The Life, Death, and Untold Legacy of Bluesman Butler “String Beans” May
There probably was no better known performer to Race vaudeville fans than Butler May … he was the Bert Williams of small time.
—Chicago Defender, 1917
The proliferation of small black vaudeville theaters at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century provided a proper platform for the concrete formulation and emergence of popular blues. Composer/publisher W. C. Handy has been immortalized as the “Father of the Blues”; but in those days of nascent southern vaudeville, Butler “String Beans” May was the stage performer most responsible for popularizing the “original blues.” String Beans was the greatest attraction of pre-1920 African American vaudeville and the first blues star.
Butler May was born in Montgomery, Alabama, to Butler May Sr., a farmer, and Laura Robinson May. Various documents place his date of birth somewhere between May 1891 and August 1894.1 After his father died around 1900, Butler May, Jr. and his seven brothers and sisters were brought up by their mother, who worked as a laundress, domestic, and cook.2 Lifelong Montgomery resident Joseph Nesbitt, born in 1902, knew something of May’s family history. For a time, the Mays and the Nesbitts were next-door neighbors at 115 and 117 Tuscaloosa Street: “[The Mays] didn’t own the house that they lived in on Tuscaloosa.… See, his mother was a widowed woman, and had been for a number of years. Because she reared her children without a husband; she was a legally married woman alright, good Christian woman … and [Butler May] was a Montgomery boy, and everybody liked him.”3
According to Nesbitt, young Butler May attended the old Swayne School, later renamed Booker T. Washington; and the May family worshipped at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to pastor in 1954, the year before the Montgomery bus boycott. Nesbitt recalled seeing Butler May perform in his neighborhood:
He’d go around in a truck, with his piano on there, and he played, you know.… He’d always do it in the summer, see? When people could come on their porches and hear him and see him. And his mother and sisters was always telling, “My son will be out,” and “My brother will be along this evening.” They’d give ’em the time of day, and my mother would always arrange her business so that she could be out there and see him and enjoy him, too.…
His piano was on a truck, and he was seated at the piano.… Some man would be driving his dray, that he was riding on, or his truck, or whatever it was. There wasn’t no top on it.… He got a truck and put a piano up there and played his own music and sang his own music.4
String Beans was often praised for his piano playing, but extant documentation reveals no clues to his early tutors or musical influences. In the spring of 1909 he left Montgomery with Benbow’s Chocolate Drops, a southern road show managed by black Montgomery native William Benbow. The Chocolate Drops set up residence at the Belmont Street Theater in Pensacola, Florida. On April 10, 1909, a company correspondent mentioned the fledgling comedian for the first time in the “Stage” columns of the Freeman: “We are still in Pensacola … The show is making good. Roster: Happy Howe, Butler May, Kid Kelley, Billy Henderson, Dave Cross, Freddie Folks, Alberta Benbow, Minnie Jones, Stella Taylor, Beatrice Howe.”5
Not long after Benbow’s Chocolate Drops opened in Pensacola, William and Gertrude Rainey came aboard:
The two Raneys open with the show on [April] 7th, and Gertie Raney [sic] is making good with her late hit, “If the World Don’t Treat You Right, Why Don’t You Come Home?” Butler May, our funny man, is still pleasing. Happy Howe and wife are still cleaning. Lizzie White and Minnie Jones are making good. William Henderson, our baritone songster, is still with us and is expecting his wife Mrs. Buela [sic] Henderson, who is at present working at Jacksonville. Mrs. Alberta Benbow is making good with her late hit, “I’m Glad I’m Married.” Our manager, M. Jacoby, always wears a smile on his face, and says it is his heart’s delight to pay his people. Prof. Noner Barras [sic] has charge of the music. William Benbow is stage manager.6
Benbow’s troupe settled into Pensacola for a long stay. In the month of May, Butler May and Arthur “Happy” Howe, “the Southern favorite,” reportedly “joined hands … and will present a vaudeville act.”7 Howe was on sabbatical from the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrel Company, where he served as leading comedian. Howe was likely one of String Beans’s early inspirations.
The Kenner and Lewis Amusement Company arrived in Pensacola from New Orleans in September 1909.8 When Benbow’s Chocolate Drops left Pensacola, Butler May stayed on to work for Kenner and Lewis at the Belmont Street Theater, teamed with fellow “funny man” Kid Kelly. Their act included buck dancing and a comic vocal duet titled “Music Makes Me Sentimental.”9
When Kenner and Lewis left for Mobile on November 14, 1909, May and Kelly broke away and headed for the newly opened Luna Park Theater on Decatur Street in Atlanta. Luna Park was a black amusement grounds with a vaudeville platform that became a particular flashpoint of the coming blues movement. R. B. “Caggie” Howard, the house pianist, later served as the band director for Tolliver’s Smart Set.10 Butler May and Kid Kelly stormed the Luna Park stage: “The team of May and Kelly, singing and dancing comedians, is the talk of the town. Butler May ‘grabbed’ the audience the first night he worked with his funny dancing and his own song, ‘Mary Jane.’”11 The song apparently referenced the popular Mary Jane style of women’s shoes. It spread quickly along the southern vaudeville theater routes. One week after May introduced it at Luna Park, Jimmie and Magnolia Cox appeared at the neighboring Arcade Theater, “making a great success with their own song entitled ‘I Love the Mary Jane, I think they are great, but I am crazy about the gal that wears the opera cape.’”12
While Butler May was at Luna Park his “String Beans” persona emerged. A Freeman report from January 1910 proclaimed, “String Beans, better known as Butler May, is bringing the house down with ‘Play It On.’”13 One likely indication of String Beans’s newly minted celebrity came in a Freeman report the following month, which revealed that Luna Park’s proprietor Charles Wood “has spent $2,000 on the place, and now has it on the order of an airdome.”14
As spring settled over Luna Park, “Butler May, known as String Bean,” was “still the favorite, and takes the house by storm when he takes that unknown trip.”15 “That unknown trip,” or simply “that trip,” is an obscure relic of black stage patois repeatedly associated with early presentations of the blues. Curiously redolent of 1960s youth-culture jargon, it suggests a process of musical improvisation and at the same time conveys an awareness of the creative powers of the irrational.
In May 1910 String Beans made a “flying trip” from Atlanta to the Globe Theater in Jacksonville, Florida, to appear in a “comedy (naval) production, entitled ‘Booker T. Cruising on the High Seas.’”16 Back in Luna Park in July, he advised Freeman readers:
Butler May, better known as Papa String Beans, is tearing the house down every night singing “I’ve Got Elgin Movements in My Hip and Twenty Years Guaranteed.” He is still packing the house and has been for ten months in succession.
Atlanta Independent, April 30, 1910.
Atlanta Independent, May 14, 1910
Regards to all in and out of the profession. Also Kenner and Lewis at Belmont Street Theater, Pensacola, Fla. Hello W. M. Benboe [sic], write to me.
BUTLER MAY
Stage Manager Luna Park Theater.17
String Beans’s wildly contagious song of “Elgin Movements,” with its tantalizing metaphor of clockwork hip action, became entrenched in blues tradition. By the fall of 1911, String Beans was advertising himself as “The Elgin Movements Man.”18 At Luna Park in July 1910, he also made an impression with “his own act entitled ‘Jasper’s Dream in the Pits of Hell,’ assisted by Sweetie Matthews, who is singing that ‘Oh, You Devil Rag!’”19
String Beans’s new partner was originally from New Orleans, where she was first spotted on stage at Dixie Park in the spring of 1909. By November of that year she had made her way to Thomas Baxter’s Exchange Garden Theater in Jacksonville: “Sweetie Matthews and Emma Thornton are Louisiana beauties, cleaning up with their act, ‘The Boy Said, “Will You”? and the Girl Said, “Yes.”’”20 She also played opposite blackface comedian Ed F. Peat in a western skit titled “Trixie, the Pride of the Ranch,” singing the 1908 sheet music hit “Whistle and I’ll Wait for You.”21
Butler May and Sweetie Matthews left Luna Park together some time before August 1, 1910, when String Beans took charge of the stage at the Queen Theater in his hometown Montgomery.22 A few weeks later, news came that:
The people are well pleased with the up-to-date shows that he has put on. The act of the first part of the week was “Under the Harvest Moon,” a three-act musical comedy, assisted by Danford Cross, our straight man, also Sweetie May. Watkins and Watkins are cleaning up singing “Grizzly Bear.” Butler May is well pleased with the bunch of people. Mr. Taylor, the manager is delighted over the packed houses that he has every night. Butler May as “String Bean” is taking the house by storm singing “I Wish I Were in Heaven with My Brother Bill.”23
Butler May and Sweetie Matthews apparently were married during their August 1910 stand in Montgomery. When they dropped down to Pensacola in early September, the Belmont Theater’s Freeman correspondent informed, “We have Butler May and his little wife, who made a decided hit.”24 Later that month, String Beans and Sweetie May backtracked to Luna Park in Atlanta and “took the house by storm singing ‘Play the Luna Park Rag.’”25
In October Will Benbow recruited Butler and Sweetie May to headline Barrasso’s new Alabama Rosebuds Company on the pioneer Tri-State Theater Circuit. On November 6, 1910, the Alabama Rosebuds opened at the Temple Theater in New Orleans, Sweetie’s home town: “May and May, better known as the ‘String Bean Duo’ was a tremendous hit from their very first appearance, and are great favorites. The rendition of Casey Jones received several encores.”26 Also with the show were Richard J. Matthews, Eugene Liggins, Stella Taylor, Bonnie Belle Thomas, Edna Landry Benbow, Leroy White, and pianist Sadie Whitehead with her eight-piece New Orleans orchestra. Stella Taylor was Jelly Roll Morton’s girlfriend, and Morton himself may have been part of the Alabama Rosebuds entourage.27
From New Orleans, the Alabama Rosebuds proceeded to the newest stop on the Tri-State Circuit, the Amuse U No. 2 Theater in Vicksburg, Mississippi.28 Shortly thereafter, May and May broke away from the Alabama Rosebuds to play a five-week engagement at the Pekin Theater in Savannah, Georgia, where Beans sang “his own song, ‘Papa String Beans Rag.’”29 The show was reviewed in the Savannah Tribune:
The first of the program that greeted the crowded houses, was a popular overture rendered by Prof. Wm. Robinson’s orchestra. The motion pictures were interesting as well as educative. May and May known as “String Beans” are always on hand with something new. Next come Tom Young who is clever in his eccentric dancing. Then come … Willie and Cora Fisher Glenn playing a return date.… Cora Fisher Glenn is a wonderful dancer and is said to be the best female buck dancer on the American Stage, while Willie Glenn is also a clever dancer. The Pekin Stock Co., under the direction of “Stringbeans” in a laughable farce by Pauline Crampton entitled “The two African Princes” closed the program. Pauline Crampton in male attire, as Jack Shriggs scored a big hit.… Stringbeans and Tom Scott as the two African Princes were a laughable treat.30
Savannah Tribune, January 21, 1911. May and May shared this bill with Will and Gertrude Rainey.
Returning to Fred Barrasso’s theatrical territory in March 1911, the “String Bean Duo” headlined a three-week engagement at the Savoy Theater in Memphis, in company with Estelle Harris, Happy Howe, and others: “‘String Beans’ is making quite a hit with the people of the town. ‘Sweetie’ is also very pleasing. She sings ‘Papa String Beans Rag.’”31 From Memphis they went directly to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where a reporter judged them “the best team ever appearing at Majestic theater.”32
Following the Hot Springs engagement, May and May headlined a heavy bill at the Central Theater in Atlanta, and String Beans took part in “a military travesty: ‘Captain Bogus of the Jim Crow Regiment,’ by J. H. Williams.”33 Influential northern comedian-producer Tim Owsley happened to be in Atlanta. Owsley was generally sympathetic to southern performers, but he was not quite ready for String Beans. In a “Write Up of All the Theaters of Atlanta, Ga.,” he offered a bemused commentary: “Butler May and Swetie [sic] May, better known to the southern show world as papa and mamma String Beans. Some name, aint’s it? … Mr. Butler May should allow his female partner to do more work in their act. As she is very charming in her costumes and sings well. They close their act with a finish, just like Murphy and Francis. I don’t know where they got it, but they do the restaurant gag.”34
Indianapolis Freeman, February 25, 1911.
The exemplary northern black comedy team of Bert Murphy and Francis Ellick toured mainstream vaudeville circuits during the first decade of the twentieth century and right up to the end of the String Beans era.35 Murphy’s 1917 obituary recalled him “singing his own popular song, ‘He’s in the Jail House Now.’”36
Two years out of Montgomery and still in his teens, String Beans had already established himself as the brightest star in southern vaudeville. In the spring of 1911 Fred Barrasso made a special trip to Chicago to confer with booking agent Frank Q. Doyle.37 Doyle was expanding his interests in “colored time,” and Barrasso apparently recommended String Beans as the one best southern act to try out on the “Dahomian Stroll.”38 In May 1911 String Beans and Sweetie embarked on their first excursion across the Mason-Dixon Line, headed for Chicago to introduce the blues at the Monogram Theater.
The homely Monogram was from its inception a “people’s theater,” a suitable harbor for String Beans and the subsequent armada of southern performers who would soon follow him north. A survivor of the “5-cent theater wars” of 1908, standing among more imposing, better capitalized theatrical enterprises, the Monogram endured on the strength of the management’s commitment to stage the most up-to-date vaudeville shows on the Stroll. Juli Jones judged: “The Monogram, the ‘fightness’ little house in Chicago, always has a capital bill.”39
Located at 3028 State Street, the Monogram first opened under the management of Miss Willie Ingalls, and changed ownership several times before it was taken over by Martin Klein in the spring of 1909.40 What Harlem’s Apollo Theater was to black popular entertainment during the 1950s, Chicago’s Monogram Theater was during the teens: a racially insular platform offering shows that bristled with in-group prestige and creative influence. But the Monogram was small-time African American show business, and success there was not a ticket into the mainstream. Manager Klein did not pay big salaries, and the building was unglamorous. Ethel Waters had particularly harsh words for the Monogram in her 1951 autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow:
Of all those rinky-dink dumps I played, nothing was worse than the Monogram Theater in Chicago. It was close to the El, and the walls were so thin that you stopped singing—or telling a joke—every time a train passed. Then, when the noise died down, you continued right where you left off.
In the Monogram you dressed away downstairs with the stoker. The ceiling down there was so low I had to bend over to get my stage clothes on. Then you came up to the stage on a ladder that looked like those on the old-time slave ships.
Ever since I worked at the Monogram any old kind of dressing room has looked pretty good to me so long as it had a door that could be closed.41
It is not clear why Waters singled out the Monogram for censure. Seemingly, it was no better or worse than the average black vaudeville theater in appointments or accommodations. The style and quality of entertainment presented at the Monogram are what account for its stature and historical importance.42
The Monogram’s pit band—“unexcelled on State Street”—comprised pianist William H. Dorsey, clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman, and trap drummer George Reeves. Martin Klein had successfully enticed Sweatman from the Grand Theater and Reeves from the Pekin. In August 1911 Sylvester Russell wrote: “The Monogram Orchestra … has the highest priced musicians on State Street.”43 Russell felt that, “as a roll drummer,” George Reeves excelled “all others and adds melody of tone in support of classical singers.”44 Wilbur Sweatman began his career with Prof. N. Clark Smith’s Pickaninny Band and made his first professional tours as a member of P. G. Lowery’s Band. He was a pioneer jazz recording artist.45
Dorsey, a veteran of southern park and saloon platforms, gravitated to Chicago in 1907: “For real classy music as well as the late rags, Mr. Wm. Dorsey, at the Monogram, is the man. Dorsey first gets all the late hits and puts them on at the Monogram in great fashion. Dorsey’s music is a scream. Many come specially to hear Dorsey.”46 While maintaining his position at the Monogram, Dorsey opened an office at 3159 State Street and went into the business of arranging songs.47 An advertisement described his range of services: “Music arranged for piano, band and orchestra. Vaudeville artists in need of music of any description for their acts, can be accommodated with bright and catchy music. Words set to music and music set to words.”48 Dorsey’s “song shop” proved so successful that he hired Dave Peyton and Wilbur Sweatman to help him run it: “If you have a song and think it can make good, send it to them and they will arrange it ready for the publisher.”49
In their first week at the Monogram, Butler and Sweetie May shared the bill with singer-songwriter Chris Smith, “a hit-factory in the ragtime line,” and blackface comedian Clayborne Jones, known for his “Zulu act.”50 Jones rocked the Monogram with “It’s Hard to Find a King Like Me.”51 Subsequently, String Beans introduced a personalized version of “King Like Me,” which he identified as a Chris Smith–Butler May collaboration.52
At the conclusion of their second week, String Beans received his first review from Sylvester Russell, headed “May and May Thrill at the Monogram.”
Butler May, who I am told, is the heaviest team comedian of the lower South, appeared with his wife at the Monogram last Monday.… Whatever it is that May hands over, nobody knows, or cares, but it thrills and creates riots of laughter. This heavy Northern atmosphere and the presence of a noted critic all seem strange to him, to inform him that he is not great, but clever as a mixer with colored audiences who hail from Mobile or the State of Tennessee.53
It was clear from the outset that Russell had little use for “whatever it is that May hands over.” Well versed in conventional theater lore, but strait-laced and snobbish, Russell was unprepared to appreciate the rising tide of vernacular arts from the “lower South.” Still, he was obliged to acknowledge the “riots of laughter” that String Beans and Sweetie May created at the Monogram.
Beans’s success confounded not only Russell but other northern critics and show veterans. The business of theaters is to draw large audiences, and String Beans generated unprecedented box office activity. Nevertheless, his style of entertaining was anathema to those accustomed to judging performers by conventional standards. His outrageous risqué comedy, blues songs, and suggestive eccentric dancing did not fit their concept of proper entertainment.
News of String Beans’s ability to draw a crowd spread quickly, and northern managers fell in line to book this hot, new, altogether different act. From the Monogram, Beans and Sweetie went to the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati: “The big noise on the bill is a new team, May and May, a couple of laugh producers. This team was made to order for Brownsville. It is a case of come early or get no seat at the Pekin as long as May and May are here. Good singing, good dancing and gaudy costumes are this team’s principal assets. The manager has sent notice out to the booking agent for more performers with this class of work.”54 May and May were held over in Cincinnati for a second week. The theater reporter called them “the big sensation of Brownsville.”55
No sooner had Beans and Sweetie conquered Cincinnati than Martin Klein fetched them back for another run at the Monogram. As their popularity soared, a river of ambiguous appraisals, backhanded compliments, and patronizing supplications began to flow from the pen of Sylvester Russell: “Butler May is of an ancient type of oddities inconceivable, but apt enough to watch or wait for a word or moment to cause a scream of laughter. But he is a comedian by recognition of his growing importance as an eccentric dancer, and his wife, believe me, has some new purple clothes.”56
In July, May and May played the Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis and then moved on to the Lyre Theater in Louisville, Kentucky. Historically, Louisville is regarded as “the Gateway to the South”; but, while the city was home to many luminaries of the early African American stage, it was outside of the southern vaudeville “wheel,” and had barely experienced the new brand of blues-tinged vaudeville before String Beans and Sweetie May arrived in town: “This being their first appearance in Louisville, they open very big, and their first song, ‘The Sweetest Man in Town,’ was a sure hit. Butler May sang ‘Get You a Kitchen Mechanic,’ and it stormed the house. He was compelled to take several encores. The closing song, ‘Alabama Bound,’ was heartily received. Without a doubt this was one of the best acts seen in Louisville and closed a good bill.”57 In their second week the Lyre correspondent called them “the scream of the present situation, who hold the audience spellbound.”58
(Courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University)
“Kitchen Mechanic” and “Alabama Bound” were signature markers of the blues revolution. “Kitchen Mechanic” first popped up at the Pekin Theater in Savannah in the spring of 1910, when G. W. Allen introduced his “latest writing … The song that starts them all to humming, singing and whistling, and is considered by the critics and public to be the greatest and funniest ragtime song ever written … entitled ‘I’ll Get a Kitchen Mechanic Out the White Folks Yard and Let Those Tantalizing Browns Alone.’”59 That summer, minstrel magnets Billy and Louise Kersands were singing “the biggest song hits of the season,” including “Kitchen Mechanic Out of the White Folks’ Yard.”60
“Alabama Bound” had become ubiquitous in southern vaudeville by 1910. Correspondence from traveling minstrel show bands also attests to its significance, as portrayed in this Freeman report from the Down in Dixie Minstrels in New Orleans: “They are not so crazy for ‘Dixie’ down here any more. It is Alabama Bound’ and ‘Casey Jones.’”61
Sheet music versions of “Alabama Bound” were circulating by 1909; one, with the subtitle “Alabama Blues,” signifies the first appearance in print of the generic term blues.62 Another conspicuous marker of emerging blues sensibilities in popular ragtime sheet music is Antonio Maggio’s “I Got the Blues,” published in New Orleans in 1908 billed as “An Up-to-Date Rag.”63 What made it up-to-date was its opening strain in twelve-bar blues form. In its earliest commercial manifestations, the blues appeared as a mosaic of musical conventions derived from popular ragtime and African American folk music. This ambivalent mix is reflected on the sheet music covers of “Alabama Bound” and “I Got the Blues,” each announcing itself a “blues” and also a “rag.”
In August 1911 Beans and Sweetie played a return at the Pekin in Cincinnati: “Just what kind of an act they are putting on it is hard to describe, but it is all real comedy. The team proved one thing, and that is they know how to produce the goods desired around here. On their former visit here they worked two weeks, giving us a new act each week, and now everything they do is new. Miss Sweetie May has some stunning new costumes.”64 Then it was back to the Monogram, where Sylvester Russell took a stab at what he called Beans’s “handsome bunch of racial oddities”:
Labor Day was celebrated at the Monogram by crowds of curiosity seekers who roughed their way in to see Butler May (String Beans) the greatest comedian of the lesser extremities of the south. The reason why String Beans is a wonder is because he don’t even know what he is going to say the next minute, but whatever he manages to say tickles every heart and causes the house to thunder. What was new and original was that he telephoned to the African Jungles, where the baboons have a panic disease up in a coconut tree. Can you beat it?65
As the summer season of 1911 drew to a close on State Street, String Beans and Sweetie May were declared the undisputed “scream of the stroll.”66“Charles. O. Harding is booking the act and he claims there is no chance for this team to be out of work on his time. The team leaves Chicago over the Harding time for twenty-two weeks.”67
In September the Freeman reported: “The team of May and May are appearing at the Gem theater, at Lexington, Ky. as we go to press. Word received from the Kentucky town is to the effect that the team is knocking them a twister at each performance. Mr. May is scoring heavily singing his new song ‘There Never Was and Never Will Be a String Bean Like Me,’ words by Chris Smith, music by String Beans himself.”68 From Lexington, May and May proceeded to the Lyre Theater in Louisville, where they again scored heavily:
The house played to over 2,000 patrons, and over 500 people were turned away. Never before since the house has been opened has such a crowd gathered to witness a show. The … big scream of the bill [was] May and May, billed as the funny String Beans, and without a doubt he is the funniest comedian that has ever played this house … and he is the best drawing card that has ever been here. His new song of “High Brown Skin Girl,” will make a rabbit hug a hound; it was a scream. Miss May sang “Fishing” very good, and was well received.69
“Fishing” was another Chris Smith song hit; it was recorded in 1928 by Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas as “Fishing Blues” and during the 1960s by “folk revival” artists including the Lovin’ Spoonful and Taj Mahal.70
Theater managers were loath to part with such a potent drawing card. A communication from Philadelphia dated October 17 said May and May “simply captivated the audiences at the Auditorium Theater. They are one continuous scream. Manager Gibson of the Auditorium says that the Mays have put more people in the house than any one team has ever played. He claims Butler May to be the funniest man in the show business, and his little wife, Sweetie May, is one best bet as a soubrette. Mr. Gibson is so enthusiastic in his praise of the team that he declares he will keep them two more weeks.”71 It seems this resulted in their “failure … to report according to contracts with the manager of the Pekin Theater” in Cincinnati, which “left the house in a very peculiar position … having billed his house and surrounding localities in anticipation of a very large crowd, as the team are big favorites on the avenue.”72 In their absence, “the only and original [Wilbur] Sweatman was a life-saver”; and “Miss Lucy Shepherd … jumped into the limelight.… Her closing song, ‘Fishing,’ was a big hit. In the chorus when she sang, ‘any old fish will bite if you got good bait,’ made some of the regulars look up.”73
May and May were said to be booked to appear in New York City.74 However, no documentation has been found to confirm that engagement. When the team returned to the Monogram in November, it was “the cause for turning crowds of people away again at this house.”75 Sylvester Russell allowed that, “String Beans, more unique than ever before, gave us a piano burlesque that was clever because of its aptness.”76 The following week he wrote: “One of the finest bills of the season is on at the Monogram Theater. The Mays … in a new act, that was quite legitimate, won heavy applause, and their singing and dancing took higher rank than ever before.”77 They put on a skit that featured String Beans as “the ruler of Hades.”78 On the third week of this engagement Russell declared that String Beans “is fast becoming the ‘candy’ of State street.”79 In light of subsequent statements, it could be inferred that Russell received a bit of “sweetening” from String Beans as compensation for his uncharacteristic tolerance. From Chicago, May and May headed to the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati, where they remained through mid-December.80
Prior to 1911, Butler May had never performed, and perhaps never even ventured, outside of the South. His unprecedented success before northern black vaudeville audiences opened the floodgates for other southern vernacular stage acts, enabling the ascent of the blues into national prominence. May and May kicked off the year 1912 with a two-week engagement at the Lyre Theater in Louisville:
And the act is naturally the feature. They are appearing in an act entitled “Booker T.’s Reception,” and the act is a riot from beginning to end.
Sweetie May is in good voice and is knocking ’em twisted with “Let Me Know the Day Before.” This young lady is a neat soubrette and her every appearance is the signal for continued applause.
The inimitable Papa Beans is as ludicrous as ever, and his antics keep the audience in a constant uproar. He is using “That’s Going Some,” and it’s peaches. The act has been strengthened by the addition of Chas. May, who appears to advantage.81
It was also reported that, “after winning success in the North,” May and May would “go direct to Montgomery, Ala., there to enjoy the pleasures of the family fireside.”82 Two weeks later the team was part of a big vaudeville bill at Frank Crowd’s Globe Theater in Jacksonville, with Muriel Ringgold, the Rainey Trio, Buster and Willie Porter, Frank Montgomery and Florence McClain, and others. The seven-piece Globe orchestra was headed by Eugene Francis Mikell. In February a note said Beans was serving as stage manager at the Globe and “playing to crowded houses.”83 May and May settled in for a long run at the Globe.
The Globe Theater bill for the week of April 15 included a skit in two acts, titled “Dr. Bill from Louisville,”
put on by Mr. Butler May … which proved to be highly enjoyable and something out of the ordinary—a regular musical comedy of songs and music by Professor Mikell and Messrs. May and J. J. Weaver …
The olio [included] the Two Weavers in an Indian act which proved to be different from all the rest (Mrs. Weaver is certainly some Indian squaw with Indian costumes, while Mr. Weaver kept the audience in hysterics with his comedy.) … Tom Young worked between the acts and when he got through singing “The Blues” he had to hoist an umbrella to keep the money from raining on him.84
Late in May 1912, String Beans and Sweetie May returned to the Monogram. Russell’s review employed a bit of rhetoric that was to become Beans’s own stage axiom: “If we are to live forever in Ethiopia, let us live by all means in the Monogram. String Beans (Butler May) stretched forth his hand again last Monday evening in the same old way, and created a riot before a full house, at each performance, which he drew on his past and present popularity. His wife, Mrs. May, was at her best, and Beans himself, who is a good natural comedian, scored, as usual, on his sarcastic humor and played the piano with much natural ability.”85
During their second week at the Monogram, Russell pronounced Beans “the most wonderful, natural and original colored comedian on the American stage … and nearer to being legitimate than heretofore.”86 The notion of “legitimacy” was repeatedly invoked by Russell and other commentators who, despite the public’s undeniable enthusiasm, insisted that String Beans should conform to established theatrical conventions.
At their next engagement, Indianapolis’s Crown Garden Theater correspondent chimed in: “Mr. May is becoming more of a legitimate comedian than he was in days of yore.” There was a brief enumeration of their “new songs, all of which are hits—‘Ball the Jack Rage [sic],’ ‘All Night Long’ and others. Mr. May also presides at the piano during his act. Some act and some drawing card … just what the doctor orders for a man with a dull, blue feeling. When once you see him, you’ll never forget him.… May and May are IT, in capital letters.”87
When Beans and Sweetie returned to the Monogram in August 1912 singing “Pray for the Lights to Go Out,” Sylvester Russell turned hostile: “String Beans brought something new, but his sarcastic admixture of religious humor must be condemned. It is hard to teach old dogs new tricks, especially if they have never been trained, consequently we are obliged to excuse Beans, as one funny, original comedian whom people come miles to see.”88
Russell’s criticism was close enough to a personal insult to provoke a pointed rebuttal from Beans, which was published under the heading, “How To Get A Good Write Up”:
Performers playing in Chicago are generally knocked by Sylvester Russell if they fail to come across with the goods. This is what Russell calls criticism. In my judgment, critics should not accept money from performers.
May and May have been getting nice mention from Russell right along until they refused to hand out any more “dough.” Performers, the knock of Russell does not do us harm in our business. He is not a critic. He is simply a money receiver. A big dinner set for him at Dago & Russell’s will work wonders.
Yours truly,
Butler May89
Russell responded with a verbose defense of his professional integrity, followed by a new line of attack: “As a performer, String Beans is not yet eligible for the big time in white theaters. His songs only appeal to colored people; his smut would be ruled out and his course of stage work at every performance is improbable and I have found it impossible to teach him or train his mind by coaching.”90
In the wake of this exchange, a rumor circulated that Russell and String Beans had been involved in a “set-to.” Physical assaults on Russell occurred often enough to constitute an underlying theme of his professional life. “It’s a disgrace to the ‘dramatic press,’” lamented rival columnist Cary B. Lewis, “for the public to be always talking about who beat up ‘the great dramatic critic.’ We hope Mr. String Beans was not as serious with his blow as Mr. Dudley.”91 Early in 1911, Sherman H. Dudley had punched out Russell at a reception.92 However, Russell denied that he and Beans had come to blows, and correctly stated that he was “old enough to be String Beans’ father.”93
When May and May played the Crown Garden Theater in August 1912, Freeman editor Elwood Knox noted, “Mr. May is not only a favorite with the audience, but the manager as well, because he can do what most acts can’t, and that is bring the people out to see him; and that means box office business.”94 During their second week in Indianapolis, “Mr. May came back even stronger … His act is a real laugh from start to finish. And his song ‘Pray, Let the Lights Go Out,’ is in the riot class.”95
In 1916, more than three years after String Beans first introduced it at the Monogram, white Chicago-based composer-publisher Will E. Skidmore placed “Pray for the Lights to Go Out” on the market as a “Negro Shouting Song,” credited to himself and contract lyricist Renton Tunnah:
Father was a deacon in a hard shell church,
Way down South where I was born;
People used to come to church from miles around,
Just to hear the Holy work go on,
Father grabs a sister ’round the neck and says,
Sister, won’t you sing this song,
The sister tells the deacon that she didn’t have time,
Felt religion coming on.
Just then somebody got up turn’d the lights all out,
And you ought to heard that sister shout,
She hollered Brother, if you want to spread joy,
Just pray for the lights to stay out.96
Skidmore’s version was not the first to be deposited for copyright. In 1915 the Copyright Office processed two manuscript versions of the same title, with the same lyrics, one by O. F. Tiffany and Gene Cobb; and the other by Clarence Woods and Clyde Olney.97 Somehow, Skidmore gained control of the song and parlayed it into a “Deacon Series” of some seven or eight titles.98
“Pray for the Lights to Go Out” was a popular feature in black minstrelsy during the 1916 and 1917 seasons, sung by Archie Blue with the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels and Charles Beechum with P. G. Lowery’s Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Annex Band, among others.99 It was first recorded in 1916 by George O’Connor, a Washington attorney turned Negro dialect singer/humorist.100 Several more recordings of the title were made during the 1920s and 1930s by hillbilly string bands and western swing groups.101 In 1929 southern blues songster Hambone Willie Newbern recorded a deconstructed folk variant titled “Nobody Knows (What The Good Deacon Does),” which is thematically and melodically related to the Tunnah-Skidmore version, but with different lyrics.
Nobody knows what the good deacon’s doing
Lordy, once the lights was out,
I ain’t no fortune teller but I declare I know
Just what I’m talking about;
She pulled off one slipper, and then one sock,
Got way back and done the double Eagle Rock,
Nobody knows what the good deacon’s doing
Lord, once the lights was out.102
The Golden Gate Quartet recorded “Pray for the Lights to Go Out” in 1947, long after the vogue for such song material had expired. The Golden Gates were capable of real dramatic flair, and they certainly brought it into play on this recording, which begins in a solemn, purely devotional style, led by Henry Owens, with the group humming softly in the background. After the stanza about “father grabbed a sister around the neck …” the sacred bottom is suddenly knocked out, and the quartet breaks into joyous swing tempo. Orlandus Wilson, bass singer of the Golden Gate Quartet, said the group was introduced to this song while briefly appearing with traveling minstrel shows, during their 1936–37 barnstorming tours through North Carolina.103
In September 1912 May and May played the Star Theater in Kansas City, Missouri, headlining a bill that included fellow Alabama blues pioneer Baby Seals.104 At the end of that year, String Beans was filling a two-week engagement at the Monogram. He posted this uncharacteristic complaint about another team:
While in Chicago at the Monogram … I used my best act of the season of 1912 … The team of Barrington and Barrington was on the bill at the time stole my act and came to Lexington, Ky., and used it, knowing we were to follow them the next week … Performers beware of Barrington and Barrington, for they sure will stand in the wings and steal your act. If anyone should hear them using a parody on “All Night Long,” with the words of different colors of race, please remind the Barringtons that they are using my act. Mr. Barrington has only hurt himself, because the Barringtons will never work the Frank Q. Doyle circuit anymore while I am in vaudeville. Look out, Long Willie Too Sweet he (Barrington) will get you.105
At the Monogram, May and May were reviewed by Cary B. Lewis, who was put off by the references to “different colors of race” in Beans’s popular parody of “All Night Long”:
Now he [String Beans] is just a little too raw and he should modify some of his humor. He has an individuality that will make you laugh; it can be done without so much—well he knows. He dances comically and “smears it on” too much when speaking of the “black gals and the high yellows.” He sings “Stop That Rag,” “What’s What,” “West Virginia Dance” and “Going Some,” the last song being a good one and nicely suited to Mr. Beans. He is here for the week and may be another, for he is a great drawing card at this playhouse.106
During their second week, Lewis heard Beans and Sweetie sing Dave Peyton’s “Pussy Cat Rag,” “So Long Brother,” “Certainly Looks Good to Me,” and others.107 At end of their engagement, Lewis reported, “‘String Beans’ left this week for the South. They have been very successful in this section.”108
After heading south, May and May were not heard from for several months. They surfaced in New Orleans in May 1913, working separately. No explanation was offered. Sweetie was at the Lee Theater, Beans at the Iroquois on a bill with Willie and Lula Too Sweet.109 In July an ad in the Freeman exclaimed, “Look What Has Happened—Butler May has opened a New House in New Orleans—Playing all best acts. You get 15 weeks’ work right in the city, as we have five theaters in New Orleans. All good acts write at once. Can use a good single girl at all times. Address—Iroquois Theatre, Rampart Street, New Orleans, La. Paul Ford, Producer—String Beans, Mgr.”110
String Beans announced that he had “joined hands with dainty little soubrette Adell Jackson,” an Iroquois Theater regular.111 “String Beans has been working single for some time. He has at last found a partner who put him back to hard work again.”112 Beans was seemingly nonchalant about losing his wife and partner, but their parting marked a turning point in his professional career. Over the next four years, he wore out no less than a dozen female partners, including many top-notch performers. Nevertheless, most auditors agreed that he never found a better match “for his line of work” than Sweetie Matthews May.
Beans’s partnership with Adell Jackson did not work out at all. In fact, on August 2, 1913, the Freeman published an advertisement for “Sweetie May & Adell Jackson, Those Dainty Little Girls—Some Team, Some Act. Iroquois Theatre, New Orleans, La.”
Before long, Beans was making the rounds of his old southern haunts, working solo. In October he stormed Pensacola’s Belmont Street Theater and made “a big hit, singing nothing but his own compositions. He is singing ‘The Titanic Blues,’ and receives three and four encores every night.”113
String Beans began the year 1914 at the Monogram with a new partner, Jessie May Horn. Probably for the sake of continuity, the team was advertised as May and May.114 Russell wrote this oblique review:
When Butler May, known as String Beans, and Essie [sic] May opened their second week at this house, Beans had donned a new trousseau one within keeping of the law and satisfactory to public sentiment. He sang his songs as the manager sat watching him to keep him from balling-the-Jack and evoking the license of the house. He perambulated as usual, void of what was to proceed the next moment, in the same oddly conceived dialectation, which drew so largely from the mixed hydromel breed of last week’s population, but retained his prestige as a most curious star who still has power to draw.115
Russell suggested that Beans had been upstaged by Emmett Anthony, “a real comedian and yodeler.” String Beans would not tolerate Russell’s aspersions: “No use for any critic to knock the team of May and May. It is a box office attraction, it never lays off. It cleaned up in Chicago just as it does elsewhere.”116
It had been approximately five months since String Beans’s last appearance in northern theaters, and his fans there were hungry. The team went next to Indianapolis, where the Crown Garden Theater’s Freeman correspondent frankly described the “String Beans effect”:
String Beans in Town; Everybody Knows It—A Rush and Crush to See May and May …
Somepin’ doin’ at the Crown Garden theater this week … Indianna [sic] avenue looked like a circus day, waiting for the parade … Positively the biggest box office attraction in the history of that playhouse …
Well, say what you will of May and May, of String Beans, they get ’em to come out … They came from far and near, and when he made his appearance a shout went up. Now, I am writing of what actually took place and not inspired by a money consideration. He was greeted with shouts at his two appearances last Monday evening. During the act the team met all kinds of applause. At times the yelling was almost deafening.
String Beans has an improvement on the kind of work he does over that of all others. His “Blues” gets ’em, and then his “Balling the Jack” is his feature. The audience screams for more, and he give them more.
Jessie May is good support. She enters into the work with the String Beans spirit. This means a kind of abandon or studied indifference, not caring much what she did. In this respect she makes a good performer, since she loses herself in the interest of the character she is playing. She sings prettily, talks nicely and talks to her partner in a way that helps the fun. Their little tango is neat. In fact, some especially good acting is noted in the run of the act.117
This was the first time the word blues was invoked in a review of String Beans’s act; it certainly would not be the last.
In their second week at the Crown Garden the correspondent noted: “The whole town, practically, came to see May & May last week and the rest of them made it this week.”
[String Beans] does something of a monologue stunt, making some good hits. If he keeps on he will eventually turn out to be the leading attraction of the Negro stage … His little song medley at the close shows what he can do. He has his own style of putting things over, just as Bert Williams has his. If he improves his stuff and keeps straight he will be imitated just as Bert Williams is imitated.
The female end of the team is a good worker … Her “Turtle Dove” song is prettily done. So is “I Don’t Want Nobody That Don’t Want Me” by String Beans.118
As if to verify the prediction, a simultaneous report from the Dixie Theater in Bessemer, Alabama, noted, “Kid May, Beans No. 2, gets his.”119
May and May continued on their march of conquest to the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati. A reviewer raved, “This is the best team of its kind in the business.”120 Opening act on the Pekin Theater bill was the team of Crampton and Bailey, with southern vaudeville pioneer Pauline Crampton; but “May & May (String Beans) is the feature turn and the name alone packed the house four times.”121
The furor that surrounded String Beans attracted the attention of the white folks. At the New Pekin Theater in Dayton, Ohio, May and May were “a scream from start to finish in front of a white and colored audience.”122 At the Dunbar Theater in Columbus, people were “standing in the snow waiting to get in.”123
Back in Chicago the first week in March, String Beans was again exposed to Russell’s cynicism: “String Beans (Butter [sic] May) whom the management, press and authorities are educating to become a gentleman, returned and imparted some more of his adaptability for promiscuous jollity of uncertain quality. Jessie May was pretty good.”124
May and May spent the last half of March 1914 playing to “crowded houses at each performance” at the Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis. The report said “The much heralded ‘String Beans’” was making his first appearance in St. Louis, “and although he has been preceded by a score of imitators, he is taking the house by storm and receiving numerous encores. The female partner has a good voice and makes a hit with ‘Go and Find My Man,’ a medley of popular song hits.”125 The theater orchestra was headed by violinist Ulysses E. Cross, and the trap drummer was Jasper Taylor.126
Their next stop was Louisville, where Beans hit a snag of sorts. According to the mainstream Louisville Herald:
The Olio and Ruby Theaters, rival playhouses playing to colored patronage on West Walnut Street, are engaged in a legal battle for the possession of the artistic talents of … “String Beans,” an accomplished black-faced comedian of the natural kind, who has been drawing unprecedented crowds to the Olio every night.
The management of the Ruby, after watching the crowds file daily into the rival insti[tu]tion, is seeking an attachment in the court … to prevent “String Beans” from exercising his genius at the Olio.
The Ruby claims that it had String Beans booked and that he jumped his contract.127
Beans filed a countersuit charging that, because he was wrongfully detained to appear in court, he had to cancel shows in Philadelphia and Detroit, where he would have made ninety dollars per week. Apparently, this was the going rate for black vaudeville’s biggest drawing card.128 The Louisville Leader reported that Martin Klein, who was booking Beans through the Colored Consolidated Vaudeville Exchange, was finally summoned from Chicago to broker a peaceful settlement between the ruffled parties.129
By the time Beans returned to Chicago in April he was “alone by himself.” Jessie May was in the hospital, “very ill,” but “fast improving and her recovery is sure. It is rumored that she has severed from String Beans.”130 After this unsettling report, nothing more was heard from Jessie May Horn. String Beans’s infamous breakups were often cloaked in vague references to “crushed hopes” and “severed” relationships. It was the Freeman’s unwritten policy to stifle stories that reinforced negative stereotyping of black performers; nevertheless, String Beans was earning an odious reputation for physically abusing his female partners.131
Russell was at the Monogram to offer another fraught but fascinating synopsis:
Butler May … dressed legitimately and singing legitimate songs and with a good piano comedy stunt, was the star attraction at this house. In his monologue he told a story of a preacher giving warning of Gabriel when he blows his horn and how the boys on the roof blew horns. His talk, this time, was neither suggestive nor sarcastic and would have been legitimate had he not ejaculated that the minister swore, by swearing. When he has omitted a preacher swearing and the words “My Lord” in one of his songs, he will become legitimate.132
Similarly, in November 1914 Russell pontificated: “Beans continues to be legitimate except when he says ‘Dog Gone.’”133 This bit of pettifoggery suggests that Beans was singing a version of “Blind Man Blues,” the verses of which contain the signature interjection, “Doggone my soul.” “Blind Man Blues” was copyrighted in 1919 by Eddie Green and Billie McLaurin, but according to W. C. Handy, who published the Green-McLaurin version, this blues classic was “an echo of the celebrated String Beans himself, at the Monogram in Chicago.”134
Beans’s next stop was Detroit, where a Freeman correspondent found him stopping traffic in front of the Unique Theater: “People came from all parts of the town to see the only String Beans. He will play at this house two weeks and then some more. His songs are screams from start to finish and his biggest hit is the ‘Blues.’ He got his all right.”135 Beans-and-blues was becoming an increasingly potent theme.
String Beans was back in Indianapolis in May. The Crown Garden commentator claimed, “he has done considerable overhauling in his work to the end that he had an act of downright merit. This is particularly true of his last stunt—his ‘pianologue’ if one may so call it …”:
“String Beans” gives a pretty description of the sinking Titanic on the piano, greatly surprising the audience by his playing. He played a lively air, such as would be played when passengers are going on board a great ship. He played the dancing airs of what he conceived to be those of the various classes of passengers “as they dance.” Amid these he throws in the minor monotony of the plunging vessel as it made its way. His knowledge of minor chords, chromatic scales, enabled him to give a weird, terrifying effect when the vessel went down …
The audience saw “String Beans” in an entirely different light …
He puts over a good song of his own, “I Ain’t Nobody’s Fool.” It is a winner.136
This description makes an interesting complement to the recollections folklorist and educator Willis Laurence James shared with jazz historians Marshall and Jean Stearns. As a schoolboy in Jacksonville, Florida, James saw String Beans perform “The Sinking of the Titanic” at the Globe Theater:
Standing at full height, he reaches down to the keyboard as he sings like an early Ray Charles … As he attacks the piano, Stringbeans’ head starts to nod, his shoulders shake, and his body begins to quiver. Slowly, he sinks to the floor of the stage. Before he submerges, he is executing the Snake Hips …, shouting the blues and, as he hits the deck still playing the piano performing a horizontal grind which would make today’s rock and roll dancers seem like staid citizens.137
During String Beans’s May 1914 stint at the Crown Garden, a talented young soubrette named Baby Mack was also on the bill: “some baby all right … she is going to be among the top notchers … The little lady has the stage essentials … She will make a good number on any bill.”138 An anonymous Freeman columnist served up a histrionic romance:
Baby Mack, a little St. Louis lady … a pleasing creature, very impressionistic … came near going into hysterics over “String Bean’s” work, insisting on seeing him every night after her own turn, which was first. The Baby seemed to feel that I was a necessary adjunct to her enjoyment, because she would have me go with her and sit in the second row of seats, a place where I never before sat, nor since, to see “String Beans.” And the little soul laughed so merrily and heartily that I quite envied Mr. Beans. It was her way of showing her attachment for him—strange, but very effective. And the many little things she would say about him and his work left no room to doubt her earnestness. They got together as a team before the week was over. And why not? He was her ideal. She was pretty, talented, young, vivacious, and alas crochety as geniuses are so likely to be—doing the unusual or “must” die.139
Baby Mack, as pictured in an ad for Eugene Mikell’s “That Plantation Rag,” Indianapolis Freeman, July 3, 1915.
The team of String Beans and Baby Mack opened in Cincinnati at the Lincoln Theater, where Marion Brooks was manager.140 It was said that Beans had temporarily broken with his agent Martin Klein and was under special contract, “at an advanced salary … He is deservedly the best paid act on the colored time, as he is the strongest card that can be pulled in any colored house.”141 The following week the Lincoln reported “good business all owing to ‘String Beans,’ the life saving attraction to managers. This week’s bill was opened by ‘String Beans’ and ‘Baby Mack’ and of course they stormed the house. They remind you of the days of Butler & Sweetie.”142
In June the Lincoln Theater stock company presented “The Gambling King,” a one-act musical farce produced by String Beans, in which he played a “straight” role, “the Dandy colored gentleman, who was leading astray a less wise gentleman of color.” Beans was said to be “a ‘whang,’ as good in the neat as in the comedy.”143
String Beans and Baby Mack played the Monogram the second week in June. Russell filed a self-fulfilling assessment: “Since String Beans has improved by criticism, the lanky bewildering idol of unsuspected joy has taken on a new coat of popularity and kept the house full at every performance. And while he paid too much attention to the trap drummer and people in the audience, he got through all right on his dancing which was legitimate. Miss Baby Mack, who assisted him is a fine soubrette.”144 The next week Russell declared: “For the first time in his history String Beans blossomed forth legitimately … and still made the house roar. He wore a white vest. I sat in a corner to take observations of his latest data, as Baby Mack fed him with a spoon full of crude cut questions.”145
Following this engagement, String Beans and Baby Mack dropped down to Atlanta. Perry Bradford noted their presence at the 81 Theater in his “Atlanta Show Shops” column of July 11, 1914. The competition in Atlanta theaters was furious, with Bradford and Jeanette, Bessie Smith, Billy Zeek and Martha Copeland, and Coleman Minor among the players vying for patronage.
Also on the bill at the 81 Theater during the second week of Beans and Baby Mack’s engagement was blues trombone specialist Charles Arrant, fresh from a successful tour of northern vaudeville hotspots. In February 1914, at the Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis, “Arrant got ’em when he came on with his trombone. No man blew a trombone so loud as that. He then put on the ‘blues.’ His instrument fairly talked ’em, and the audience went wild.”146 At the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati: “He makes his trombone talk the ‘Blues.’ He encores on ‘Easy Rider.’ … In the final chorus he lies down on his back and manipulates the slide with his foot.”147
According to Bradford, who had no affection for String Beans, Charles Arrant proved to be the hit of the bill at the 81: “Atlanta’s favorite … the man who plays trombone with his feet … had the house in an uproar when he hit them Blues. Keep playing them, because they certainly sound good to us.”148 Arrant’s trombone blues, set off by his comical manipulations of the slide, place him squarely in the territory of incipient jazz. But, like String Beans, Arrant was cut down in his prime; on December 6, 1922, he “was killed in a pistol duel in Durham, N. C.”149
After two weeks in Atlanta, String Beans and Baby Mack moved over to Birmingham, where they appeared “to capacity business” at the grand opening of the new Champion Theater.150 In the wake of these engagements, Perry Bradford posted a letter from Atlanta that gives a measure of his animus:
I learn that Baby Mack was a hit in Birmingham last week. It’s too bad such a clever little girl can’t get with some legitimate performer, because the one she has is said to be the smuttiest in the business. When we can get to the place that we can get the audience without smut then we have an act. It’s a foregone conclusion that we can’t educate the theatergoers down here when we use smutty sayings. This class of performers have run down the best houses. Charles Arrant showed me that a man could get by and clean smutty performers when he was made to close the show behind one of the low degenerates. If I could say what this guy says on the stage in these columns Mr. Knox [i.e., Freeman editor Elwood Knox] would have to cease publishing this paper.151
Charles and Mabel Arrant, Indianapolis Freeman, February 14, 1914.
Charles and Lena Arrant, Indianapolis Freeman, June 1, 1918.
Bradford’s talk of “legitimate performers” and “educating the theatergoers” smacks more of Sylvester Russell’s agenda than his own. It seems his real gripe was personal, not professional. One week after Bradford’s letter was published in the Freeman, String Beans notified that: “The big noise of vaudeville is at the Pekin theater, Montgomery, Ala. The only and ever will be string beans [sic]. If we are to live ethiopia [sic] let us live by all means at this house. String Beans creates a riot in front of a full house at each performance. It causes the police department to disperse the crowd. All the glasses were torn out by mad crowd and hundreds were turned away. On the bill with ‘Beans’ is Jeanette Taylor, partner of ‘String Beans,’ who is good.”152
Jeanette Taylor was Perry Bradford’s attractive stage partner of many years. At the Dixie Theater in Atlanta, just prior to her run with String Beans, “Miss Jeanette broke the show up with Bradford’s ‘Baldy Jack Rag,’” and Bradford made a hit “singing his new song, ‘What It Takes to Keep My Wife from Running Around I’ve Got It All.’”153 Jeanette’s association with String Beans lasted only a couple of weeks, but it made a lasting impression on Bradford. In 1915 he accused Beans of stealing from him: “Managers please stop String Beans from using Mule Bradford’s closing song, ‘How Do You Figure I Miss You?’ All the managers East know this is my song. I worked on the bill with Beans in Asbury Park this summer and he stole it from me and went down South and used it.… Bert Murphy’s jail-house song and his dog song were also stolen by him.”154 Bradford repeated his accusation in 1917, when he reported having seen a “ballad” sheet circulating in Richmond, Virginia, that attributed his own “How Do You Figure I Miss You” to Beans.155
Somewhere along the way Beans and Baby Mack had gotten separated. The sudden demise of this promising team played out on the Freeman gossip mill, where it was written that Baby Mack “was simply another one of the crushed hopes that have buzzed about Mr. May.”156
Toward the end of August 1914 String Beans checked back into the 81 Theater in Atlanta, working single: “The Only String Beans opened Monday night and screamed the house … He sang some new ‘Blues,’ entitled, ‘The Whiskey Blues’—some more song [sic]. Twenty people at the [rival] Dixie Theatre, but they don’t worry Beans. He still retains the crowd in Atlanta.”157
On Labor Day String Beans opened a return engagement at the Champion Theater in Birmingham.158 Ella Goodloe and Muriel Ringgold were also on the bill. The Freeman revealed that “Mrs. Ella Goodloe has sued John Goodloe for divorce while playing in Birmingham. She is working with String Bean. Some act.”159 Beans was riding roughshod over black vaudeville’s female contingent. However, Ella Goodloe was quite a bit older than Beans, and her divorce was probably coincidental with their new stage relationship. She had recently been teaming with Viola McCoy.160 May and Goodloe remained in Birmingham until the Champion Theater closed for remodeling on September 26.161
String Beans and Ella Goodloe opened at the New Monogram Theater in Chicago the third week of October 1914, on a bill with Buzzin’ Burton. Sylvester Russell hailed Beans as “the natural humor comedian, now catering to social society successfully” with “the best partner he ever had.”162 Russell rated Ella Goodloe as a “fine quality real actress.” Beans and Ella played two weeks at the New Monogram, then moved down State Street to the Old Monogram, where they appeared opposite Charles Anderson, “the Birmingham tenor and yodler and character artist who introduced Handy’s St. Louis Blues.”163 The Chicago Defender noted: “Mr. Anderson is from the old school and should be on the big time for his class of work, but we strollers like good acts also.… String Beans and Madame Ella Goodloe, two knockouts, close the bill.”164
May and Goodloe jumped to Cincinnati early in November to play the Lincoln Theater. The reporter allowed that they were “the best entertainers of their kind in the show business and as strong a drawing attraction as can be found.”165
Back in Chicago a few weeks later, Sylvester Russell rained down hostility on “the most important unimportant actor in the jig-time era”:
Mr. String Beans Butler May has taught us that ignorant actors, like savages, can not easily be trained or even coached to do their stunts willingly. They have to be kept in cowardice by being defied by managers, critics and the law. When Beans found that there were no managers or critics in the Old Monogram Theatre, during the last half of his one week’s stay in the city, they say he cut loose and spoiled all the good things I had cultivated him to do and praised him for doing and went back to his old tricks of damaging trade and shocked the sensibility of another newspaper man, who happened to be present, and who had open space to write about actors … And so we have it. String Beans, that wonderful spasm of genuine but adulterated fun, whose development I had prided upon and whose future I had cherished, even to a point of thinking to recommend him to the Grand Theatre agent, Lew Cantor, down town, went crazy. So the second week of Beans’ engagement was cancelled.166
Indianapolis Freeman, August 6, 1910.
Beans did not take kindly to Russell’s blast:
In reply to a recent article in your paper will say I, Butler May, with Miss Goodloe, played the week of November 31 at the Booker Washington Theater in St. Louis. While there I put on the same act I presented in Chicago the 17th. I went big, packing the house every night and used nothing vulgar. While in Chicago I did not change my act.… I was not cancelled in Chicago. My contracts called for one week in Chicago, one at the Pekin in Cincinnati, one at the B. W. in St. Louis, and I have filled them all. I am now filling a two weeks’ engagement in Memphis for the small salary of $180, then I will be back to Chicago to meet my enemy critics. I have a legitimate act, am packing the theaters nightly and can prove this by Ollie Dempsey, Charles Turpin and Manager Klein, the men who keep me working all the time. I got more money in St. Louis than any other team that has played there. I have been in show business since 1909 and have never laid off a week. I got 40 weeks’ work over the Consolidated time and then some more. The critics of Chicago are the only ones who knock me, because they are always looking for a hand out but I will pay no more critics for writing me up. Now, the critics may just as well stop knocking and go to boasting me, for I am making good and have the only act in the show business (colored) that can pack the house on a rainy night.
Truly yours,
Butler May
(String Beans)167
Summarizing the events of 1914 in an “Annual Review of the Stage,” Freeman columnist Billy E. Lewis wisely dismissed the question of “legitimacy” in String Beans’s case:
S. H. Dudley and Patrick the mule need no special mention. It is conceded that they were the banner attraction of the year.… Perhaps for legitimate work, this act drew larger than any other. But we must reckon with “String Beans” when it comes to getting the nickels in regardless of the kind of shows. He beat them all as a money getter. It will not be necessary to discuss the reason why. I state merely a fact.… His pianologue business was really good.168
String Beans’s partnership with Ella Goodloe did not last through the end of the year. They were at the Metropolitan Theater in Memphis early in December 1914, “billed as a circus would be”; and then, finally, at the Ruby Theater in Louisville, Ella’s home town.169 Meanwhile, Beans’s estranged wife Sweetie May had not slipped from public view. In September 1913, just a few months after she and Beans separated, Sweetie was spotted in Cincinnati, teamed with young blackface comedian Johnny “Hamtree” Harrington.170 The following month Sylvester Russell briefly reviewed their act at the Monogram Theater, noting only that Harrington “suffered from stage fright.”171
Harrington and May played two weeks at the Globe Theater in Jacksonville, Florida, in February 1914, and were scheduled to appear next in Harrington’s hometown of Columbia, South Carolina; but that same month Sweetie was noted in Charleston, South Carolina, with a large stock company headed by “two of the best comedians in the business,” Leroy White and J. H. “Blue Steel” Williams.172 By the end of 1914 Sweetie was laying off in Cairo, Illinois: “She has the rheumatism.”173
In January 1915, following an eighteen-month separation, String Beans and Sweetie May reunited and set out to conquer the Northeast. On what may have been their first reunion engagement, Beans and Sweetie were the headliners at Gibson’s New Standard Theater in Philadelphia. They put on a skit called “In the Hands of the Law”: “‘String Beans,’ who is a dapper chap, has as trim a little wife as any one could wish.… The act gave May and May opportunities to dance in their distinctive style and sing some new songs, assisted by piano specialties that were very effective, which were highly appreciated by the large audiences.”174
Next, May and May invaded the legendary Lafayette Theater in Harlem. Lester Walton, co-manager of the theater and entertainment editor of the New York Age, was relieved to see them give a “clean act”:
The chief item of interest in this announcement extraordinary is not that “Stringbeans” is appearing at the Lafayette Theatre, but that “Stringbeans” is associated with a clean act.… Heretofore his … name has been synonymous with coarse, vulgar jokes …
“Stringbeans” is doing a turn with his female partner under the name of May & May. The act is a riot. At each performance he proves himself an adept manufacturer of laughter, producing gales of it. “Stringbeans’” method of provoking laughter, somewhat unpolished ’tis true, is new to Harlem theatregoers, and he may be aptly described as a comedian who is original and who has a way of putting over jokes and songs peculiar to himself. His ability to play the piano serves him in good stead and his brief exhibition as a tickler of the ivories shows him to advantage.
Before the first show Monday afternoon “Stringbeans” was warned by the management to present an act minus vulgar jokes and songs, which he promised to do.175
Lester Walton’s high-minded concerns were of a stripe. Many northern theatrical pundits found String Beans’s unadulterated southern style incomprehensible. Nevertheless, Beans’s impact on New York audiences almost equaled what it was in Chicago. Some critics attributed this to his newfound willingness to tone down his act, but their assessments probably had little bearing on public opinion.
Following May and May’s first big week at the Lafayette, the Age testified to the “String Beans effect” in Gotham: “Last week at the Lafayette Theatre ‘Stringbeans’ was the principal magnet that drew hundreds to 7th avenue, between 131st and 132nd streets.… No act since the opening of the Lafayette Theatre has occasioned so much complimentary comment as ‘Stringbeans.’ This week May & May are putting on a new act, and it is even a bigger hit than the one presented last week.… And the best of it all, “Stringbeans” is still turning a deaf ear to vulgarity and is giving a clean act.”176
Butler and Sweetie had not been seen together in Chicago for two full years. When they reappeared at the New Monogram they were again subjected to Russell’s critical gaze:
Back to give testimony of how his art has variated since his last departure in a siege of waning glory, String Beans (Butler May) and his wife Sweetie May, are on the job again to give Bandana Land, who gave them a full house, a new initiatory. Beans told tedious stories of war which went into Biblical history. Then told how bad he is. He said that when he goes to bed the bed bugs cry for mercy and when he gets up he has to be polite to himself. Sweetie, whose limit of poses were “called” by Beans, was dressed in cream satin with a turbin [sic] which had beaded tossels [sic].177
The team went next to the Lincoln Theater in Cincinnati, appearing on a bill with Coleman L. Minor, who “made a good impression with his own song, ‘There’s Goin’ to be Some Stealing Done.’”178 Continuing eastward, May and May played the Star Theater in Pittsburgh: “Miss Sweetie May works her songs with credit and is well liked by our patrons. String Beans was forced to take several encores on his own new song, ‘Gabriel Has Blowed His Horn.’”179
Beans and Sweetie traversed Pennsylvania. In April they landed in Philadelphia for a three-week engagement at Gibson’s New Standard Theater, where it was reported: “Mr. String Beans, in the past has borne the reputation of being suggestive. He is now in his fourth engagement and each engagement has meant three weeks at one time and a different act each week; and there has not been one joke or line that we have had to ask him to eliminate. Every act that he has done has been a knock-out.”180
The following week String Beans and Sweetie May were seen in a skit titled “Educational of Ignorance.”181 In their third week at the Standard they joined hands with the team of Sam Gray and Ora Dunlop, in a skit titled “My Friend.”182 When String Beans swung onto Sherman H. Dudley’s model East Coast theater circuit, Dudley told Freeman readers: “I only wish we had more String Beans. He has proven to be the best box office card we have today by breaking all records everywhere he plays.”183 While they were at the Howard Theater, “Mr. Dudley took [Beans] out in his car and showed him Washington. There never was a man more welcome to a city than String Beans and Sweetie May. They opened Monday night to a packed house … They took seven encores.”184
May and May opened at the Dixie Theater in Richmond, Virginia, on May 3, 1915, and remained there for three weeks. The third week they shared the bill with the Hill Sisters, a rising trio which included young Ethel Purnsley, later known as Ethel Waters. She was so impressed by Beans that she appropriated his stage moniker, as indicated in a February 1916 communiqué from the Douglass Theater in Macon, Georgia: “The Hill Sisters are playing this house and making a big hit as usual. Mama String Beans is singing St. Louis Blues and scores heavily.”185
Papa String Beans returned to New York City’s Lafayette Theater the last week in May and remained for an unprecedented three weeks, given top billing over Fanny Wise, J. Leubrie Hill, and other northern vaudevillians who had worked successfully on mainstream vaudeville circuits as well as on “colored time.” The New York Age suggested Beans might finally also be ready for the “big time”:
Without a doubt “Stringbeans” (Butler May) is the biggest drawing card before the colored theatrical public today. There is something about him that causes the audience to laugh uproariously at almost every little thing he says or does. Some say it is his personality. Anyhow, what it takes to make the people laugh “Stringbeans” has it.… At this moment a most promising career awaits “Stringbeans”—that is, unless he takes the airship route which has injured many a promising performer who has lost his head and “gone up in the air,” only later to come to his senses and realize that he has lost the opportunity of his life to make fame and money.
With “Stringbeans” is his capable partner, “Sweetie” May, who plays a more important part in the act than many think. Dainty and petite, a clever little actress and a good singer, Miss May does the straight work in a highly acceptable manner. There is not a colored performer on the stage of the female sex who pays more attention to her wardrobe than Miss May, whose costumes always excite favorable comment.186
Dudley again added his imprimatur: “Dudley says that String Beans is the coming comedian and the most original of all of the young comedians.”187 The Age reminded readers that Beans had shown himself to be as popular in New York as elsewhere: “As an evidence of his drawing powers, May & May are in their third week at the Lafayette Theater, which is a new record set up for continuous booking at this popular house. Usually an act plays a split week—the first three days, or the last four days. To play the house for one week is the ambition of vaudeville turns.”188
From his jaundiced vantage point, Sylvester Russell begrudgingly conceded that “String Beans played the Lafayette, but in Chicago he has never played the Grand and they wouldn’t have him in the house.”189 Comedy star Salem Tutt Whitney, like Sherman H. Dudley, was more liberal in his appreciation: “The original ‘String Beans’ … is a great hit in the East. His methods of provoking mirth are severely criticized by some people, but he is evidently giving the public just what it desires, as he is considered the best drawing card in colored vaudeville and that is all performers are expected to do—please the public.”190
New York Age, June 10, 1915.
Lafayette Theater managers Walton and Morganstern were set to feature Beans and Sweetie in a “big road show” titled Happy Days: “Alex Rogers is now at work on the book and lyrics.”191 The golden era of black musical comedy companies was still fresh in the memories of northern show folk, exciting expectations that a charismatic star such as Butler May could be the catalyst for a revival. In spite of popular support, however, Happy Days never materialized. Certainly Beans possessed the necessary talent and versatility to carry a big show, but investors may have balked at his volatile temperament.
Leaving New York, May and May played a return engagement at Gibson’s New Standard Theater in Philadelphia, sharing the bill with Whitney and Tutt’s Smart Set Company. Whitney described how they “rocked the house with laughter”:
“String Beans” is an excellent delineator of the ignorant, funloving, obstreperous levee or cotton field darkey. He is innately funny with a magnetic personality. It is all unnecessary for him to resort to lines and songs overflowing with double, triple and sometimes quadruple entendre; but an unprejudiced jury would find his audiences accessory to the crime. “String Beans” serves the dish and they, the audience, eat it up with evident relish, so why lay the blame to “Beans.” He possesses the physical requisites for a comedian; tall, lean, lanky, the personification of a bean pole, with elongated head, liberal mouth, full lips and ample pedal extremities. He seems to encounter no difficulty in being funny and none should envy him his wide popularity. “Sweetie,” his partner, is an actress of ability, sings pleasingly and contributes largely to the success of Beans.192
Held over at the Standard through June 1915, Beans and Sweetie put on “Percilla Johnson’s Wedding,” in which Babe Brown “agreeably surprised her many friends and admirers, by doing blackface comedy of the Topsy variety. Her mirth provoking stunts were second only to those of the original ‘String Beans.’”193 Also on the bill was the “clean, wholesome and refreshing” team of Frank Montgomery and Florence McClain. When Perry Bradford arrived at the New Standard Theater in July, he relayed a sensationalistic news report: “It is reported here that Frank Montgomery, of Montgomery & McClain is dead. He was severely cut by String Beans a fortnight ago. Let us hope the rumor is not true.”194
It turned out Frank Montgomery’s wounds were not fatal. A follow-up report in the Freeman explained:
We are glad to know that Frank Montgomery is all right again. As we understand it, there was a serious mixup between him and String Beans. Beans slashed Frank with his carving implement, wounding him so seriously that he was laid up for a few weeks in the hospital. In the meanwhile Beans, according to the court, paid Montgomery $50 per week for lost time. The female members of the teams also became slightly implicated in the fracas the result being that Beans got a few gashes about the shoulders by one of them. It is not necessary to say who. The female members were Florence McLain and Sweetie May. Perhaps it would not be fair to the performers to publish the history of the affair, since it was unfortunate, and it might work them harm—some of them, at any rate.195
Frank Montgomery’s own tedious account of the incident was also furnished:
I am writing to have you rectify the report that I am dead. No, I am very much alive. I also read in your last issue that String Beans was paying me fifty dollars a week as long as I was unable to work. Wrong again. The morning of the trial String Beans asked me how much I wanted to compromise the case.… All I wanted was the money back that I would have to spend on the doctor’s bill and for getting someone to work in my place as it wouldn’t do me any good to see him serving time. So he signed an agreement to pay me the seventy-five dollars that I spent that week in payments of twenty-five dollars weekly.… Out of the seventy-five he was to pay me he has only paid me twenty dollars up until the present time, so that is all the rot about him paying me fifty dollars a week until I was able to work.… And another thing I wish to rectify is that Florence and Sweety were not mixed up in the affair at all, as they were in their dressing rooms when it occurred and Florence and Sweety are the best of friends. If String Beans was as nice as his wife Sweety May he would not have had any trouble.
I am sorry that the whole thing occurred, but I know that I was in the right, as any one on the bill will tell you. It all started over me speaking to him about using profane language on the stage in front of ladies and he started the fight and I accommodated him. The only thing was I was fighting fair and he was using weapons.…
I wish to thank Mr. Salem Tutt Whitney for taking up his valuable time in coming to my rescue and doing something that no one else could have done on such short notice in taking my place in the act.
I also thank my other friends for what they did for me, especially Homer Tutt, Smithy Lucas, John T. Gibson, and Emmanuel, the electrician.
Yours truly,
Frank Montgomery196
Salem Tutt Whitney had been an “unwilling witness to the whole affair,” which fell so plainly within the scope of his “Seen and Heard While Passing” column that he felt obliged to editorialize:
The fracas was such as often happens between two men, overwrought and in a white heat of passion. The women were in nowise involved except as in the role of peace makers and the inconveniences they suffered as a result of their husbands’ altercation was the lot common to all peacemakers. No one regrets the occurrence more than the principals. The affair was settled amicably between the two and the news was not even allowed to reach the daily white papers. Such occurrences work harm not only to those embroiled, but to the whole theatrical fraternity and we should be slow to give them publicity. As Shakespeare says, “The evil men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones.”197
Butler May’s convincing personification of badass “String Beans” may have stimulated his darker impulses. The promising young stage genius exhibited some dangerous proclivities while spreading his message of the real blues. Frank Montgomery might have been safer had he kept his moral rectitude to himself.
Following the incident with Frank Montgomery, Beans and Sweetie made a beeline south. They appeared at the Dixie Theater in Richmond during the week of July 12, 1915, and in August they reached the Strand Theater in Jacksonville. They were scheduled to jump from Jacksonville to the Olivette Theater in Louisville, but “were disappointed through railroad tickets,” and went instead to the Douglass Theater in Macon, Georgia, where house drummer H. Woodard took a useful inventory of Beans’s latest line of blues songs: “They open with a medley chorus consisting of ‘Walk Like My Man,’ and ‘I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone.’ Sweetie May sings ‘Love Me or Leave Me Alone.’ She scores heavily with this. String Beans takes the audience almost off their feet with his own composition, ‘Low Down Jail House Blues.’ The way he touches the ivories makes anybody blue.”198
That same week, the Freeman published a long letter from William Benbow, bragging about how he had been “the first to put Beans in the show business … the first to take him away from home and put him in a small stock company in Pensacola, Fla. and put him and Sweetie May together,” etc. Another portion of Benbow’s letter bears reproduction, because of what it may reveal about Butler May’s early attempts at songwriting:
I remember the first song he wrote, entitled “You Look Like Something the Buzzard Had.” He brought his words to me and sang me his air. No living man could have thought of those words but Beans and his air to the song puzzled the best piano player, yet when Beans got through with it it was a riot. His next song was “Sallie, Don’t Forget to Come Back Home.” This song was another hit for him. This song was a cousin to the first. The only change he had was “Nearer, My God, To Thee” in the song. The third song was “Come Out of the Kitchen and Stop Burning That Ham.” This song was claimed by other performers, but as Beans would always come to me to criticize I can swear the song belongs to him.199
Butterbeans and Susie’s 1929 OKeh recording “Get Yourself a Monkey Man, Make Him Strut His Stuff,” and Viola McCoy and Billy Higgins’s Vocalion recording of the same title both warned: “I’d make you look like something the buzzards had.”200 The expression also appears in a transcription of the “folk-minstrel” tune “Gonna Raise a Rukus Tonight” in Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson’s 1926 collection Negro Workaday Songs.201
“Sallie, Don’t Forget to Come Back Home” may be related to the barbershop ballad “Sally in Our Alley.”202 As Benbow’s commentary suggests, “Come Out of the Kitchen and Stop Burning [or Scorching] That Ham” was claimed by blackface comedian Ed F. Peat, who sang it at the Exchange Garden Theater in Jacksonville in the fall of 1909, and Albert Powell, who sang “his own song, ‘Come Out That Kitchen Gal, And Bring Me That Pan’” with the Colored Aristocracy Minstrels in the fall of 1910.203 A similar phrase appears in Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon’s late-1920s hit record “Fan It”: “My mama’s in the kitchen, just heard that back door slam, / Come on out that kitchen, honey, quit that scorching that ham.”204
A report from St. Louis on October 30, 1915, placed Beans and Sweetie at the finale of a genuine, first-generation “battle of the blues”:
Booker Washington theater patrons are at the complete mercy of the “blues” this week, and a large colony of admirers of this grade of music are filling the house to capacity nightly.
Miss Laura Smith opens the show with three numbers in the mournful melodies, presented with their characteristic gesticulations and almost stops the show. Johnnie Woods and “Little Henry” follow with their version of blue temperament and, coupled with their comedy dialogue, keep the house in an uproar. String Beans and Sweetie May close the show with still more blues of the “Beans” variety, and continue the hilarity to the end. If there is any variety of “The Blues” not in display here this week, it’s not the fault of the performers.205
Beans sent word from St. Louis: “We expect to go east soon, but Sweetie needs a rest and will be going to her home in New Orleans Christmas for a three months vacation. I want a good capable female about Sweetie’s color and size with talent enough to do my class of work; who will work during her vacation. I will pay $35 a week and guarantee no lay-offs. Any one may write to me, care of The Freeman.”206 With six weeks to go before the announced vacation, Beans and Sweetie continued down the highway to the Crown Garden in Indianapolis, where a local reporter had special words for Sweetie’s art:
Sweetie May is … a dream—quiet, dignified, as her kind of work permits, and graceful as a queen. She puts on the high touches now and then which makes her work stand out. She makes a fine stage personage. Miss May’[s] steps, singing and talking are of a kind, gentle, winning. She is a much different Sweetie May than she was a few years ago. She fairly equals String Beans as an attraction.
Beans was particularly good in his pianologue—altogether new, novel and original.
The song, ‘I Loves My Man Better Than I Loves Myself,’ by Sweetie May, and ‘I Don’t Want Nobody That Don’t Want Me,’ by String Beans, two rousing good numbers, were written by String Beans.207
Viola McCoy recorded “I Don’t Want Nobody That Don’t Want Me” in 1924.208 Ida Cox recorded “I Love My Man Better Than I Love Myself” in 1923.209 The line “I love my man better than I love myself” is also prominent in “Any Woman’s Blues,” recorded in 1923 by both Ida Cox and Bessie Smith: “I love my man better than I love myself, And if he don’t have me, he sure won’t have nobody else.”210
String Beans’s authorship of “I Love My Man” is substantiated in a 1916 report from the Queen Theater in Chattanooga: “Billy McLaurin opened the vaudeville … Mrs. Rennell Robinson, Memphis Coon Shouter, followed, singing String Beans’ song, ‘Love My Man Better Than I Do Myself.’”211 Further, a 1918 report from the Palace Theater in Augusta, Georgia, informed, “Bessie Brown sang one of String Beans numbers, ‘I Love My Man Better Than I Do Myself,’ which took the house by storms.”212
While Beans was at the Crown Garden, he had his new “calling card” reproduced in the Freeman. It bore his likeness, in a stylish suit and hat, with the motto, “String Beans Been Here Made His Quick Duck and Got Away.” A brief message was attached: “If we are to live in Ethiopia let us live by all means in the Crown Garden Theatre, Indianapolis. String Beans stretched forth his hands again this week in front of a large audience at each performance. His wife, Miss Sweetie May, the cleverest, neatest and best looking colored woman on the stage today, brings the audience to a feeling.… String Beans has purchased a big touring car and is seen nightly sailing through the atmosphere. Would like to hear from Frank Montgomery.”213
On November 29, 1915, May and May took their third stand of the year at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, presenting “Josephine Spiller’s Wedding” with the support of an eighteen-member “High Life Set”: “This company is well dressed with elaborate costumes while Sweetie May, the little girl with the personality is featuring Louis Thomas’ song, ‘I Want Some One to Cure My Love Disease,’ assisted by a chorus of eight.… The sensational clarinet player, Wilbur Sweatman, was a scream on the same bill.”214 Among those who witnessed the performance were “modern dance” idols Irene and Vernon Castle.215
Shortly before Christmas, Sweetie returned to New Orleans, ostensibly to spend the holiday with her mother.216 She and String Beans never again appeared together as a team. Butler May, “High Life Set” soubrette Babe Brown, and an unnamed third performer spent the Christmas holidays at Gibson’s New Standard Theater in Philadelphia, booked as the String Beans Trio.217 In his second week at the Standard, Beans teamed with the great stage personality and blues foremother Ora Criswell “in a make-shift where he ‘don’ want no work wid chittlings,’ displaying a little versatility with some good singing and piano specialties. Ora Criswell was as sweet as ever and she was seen in a shimmering silk that showed her shape to perfection.”218
String Beans chose Ebbie Burton for his next partner. As Little Ebbie Forceman, she had started out singing and dancing in the rough-and-ready theaters of Dallas, a “real ‘coon shouter’ from the fields of sugar cane.”219 She later replaced Bessie Smith as the stage partner of eccentric dancer Wayne “Buzzin” Burton, whose name she kept after they split up in 1914.
On February 5, 1916, Beans’s calling card appeared again in the Freeman, accompanied by this update from Chicago: “If we are to live in Ethiopia let us live by all means in the New Monogram Theatre. Stringbeans stretched forth his hands in front of a full audience … His little partner, Miss Ebbie Burton, is a clever and neat little worker; sings her song, ‘I Love My Man Better Than I Do Myself.’ Beans … sits at the piano and sings and plays his own songs. The closing number is a scream. The ‘Blues’ they play is called ‘Hospital Blues.’”220
These titles vividly depict Beans’s influence on the future of the blues; however, Sylvester Russell could see no value in what they represented: “Beans made no attempt to do a real act. He delivered nothing but junk, but there was no smut. He had troubles with his ‘gal,’ Ebbie Burton, a good alto robusto.… He once had a real act with Edna [sic] Goodloe, and if he will reproduce it he will be ready for the Grand theater and he will be able to get some white time outside of the jig factory.”221
Whatever aspirations Russell and others may have claimed for him, Butler May was not driven by love of money, but by deeper creative urges. Billy E. Lewis once observed that “Beans has made all kinds of money, being easy the best attraction of the colored show business. But he seems more anxious to do something that will tell in his work than to make money.”222 Independent, unpredictable String Beans was the young lion of African American theater entertainment for an African American audience, the first national star whose fame and success depended not at all on approval from the white world. His credo was repeatedly expressed on his “calling card”: “If we are to live forever in Ethiopia, let us live by all means …”
Seemingly content to rule State Street, Beans notified the Freeman: “The old State Street Stroll was in its bloom … with all ‘headliner’ acts at every colored theatre. The Smart Set at the Grand with Salem Tutt Whitney, Wm. Benbow at the Old Monogram. But it seems like String Beans was born with good luck stamped on his face. The amusement seekers of Chicago seem to think that String Beans only can cheer them up with his nonsense, when they are feeling blue.”223
Before Beans left Chicago, he was escorted by Sylvester Russell, in company with Will Benbow, Glover and Nettie Lewis Compton, Will Able, and others, to a Smart Set matinee at the Grand. “I wanted to see what String Beans thought of the performance,” Russell confided, “and I was favorable surprised when he told me he was carried away with Salem Tutt Whitney’s comedy work and he laughed heartily.”224 In turn, Whitney went to see Beans at the Monogram and commented, “‘String Beans,’ the elongated comedian from ‘down home,’ … has no peer in his line of work. His partner is a clever worker. We are not indulging in comparisons and hope not to be misunderstood when we say we miss ‘Sweetie’ May.”225 Whitney admired Sweetie enough to bring her into the 1916–17 edition of his Smart Set Company.226
Before leaving Chicago, Beans posted another missive under his “calling card,” which was appearing weekly in the Freeman:
The original Stringbeans is still in Chicago playing to nice houses each night. It is a funny thing why the critics still knock me. I think the colored critics should boost me after the criticism does no good. I have seen acts that are worse than mine, and certainly did use smut.… This is my fourth week in Chicago and booked for St. Louis week of the 21st, and will be booked until I leave for New Orleans for the Carnival.
Benbow & Baby are playing their second week in Chicago and are still meeting with success, and will open in St. Louis week of February 21st, on bill with myself. We are forming a four-act and will be seen out east shortly.
Yours truly,
“STRINGBEANS.”227
After one week in St. Louis, String Beans, Ebbie Burton, William Benbow, and Robbie Lee Peoples (then known as Baby Benbow) opened February 28, 1916, at the Ruby Theater in Louisville with a new company known as Beans and Benbow’s Big Vaudeville Review. In addition to the four principals, the company included Gallie D. Gaston, who had previously teamed with Little Frankie Jackson (later “Jaxon”); Archie Jones (“that colored Jew”), Billie West, and Emma Frederick.228 Beans was listed as the show’s owner, Benbow as business manager.229 The Big Vaudeville Review was “not a stock company, but one of Bean’s [sic] ideas. Each one does their act and then they all join Beans in his act, which lasts about thirty-five minutes.… All the songs used in this company are from the pen of String Beans.”230
The company opened in Atlanta at the Royal Theater, also known as the 91, on March 13. String Beans’s presence on Decatur Street incited resentment from S. A. “Buddie” Austin, current stage manager at the rival 81/Arcade Theater. Austin posted a letter in the Freeman bragging about the big business they were doing and insinuating that String Beans was “a man with a past reputation.”231 Never inclined to let an insult pass without comment, Beans countered:
While reading the Freeman last week we noticed where some one said that String Beans was a man with a past reputation. This was taken for a joke as everyone in the show business from the performers to the managers knows that Beans is a life-safer for theaters when their patrons have tacked crepe on the box office. It looks like Beans is getting quite popular as there are managers fighting over his company daily … Beans is so popular that managers has his baggage attached to keep him from working at other theaters except theirs.232
Beans’s jab about having his baggage attached provoked a reaction from 81 Theater owner Charles Bailey, who wanted it known “that he had the trunks of String Beans attached to satisfy a debt that was owed him by String Beans, the amount of money being over one hundred dollars … If I should ever need a life saver for my theatre I have been in the business long enough to book clean acts and not a bunch of smut.”233
The bill at Bailey’s 81 included the sister team of Josephine Hill and Ethel Purnsley, later known as Ethel Waters but at the time advertising herself as “Mama String Beans.”234 She remembered the engagement in her autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow:
So the original Stringbeans was playing at 91 Decatur Street while I, Sweet Mama String Bean, the feminine version of that long, thin green vegetable, was working just next door. Stringbeans, whose real name was Butler May, was a fine man and a good buddy. He never resented my taking over his professional name. He and his wife, Sweetie May, became good friends of mine … Stringbeans accentuated his thinness by wearing very tight clothes. When he walked out on the stage he wore a thick chain across his vest with a padlock on it. The chain was just slack enough for the padlock to hang in front of his pants fly. This always got a guffaw from his admirers out front.235
Beans and Benbow’s Big Vaudeville Review played returns in Louisville, St. Louis, and Chicago before reaching the Washington Theater in Indianapolis in August 1916. The company was now fourteen members strong, including George Baker, a “chair balancer and barrel jumper” who “hops nimbly as a squirrel”; Hi Henry Hunt, the well-known fire-eating contortionist; yodeler-comedian Emmett Anthony; eccentric dancer Kid Bumpsky; Andy and Carrie Pellebone; and a female chorus. “However, Beans, as he is now generally called, is the high card of the bunch.”236
By the time Beans and Benbow’s Big Review arrived in Indianapolis, Ebbie Burton had left to tour with Wooden’s Bon Tons.237 Beans took Robbie Lee Peoples—Baby Benbow—as his new stage partner.238 She was singled out for her “vaudeville voice, the prettiest ever for singing her songs—the little queen of the blues or ragtime shouters. Her dancing alone would make her a safe place on the stage. She is a very choice bit of a woman.”239
This little lady is full of life and displays it most delightfully all of the time.… This time she abandons her smart frocks, and comes out just a plain little colored woman, rather antique appearing. For my part she could continue wearing her smart gowns and also wear her natural color. Of course, it does appear that she might be rough and ready like Beans, but we are not used to seeing things that way. There is something fetching about those girls or women who look fitting and yet are just a trifle naughty. Of course the other women don’t care any too much about them—but O, the men.240
During their stay in Indianapolis, the Freeman offered this succinct “Review of the Review”:
Opening—“Night Time in Dixie Land,” followed by the “My Hero” song. Benbow leads chorus. Medley singing continues closing with “Dixie Land.” Beans and Miss Benbow in “All Night Long,” duo, concluding with the “Hesitation Blues.” Beans’s drill of the girls was a stand-out feature. The Benbow, Pellebone, Anthony and Beans mix-up was the nearest thing to a plot. The little snatches of songs by the girls now and then added cheerfulness to the whole. The “Walking the Dog” gave the company opportunity to please greatly. It is already a popular something, but done as the Beans and Benbow Company does it satisfies every bit of one’s curiosity to see the amusing stunt.241
Indianapolis Freeman, October 14, 1916.
In a high point of the proceedings, Beans made “a sensational entrance at the end of a rope, being dragged from the sea.”242 String Beans was said to be “reaching the class of Hogan and Dudley, reminding one very much of Bob Cole in his seeming foolish simplicity.… And doubtless, if he keeps up the pace he will lead in some big aggregation if there are going to be any more big aggregations.”243 Demand was such that the revue was brought back to Indianapolis after only three weeks absence: “Got to take hats off to Beans.… In this review are all the elements of a great big show: It’s a big show reduced.”244 When they finally left town late in August a writer commented that “String Beans has shown the people of Indiana he is also a musical comedy man as well as a vaudevillian.”245
The company moved directly to the New Monogram Theater in Chicago, but, as was occasionally the case, the manager barred Sylvester Russell from the theater, and he wrote no review. A communiqué from the show noted, “This is the first time to see Beans with a company in Chicago.… They are having to give five shows each night.… Baby Benbow has set State street wild with her dainty singing and dancing. Billy Walker of the team of Murphy and Walker joined the String Beans and Benbow Company.… Ora Brown, Cassie Pellibone [sic] and Maude Elder as chorus girls look good and play their parts.”246
Their next engagement was at the Vaudette Theater in Detroit: “from present indications, and the crowds that are pouring in nightly, it looks as if they will be here for an indefinite stay.”247 The Beans and Benbow Review returned to the Old Monogram for two weeks at the end of September before moving back to the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, “Crowding them in as usual.”248
This, its third appearance … removes all doubt as to its being the most popular attraction now playing before Colored audiences.
It must be admitted that Beans’ popularity has much to do with this. However, there are other good, successful players in the bunch.
Baby Benbow is a dream girl of a performer, who pleases all that see and hear her. She is noted for pretty dances and prances. As a singer she also makes a hit in everything she renders. Her song “Daddie,” supported by a quartet of male voices, was a feature of the bill. She costumes prettily, making a very attractive stage personality.…
String Beans, as usual, was the stellar attraction … given an ovation on his first appearance. His comedy, monologue and blues renditions were joyously received, proving that the “king” had lost nothing in the affection of his hearers.
The young men of the company have good voices. They were costumed neatly … all being dressed alike. The opening chorus was pretty in effect as well as musical. The girls were neatly attired who, with the boys, made a striking picture.249
Ethel Hudson was assisting Beans in his act. They performed the popular song and dance “Walking the Dog.” Veteran vaudeville comedian Ed F. Peat, who once contested Beans’s claim to the song “Stop Scorching That Ham,” was now a member of the Beans and Benbow Review: “His jokes were big hits even if they were not all new. His stump speech also went big.”250 William Benbow filled the essential role of “straight.” As an added attraction at the Washington Theater engagement, pioneer jazz composer–pianist William Benton Overstreet presided at the piano.251
The triumphant engagement in Indianapolis gave Freeman critic Billy E. Lewis opportunity for commentary and analysis, including a presentiment of “String Beans and His Future” that zeroed in on the powerful effect of Beans’s blues piano playing:
Beans is rapidly developing into a comedian who will go anywhere. It must be admitted that much of his present popularity is due to his oddities, his eccentricities, differing wholly from anything ever seen on a public stage.… He is a study because so different and that he is true to much seen in the race in a general way.
At this time he has just what pleases colored audiences as we find them at colored playhouses. His strange comedy and his blues, especially when at the piano, create a furore [sic]. He will be readily conceded to be the blues master piano player of the world. That says very much. But one will not easily conceive of anything better of the kind. Great piano artists often find it necessary to label their compositions before most people know the subject or the thought that they wish to convey. Beans’ work talks for itself. It suggests its own kind of name, and which no one knows in particular, not even Beans, but at that these blues say something definite. They moan and weep and cry, setting up kindred emotions in the listeners, and who often must yell, or give vent to their feeling in some way for relief. I am not much on blues; don’t think much of any variety of them. But if they are anything, Beans has got them.
S. H. Dudley is watching Beans, having in mind hitching him up with a big aggregation to take up the old touring route of a few years ago. Beans is in training for the big event.… As it is, Beans is now the best money-getter. He is known as the salvation man, the pinch hitter for the managers. He puts money in their pockets.
Beans is yet a young man; really he is a boy, boyish in action when on the street. He has good common sense, and holds a good conversation; not stupid, as he appears on the stage. In fact he displays good art in this respect. He is so strong in his character that one expects to see him on the street as he appears on the stage. He is generous with his funds; some say too generous. At any rate this quality has made him many friends … He is pleasing to meet, and companionable.
He has plenty of good street clothes, and looks well when he has them on. He has a good-sized diamond in one of his gold teeth, as if a standing challenge to hunger.252
Lewis was especially taken by Beans’s interpretation of an old Ernest Hogan skit, “The Four Hundred Ball”:
[String Beans] is not known for sticking very close to his lines, depending on his wit to help him out when he pitches something that is unexpected. He together with Benbow as straight and the rest of the company gave a bit of Ernest Hogan’s Four Hundred Ball. Here he stuck close enough to the lines, taking but little liberty and that little was for the best. The sketch was a big success owing very much to Beans’ conception of his part.… He doesn’t seem to be doing so much; but it is so different, and no one can do anything like it. He is his own copyright.253
The Four Hundred Ball was Bean’s [sic] opportunity and he did not forget to make it. I take it that he never saw Hogan work, but there was much that he did that was similar to the work of that great comedian. If anything he was funnier than Hogan, due of course to his peculiarities. His pianologue took as usual. And nobody showed up to contest him for the superiority in playing the blues.254
The association of blues singing and comedy may be foreign to modern sensibilities and experience, but there was an essential connection during the period when blues first emerged on the popular stage. In fact, blackface comedians had been the primary outriders of breaking trends in vernacular music since the earliest days of American stage entertainment. In his famous 1938 Library of Congress interview sessions, Jelly Roll Morton allowed that String Beans was “the greatest comedian I ever knew, and a very, very swell fellow”:
“A slight reminder of String Beans,” Indianapolis Freeman, June 13, 1914.
He was over six feet tall, very slender with big liver lips, and light complexioned. His shoes were enormous and he wore trousers impossible to get over his feet without a shoe horn … He used to bring down the house when he sang “I Got Elgin Movements in My Hips, with a Twenty Year Guarantee” and “What Did Deacon Jones Do, My Lord, When the Lights Went Out,” or “Gimme a Piece of What You’re Settin’ On” … and such stuff as that. He sang all those songs to the same tune, but when he would wobble those big feet of his, nobody noticed the difference and they liked him right on.255
Morton’s insinuation that String Beans was a limited piano player contradicts contemporaneous commentary; and his concession that black theater audiences “liked him right on” is a gross understatement. While Morton was still vacillating between playing piano and hustling pool halls, String Beans was earning the title “blues master piano player of the world.” In June 1914, when Ferd and Rosa Morton announced their new vaudeville team act, the Freeman remarked, “Mr. Morton, ‘Jelly Roll,’ is a slight reminder of ‘String Beans.’ He does a pianologue in good style. He plays a good piano, classics and rags with equal ease.”256 Historians have tended to segregate Jelly Roll Morton the vaudevillian from Jelly Roll Morton the pianist, effectively ignoring his “pianologue.”
Pianologues typically consisted of two or three numbers strung together with jokes and patter. Morton’s unprecedented Library of Congress interview is in the form of an extended pianologue. Morton’s original prototype, String Beans, used the pianologue as a primary vehicle for bringing the blues to the popular stage.
In addition to String Beans and Jelly Roll Morton, early African American pianologuists included Shelton Brooks. At the Grand Theater in Chicago in 1911, just before May and May made their northern debut at the Monogram, Brooks drew praise for his “monologue-pianologue.”257 Brooks’s stage career was interrupted shortly thereafter, when he “had to undergo an operation of the stomach.”258 In October 1912 Brooks made “his re-appearance at the Monogram … in a new complete repertoire of songs.… He is not yet able to dance, but, seated at the piano in blackface, he distributed jokes between songs and parodies which were original and full of humor.”259
No one called Shelton Brooks a “bluesman,” but he was nonetheless adept at modifying blues-ready, street-corner locutions for use on the vaudeville stage. Riding high on “Some of These Days,” Brooks used his pianologue to introduce subsequent hits like “All Night Long” and “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone.”260 String Beans seems to have admired Brooks; he was featuring Brooks’s smash hit “Walking the Dog” in 1916, when he announced: “Here I am a nice clean act that the people of each town I play in turn out to see it. With my pianologue—only two of us black-face comedians do it, Shelton Brooks and myself.”261
When String Beans first brought his shoulder-shaking blues pianologue before the public, there really was no one to compare him with. In his heavy southern vernacular style, his original songs, dances, and comedic expressions, as well as his displays of reckless abandon both on and off the stage, String Beans personified the unadulterated instincts of the blues. He was a bluesman by any definition.
At the Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis during the weeks of October 30 and November 6, 1916, the Beans and Benbow Company “broke all records.… They had to start the show at 6 o’clock Monday evening in order to handle the crowd. Five shows were given Monday.”262 From St. Louis they proceeded to the Olio Theater in Louisville. When they reached the Lincoln Theater in Cincinnati, the “police were called to handle the crowd as traffic was really blocked.”263 Beans was said to be “showing a new form that signifies he is now a real student of comedy. He is now funnier to all than he was before to a certain class … and gets as many laughs from pantomime and mimic as his original line of work.… Baby Benbow … is one grand little worker and renders her numbers swell, assisted by ‘String Beans’ Harmony Four’ a quartette that can really sing.”264
Here’s a glimpse of a feller named Butler May
Whose [sic] never without something funny to say—
He’s teasing, good looking, but long and lean;
That’s why they call him “Sweet Papa String Bean.”
Closing out the year in Chicago, Beans and Benbow “engaged in a little commercial business. They bought out little Nellies restaurant at 3222 State street, where they will probably feed actors free of charge. A handsome lady cashier has been installed.”265
In January 1917, at Gibson’s Standard Theater, Philadelphia, an “over-generous” bill opened with Irvin C. Miller’s “ragtime revue” and closed with Beans and Benbow’s “new act, which is filled with ragtime riot that really caught on.” With the likes of Esther Bigeou, Lula Whidby, Laura Bailey, and others, Miller’s review, a forerunner of his famous “Brown Skin Models,” was rated “some girlie show.” However, the standing-room-only audience was said to be “essentially a strong Bean’s [sic] aggregation.”266
Despite their obvious successes, Beans and Benbow never managed to stay together long. In February 1917 they took their review to the little Blue Ridge Mountain town of Lynchburg, Virginia, and soon afterward parted company.267 Benbow signed on as stage manager and producer for C. W. Park’s Colored Aristocrats and String Beans returned to Chicago as a single. Russell provided a description of Beans’s new act in the March 17, 1917, edition of the Freeman:
When Butler May, famously known as String Beans, stepped his foot on the Monogram stage platform last Monday evening, there was a wild roar of actual applause from an audience which completely filled the house to see what the greatest stage metamorphose known in history was going to do…. He was attired as a blackface sailor. He said that President Wilson had sent for him to join the navy, but he had made up his mind that he was not going to fight, and if he decided to do any fighting that he would fight liquor—that’s all. He had one good song about some one was enticing him to steal, but he objected, and in the chorus he told that he is eating and sleeping, has good clothes and is satisfied. He said he had dined with President Wilson in Washington, but they dined in different places. He said he had told Wilson in his interview that Uncle Sam was not his uncle, that his uncle’s name was Abraham. He told of a trip to Mexico, where he went to interview Villa for the President. He said that when Villa found out that he was from America he turned a cannon on him and the cannonball chased him side by side, across the border line back to the states in Texas.268
During his second week at the Monogram, Beans:
entered as a working man with a dinner pail and shovel. He sang about his Hannah. She wanted nice dresses, so he went down to Siegel & Cooper’s to get her some clothes at 3 a.m. and found that the watchman was still there. Then he talked about the stock yards. He said he was in the hog pen catching grunts and squeezing young hogs to death. He burlesqued Shakespeare. He concluded seated in a chair with his leather-toed feet up on a table, in the spotlight. Then he told about a railroad porter who lost his job because he was so dark that the man who hired a berth couldn’t see him coming.269
While holding down the Monogram stage, Beans also took part in a special midnight show, an “Emergency Fund Benefit for Thespian Charities,” at Chicago’s States Theater.270 Afterward, it was back to Indianapolis for a return engagement at the Washington Theater, “singing numbers with the Beansesque play between, his dance humoresque and the rest of it”:
Those knowing him expected to see him in his well known “costume.” But no, he burst on in a sailor’s outfit, trim and fitting enough, but just to think of Beans tricked out in that style! Nothing remained of his old self excepting those tremendous flat shoes that sprawl the floor. He appears in black face.
He has three good song numbers, with more or less humorous verses. Some of these make great hits, especially when he refers to Uncle Sam. He says that he has but one uncle, and his name is Abraham. He cared nothing about the war.
Beans also does a monologue which hits every time. He tells nothing but funny ones. He also rings in his famous pianologue, preceded by his taking style of blues playing.271
Following his second week in Indianapolis, Beans got a strong review, headed “String Beans, Novelty Comedian, Blues and Pianologue”:
Beans in some respects clearly distances all other comedians of his race. He takes more chances. In fact he can’t help himself. He couldn’t repeat a show word for word to save his life. He must be nearly original saying and doing what occurs to him, then and there. His secret is that he must also be entertained, that is, Beans must entertain Beans. And he cannot do it by telling himself what he had to say an hour or so ago. He is his own weathervane. If he is making a hit it is known by his own enjoyment. In this respect Beans has got all of his brother comedians “skinned.” He is original, because he is built that way.
The beauty of it is that he is good in his originality, saying things that produce a different kind of laughter, the kind that seizes one all over—makes you laugh until it hurts. He is just that humorous at times. He is wholly different to anything the race has produced … The people want to see Beans—they must see him. They hunger for him.… His stock yards’ stunt this week is a good example of his originality. He gave as many different shows as the times he appeared. He also rung in a variety of songs, some that his audience had never heard before. It was evident that Beans can not be pumped dry; he is a fountain. His piano playing is descriptive blues, and strictly a Bean’s [sic] creation. Many try to imitate him in this respect, a sure proof of the quality of his work.272
This insightful critique draws attention to a distinctive aspect of String Beans’s art that more typically evoked bewildered derogation: his oft-cited faculty for improvisation. In retrospect, Beans’s free use of creative improvisation was an important mark of modernism in twentieth-century American music and entertainment.
On April 7, 1917, Beans presented his calling card and proclaimed, “Hurrah for String Beans, commander-in-chief of the army of fun and the real blues.”273 Two days later he descended on the Lincoln Theater in Cincinnati, “where the announcement of his coming … caused the selling out of the house for the first two performances in advance.”274 While Beans was at the Lincoln, Salem Tutt Whitney’s Smart Set Company opened at one of Cincinnati’s opposition theaters, with Sweetie May leading the Smart Set chorus in “Sweet Melodious Blues.”275 During their overlapping sojourns in Cincinnati, the estranged couple reportedly met at the Dunbar Club, prompting a local correspondent to “wonder.”276 But Butler and Sweetie May did not get back together. Sweetie left Cincinnati with the Smart Set. In the fall of 1917 she joined Billie Young and Eloise Johnson in the original Jazz Trio/Jazz Girls; at the Monogram Theater, they did a “dizzy dance in Hula clothes, interpreted by the trap drummer and entering into the ‘Weary Blues.’”277
Beans moved on to Pittsburgh, where he appeared one week each at the Star and Crescent theaters, “to capacity houses every night.”278 An engagement at the Lincoln Theater in New York City followed in early June 1917, evoking a press report that suggests String Beans had planted his flag firmly on the sidewalks of New York: “Singing, piano playing and dancing were all executed in the droll, humorous style such as only String Beans himself is capable of doing. To say that he carried the week at this theater would be placing it mildly, so we’re coming out with the staggering truth by acknowledging that he was such a sensation that songs, actions and name are ordinary conversation in every other persons’s [sic] home.”279
In light of String Beans’s recent triumphs, Salem Tutt Whitney was inspired to praise him for cleaning up his line of talk. But Whitney apparently could not help encumbering his approval with the same old lines of criticism that had dogged String Beans throughout his stage career:
Perhaps no single ARTIST IN COLORED VAUDEVILLE
Has gained the popularity enjoyed by BUTLER MAY (STRING BEANS.)
None have attracted more ATTENTION NOR CREATED MORE SENSATION
Than the elongated comedian, truly LIKE A BEAN POLE IN SIZE AND HEIGHT
“String Beans” was not always PARTICULAR ABOUT WHAT HE SAID,
Or how, when or WHERE HE SAID WHAT HE SAID.
Seldom did he say THE SAME THING TWICE.
Perhaps it was difficult to REMEMBER THE THING FIRST SAID.
Much that he said would not DO FOR A MINISTER’S SON,
And he was severely CRITICIZED FOR WHAT HE SAID.
It was this UNCERTAIN, SPECULATIVE, SUGGESTIVE QUALITY OF HIS SPEECH,
And the storm of CRITICISM THAT IT AROUSED
That made “String Beans” the BIGGEST DRAWING CARD IN COLORED VAUDEVILLE.
STRING BEANS IS REALLY FUNNY, THE ONE THING NEEDFUL TO A COMEDIAN.
He possesses TALENT AND MUCH ORIGINALITY.
Many of the funny sayings we hear and LAUGH AT IN COLORED VAUDEVILLE
Found their origin IN THE ANGULAR ONE’S THINK TANK.
Beans is now proving his ABILITY TO BE A LEGITIMATE COMEDIAN.
He no longer resorts to SMUT AND SUGGESTION TO WIN APPLAUSE.
Ladies and children can NOW LISTEN AND LAUGH WITHOUT SHAME.
The new STRING BEANS IS WELCOME,
And will doubtless be a BIGGER DRAWING CARD THAN EVER BEFORE.280
In spite of everything creative and salutary that Butler May contributed to the black vaudeville stage and box office, northern critics could not get away from what they conceived as his inadequacies. The most commonly heard “knock” concerned his use of sexually suggestive humor and double-entendre, commonly referred to as “smut.” Perhaps this charge had some justification in context; though nothing String Beans ever said offended the public sufficiently to keep them from storming the box office wherever he performed. The issue of vulgarity has a very different relevance in the context of the development of the blues, as unabashedly licentious a music form as America has ever produced. If anything, the accusations only reinforce Beans’s claim to the title “commander-in-chief of the real blues.”
Some of the criticisms leveled against String Beans reflected a regional tension that was set off by his 1911 invasion of the North. The blues-laden southern vaudeville acts that followed in String Beans’s footsteps were the specter of things to come in African American popular entertainment, to the dismay of many established northern vaudevillians. In 1916 a Freeman correspondent set String Beans’s “comedianism” in territorial perspective:
A few years ago when String Beans and his Sweetie May came north from their Southern scenes of triumph they brought with them the best of the line of purely Negro oddities, and which were directly developed under purely Negro influence. Their offering appeared crude to the senses of Northern Negroes who had seen nothing of purely Negro origin. They had seen comedians and comedians, but these were made under the influence of white performers, consequently their impress was on them. The Northern white comedian and the Northern Negro comedian did similar work and yet do similar work. But when Beans came he introduced a different comedianism, the likes of which had never been seen in the North. He was not alone in his peculiar work. Others from the South were on the same line. As comedians differ he was different from his species—his fellow Southern performers—and he was the best of them all in that peculiar line.
His work was first received in the nature of a curiosity. It was amusing from the start because so different. He did not at first make an impression so much as a comedian proper, but as a comedian monstrosity. He was more of a comedian caricaturist or cartoonist, who told the truth of the conduct of some of his race in an exaggerated way. He had nothing to conceal; he put it on like he saw it, only overdoing it, of course, as all comedians do. Some tried to dislike him at first because he was too plain. But in the end truth will prevail. The most careful people saw that String Beans was putting on what they either knew or had seen, hence true to the life of a class, even if too highly colored.
However, in time Beans also got a touch of the North, the Northern Negro, perhaps; or he was influenced by their views, so he toned down his performance just a bit, making his work more acceptable, while nothing of the originality was lost. He improved on himself, doing his work better with the years. He is now a comedian in every sense of the word, depending at no time on suggestive stuff. A bit of that creeps in, of course, now and then, but scarcely any more than what creeps in some acts of the best theaters in the land.281
Beans worked the week of June 18, 1917, at the New Lincoln Theater in Baltimore.282 Shortly thereafter he ducked out of vaudeville to travel with Park’s Colored Aristocrats, whose stage manager was Will Benbow. A report said that he was offered “a salary of such magnitude that ‘Beans’ felt justified in canceling a long vaudeville route and accepting his office at once.”283
Park’s Colored Aristocrats were an outgrowth of what had been Tolliver’s Smart Set. They were maintaining the variety atmosphere that inspired the show’s original concept of an “All Colored Circus,” with a contingent of jugglers, roller skaters, and a “modern Sampson” who “lifts, unassisted, a 1,300 pound horse.”284 Advertised as the “Largest Colored Show on Earth,” Park’s Colored Aristocrats worked primarily under canvas. During the week of July 4 they held down the corner of Scott and Granby streets in Norfolk, Virginia: “As an added attraction … several new acts will be seen, among them the World’s Famous ‘String Beans,’ positively the funniest colored man in the world today.”285
A few weeks after Beans joined Park’s Colored Aristocrats, Will Benbow resigned.286 It seems Beans and Benbow were fundamentally incompatible. Benbow gathered an independent troupe, Benbow’s Merry Makers, and went on his way. Retaining Beans as their “premier comedian,” and replacing Benbow with William B. Smith, the Colored Aristocrats (also billed as the Original Smart Set) spent much of the summer of 1917 in Pennsylvania. They “happened to be in Chester, Pa., when a race riot developed there and some of the bunch had the pleasure of witnessing a few exhibitions of the enormous amount of race hatred and prejudice that seems to prevail in that town.”287
Moving into New Jersey, the Colored Aristocrats played “day and date” with Jess Willard’s Buffalo Bill Show.288 In August the Aristocrats appeared at the Star Theater in Pittsburgh: “played to crowded houses each night and the standing room only sign was out.… Butler May (String Beans) is the big hit with this show.”289 The following month found them with their tent spread at Federal Park in Covington, Kentucky.290 They continued south to Nashville, appearing “Under Water Proof Canvas” at the corner of Cedar Street and Tenth Avenue for one week beginning September 10.291 Advertising and press reports indicate that String Beans was still with the show in Nashville; but when the company proceeded to Memphis, it was with “Pork Chops as leading comedian.”292
String Beans had broken away from the Colored Aristocrats and headed for Atlanta in company with Jodie and Susie Hawthorne Edwards, two young performers fresh off the roster of Alexander Tolliver’s Big Show. Although they had been traveling in the Tolliver Show for two years and had “started living together as husband and wife,” Edwards and Edwards had only begun performing as a team a few months earlier.293
An October 6, 1917, report notified that “String Beans opened the 81 Theater, Atlanta, and is packing them at every performance. Mr. Bailey will hold Beans over another week and then some more. Edwards and Edwards are with String Beans and they are cleaning up everywhere they go. They don’t need any more acts on the bill as these are standing them in the streets nightly. Edwards and Edwards open and Beans closes with his piano. Nuff Sed.”294
From Atlanta, the fateful trio made a jump to Macon, and then to Jacksonville.295 The Chicago Defender told of a “big week” at the Strand Theater there, “featuring the great String Beans and the sterling team of Edwards & Edwards.”296
On November 10, 1917, vaudevillian Hattie Akers posted a letter from Jacksonville to Defender columnist Tony Langston. Langston published the letter intact, warning readers that it “told of what may be, but what we hope will not be, the finish of one of the most unique characters in present-day show business.” Following a bit of chit-chat about the summer-like weather in Jacksonville, Akers broke the news: “I suppose you have heard about String Beans. He was being initiated into a lodge and in some manner they broke the small bones in his neck. He now lies in a hospital paralyzed from head to foot.”297 The victim of an absurd “hazing” accident, String Beans languished for more than a week before the final curtain rang down.
String Beans’s death was reported in several African American weeklies. It made front-page news in the Emancipator, his hometown Montgomery community paper: “[T]he world weeps with the friends and relatives of this gifted comedian who now lies asleep in the little cemetary [sic] in his native home town.… His body was brought to Montgomery Monday the 19th inst., and was buried Wednesday at 2:00 o’clock P. M., the funeral services being held at Mr. May’s home, 804 South Hall Street.”298
Obituaries also appeared in Montgomery’s mainstream dailies. The Montgomery Times reported:
It is alleged that May’s neck was broken and that rough places are about the head. It is charged that the man’s death was due to the initiation at a Jacksonville lodge and a very great indignation is expressed here where he was popular with his race.
His family employed an attorney today and no effort will be spared to bring to light the facts concerning his death.
An effort was made at Jacksonville to suppress the real facts, one report having it that May was killed in an automobile accident in going home after the show.
“String Beans” was the best known negro comedian in the south and was the highest-price negro showman in the country.299
Sylvester Russell later revealed that the lodge where String Beans met his fate was “not the general Masonic fraternity, but an independent Masonic order, only of local recognition in Jacksonville, Fla. It is not generally believed that anybody had anything against the popular actor and it is not generally believed that anybody wants or wanted to get back at the secret order where the unfortunate accident happened. In conclusion and in behalf of secret orders, by the example shown in String Beans’ death, colored orders have long been too rough in their initiations.”300
Butler May’s death certificate provides the final word concerning the cause of death. In the nearly illegible script of the attending physician, it is ascribed to a “Fracture of [Bilateral?] 6th Cervical Vertebra of Neck.” Elsewhere on the death certificate, Beans’s sister Blanche attributed his death to “natural causes.” In the space marked for the deceased’s former address, Blanche wrote, “traveling man.”
Billy and Mabel Arnte’s Dixieland Troubadours were playing in Beans’s hometown at the time of his funeral. Frank S. Reed, the manager of Arnte’s Dixieland Troubadours, informed the Freeman: “The home of Mrs. May was not able to accommodate the many friends of Butler’s, not only among the negro race, but the white as well. The long funeral cortege passed silently and sadly along, and many a heart was too full to do otherwise than breathe a sad and silent farewell to poor ‘String Beans.’”301
Butler May was laid to rest in Montgomery’s historic Oakwood Cemetery, in an inconspicuous tomb now shared by his mother, who died in 1941, and his sister Blanche, who died in 1969. Country music legend Hank Williams is also buried in Oakwood, with an elaborate marker and memorial, about a hundred yards away from the May family plot.
Many tributes to String Beans were published in the weeks following his death. “They can get all kinds of stock singles and teams,” rhymed Will Benbow, “but there’ll never be another ‘card’ like the original ‘String Beans.’”302 Salem Tutt Whitney mourned in his “Seen and Heard” column: “We are grieved to learn of the death of Butler May.… Thousands have forgotten their woes while listening to Beans. Can there exist a more commendable occupation than that of a joy dispenser. ‘String Beans’ was the best known personage in colored vaudeville. A box office winner, sought by all astute managers. His brand of comedy, distinctively his own, original, appealed to the mass of patrons of colored theaters.”303
The Chicago Defender reinforced Whitney’s assertion: “There probably was no better known performer to Race vaudeville fans than Butler May.… String Beans was a song writer of no mean ability and seldom used anything but original numbers in his act.… [H]e was the Bert Williams of small time.”304 The Defender published a dedicatory poem by Eleanor Wilson Morton titled “A Tribute,” which ended: “His struggles are over, to all it seemed / That he tried to make his last act clean.”305
Indianapolis Freeman, January 26, 1918.
There was no public statement from Sweetie May. At the time of Beans’s death she was at the Monogram Theater in Chicago, teamed with Eloise Johnson and Billie Young. She continued to work through the 1920s, most notably in a “sister act” with Bonnie Bell Drew.306 A 1942 press report identified Sweetie May as one of several “old-timers that can be seen daily” in the black entertainment section of New Orleans.307
Jodie and Susie Edwards were profoundly influenced by their brief association with String Beans; so much so, that in the wake of his death, they decided to inhabit his stage persona. An article in the January 26, 1918, Freeman heralded “Edwards and Edwards, the New String Beans and His Capable Partner Who Sings the Blues With a Feeling.… Jodie … is String Beans over again, but of course not so aggressive as the original.… His singing, his comedy, his dancing all have the String Bean touch, but not his exaggeration and liberty.” The article confirmed that before Beans’s death, he and Jodie had “made arrangements to team under the name String Beans and Butter Beans.”308
In a 1960 interview, Jodie Edwards was asked how he got the name “Butterbeans”:
I got that from a fellow in St. Louis. Charlie Turpin. There was a fellow named String Beans, he was a big drawing card. And he died. And see, when he passed, we was working with him … doing a trio together … And I took mostly all his style, you know, and his songs, and stuff like that … after he passed … the people was saying, “Oh my goodness, he remind me of String Beans.” Why I remind them of String Beans? Because I had just left him! And I had adopted his way! … and so then this manager that owned the theater [Turpin], he came back there and said, “Boy,” “Did you ever knew String Beans?” I said, “Yes, I knew him.” He said, “Well, by jingo,” said, “You work kind of like him; the only thing is, you ain’t playing no piano.” He said, “I’m going to make these people bill you as ‘Butterbeans.’”309
Without the requisite piano skills, Jodie Edwards was not fully equipped to perpetuate String Beans’s blues legacy. Otherwise, however, his act so resembled Beans’s that six years after Butler May’s death the black press was still touting: “‘Butterbeans,’ the one and only rival of the late ‘Stringbeans.’”310
At the Monogram Theater in April 1918, Sylvester Russell found Jodie Edwards’s dancing “comical to the extreme and sometimes vulgar.… When he sings, he resembles the late String Beans, but will not dare to follow after his footsteps.”311 In Memphis later that summer, Butterbeans and Susie put over a version of Beans’s 1912 hit “Nobody Knows What Deacon Jones Does When the Lights Go Out.”312 Three months later, at the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, they received the kind of press they were apparently looking for:
The team of Butter Beans and Hawthorne … are becoming more and more popular as the week draws to a close.
One needs only to remember what the famous String Beans was to form an ideal as what sort of comedian Butter Beans is. In his jokes, dancing and walk, even in his talk this expert is creating the kind of laugh that is rioting wherever he goes is just like String Beans in every way.…
Madame Hawthorne is capable of making ones heart bleed by the touching manner in which she sings the blues.313
The untimely death of String Beans was a great loss to vaudeville patrons and theater owners; but it was a catastrophe for the historiography of the blues, leaving a gap that cannot be remedied simply by reconstructing portions of his itinerary and stage repertoire. Butler May was a formative figure in the early evolution of the blues, the first national blues star; but key elements of his legacy remain unrecognized, essentially hidden in plain sight. The realities of the recording industry during the “String Beans decade” left no trace of what his music sounded like. Moreover, freewheeling String Beans never bothered to register any of his compositions for copyright.
But the absence of sound recordings and sheet music does not fully explain why “the best known personage in colored vaudeville” disappeared so completely from the historical record.314 Amid the daily struggle for survival that characterized southern vaudeville, concerns about posthumous fame were not much of a factor. Beyond any endemic “forgetfulness,” some of String Beans’s contemporaries harbored jealousy and resentment of his phenomenal popularity; while others took advantage of his death to appropriate and claim credit for elements of his act and persona. Writer Abbe Niles, who “never saw ‘String Beans’ on the stage,” disrespected his memory when, drawing from W. C. Handy’s recollections, he described Beans as “a Negro entertainer of high and odiferous fame.”315 Jelly Roll Morton’s claim that Beans sang all of his songs to the same tune is of a type with his casually dismissive appraisals of fellow performers.316
In the course of their research into black vernacular dance and jazz history, Marshall and Jean Stearns heard about String Beans from both Jodie “Butterbeans” Edwards and folklorist Willis Laurence James. In a 1966 article in the Southern Folklore Quarterly, the Stearns tapped James’s recollections of a performance he had witnessed in Jacksonville, Florida, a half-century earlier.317 Their reconstruction of James’s description was the most anyone had written about String Beans from the time of his death in 1917 until recent years.318 Regrettably, the Stearns did not investigate what they had been told sufficiently to establish String Beans’s correct name, which they misinterpreted as “Budd LeMay.”319
“The Elgin Movements Man,” Indianapolis Freeman, September 2, 1911.
String Beans’s most celebrated quality was his originality. Salem Tutt Whitney made a cardinal point when he declared: “Many of the funny sayings we hear and laugh at in Colored vaudeville found their origin in the angular one’s think tank.” However, reconstructing String Beans’s tangible legacy a century after his death is not a simple task. Contemporaneous press commentaries from 1910 to 1917 make it possible to identify song titles and phrases from Beans’s repertory, many of which turn up in later blues texts. Documented attributions of titles including “Pray for the Lights to Go Out,” “Blind Man Blues,” “I Don’t Want Nobody That Don’t Want Me,” “I Love My Man Better Than I Love Myself,” “Hospital Blues,” “Low Down Jail House Blues,” “Whiskey Blues,” and more attest to a body of original String Beans blues songs. It is possible that these titles are not, in fact, or in toto, songs known from later recordings or publications; but it is much more likely that not only these, but countless other anonymous blues songs and characteristic phrases are, in fact, unaccredited products of “the angular one’s think tank.”
One persistent reminder of String Beans’s silent influence is the “Elgin Movements” metaphor. Beans introduced it at the Luna Park Theater in Atlanta in 1910. Three years later, in the wake of the most famous maritime disaster in history, he irreverently crossbred his “Elgin Movements” song with a parody on the sinking of the Titanic.320 The lyrics to this topical monstrosity were posited in a 1928 article by Abbe Niles, as “remembered … by the Father of the Blues, W. C. Handy, and which used to be sung at the Monogram Theater, Chicago, by ‘String Beans’”:
I got dem Elgin Movements in ma hips,
Twenty years’ guarantee!
I want all you ladies in dis house
To nestle up close to me.
I was on dat great Titanic
De night dat she went down;
Ev’rybody wondered
Why I didn’t drown—
I had dem Elgin movements in ma hips,
Twenty years’ guarantee!321
Folklorist Dorothy Scarborough collected a similar set of lyrics, which she allegedly overheard while “sitting on the porch of her Virginia summer home” and reproduced in her 1919 book, From a Southern Porch:
Come, all you people, ef you want to know
Something dat happened not so long ago.
I guess yo’ heard bout dat misteree,
Bout de Titanic sankin’ in de deep, blue sea.
Dey was people on dat ship
Had Elgin movement in dey hip.
Captain Smith had de worry-blues.
I got de Titanic movement in my hip,
Wid a twenty-year guarantee.
I ain’t good-lookin’ an I don’t dress fine,
But I angles in my hips, an’ I’m goin’ to take my
time!322
Scarborough took the song for a grassroots folk invention; but it is a luminous reminder of the original “Elgin Movements” man of early southern vaudeville.
String Beans’s outrageous boast, that his “Elgin movements” saved him from drowning, is thematically akin to infamous street-corner toasts concerning “Shine and the Titanic,” in which “Shine” survives by virtue of his superhuman aptitude for swimming.323 An identical scenario is found in the coon song “Traveling Man” (or “Traveling Coon”), recorded by numerous blues and country artists during the 1920s and 1930s.324 The assertion that the “Traveling Man” (Beans, Shine) had somehow boarded the Titanic in the first place is racially charged. As an African American press report of the time pointed out: “There were no Negroes on the ill-fated Titanic when she went down in mid-ocean. It develops that none were to be permitted to cross the pond on the majestic liner.”325
String Beans’s “Elgin Movements”/“Titanic Blues” song was never committed to sheet music or sound recordings. Nevertheless, the deep impression String Beans left on race recordings is preserved in the noble lineage of his “Elgin movements” metaphor. Delta blues enthusiasts readily associate it with Robert Johnson’s 1936 recording “Walking Blues”; but Blind Lemon Jefferson’s precedent “Change My Luck Blues,” from 1928, contains the identical lyric configuration: “She’s got Elgin movements from her head down to her toes, / And she can break in on a dollar most anywhere she goes.”326
Various allusions to “Elgin movements” are present in Sippie Wallace’s recording “Off and On Blues,” Sodarisa Miller’s “Broadway Daddy Blues,” Edmonia Henderson’s “Brownskin Man,” and Eva Taylor’s “Everybody Loves My Baby,” all from 1924. Trixie Smith employed it in her 1925 recording of “Everybody Loves My Baby.”327 That same year, Jenkins and Jenkins mentioned “Elgin movements” on their recording “Sister, It’s Too Bad,” while Clara Smith’s “I’m Tired of Being Good” insists, “I was born in the country, raised in town, / Got Elgin movements from my head on down.”328 Old-time country musicians Garley Foster and Dock Walsh must have been paying close attention, because their 1931 recording titled “Wild Women Blues” affirms: “She was born in the country raised in town, / She’s got Elgin movements from her hips on down.”329
(Courtesy Roger Misiewicz)
Georgia blues songster Peg Leg Howell employed the “Elgin movements” metaphor on two records, “Papa Stobb Blues” in 1927 and “Fairy Blues” in 1928.330 Blind Blake sang of “Elgin movements and a twenty year guarantee” in his 1928 recording, “Panther Squall Blues.” In 1929 Barbecue Bob put it to use in “She Moves It Just Right,” as did singer-pianist J. C. Johnson, with a combo known as Feathers and Frogs, on the song “How You Get That Way.”331 Rob Robinson and Meade Lux Lewis’s 1930 recording “I Got Some of That” says, “Look what I see walking down the street, / she’s got Elgin movements from her head to her feet.”332
Bluesman Charley Jordan bragged on his 1936 record “Got Your Water On” that he had “the best old Elgin movements.”333 Also in 1936, when southern vaudeville pioneer Trixie Colquitt Butler finally got around to making records, the first song she waxed, “Take It Easy Greasy,” referred to “Elgin movements from my hips to my knees, / automatic worker, twenty years guaranteed.”334
The opening bars of the “String Beans Blues” segment of H. Alf Kelley and J. Paul Wyer’s “A Bunch of Blues.”
Jelly Roll Morton’s piano introduction to Billie Young’s 1930 Victor recording, “When They Get Lovin’ They’s Gone” (Transcribed from the record by Adam Swanson).
Curiously comestible reconfigurations of String Beans’s “Elgin movements” metaphor cropped up in southern vaudeville as early as November 1910, when a Freeman correspondent from the Dixie Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, reported, “Papa Tom Young, with oakra [sic] in his hips and tomatoes in his sides, is still holding his own, singing ‘The Blues.’”335 Charles “Cow Cow” Davenport and Dora Carr’s 1926 blues comedy confrontation “Alabama Mis-Treater” puts forth a similar variation:
Davenport: I got cabbages in one hip,
Mashed potatoes in my side,
I got a twenty-year guarantee.
Carr: You can have ice cream in your hips
Pistachios in your sides,
You buy a ticket on this train
Before you ride.336
Davenport revisited “Alabama Mistreater” on a 1928 solo recording for Vocalion: “I’m that mistreating daddy, born in Alabama, / Got everything a good man needs, / I even got cabbages in my hips and onions in my thighs, / What about a hundred-and-ninety year guarantee!337
An imprint of the “String Beans Blues” figure in Cow Cow Davenport’s 1929 Gennett recording, “Atlanta Rag” (Transcribed from the record by Tom McDermott).
The opening bars of the “Cow Cow Blues” manuscript submitted for copyright by Charles “Cow Cow” Davenport (Courtesy Wayne D. Shirley).
Jelly Roll Morton may have betrayed another debt to String Beans when he recounted how he had acquired his famous nickname around 1912, while plying the southern vaudeville routes with Texas-based comedian Sandy Burns. One night they engaged in an extemporaneous dialogue in which Burns introduced himself as “Sweet Papa Cream Puff, right out of the bakery shop. That seemed to produce a great big laugh,” Morton recalled, “and I was standing there, mugging, and the thought came to me that I better say something about a bakery shop, so I … told him I was Sweet Papa Jelly Roll with stove pipes in my hips and all the women in town just dying to turn my damper down!”338
Vaudeville blues singer Cleo Gibson recorded a clever permutation in 1929: “I’ve Got Ford Engine Movements in My Hips (Ten Thousand Miles Guaranteed).”339 The theme was further abstracted by R. T. Hanen on a recording titled “She’s Got Jordan River in Her Hips”; and a related vestigial interpretation is preserved on Washboard Sam’s “River Hip Mama” from 1942:340 “Men’s all crazy about her, and she makes them whine and cry; / She’s a river-hip mama, and they all wanna be baptized.”341
Count Basie, in his memoir Good Morning Blues, wrote of his mid-1920s tours with blues veteran Gonzell White. Her company also included Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham, who “used to do a song and dance and say, ‘I’m Sweet Papa Pigmeat. I got the Jordan River in my hips, and all the women is raving to be baptized!’”342 Writer and critic Stanley Crouch made an indirect reference to this variation in a 1983 essay, in which he imagined “Poseidon hanging out down Africa way, enjoying fast women of river hips who baptized him nightly.”343
In what may be the final “Elgin movements” connection on a commercial recording, Chicago blues guitarist Buddy Guy unconsciously linked String Beans to rock-and-roll icon Dick Clark in his 1963 recording “American Bandstand” when, in the best String Beans style, he rhymed the word “hip” with “Titanic ship”: “Put your hand on your hip, / Let your backbone slip. / Oh, pretend you are rocking / Like that Titanic ship. / Oh, you are doing that thing / On American Bandstand.”344
It is one thing to identify song titles, “floating verses,” and phrases attributed to String Beans that later appear in recorded blues, and quite another to recreate anything of his music, absent sound recordings or song publications with his name attached. There is, however, a shard of published music to which String Beans’s name is associated. This precious engram of String Beans’s blues was submitted for copyright by State Street composers H. Alf Kelley and J. Paul Wyer in 1915, while Beans was still alive and flourishing. Their instrumental medley “A Bunch of Blues” welded the chorus of their 1914 hit “Long Lost Blues” with three additional blues melodies: “The Weary Blues,” “Ship Wreck Blues,” and the eponymous “String Beans Blues.”345
There are at least two recordings of “A Bunch of Blues,” and one of a medley that included “String Beans Blues.”346 A distinctive element in “String Beans Blues” is its staccato introductory, which cast great ripples in blues tradition. Among those who reprised it on record was, of all people, Jelly Roll Morton, as a prelude to his accompaniment of blues vocalist Billie Young’s 1930 recording “When They Get Lovin’ They’s Gone.”347
The introduction to “String Beans Blues” consists of two distinct parts: it begins with eight (or six) identical staccato notes on the same pitch, then a half-beat pause, followed by a brief descending progression. The staccato “first part,” harmonized in the Kelley-Wyer arrangement, is sometimes rendered in single notes. Something about this deceptively simple, unprepossessing riff was identified as essentially blues—initially, perhaps, because of its association with String Beans. Furthermore, as noted by David Evans: “Part of the effectiveness of the phrase is that it more or less defines a descending ‘blues scale,’ including the two main ‘blue notes.’ For many listeners this must have been the first taste of the blues, and they got it in nearly its complete musical form.”348 Exactly how String Beans employed this figure remains a mystery. Presumably it was part of one or more of his piano blues songs; perhaps it was used as a referential theme in his stage act or pianologue.
The “String Beans” figure seems fundamentally admissive of creative adaptation and embellishment. In the Wyer/Kelley sheet music, the downward progression is not fully resolved and seems to call for improvisation. Cow Cow Davenport and Blind Lemon Jefferson did more with this motif than anyone else. Davenport fashioned a bluesy movement in the midst of an otherwise straightforward ragtime piece, “Atlanta Rag,” by inserting the “String Beans Blues” riff. In the process, he devised an artful extension of the motif.349 About “Cow Cow Blues,” one of the most influential of all early piano blues compositions, it could be said that Davenport fragmented the “String Beans Blues” motive and added a definitive, original resolution that is lacking in Wyer and Kelley’s transcription, while nevertheless preserving the original musical idea.350
Sam Collins’s guitar introduction to his 1931 recording, “New Salty Dog” (Transcribed from the record by David Evans. Transposed to the key of G for comparison).
Retentions of Beans’s presumptive theme can be heard on recordings spanning decades and encompassing a wide variety of blues styles. Sometimes the “String Beans Blues” figure appears as an introductory, as Jelly Roll Morton used it.351 Other pianists inserted it as an ornament or flourish in the body of a song.352 Country music piano player and vocalist Aubrey “Moon” Mullican used it as a tag-on ending to his 1953 interpretation of Roy Brown’s R&B number “Grandpa Stole My Baby.”353
In 1929 Vocalion record company assembled several of its most popular blues artists, including Jim Jackson, to put down an ensemble number with spoken dialogue titled “Jim Jackson’s Jamboree.” Toward the beginning of the performance, Georgia Tom Dorsey beckons to Rufus Perryman, a.k.a. Speckled Red: “Well come on there ‘Red,’ hit them blues up there a little bit for us.” The pianist responds by launching directly into the “String Beans Blues” riff.354
Paramount recording stars Charlie Spand and Blind Blake also had more than passing familiarity with the “String Beans Blues” theme. Pianist Spand played it on the unissued take of his “Mississippi Blues,” deftly transforming the staccato first part into a trill, followed by the familiar distinctive descending progression.355 The figure appears again in Spand’s “Moanin’ the Blues.” On the tour-de-force instrumental duet “Hastings St.,” which he recorded with Blind Blake in 1929, Spand executes the “String Beans Blues,” and Blake quickly responds, interpreting the same lick on the guitar.356 The way the figure rolls off Blake’s nimble fingers is evidence that adaptations of String Beans’s riff were by no means limited to piano.357
Jazz band variations of “String Beans Blues” can be heard on recordings by Johnny Dunn’s Original Jazz Hounds.358 Daddy Stovepipe plays the same figure on harmonica on his “Tuxedo Blues.”359 On the Dallas String Band’s “Sweet Mama Blues,” mandolin player Coley Jones renders the staccato part as a trill, reminiscent of Charlie Spand’s piano treatment on (the unissued take of) “Mississippi Blues.”360
Blind Lemon Jefferson is responsible for the earliest guitar adaptation of the String Beans figure on record.361 It is a mystery whether he ever heard String Beans perform.362 In any case, Beans’s music reached Texas theaters via the songs he wrote and made famous and by traveling performers who were imitating him, or were influenced by him.363
Jefferson recorded almost 100 songs from 1926 to 1929. He played the “String Beans Blues” phrase on “Corinna Blues,” “Black Snake Moan,” “Mean Jumper Blues,” and “That Crawlin’ Baby Blues,” cycling it into his guitar accompaniment along with other unrelated phrases. “Hangman’s Blues,” “Lock Step Blues,” “Black Snake Moan No. 2,” and “Dynamite Blues” also contain adaptations of “String Beans Blues.” On “Rambler Blues” Jefferson devised an elegant variation by abbreviating the staccato part and transforming the descending portion into a fancy run.364
It is likely that Memphis blues legend Furry Lewis had a chance to see String Beans in action. Lewis clearly had an affinity for the “String Beans Blues” theme, using it as an introduction to his recordings of “Rock Island Blues,” “Furry’s Blues,” and “Black Gypsy Blues” and employing it in his “Good Looking Girl Blues.”365 The theme is also used to introduce Sam Collins’s “New Salty Dog,” Kid Prince Moore’s “Honey Dripping Papa,” Edward Thompson’s “Seven Sisters Blues,” and Blind Boy Fuller’s “Cat Man Blues.”366 Mississippi Delta bluesman Ishman Bracey introduces his “Left Alone Blues” with a variation of the “String Beans Blues” figure, and subsequently used it to resolve his vocal phrases.367
Other variations can be heard by guitarist Walter Vincson on the Mississippi Sheiks’ 1930 recording “Church Bell Blues,” and again six years later, in his accompaniment to Tommy Griffin’s “Hey Hey Blues.”368 Barbecue Bob seems to have been partial to the riff, featuring it heavily in “Cloudy Sky Blues,” “Goin’ Up the Country,” and “Meat Man Pete.” His twelve-string guitar renders the staccato notes as ringing chords.369 Dan Sane, guitarist with Jack Kelly’s South Memphis Jug Band, employed it in their initial recording, “Highway No. 61 Blues,” made in 1933.370 The same riff is incorporated into recordings by Big Bill Broonzy, Buddy Moss, Little Hat Jones, Arthur Pettis, and others.371
Several classic guitar blues seem to be virtually constructed around the “String Beans Blues” figure. On William Harris’s “Keep Your Man Out of Birmingham” the figure is not merely rendered on guitar, but the singing of the verses reproduce the melodic motif.372 Mattie Delaney’s “Down The Big Road Blues” is likewise fundamentally grounded in the String Beans theme.373 Yet another example is Buddy Boy Hawkins’s “Shaggy Dog Blues,” in which the guitar figure is approximated in Hawkins’s scat vocal: “dee dee, dee dee, dee dee” (the repetitive “first part”); “dee dee dah, dee dah” (descending “second part”).374
Blind Lemon Jefferson famously configured the verses of many of his songs in an alternating pattern of vocal lines and guitar responses. He often played his interpretation of “String Beans Blues” as a response to his vocal line, using the phrase in a manner in which it resolves rather than initiates the melodic phrase. Speaking of Blind Lemon’s special blues guitar playing skills, B. B. King described: “when [Jefferson] would resolve something, it was done so well … he’d come out of it so smooth.”375
Jefferson’s innovative repurposing of the “String Beans Blues” figure to resolve a blues line was widely imitated. Subsequent appropriations of this approach are in evidence on guitar blues records such as Freddie Spruell’s “Tom Cat Blues” and Pearl Dickson’s “Little Rock Blues”—with expert guitar work by Maylon and Richard Harney, known as “Pet and Can.”376 Other examples are found on records by Kansas Joe McCoy, Shorty Bob Parker, and Josh White.377
A few guitar renditions of “String Beans Blues” have been noted from the postwar era. John Lee plays it twice in his “Alabama Boogie” from 1951; Munroe Moe Jackson executes it at the beginning and then twice more in his 1949 version of Hank Williams’s “Move It On Over.”378 No doubt many of the guitarists who used the “String Beans Blues” figure learned it from Blind Lemon Jefferson’s records, and may have never even heard of String Beans; nevertheless, something of the spirit and substance of Beans’s music graces their work.
When Butler May first left home in 1909 the blues was not yet known by its rightful name. To a significant degree, the ascendance of the blues in black vaudeville was accomplished under String Beans’s authority; but his creative influence, his material legacy, and his legend were all checked in full career. In the long run, the continued vitality of the blues was not dependent on String Beans; however, his sudden disappearance altered the course of blues evolution. For one thing, it cleared the stage for the era of the “blues queens.”
