“Aba Daba Honeymoon” was first introduced into the airwaves in 1914 by Collins & Harlan. It was part of an emerging and fresh new taste in music called Ragtime. Ragtime was specifically a dancing and momentum based type of music, which explains a lot of the hustle and bustle of the tune to Aba Daba Honeymoon, but it was a complete divergence of the strict European music style that predominated music charts before ragtime. This new music had stemmed from the formal European piano music traditions (hence the heavy use of piano sounds within the song) but added a lot of informal and folk type tunes into the mix. These folk sounds were contributed by the African American culture who introduced the ragtime tune to a larger audience.
However, though Ragtime, and in this case Aba Daba Honeymoon do portray a sense of frivolous fun in its kooky and “ragged” tune – it underlines a lot of derogatory and racial slurs within its text. When looking through some old images of record covers and even other media images – often times the portrayal of African Americans was very savagely drawn, depicting them almost as wild and barbaric and in many cases with an uncanny resemblance to monkeys. This obviously echoed the context and ideas of the times as viewing the African American race as inferior, primitive and savage. And though Aba Daba Honeymoon might portray these “monkeys” as being “happy and gay” it appears to be in a context of a very simplistic and rudimentary based pleasure (simply chatting away nonsense). A lot of these stereotypes and biases can also be found within Indissoluble Matrimony by Rebecca West that depicts the colored race in Evadne’s character as inferior, simple, and easily amused.
And HERE you can find the video!
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