So, why are police officers blasting this jingle from their cruisers in predominantly Black neighborhoods? As of the time of publication, the NYPD has refused multiple requests to comment. But with the nation in the midst of a racial reckoning, it may be illuminating to look at the melody’s place at the intersection of ice cream and Black history.
The tune many recognize as “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” first reached American shores with an influx of Scots-Irish immigrants in the 1700s; it was originally a fiddle song called “The Rose Tree.” Early Americans took kindly to the meandering melody, and by the early 1800s it became “Turkey in the Straw,” a playful exploration of rural Appalachian life. The jingle was borrowed again later in the century for an altogether new, and uniquely American form of entertainment: traveling blackface minstrel shows.
As Theodore R. Johnson writes for NPR, the earworm lost its innocence in the 1820s when it became “Zip Coon.” The song introduced a blackface character of the same name who, after finding freedom and moving into a metropolitan setting, clumsily attempted to fit into white society with fancy clothing and big words. By the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, “Zip Coon” was the most popular song in the United States.
The success of the melody as a vessel for white supremacy hit a fever pitch in 1916 with Harry C. Browne’s “Nigger Love A Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!,” released by Columbia Records. Oddly enough, music of this ilk found a happy home in American ice-cream parlors.
To keep American families entertained while they enjoyed their soft serve with sprinkles, many parlors housed music boxes that played popular songs of the day. Unfortunately, well into the 20th century, that meant minstrel show tunes like “Camptown Races,” “Dixie,” “Jimmy Crack Corn,” and, of course, “Zip Coon.” When ice cream went mobile in the 1920s, newfangled ice cream trucks kept the parlor soundtrack, blaring instrumental versions of the aforementioned hit songs into newly constructed suburban neighborhoods. Thus, the catchiest tune of them all, “Zip Coon,” became simply known as “the ice cream truck jingle.”
When Johnson’s article went viral in 2014, detractors argued that ice cream trucks were, surely, only playing the innocuous “Turkey in the Straw.” Yet as Johnson points out in a follow-up article, early-20th century sheet music for “Turkey in the Straw” featuring racist imagery proves that “Zip Coon” had made such a splash that even the once-innocent song leaned into its more problematic connotations. As Johnson wrote, “There is simply no divorcing the song from the dozens of decades it was almost exclusively used for coming up with new ways to ridicule, and profit from, black people.”
So is the NYPD playing this storied jingle as a joke, by coincidence, or as an obscure dog whistle? A quick survey of officers’ sense of humor suggests it could be the latter.