attention of a circus proprietor named West. The man convinced Dixon to join his traveling circus as a stablehand and errand boy. Dixon traveled with this and other circuses for a time, and he appears as a singer and reciter of poems on bills dated from as early as February 1824. By early 1829, he had taken on the epithet "The American Buffo Singer". Over three days in late July 1829, Dixon performed "Coal Black Rose" in blackface at the Bowery, Chatham Garden, and Park theatres in New York City. The Flash characterized his audience as "crowded galleries and scantily filled boxes"; that is, mostly working-class. On September 24 at the Bowery, Dixon performed Love in a Cloud, a dramatic interpretation of the events described in "Coal Black Rose" and possibly the first blackface farce. These performances proved a hit, and Dixon rose to celebrity, perhaps before any other American blackface performer had done so. On December 14, Dixon's benefit at the Albany Theatre grossed $155.87, the largest take there since the opening night earlier that year. Dixon performed through 1834, most frequently at New York's three major theatres. In addition to blackface song-and-dance numbers, he did whiteface songs and scenes from popular plays; much of his material was quite challenging. Dixon's fame allowed him to pepper his material with satire and political commentary. On November 25, 1830, he sang before a crowd of 120,000 in Washington, D.C., in support of the July Revolution in France. He began selling a collection of songs and skits he had popularized called Dixon's Oddities in 1830; the book remained in print long after. Dixon mostly played to a working-class audience, including in his repertoire such songs as "The New York Fireman", which compared firefighters to the American Founding Fathers. Oratory made up another facet of his act; on December 4, 1832, the Baltimore Patriot reported that Dixon would read an address from the President at the Front Street Theatre. In 1833, he started a small newspaper called the Stonington Cannon. However, the publication saw little success, and by January 1834, he was performing again, now with new talents, such as ventriloquism. Dixon seemed untarnished by his yearlong hiatus. Reviews said that "his voice seems formed of the music itself— 'it thrills, it animates' ..." The Telegraph wrote, Few Melodists have gained more celebrity or been so universally admired, ... The many effusions from