THE LAST MINSTREL.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3163, 14 April 1909, Page 7

THE LAST MINSTREL.

"An old, white-haired man, with a shabby white moustache, and a little white tuft on his chin, brown eyes that have not lost the laughter that was born in them, a mouth that can still help to make droll grimaces"—such is an English newspaper's description of Mr. W. Moore—"Pony" Moore—the famous Moore of Moore and Burgess Minstrels, and one of the. originators of "nigger minstrelsy." There is a difference of opinion as to "Pony's' precise age; he himself declares tha' he numbers eighty-nine summers; bit daughter will only allow him eightys seven years, whilst his niece maintains him to be eighty-five. Despi this age, however, the old veteran ie still hale and hearty, and his hearing is as keen as his eyesight. Mr Moore has naturally a fund of anecdote to relate about the long-ago days when "nigger ministrel % ' bands were rarities. His band, he tell" us, was the first to use bones; the others were in the habit of using slates, "just to make a noise," but one day he experimented with the bones and found they made a merrier din. "When I first knew the banjo it was made out of a gourd, hollowed out, with a piece of skin stretched over it. Four shillings was the price thereof, but now £2O is demanded for a good instrument; yet 1 doubt if any of the finest sound so sweet as our old gourd-banjos of more than half a century ago." Mr Moorfi is the oldest minstrel living now, and holds the record of playing for more that forty years in one hall. He still feels the stage a-calling, for when interviewed he waved his hands as though he were rattling bones, shuffled his feet, and raised a wheezy voice:—

"I wheel about, I turn about, Jump jes' so, And every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow." Mr Moore stated that he played before the King when he was at Oxford, and his ("Pony's") favourite song was "Ada with the Golden Hair." But again the recollection was too strong for the old man; and again the waving of hands, the shuffling of feet, the wheezy voice—then he sang. — Oho! I love Ada, Pretty little Ada, Chummy little Ada, Oho ! Ada with the golden hair."

Mournfully the old melody-maker concluded the interview:—-"I have! got gout in my hands, or I could play the banjo and bones as well as ever. But lam not bad for eighty-nine." "Eighty-five corrected the niece, gently; "eighty-seven," said the daughter; "eighty-nine," insisted "Pony" Moore.