There is no glossing over the fact that most "coon songs" reveled in ridicule. The reception of "coon songs", however, was by no means uniform. White performers embraced the "coon song craze" as it suited them. The North Carolina Piedmont pioneer Charlie Poole was an acrobatic jokester with a banjo beating out a "barbaric twang", but he did not perform the "coon songs" he covered in black dialect or in blackface. Poole preferred to hone his own identity and style. While his comedy marked him as hokum, his music was drawn from the "hillbilly" polyglot of Tin Pan Alley, marches, blues, Appalachian Scots Irish old-time fiddle tunes, two-steps, early vaudeville, Civil War chestnuts, event songs, murder ballads and the rest of the mix, with minstrel tunes another important source.