor and Austen, black minstrelsy may be embraced, rejected or "signified on," but it remains ever-present: "Whichever approach is taken, the black minstrel image remains inescapable, something that every black performer, critic and thinker has to reckon with." It is with the concept of "signifying" that the authors first go astray. Sly yet clear - like the meaning of jazz - signifying might be defined as overt understatement, whether that means indirectly talking about someone in earshot or full out playing the dozens, that loose-limbed ritual of jonin," snaps and Yo Mama jokes. Yet this often thoughtful book doesn't really delve into signifying as a form of comedy, or do more than touch on forms of black folk humor that might complicate or contradict its thesis. By the end, the authors have painted minstrelsy with such a broad brush that practically anyone who sang or danced blacked up. "Darkest America" shines best in discussing the turn of the 20th century. Any account of the blackface performer Bert Williams is a welcome one, and the authors recognize how Williams, first as part of the comedy team Walker and Williams, and later as the first black performer in the Ziegfeld Follies, transformed blackface from mere buffoonery into a genre not of bathos or pathos - that was familiar - but of real sorrow. In his songs "Nobody" and "Jonah Man," in his famous pantomime of a poker game, Williams played "a fool yet nobody's fool," a profound clown who "single-handedly, if temporarily, freed blackface from ridiculing his race." Kevin Young's books include "The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness" and "The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink," an anthology.