In the third interlude, ‘The Storm’, I examine the performance of a single song by one singer, the crippled black sailor Joseph Johnson. Taking an approach somewhat indebted to Timothy Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat, I pursue the elements bound up in Johnson’s performance right across the globe, from the Antipodes to Jamaica, from Versailles to the West End stage, placing this East End performance within an imperial narrative of cultural appropriation, assimilation, and identity formation. Johnson emerges as in many ways the epitome of the ballad-singer: a marginal figure disadvantaged by both race and injury, whose self-fashioning (based on Jamaican Jonkonnu practice) was designed to reposition himself at the heart of both metropolitan and national notions of patriotism.

Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, enslaved people in the Caribbean and South, Central, and North America performed Jonkanoo, a masked parade of dance and song. This Christmas tradition was rooted in the memory of armed resistance to imperialism in the figure of‘John Cannu’, also known as ‘John Konny’, a West African tribal chief who rebelled against Dutch settlers in the 1720s. After being captured and sent as a slave to Jamaica, he became a folk hero featured in Jonkanoo performances. Merging African dance and masquerade traditions with English carnivalesque mummery, these performances were tolerated by slave owners as a ‘temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men’, as Mikhail Bakhtin posited. Jonkanoo was nonetheless a form of resistance against white oppression and persists today in Jamaica and the Bahamas as vernacular performances of resistance, freedom, and memory that represent a fluidity between formal theatre, music, and street performances.