Midwest Musicians: Why Missouri?
A striking number of sideshow musicians hail from the Midwest; not only that, an inordinate number are north-central Missouri (and if not there, then east Kansas). Why is this?
One hypothesis is that they or their parents were Exodusters, the name given to disenfranchised African Americans who participated in the mass emmigration northwards into the Kansas area starting in the 1870s, the first post-war migration of Black people. However, census records of the musicians in question - and their parents - do not support this theory. Many Black sideshow musicians were not only born in the Midwest (usually Missouri, Kansas, Ohio, or Kentucky), but their parents were as well. These musicians and their families were usually local to the area going back into the days of slavery; most parents of these musicians were previously enslaved, with their children escaping the binds of slavery only by a few years. Considering Missouri specifically, this is probably largely in part due to the Missouri Compromise; slavery was legal in Missouri until 1865.
Why then were so many Black sideshow musicians from this area of the Midwest? There are a few other potential reasons. First, the Midwest was big money for traveling circuses. The circus utilized every inch that it could of the railroads rapidly expanding like spiderwebs through the Midwest to get to the pocketbooks of small Midwest towns; before the reign of planes, there was no fly-over. Perhaps this visibility engendered the possibility of circus music as a vocation in the minds of Midwest African Americans, further spurred on by the lack of other opportunities in the Midwest as opposed to the East Coast?
Regardless, many Black musicians in the circus circuit not only shared the African American experience, but a Midwest experience. Even more granular than that, several musicians were hit by the same 1883 tornado that ripped through north-central Missouri, including Wolfscale, McNutt, Pleasant, Powell, and the Enix brothers.