Male Blues Singers in Southern Vaudeville
Out of all that I love, I love best my dear old Southern home.
—H. Franklin “Baby” Seals
For all his unique and revolutionary attributes, Butler “String Beans” May was fundamentally a blackface comedian with a skill set tailored to the vaudeville stage. His act featured comedy patter, eccentric dancing, character acting, piano playing, and singing. Unlike his contemporary vaudeville brethren, String Beans made the blues his specialty, proudly announcing himself as the “commander-in-chief … of the real blues.”
Male performers of every ilk, including ventriloquists, yodelers, and novelty instrumentalists, helped usher the blues onto the African American stage. While most of them cannot be characterized as bluesmen in precisely the same sense or spirit as String Beans, their startling diversity prescribes a more liberal appreciation of the variegated firmament of the blues.
Largely as a result of attrition, few pioneer male blues singers made phonograph records. Consequently, “classic vaudeville blues” has come to be regarded as a female art form. Had the blues record “boom” occurred a few years earlier than it did, the gender imbalance would be less pronounced. Nevertheless, it remains true that a significant “gender gap” did exist, particularly in respect to the popular imagery. With the growth of southern vaudeville, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura and identity in the emergent concept of the “blues queen,” while male blues singers somehow remained tethered to the image of blackface comedian.
One thing that all the men who sang the blues in early vaudeville had in common was an approach to stage entertainment predicated on southern style. Their “original blues,” however syncretical, was the organic product of a theatrical context that catered exclusively to black southerners.
Kid Love and Baby Seals
The exploits of Kid Love and Baby Seals in the frontier vaudeville houses of East Texas direct attention to the theater pit as an incubator of early blues piano playing. These two players were never team partners, but they had much in common: both were natives of Mobile, Alabama, and during the first months of 1910, both showed up on Milam Street in Houston.
At that time, Houston’s black entertainment world revolved around two nearby theaters: the People’s at 211 Milam Street and the Palace at 514 Milam. Both theaters were managed by Frank McKenzie, “the only white man on the job.” Advertising steady work to piano players at a salary of $12.50 per week, McKenzie attracted Kid Love and Baby Seals to this rough-cut southern vaudeville frontier. Competing head-to-head in Milam Street’s theater pit bands, Seals and Love brought piano blues to the brink of recognition.
Working at the Palace Theater early in 1910, Kid Love and trap drummer George Williams did “a little act of their own in the orchestra pit that keeps the audience applauding them for their music.”1 The following month, down the block at the People’s Theater a reporter claimed, “Kid Love, our pianist, George Williams, our trap drummer, and James Miller, the trombone player, certainly handles the musical end of the show to perfection.”2
After Benbow’s Alabama Chocolate Drops Company concluded a date at the People’s Theater in April, Kid Love and his wife Gussie traveled with the Benbow show to the Majestic Theater in Hot Springs, Arkansas: “Mrs. Gussie Love took Hot Springs by storm singing ‘Wild Cherry Rag.’”3 When the Chocolate Drops completed their Hot Springs engagement, the Loves returned to Houston and set up shop at the Palace Theater.4 A landmark in the history of the blues calls out from a July 16, 1910, Palace Theater correspondence: “Mr. Kid Love is cleaning with his ‘Easton Blues’ on the piano. He is a cat on a piano.”5 The derivation of Love’s “Easton Blues” remains a mystery; the simple fact of its existence represents an uncontestable milestone.
Baby Seals first surfaced in the spring of 1909, playing piano in the pit of the Lyric Theater in Shreveport, Louisiana.6 That summer he was musical director of the World Beaters Company, featuring the drama “Railroad Jack” with blackface comedians Leroy White, Billy Henderson, and Ed. F. Peat.7 Seals was living in New Orleans in January 1910, when he published his first sheet music production, a crap-shooting ragtime-cum-blues song called “You Got to Shake, Rattle and Roll.”8
Shortly thereafter, Seals followed Kid Love into the Milam Street theater scene. Holding down the piano at the People’s Theater in February 1910, he put his personal stamp on the stage show: “At the closing of the olio comes Tansell, Levi and Tansell, featuring Baby Seals’ song hit, ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll.’ We close the show with old man Beaver Dam, who belongs to the U-B-Dam Baptist Church.”9
When Seals took the piano at the Palace Theater in April, the bill included future blues recording artist Viola McCoy and “dainty little singing and dancing soubrette” Floyd Fisher, the “doll of Memphis.”10 Four weeks later, Seals and Fisher were spotted together at the Ruby Theater in Galveston: “Little Baby Floyd Fisher is still holding her own.… H. F. (Baby) Seals is holding the show down with his mighty stunts on the piano.”11 The consensus of opinion at the Ruby was that “Baby Seals, pianist and musical director, is above the average. He can put so much juice in your song that you will sing even when you don’t feel like singing.”12
Seals ended his Texas sojourn that summer and headed back east in a husband-and-wife team act with Baby Floyd Fisher. On July 28, 1910, they opened at the Arcade Theater in Atlanta, where Seals sang “Labor for Nobody” and “I Beg Your Pardon Mr. Johnson.”13 The following month, Paul Carter’s Stock Company, featuring Love and Love and Seals and Fisher, all fresh off the Texas blues frontier, made their appearance at the Pekin Theater in Savannah.14
Paul Carter, the stage manager of this touring company, was known for “his eccentric dancing and clean comedy.”15 By 1910 he had accrued more than ten years with top-notch minstrel companies, including the Rabbit’s Foot, Florida Blossoms, and P. G. Lowery’s Band and Minstrels.16 In 1912 Carter submitted the first “anti-blues” commentary to appear in the Freeman:
The blame for smutty sayings and suggestive dancing in theaters lies with the patrons. There is no class to the vaudeville stage now, and it is getting worse every day. There are a great many acts doing things away out of their line in order to please the patrons and manager. When a performer meets another that has played the theater he intends playing the next week, he will ask how things are over there. This will be the answer: “Oh, they like a little smut, and things with a double meaning. If you don’t put it on you can’t make it there.” He then says to himself, “I guess I’ll have to frame up some junk for that bunch.” He then lays aside his music for his regular opening, and when he gets to the theater for rehearsal he will say to the piano player, “When I come on just play the ‘Blues.’” He opens and starts singing in the wings, “I had a good gal, but the fool laid down and died,” and to hear the audience scream one would think the show was closing with a very funny after-piece. When he gets off after the show the crowd is waiting to greet him. You will hear them say, “There’s that guy; he sure can sing ‘Dem Blues.’” “Did you see him take that ‘trip.’ Boy he’s a cat.” Now on the same bill were singers of such class as Abbie Mitchell … and no one says a word regarding their classy numbers. But just let a soubrette on the bill, that some comedian has taken from home, because she looked good to him, and showed her how to “fall off the log” and sing any old ragtime song, and she will receive a bunch of flowers and a few cards with prominent names of amusement lovers of the town. She then goes big all the week and gets a return date in the house in three weeks’ time for a four weeks’ run.17
Carter’s reactionary critique represents the opinion of a knowledgeable insider whose colorful vernacular terminology is evocative of the southern vaudeville theater habitués who first summoned the blues onto the popular stage, before any blues songs had been published, let alone recorded. The conflation—“He sure can sing ‘Dem Blues.’” “Did you see him take that ‘trip?’ Boy he’s a cat”—revives phrases observed in even earlier blues-related contexts. At Atlanta’s Luna Park in the spring of 1910, String Beans was said to be taking the house “by storm when he takes that unknown trip.”18 When Kid Love performed his “Easton Blues” at the Palace Theater in Houston in the summer of 1910, a reporter declared: “He is a cat on a piano.”19
Carter’s defense of “class” on the black southern vaudeville stage suggests unrealistic and perhaps even misguided aspirations. When proletarian theatergoers applauded the singing of “any old” blues song, they were saying “amen” to a validation of their cultural heritage, and expressing their uncompromised pride of identity. Carter’s bundling of “smut,” “double meaning,” and “junk” with the blues reveals a prejudice that must have softened with the changing times, because he later co-wrote such blues standards as “Weeping Willow Blues” and “The Bye Bye Blues”—both recorded by Bessie Smith—and “A Woman Gets Tired of One Man All the Time.”20
Paul Carter may well have classified Kid and Gussie Love among the “acts doing things away out of their line in order to please the patrons and manager.” Unlike Butler May and H. Franklin Seals, Kid Love was not a fresh product of the southern vaudeville environ. As early as January 1904, he was traveling through the state of Tennessee with The Hottest Coon in Dixie No. 2 Company, teamed with Raleigh W. Thompson in a blackface comedy act.21 Late in 1910, Kid and Gussie Love appeared in Cincinnati, well ahead of the curve for acts off the southern time; and in June 1911 they were scheduled to play Chicago’s prestigious Pekin Theater. By this time, Kid Love had become a member of the Goats, the Chicago-based performers’ fraternal organization.22
At the Maceo Theater in Columbia, South Carolina, in November 1910, the Loves put on a “novelty sketch and dance act, singing ‘The Grizzly Bear Rag’ and ‘I’ve got Elgin movements in my hips with a twenty-year guarantee, and strange things will happen just as sure as you’re born.’”23 String Beans had sung similar lyrics at the Luna Park Theater in July 1910, but Love and Love steadfastly claimed to be “the original writers of ‘Elgin Movements.’”24 The question of whose signature should be attached to this signature blues metaphor will probably remain unanswered. Regardless, Love and Love used “Elgin Movements” in their act at least through 1912.
In July 1911 Love and Love played the Garden Theater in Louisville, where Kid “rendered several ragtime selections on the piano and his singing of ‘What You Going to Do When Your Bon Bon Buddy’s Dead’ was a scream.”25 Several weeks later, at the Ruby Theater in Louisville, they put on “‘An Unhappy Pair,’ in blackface. Mrs. Love pleads in song for the Lord to send her a man, when Mr. Love brings in a good one, ‘You’ve got to have Elgin movements.’”26 One week later, at the Lyre Theater in Louisville, Love and Love shared a bill with May and May.27 During the summer of 1912 Love and Love appeared in New York and Philadelphia, and then ran the S. H. Dudley Circuit from Washington down to Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Norfolk, Virginia.28 At the end of the year they played the Olio Theater in Louisville, where they were advertised as “the original writers of ‘Elgin Movements.’ … Their act is free from all vulgarity. Their main song is ‘I Ain’t Going to Work for Nobody.’”29
Shortly after Love and Love played a date at the Central Theater in Atlanta, in June 1913, Kid Love became “very ill and unable to work … Performers in Atlanta have already started a movement to take up money to send their brother performer home.”30 Love was still in Atlanta when he died on August 9, 1913. A brief obituary noted: “His real name was Henry Warren. His wife took him to Mobile, Ala., for burial. He was thirty-five years old. He was known as a composer of songs.”31
In September 1910, not long after ending their Texas sojourn, Seals and Fisher took the stage at the Globe Theater in Jacksonville with “their original sketch, ‘How to Get a Job,’” in which Seals sang “one of his original songs, ‘Woman Pay Me Now,’” and “made the gallery gods laugh again and again at the grotesque make-up he wears in his act.”32 Later that year Seals formed a company of fourteen people known as the “Baby F. Seals Bunch of Fun Promoters” and presented them at the Royal Palm Theater in Greenville, Mississippi. Apparently encouraged by his reception there, Seals took the courageous step of leasing the 500-seat Bijou Theater in Greenwood, Mississippi, opening on December 6, 1910, for a continuous engagement that lasted at least five months.
The southern vaudeville theater movement was a highly visible manifestation of black cultural and economic self-determination, which was vulnerable to the erratic and volatile circumstances of everyday life in the South. It was a movement that called for thoughtful and calculated action. Few performers confronted that aspect of southern vaudeville more deliberately than H. Franklin Seals. In Greenwood, Seals warily insulated the Bijou Theater from its racially charged Mississippi Delta surroundings, constructing a self-contained theatrical enclave, complete with “nice rooms for my people” on the second floor: “Now they don’t have to go out of the house.”33
Highlights of Seals’s Bunch of Fun Makers show at the Bijou included Kid McCoy, the “dancing demon”; Harry Bonner, “the Black Caruso”; Leroy White, “one of the funniest boys in the South”; Viola McCoy, “noted for her Eagle Rock, and featuring the ‘Grizzly Bear’”; and Baby Floyd Fisher, “the smallest and sweetest little thing on the stage, singing anything the audience asks for.”34 Seals did not play piano or otherwise perform in the show: “I had to retire from the stage as my business rose to such a height until it takes a ticket taker … an officer … two uniformed attendants and myself to look after everything out front.”35 The pit was handled by “Ollie Sullivan, the Southern rag-time piano king and entertainer, who makes sentimental and operatic songs a specialty … assisted by Harry Wm. Jefferson, the St. Louis trap drum wonder, who is taking as many encores as the stage.”36
Seals’s theatrical venture in Greenwood was something of a “sociological event,” accompanied by detailed reportage and conspicuous advertising in the Freeman. It ended some time before June 1911. An appearance at the Duvall Theater in Atlanta followed, with a smaller company of performers, including Leroy White.37
Seals and Fisher would have joined the parade of southern acts that followed May and May through northern vaudeville theaters in the summer of 1911; but something blocked their path. Seals provided the details in a letter to the Freeman, after he had read a statement by black theater legend Billy McClain, currently an expatriate boxing promoter in London, England. While vacationing in London, Pat Chappelle, proprietor of the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, encountered McClain and tried to entice him to return to America, “go South where the talent is,” and help lead the rising generation of southern performers. McClain responded frankly:
[N]othing short of a miracle would ever take me South of the Mason and Dixon line. Mind you, I quite agree with you that I can make money; but as I have said before, it is not all money with me, for I like liberty and freedom.
Those necktie parties and burning stake dramas are two entertainments I don’t enjoy.… I don’t care to ever see again a man dangling at the end of a rope to satisfy a howling mob and shouting chorus.… Now speaking plain facts, do you really think that I … could withstand the injustice of the overbearing class of people that you have to come in contact with, that you are called upon to do business with.… They would hire someone to kill me accidentally if they could not get me any other way … knowing what I do, they would never let me light.38
Seals was an outspoken critic of the racially inspired abuses endemic to the Old South in which he was raised and which he knew firsthand. He weighed in from Birmingham, Alabama:
I for one agree with Mr. McClain. It is true that the Negroes have advanced in the last eight or ten years at the rate of a mile a minute clip, but the conditions are the same, so far as these crackers are concerned.…
It is true, there is a mint of money in the show business down here, but did Mr. Chappelle … tell you frankly and truly what you’ve got to do and go through to get this money? What am I staying down here for? Well if you will write Mr. A. Houston, of the Houston Theater, Louisville, he will tell you why we didn’t open there on the 17th, as we were signed to do. The same thing happened to Billy Henderson and his company in Houston, Texas. It happened to me and my company here [in Birmingham]. It cost us all $20 each to get bonds. Then after being liberated, we had to sign contracts for 30 days more before we could leave. We are now working for the same man that put us in. What do you think of that? We get our salaries O. K., but when we kick, why they say this town belongs to us white folks; so we are paid slaves.
I will say to any man or woman in my line of work, if you are a man with a manly feeling, do just what Billy McClain says, stay in God’s country. I am disliked by some of them because I am not that show your teeth and scratch your head kind. I do not say stay away. I only tell you the conditions in the Southern States in part.39
After finally getting free from theatrical peonage in Birmingham, Seals and Fisher spent the final weeks of 1911 in New York and Philadelphia.40 During the first week of 1912, they opened at the Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis, where they fetched an enthusiastic review from Freeman editor Elwood C. Knox:
Then on came Seals and Fisher, the laugh promoters. Well, everything they did made one laugh; every word they would say would bring a laugh. This act was of a travesty nature. Mr. Seals, as a comedian, is real funny, and Miss Fisher, the dainty, cute little soubrette, a real actress. The act bore the title of “Rehearsing His Part.” This act is one best bet. Mr. Seals’ parody on Jack Johnson was well received. Such acts as the Seals and Fisher kind are what the public wants. So different in every way.41
Emboldened by the support of Elwood Knox, Seals orchestrated an unprecedented promotional blitz in the Freeman. He began by protesting against what he perceived as unfair criticism of southern performers:
Every city and town that I play I hear something about the Southern act and actors. But I ask what act is it that has come out of the South and frosted? … Take those acts in my class, such as May and May, Porter and Porter, Two Sweets, Goodloe and Goodloe, and Floyd and Floyd, and a good many more that I could mention. They did not come up here and get canceled. Then why all this criticism about your own sister and brother performers from the South?
After I had been on the stage six weeks my costumes were criticised and that alone made me get better ones. My make-up was also criticised. That helped me. But I have but one more critic to meet now and that is Sylvester Russell, and when he gets through with me I think I will be ready then for the “big time” or go back home. To my brothers and sisters of the South: I want you to not mind what others say but try and please the public and your manager. Listen! Don’t take all of your sisters’ and brothers’ best stuff and use it in ahead of them, like the Raineys and others are doing me.… I am not original, but enough so to get as far away from my brother performers as my ability will allow. So let my brothers and sisters of the North wait until we fall, frost or prove otherwise. Then jump on us with both feet. One race of people on top of us is enough for the present.42
Indianapolis Freeman, January 13, 1912.
With the “Stage” pages of the Freeman as his forum, Baby Seals established himself as a principal spokesman for the southern performer. He realized the creative potential latent in his southern cultural heritage, and openly defended and identified himself with it. His provocative commentary triggered a patronizing rebuttal from Sylvester Russell:
If Baby F. Seals, an actor whom I have not yet seen, desires a literary outfit he must have it by all means.… Most actors who make their first trip North are green and often incapable both in artistic development, advanced literary equipment and clothes of the right kind to attract in a big city. So they have to get broken in.… The kind of criticism I give them is instructive and won’t hurt them at all so far as getting work is concerned.… Seals’ talk is baby talk.… The assertion that white people are all against us is an ignorant mistake. Our duty is to first demonstrate and show what we are ourselves.43
Seals proceeded to trump the famous critic:
I wish to say that his quoting me as saying that the white people are all against us is an ignorant mistake. I did say that one race of people on top of us was enough for the present. Now, if we were on top, we would not have to be fighting so hard for recognition and equal rights and numerous other things that we are now striving to obtain … and if Mr. Russell thinks that Seals’ talk is baby talk, let him spend about three or four weeks down in the Delta; not that he will find everybody bad, but that he will find some of the grandest white people there that he can find anywhere in the world. But he will also find so many bad ones that he will think there are seven races on top. He may tell me how and what to do with my act, but when it comes to the Southern States and her performers, etc., or speaking of “The Man Farthest Down” (with apologies to Dr. Washington), I think I can give him cards and spades and several aces besides. Out of all that I love, I love best my dear old Southern home.44
Seals and Fisher had arrived in Indianapolis in the dead of winter. Attendance at the Crown Garden was off, but those who braved the bitter cold weather were leaving “well satisfied,” so the management held them over indefinitely. In an unabashed editorial endorsement, couched as an interview, the Freeman noted:
The coming of Mr. Baby F. Seals to the Crown Garden Theater, Indianapolis, Ind., has created much comment here among critics and observers of things theatrical. The reason for so much comment is that Mr. Seals is one of the most representative actors of the day, South or North. His well-known stand for the progressive, original artist has won for him a reputation that is known the country over. Of course, he is from the South, and he sees bright prospects ahead for the performers of that section of the country.…
“Yes sir, the sister and brother performer of the South has no reason to be ashamed of the distinction they have won upon the vaudeville stage,” he exclaimed. “In fact, he has rather a right to be proud of the reputation he has made and is making, for it seems that nearly every act that invades the North generally makes good or soon becomes a headliner.” …
[T]he real importance that we find in Seals is his artistic ability as a writer of songs and sketches and his peculiar tact of studying humorous characters and then developing them and creating them upon the stage. But the best of it is he is ever springing something new. If the variety stage can ever get a few more Baby F. Seals then we feel that colored theaters will have little reason for closing, and managers will smile while the people will ever continue happy.45
Seals and Fisher were wrapping up the fourth week of their engagement at the Crown Garden when a reviewer described their latest production:
One of the cleverest twenty-minute sketches ever seen here in vaudeville is that which Baby F. Seals and Baby Fisher are appearing in this week … it has to do with a $10,000 race horse named “Josephine,” whom the wife believes to be a woman whom her husband is infatuated with. Despite that her husband overhears the wife rehearsing some passionate lines concerning a man named Horace in a play in which she is to appear the following night. They get much exciting comedy out of their lines before they come to an understanding. Both of them are strong in their stage business, but suffer the least bit in their pronounciation [sic] of words.46
Samples of the cartoon strip “Baby F. Seals In Search Of Fame,” which was serialized in February 3 through March 16, 1912, editions of the Freeman.
Seals and Fisher’s eight-week run at the Crown Garden Theater “broke the record for hold-overs.… The farewell set was a stunner. They are in Chicago this week, at the Monogram.”47 Throughout their long Crown Garden engagement Seals saturated the Freeman with self-promoting cartoons and treatises on the profession, not to mention the newspaper’s own laudatory reviews and editorials. With the wind of so much publicity at their backs, Seals and Fisher struck Chicago with a force that even Sylvester Russell had to acknowledge:
The Monogram was crowded at the first performance on last Monday night to witness Baby F. Seals and his wife, Baby Floyd Fisher. Mr. Seals is one of the few actors from the south whom we can dismiss with our blessing because he made good. This boy, who hails from Mobile, Ala., has plenty of nerve to help him out. As a comedian he deals in droll oddities of the old-fashioned school that can be modernized. The Jack Johnson overture, which plays too late after the siege of Reno, was good, and his work as an actor is an assurance that he will be a growing success. His wife has a nice personality and is clever.48
After one week at the Monogram, Seals and Fisher jumped directly into mainstream vaudeville at Chicago’s Virginia Theater, where “Mr. Seals put on an act to suit white audiences, which won favor.”49 In a letter published April 6, 1912, Seals commented on their recent exploits:
We opened in Chicago February 26th, at the Monogram and found Mr. Klein a prince, but being spoiled by hamfats, to whom this gentleman lends a helping hand, and in return he gets a lemon. It was very hard for me to convince him that I was a little different from the rest. Since that time we have played nothing but white houses on the Frank Q. Dayel [sic, Doyle] time.… Must say, my advertising through the Freeman is the cause of it all. There is not a manager or booking agent in Chicago that doesn’t know Seals and Fisher or has read of them.… While here I have had one of my best songs published by the Dean Music Publishing Co. The title of the song is “I’ll Take The U.S.A. For Mine.” It’s a hot one. Baby Floyd Fisher, in her new jewel costume, is cleaning up.50
Seals and Fisher returned to black vaudeville as a headline act at the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati: “While the patrons have read of the work of this team regularly through the theatrical columns of The Freeman, there was still some doubts as to the ability of the pair to please this very critical bunch; but facts are facts, and it is the box office that tells the story. And that’s a-plenty.’”51 In another bright moment of Freeman publicity, humor columnist Frank Hendon wrote about Seals’s parody of the popular song “Stop Kicking My Dog Around,” familiarly known as the “Dog Song”:
Among the latest frigid discoveries are the South Pole and the dawg song. Baby F. Seals has a parody on the dawg song. It goes like this:
“All up here on the Northern grounds
Folks keep knocking the Southern towns,
Makes no difference if they is way down,
Dey gotta quit knocking the Southern towns.”
And they say Seals is to tour the country singing that dawg dope. Seals should be careful about his songs, but as to touring the country, he auto, because he is from Mobile.52
The Freeman of April 27, 1912, featured a cartoon of “Seals & Fisher Playing Before White Audiences,” along with a letter from Seals discussing some of his favorite theater managers. There was also a report from the Olio Theater in Louisville, which seems to portend the soon-to-be-published opus, “Baby Seals Blues”: “Baby Seals and Baby Fisher are with us again, and are much improved and delightfully entertaining. They are living up to their reputation of the last few months. Seals features ‘Blues.’”53
Late in April, Seals and Fisher went to Nashville and remained there for no less than three months, filling engagements at the Twelfth Avenue Theater, Majestic Theater, and South Street Theater. At the Twelfth Avenue Theater, “The seating capacity is 1,400 and the house was packed to the side walls.”54 A subsequent correspondence detailed:
For the third week Seals and Fisher have played to packed houses nightly.… The title of the act is “The Eight Musical Seals,” using 4 pianos and 8 musicians on the stage at one time and a chorus of 14 people. Guitar and mandolin, piano solo, Mary Bradford and Prof. Ed. Davis. That bearcat of Nashville, Mattie Ford, singing “Do It The Right Way;” James (Frosty) Moore, the old minstrel head, doing the “wench,” keeps them screaming.… A new hair-raising act, produced by Baby Seals, was presented this week by manager L. W. Wastell, at a cost of $98.00, the highest priced act ever put on in stock in the Southern States. But he says he can give performers $16 to $20 a week, and whatever the cost is, he will have them, and good shows.55
Later, an ad announced that Seals had taken charge of Nashville’s black-owned Majestic Theater: “Leroy White, Bonnie Belle Thomas, Zenobia Jefferson, Viola McCoy wire for tickets at once. Other performers wishing from four to six weeks, write or wire. Will send tickets to those I know.”56 In July 1912 Seals and Fisher participated in the grand opening of Nashville’s new South Street Theater.57 They were not heard from again until September, when they closed out a date at the Booker T. Washington Airdome in St. Louis.58 That same month they appeared at the Star Theater in Kansas City, on a bill with String Beans and Sweetie May.59
Early in October 1912, Seals and Fisher returned to the Crown Garden Theater. Elwood Knox spread the news:
Baby F. Seals and Baby Fisher—Author, producer, manager, song writer and comedian, returned to us with his cute little wife, who is one of the best soubrets in the country. Mr. Seals offers all new material in songs, jokes and sayings. The song he is singing is one big hit. The title of it is “Sing Them Blues.” This song is not the “Blues” one hears so much of, but is of a clever nature. Mr. Seals has published it, and it is being sold at each performance. Miss Fisher also sings one of Mr. Seals’ original songs entitled “If I Do, Don’t Let It Get Out.” This is also a hit, and is published, like-wise. Seals and Fisher please here all the time in a clean and clever way.60
“Sing Them Blues” was published under the title “Baby Seals Blues.”61 A frontrunner of the blues publishing explosion of 1912, it is arguably the earliest known commercial sheet music publication of a vocal blues. The person Seals got to arrange it for publication was Artie Matthews, whom Jelly Roll Morton recalled as “the best reader in the bunch” of St. Louis–based ragtime pianists.62 An important composer in his own right, Matthews also arranged Seals’s follow-up hit, “Well If I Do, Don’t You Let It Get Out.”
“Baby Seals Blues” was ingeniously constructed to give the effect of being loosely extemporized:
Honey baby mamma do she double do love you.
Love you babe, don’t care what you do,
Oh sing em, sing em, sing them blues,
’Cause they cert’ly sound good to me.
I’ve been in love these last three weeks
And it cert’ly is a misery.
There ain’t but one thing I wish was right,
I wish my honey babe was here tonight.
…
Oh sing em, sing em, sing them blues,
’Cause they cert’ly sound good to me.
Seals and Fisher sold copies of “Baby Seals Blues” and “If I Do Don’t You Let It Get Out” from the stage at the Crown Garden, and struck an enterprising arrangement with Elwood Knox to use the Freeman as a base for mail-order distribution.63 A provocative ad invited dealers to “write for special terms. Single copies 15 cents. Address E. C. Knox, care The Freeman.” Columnist Frank Hendon was prompted to remark, “O-O-O-O-e! Did you see Baby Seals on the second theatrical page singing ‘Dem Blues?’ Wasn’t he full of note? You should hear the Crown [Garden] Orchestra play that dark hued melody.”64
Apparently, the ad was effective. Three weeks after its initial appearance, word came from John Eason’s Annex Band with Yankee Robinson’s Circus: “Mr. Frank Terry … has just finished a band arrangement of Baby Seals’ ‘Blues,’ and is making a daily hit with it.”65 Other road show bands followed suit. With O’Brien’s Famous Georgia Minstrels during the summer of 1914: “Prof. Geo. W. Ayers and his famous 18-piece band is featuring the Baby Seals Blues in concert.”66
“Baby Seals Blues” found special favor with fellow southern vaudevillians. In January 1913 “Daddy Jenkins and Little Creole Pet” were at the Elite Theater in Selma, Alabama, with their accompanist, Jelly Roll Morton: “Little Pet takes the house when she sings ‘Please Don’t Shake Me Papa, While I’m Gone’ and ‘Baby Seals Blues.’”67 A few months later, at the New Lincoln Theater in Galveston, there was a “hailstorm of money caused by Hapel Edwards and Vivian Wright, putting on one of their clever singing, dancing and talking acts, featuring Baby Seals’ ‘Blues.’”68 Other southern vaudevillians who featured “Baby Seals Blues” in 1913 include future recording artists Charles Anderson, Edna Benbow (Hicks), and Laura Smith.69
Despite its enormous popularity and influence, there are few “complete” recorded versions of “Baby Seals Blues,” none at all under its original title. In 1923 Charles Anderson recorded it as “Sing ‘Em Blues,” accompanied by Eddie Heywood. That same year Ida Cox recorded it as “Mama Doo Shee Blues,” accompanied by Lovie Austin and Her Blues Serenaders. And in 1939 female jazz crooner Teddy Grace recorded “Mama Doo-Shee,” backed by an instrumental quintet featuring Billy Kyle and O’Neil Spencer.70 However, signature phrases from the song were “sampled” on many recordings by vaudeville performers and country blues singers alike. The whimsical “mama double do love you” refrain appears in Ethel Finnie’s recording of “Don’t You Quit Me Daddy” from 1923; Sara Martin’s “Don’t You Quit Me Daddy” from 1924; Ida Cox’s “Mister Man—Pt. 2,” 1925; Peg Leg Howell’s “Fo’ Day Blues,” 1926; Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Long Lonesome Blues,” 1926; Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Mumsy Mumsy Blues,” 1926; Hound Head Henry’s “Hound Head Blues,” 1928; Alura Mack’s “Old Fashioned Blues,” 1929; Joe Calicott’s “Traveling Mama Blues,” 1930; Mississippi Moaners’ “It’s Cold In China Blues,” 1935; Jesse Thomas’s “D Double Due Love You,” 1948, and, perhaps for the last time, Memphis Slim’s “The Come Back,” from 1953.71
Bessie Smith heard Baby Seals sing his “Blues” in January 1913, and her 1927 recording “Preachin’ the Blues” contains another reverberation of the lyrics—the hallmark clarion call to “Sing ’em, sing ’em, sing ’em blues.”72 This phrase was commonly referenced by both players and press; it appeared repeatedly as a column heading for blues news and in advertisements for blues records.
January 1913 Seals and Fisher played the Savoy Theater in Memphis, Baby Fisher’s home town: “This is Seals and Fisher’s first appearance in Memphis, and they have already proven to be a box office attraction. They were a decided hit.”73 They were surrounded by an exceptionally good bill at the Savoy: the Too Sweets, blues singer Helen Bumbray, Tommy Parker, and the momentous team of Buzzin’ Burton and Bessie Smith.
Detail from a Paramount ad for “Mama Doo Shee Blues,” Chicago Defender, February 9, 1924.
From Memphis, Seals and Fisher “had a hog-killing time on the L. D. Joel circuit” from Atlanta to Jacksonville, where a Globe Theater correspondent quipped: “Now the boys are beside themselves, and just because Baby Seals and Fisher give them the blues, and then tells them not to let it get out. What!”74 They settled in for a long run at the Globe: “Seals and Fisher, booked for two weeks, have been here seven weeks. For five weeks he has been manager and director of amusements … if he keeps it up he will break the record of Lew Kenner, who held the stage for twenty some weeks.”75
In June 1913 Seals and Fisher opened at the Pike Theater in Mobile, where Seals was welcomed with open arms: “After fourteen weeks of rapid firing in Jacksonville, Fla. Seals and Fisher entered the gates of his home town for the first time since he has been in vaudeville and oh what a welcome. His arm is sore from shaking hands, his neck is stiff from bowing, his lips are swollen from kissing—um um. But he doesn’t stay out late from his little wife. He goes in early every morning.”76 Seals and Fisher extended their Mobile homecoming by relocating from the Pike to another local vaudeville house, the Gayety.77
Following their stay in Mobile, Seals and Fisher filled additional dates in Deep South theaters. On August 4 they surfaced in Birmingham, and Seals half-jokingly marked the date as his “Return To America”:
After being tied for two months between a cotton patch in front, and a tater patch bringing up the rear, in the jungles of Mississippi and lower Alabama, these renowned fun makers sail for the U.S.A., August 3rd, and open the Grand Theater, Birmingham, August 4th, for one week. Savoy Theater, Chattanooga, Aug. 11. Oh, we will go back about 1925 to take Christmas. We have a new act entitled “Out Of The Jungles, or What Happened To Him? Did He Get Out Alive?” See the act.78
Chicago Defender, March 7, 1925.
Seals and Fisher did make it out alive, this time. At the end of August 1913 they were on a bill at the Olio Theater in Louisville: “They open with ‘You Are My Baby’ … and close the show with ‘Pussy Cat Rag.’”79 In September they appeared in Winchester, Kentucky: “This team is held over for another week. The beauty of this act is that Seals and Fisher use only one song that is not their own. This week they are featuring the song hits, ‘Chocolate Baby,’ ‘I’ve Got the Blues So Bad,’ [and] ‘Goodbye, I’m Gone,’ re-arranged by the E. B. Dudley Song Bureau, Louisville, Ky. Those are the late ones not out yet.”80
In October Seals reflected on their recent exploits:
We settled down to real vaudeville work this season in Louisville.… We came across one Senator Bell, who met us with a handful of money.… Senator Bell should be in the White House advocating the Negro vaudeville.
“Wanted in Der Germany,” Indianapolis Freeman, February 28, 1914. Other cartoons in this series depicted Seals and Fisher “Enroute to Africa” and “in London”; but the team never did travel abroad.
Then we rolled into Cincinnati Pekin Theater where we found Ollie Dempsey, who is rightly called the prince of good fellows. As soon as I hit the theater, “Bang,” another roll of money, and with a smile.…
Then we opened on S. H. Dudley’s Eastern time for eight weeks. The first house was the Ogden Theater, Cleveland, and if there ever was a princess Miss Ogden is that one. A grand reception when we entered and another bunch of dust. After the show—um-um.
We are now in Pittsburgh with our friend, A. Minsky. From the name you would think he was a Jew, but he’s a white man, every bit of him.
While in Cincinnati I visited Dad Henderson’s Pekin Cafe. Dad has something he calls Old Black Cow—and the milk that cow does give! O-o-o-o!”81
Seals and Fisher spent the next two months on S. H. Dudley’s East Coast circuit, filling dates from Philadelphia to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and as far west as Roanoke, Virginia.82 In Washington, D.C., they closed “in a blaze of glory, featuring ‘Them Blues,’ and also singing two songs at once.”83 At the end of the year columnist Will Lewis appraised: “Baby Seals and his Blues are nearly famous. His Blues had quite a run.”84 And when Seals was inducted into the Order of Elks at Richmond, Virginia, the following spring, a reporter identified him as the “Famous Writer of ‘Blues.’”85 Shortly thereafter, Seals and Fisher played the Lincoln Theater in Harlem: “After working themselves through the west and south, they are now trying to repeat the same in New York, making themselves favorites singing ‘Baby Seals Blues.’”86
Early in 1915 Seals and Fisher filled three or four weeks at the Iroquois Theater in New Orleans.87 Toward the end of their run at the Iroquois, Baby Floyd Fisher was spotted among the entertainers at the notorious Poodle Dog Cabaret.88 Several weeks later, Baby Seals opened at the Lincoln Theater in Galveston, without Baby Fisher. A local reporter noted:
Baby F. Seals, the famous song writer, comedian and manager, opened here March 4th (single) to a house that was packed and jammed to the sidewalk. There was some disappointment when it was announced that little Baby Floyd would appear later in the week, but as Seals hit the stage there was an uproar and believe us, he did bring some single. He is nothing but laugh. He was given the management at once and we have not had such shows since Russell and Owens were here.… Baby Seals wants to hear from a good pick at once. Will send ticket. Oh Seals, who was that half O’Fay at the stage door. Lookout Bub; we see you, Mr. Manager.…
Nothing but receptions and parties await Seals and his bunch after the show each night.89
Somewhere between the Poodle Dog Cabaret in New Orleans and “that half O’Fay at the stage door” in Galveston, Seals and Fisher parted ways. In May 1915, at the Hippodrome Theater in Galveston, Baby Fisher was “putting it over with her own song, ‘Call Me Mamma.’”90 In 1917 she and Joe Johnson became partners in the Johnson-Fisher Stock Company, playing black vaudeville theaters from Muskogee, Oklahoma, to Jacksonville, Florida.91 Baby Floyd Fisher was still in the business in the fall of 1927, when she appeared in George Stamper’s “Dixie Revue” at the Bamboo Inn in Harlem.92
The “famous writer of blues” also stayed busy, but his time was short. An April 1915 announcement from the Lincoln Theater in Galveston assured that “the well known comedian and composer of ‘Baby Seals’ Blues’” was “drawing great crowds,” and that he was about to publish four new songs.93 In August he reported: “I am working, thank you. Baby Seals, Bunch O’ Follies, Dreamland Theater, San Antonio, Tex.”94 A few months later Seals was at the New Queen Theater in Birmingham, working single, “going ‘forty.’”95 But on February 5, 1916, the Freeman summarily reported:
Indianapolis Freeman, May 23, 1914.
BABY SEALS, PASSED AWAY
A Well Known Performer And Producer Noted for His Baby Seals Blues.
Anniston. Ala.—The many friends in and out of the profession will be grieved to hear that “Baby Seals” died in Anniston, Ala., Dec. 29. Several weeks before his death, he made The New Queen Theater, Blaine [sic], Ala. his headquarters and had won a host of friends here.96
This is a confounding, inglorious eulogy for a performer of Seals’s reputation and accomplishments. The Freeman provided no further details of his untimely demise; no lofty statement from his old friend the editor, Elwood Knox; no retrospective on his career; no additional commentary from players or critics. The manner and circumstances of Baby Seals’s death remains one of the great intractable mysteries of early blues lore.97
Had Baby Seals not died so early, he might have been a contender for the title “Father of the Blues.” Less than a decade after his death, Seals’s southern “brothers and sisters,” using blues and other timber hewn from rural folk culture as their battering ram, had risen from the roughneck little theaters of Houston, Greenwood, Mobile, and Memphis to the premier African American playhouses of Chicago and New York, and were “riding to fame and fortune with the current popular demand for ‘blues’ disc recordings.”98 Signature elements of “Baby Seals Blues” continued to reverberate, but Seals himself was all but forgotten. Tim Owsley paid him a belated tribute in 1926:
The young showmen of the present day never knew Baby Seals and perhaps never heard of him. Yet in his day he did his bit to blaze the trail on which they travel now. The late Baby Seals wrote the words and music and published the first blues song that caught the music-loving public’s ear. It was the kind of blues that is creating so many record stars nowadays. Baby Seals died without gaining a fortune or becoming popular, but his original idea lived and still lives.99
Charles Anderson
When “Baby Seals Blues” originally appeared on the market in 1912, a Freeman reporter made a point to distinguish it from the generic run of blues songs: “not the ‘Blues’ one hears so much of, but is of a clever nature.”100 At this point in time, cleverness and development were not seen as a break with tradition, but a means of honoring musical traditions and molding them into a successful commodity. The formalization of folkloric matter reflected the urge to elevate the African American musical and cultural heritage, artistically, intellectually, and commercially.
Indianapolis Freeman, October 2, 1915.
“Baby Seals Blues” was the first blues song to appear in the stage repertoire of tenor-yodeler Charles Anderson, who performed it at the Booker T. Washington Airdome in St. Louis in August 1913. Ten years later, when Anderson began his OKeh label recording career, it was the first song he recorded.101 Anderson also had the distinction of introducing Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” in vaudeville, performing it at the Monogram Theater in Chicago on a bill with String Beans in October 1914.102 At that time, Handy’s masterful blues composition had only been on the market for about a month.103 When Anderson sang it at the Monogram again the following year, Sylvester Russell called the performance “Southern perfection that others can’t approach.”104 Anderson was the type of southern singer Russell could appreciate: “His voice is a natural organ of alto material, which ranges high and pure and loud in altissimo, and he possesses both temperament and magnetism. As a lullaby gag-love singer, and especially as a yodeler, he probably has no equal, and his protean character work is convincing. In fact he is a wonder in a new sphere of vocal discovery.”105
After he played a white theater in Indianapolis, a columnist remarked: “Anderson calls the blues, a phase of ragtime, grand opera. If it were grand opera, then he were its Caruso. Perhaps he leads the procession in that kind of singing. Last Saturday night he put the house in motion like a boat at sea, when he put over his own blues creation.”106
The notion that the blues was “colored folks opera” may have originated as a joke, but it represents a logical extension of Dvořák’s famous declaration that a great American classical music could be built on the foundation of African American folk music. Something of this sensibility is reflected in the carefully crafted blues compositions of W. C. Handy, especially “St. Louis Blues.” However, Handy mindfully urged that his music be “Not viewed by what Liszet [sic] did or Wagner did, but by what they would have done if they had been American Negroes, living in the times in which we live and suffer.”107
Charles Anderson’s folk-operatic tenor is a vivid manifestation of “colored folks opera,” and the phrase was repeatedly invoked in reference to his blues interpretations, but not to his exclusively. Wooden’s Bon Tons allowed that “Miss Ethalene Jordan … deserves much credit for her rendition of popular and classy numbers and remember, she sings the colored folks opera too (The Blues).”108 Salem Tutt Whitney’s Smart Set Company reported in 1917 that “‘The Weary Blues,’ sung by Moana [Juanita Stinnette] and others, passed right on to opera—regular opera—having the touch of one of Wagner’s compositions. It was the very height of blues singing.”109 And Perry Bradford was deemed “successful in his pianologue … doing what he calls the colored folks opera.”110 “Colored folks opera” also manifested itself in regally gowned “Queens of the Blues” like Madame Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, with their vernacular reorientation of the turn-of-the-century “Black Patti” symbolism.
Like Kid Love, Baby Seals, and Butler May, Charles Anderson was Alabama born, probably in the historic black college town of Snow Hill. He was still a child when he moved to Birmingham with his parents.111 Anderson was recognized as a “clever young rising comedian” as early as 1909, when he performed an “old woman monologue” at the Lyric Theater in Memphis.112 At Memphis’s Royal Theater the following year, Anderson was “cleaning up with those illustrated songs,” despite “suffering from his new $100 cork leg.”113
Over the next two years, Anderson began to establish a national reputation. In 1911 he appeared in Mississippi and Alabama on bills with teenaged Bessie Smith.114 He made his northern debut at the Monogram Theater in August 1912.115 The following week, at the New Crown Garden in Indianapolis, Anderson was judged a “number one character comedian.”116 On the S. H. Dudley theater circuit later that fall, he was “still making high C.”117
By the summer of 1913, Anderson had perfected his trademark concoction of blues, yodels, and impersonations. In August he received an illustrative review from a reporter at the Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis:
The Male Mockingbird, Charles Anderson, the man with the golden voice, is some character singer, imitator, and impersonator. As an imitator, Anderson has the best on the market skinned, his violin imitation intermezzo went big, and was one of the best imitations of a musical instrument heard in this neck of the woods for many moons. “Sleep Baby Sleep” a lullaby sung in costume of an old nurse, went big. The yodeling in this song was excellent. “Baby Seals Blues,” as rendered by Anderson, was worth going to hear. After a quick change, Anderson reappeared as the polished gentleman and sang “When the Cuckoo Sings,” instantly winning the hearts of the audience with his perfect yodeling, causing said audience to cheer like mad for more.118
Anderson reprised his blues and yodeling act in Indianapolis the following month, in front of a perceptive critic:
Charles Anderson does a splendid colored mammy. Everyone likes this creation of his. This kind of portrayal of character does not give offense. This mammy is just a mammy; not particularly old; not particularly ugly and lame, as some are. She does things that are amusing and witty, as many real mammies do.
She gets the blues. Then she puts on Baby Seals’ well-known song, making a tremendous hit. The part including the song makes for the best character of the kind seen here. When responding to encore, Anderson appears in full dress suit.
As a yodler, he is among the best in the country. Perhaps none will ever equal the great Fritz K. Emmett, but he greatly reminds one of that eminent yodler of years ago. He sang one of Emmett’s songs. He won applause by holding a note sixty seconds, a difficult defeat [sic] and pleasing enough because accompanied by a pretty waltz movement by the orchestra.119
Before the close of 1913 Anderson made a brief foray into white vaudeville, appearing at theaters in Canada and northern Michigan. Dropping down to the Unique Theater in Detroit, he was “well received in his song ‘The Blues,’ and his old woman’s makeup is a riot.”120 The New Year found him working on S. H. Dudley’s time.
Blues eventually became a more prominent part of Anderson’s varietal song repertoire. At the Crown Garden in Indianapolis in 1915, he “gave a very fine rendition of the blues—‘St. Louis Blues’ and ‘The Weary Blues.’” The latter may have been Coleman L. Minor’s “Weary Way Blues.”121 In August 1916, “the well-known yodler and blues singer” organized his own troupe, the “Indianapolis Follies.”122 A review described: “Miss Edna Pervine and Charles Anderson with the ‘Blues’ are screaming them each night.… Mr. Otis Huntley, the black-face comedian, sings the song ‘If You Got a Little Bit Hang On to It Because it’s Hard to Find a Little Bit More.’ Then came … Mr. John Berry, the greatest Colored female impersonator of today.”123 By early November Anderson was back down South, working single.124
At the Washington Theater, Indianapolis, in February 1917 a reviewer judged: “As a yodeler he is very well known, being, perhaps, the best colored performer in this line of work. His opera, the blues, wins as usual.”125 By April he was “going big” at the Princess Theater in Sirmia, Ontario Province, Canada, “singing ‘Baby Seal’s Blues.’”126 When Anderson returned to the Monogram in November 1917, Russell proclaimed him a “Singing Star”: His “falsetto soprano invisible, before entering, was a novel deception. His violin imitation and his ‘Blues’ songs which now excel the renditions of other singers made a hit.”127 At the Crescent Theater in Pittsburgh in February 1918, “the ‘Yodeler Blues’ singer” was “a scream from start to finish. His act is a winner and what you call a show stopper. His ‘Jelly Roll Blues’ sung in his own way, just clocked the show.”128
Anderson was one of only a handful of male vaudeville blues pioneers who made commercial sound recordings. His “Sing ’Em Blues” documents a finely controlled high tenor voice, richly nuanced with blues inflection. Nevertheless, his records have not served to enhance his reputation among modern blues aficionados, who have tended to dismiss him as a curiosity, not a real blues singer. The presence of straightforward ballad yodels in Anderson’s recorded repertoire, the decidedly feminine quality of his ultra-high tenor voice, and his perfect diction are stylistic aspects that conflict with modern tastes and stereotypes. But these elements do not place him outside the black vernacular music mainstream. Anderson’s “Blues Caruso” image was an integral part of the cultural lineage that preceded the fruition of the country blues. His exceptional vocal qualities made him a great favorite with black vaudeville audiences.
Johnnie Woods and Little Henry
The collected documentation of the earliest chapter in blues history argues forcefully for a more broad-minded concept of the nature of the blues. Consider, for example, the earliest known document of blues singing on a public stage, which has it coming from the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy!129 Like blackface makeup, ventriloquism afforded a certain distance, a refractive channel, through which vernacular culture was acceptably conducted from the street to the stage.
Black ventriloquists were at work in the South long before the advent of blues singing.130 Among several black ventriloquists active during the early 1900s, John W. F. “Johnnie” Woods leapt into blues history when he brought a wooden-headed dummy named Little Henry to life as a drunken-hearted, blues-singing vagabond. Woods was probably born in Memphis around 1888.131 By the fall of 1908, he was touring with the Plant Juice Medicine Company, “making a great hit doing female impersonations and his ventriloquist act.”132 Also on the roster were C. C. Cook, “the world’s champion banjo player,” and Lehman Smith, “the man who made the alligator ‘laf.’”
In the spring of 1909 Woods and Cook closed with the Plant Juice Medicine Company and announced that they “will work concert halls, Woods doing ventriloquist, Punch and Judy, singing and dancing; Cook juggling his banjo and doing stump speeches and his sensational clog dance.”133 Woods filled an engagement at Simpkins’ Airdome in Georgetown, South Carolina, that spring, “working to mostly white people.… Woods is doing ventriloquist, and his little boy is singing ‘Yongo Head,’ ‘Friend of Mine,’ and ‘I’ll Stay Right Here.’”134 As summer came on, he reconnected with the Plant Juice Medicine Company in Oklahoma:135 “The star performer of these comedians is John W. F. Woods, of Memphis, Tenn.… Muskogee will long remember ‘Little Henry’ and his little wife ‘Georgia,’ the black dummies who, under the dexterity of his gifted art, hold animated conversation with each other and crack many funny jokes.”136 Woods donned blackface and sang “That’s a Plenty,” and his “little wooden-headed boy” sang Chris Smith’s late sheet music hit, “Trans-mag-ni-fi-can-bam-dam-u-ality.”137
Returning to vaudeville that fall, Woods narrowed his focus to the character of Little Henry. In the spring of 1910, at the Airdome Theater in Jacksonville, he introduced a new “drunken act” that marked the beginning of Little Henry’s blues-singing career: “This is the second week of Prof. Woods, the ventriloquist, with his little doll Henry. This week he set the Airdome wild by making little Henry drunk. Did you ever see a ventriloquist’s figure get intoxicated? Well, it’s rich; it’s great; and Prof. Woods knows how to handle his figure. He uses the ‘blues’ for little Henry in this drunken act.”138
In 1911 Johnnie Woods and Little Henry made their final tour with the Plant Juice Medicine Company.139 That fall they invaded the Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis, where Woods was recognized as “a sure enough ventriloquist.… He makes ‘Henry,’ his doll do a line of comedy that the biggest of the comedians would not be ashamed of.… He is also an originator and of course a good thinker. He studies the public and consequently has succeeded greatly because he gave the public what was wanted.”140 Woods gave the African American vaudeville theater-going public confrontational humor and blues singing. He paused at the end of the year to reflect on his career to date:
I have been pressed by many theater-goers and newspaper writers to write or explain something of how I came to be a ventriloquist. Now, really, I have been studying and wondering the same thing, for when I first noticed that I was possessed with this peculiar power I did not know what it meant, and it was some years later that I saw a Punch and Judy show in a church. I set about at once and produced a similar attraction, and it was not until the colored picture houses began to spring up through the South that I began to earn any money for my work—eight dollars a week, which looked like a mountain to me for ten minutes’ work each night. And when I was landed by a medicine show I thought then I had reached the limit, but later, however, I came in contact with Bob Russell, Marion Brooks and Tim Owsley, who were playing through the South with their stock company, and with a short association with them I have learned that I haven’t begun.141
By this time Woods was married to Essie Whitman of the famous Whitman Sisters. In January 1912 they played a date together at Gibson’s Auditorium in Philadelphia: “Prof. Woods is simply screaming the house with Little Henry, his doll. His wife and her two picks are also taking the house by storm.”142 Woods’s marriage to Essie Whitman did not last long; neither did his marriage to actress Margie Lorraine, who had him arrested at the Monogram Theater in 1914 in connection with divorce proceedings.143 But his partnership with Little Henry sailed right along.
On August 1, 1912, Johnnie Woods and Little Henry helped inaugurate the Rex Theater in Durham, North Carolina, in company with Tom Young and Clara Smith.144 Later that fall, at the New Circle Theater in Philadelphia, a reviewer noted:
Johnnie Woods, the loudest singing and talking ventriloquist I have ever heard, was the largest success ever booked here. While it is a common occurrence for pleasing acts to stop the show, never before has it been necessary after the regular encores and bows and extra overture by the orchestra to have to repeat the same act before anyone else can go on. This was the case with Woods, who has a peculiar little “squeak,” and his manipulation of the dummy, Little Henry, is simply wonderful. Little Henry is an ignorant vagabond, drifting aimlessly through the world, very fond of liquor, and will stop at nothing to get it. He is not slow in telling how he is abused, and winds up with, ‘Yeah! Hoo! I’ve got the blues.’”145
Back at the New Crown Garden in the spring of 1913, Woods and Little Henry were “at their best.… Their songs, parody on ‘By Myself, Nobody But Me Alone’ and ‘Don’t Get It in Your Head That You Ain’t Aunt Dinah’s Child,’ are great.”146 A few weeks later, at the Monogram, Sylvester Russell could “safely say that as a ventriloquist he takes foremost rank of any artist in his line of his own race.”147
Turning southward, Johnnie Woods and Little Henry filled dates in Memphis, Savannah, Jacksonville, and Atlanta before bobbing up again at the Monogram in July, singing “Chickens in Heaven.”148 At their next stop, the Booker Washington Theater in St. Louis, “the song, ‘Everybody’s Picking on Me,’ as sung by Johnny and ‘Little Henry,’ had the management in a quandary as to whether to call the ambulance or the morgue wagon, as it seemed the audience had gone demented with laughter. ‘The Blues,’ as sung by ‘Little Henry,’ is great, calling forth a signal of distress from the audience that if more was coming Mr. Turpin would be called upon to answer for the results.”149 Back at the Monogram the following week, Johnnie Woods “held the audience spell bound” singing “Aunt Dinah’s Child” and “Good Morning Judge.”150
1913 brought two “new aspirants for ventriloquism fame” into African American vaudeville: Verner Massey and Sam Evans. When Woods accused Massey of stealing material from him, Massey pushed back smartly: “You just go ahead and shoot the liquor to little Henry. I don’t allow Tommy to drink at all.… No, John, I haven’t heard my boy ‘Tommy’ use anything your boy ‘Henry’ says or does, and if he does, I’ll wear him out.”151 Toward the end of the year, Sam Evans took his first bow at the Crown Garden Theater: “Two other ventriloquists have appeared at this house previous to Evans’ engagement. Perhaps the best known is Johnny Woods, whose work Evans greatly resembles. He has that same droll humor on the part of the doll.… They do a well-known parody on All Night Long.’”152
At the close of 1913, Freeman critic Will Lewis recalled having “met the following ventriloquists: John W. Cooper, Johnny Woods, Sam Evans and Verner Massey.… I may say, in short, that they were all good, and all different. Johnny Woods was the most humorous. Cooper, perhaps, showed the greatest ability, dealing with a number of dolls at one time. Sam Evans kept his lips quieter. Massey threw his voice furthest … Each excels in his own feature.”153
Johnnie Woods and Little Henry kicked off the year 1914 on the mainstream Loew’s Theater Circuit.154 They were back on “colored time” by July, when they ducked into the New Monogram.155 At the New Crown Garden in August a reviewer declared: “Little Henry does the best blues in the business—those low down, whiskey blues.”156 Early in 1915 they played Chicago’s mainstream Empress Theater and made “a hit in the most prejudiced part of the city.”157
In his “Seen and Heard While Passing” column of July 17, 1915, Salem Tutt Whitney disclosed: “Henry has something on Johnny and Johnny knows it; that is the reason Johnny takes advantage of Henry’s diminutive size and smacks him on the mouth in front of the audience, just because Henry asks for his share of the money he placed with the syndicate, said syndicate being comprised in Johnny. But Henry gets Johnny’s goat when he sings: ‘I’m going to get a gun, hide behind a tree, and shoot every syndicate that takes money from me.’”
Early in 1917, at the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, Woods again breathed life into Little Henry:
His association with his doll is so splendidly conceived that it seems to take on life. One enters into the spirit of what he does at time[s], forgetting that it is a piece of wood rigged up in “rags.” We say rags, but Johnny keeps his partner up to date, patent leather shoes with white tops and the rest of it in keeping with an up-to-date gent. His work all through was received with rapt attention, laughter and hearty applause. Henry’s closing song, “I Believe I’m On My Last Go Round,” featured by Woods, is pathetic, touching, giving wonderful realism to the work.158
Johnnie Woods and Little Henry continued to work into the 1920s, dividing their time between black traveling shows, white vaudeville theaters, and T.O.B.A. outlets. In the spring of 1928, Woods fell seriously ill; and on July 23, at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, Johnnie Woods and Little Henry took their final curtain call:
Authentic telegraph reports from New York City chronicle the death of Johnny Woods, the famous ventriloquist, who dropped dead after an attack of acute indigestion, Monday, July 23, directly after the performance at Lafayette Theater. The body was shipped to his home in St. Louis by his father, who had left New York immediately. His son, Tommy Woods, the dancer, left Chicago for St. Louis to attend the funeral. Johnny Woods made his early appearance on the stage with Lehman Smith in Memphis, Tenn. His medicine show practice made him perhaps the most perfect ventriloquist ever known. He was also an actor, comedian and dancer of exceptional merit. He was a member of the original Georgia Minstrels for several seasons and in vaudeville was one of the strongest single drawing cards on the T.O.B.A. circuit. His performance with Little Henry, his black art image, is well known to the public, and was the most entertaining and original in the history of ventriloquism.… Floral offerings from friends and professionals all over the country were sent to his funeral.159
According to Salem Tutt Whitney, “Loving friends laid Johnny upon his last bed and placed ‘Little Henry’ at his side. Together they journeyed to St. Louis, there to make their last earthly appearance.”160
Willie Too Sweet
By the early 1910s, impressive variations on the blues were cropping up across the Southeast. Willie and Lulu Too Sweet, Will and Gertrude Rainey, Baby Seals and Baby Floyd Fisher, Bessie Smith, Laura Smith, and others were charting a new course in American entertainment, but strictly within the confines of southern vaudeville. For some time this accelerated activity, though widely reported in the Freeman, remained out of range of northern theatergoers. When String Beans broke through the barrier in the summer of 1911, southern acts began streaming north. Midwestern theater audiences were anxious to check out the rest of the southern vaudeville universe.
The highly accomplished, multi-talented comedy team of Willie and Lula Too Sweet were the pride of early Memphis vaudeville. They specialized in skits that cast them in the roles of children: “Willie Too Sweet is perhaps the best kid lover on the stage. He has thrown together the best of his observations of boys, giving a composite boy that everybody knows something about.”161 His partner Lula (or Lulu) was the personification of the “baby soubrette,” all childhood innocence one moment, then shamelessly manipulating her audience with double entendre: “When Miss Too Sweet put in her appearance the women folks all over the house would exclaim, ‘O, Ain’t she sweet!’ ‘O, she’s such a dearie!’ These were women mind you. The Lord only knows what the men were saying.”162
The Too Sweets’s “kid” comedy was punctuated by their contrasting physiques: “The lady member of the team is dainty and has a sweet little voice. She looks to weigh about sixty pounds on the stage and Willie looks like Jack Johnson, so it makes their act one of novelty in appearance.”163 To amplify the humor, Willie’s super-sized character was typically victimized by his diminutive playmate: “[Willie] plays the boob, permitting all sorts of pranks to be played on him. He stands for it all.”164 Role reversals occasionally added to the fun: “Mr. Too Sweet in characterizing a woman of the underworld in a humorous way, brings one laugh after another from the audience. Little Miss Lulu Too Sweet in a new character to us, is indeed charming as well as pleasing. Lulu is playing the part of a young man, and she is some male impersonator. Yet I am sorry to say there never was a man that looks as good as Miss Too Sweet, only in a picture book.”165
Indianapolis Freeman, September 27, 1913.
String Beans and Sweetie May’s initial success in Cincinnati had so impressed the theater manager that he “sent notice out to the booking agent for more performers with this class of work.”166 On the last day of July 1911, the Too Sweets crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to play Cincinnati’s Gaither Theater, where a reviewer acknowledged them as “one of the good acts off of the Southern time.… The male member of the team uses cork, just what the people here expect of a comedian, and he sang a couple of parodies on two of our once popular songs that were screams.”167
At the Monogram Theater in Chicago, Sylvester Russell was surprisingly taken by their act: “Billy Sweet, of the two Sweets, who I claim is the best comedian I have seen who hails from the lower south … is not only a naturally clever comedian, but most of his work is legitimate and he has acting qualities of mimicry which he is not aware of, somewhat similar to the late Ernest Hogan. His song, ‘A Fat Gal Am the Best Gal, After All,’ was a literal scream, and if Mr. Sweet continues to be progressive and unaffected he will soon become a headliner and a favorite.”168
Their next show stop was the Lyre Theater in Louisville: “This being their first appearance they were heartily received. They have a very clever act and Mr. Too Sweet proved to be a real comedian. His parodies on Lovey Joe and Some of the [sic] Days was a knockout. Mrs. Too Swet [sic] sang ‘Totaloe Tune’ and made quite an impression on the audience. It seemed as if the audience could not get enough of this act.”169 The Too Sweets went on to make “Lovie Joe” a character in one of their skits, “The Death of Lovie Joe”: “Mr. Too Sweet is particularly droll in his delineation of his part.”170
Six weeks into their debut tour of northern vaudeville, the Too Sweets arrived at the showcase Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis, where reviewers sounded a clarion call:
This team is a new importation from the South and we certainly can say for the people of the South if they have any more “Sweets” hurry them North as fast as the trains can bring them with the assurance that the people of this neck of the woods are anxiously awaiting their coming with the glad hand extended to greet them.…
They are fully entitled to all the good things said of them in advance of their coming. Their act is a clean proposition throughout, without a single line or suggestion of vulgarity and will go in anybody’s house. In the first place, the two Sweets have departed from the timeworn slapstick variety of comedy usually offered by colored teams. They have introduced quite a bit of novelty in their act by way of a new style of dialogue, action and in fact every thing else that goes to make up an act radically different from the rest.… Mr. Sweet scored heaviest, perhaps, in his descriptive song, “Jack Johnson,” in which he went through all the supposed incidents of the Jeffries-Johnson fight. They were falling out of their seats at the conclusion of this number.171
Enough has not been said of Miss Too Sweet, who really does appear too sweet in her acting to be on the stage.… Of course, “Old Man” Too Sweet is there, looking like any other cornfield darkey—direct from field to stage.… In fact, the Too Sweets are ideal.172
When the Too Sweets returned to the Monogram in October 1911, Sylvester Russell found them “more popular than on their last visit. Billy Sweet was there with the goods again and all new and original. His song ‘Nothing New Under the Sun’ was great and the hypnotic dance used as a finale was just the thing.”173 In their second week, however, Russell was somewhat nonplussed by Willie Too Sweet’s southern vernacular style: “Sweet’s new talk and dialogue was clever, but he has taken to neckbone speeches that appeal to colored audiences and sang a neckbone song. But ‘Willie’—I call him Bill—Sweet will do, and his wife, the little fawn, is a little peek-a-boo.”174
Back at the Crown Garden a few weeks later, “A big dual number that went with a dash was ‘My Dream Man.’ Mr. Twosweet’s ‘Neck Bones,’ a comic song of unusual merit as a laugh getter, was also well received. The act was closed with a roaring parody on George M. Cohan’s ‘Yankee Prince’ with Svengali and Trilby finishes that made it very funny.”175
The Too Sweets were special favorites at the Crown Garden, where, in September 1912, Lula sang “her original song, ‘Mamma Don’t Allow No Easy Talking Here,’ and she was forced to take several encores.”176 In Indianapolis one year later, she introduced another original song, and lodged an accusation regarding her earlier hit:
Little Miss Two Sweet is certainly well named, as it concerns her stage appearance and actions. She is a kid, one of those kind that makes you like them. She is rather quiet at most times, but breaks out at the proper time, an art which makes her work very taking. She sings “Mamma Don’t Know Where I Am At” in a very childish voice. The fact that she looks like a child and her pretty airs are what makes for the success of her songs. By the way, Miss Two Sweet has had this song copyrighted to keep it away from the pirates. She says she will prosecute anyone who sings it. Her other song, “Mamma Don’t Allow No Easy Talking,” was stolen from her. Willie Two Sweet writes all the songs they use. They fit their work in fine style. Miss Two Sweet joined in writing the present hit mentioned.177
The accusation concerning “Mama Don’t Allow” may have been directed at fellow Memphian W. C. Handy, who claimed that his 1912 instrumental sheet music hit “Memphis Blues” had been inspired by a topical folksong that was popularized during E. H. Crump’s 1909 Memphis mayoral campaign.178
This advertisement for Willie and Lulu Too Sweet’s original songs and parodies, including “Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Talking Here,” appeared in the September 21, 1912, edition of the Freeman, concurrent with the original sheet music publication of W. C. Handy’s “The Memphis Blues.”
This publication of “I’m So Glad My Mama Don’t Know Where I’m At” carries a copyright date of 1915 (Courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University).
At the end of 1913, Indianapolis-based reporter Will Lewis provided a critical summing up:
The Two Sweets have carved little niches in the hearts of the amusement loving people of this community. Her two songs, “Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Talking Here” and “My Mama Don’t Know Where I Am At,” have added to her fame. The little lady is jealous of her two songs, but she needn’t be. There is but one Miss Two Sweet. Her husband, Willie, wrote the songs, and nice ones they are, but no one can sing them but her. The team makes good because of their fine ability to play children’s roles. Both are good. Miss Two Sweet will not be excelled by any one.179
The Too Sweets continued to ring in new blues songs. Perhaps in the nature of “tit for tat,” they concocted a vocal rendition of W. C. Handy’s 1913 instrumental hit, “Jogo Blues”; which was noted in a report from Macon, Georgia, in the spring of 1916: “The cream of the ‘Merry-Merries’ will be seen at the Douglass this week. The Two Sweets are going big with their opening ‘Jelly Roll Blues.’ Too Sweet himself is an excellent comedian, gaining scores of applause from the audience. His parody on ‘Keep It Up All the Time,’ is indeed good. The closing number, ‘Jogo Blues,’ is a scream.”180
Shortly thereafter, Lula disappeared from view and Willie Too Sweet continued as a single.181 From the summer of 1916 until the fall of 1918, he was the principal comedian with Ed Lee’s Creole Belles Company.182 When he played an independent date at the Monogram Theater in December 1918, Sylvester Russell noted: “Willie Too Sweet … clearly demonstrated that he can give a southern monologue that will go on any stage and make people scream on the big time. I hope he will play the Grand, but his ‘blues’ song is too long or could be omitted as his encore song is better.”183
Too Sweet played an important part in the formative process of vaudeville blues, but he was best known as a creator of humorous song parodies. In 1912 Freeman editor and music critic Elwood Knox opined: “I dare say Mr. Too Sweet could make a living writing parodies alone, as his products are the best, barring none. That’s a good deal to say, but it is true.”184 A Cincinnati correspondent judged Too Sweet’s brand of parody “a little suggestive, but acceptable.”185 An Indianapolis critic noted his use of local color and political satire: “Mr. Sweet’s new song, ‘Nothing New Under the Sun,’ with localized verse, was a big hit. Whilst he has no advance man to get together on this line of stuff for him as does Mr. [Lew] Dockstader and others we might mention, he nevertheless has put together several stanzas of a local political nature that set the house wild with laughter.”186
Too Sweet’s humorous parodies fitted up popular song lyrics for the esoteric appreciation of black vaudeville theater audiences. His reputation only grew over the course of his long stage career; in 1923 and again in 1927, the Chicago Defender crowned him “king of parodies.”187 Parody was endemic to African American minstrelsy and vaudeville; no topic was barred, from the adventures of Booker T. Washington to the sinking of the Titanic. However, the relationship between song parodies and the blues may not be evident.
Howard Odum’s early field studies reveal that the appropriation and manipulation of popular songs was a common folk practice in the South: “the negro … quickly adapts new songs to his own environment. Mention has been made of the negro’s fondness for the new and popular coon-songs; but these songs often lose their original words, and take on words of negro origin.… The song itself often becomes amusing because of its paraphrases.”188 “In any case, the song, when it has become the common distinctive property of the negroes, must be classed with negro folk-songs.”189 The notion of copyright-protected popular songs as “common property” represents a historical intersection of two distinct songwriting cultures.
The justification for Odum’s assertion that, “‘I got mine,’ ‘When she roll dem Two White Eyes,’ Ain’t goin’ be no Rine,’ and many others adapted from the popular ‘coon-songs’ … have become the property of the negroes, in their present rendition, regardless of their sources or usage elsewhere,” may rest on the fact that the creative adaptation of pre-existing song material corresponded with the traditional process of southern folk music construction, or on the distinctive character of the folk-interpretations he observed.190 Some of the adaptations of popular songs which he transcribed contain personalized or topical allusions, including to local judges and sheriffs; one references “my brother-in-law … in Collins’ jail.”191
The parodying of Tin Pan Alley ragtime coon songs by southern blacks was, in effect, an appropriation of an appropriation, or a cultural reclamation. Too Sweet’s parody writing was related to this folk-derived form of song construction, which is intimately associated with the original synthesis of the blues. In this light, Too Sweet, who was described in one 1911 commentary as “looking like any other cornfield darkey—direct from field to stage,” may be seen as an essential link between the “field” and the professional stage.
Tom Young
Thomas B. Young was a versatile journeyman vaudevillian: a blackface comedian adept at “funny talking, singing and dancing,” with a penchant for the blues, which he sang on stage as early as 1910.192 Young apparently did not play an instrument in his stage act. He was described as a “western comedian from St. Louis,” but Georgia was his main stomping ground.193 His professional activity appears to have been confined to a limited geographic radius. Between 1909, when the Freeman first caught sight of him, and 1913, when he disappeared from view, Young was not spotted north of Durham, North Carolina; south of Jacksonville, Florida; or west of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In November 1909 Young took up residence at the Pastime Theater in Athens, Georgia, “cleaning up for all local comedians South,” performing ragtime titles such as “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself, but Leave His Wife Alone,” and “Abraham Lincoln Jones.”194 Playing opposite “up-to-date coon shouters” Evelyn White, Alberta Williams, Alberta Smiley, and Effie Means, under stage manager John H. Williams, with Madam L. Graham at the piano, Young was “right in line with his late hit, ‘Skinney.’”195 A March 1910 report assured, “Tom Young, the Athens favorite, still holds his own and says, ‘Don’t leave me here.’”196
In August 1910 Young was stage manager at the Ivy Theater in Chattanooga, “scoring a hit on account of the droll way in which he sings ‘Grizzly Bear’ and ‘Casey Jones.’”197 By November he was managing the stage at the Dixie Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina. The pianist there was Prof. Walter Slade, “the blind wonder.” A noteworthy correspondence from the Dixie Theater said: “Papa Tom Young, with oakra [sic] in his hips and tomatoes in his sides, is still holding his own, singing ‘The Blues.’”198
This only known photograph of Tom Young appeared in an ad for L. D. Joel’s Atlanta Players in the 1912 “Christmas Edition” of the Freeman.
During the first week of 1911 Young appeared at the Pekin Theater in Savannah, on a bill with String Beans and Sweetie May, and drew praise for his eccentric dancing.199 Still at the Pekin the following month, “Tom Young the female impersonator in his Monologue and song the ‘Piano Man’” was “a scream.”200 At the Globe Theater in Jacksonville in March, he “made a decided hit” singing “Hug up Close to Jack Johnson.”201 Back at the Pastime in Athens later that year, on a bill with Bessie Oliver and Clara Smith, Young reportedly “cleaned up” with “Next Week,” “Prosperity,” and “You’ll Get Something You Don’t Expect.”202
In April 1912 Young filled two weeks at the Globe Theater in Jacksonville. The bill of the second week was headed by String Beans: “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.”203 Later in the year, Young helped open the Rex Theater in Durham, North Carolina, along with Clara Smith and Johnnie Woods. This time he appeared in a team act: “Tom Young, better known as ‘Two-Story Tom,’ rushed on the stage singing ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’ Mrs. Lillie Young seemed to be a special favorite of this team. She was gorgeously gowned in a canary silk and wore flesh colored hose. She sang ‘I’m So Glad I’m Brown Skin.’ Mr. and Mrs. Young are rapid conversationalists and held the audience’s attention during the act.”204
A final, ominous dispatch from Jacksonville at the end of 1913 informed: “Tom Young, the comedian, was severely burned Monday night, December 8, at the Globe theater, in the dressing room. He is now at the hospital in a serious condition.”205 Before Young slipped beyond reflection, he was recalled in a nostalgic essay that appeared in a 1927 issue of the African American journal Opportunity. While thumbing through a stack of sheet music in an “Old Song Shop,” the author of the essay came across a copy of “Grizzly Bear” and was transported to his childhood days in Jacksonville. It brought back memories of “hying away to the Globe Theater to hear Tom Young give his version of the song”:
Tom is a huge fellow at least six feet tall. And to put over this particular song which he has twisted into a parody of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, he blackens his face, whitens his lips and dons boxing gloves. He sings:
Johnson said to Jim Jeffries …
Knocked his head up to the ceiling -
Lordy! … Lordy! … what a feeling!
And the all-colored audience stomps, yells, whistles, applauds. “Hot zigety-bum! Tell ’em ’bout it, Tom!” They shout. And Tom does tell ’em ’bout it. But the rest of his parody is drowned in the ecstasy of their enthusiasm. So now, for his effect, he’s pantomiming. He rolls his huge white eyes toward the ceiling. He shuffles. He shambles. He staggers. He reels. A genuine comedian, is this fellow Tom Young. (I wonder if Carl Van Vechten ever saw a genius like this entertaining his own folk away down home?). Finally his lips quiver and his big wide mouth, made bigger and wider by the white paint, opens, it seems, away back to his ears and he bellows his last “Lordy! Lordy! What a feeling” loud enough for the audience to catch every word of it.206
John H. “Blue Steel” Williams
Reports of Tom Young’s shambling “coon comedy” are reminiscent of ragtime-era performers such as Happy Howe and Chink Floyd. His song repertoire, however, depicts the speedy transformation from coon songs to blues. Another example of this revolution in stage repertoire can be seen in the career of John H. “Blue Steel” Williams, which stretched from the earliest days of tented minstrelsy into the era of T.O.B.A. vaudeville. Better known and more widely traveled than Tom Young, Williams was a producer and performer whose songs and original comedy skits hewed close to southern folk idiom.
A 1916 report claimed that Williams “has been in the business 20 years.”207 Contemporaneous press reports tracked him through most of the first quarter of the twentieth century, as he took turns between black vaudeville and itinerant tented minstrelsy. As early as 1903 Williams was “leaving them screaming” with Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels, singing “If Dem Chickens Don’t Roost Too High.” Later that year he appeared at the Blue Ribbon saloon-theater in Louisville as “the Mississippi Sunflower,” on a bill with John Goodloe.208
Williams traveled with carnival and plantation shows before rejoining Allen’s Minstrels in June 1905, when he teamed with John Goodloe, “making a hit in the olio, leaving them screaming every night.”209 He remained on the roster of Allen’s Minstrels for about three-and-a-half years, as comedian and old man impersonator, “making the old folks as well as the children laugh playing ‘rube’ in the streets.”210 His ragtime minstrel song repertoire included “On the Rock Pile,” “If My Baby Could See Me Now,” “Home Sweet Home Sounds Good to Me,” “Ragtime Boy,” “Lemon Coon,” and “What A Time.”211
In June 1906 Williams took a brief sabbatical from the minstrel routes to fill a three-week engagement at the Budweiser Theater in Tampa.212 In December 1908 he left Allen’s Minstrels for good and dropped right into the heart of the new theater movement at Tick’s Big Vaudeville in Memphis, singing “You Are in the Right Church But the Wrong Pew.”213 This popular Cecil Mack–Chris Smith collaboration was featured by Bert Williams in the 1908–09 production of Bandana Land.214
When L. D. Joel opened the Air Dome Theater in Jacksonville in May 1909, he enlisted Williams to manage the stage.215 The Whitman Sisters Company opened at the Air Dome in June: “J. H. Williams, the clever comedian, who is looked upon as a coming star, has united with the sisters and will put the finishing touches on their comedy parts.”216
Fred Barrasso brought Williams back to Memphis in August 1910 to bolster the legendary Savoy Stock Company. Soon afterward, Barrasso divided the company into touring parties to populate his experimental Tri-State Circuit. A correspondence on October 1 relayed news of “The show at Vicksburg, Miss., headed by John H. Williams, the king of all comedians in the South; who takes three and four encores singing ‘Alabama Bound,’ ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll,’ [and] ‘Tie Your Little [Bull] Outside.’ … Mrs. J. H. Williams is pianist, and reads at sight. Joe White is trap drummer.”217 Barrasso subsequently rotated Williams’s party to the American Theater in Jackson, Mississippi, where Mrs. Williams shared the orchestra pit with trap drummer Harry Jefferson.
Completing an eighteen-week contract with Barrasso in December 1910, Williams moved on to an engagement in Jacksonville, Florida, making it known through the Freeman that “Mr. F. A. Barrasso is a gentleman and pays as promised. Boys, I am going where the weather suits my clothes.”218 Williams joined the Globe Theater stock company, performing songs and monologues on vaudeville bills with Trixie Smith and the Raineys, and taking part in short plays under the direction of J. Francis Mores.219
When Mores joined the cast of S. H. Dudley’s Smart Set in February, Williams assumed the post of producer and stage manager at the Globe.220 Princess Rajah, billed as “the German-African comedienne,” came to the Globe in March and she and Williams collaborated on staging plays.221 A note from the proprietor Frank Crowd announced, “The Princess and J. H. Williams joined hands for life on March 8.… Williams is leaving of his own accord, as I deem him one of my most esteemed producers and stage directors.… In conclusion, I will say that J. H. Williams and Princess Rajah will make one of the greatest teams that the colored race has ever had the pleasure of seeing.”222 It is not clear how long their partnership lasted.
Williams continued to divide his time between tented minstrelsy and vaudeville theaters, sustaining a reputation as one of the South’s premier producer-managers. By 1914 his song list, which had previously favored up-to-date ragtime, was veering toward blues, and he acquired the nickname “Blue Steel.” That fall he was piloting the Blue Steel Stock Company through the state of Virginia: “our stage manager, Mr. Williams, the original Blue Steel.”223
In Savannah with the Florida Blossom Minstrels during the summer of 1915, Williams was “cleaning up nightly singing his own composition, the ‘Blue Steel Blues.’”224 The Florida Blossoms were a bluesy aggregation that season; Kate Price was singing “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone,” and the five-piece band under cornetist Attler Cox was playing “Memphis Blues,” “High Yellow Blues,” “Florida Blues,” and “Jogo Blues.”225 At the end of 1915, the Florida Blossoms were in the state of Florida, where “the natives are wild about the show.… John H. Williams (the original Blue Steel) is singing his own composition, ‘The Sanctified Blues,’ and doing seven minutes of first-class monologue.… Miss Bessie Smith is a riot singing the ‘Hesitation,’ ‘St. Louis’ and ‘Yellow Dog Blues.’”226
In 1916 Williams signed on as stage manager and producer for Mahoney’s Mobile Minstrels: “Blue Steel is closing a red hot first part singing ‘The St. Louis Blues.’”227 The roster included saloon-theater pioneer Buddie Glenn, “the oldest young man in the business. 74 years old and works like a 20 year old comedian.”228 By late summer Williams was “getting together his stock company known as the Blue Steel Stock Company and as soon as the show closes for the winter will go in vaudeville with 14 people.”229 During the early weeks of 1917 he served as producer and stage manager at the Dixieland Theater in Charleston, South Carolina, in company with blues star Virginia Liston and dancers Cuba Austin and Wayne “Buzzin’” Burton.230
One of Williams’s perennial show stops was the Star Theater in Pittsburgh.231 There in the fall of 1919, he headed a bill that included Laura Smith.232 The following year, proprietor Harry Tenenbaum remodeled the Star Theater “from bottom to top” and gave out news that “J. H. Williams known as Blue Steel is manager. He is an old performer and really knows the show business. Also knows how to treat performers and patrons.”233 Williams managed the Star Theater for several years during the T.O.B.A. era. The Chicago Defender announced his death in October 1925: “John Williams, better known as Blue Steel and former manager of the Star Theater, Pittsburgh, Pa., was found dead last Wednesday morning in East Youngstown, Ohio, where his company was working. He leaves a wife and two small children to mourn him.”234
The stage careers of first-generation southern vaudeville bluesmen embodied unprecedented development and upheaval in black entertainment. Blues in vaudeville essentially supplanted the ragtime coon songs that were ubiquitous less than a decade earlier. Played and sung in the new context of insular black vaudeville theaters, the blues mirrored “the souls of black folk” in a way that coon songs never did.
