The Phrenologist Coon

"The Phrenologist Coon" is a 1901 song written by African-American entertainer Ernest Hogan with music by Will Accooe.

[5][6] It was produced by Williams and Walker Co. and published by Jos.

[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.