The Phrenologist Coon
"The Phrenologist Coon" is a 1901 song written by African-American entertainer Ernest Hogan with music by Will Accooe. Bert Williams recorded it on Victor Records and sheet music was published for it. It was produced by Williams and [Walker Co.] and published by Jos. W. Stern & Co. in New York City.
The song's lyrics describe a "conjureman" ironically engaging in phrenology – the pseudoscientific study of human characteristics according to the shape of the skull. Paula J. Massood hypothesizes in Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film that "In what is at first glance a demeaning stereotype, 'The Phrenologist's Coon' might, indeed, be something much more involved, because it suggests that black artists were self-consciously dialoging with political context prior to the modernist explorations of affirmative black identity by the Harlem Renaissance writers".
The tune as a schottische was used for the 1902 song "Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes" by Cole and Johnson.