Left: a stereoview, c. 1900, portraying the cakewalk with white actors, half of whom are in blackface, though clearly delineating the dance as one by black performers for the "benefit" of a white audience.

1 Epstein, Dena; Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, University of Illinois Press,1981; p.44.

It has been suggested many times that the cake walk was an imitation of white plantation masters' refined dances by their black slaves, either originating as, or developing into, a parody of the affectations of european high culture. Such a hypothesis certainly has some corroborating evidence; Robert Anderson, a slave who was born in Green County Kentucky in 1848, recalled an incident when the master's family had left the plantation and so they "had a regular jubilee which lasted the greater part of the night. We danced the dances like the white folks danced them, and then danced our own kind of dances."1