"The Phrenologist Coon" is a 1901 song written by African-American entertainer Ernest Hogan with music by Will Accooe.[1][2][3] Bert Williams recorded it[4] on Victor Records and sheet music was published for it.[5][6] It was produced by Williams and Walker Co. and published by Jos. W. Stern & Co. in New York City.[7]
The song's lyrics describe a "conjureman" ironically engaging in phrenology – the pseudoscientific study of human characteristics according to the shape of the skull.[8] "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," suggests Paula J. Massood in Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film (2013).[9]
The tune as a schottische was used for the 1902 song "Maiden with the Dreamy Eyes" by Cole and Johnson.[10]