minstrel

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A medieval entertainer who traveled from place to place, especially to sing and recite poetry.
2. n. A lyric poet.
3. n. A musician.
4. n. A performer in a minstrel show.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A musician, especially one who sings or recites to the accompaniment of instruments. Specifically, in the middle ages, the minstrels were a class who devoted themselves to the amusement of the great in castle or camp by singing ballads or songs of love and war, sometimes of their own composition, with accompaniment on the harp, lute, or other instrument. together with suitable mimicry and action, and also by storytelling, etc. The intermediate class of professional musicians from which the later minstrels sprang appeared in France as early as the eighth century, and was by the Norman conquest introduced into England, where it was assimilated with the Anglo-Saxon gleemen. Everywhere the social importance of the minstrels slowly degenerated, until in the fifteenth century they had formed themselvel generally into gilds of itinerant popular musicians and mountebanks. In England theyfell so lowin esteem that in 1597 they were classed by a statute with rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars; but in France their gilds were maintained until the revolution. See gleeman, troubadour, trouvère, and jongleur.
2. n. Hence Any poet or musician. [Poetical.]3, Originally, one of a class of singers of negro melodies and delineators of life on the Southern plantations which originated in the United States about 1830: called negro minstrels, although they are usually white men whose faces and hands are blackened with burnt cork. The characteristic feature of such a troupe or band is the middle-man or interlocutor, who leads the talk and gives the cues, and the two end-men, who usually perform on the tambourine and the bones, and between whom the indispensable conundrums and jokes are exchanged. As now constituted, a negro-minstrel troupe retains but little of its original character except the black faces and the old jokes.

Wiktionary

1. n. historical A medieval traveling entertainer who would sing and recite poetry, often to his own musical accompaniment.
2. n. One of a troupe of entertainers who wore black makeup (blackface) to present a variety show of song, dance and banjo music; now considered racist.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. In the Middle Ages, one of an order of men who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sang verses to the accompaniment of a harp or other instrument; in modern times, a poet; a bard; a singer and harper; a musician.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a singer of folk songs
2. v. celebrate by singing, in the style of minstrels
3. n. a performer in a minstrel show