The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville

The vaudeville stage provided African American song writers with a launching platform for their latest blues compositions. Black vaudeville’s female blues shouters became popular along with the new songs. By the exercise of their original styles and creative treatments, they broadened the parameters of the blues and helped establish its direction. They were not merely early exponents of blues singing, they were its architects.

Bessie is what is sometimes called a ‘coon song shouter,’ but she is more than that.
—Billy E. Lewis, 1918

Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith are the two most famous blues singers to come out of southern vaudeville. During the first half of the World War I decade, Rainey and Smith were among the ranks of stage performers equivocally celebrated as “coon shouters”; but in the latter half of the decade they were elevated to the status of “blues queens.” A look back at their early years helps situate Rainey and Smith within the trends and developments that led to this pivotal transition.

In an often-cited late-1920s interview with John Work III and Sterling Brown, Ma Rainey recalled a 1902 encounter with what she came to realize was “blues.”3 Thus far, however, no one has discovered a single contemporaneous document that specifically denominates blues performed on a vaudeville or tent-show stage, southern railroad station platform, prison farm, street corner, porch, levee, construction site, cotton field, European music hall, or anywhere at all prior to 1909. Evidence does exist of fragments of verses and other distinctive musical characteristics that would soon be cobbled into identifiable blues songs—and this might explain what Gertrude Rainey remembered having heard in 1902.⁴ However, the associated claim, that Rainey began performing blues songs shortly thereafter, does not withstand scrutiny.

The historical narrative is skewed by the baseless notion that Rainey was a singular pioneer, the “Mother of the Blues,” and Bessie Smith her great protégé. In fact, there were female vaudeville performers singing blues songs before either Gertrude Rainey or Bessie Smith; but the distinction has no real significance, because blues in southern vaudeville was a widespread, spontaneous movement; no one performer can be legitimately credited as its instigator.

A transitional style of vocal ragtime, sometimes termed “up-to-date coon songs,” was the immediate precursor to the emergence of blues singing in southern vaudeville.⁵ Up-to-date coon songs were the gateway for Gertrude Rainey, Bessie Smith, and the rest of the first generation of professional blues singers.

By their nature, up-to-date coon songs constitute a moving target. “Progressive” turn-of-the-century coon songs emphasized authentic street slang. The later, more urbane coon song hits of Shelton Brooks, Joe Jordan, Chris Smith, and Irving Berlin did, too, but the terminology had evolved with the times. Their compositions, closer to the blues in language, form, and attitude, suited the new, racially exclusive vaudeville context.

An inwardly directed, independent African American cultural sensibility had been ripening for decades.⁶ In the North as well as in the South, newly urbanized African American theater audiences encouraged a recalibration of established practices and modern innovations.⁷ This entailed a pattern of mediations between northern and southern entertainment standards; the conventions of minstrelsy and those of vaudeville; sophisticated and down-home humor; popular song and folk song; all of which contributed to the alchemy that turned ragtime coon songs into blues.

Gertrude Pridgett was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1886. She married Will Rainey in 1904, and they traveled together until Will’s death in 1919.⁸ Reports from the Raineys began to appear in the Indianapolis Freeman in 1906, at which time they had charge of the Alabama Fun Makers Company: “Mr. Rainey is making a hit with his ‘old man’ turn and ‘Let Him Without Sin Cast the First Stone,’ while Mrs. Rainey is giving, ‘I’ll Be Back in a Minute, and I’ll Do the Same for You.’”⁹

Before the close of 1906, the Raineys joined Pat Chappelle’s Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels. They were billed as “Sketch Artists, Black Face, Song and Dance Comedians, Jubilee Singers and Artists, Cake Walkers, Old Man’s Specialty.”¹⁰ Gertrude Rainey was featuring “The Man in the Moon” and “Miss Jane,” and she and her husband teamed up to sing “I’ve Said My Last Farewell.”¹¹ The Raineys remained with the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels through the season of 1907–08, performing alongside singing comedians Arthur “Happy” Howe and Allen “Chintz” Moore, who was singing “All In Down and Out.”¹²

I beg to state, in behalf of the Georgia Sunbeam Company, headed by Rainey and Rainey, that we have just closed a six weeks’ engagement at Luna Park, Atlanta, Ga., and now are down in the land of flowers. The company is composed of the following: Rainey and Rainey, who are still scoring success every night; Will Owens, the comedian … Porter and Porter, vaudeville artists … Mattie Parker and Mittie Bradford, singing and dancing soubrettes; Kelly, the dancing wonder; Zeke, the man who has them all beat … The orchestra is very fine, and is led by Prof. C. M. Price. Porter, of the traps, is something of a wonder. Regards to the profession. W. M. Rainey, 206 Garden Street.¹⁶

Rainey and Rainey remained at Pensacola’s Belmont Street Theater for the next several weeks: “Madam Rainey is the latest sensation, singing and featuring her new song ‘Temptation Rag.’”¹⁷ “Mrs. Gertrude Rainie [sic], our coon shouter, never fails to leave the house in an uproar … We are presenting ‘The Cuban Queen’ the last half of the week. Billie Zeek and Henry Jennings doing the comedy … Mrs. [Elsie] Jennings the queen. Mrs. Rainie, Miss Mildred Kernion and Miss [Sidney] Coleman as flower girls.”¹⁸

When the Ocmulgee Park Pavilion in Macon, Georgia, opened its season on April 16, 1910, Will Rainey took charge of the stage with his Georgia Sunbeams Company of eighteen performers, including a nine-piece brass band.¹⁹ Two weeks into the engagement, “Rainey and Rainey, that clever comedy team,” were heard “singing their own composition ‘Baby, I Have Brought You That Hambone Dat I Found Last Year,’” while Gertrude Rainey soloed on “Temptation Rag” and “her new song, ‘That Fascinating Ragtime Glide.’”²⁰ In 1910 Gertrude Rainey was “holding her own,” singing up-to-date ragtime songs and performing comedy sketches with her husband; but there is no evidence that she was singing any blues.

Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, sometime between 1892 and 1895.²¹ Most of what passes for common knowledge regarding her earliest stage activity can be traced to her obituary in the Baltimore Afro-American, which includes some background information apparently provided by her older brother Clarence:

She completed the elementary schools of [hometown Chattanooga] and in 1912 joined the show owned by Moses Stokes.…

Her first appearance was in a store front building in her native home in a presentation staged by Lonnie and Cora Fisher.

Members of the troupe when she made her debut were Ma and Pa Rainey, Gertrude McDonald, Son Riggins, Wiley Teasley, Isaac Bradford, Len Collins, Abner Davis, and her brother, Clarence Smith, who secured her the job as singer with the unit.

A few months later she joined a second show with its first appearance in Dalton, Ga.²²

Smith’s 1909 engagement at the Arcade/81 Theater may have lasted several weeks, because she was noted there again in mid-June, when a real “baby soubrette” seems to have stolen the spotlight: “The Arcade Theater, 81 Decatur Street, Atlanta, Georgia, is doing a splendid business. The program is given by Miss Evelyn White, Miss Bessie Smith, Willie Butler, Mack and Austin, two clever boys, and Miss Leona Butler, a six-years-old soubrette who is a wonder, shouting a favorite coon song entitled ‘I Ain’t Had No Loving In A Long Time.’”²⁴

During the week of August 1, 1910, Smith held the stage at Luna Park, just down Decatur Street from the Arcade/81, in company with Rosetta Brannon and vernacular dance specialists Jack and Lena Wiggins.²⁵ Two weeks later, Luna Park’s Freeman correspondent noted: “We closed Wiggins and Wiggins, Bessie Smith, Gordon and Gordon, Rosetta Brannon. All left sad hearts at the park.” Then came this teasing afterthought: “Say Bess, have you 10? Luna Park, never late.”²⁶

While Smith was performing at Luna Park, Will and Gertrude Rainey moved into the Arcade/81. Fabulous tales of Ma Rainey discovering young Bessie and taking her under her wing are deeply embedded in blues lore and literature. Contemporaneous reportage confirms that Bessie Smith did perform with Will and Gertrude Rainey, as early as 1910; however, the collaboration was brief and did not end well.

On September 3, 1910, news came that, “Wm. Rainey has just closed a six weeks’ engagement at the Arcade Theater at Atlanta, Ga., and opens for a six weeks’ engagement at the Pekin [in Memphis] with a strong trio, with the following members: Bess Smith, a favorite Tennessee coon shouter; Gertrude Rainey is still holding her own and setting the town wild with her singing. W. M. Rainey does the ‘Elk’s Club,’ a big success. He introduces his act by entering the club in an airship.”²⁷

Three weeks into their Pekin Theater engagement in Memphis, the “Three Trio”—Will and Gertrude Rainey with Bessie Smith—was “making good at every performance.”²⁸ After week four, however, the Freeman served notice that the Raineys had replaced Bessie Smith with another future blues recording artist, Laura Smith. There was also this unusual “editorial”:

Someone writes in from the Pekin, Memphis, Tenn., sounds a note of warning concerning Bessie Smith. Managers are advised to cancel engagements with her. Well, we don’t know Bessie, but think that if she can get very many engagements it ought to say that she could not be so “very awful” bad. Managers don’t have to keep disturbers of the peace. And if she is all said of her she won’t need anyone to help her out of employment, since her own actions, according to information, would stop her. But maybe she isn’t so bad. Let us hear about it, Bessie. Send in a note. Will publish only what is expected to be published. Yours, The Freeman.29

There was no published response from Bessie Smith, and the matter was never mentioned in the Freeman again. Bessie Smith’s vaunted “apprenticeship” with Gertrude Rainey in the “Three Trio” lasted less than four weeks; and it appears their paths did not cross again until 1917.

After replacing Bessie with Laura Smith, Will and Gertrude Rainey left Memphis for the Gulf Coast. In November the Rainey Trio with Laura Smith played the Belmont Street Theater in Pensacola as members of Henderson’s Tennessee Troubadours: “The team of Rainey and Smith did a novelty singing and dancing act that was way above the average.” The same report said Gertrude Rainey, “the Southern shouter,” had left Pensacola “to open at the Lagman Theater, Mobile, Ala.”³⁰

After a couple of weeks in Mobile, the Raineys returned to Pensacola, where Will was placed “on the sick list.”³¹ Nevertheless, they filled three weeks at the Belmont Street Theater and enjoyed the holiday season with family and friends: “Mrs. Rainey’s sister, Molissi Nix, arrived in Pensacola on the 22nd to spend Christmas, and was highly entertained by many of the friends of the Raineys.”³² Meanwhile, Laura Smith returned to Barrasso’s fold, joining his road company at the Amuse Theater in Vicksburg, Mississippi.³³

In the immediate wake of the Pekin Theater incident, Bessie Smith settled in for a long run at the rival Savoy Theater, Fred Barrasso’s Memphis stronghold. An October 1910 correspondence noted, “Miss Bessie Smith … is quite a dancer, receiving encores nightly.”³⁴ The following week the Savoy staged a “typical Western drama” called The Girl from Dixie, with the following cast of characters: “Kite [sic] Fisher, ‘The Girl from Dixie;’ Estelle Harris, ‘Tough Lize;’ Bessie Smith, ‘The Adventuress;’ Billy Mills, ‘Jack Gordon;’ George Freeman, ‘Dingy Bill;’ David Perdue, ‘Dewer Bill.’ The comedy roles were carried by Billy Earthquake and Slim Henderson. The other members of the company were cowboys.”³⁵

A November 12, 1910, report conveys something of the rough-and-ready ambience of the Savoy Theater during Bessie Smith’s tenure:

The cool weather has caused a slight falling off of our attendance, otherwise we have no kick coming as our company is running along smoothly. Billy Earthquake is our present stage manager and is very popular with Memphians, although he has been working under great disadvantage, being very sick at times. Our principal comedians, Slim Henderson and Billy Mills, are receiving their share of popularity. Miss Estelle Harris had the misfortune to step on a nail last week, which confined her to her bed for about five days, but we are glad to say she is with us again and came back to work singing that most popular song of “Lovie Jo [sic].” Miss Kate Fisher is to be complimented on her “line” work, which is so necessary in stock companies. Miss Bessie Smith is still with us and is quite a favorite with our audiences … Mr. Billy Jones, our popular singing “Savoy Annex” bartender, has just returned from Chicago and was heartily welcomed … Congo Kid, our popular little prize fighter, also Johnny Flynn and Raymond Russell have just returned to the city after quite a tour and are our regular “stage door Willies” and they are quite favorites of the profession. Our show this week is a spectacular minstrel first part with a strong olio and a small act to close.³⁶

Fred Barrasso initiated his Tri-State Circuit in the fall of 1910. In February 1911 he dispatched Bessie Smith to Lagman’s Theater in Mobile, Alabama, as a member of Barrasso’s Strollers. The company was under the direction of Will Benbow, with E. Deb Levi, assistant stage manager and secretary. The headliner was Billy Mills:

In March Barrasso’s Strollers moved into the American Theater in Jackson, Mississippi, where Bessie Smith was given star billing:

The bill the last half of last week was a big success. The opening act, a musical number entitled “Dollar Bill,” featured by Mose Graham as “Dollar Bill” and E. Dab Lewis [sic], our new stage manager, playing the straight lines as “Silver King.” When Andy Pellebon appears as “Dollar Bill’s” wife the house goes into an uproar. The olio was a pleasing one with plenty of new catchy songs and jokes. Miss Bessie Smith, our star, is still sending them away screaming with “Lovey Joe.” Kid Ewing, the boy comedian and buck dancer, is over making good. The Pellebons, Andy and Sadie, are holding their own and are a clever team. Two-story Mose, our comedian … brings the house down by storm with witty sayings and songs. Mr. Chas. Anderson, our character man and Henry Lafton, the silver-voiced tenor singer, are delivering the goods to perfection. Our manager Mr. J. C. Boone is very much pleased with his stock company and would like to hear from good performers at all times.… Little Dinky Pellebon, our mascot, is still doing the “eagle rock.”³⁸

Joe Jordan and Will Marion Cook’s 1910 sheet music hit “Lovie Joe” was standard fare for up-to-date coon shouters. Bessie Smith may have learned it from Estelle Harris. Before summer came on, Smith left Barrasso’s enterprise to join Will and Edna Landry Benbow’s Alabama Chocolate Drops. At Jacksonville, Florida, in June, they put on a two-act musical comedy titled “Mr. Sardines From Sardines, Fla.,” “which proved to be a riot from start to finish.… Miss Bessie Smith and Mose Graham took the house by storm with their singing and talking.”³⁹ Later that summer Bessie Smith, “the Tennessee coon shouter,” and two Alabama Chocolate Drops company-mates, E. Deb Levi and Freddie “Sardines” Falk, opened at the Pekin Theater in Savannah as the E. Deb Levi Trio.⁴⁰ They were booked to go on to an extended engagement in Tampa, beginning August 14.⁴¹

On October 3, 1911, the Bijou Theater in Bessemer, Alabama, opened “with the following bill: Bessie Smith, Irwin & Irwin, Stewart & Watkins, Carrie Lowe, E. J. Benjamin, and Alfred A. Grady. Mrs. Nellie Benjamin, pianist.”⁴² Smith may have spent the next two months in the Bessemer area; and this may have been when she first met singing and dancing comedian Wayne Burton, who was performing in and around Birmingham.⁴³ On December 1, 1911, Burton posted a letter to the Freeman, listing Smith among the players he was appearing with at an unidentified Birmingham theater:

Bessie Smith attracted special attention at the Lyre Theater in Louisville, Kentucky, in February 1912. The bill featured Mamie Payne and local “colored fashion plates” Taylor and Taylor: “Next came the big storm on the bill, Miss Bessie Smith, the girl with the big voice. Miss Smith is undoubtedly the best coon shouter ever seen in this house. She was compelled to refuse her encores.”⁴⁵ John and Ella Goodloe closed the show.

One week later, a Lyre Theater reporter trumpeted teenaged Bessie Smith as “the greatest coon shouter of her race. This is her second week, and she went bigger than ever. Miss Smith knows how to put her songs over the floodlights in a way that makes her audience scream with delight.” That same week, Joseph Clark, Jr., assistant manager of the Lyre and member of Louisville’s famous Clark family of performers, engaged a group to entertain at a “Millionaire Smoker” at the Seelbach Hotel. Along with Bessie Smith, the participating entertainers included John and Ella Goodloe, Charles and Sadie Pewee, and a five-piece band comprising James Clark, piano; Edgar Morton, cornet; Howard Jordan, clarinet; John Embry, trombone; and Albert Smith, drums.⁴⁶

The Lyre Theater, located on Thirteenth and Walnut streets, opened in the summer of 1910, and had changed ownership at least twice before Bessie Smith made her appearance.⁴⁷ An extraordinary report to the Freeman indicated that conditions there were less than desirable: “The Lyre theater is under such poor management that the theater going public is becoming disgusted. A large number of people stay away because they are afraid that they may be injured in the many fights that occur. The players have set up a howl that the management is unable to pay them.⁴⁸

Wayne Burton followed Smith into the Lyre Theater, and on April 20, 1912, the Freeman broke the story of a new partnership: “That sensational duo, Burton and Smith—Wayne and Bessie—opened the Auditorium Theater, Philadelphia, on the 8th with great success—Baltimore to follow.” These two talented young upstarts became part of the first wave of southern vaudeville players to land on northern theatrical shores.

According to retrospective accounts, Wayne Burton was born in Birmingham in 1893. In southern vaudeville houses and tented minstrel shows during the course of 1910–11, he combined his eccentric dancing skills with a song list that included “Mary Jane,” “Casey Jones,” “Steamboat Bill,” “Hold Me, Parson, Hold Me (I Feel Religion Comin’ On),” “Chicken Reel,” “On Mobile Bay,” “That Alamo Rag,” and “Plant a Watermelon on My Grave (And Let the Juice Ooze Through).”⁴⁹

When Burton took Bessie Smith for his partner in 1912, he was known as “That Boy”; but he eventually adopted the nickname “Buzzin’”—identifying with a late-breaking dance step, of which he became an acknowledged master. Marshall and Jean Stearns described Burton’s signature step in their 1968 book Jazz Dance:

As the climax to his act, Burton fell into the Buzz—long sliding steps forward, knees bent and arms flung out alternately to the sides with hands turned down at the wrist and fingers vibrating in imitation of a bee’s wings …

For his exit, Burton hunched his shoulders, wiggled his index finger toward the sky, and shuffled offstage—a combination of motions that became the standard ingredients of Trucking years later.⁵⁰

Indianapolis Freeman, July 6, 1912.

On Monday, June 17, 1912, Burton and Smith opened at the landmark Monogram Theater in Chicago on a bill headlined by Frank Kirk, the “musical tramp.” Sylvester Russell reviewed the show, but with nary a word to waste on Bessie Smith: “Burton and Smith were an act which won favor. The comedian, who is quite clever, has the qualities to broaden out to good effect, if he continues to keep free from smut, for these days are the days of cleverness and ability. His song, ‘I’m By Myself, Nobody But Me Alone,’ made good.”⁵²

Burton and Smith proceeded directly to the Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis, where advance notice proclaimed: “Wayne is known as the boy with the insane feet. Bessie is the girl with the ragtime voice.”⁵³ A brief review appeared under the heading, “Burton and Smith Do A Good Down Home Act”: “Burton and Smith are new faces to Crown patrons and as a team did nicely. The female member of this team, Miss Smith, is a real coon shouter, and if she would only sing a late one, my, what a hit she would make. Mr. Burton is a clever dancer. They received enough applause to put them in the O. K. class.”⁵⁴

In late July and early August 1912, Burton and Smith filled two weeks at the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati. Commentary on their first week’s performance noted: “Smith and Burton are the curtain raisers and have a very lively turn. Miss Smith has a strong voice, sings a good number and makes a very attractive appearance, while Mr. Burton is a funny comedian and gets away with a freak lot of eccentric dancing.”⁵⁵ The following week’s performance brought further insights: “Smith and Burton were held over and it proved to be the proper thing, as they produced a turn that gave better satisfaction than that of last week. This is a good team and should be in regular demand when they get better acquainted.”⁵⁶

Burton and Smith’s reviews from this period are equivocal enough to suggest that they were having a bumpy ride in northern vaudeville. Throughout their tour they encountered performers with far more professional experience, which might have accentuated their own immaturity. Their native talent was obvious to all, but they may have been a bit too unpolished for northern audiences.

On November 30, 1912, the Freeman reported: “The act of Burton and Smith is now known as Burton and Burton, at St. Louis this week. Wayne and Bessie.”⁵⁸ A photo from this period captures a young Bessie Smith, thin and pretty, with her dapper partner.

On January 25, 1913, the Freeman notified that “Burton and Burton, Wayne and Bessie, are making good in Atlanta. Booked solid throughout the South.”⁵⁹ But within the next few weeks there was a dramatic switch: “Wayne Burton, formerly of Burton and Smith, and little Miss Ebbie Forceman, of the Benbow Trio and Dallas, Texas, put one over on the performers in Atlanta, Ga., last week when they slipped away and were secretly married. There is a bright future for them, as Burton is progressive.”⁶⁰

Wayne and Ebbie Burton picked up touring where he and Bessie Smith had left off. Their 1913 bookings took them from Jacksonville to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.⁶¹ Bessie Smith, on the other hand, settled back into southern vaudeville. At an unidentified theater in Rome, Georgia, she “set the house crazy singing ‘I Got the Blues and Mean to Cry’ [sic].”⁶² This was apparently the 1912 Chris Smith–James Tim Brymn song titled “The Blues (But I’m Too Blamed Mean to Cry),” a proto-blues concoction with folk bona fides—the phrase “I’ve got the blues, but I’m too mean to cry” was first collected by Howard Odum in rural Mississippi.

Rainey and Rainey opened January 2, 1911, at the Globe Theater in Jacksonville for a four-week run. During the first week, they took part in J. H. Williams’s farce comedy production, “The Pressing Club.” In the vaudeville portion, “The female member of this team caught the house from the go and kept them with her. One could sit all night and hear her sing the ‘Dying Rag.’”⁶³ Subsequent commentary was more pointed: “The lady member of the team is a great coon shouter, while the gentleman should retire from the stage.”⁶⁴ Gertrude Rainey responded to this “knock” with a heated “Letter Of Protest”:

Indianapolis Freeman, December 28, 1912.

Gertrude Rainey’s progress was hampered by the burden of traveling with her increasingly incapacitated husband and partner, to whom she was obviously devoted. Not long after her letter of protest, it was reported that Globe Theater stage manager Tim Owsley and band leader Eugene Mikell had composed a song for her: “Mrs. Rainey, singing coon songs, is there to the letter. Her new song play that Mikell Rag, by going authors and composers, Owsley and Kikell [sic], is a good rag song, and no doubt will become popular. She also sang the ‘Barber Shop Chord’ different than we have ever heard it. But the audience would not let her go until she sang that dying rag.”⁶⁶

Taking “pick dancer” Bishop Brown in tow, the Raineys launched the latest iteration of their Rainey Trio. Late in March 1911, they closed a date at the Dixie Theater in Durham, North Carolina, and opened at the Wizard Theater in Norfolk, Virginia: “When Gertrude Rainey sings ‘Dreamy Rag’ and ‘Barber Shop Chord,’ and Wm. Rainey put on that song ‘Woman Pay Me Now,’ the house came down.”⁶⁷ On May 1, 1911, the “Rainey and Rainey Big Musical Comedy Four” opened at the Lyric Theater in Newport News and held the boards for three weeks before moving inland to Petersburg.⁶⁸ In August they logged the fifteenth consecutive week of a return engagement in Newport News.⁶⁹

Meanwhile, Butler “String Beans” May introduced the southern brand of black vaudeville entertainment to the patrons of the Monogram Theater in Chicago, subsequently opening lucrative northern venues to just such acts as Rainey and Rainey. While the Raineys showed no inclination to invade Chicago at this time, they did play two weeks at the Lincoln Theater in New York late in 1911, before dropping back down the East Coast to the Globe Theater in Jacksonville.⁷⁰ They played two weeks in hometown Columbus, Georgia, in the spring of 1912.⁷¹

The first clear evidence of Gertrude Rainey singing blues songs on a public platform occurred in the summer of 1913, when she and her husband finally did reach Chicago: “The Raney’s are a Southern act and appealed to many of the Monogram patrons. Strawberries, Easy Rider and The Blues are the songs rendered.”⁷² At the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati the following week: “The Raineys, a sketch team off the Southern time, as the main feature was well received. Their work was fine, and Miss Gertrude Rainey is a real coon shouter.”⁷³ The homely Raineys do not appear to have gained entrée to the Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis on this tour, or enjoyed a return to the Monogram. By late July they were playing dates in Kentucky, “moving along nicely,” headed south.⁷⁴

When Bessie Smith first appeared in the city of Atlanta in 1909, she was still a teenager. Over the next five years she became a Decatur Street fixture; Irvin C. Miller, Leigh Whipper, and Thomas A. Dorsey all recalled having encountered her there.⁷⁵ A sure step forward in the popularization of the blues took place in Decatur Street’s black vaudeville theaters, which were all wide open to blues acts.

Clearly, Foster was unprepared to embrace the southern vaudeville environment; the “band of hoodlums” he confronted on Decatur Street represented a cultural revolution taking place before his eyes. One of the “don’t-care young women” he disdained may well have been Bessie Smith, who was counted among the performers at the recently opened Dixie Theater, 127 Decatur Street, in February 1914.⁷⁷ Owner Charles P. Bailey hired L. Don Bradford to manage the Dixie, and Bradford outlined the terms of engagement:

I can give you four to ten weeks. No salary too large. If you can do the work you can get the money. No more 11 to 11. I only have four shows a day, each 45 minutes long. I have remodeled the entire house with scenery and every convenience for actors. Of course Mr. C. P. Bailey is the owner of the Dixie. Still, he has positively nothing to do with the management of it.…

I keep twelve to sixteen people all the time, ten or twelve steady stock people and one or two new teams weekly. If you are good stockworkers I will keep you six or ten weeks without cut. Clayborn Jones, Fairchilds, B. B. Joyner, Jack Wiggins Trio, Goodloe & Delk, Irene Cook, Ruby Taylor, Bessie Smith and Ada Lockhardt are all doing well and making good.⁷⁸

During the spring and summer of 1914, Smith appeared in Atlanta as part of a new foursome. In April they played the Globe Theater and fetched a compliment from Smith’s old partner Buzzin’ Burton: “Mr. Dinah Scott, Fatchild, Miss Bessie Smith and Stella White complete the show out here. They are putting on good shows and getting the dough.”⁷⁹“Fatchild,” whose proper name was Andrew Fairchild, and Dinah Scott, “the supple boy with the curly hair,” were popular Atlanta-based dancing comedians, often seen at the Dixie, 81, and other local venues. After Stella White left the foursome, Smith, Scott, and “Fatchild” continued as a trio.

In Atlanta for the summer, Perry “Mule” Bradford launched his “Atlanta Show Shops” column in the Freeman on July 11, 1914, outlining the bills at the Arcade, Avenue, and Peters Street theaters. At Peters Street, “Buzzin Burton was the big noise. Others on the bill were Smith & Burton.” Unfortunately, Bradford did not specify which Smith or Burton; perhaps was Bessie Smith and Ebbie Burton. Bradford tinged the mystery by noting: “Buzzin Burton was poisoned today in something to drink. We all wish for a soon recovery.”⁸⁰

In the following week’s column, Bradford provided an update on activities at the Dixie Theater: “Bessie Smith, Fat Child, and Dinah Scott closed the show, and closed it to perfection. This is a very good act. Although just put together, they stick well and make a good act.”⁸¹ On August 1, Bradford reported having seen them again at the Dixie Theater, closing a bill that included future race recording artist Martha Copeland and her husband Billy Zeek: “Last but not least—Dinah Scott, Bessie Smith and Fat Child. I only wish this act would stick together, because it’s good and can go up the country. This girl, Bessie Smith, is the best coon shouter I ever heard, and Dinah, he is a good dancer and funny. Fat Child is the Buzzin King.”82

Bradford’s farsighted assessments sustain his reputation as a judge of talent. Ten years later, he voiced a similar appraisal, but updated his terminology: “Perry Bradford, the famous blues king has signed with the Columbia Phonograph company for two years.… ‘Double Crossin’ Papa’ and ‘He’s a Mean, Mean Man’ will be the first songs recorded for Columbia and the singer will be Bessie Smith, whom Perry declares to be the best blues singer in the whole world, barring none.”⁸³

Bessie Smith’s 1914 teammates both charted lengthy careers. In 1924, at the Koppin Theater in Detroit, on a bill headlined by Smith, Dinah Scott scored “with his parody on ‘Down and Out.’ He is still the same funny Dinah of years ago.”⁸⁴ In 1926 he became stage manager and principal comedian of Bessie Smith’s high-flying vaudeville revue.⁸⁵ A 1927 critique of her “Harlem Frolics” Company assured: “The comedy is well handled by Dinah Scott, one of the funniest comics on the stage today. He is ably assisted by Clarence Smith, brother of the record star.”⁸⁶ In 1928 Scott headed a company of his own, with a roster that included Andrew Fairchild.⁸⁷ When last heard from in 1938, Fairchild was back in Atlanta where he started out: “Eddie Haywood [sic] and Andrew Fairchild are putting on stock at the Lincoln and 81 theatres.”⁸⁸ Dinah Scott was still active in 1954, touring with the venerable tented minstrel show, Silas Green from New Orleans.⁸⁹

Bessie Smith continued as a single. In the spring of 1915 she played a two-week engagement at the Queen Theater in hometown Chattanooga on a bill headlined by Jimmie and Robbie Lee Cox.⁹⁰ Before the end of the year she joined the Florida Blossom Minstrels; and on January 1, 1916, the Freeman associated the name Bessie Smith with the blues for the first time.⁹¹ The Florida Blossoms reported: “Bessie Smith is a riot singing the ‘Hesitation,’ ‘St. Louis,’ and ‘Yellow Dog Blues.’”⁹²

Smith was traveling independently in February 1916, when she played a return engagement at the Queen Theater in Chattanooga.⁹³ Later that spring, at the New Queen Theater in Birmingham, she elicited the following assessment: “Bessie Smith stops the show nightly. Miss Smith is Birmingham’s favorite when it comes to the ‘Blues.’”⁹⁴ By July she was back with the Florida Blossoms, cutting a path through North Carolina: “Miss Bessie Smith is singing the Hesitation and St. Louis Blues to three and four encores every night.”⁹⁵

The Florida Blossoms show featured “a number of musical numbers by a well drilled chorus,” under the stage direction of Lonnie Fisher. He and his wife of earlier years, Cora Fisher, figure prominently in retrospective accounts of Bessie Smith’s early days in show business.⁹⁶ Interviewed by race reporter Allan McMillan in 1936, Smith said her “initial inspiration came from Cora Fisher and William C. Handy.”⁹⁷ Handy’s influence is apparent in Smith’s early repertoire; Cora Fisher’s role is more difficult to pin down, though it may relate to Smith’s early reputation as a dancer. When Bessie Smith was last mentioned with the Florida Blossoms in the fall of 1916, she was “still singing the Blues as no one else can.”⁹⁸ In 1917 she joined Alexander Tolliver’s Smart Set.

Blues songs were heard in southern vaudeville as early as 1910. More impetus was provided in 1912 when the repertoire was modestly expanded by the first burst of blues on sheet music. The following year the momentum increased, driven by such forerunners as String Beans, Baby Seals, Clara Smith, and Virginia Liston. Songwriters were quick to recognize the popular trend, and ragtime coon songs gradually began to fade from the scene.

After six weeks in Kentucky, the Raineys dropped back into Tennessee and Alabama.¹⁰⁰ During the early weeks of 1914, they made an appearance at the Belmont Street Theater in Pensacola: “Mrs. Rainey is scoring big singing her own composed song, ‘Titanic.’”¹⁰¹ The Raineys continued to storm the southern vaudeville routes until the summer of 1915, when they joined Alexander Tolliver’s Smart Set.

Tolliver’s Big Show played “week stands, one show a night, no parades,” through the Southeast, providing a bright platform for female blues singers.¹⁰² When the Raineys joined Tolliver’s ranks Ma was already one of the better-known shouters in the South. Alongside Trixie Smith, Clara Smith, Susie Edwards, Leola “Coot” Grant, Evelyn White, Daisy Martin, and other Tolliver soubrettes and shouters, Ma Rainey was firmly identified as America’s premier blues singer. The prominence of Tolliver’s Big Show, staged in a mammoth tent seating as many as five thousand and routinely filled to capacity, magnified her reputation.

The Smart Set was dropping through the Carolinas in the fall of 1915 when Al Wells, the company’s faithful Freeman correspondent, hailed: “Ma Rainey assassinates the blues.”¹⁰³ At the beginning of 1916 Wells noted, “There are a number of performers singing the ‘blues’ but when Ma Rainey sings them, nuff said. She has to take three or four bows every night.”¹⁰⁴ However, not all of her 1916 repertoire was blues; reported titles included “Down Home Blues,” “One Beautiful Morning,” “I’ll Be Gone,” “Morning, Noon and Night,” and “Lonesome Melody.”¹⁰⁵

Indianapolis Freeman, December 25, 1915.

An all-star jazz band famously accompanied Ma Rainey and the other Tolliver blues women, setting a pattern for her later association with jazz bands on records and in 1920s vaudeville.¹⁰⁶ As a member of the Smart Set, Rainey participated in dramatic skits, as well as the show’s famous dancing chorus. During the season of 1916 she formed a team act with Susie Hawthorne.¹⁰⁷ She was emphatically a prime luminary of this star-studded revue: “Ma Rainey: Yes, she was there. Nuff said.”¹⁰⁸

When Bessie Smith briefly joined Tolliver’s roster in 1917, a new dynamic may have surfaced, portending things to come:

By the fall of 1917, both Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith had left Tolliver’s Smart Set and returned to southern vaudeville. Bessie Smith was back on Decatur Street in October, when theater boss Charles P. Bailey boasted: “my bill for next week will [include] Charles Anderson, Ida Cox and Bessie Smith. Some bill, I can assure you.”¹¹⁰ From Atlanta, Smith went to the New Queen Theater in Birmingham and “cleaned up” on a card that included blues trombonist Charles Arrant and another veteran of Tolliver’s Smart Set, Evelyn White, “the girl with the big voice, singing all the blues.”¹¹¹

Early in 1918, the Douglass Theater in Macon advertised a mixed bill of vaudeville and moving pictures that included “Madam Tolliver, vocalist” and “Bessie Smith, ‘shouter.’”¹¹² Later that spring Smith and Tolliver showed up as a team act at the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, and drew a perceptive review from reporter Billy E. Lewis:

Bessie Smith has been seen in this city, but it was several years ago when she was a little girl. She is robust and healthy appearing this time and gives an excellent account of herself as a performer.

Bessie is what is sometimes called a “coon song shouter,” but she is more than that. Her voice is profoundly affecting, and which if employed in the higher realms of music, owing to its soulfulness, she would be a leading contralto or baritone singer of the day regardless of race.

Mabel Tolliver is the wife of Tolliver of “Southern Smart Set” fame, a show in which she aided to establish. Her voice is also remarkable, but wholly in a different direction—big and refreshing in a soprano of the widest range and pure accordingly. This is noted for her upper register. She could have been a grand opera singer, so far as quality and volume of voice are concerned.

They open with a pretty version of “Dixie,” when tone quality and harmony are the features. Miss Tolliver is effective in rendering “Until the Sand of the Desert Grows Cold.” Miss Smith’s rendition of “I Want to be Somebody’s Baby Doll” captured the audience nightly. Her encore song was with that same pathos that she knows how so well to put in her songs. She is just as good without the orchestra as with it. This was particularly noticeable in her closing number, “Hula Dula Man.” They sang without the orchestra, Miss Smith leading. They costume well, and are of pleasing appearance.¹¹³

Several weeks later, Smith returned to the Washington Theater as a single, and Billy E. Lewis submitted another insightful analysis:

Not only is Miss Smith’s voice big, it is musical. Added to this is that peculiar strain and quality only known to our people, and which makes for what is now called blues singing. It is something on the order of what was called coon shouting, and which, in spite of the ugly name had an appeal in it that touched most of our race.

And indeed the white people fell for it as may be noted by the reception Sophie Tucker, and a few other white artists of the kind receive. The gallery gods go wild about Sophie’s singing, and yet she is imitating the Colored folk. The downstairs people like it well enough, but they are too cultivated to show it.

The context of black vaudeville theater entertainment for a black audience enabled the full creative development of the blues. Insular black theater entertainment was a liberating phenomenon for performers. Unconstrained by what white theatergoers were prepared to accept, their blues spoke directly to African Americans. Audiences felt validated and empowered. The “birth of the blues” manifested artistic, commercial, and political motives. One measure of the cultural impact of the blues pertains directly to the term “coon shouter.” As the blues gained acceptance, “coon shouting”—not only the “ugly name,” but what it implied about the commodification of African American culture—gradually descended into the dustbin of history.

In June 1918 Bessie Smith finally returned to the Monogram Theater in Chicago, six years to the week after she had first appeared there with Buzzin’ Burton: “Bessie Smith, the singer of jazz songs and melodies, makes her reappearance after a long absence. She is as popular as ever, and her work stands out.”¹¹⁵ Sylvester Russell, who had completely ignored her first Monogram appearance, now conceded: “Bessie Smith … proved to be a genuine song shouter with an excellent alto voice with power and she is a knobby looker.”¹¹⁶

Russell never entirely warmed to the blues artistry of Bessie Smith. When she appeared at Chicago’s Grand Theater in 1929, less than a year before his death, Russell characterized her as “a type of her race species, part mammy, cordial or get rough and love tokened when she sings about her sporting man. Her voice, which is hard-boiled and pleasing, captivates on its praise meeting delivery.”¹¹⁷

(Courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University)

Smith’s calendar for September 1918 included a date at the Foraker Theater in Washington, D.C., where she was advertised as the “Southern Nightingale.”¹¹⁸ In November she played the Liberty Theater in hometown Chattanooga, along with Tolliver’s Smart Set alumna and blues queen Clara Smith:

Bessie Smith, the Blues Girl Bessie, is a real coon shouter and never fails to get them. She opens with “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and closes with “Bring It With You When You Come.” Ten minutes, one encore and two bows.…

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” was black singer-songwriter Eddie Green’s latest sheet music hit.¹²⁰ In 1927, nine years after she performed it at the Liberty Theater, Bessie Smith recorded it for Columbia.¹²¹“Bring It With You When You Come” was recorded by Ma Rainey as “Hear Me Talking To You.”¹²²

In the autumn of 1920 a cryptographic correspondence from Atlanta once more located Bessie Smith among Decatur Street’s quaint and unique habitués: “Lonnie Fisher’s 81 Theatre company of sixteen people and Bessie Smith, who threw the peanut circuit boss to work the 81, are making good. Decatur Street is the same old street and Flu is still serving chine bones. Come on down and wind your jaws when the wind hits you.”¹²³

When Ma Rainey’s historic run with Tolliver’s Smart Set ended in the summer of 1917, she and her ailing husband returned to southern vaudeville: “Pa Rainey is on the sick list, but is traveling with Ma for the good he has done.”¹²⁴ During this period Ma Rainey often appeared in “sister” acts. At the Queen Theater in Chattanooga in September she was on a bill with Louisville, Kentucky, native Edmonia Henderson: “Ma Rainey is a decided hit with her blues for home sweet home. Miss Irene Elmore and Bee Joyner are clever as a team in their shimmie shi wobble. Then came Miss Edna [sic, Edmonia] Henderson, who is so pleasing with the German Blues. The audience was very much pleased with her.”¹²⁵ The following week’s critique made specific reference to Ma Rainey performing in blackface: “The bill this week was well received by the patrons of this theater. Mr[s]. Rainey was seen to a great advantage in her black face act, and Miss Edmonia Henderson was very pleasing in the straight in Ma Rainey’s act. The team departed for Atlanta, Ga., where they will play.”¹²⁶

Pittsburgh Courier, March 7, 1925.

On October 6, 1917, Edmonia Henderson married Queen Theater stage manager Pete Porter: “Those present at the wedding were Rainey and Rainey, Ma Rainey being the bridesmaid.… Mrs. Porter departed at once to fill an engagement at 91 Theater, Atlanta, joining her husband later. Ma Rainey is also in Atlanta, where she has a suit against the railroad company. The company caused her trouble in selling her a ticket from Atlantic City to Atlanta.”¹²⁷

Later that month, Rainey and Henderson appeared with Watts and Willis’s Darktown Strutters at the Douglass Theater in Macon, Georgia. In November an unnamed informant submitted this frank report:

After three weeks in Birmingham, Ma Rainey returned to Atlanta and did a team act at the 91 Theater with the ubiquitous Evelyn White.¹²⁹ In February 1918 she journeyed to hometown Columbus, Georgia, to visit her sister.¹³⁰ That summer she filled a two-week engagement in Chattanooga with C. W. Park’s Smart Set (a.k.a. Colored Aristocrats), headed by Lew Kenner and his wife Minnie Williams, with Evelyn White, Mattie Dorsey, and others, including a three-piece band comprised of Willie and Lottie Hightower and John Porter.¹³¹ In November, C. W. Park advertised that he had two shows touring under his management, Park’s Colored Aristocrats and Madam Rainey’s Southern Beauty Show.¹³²

On the morning of June 28, 1919, at Montgomery, Alabama, William “Pa” Rainey died “with a stroke of paralysis.… He leaves his wife, who is greatly known as Ma Rainey; one brother, Son Rainey, and a stepmother, Mrs. Lizzie Rainey.… The deceased was an Elk, Mason and K. of P., and is now resting in that wonderful land of ease.”¹³³

Ma Rainey moved over to Park’s Colored Aristocrats, who were scheduled to open in Macon, Georgia, on June 30 with a roster that included Gaston and Gaston singing “He’s In The Jail House Now” and Mose Williams “with his jazz orchestra.”¹³⁴ In September the Colored Aristocrats reported from Richmond, Virginia: “Madam Rainey still holds her own … Gaston & Gaston are still in the jail house … Hester Moore is closing the show with the ‘Blues’ and ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’”¹³⁵

Rainey was heading up a new company by April 1920, when Ray “Pork Chops” Gibson identified himself as a member of the “Dan Michaels and Madam Rainey New York Follies,” which had “just closed two weeks at the Strand Theatre, Jacksonville, with Charleston, S. C., at the Lincoln Theatre, to follow.”¹³⁶ In May the company was advertised as the “Dan Michaels and Ma Rainey Southern Beauty Company,” recruiting “chorus girls, teams, comedians and musicians” to join them at the Warwick Theater in Newport News, Virginia.¹³⁷ But in July, Rainey denied that Michaels had any connection with her Southern Beauty Stock Company: “Mme. Rainey was highly indignant while explaining herself on the subject.”¹³⁸

Madam Rainey’s Southern Beauty Company played two weeks in Detroit “to S. R. O.,” and then two weeks at the Monogram, where they were summarily dismissed by Sylvester Russell: “The Southern Beauties, featuring Mme. Rainey, was last week burlesque Co. at this house. Willie Glover, quite a funny young comedian, monopolized the worry but his voice needs medicine and his summer attire was missing. The Mme. is a buxom alto of the Camp meeting days now fleeting.”¹³⁹

At the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, they received a more generous appraisal:

Back down south again by September 1920, Rainey’s Southern Beauties swung out to Dallas and split a bill with the Hambone Jones Company, featuring Virginia Liston.¹⁴¹ They played a two-week stand in Beaumont in October, “on independent time. The company is doing fine and Mme. Rainey is paying off with a smile. She says, ‘The woods for mine. No more long jumps.’ She is wanting 25 more people, musicians and performers, must double B. and O. Write at once, as business looks good. Company sends regards to Ham Bone Jones Co. We are now out of ‘no man’s land.’”¹⁴²

Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith’s 1920s recordings, the source of their enduring fame, are tokens of hard experience gained on the southern vaudeville routes of the pre-T.O.B.A. era. Unlike so many of their contemporaries, Rainey and Smith survived into the 1920s with their singing powers fully intact. Bessie Smith’s extraordinary talents were noticed by receptive critics very early in her career; but those same critics hinted at her physical and emotional immaturity. It was only during the second half of the 1910s that they began to perceive her outright artistic sovereignty, and not until the release of her first Columbia records in 1923 that she skyrocketed into national prominence.

Ma Rainey’s Paramount records integrate “barrelhouse” style and “down home” sensibilities with vaudeville blues conventions so convincingly that they belie artistic contrivance. However, no one should imagine that Rainey was a naive “folk singer”; she was known as one of the most experienced professionals in T.O.B.A. vaudeville. Her recordings make it difficult to believe that she was ever anything but a blues singer. They include many “very slow” blues songs and practically no “rags.” This indicates a dramatic departure; a decade earlier, her reports to the Freeman were dominated by such titles as “Temptation Rag,” “That Fascinating Ragtime Glide,” “Dying Rag,” “Play That Mikell Rag,” “Barbershop Chord,” “Dreamy Rag,” etc.¹⁴³

While Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith’s records are familiar to appreciators of the blues worldwide, the recordings of their blues singing contemporaries Virginia Liston and Laura Smith are practically terra incognita.¹⁴⁴ Among their original auditors, however, Liston and Smith were considered the peers and rivals of any “blues queen.” These two women were consummate variety artists, adept in all the requisite vaudeville stage skills. Their recordings capture only a fraction of their vast theatrical energies; nevertheless, they harbor uncommon examples of the transitional “ragtime-cum-blues” style with its original luster intact.

Like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, Laura Smith and Virginia Liston were acclaimed “coon shouters” before they emerged as blues stars. Both Laura Smith and Liston retained elements of ragtime repertoire and style long after they had become recognized blues queens. The last song Liston recorded, in May 1926, was “I’m Gonna Get Me A Man That’s All,” which she had introduced with the Kenner and Lewis Amusement Company way back in 1909, when she was billed as “The Louisiana Coon Shouter.”¹⁴⁵ Similarly, Laura Smith kept one foot in each camp throughout her long career.

Virginia Liston’s maiden name was Crawford. The 1900 U.S. Census suggests she was born in Mississippi around 1890, but by age ten was living with her parents and eight brothers and sisters at 728 South Galvez Street, New Orleans.146 On Easter Sunday, April 11, 1909, Virginia Crawford participated in the grand opening of Dixie Park in New Orleans, as a member of the Kenner and Lewis Amusement Company.¹⁴⁷

Laura Smith’s origins and early history are not so clear.¹⁴⁸ She first came into view in the summer of 1909, appearing with a minstrel show in a State Street theater, winning over her audience but drawing harsh moral censure from Sylvester Russell:

It is a peculiar thing to see people come right out of church and go into a vaudeville theater and remain till midnight. One of the features I saw at an electric theater on a Sunday night in King and Simms’ Minstrels was the appearance of Laura Smith, a ragtime song and dance artist, who was applauded in advance like a star. She was third and last on the bill, following Miss Devine and Miss Grundy. When I saw her do an immoral dance, then I knew what the applause was all about … Miss Smith got the reception that would come to her nowhere else except in Chicago; in fact, she would even be closed in any theater twenty miles away. Miss Smith, however, cannot be blamed for a suggestive act in a city where it is encouraged instead of not being tolerated. Such an act is deathly poisonous to the morals of the colored children born in the community … we may as well fill it out by further advising managers who provide amusements for colored people on State street to please cut immoral dances out for the good of a race that needs better teaching and a purer atmosphere for the upbuilding of its people.¹⁴⁹

A few months later Laura Smith popped up in Memphis, a more nurturing environment for a budding blues star. She opened at the Pekin Theater on South Fourth Street, October 26, 1909, and remained through the winter. A local theater correspondent said her act was “nothing but curtain calls.” Teamed with Johnnie Lee and John and Ella Goodloe, she was “a scream,” “the hit of the town” singing “Wild Cherry Rag” and “Teasing Rag.”¹⁵⁰

Virginia Crawford also visited the “Memphis Stroll” during the autumn of 1909, showing at Fred Barrasso’s Amuse U Theater, where she “made an instantaneous hit” singing “I’m Going to Get Me a Man, That’s All” before rejoining the Kenner and Lewis Company at the Belmont Theater in Pensacola.¹⁵¹ Leaving Kenner and Lewis for Benbow’s Alabama Chocolate Drops, Virginia Crawford continued to explore the new Gulf Coast vaudeville platforms. At Pensacola’s Eldorado Theater in the spring of 1910, she had to “respond to four and five encores nightly singing ‘There Ain’t Nothing Doing in the Loving Line.’”¹⁵² Her future husband Dave Liston, a tenor balladeer from New Orleans, was also traveling with the show.¹⁵³

Benbow’s Chocolate Drops were a cutting-edge black road show, moving through a creatively charged theatrical landscape. Crawford was with them in April 1910 when they played the Peoples Theater in Houston, where Kid Love presided at the piano; and she was said to be “holding her own as a coon shouter” when they played the Majestic Theater in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where J. Paul Wyer’s “musical turn” made a hit on the same bill.¹⁵⁴ When the Chocolate Drops left Hot Springs to play a string of dates in Oklahoma, Crawford and Liston mustered out and returned to Houston as a team.¹⁵⁵

Meanwhile, Laura Smith became a charter member of Fred Barrasso’s seminal Savoy Theater Stock Company. Working alongside such outstanding performers as Estelle Harris and Charles Gilpin, she quickly became “the life of the company,” acquiring the nickname “Little Ginger”:¹⁵⁶ “The Savoy Theater is the home of high class musical numbers at all times. For the first half of last week the bill was ‘Miss Mandy’s Moonlight Festival,’ featuring Laura Smith, who was perched in a half moon above the stage, singing ‘Shine On, Harvest Moon.’”157

Skits and dramas of various kinds were an essential element in early black vaudeville; they were the principal justification for the existence of stock companies. In the spring of 1910, the Savoy Stock Company staged a series of “very heavy Western dramas,” including “Dick Turpin, the Outlaw,” in which Laura Smith played “Dottie, a child’s part, and she made good.” In “The Old Nolan Gold Mine” she played “Sarah Matton, the queen of the Black Hills … The play went big and each performer, male and female, played their parts jam up.”¹⁵⁸ She was no less “jam up” in the vaudeville portion of the show: “Then came Laura (Little Ginger) Smith, the Savoy’s favorite, singing ‘Goodby [sic], I’ll See You Some More,’ and the way she put it on. Well, she is in a field by herself.”¹⁵⁹

In June 1910 Barrasso’s Tri-State Circuit road show opened at the American Theater in Jackson, Mississippi, and “packed them to the doors for two weeks … Poor Laura (‘Little Ginger’) Smith sings herself hoarse every night responding to encores.”¹⁶⁰ The show was held over for an additional week: “Miss Laura Smith is still with the company, though very homesick. Oh You ‘Ed Daniels.’”¹⁶¹ On Saturday night, July 2, “Miss Laura Smith closed with the road show … and left for Memphis, where she can get some ‘tatoes’ raised in Mississippi. She will be missed very much, as she was the life of the company on and off.”¹⁶²

While Laura Smith was reestablishing herself at the Savoy Theater, Virginia Crawford resumed her residence at the Peoples and Palace theaters in Houston. In a two-act drama titled “The Stolen Child,” she played “Sue the cook,” and she and Dave Liston sang “Amo.”¹⁶³ Of her new partner, a correspondent said, “Dave Liston, our tenor soloist, is simply grand in his renditions of the most popular songs of the day.”¹⁶⁴

At the Ruby Theater in Galveston in October 1910 a reporter proclaimed Crawford “the greatest of all coon shouters. She takes the house by storm whenever she appears.”¹⁶⁵ In November the Ruby Theater Stock Company put on “The Barber Shop,” with Walter Williams and Dave Liston as the barbers: “Virginia Crawford, the fashion plate, sang ‘That Fussy Rag.’ Buddy Glenn did a song and dance.”¹⁶⁶ A few weeks later, “Mr. Dave Liston, the silver-toned tenor and sweet singer, had the house with him when he sang, ‘When the Moon Is Down on You and I, Love,’” and “Miss Vergie Crawford captured the hearts of the audience by singing ‘I am Going to Get Another Man, That’s all.’”¹⁶⁷

In or around February 1911 Dave Liston and Virginia Crawford got married and left Houston headed east. In March, at Barrasso’s Amuse U Theater in Vicksburg, “The Listons, Dave and Virginia, society sketch artists, made a big hit singing ‘My Heart Has Learned To Love You’ and ‘I’m Going Home.’”¹⁶⁸ From Vicksburg they dropped down to the Gulf Coast and followed the southern vaudeville trail from Lagman’s Theater in Mobile to the Belmont Street Theater in Pensacola, and on to the Globe in Jacksonville.

In 1912 the Listons joined the northern invasion. At the Circle Theater in Philadelphia during July: “Liston and Liston went well.… [They] are creoles with good voices and harmonize wonderfully. The rag shouting of the female member of the team reminds us of Artie Hall.”¹⁶⁹ From Philadelphia they dropped into the Southeast. Notices of November and December 1912 placed them at theaters in Winston-Salem and New Bern, North Carolina.

Teamed with Hambone Jones, Virginia Liston stepped forth as one of the very first blues stars on the African American stage. At the New Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis in May 1913, she reportedly conducted a “blues séance”:

The piece de resistance of the act is Miss Liston’s rendition of the “Blues,” singing the “Titanic” and “Casey Jones.” She is a tallish Southern girl, showing it in her accent. Her singing voice was not that of a nightingale or a mocking bird, but it suited her notion of the “Blues.” She carried the audience with her as if by a hypnotic spell. Men and women answered her and seemingly all unconscious of the fact, or because they could not help but answer her. She sang and swayed. Had she been an evangelist the audience would have been drawn to her feet. As it was, some forgot and worked in words of praise such as are heard in churches. At the close of her “Titanic” she remains quiet a moment while the orchestra plays “Nearer My God to Thee,” then she sings the concluding lines of the last verse.¹⁷²

In their second week at the Crown Garden, Jones and Liston earned another outstanding review:

Miss Liston is still there with her “Blues,” singing them as she only can. She sprang a couple of new ones this week, but the audience wanted more of the “Titanic,” so she had to put it on again. Last week she was mentioned as a tallish Southern girl. She looks as if the “Blues” were made for her to sing. Her swaying body keeping time with her singing adds largely to the effect of her songs. She has also a sweet, sad smile in keeping with that bluish feeling that overtakes everybody now and then. Her songs go right on “home,” that’s all.¹⁷³

Hambone Jones and Virginia Liston, Indianapolis Freeman, June 7, 1913.

These succinct commentaries reflect an attuned concept of what constituted blues singing on the African American stage in 1913. Back in 1909 and 1910 Virginia Crawford had been routinely designated a “coon shouter,” but now the critic detected something in her repertoire and style of singing that he unequivocally identified as blues. A Freeman editorial confirmed her triumph: “Miss Liston and her delightful ‘Blues’ are gone from the Crown Garden, Indianapolis after a splendid two weeks’ run. She was good to the very last minute. She couldn’t sing ’em too much.”¹⁷⁴

(Courtesy Roger Misiewicz)

A remarkable proliferation of songs about the Titanic was recorded by American musicians black and white, reflecting not only the extent to which the disaster imprinted itself on the popular imagination, but also the importance of topical ballads in the early evolution of American vernacular song.¹⁷⁸ Beyond the traumatic image of massive human suffering, the event conjured issues of hubris, as well as class and race discrimination, which figure prominently in some Titanic ballads, especially in recorded versions from years afterward.¹⁷⁹ It remains an open question whether these issues were raised contemporaneously in early black vaudeville—that is, apart from the insinuation of the humorous, sexually suggestive “Elgin Movements” metaphor in the infamous Titanic-themed song featured by the most irreverent of all vaudevillians, String Beans.

Virginia Liston’s 1926 recording of “Titanic Blues,” which presumably preserves the lyric content of her earlier stage version, contains no such editorializing. It is a wholly sympathetic, straightforward narrative account of the tragedy. As the Freeman reported in 1914, “she recites in song what she conceives to be the last scenes and words of the ill fated set.”¹⁸⁰ The jazz band that accompanies her on the Vocalion recording session does not introduce “Nearer My God To Thee” prior to the final verse, as the New Crown Garden Theater band reportedly did in 1913.¹⁸¹

The most characteristic element of Liston’s Titanic recording is its core refrain, “Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well.” Leadbelly’s “Titanic Blues,” recorded for the Library of Congress in 1935, preserves that same refrain; suggesting the famous folksinger might have been familiar with Liston’s recording, or perhaps heard her sing the song in a southern vaudeville theater years earlier.¹⁸²

Virginia Liston is credited on the record label as the composer of “Titanic Blues”; but two months prior to her earliest documented performance of the song, the Freeman noted “Moses Graham, better known as Two-Story Mose, singing ‘Titanic, Fare Thee Well,’” at the Brooklyn Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina.¹⁸³

The “fare thee well” refrain evokes John Queen’s 1901 coon song hit, “Fare Thee, Honey, Fare Thee Well.”184 Queen’s lyrics adhered to the predominant coon song practice of racial insult and epithet; there is nothing noteworthy about them, other than the poetic title and chorus. One might wonder whether Queen lifted it from an anonymous folk source and constructed his coon song around it.

Liston’s “Titanic Blues” is one of a constellation of blues songs that reference some variation of Queen’s “Fare thee, honey, fare thee well.” Others include Ma Rainey’s “Titanic Man Blues,” which is not about the sinking of the Titanic; rather, it is a parody in the form of a lover’s complaint. Where Liston begins her “Titanic Blues”: “Pay attention while I sing this song, / About the Titanic that went down. / It was the last time, / Titanic fare you well,” Ma Rainey counters: “Everybody fall in line, / Going to tell you about that man of mine. / It’s your last time, / Titanic fare thee well.”¹⁸⁵

The “fare thee well” refrain appears on several country blues classics wholly unrelated to the sinking of the Titanic, including Mississippi Joe Calicott’s “Fare Thee Well Blues,” Johnny Head’s “Fare Thee Blues,” and the Memphis Jug Band’s “I’ll See You In The Spring, When The Birds Begin To Sing.”¹⁸⁶ For some unknown reason, along with “fare thee honey, fare thee well,” these three songs all incorporate the insipid couplet, “I’ll see you in the spring, when the birds begin to sing.”¹⁸⁷

The complex regeneration of the “fare thee well, honey” lyric, snatched from its coon song brooder for use in a topical blues song on the black vaudeville stage, then recombined by country blues musicians in a spectrum of personalized takes on a shared motif, manifests a fundamental process in the original formulation of the blues.

During the first week of June 1913, Hambone Jones and Virginia Liston played a return date in Indianapolis, where a local correspondent remarked that Crown Garden proprietor Tim Owsley had “hit it lucky when he booked Liston and Jones.”

This team was here just a few weeks ago. Manager Tim went to Chicago and brought the pair back.… Other teams may do finer work; they may be more humorous and all like that, but when it comes to giving satisfaction just set Liston and Jones down among those at the top of the list.… But it is Miss Liston who is the greater drawing card of the team. She is a “blues” song singer, such as perhaps the Crown has never seen before. She has a splendid personality for the business—tall, good looking with a bit of “wickedness” in her—just enough to make her go good. The men patrons surely must carry salt and pepper in their pockets, for they eat her up. Her “Titanic” holds ’em spellbound. She puts it over mournfully, soulfully, reaching the heart. Her “Casey Jones” is just like gold when she sings it, it does not tarnish or lessen in value. The audience still remains through the “séance” to hear Miss Liston. She is beautifully costumed this week, which adds very much to the act and the effectiveness of her singing.¹⁸⁸

Following a return appearance in Chicago, they were summoned to the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati: “Large crowds turned out Monday night to see Liston and Jones, a new vaudeville act playing over this time. The team have been well received every place they have appeared, and the information received here was to look out for them, they were the goods. Well the information was right.”¹⁸⁹

Later in July, Jones and Liston were at the Alpha Theater in Cleveland, “closing the bill and stopping the house with a riot.”¹⁹⁰ In the autumn of 1913 they made their way into the Piedmont section of North Carolina, where they apparently had a long run. A March 7, 1914, report placed them at the Queen Theater in Wilmington.

When Jones and Liston returned to the New Crown Garden at the end of 1914, they were hailed as “the Eccentric Comedian and the Blues Girl”:

Jones and Liston went from Indianapolis to Cincinnati, to the New Monogram Theater in Chicago, and then to the Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis, where they made a decided hit: “Jones & Liston finish the program in a scream, a continuous scream that knows no end, until the curtain is down. By special request, Miss Liston is singing ‘Titanic Blues,’ and this is the feature of the entire bill. Jones cleans up with his comical lingual and eccentric dancing.”¹⁹²

Still in St. Louis two weeks later, Liston was left to perform single, while her partner went into the hospital: “‘Hambone’ Jones … who was operated upon here last week, was seen on the streets Tuesday, walking slow but sure. ‘Hambone’ is doing nicely and will be back before the footlights soon.”¹⁹³ The next week, Liston participated in a special performance at the Washington Theater, attended by Bert Williams and other members of the Ziegfeld Follies.¹⁹⁴

Jones and Liston were back together at the Queen Theater, Birmingham, Alabama, during the week of June 28, 1915. The following month, they sent regards from Columbia (sic), Georgia: “Both are fast improving in health and we extend our best wishes to the profession.”¹⁹⁵ Health problems made it difficult for Liston and Jones to sustain professional momentum. They dropped out of sight through much of 1916.

Little Laura Smith joined the blues invasion of northern vaudeville theaters in June 1911, on the heels of Butler and Sweetie May. At Ollie Dempsey’s Pekin Theater in Cincinnati she appeared on a bill with banjo picker Vance Lowery. “The big noise in the bill is little Miss Laura Smith, the ‘Southern Rose.’ As a genuine coon shouter she is in a class by herself. The manager booked the little lady from the Southern Circuit, and she has proved to be just what the patrons of the house were looking for. She is very clever.”¹⁹⁶ At the Pekin again the following week, “held over as a feature,” Smith “scored heavily with her two big numbers, ‘Casey Jones,’ and ‘I Wonder Why.’”¹⁹⁷

The following week Whitman and Smith shared the Garden Theater stage with headliners Billy and Louise Kersands. After Louisville they played Indianapolis:

The management of the Crown Garden Theater were fortunate in securing Mattie Whitman and Laura Smith for the weeks bill. They are styled the queens of all the coon song shout’ahs. There are none better. Miss Whitman’s male impersonation is fine. She presents a very pleasing personality, which is approved by hearty applause.…

Miss Smith gives a genuine surprise. She is short and a little heavy; this, together with her ability as a dancer, makes her at once a favorite. In her stunts and movements she has not been surpassed on the Crown Garden Theater stage. She is at once graceful and comical, making an entertainer that one does not tire of seeing. Her “Stop That Rag” is done with suitable action, which gets her the hands.

They double in the first part, doing a rapid firing duet arrangement of “Stop, Stop, Stop.” The vim put into the song at once warms up the audience, and when they wind up it is in a furore. “Smile On Me” is also successfully sung. The team has made itself a favorite in Indianapolis.¹⁹⁹

From Indianapolis, Smith and Whitman moved on to the Monogram in Chicago. Sylvester Russell was still uncomfortable with Little Laura: “Smith and Whitman constituted a new team, which gave quite a deal of satisfaction. While fat legs should have more covering, the little, short soubret seemed to please, and the male impersonator came very nigh to being an artist.”²⁰⁰ Chicago theatergoers were not calling for “Little Ginger” to cover her legs; they were marveling at her songs, her “stunts,” and her “action.”

However electrifying the team of Smith and Whitman, their personal chemistry was too volatile to last long.²⁰¹ A report dated September 12, 1911, informed that Smith was at the Gaither Theater in Cincinnati, performing as a blackface single, singing “Monkey Rag” and “Casey Jones.”²⁰² The following week Smith and Whitman appeared together at Cincinnati’s Pekin Theater, where Whitman was reportedly stabbed “by some unknown party.”²⁰³ Then Smith was reported ill and unable to complete her Cincinnati engagement.²⁰⁴ Details of this muddle were obviously suppressed. Mattie Dorsey and Laura Smith went their separate ways.

Smith headed to Memphis “for a rest.”²⁰⁵ She retreated to her former home base, the Savoy Theater, serving perhaps as long as a year as a producer and performer, staging two- and three-act dramas presented by the Savoy Stock Company.²⁰⁶ Communication in November 1912 described: “This week’s bill is a western drama entitled ‘In The Hills,’ staged by our noble stage manager, Miss Laura Smith, to whom is due much credit for the way she strives to make the show go, and for keeping new ones on hand, always producing something new.”²⁰⁷ Laura Smith was a valuable addition to any small theater company: an African American vaudeville queen with a broad repertoire of theatrical tools.

For a while in 1913, Laura Smith teamed with Rebecca Redmond, a former teammate of composer and stage veteran Jimmie Cox. They played a week at Indianapolis’s Crown Garden Theater, where Hambone Jones and Virginia Liston had appeared the week before:

Indianapolis Freeman, May 17, 1913.

In the fall of 1913, Smith took her skills to the fertile fields of Texas. At the Park Theater in Dallas, she had “the whole town whistling ‘Them Memphis Blues.’”²⁰⁹ At the Alcazar Theater in Galveston, she sang “Baby Seals Blues.”²¹⁰

Smith spent the latter part of 1914 with the Lyric Theater Stock Company in Kansas City, Missouri, where Edward Lankford was manager. In company with Trixie Smith, Doc Straine, Sandy and Gretchen Burns, Mattie Dorsey, and others, she was pronounced “the queen of coon shouters.”²¹¹ “Little Laura is singing one of her own songs, Baby mamma did not care what [you] did, but it’s the way you did it.”²¹² She also produced musical comedies at the Lyric: “Believe me, she is screaming.”²¹³ At the Lincoln Theater in Galveston in the spring of 1915, a correspondent assured: “Little Laura Smith is here with the goods, as usual.”²¹⁴ Late in October she rounded out a blues bill at the Booker Washington Theater in St. Louis that also featured Johnny Woods and String Beans and Sweetie May: “Patrons are at the complete mercy of the ‘blues’ this week, and a large colony of admirers of this grade of music are filling the house to capacity nightly.”²¹⁵

In February 1916 news broke that: “Laura Smith, comedienne, is now the wife of Olander Sharpe, formerly of Greenville, Miss., but employed in Detroit, where the couple will make their home.”²¹⁶ In April she played the New Monogram in Chicago and was declared “the world’s greatest ragger and bluer.”²¹⁷ A May 6, 1916, report from Anselmo Barrasso’s Metropolitan Theater in Memphis announced: “We are expecting Miss Laura Smith next week and it seems as if all Memphis is waiting for her.”

Inexplicably, Smith went missing from the press for the next two years. She surfaced in May 1918 at the Monogram Theater, Chicago, where Sylvester Russell viewed her in a new light: “Laura Smith was a colored people’s scream, and not only that, she now has an act that is clean and could electrify any kind of an audience of any race or color. She was in black face.”²¹⁸ Smith remained in Chicago-area theaters into the summer of 1918. She was back on the road in July, when a descriptive review from the Crown Garden Theater, Indianapolis, praised her new act:

As a performer, a comedienne, Laura Smith should feel proud and satisfied owing to the way she was received at her appearance each evening.

Her monologue varies some from what she did the last time, but it is essentially the same, having to do with her good husband, but of limited salary, and whom she throws down for a new guy who does not show up half as good.

She has a good conception of what appeals as humorous. And then her style of telling her troubles makes for a comedianism that is among the best kind.

She costumes her part so that it helps very much. She shows that she is not ashamed to look the part that she is playing. She takes pride in showing the little plait of hair on the top of her head tied with a bit of red ribbon.

Laura’s steps and stage prances are in keeping with her comedy. Her voice is of good vaudeville quality—strong and musical. She sings “I Hate to Lose You” and her big hit number, “A Good Man’s Hard to Find.”²¹⁹

By the spring of 1919, Smith had joined forces with singer and straight man Everett Butler, advertising themselves as the “Brown Skin Jazzers.”²²¹ At the Star Theater in Pittsburgh, on a bill that included John “Blue Steel” Williams and Sam H. Gray, Smith and Butler turned in “a neat singing and dancing act. Miss Smith received several encores when she sang the ‘Blues.’ Butler made a big hit in his song ‘Mammy O’ Mine.’”²²² Sylvester Russell expressed his opinion that, “Everett Butler, quite a sweet tenor, whose voice and presence appeals to an audience, was a good help mate to the great comedienne.”²²³ “No matter about her team act, she is declaratively funny.”²²⁴

At the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, Smith and Butler were “smart and entertaining”:

Butler, as straight man … is acting his part well. Miss Smith … is being showered with silver to a greater extent than ever, as a result of her catchy singing and other witty productions. The team’s opening song “How You Going to Keep Them on the Farm,” is being well rendered. Butler in his song, “Tosti Goodbye,” is tasty. His voice is a creditable one and his poise is good. Butler is being applauded and encored immensely.

Miss Smith in her “Baby Cox [sic] Blues,” is, as of old, very satisfying to the big audiences. She is creating a real sensation every night and receiving much heavy applause.²²⁵

The Washington Theater reviewer apparently had his “babies” confused. A vaudeville star in her own right, Baby Cox was the daughter of Jimmie Cox; but Smith was surely featuring “Baby Seals Blues,” the “original blues” referred to in earlier reviews.

Laura Smith and Everett Butler appeared at mainstream houses in Gary, Indiana, and Chicago during late November and early December 1919, and then played a return engagement at the Monogram, on a bill with Tim Owsley, Lena Wilson, and Butterbeans and Susie.²²⁶ Sylvester Russell expressed his admiration for Laura Smith’s blackface comedy manipulations: “Miss Smith’s comedy showed great ability and naturalness in a quaint old racial type of mistress.”²²⁷

In February and March 1920, blues songwriters Perry Bradford and Eddie Green both placed ads in the Freeman, touting their latest compositions and specifically soliciting Laura Smith to “write to me” and “let me hear from you at once.”²²⁸

In the summer of 1920 Smith and Butler exercised their creative talents in the more lucrative northeastern theater setting. They were said to be “having fine success in the East,” performing before audiences of both races. In June they appeared at Steinway Hall in New York City.²²⁹ Shortly afterward, Laura reportedly “shook Butler and is doing her single again.”²³⁰ Over the next several months she performed in New York; Asbury Park, New Jersey; and Baltimore, Maryland.²³¹

Laura Smith organized a company known as the Victory Belles. Before the end of the year Butler rejoined her and her troupe.²³² They toured widely, but by the fall of 1922 Butler had left again, and the company continued under a new name: Laura Smith and her Ginger Pep Workers. They played New York City in September 1922, “with two weeks in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Md. to follow.”²³³ They appeared at the Star Theater in Shreveport, Louisiana, on December 4, 1922, and received a review in Billboard:

The Laura Smith Company, with Laura working under cork, and supported by Willard Davenport, comedian; Jimmie Howell, Estelle Floyd, Elmore Floyd, Violette Howell, Dorothy Washington, Millard White, Edith Oliver and Elmira Anderson, occupied the house this week.

Chicago Defender, October 4, 1924. This ad depicts Laura Smith in one of her compelling stage personae.

News reached the Defender in February 1923 that Everett Butler had died, and that “Miss Smith has lately suffered a nervous breakdown.”²³⁵ In April she announced: “The show will close some time this summer in New York, where Mrs. Smith will retire from the show business on account of her partner’s death, E. Butler. She will go in another business in her own home town, Chicago.”²³⁶

Vaudeville life was taking its toll on Little Laura, but she managed to keep her Ginger Pep Workers on the road a while longer. In May they played the Lincoln Theater in Baltimore: “‘Slim’ Jones is the featured comedian who working under cork proved himself a laugh getter of no little ability. Laura Smith, also working under cork heads the feminine contingent and demonstrated a talent as comedienne that compares with the best in the business.”²³⁷

In August 1924 Laura wrote from D.C. to inform that she was “going to make a ‘flying’ trip to New York City, where she will make a few phonographic records.”²⁴² An ad in September introduced “Okeh’s New and Exclusive Artist Laura Smith.”²⁴³ In October OKeh ran a half-page ad devoted to Smith’s debut recording. Some evocative commentary appeared in a separate column: “Laura is one of the blues singers who hold off the records for a long time, but after a long siege by the OKeh promoters she was landed, and we venture to say that the company has made a ten-strike in making Laura an exclusive artist for their recording laboratories.”²⁴⁴

Laura Smith and her Revue played T.O.B.A. theaters through the end of 1924, but in January news came from Chicago that she had suffered another nervous breakdown: “Laura Smith, the Okeh record artist who was booked to play an engagement with her unit at the Grand theater, this city, the past week, but was unable to appear during the entire week, is much improved now, but reports from her home, 4306 Forrestville Ave. that she will remain indefinitely or until she has fully recovered.”²⁴⁵

In October 1925 the Defender announced Smith’s marriage to Slim Jones.²⁴⁶ By the fall of 1926 the couple was living in Baltimore, Jones’s home town, where it was reported: “Illness caused Miss Smith to cancel all present legitimate appearances and to temporarily cease recording. However, she will go to New York the latter part of this month to ‘Can’ several numbers for some prominent firm. Miss Smith says she does not intend to appear upon the stage again with her own unit or any other attraction.”²⁴⁷ Smith continued to make records, and her new releases were duly noted in the African American press, but she did not return to the stage until 1929.

In the summer of 1916 Virginia Liston was spotted in North Carolina, touring under canvas with the Reyno Comedians, “putting on musical comedies” with a cast that included Willard Davenport and “the original ‘Slim’ Jones.”²⁴⁸

Early in January 1917 Liston teamed with comedian George Wright. They appeared that month at the Dixieland Theater in Charleston, South Carolina, where the stage director was J. H. “Blue Steel” Williams.²⁴⁹

News from Washington, D.C., in July 1917 proclaimed: “Virginia Liston, who can sing more ‘blues’ than any other woman in this neck-o-the-woods, is now Mrs. Brown, and is making her home in Northeast Washington.”²⁵⁰ By late September she was on the road with Benbow’s Merrymakers. A note from Lynchburg, Virginia, said they were “drawing bigger business than any company has ever drawn playing this territory.… Virginia Listen [sic], the Queen of the Blues … says ‘Hello, Mule Bradford. I got them rocking in their seats with your Blues.’”²⁵¹

Liston was not much mentioned in 1918. She got some negative press in the Freeman that spring, when John V. Snow, who was seeking the whereabouts of his delinquent performer son Jay Gould Snow, threatened: “Miss Virginia Liston will later on tell a jury why she worked with a minor on the stage against the will of his father.”²⁵⁵

In 1919 Liston reunited with Hambone Jones and returned to prominence as the blues singing star of the Hambone Jones Company, which also included Gonzell White, another popular blues singer from the early days. During the Hambone Jones Company’s two-week stand at the Washington Theater, Indianapolis, in the fall of 1919, Liston featured blues songs from the catalogs of both Pace & Handy and Williams & Piron, “creating a sensation” with “Grave Yard Blues,” “Hop Scop Blues,” “In A Country Town,” and “Hooking Cow Blues.”²⁵⁶ Hambone Jones “got his” by “dancing what he termed a high class opera (Blues) in real comical style.”²⁵⁷

At the Monogram two weeks later, the Hambone Jones Company enacted “Deacon Green on the Picnic Ground,” and Sylvester Russell noted:

While the performance was only a burlesque show until the farce comedy afterpiece, there was fun galore, from start to finish, of the down home order. Hambone certainly shined as the deacon in the farce, but the finishing shimee shiver chorus was a little lengthy in its prominence. Virginia Liston as a national “Blues” songster and also shouter can be accredited with making a hit without going too far in her songs. “The Royal Garden Blues” furnished an encore.²⁵⁸

Indianapolis Freeman, August 24, 1918.

The Hambone Jones Company seemed to be on the verge of national recognition and “actual success financially.”²⁵⁹ But just three weeks after they left Chicago, a report from Detroit notified that, “Mr. Ham Bone Jones, known as the simp comedian, was taken with a stroke of paralysis.… Rev. Charles A. Hill called to see him before his departure for the hospital and we all knelt in prayer.”²⁶⁰ Jones died less than a week later, and the company dispersed.²⁶¹

At the beginning of 1920, the Freeman heralded a revived Hambone Jones Company, headed by Virginia Liston in a new partnership with bass singer, producer, and character actor Sam H. Gray.²⁶² Gray had traveled with Whitney and Tutt’s Smart Set Company and then toured the vaudeville circuits in a popular husband-and-wife team act with Ora Dunlop.²⁶³

The 1920 edition of the Hambone Jones Company promised “Real Colored Musical Comedy with a High Brown Chorus.” The show was well conceived: “Miss Virginia Liston works with more ease than ever, holding her own as leading lady with a wonderful cast. Sam H. Gray, from the Smarter Set Company has some excellent material.… Zackaria White, the only black-face comedian in the show, is a hit from start to finish.… James McPheeters, producer and stage manager, has a very good taste for what it takes to please the public, and is a number one straight character man.”²⁶⁴

Allen “Chintz” Moore, Billboard, October 25, 1924.

Indianapolis Freeman, April 21, 1917.

The Hambone Jones Company’s repertoire of short dramas and musical comedies for the season of 1920 included “Cotton Brokers,” “Bringing Up Husbands,” “Deceived Wife,” and “Between the Firing Lines.” Gray made a hit in one production when, “attired in a sailor costume, he sings the bass solo, ‘Ding Dong’ assisted by six girls in costume to match, who go through a series of drills and at the wind up dance the sailor’s hornpipe.”²⁶⁸

It was announced during this time that Virginia Liston had become Mrs. Sam H. Gray. It seems these two experienced professionals had the respect of the people who worked with them: “Each and every member of this company is treated as a sister and a brother, taking Mr. Gray as ‘Pop,’ and Mrs. Gray as ‘Mom.’ It is what the old heads call a family show. Nothing is too good to do or say in regards to the personality of these two show owners and managers. The Ghost walks twice a week, and any other time he is needed. We are treated with the greatest respect that can be offered by all of the managers of the houses that we play.”²⁷²

Before the end of 1920 the Hambone Jones Company was joined by “Sarah Martin, one of our leading robust blues singers.”²⁷³ Long a favorite in her native Louisville, Martin had made sporadic ventures onto the broader professional stage, but had not yet begun her rise to national prominence. Her stay with the Hambone Jones Company was apparently brief; she was no longer aboard in February 1921, when they put on “Where the Trail Ends in Mexico” at the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, starring Virginia Liston as “Queen of the Mexican sonoras” [sic]:

Receiving her usual great ovations on stepping to the stage every night, Miss Listen [sic] continues as of old to lift the house off its feet with her clean hit rendition musical numbers, “Lorumba” and “Papa Loving Joe,” while it can also be truthfully said that she is highly artistic (aided magnificently with the indispensable cigarette) in her “La Paloma” dancing.… “Jealous Hearted Blues,” which was featured by Miss Virginia Listen with such roaring success … is one of Coleman Minor’s latest great musical hits.… Miss Listen’s posing I think is comparable to that of the movie star, at least it is highly professional.…

Norfolk Journal and Guide, April 2, 1921.

Messrs. Gray, Giles, Davis and Clark [the Ethiopian Quartette] are racially appealing in the musical number, “Old Man Shouts What A Time.” The song is going big.

By early 1922 Liston and Gray had dismantled the Hambone Jones Company. Touring as a husband-and-wife team, they “brought their singing act, At the Lighthouse,’ to New York, and after playing the Lincoln are having no trouble to see the agents.” Late in May they appeared at New York’s Lafayette Theater.²⁷⁵

Later that summer Liston and Gray seem to have temporarily discontinued their team act, while S. H. Gray sang bass with the Manhattan Quartet of the “Shuffle Along Review.”²⁷⁶ But by October 21, 1922, Liston and Gray were reported “working together again in an act entitled ‘It Takes a Good Man to Do That.’ The act has gone well in Philadelphia, the Regent in Baltimore, and has much promise.”²⁷⁷ They soon joined S. H. Dudley’s new production Go Get It, featuring comedians John H. Mason and Slim Henderson, a chorus of twenty-four female and eight male voices, and Blackwell’s Jazz Orchestra.²⁷⁸ Go Get It closed before the end of the year, and Gray and Liston complained that they were owed S700.²⁷⁹

Gray and Liston were on the southern T.O.B.A. route in the spring 1923. They were reviewed at the Frolic Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, in March: “The act is built around ‘It takes a good (man) gal to do that to me.’ The woman rendered ‘Stingaree Blues,’ followed by Gray in a character plantation medley that was great. After a bit of talk the act closed seventeen minutes’ work with ‘Yankee Doodle Blues.’”²⁸⁰ Gray and Liston subsequently participated in a four-act “vaudeville unit” including Hezekiah and Dorothy Jenkins, which toured together for several months on the T.O.B.A. time.²⁸¹

The Chicago Defender of July 21, 1923, reported: “Virginia Liston, the clever blues artist of the team of Gray & Liston, made a couple of records for the Paramount Co. while in Chicago last week. The songs recorded were her own original numbers, ‘Jealous Hearted Blues’ and ‘Never Put Your Mind on No One Man.’ Lowey [sic, Lovie] Austin of the Monogram theater accompanied on the piano.” J. A. Jackson, writing in Billboard, qualified that Liston had made “test records” for Paramount.²⁸² Her recordings of these “original numbers” were apparently not issued. Ma Rainey, however, recorded “Jealous Hearted Blues” for Paramount in October 1924.²⁸³

Virginia Liston’s first verified recording sessions took place September 18 and 21, 1923, for OKeh Records in New York City, with Clarence Williams as piano accompanist.²⁸⁴ In November OKeh began its newspaper promotion with a large photo of Liston in the Defender.²⁸⁵ A “puff” article appeared a few weeks later, informing: “Virginia Liston, celebrated vaudeville artist and Okeh record star, has been ill with rheumatism for the past few weeks. This illness has delayed her vaudeville tour, interrupted her Okeh recordings and spoiled her enjoyment of the new car she recently purchased. The other day she managed to hobble down to the Okeh laboratories in order to make some new Okeh records.”²⁸⁶

The sweet sadness “with a bit of wickedness” described in 1913 commentaries is still evident on Liston’s 1920s recordings. They do not reveal a mellifluous voice; she had neither the rich alto pipes of other, better-remembered vaudeville blues women nor the growling texture associated with “barrelhouse blues.” Her effectiveness as a blues singer derives from her artfully understated delivery, which conveys credibility and conviction without resorting to melodrama. As one contemporaneous commentator put it, “Her songs go right on ‘home,’ that’s all.”²⁸⁷

Virginia Liston, Sam Gray, and Clarence Williams are credited as composers of the classic blues song “You Don’t Know My Mind,” with its signature couplet, “You see me laughing, I’m just laughing to keep from crying.”288 This song was recorded by artists ranging from Clara Smith to Huddie Led-better.²⁸⁹ Liston’s own straightforward, largely unornamented treatment of “You Don’t Know My Mind” is an outstanding example of trenchant expression in blues singing.²⁹⁰ Her recordings emphasize the fact that there is more than one way to put over a blues song.

There is a timeless quality to much of Liston’s blues, blending a decidedly modern brand of soulfulness with a strain of old-time folk style and content, epitomized by her elegant rendition of “Bill Draw,” an obscure blues ballad which is thematically redolent of “Stagger Lee” and melodically reminiscent of “Frankie and Johnny”:

Liston also recorded the stellar ragtime dance songs “Happy Shout” and “House Rent Stomp,” with neat piano accompaniment by Clarence Williams, and two comic tête-à-têtes with husband Sam H. Gray, “Just Take One Long Last Lingering Look” and “You Can Have It (I Don’t Want It),” which are fine examples of that important stage genre.²⁹²

“Adult” humor of a variety endemic to vaudeville is conspicuous in the recorded repertoire of both Virginia Liston and Laura Smith. Smith’s darkly hilarious “Gonna Put You Right In Jail” opens with a meek complaint addressed to her mean “daddy,” but quickly shifts to something more assertive:

OKeh recorded Laura Smith with a bewildering variety of instrumental accompaniment. Her initial session in August 1924 was backed by Tom Morris, cornet; Charlie Irvis, trombone; Ernest Elliot, clarinet; Buddy Christian, banjo; and Clarence Williams, piano. The songs from that session are a testament to her proficiency in singing a “very slow” blues. Back in the days before the twelve-bar, AAB structure became a determinative consideration, the chief stylistic characteristic of published blues songs was their markedly retarded tempo. Purchasers of the sheet music for “Baby Seals Blues” were advised to play it “Very Slow.” The original sheet music for Hart A. Wand’s “Dallas Blues” left no margin for doubt about how a blues tune should be played: “Tempo di Blues. Very Slow.” On very slow blues songs such as “Has Anybody Seen My Man” and “I’m Gonna Get Myself A Real Man,” Laura Smith’s deliberate phrasing puts the emphasis on syncopation.

Laura Smith, as pictured in a 1920s OKeh Race catalogue.

Williams’s piano is the only accompaniment heard on more than half of Virginia Liston’s recordings; he is also the only accompanist on several of Laura Smith’s records, including her “Two-Faced Woman Blues” from October 1924.²⁹⁶ Credited as a Clarence Williams composition, “Two Faced Woman Blues” gives evidence of the vibrancy of song lyric migration in the early blues. It begins with the couplet: “You better stop your man from asking me where I been / He’s always around my house, trying to tickle me under my chin.” Virginia Liston’s January 1924 recording of “Jail House Blues,” credited to Clarence Williams and Bessie Smith, adds spice to that admonition: “You better stop your man from tickling me under my chin / ’Cause if he keep on tickling, I’m sure gonna lick him on in.”²⁹⁷

On Laura Smith’s OKeh sessions of October 1925 she is accompanied by Perry Bradford’s Mean Four, a somewhat outlandish combo consisting of violin, harmonica, guitar, and piano. In her piece-de-resistance “Humming Blues,” she seems energized by their jazzing, and spontaneously shouts, “Oh, whip it,” and, “Play it boys, play it.” In high soprano register, Smith “hums” a passage that is startling in its tonal clarity. Her ethereal, pseudo-operatic humming morphs into a briefly extemporized duet with the fiddler.²⁹⁸ Other full-throated ragtime-cum-blues shouts recorded by Laura Smith in 1925–26 include “Lucy Long,” “Jackass Blues,” and her own composition, “Cool Can Blues”:

Laura Smith’s final OKeh session of March 1927 documents a late-in-life singer with a perceptibly weakened voice that nevertheless seems to have gained in sweetness and charm. This is especially evident on “Don’t You Leave Me Here,” a version of one of the earliest documented blues songs, “Alabama Bound.”³⁰⁰ If only Laura Smith had recorded “Baby Seals Blues,” the “original ‘blues’” that she sang on stage as early as 1913 and at least as late as 1919.³⁰¹

Perhaps something interfered with these plans, because neither the film nor the QRS recordings are known to exist. Late in May, Smith opened at the Grand Theater in Chicago with the famous Drake and Walker Revue: “‘My Chocolate Girl’ was the first of a series of reviews which Henry Drake will stage at the Grand Theater where his company opened to a full house.… Laura Smith was an immediate comedy hit. Her song, ‘You Can’t Come In,’ and her African strut and shivers, brought loud applause from the audience, which she held in captivity.”³⁰³

Defender columnist Bob Hayes judged the three biggest acts in the Drake and Walker Revue to be the “cyclonic jazz band,” the dancers Peg and Peg, and “the one and only Laura Smith. We don’t say how long ago, but Laura seems like old wine that improves as the years go by. Time has certainly left no finger prints on her.”³⁰⁴ When the revue returned to the Grand in August, playing “Zulu Jazz,” Hayes again uncorked the “old wine” metaphor in paying a heartfelt tribute: “Like old wine, Laura Smith improves as the years go by. Her appearance was a signal for an outburst of deafening applause. She seems to have the same speed that put her in the hearts of the public a decade ago. To hear her is to love her.”³⁰⁵

In September Smith became the “warbling, dancing comedienne of the Music Box theater” in Denver, Colorado: “She is being sponsored by influential patrons and in addition to regular broadcasting doubles at an exclusive night club. When her contract ends she will go to Hollywood to enter the movies.”³⁰⁶ In December she was spotted at Curtis Mosby’s Apex Club in Los Angeles.³⁰⁷

Laura Smith spent the remaining few years of her life in Los Angeles. She reportedly played some local theater engagements, but if she made any movies, they have not come to light. Her main creative outlet in Los Angeles appears to have been a local choral ensemble, Sarah Butler’s Old Time Southern Singers. In August 1931 Smith was hospitalized, and friends were notified that “six months time is staring the artist in the face.”³⁰⁸ Six months later a eulogy appeared in the local California Eagle:

With a tenderness that helped dispel the sadness that rested over the chapel, and lent a sweetness to the final parting, Sarah Butler’s Old Time Southern Singers rendered some of Laura Smith’s favorite numbers as she was laid to rest recently. Laura who had been ill for a long time following an attack brought on by high blood pressure had been a member of the famous chorus for about a year and she was well loved by all its 36 members for her friendly smile, ready wit and kindly consideration of others. At rehearsal or during an appearance she was always tirelessly willing to follow directions and aid with the wide experience she had gained on many stages.

Their reluctance at her departure into the great beyond, as well as their bidding her god-speed on her journey into Eternal Peace, was exemplified in some of the softest, sweetest, purest notes that ever welled from human throats.

In the spring of 1924, possibly with assistance from the OKeh Record Company, Virginia Liston again went out at the head of a vaudeville troupe. At the Lincoln Theater in Pittsburgh:

Virginia Liston, Okeh Record Artist, and her famous Okeh Jazz Five, accompanied by select vaudeville specialties from “B’way” opened the New Lincoln here Monday night with a record-breaking attendance.… People were grappling and struggling for standing room.

The curtain went up at six o’clock and the performance was continuous to 12:30. At least 5,000 people witnessed the opening, to say nothing of the thousands turned away.

Miss Liston and her “Jazz Hounds” were probably responsible for the record-breaking attendance.…

The “Plantation Female Quartette” favorably impressed their audience. The quartette included talented Ruth Coleman, Lucy Mitchell, Juanita McGee and Pearl Graham.

Miss Liston and her “Jazz Five,” Globe Favorites, Cleveland, staged a come back in each performance. With the exception of a slight cold she was truly herself when she sang, “You Dono, Sho Dono” and “Taint a Doggone Thing But The Blues.”³¹⁰

Back in Pittsburgh one month later, the company put on a skit called “Domestic Entanglement” at the Elmore Theater, with “Miss Liston as the lady of the house and also the feature attraction of the play.… She also sings a number of her Okeh Record hits.… Sam Gray as a characteristic singer is at his best when the quartet sings ‘In 1999.’ … The music is furnished by the Famous Okah [sic] Jazz band. Take it from us, it is jazzy.”³¹¹

From Pittsburgh, Liston and Gray set off on a southern tour with a company that included comedian Boots Hope, “The World’s Greatest Liar,” and the Seminole Syncopators, who also recorded for OKeh in 1924.³¹² A big three-week engagement at the Paramount Theater in Memphis ended badly and may have spelled the end of the company. Initially, the Memphis daily raved about how:

A “blues” singer who could teach Memphis, Tenn. something about the art, and the biggest five-piece jazz band in the world, were features of the special concert staged at WSB Tuesday night by the Colored entertainers with the Virginia Liston Jazz revue, now playing the Paramount theater, 192 Auburn Ave., where a “Midnight Ramble” for white patrons only will draw a big house Wednesday night at 11 o’clock.

Virginia Liston, billed as “Queen of the Blues,” lived up to all claims, while the Seminole Syncopators put more impetuosity and variety into their music than would be expected of a 20-piece ensemble. Both attractions are on the Okeh phonograph list. S. H. Gray filled out a unique hour with three songs done in basso profundo style.³¹³

Soon afterward, Gray complained that the show had been “buncoed” by its northern managers: “Fulcher and Bohan of New York City have done it again—jumped down and skipped town owing the show three weeks salary and also left behind a bum check for $140 with the theater where we finished last night—Paramount theater—and the theater manager attached our beautiful silk drop on that account.”³¹⁴

At the end of 1924 Gray and Liston were in Sam Gray’s hometown Baltimore, producing “Domestic Entanglement” with a small company that included Dinah Scott, Frank Bailey, Gertrude Scott, and Hazel Springer.³¹⁵ This turned out to be a prelude to “Eliza Scandals,” “an original production from their own pens.”316 Gray and Liston’s “Eliza Scandals” Company greeted the New Year in the Tidewater section of Virginia, and then tracked southward.³¹⁷ In February a mainstream columnist in Macon, Georgia, called it “the best small show that he had ever looked at. It carries everything, including a plot. It was written and produced by Sam H. Gray and staged by his wife and professional partner, Virginia Liston, one of the greatest topical singers on the stage.”³¹⁸ Another review of the same performance appeared in Billboard:

S. H. Gray’s Eliza Scandals got off to a well-filled house with a program that pleased. Four girls in checkered overalls and bandannas opened before a special drop. At the conclusion of the first number Virginia Liston joined them in silk overalls to sing “Going Home,” a number that has been used too often.

Dinah Scott, a Macon boy, is comic in chief. He and “Bozo” Bailey followed the girls in dialog and songs that drew plenty of laughs. Sam Gray, in sailor garb, sang his own arrangement of “Tuck Me to Sleep” and pleased immensely.…

Virginia Liston, Okeh record singer, scored in four numbers, accompanied by “Bozo” Bailey on a stringed instrument. This was followed by Gray and Liston, with the girls in “Liza,” with flash-light effects.… The show closed an hour’s performance with “Goin’ Home” a fast finale number. A serial and a feature picture completed the program.³¹⁹

The “Eliza Scandals” Company proceeded to Florida, where they made the rounds for about three months. At the Grand Theater in West Palm Beach, Liston was referred to as “the titanic blues shouter,” suggesting that the popularity of her “Titanic Blues” had yet to subside.³²⁰ “Eliza Scandals” was among the year’s top African American stage productions, but the company nevertheless had difficulty navigating the financial conditions that prevailed on the T.O.B.A. routes.³²¹

(Courtesy C. H. Douglass Business Records Collection, Middle Georgia Regional Library)

After their West Palm Beach engagement, Sam Gray hired an advance man and attempted to move “Eliza Scandals” off the black theater circuit:

For reasons not fully explained, this new arrangement did not last long; as Defender columnist Joseph “Jonesy” Jones reported from Jacksonville:

S. H. Gray’s Eliza Scandal company is the present attraction at the Strand theater for the week of April 27, and doing business. The aggregation is headed by the Okeh record artist, Virginia Liston.… On April 18, 19 and 20 the show played a successful engagement at the Gem theater [white], this burg. The engagement was a big success every way, excepting no money was made. Right here and there S. H. Gray decided he would free lance no longer, but return to the fold of the T.O.B.A. moguls. Hence his present date at the Strand.³²³

During their Strand Theater engagement, “Virginia Liston stormed the house with her blues renditions, assisted by the Guitar fool, ‘Bozo’ Bailey. S. H. Gray’s girly quartet also scored heavily.”³²⁴ “Guitar fool” Frank “Bozo” Bailey was better known for his work as a team comedian and dancer.

“Eliza Scandals” toured T.O.B.A. theaters in Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama through the summer of 1925. Liston ducked out for about a week in June, traveling to New York City to make more records for OKeh. She may have taken part in a blues singing contest while there, because two months later she was noted as “the prize winner at the New Star Casino, New York City, for being the world’s greatest, snappiest blues shouter.”³²⁵

At Nashville in July, the company ran into a problem with Bijou Theater owner and T.O.B.A. president Milton Starr, who reportedly deducted $75 from their payment on the grounds that a company Gray had brought into the Bijou three or four years earlier was “three people short.” Gray pointed out that “T.O.B.A. contracts have no clause that house managers can deduct for a company coming in a theater short of people.” But Starr left town before the conclusion of the “Eliza Scandals” engagement, and “sent a statement back to Gray by a boy that cleaned the theater. None of the company’s expense had been paid. After shuffling all night Gray managed to make his train.”³²⁶

Circumstances continued to deteriorate after Gray “made the mistake of routing the company for the summer over the worst territory, Arkansas and Oklahoma.”³²⁷ In Hot Springs they encountered W. Benton Overstreet, who was having his own troubles, trying to get out of jail after former partner William Sellman pressed charges against him for allegedly stealing costumes and other articles from his trunk.³²⁸ Upon his release, Overstreet became the musical director of Virginia Liston’s Revue, which opened at the Ella B. Moore Theater in Dallas in a crippled state:

At present this little company consists of six people—S. H. Gray, Virginia Liston, William Benton Overstreet and Mrs. William Benton Overstreet. There is no comedian with the aggregation at present and Mr. Gray is doing the comedy. Mr. Gray is corresponding with performers to complete his number.… Miss Virginia Liston, leading lady of the Liston-Gray company, is somewhat ill, suffering with her throat. She is contemplating leaving for her home to undergo an operation.329

Liston left the show a short while later and did not return. Gray turned his back on vaudeville and joined the Silas Green from New Orleans minstrel show as producer. Before the close of 1925 Liston joined the “Shufflin’ Sam” company, forty members strong. She was “singing her own blue songs, is a hit everywhere and is just as big a success on the stage as she is on the records.”³³⁰ However, in April 1926 Liston was “taken suddenly ill in Chicago … and had to leave the show.”³³¹

One month later she was with Walter Rector’s Darktown Strutters at Indiana Harbor, Indiana.³³² In December 1926 she appeared at Detroit’s Koppin Theater: “Virginia Liston, record artist, scores heavily in several songs. It has been some time since Miss Liston has played the house. She displayed a wonderful and pleasing personality. There are not so many blues singers who work their songs as Miss Liston does. She has a way of her own and she receives much applause throughout.”³³³

An alarming note was sounded in February 1927, when the Pittsburgh Courier reported: “Virginia Liston, who was shot by her ex-sweetheart, Walter Brown, manager of the Columbia Hotel, has recovered from a chest wound from which the bullet was extracted. Just what Miss Liston was doing in the hotel is not known. The famous Vocalion and Okeh record star will not prosecute Mr. Brown, who is an Elk.”³³⁴

In November the Defender published a review from the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, where Liston had inspired rhapsodic prose a decade earlier. This time she was barely noted—“Virginia Liston, singer of note”—on a bill with Johnnie Woods and Little Henry.³³⁵ This was her final dispatch from the vaudeville routes.

In the fall of 1929 a letter reached the Defender from St. Louis: “Virginia Liston, once a popular performer, writes that she is happily married … Mrs. Charles Harry Lee Smith asks friends to write to her at 370–7A Chouteau Ave.”³³⁶ According to her entry in Blues Who’s Who, Liston died “June 1932, St Louis, MO (unconfirmed).”³³⁷

The blues emerged in southern vaudeville early in the 1910s. By the 1920s many of the original blues stars were retired, sick, or dead. Laura Smith and Virginia Liston survived into the T.O.B.A. era and left a legacy on race recordings, only to be relegated to the wayside of modern blues literature.³³⁸ But, in their heyday, Smith and Liston were as influential in popularizing the blues as any of their contemporary performers, male or female, with the sole exception of Butler May.

The historical reality of black comedians performing “under cork” for enthusiastic audiences of their peers might be difficult for a modern auditor to digest; but in the context of early-twentieth-century African American vaudeville there was often a cleverly subversive aspect to the use of blackface. Intelligently conceived blackface characterizations on the black vaudeville stage represent an aggressive process of self-definition, license, and acknowledgment of the absurd humor that clings to the familiar aspects of everyday life. The deliberate manipulation of this crude theatrical convention, an emblematic remnant of “Ethiopian minstrelsy,” imbued black vaudeville with a highly charged communicative energy.³³⁹

Crow Jane was a popular vehicle for female impersonation by blackface comedians on the African American stage. The character is only nominally removed from the “wench” archetype, which seemingly predated it, but also existed concurrently. Andrew Tribble, prominently featured in the big musical comedy productions of Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson, was regarded as “one of the best ‘wench’ characters of the stage.”³⁴¹

A denizen of urban back streets, Crow Jane is closely related to “Black Sal from Dark Alley,” a popular “wench impersonation” performed by Philip Williams with Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels in 1909.³⁴² As late as 1925, Leroy “Kike” Gresham, blackface comedian with the Silas Green from New Orleans show, appeared “in a cabaret scene … [doing] his ‘Winch’ [sic] impersonation, for which he has no peer.”³⁴³

A 1911 correspondence from the Amuse Theater in Vicksburg, Mississippi, described how the male member of the team of Pugh and Pugh “takes them out of their seats when he does that ‘Crow Jane Walk.’”³⁴⁴ In 1914, at the Circle Theater in Philadelphia: “Bernard and Lee, in a very funny sketch, entitled ‘The Crow Jane Reception,’ gives a pleasing fifteen minutes of fun and song.”³⁴⁵

Offstage, Crow Jane was something more than a comedy role for female impersonators. A 1934 article on black vernacular speech articulated that “To call a dark girl Crow Jane is very low-down, a racial insult.”³⁴⁶ As a referential phrase, “Crow Jane” is apparently still latent in the black cultural lexicon, although its meaning has become somewhat scattered.³⁴⁷ It certainly has a long history on blues records. Mississippi Delta bluesman Skip James recorded his take on “Crow Jane” as late as 1965.³⁴⁸ Earlier renditions include Sonny Terry’s “Crow Jane Blues” from 1947, Carl Martin’s “Crow Jane” from 1935, vaudeville blues star Ida Cox’s “Crow Jane Woman” from 1928, and Julius Daniels’s “Crow Jane Blues” from 1927.³⁴⁹

A 1928 recording of “Crow Jane Alley” by Foster and Harris preserves a laundry list of Crow Jane’s unpleasant proclivities:

The term “Crow Jane” appears in Waymon “Sloppy” Henry’s “Hobo Blues,” a bluesy version of “Casey Jones.”³⁵¹ Crow Jane is also referenced in Blind Blake’s 1930 recording “Righteous Blues” and Blind Willie McTell’s “Bell Street Lightnin’” from 1933, wherein the singer acknowledges: “I’m down in Bell Street Alley, / Just as drunk as I can be / Seem like them Crow Jane women, / Man, done got rough with me.”³⁵²

Rose Melville in her Sis Hopkins stage persona, Richmond Planet, February 3, 1917.

Beyond their symbolic attributes, Crow Jane and Black Sis Hopkins were piquant parodies of personality types that were immediately recognizable to black theater audiences. As such, they emphasize the potency of in-group communication in black vaudeville.

Ora Criswell and Trixie Smith both featured popular takes on Black Sis Hopkins in their stage acts. Trixie Smith’s “Sis” sang an original blues song in 1914, probably inspired by Criswell, who had introduced her own blues composition in 1913 under the guise of her original blackface personification, “Bolivia from Possum Trot.”

Ora Criswell was the paragon of all blackface comediennes. Under her control, blackface makeup became a fetish with powers to invade the subconscious. She mesmerized African American audiences with her racial comedy, ragtime, and blues singing. Roundly celebrated during her lifetime as “the supreme representative of Colored women in her line of work—nothing short of a genius,” Criswell might as well be imaginary for all the scholarly attention she has thus far received.³⁵⁴ Like Butler May, Criswell died in 1917 and left no sound recordings. Contemporaneous critical commentary is essentially all that remains to mark her life’s work, perhaps along with a mote of reflection in pioneer southern blues recording artist Trixie Smith, herself a blackface comedy star in the Criswell mold.

Criswell was a past master of both northern and southern stage arts who took part in the earliest experiments in black vaudeville.³⁵⁵ She may have been a Memphis native. When she appeared at the Rialto Theater there in 1901 with J. Ed Green’s landmark Ragtime Opera Company, she was described as “Memphis’ own ragtime.”³⁵⁶ According to one retrospective, Criswell also appeared in Chicago in Green’s original Pekin Theater Stock Company production The Mayor of Dixie.³⁵⁷ Another article said that she had been a member of Ernest Hogan’s The Oyster Man Company during its brief run in 1907.³⁵⁸

Chicago Broad Ax, September 16, 1911.

In the spring of 1910 they appeared in southern vaudeville. At the Airdome in Jacksonville, Criswell was “forced to sing ‘Wild Cherry Rag’ as an encore. She has stamped this song into the hearts and minds of the people, and they can not get enough of Miss Webb and the ‘Wild Cherry Rag.’”³⁶⁰ But her success was tarnished by a “wrangle” that resulted in Webb and Webb slipping away from the Airdome “without a moment’s notice, owing the management over $40.”³⁶¹

Later that summer they played Barrasso’s Savoy Theater, and then went out on his Tri-State Circuit.³⁶² They were at the American Theater in Jackson, Mississippi, when Barrasso posted a warning: “Managers booking colored talent for stock vaudeville beware of the team of Webb and Webb.” He cited their “overdrawn salary” and “the vile tongue of Miss Ora ‘Criswell’ Webb, who is the trouble maker for the team.”³⁶³ Two months after Barrasso’s warning, Webb and Webb played the rival Pekin Theater in Memphis on a bill with Rainey and Rainey.³⁶⁴

Shortly thereafter, Webb and Webb parted ways, and the trail of bad press that had followed them from New York to Memphis ended. By 1911 Ora Criswell had returned north as a single, and was working her way through the key black vaudeville theaters of the Midwest. At the Monogram in Chicago, Sylvester Russell found her “magnetically entrancing” as a “singing soubrette.”³⁶⁵ A few weeks later, Criswell made her bow at the Crown Garden in Indianapolis, where she was heralded as “the old time coon shouter, of the original Pekin Stock Company of Chicago.… She presents a straight singing act offering some good and catchy songs, the best received, perhaps, was ‘I can’t be satisfied with one.’”³⁶⁶

At the beginning of 1912 the “famous singing comedienne” appeared at the Howard Theater in Washington: “Her singing of ‘Pianoman’ gained for her much applause. Ora Criswell is natural on the stage: she is Ora Criswell and the same off the stage. She is not artificial. She needs no grease paint, powder or rouge to make her different than she is. All though [sic] she uses it, she does not need it.”³⁶⁷

Before the end of 1912 Criswell formed a sister team with Laura Bailey, formerly a member of the Cubanola Trio.³⁷⁰ Criswell and Bailey kicked off the New Year 1913 with a skit in which Bailey played a society sophisticate and Criswell exhibited “her powers in blackface comedy by assuming the role of a maid from ‘Bam,’ introducing her ‘Haunting Melody,’ accompanying herself on a diminutive piano.”³⁷¹

At the Lincoln Theater in New York later that spring, “Criswell and Bailey in their Zulu number and changing to their Indiana [sic, Indian] number were a scream.”³⁷² That summer they were labeled the “female Williams and Walker,” and Criswell was singled out as “America’s premier coon shouter.”³⁷³

She is a black face comedian and worthy of the title. Her work is new, novel, having nothing to do with set forms. Her partner, Miss Bailey is a good straight.… They do a little skit. Miss Bailey advertises for a lady to do a leading part in a theatrical company. Miss Criswell answers, making the mistake in thinking a domestic was wanted. After a little rapid firing talk between them, which is full of wit and humor, Miss Bailey discovers that the odd looking applicant has some ability and will just suit. When Miss Criswell comes back she is Manners—dressed in the best and looking good even if as black as coal. She does some steps and movements which set the audience wild. The two share the honors.… To say they go big is to put it mildly. Their songs are “Midnight Choo Choo,” a talking parody, sung by Miss Criswell; “Beautiful Dreams,” by Miss Bailey; “Million Dollar Bill,” sung by both.³⁷⁴

The skit was titled A Leading Lady Cook.³⁷⁵ When they put it on at the Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis, Criswell was proclaimed “Fanny Brice in black face.”³⁷⁶ The news that she was “dressed in the best and looking good even if as black as coal” suggests she had radically reconfigured her blackface stage character. One objectifying critic concluded that, in addition to being funny, Criswell was “one of the prettiest and most dainty little pieces of flesh that ever beamed from behind burnt cork.”³⁷⁷ At the Crown Garden in Indianapolis, “The singing of ‘Chief Bungaboo’ by the two was the best ever heard at this theater.… They mix up Indians and Zulus, but that doesn’t matter, since the object is to get to wear those pretty Indian costumes in Zululand. A feature of the act is the lightning change of Miss Criswell from cork to her natural face.”³⁷⁸

Indianapolis Freeman, December 20, 1913.

Before the end of the year Criswell and Bailey played a return engagement at the Crown Garden: “The ‘Criswell Blues’ by Miss Criswell, her own composition, was applauded time and time again. They were a weird something on the piano, but with a vocal touch at the conclusion of the instrumental stanzas. Perhaps she alone can do them. Miss Bailey joins in the humming which is a feature.”³⁸⁰

There was a timeliness to Ora Criswell’s blues-in-blackface act. Only a decade earlier, the popular stage was crowded with blackface comedians singing coon songs. Operating within racially insular venues before sympathetic audiences of their peers, Criswell and her contemporary performers had a very different orientation. They transformed the blackface convention into a deflective agency through which blues and other vernacular arts were introduced to the professional stage.

Criswell and Bailey split up before the summer of 1914, and Criswell went ahead as a single. At the Monogram Theater, Sylvester Russell proclaimed: “There was one song bird in black, who depicted the life of her own race ancestry in modern time, and that was Ora Criswell, a real star, who sang the ‘Choo Choo.’”³⁸¹ He later added, “To make fun in black face is no easy task for a woman, but Ora Criswell has proved to be the ‘funniest gal’ of the kind on record.”³⁸² Russell and his contemporary critics did at times criticize the purposeless, unreflective use of blackface make-up; but they recognized that in the hands of an intelligent performer it could be an effective tool. After all, the most celebrated black male comedy stars of the era practiced their art under cork: Ernest Hogan, Bert Williams, Sherman Dudley, Salem Tutt Whitney, Shelton Brooks, etc.³⁸³ Palpable change was nevertheless in the air, and Ora Criswell was recognized as one of its preeminent agents.

Criswell’s most enduring stage creation was “Bolivia from Possum Trot.” At the Crown Garden Theater in the fall of 1914 the house critic observed that, “while made up a jet black,” she “seems to enjoy the character. Some performers seem to wear the black paint because they have it to do. Ora forgets that she is Ora, and at once becomes Oblivia [sic].… She does a parody on All Night Long’ which gets her generous applause. She has a most satisfactory, tuneful voice, which she can make soulful enough to start tears in the eyes. And then she can turn it in a moment to a mimicry that tickles all.”³⁸⁴ Tim Owsley added: “She doesn’t care how black her makeup nor how grotesque she looks. This is the art of her work and it wins. She sang her two songs, a parody on ‘All Night Long’ and ‘When the Chu Chu Leaves for Alabam.’”³⁸⁵ These commentaries point to the essential relationship between blackface makeup and creative abandon on the African American vaudeville stage. The racially exclusive theatrical context afforded a genius like Ora Criswell great latitude for her fertile imagination, unfettered by the judgment or approval of outsiders.

Word came in November that Criswell and fellow performer Jimmie Marshall had gotten married and were playing in stock at a theater in Nashville: “‘Aunt Peggy’s Birthday’ is the title of the bill … with Ora Marshall, nee Criswell, as Aunt Peggy.”³⁸⁶ Returning north to the Monogram, the new couple “danced ‘Virginia’” together in blackface.³⁸⁷ The “Annual Review of the Stage” for 1914 observed that, “in her line of work,” Criswell “has no superior.”³⁸⁸

I will have everybody to understand that there is no artist, black or white, on the American stage today in her line who is in Ora Criswell’s class. Jimmie Marshall, who is a good young character and straight man, is no black-face comedian, and colored people will not accept him as such. Just where the hitch is, in framing their act, is their own business, but the public would accept the team both in white and colored houses everywhere if Jimmie will do the straight or do a yellow slum boy comedy to Ora’s black-face character.³⁹²

Shortly thereafter, Marshall and Criswell gave up on their team act. In May 1915 Criswell returned to the Crown Garden as a single and “put it on with a feeling.”³⁹³ At the Monogram, she opened with what Russell termed “an unreal haggard fiction,” and then came back in “a jungle scene, with two good songs, an excellent costume, her wonderfully musical alto voice, and skillful art in dancing.”³⁹⁴

During the fall of 1915 Criswell played theaters in North Carolina in a team act with Jimmie Avery.³⁹⁵ At the beginning of 1916 she took her turn in the long line of soubrettes who teamed briefly with Butler “String Beans” May. Later that spring, the Panama Café in Chicago “was full downstairs, owing to the appearance of Ora Criswell, the mirthful star.”³⁹⁶ Her appearance at this landmark State Street cabaret marked a rare departure from the vaudeville routes.

Alarming news came later that summer that Criswell was laid up at a friend’s house in Cincinnati, “seriously ill … very low and in a dangerous condition. She wishes the world God’s blessing.”³⁹⁷ Within the next six weeks, however, she was back on the road.³⁹⁸

“Bolivia from Possom Trot,” Indianapolis Freeman, December 23, 1916.

Indianapolis Freeman, July 30, 1910.

Ora Criswell came back to them in her second week even better than her first week, when she carried her audience by storm.… Wave after wave of laughter greeted her, and which must have proved very satisfactory to her. She closed with her well-known letter from her mother who lived in the South, giving her advice. It was a fine opportunity for the Criswell humor. She sustained herself as the most splendid woman performer of her race, and one of the very best in the business regardless of race.

Miss Criswell surprised her audience by her fine renditions at the piano. These were among the best of the kind. Her “Criswell Blues” called for more. “The Melody” played and sang was a great number. Her song “Tennessee” was touching, reaching the hearts of southerners, especially those from that state, with her pathos and soul longing for the dear old Southland—the section of song and story. Here she proved herself again to be in a class by herself, distinctly two great and satisfying acts in one.

Miss Ora Criswell, while doing blackface makes it a point to costume in the best style. This week she is in cream colored silk, making a superb looking Negro woman whose color was forgotten owing to her ability. Ora Criswell as a comedienne is great!⁴⁰⁰

How Criswell managed to “banish all thought of color” while performing in blackface, lavender satin, and cream colored silk must remain to some extent a mystery. Her “black but comely” character, seemingly drenched in color, represents an extravagant, comic adaptation of Aida Overton Walker’s groundbreaking turn-of-the-century “dark soubrette.”⁴⁰¹ The source of Criswell’s genius was her startling originality, “having nothing to do with set forms.” Criswell effectively undermined those set forms, turning the blackface demon on its head. Her radical comic manipulations epitomize the aphorism: “Change the joke and slip the yoke.”⁴⁰²

Early in 1917, Criswell announced plans to launch a sister team with future blues recording artist Lena Wilson.⁴⁰³ But she was working single that spring, in “a Zulu act that sets them screaming,” at the Vaudette Theater in Detroit.⁴⁰⁴ Two months later news came that the great blackface comedienne had “passed away at Mercy hospital, Baltimore, Tuesday, May 29, after a lingering illness of four weeks.”

Ora Criswell had “lived the life,” and when she died she was, like many other performers, “without funds.” Friends were compelled to hold a benefit to help defray her funeral expenses.⁴⁰⁶ Meanwhile, former partner Laura Bailey was accused of blowing into Baltimore and laying claim to Criswell’s theatrical trunk, to which she responded:

I did not make a special trip to Baltimore as stated, but instead I threw down three days’ work to show my duty as a performer and one-time partner to go to Baltimore to show my last respects to the dead, and I also did all I could do to see that she would be put away nice. I could not afford to bury her, but through the kindness of Princess Mysteria and partner, who gave the benefit for her, she was put away nice, without having to beg for her, and Mrs. Minnie C. Moore, who had her insured, is the lady who has her trunk … so make your soul right with God, as I have done and as my former partner, Ora Criswell, did before she died.⁴⁰⁷

In the wake of Ora Criswell’s death, Trixie Smith was recognized as the premier blues-singing blackface comedienne. The Freeman’s end-of-the-year review of the stage for 1917 declared her “the logical successor of Ora Criswell.”⁴⁰⁸ Smith was reportedly born in Atlanta, some time after 1888.⁴⁰⁹ According to a 1910 Freeman report, her given name was Adella J. Smith.⁴¹⁰ When first mentioned in the spring of 1909 she was traveling with the Florida Blossom Minstrels.⁴¹¹ The following spring, “Adella Smith with Billy Bliss made quite a hit … in a ragtime jubilee” at the newly inaugurated Olympia Theater in Anderson, South Carolina.⁴¹²

By October 17, 1910, she had adopted the stage name “Trixie” and was in the midst of a four-week engagement at the Famous Theater in Atlanta.⁴¹³ At the end of that year, the Globe Theater in Jacksonville advertised her as “Trixie Smith, the sweetest singer in Dixie.”⁴¹⁴ She opened the vaudeville portion of the show, and then took part in the farce comedy production Mamma’s Baby Boy, playing “Sallie Brown from Eaton Town, a dope fiend.”⁴¹⁵

In February 1911 Trixie Smith was riding the Tri-State Circuit with Barrasso’s Strollers, in company with Bessie Smith and Edna Landry Benbow.⁴¹⁶ In May she appeared at the Airdome in Tampa, Florida, engaging the up-to-date coon shouter repertoire: “Lovie Joe,” “Some Of These Days,” and “Honk a Tonk Rag.”⁴¹⁷ One week later, the Globe Theater in Jacksonville staged Life of Bridge Street with a cast of twenty-five people, including “Trixie Smith, coon shouter,” under the direction of Madame Cordelia McClain.⁴¹⁸ Evidence of Smith’s popularity, along with a hint that she may have begun performing under cork, is found in a correspondence later that summer: “Miss Trixie J. Smith, that singing girl, closed a six weeks’ engagement at the Globe Theater, Jacksonville, Fla., on July 8, and opened at the McKinnie Theater on July 10, where she is taking six and seven encores nightly, singing some of her favorites. Minor strain—‘That’s Why They Call Me Shine.’”⁴¹⁹ At the McKenzie Theater in Augusta, Georgia, Smith put over “Stop That Rag” and “Some of These Days” “to the delight of all.”⁴²⁰

Kansas City Call, November 7, 1924.

She was back south by the spring of 1912, when “The Smiths (Trixie and Speedy), late of Brooks-Smith Stock Co.,” appeared at the Twelfth Avenue Theater in Nashville on a bill headed by Baby F. Seals.⁴²³ By summer she was working single.⁴²⁴ In the spring of 1913, at the grand opening of the Lyric Theater in Miami, she “had the audience on their feet yelling with delight two minutes after she had been on the stage. She took so many encores that it looked as if the rest of the performers would have to go home, but finally the audience was content to let her go. There is no doubt of her being the favorite soubrette of Miami and she has been retained by the management for eight weeks and will probably stay longer.”⁴²⁵

Trixie Smith made her way to the Lyric Theater in Kansas City in the spring of 1914, where she stayed for three months, “making good each night with her comedy songs.”⁴²⁶ When she finally left Kansas City to play the Monogram in Chicago, Sylvester Russell pronounced: “There was one Trixie Smith, a Southern girl in black face, who pleased the far down folks. She is a girl who shows signs of real talent and has a good singing voice. She made good and will later be a winner.”⁴²⁷

That fall she appeared at the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati: “This girl has a nice single that took well. Her blackface turn is good.”428 Her next week’s engagement was at the New Crown Garden Theater in Indianapolis, where Ora Criswell had just left audiences clamoring for more. In the afterglow, Trixie Smith triumphed as “the ‘Blues’ Girl,” “the girl who sings her own Blues. That is, she composes them. Her ‘Melody Blues’ makes a big hit. Her other songs are also nicely received. She is also something of a monologist. Trixie’s makeup gets ’em. One immediately thinks of Sis Hopkins, and she says some strangely funny things.”⁴²⁹

She went from the Crown Garden to the Monogram. This time Russell merely noted: “Trixie Smith does a lonesome blackface.”⁴³⁰ After witnessing the same performance, Chicago Defender columnist Columbus Bragg enlisted Smith to participate in a classy benefit matinee at which, “All the Stroll’s theaters and cabrays [sic] will combine.… Miss Trixie Smith, a versatile singer, as she can sing in three voices, and one of the race’s greatest black-face comediennes, will appear in straight costume.”⁴³¹

In the fall of 1915, Trixie Smith joined Alexander Tolliver’s Big Show at Richmond, Virginia: “She never fails to win the audience and always draws a big laugh.”⁴³² She remained with Tolliver’s Show for about two weeks before jumping off to team with Ebbie Burton in a “red hot vaudeville show” at the Pekin Theater in Savannah, Georgia.⁴³³

In January 1916 the team of Trixie Smith and Ebbie Burton took the platform at Gibson’s New Standard Theater in Philadelphia, in a variety act that consisted of “singing, dancing and persiflage.”⁴³⁴ Shortly thereafter, Burton broke off to partner with String Beans.

That spring Trixie Smith helped inaugurate the Rose Theater in Augusta, Georgia.⁴³⁵ She was back north at Gibson’s New Standard Theater by fall, when a local reporter described “Trixie Smith, a black-face woman in pantalettes, in a cyclone of comedy. She catches on readily, especially when she sings, ‘How Well Do I Remember.’ The audience shower her with coins of all denominations, which causes her to pursue a running talk while she obligingly picks them up.”⁴³⁶

Kansas City Call, May 27, 1922. This photograph was circulating in the African American press as early as 1917.

Smith took a second week in Indianapolis at the Senate Avenue Theater, then spent several months traversing the state of Pennsylvania, filling extended engagements in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where she played both black and white houses, “Doing well.”⁴³⁸ In July, after having “completed eight weeks at Pittsburgh, winning more fame,” Smith returned to Philadelphia’s New Standard Theater with her old partner Speedy Smith, in the banner feature, a “war production, ‘The Black Volunteers.’” She was pronounced “the only black face single and a good one in all respects.”⁴³⁹

During her late summer 1917 run on S. H. Dudley’s East Coast theater circuit, New York City–based columnist Billy E. Jones alluded to “Trixie Smith, the only lady single playing under cork since Ora Criswell.”⁴⁴⁰ Back in Pittsburgh for a two-week engagement, she was described as “Trixie J. Smith, the star comedienne … the only single blackface with any reputation.”⁴⁴¹ In December Trixie “stormed them again” at the Pekin Theater in Cincinnati, “amidst a rain of nickels and dimes.… Her original backwoods character has won her the name of Black Sis Hopkins. She told the writer her past, which was a pleasing recital from a finished character woman.”⁴⁴² She went from Cincinnati to the Owl Theater in Chicago, where Sylvester Russell called her “a popular winner as an attraction for colored people in her Jazz songs and talk, which was put over a little slow.”⁴⁴³ Perhaps Russell was not yet accustomed to “Tempo di Blues.”

After a remarkably successful 1917, Smith disappeared for a time. The Freeman of September 21, 1918, finally broke the silence with an editorial titled, “Trixie Smith Heard From At Last”:

Only a few days ago in opening up the mail the dramatic editor of The Freeman ran his eyes over an interesting letter from our noted actress friend, Miss Trixie Smith. But we were surprised—everyone in the office—to read that she was no longer a Miss Smith for she informed us that she had been married ever since December 26, 1917, and that she was now Mrs. Camanche Muse of 1027½ North Church Street, Jacksonville, Fla., the wife of a wealthy property owner of that city. Mrs. Muse has hopes of returning to the stage sometime in the near future, but at present is enjoying domestic life in her own happy home.⁴⁴⁴

She may have been back on the road with her husband and daughter on November 3, 1919, when: “Little Elizabeth Muse, daughter of Miss Trixie Smith, died … at Memphis, Tenn., aged thirteen months, of brain disease. The mother and father tried hard to save the little one, but it was God’s will for her to go and His will be done.”⁴⁴⁵

Smith was featured at the Monogram Theater on at least three occasions during the second half of 1920. When she appeared there in July, Defender columnist Tony Langston called her “an old Monogram favorite … back with a fine line of topical songs.”⁴⁴⁹ Upon her return in October, Langston dubbed her “one of the most popular singles in the business,” and Russell reported that she was held over for a second week by popular demand.⁴⁵⁰ Back again at the end of the year on a bill with future recording artist Sam Robinson and blues ventriloquist Johnny Woods, “It was Trixie Smith who closed the show and held the audience until the curtain went down with her riot of comicalities and ‘blues.’”⁴⁵¹

In the spring of 1921, at the New Lincoln Theater in Baltimore, the bill advertised “Trixie Smith—A Mean Blue Singer.”⁴⁵²

For all that, Smith did not gain notice beyond the confines of racial vaudeville until 1922, when she entered into a blues singing contest at the Manhattan Casino, a favorite black society venue located at Eighth Avenue and 155th Street. Years earlier, the Manhattan Casino was the scene of semi-annual concerts by the Clef Club Symphony Orchestra, with James Reese Europe directing.⁴⁵³ Europe appeared there with Vernon and Irene Castle in 1914; W. C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band brought the blues there in 1919.⁴⁵⁴

On January 20, 1922, the Manhattan Casino was the scene of the “first annual concert and ball” of the Fifteenth Infantry Band, “under its new leader, ‘Bill’ Vodery.” The Chicago Defender carried a detailed review under the headline, “Society 400 Applauds New Sort o’ Opera”:

The concert, which started at 10:30, was superb in every particular. Nine numbers of classic and popular song hits comprised the program. Selections by our composers were among the band’s repertory, which included “Admiration” by Will H. Tyers; “Puppy’s Gone,” by Lieut. Vodery; “Love Will Find a Way,” Noble Sissle, and “On Patrol in No Man’s Land,” by the late Lieut. James Europe. Dancing interspersed the joy that flowed till midnight, when the principal attraction of the evening took place—the blues singing championship contest—which was introduced by a jazz selection from James P. Johnson of the Q. R. S. rolls and his six syncopators.

Miss Trixie Smith, called the Southern nightingale, was the first to appear. She sang “Stingaree Blues” and made a decided hit at the outset. “The girl with a smile,” who portrayed that title in every way, was Miss Daisy Martin of the Okeh Phonograph Co. She was another whose singing pleased. Miss Alice Leslie Carter and Miss Lucille Hegamin of the Arto Phonograph Co., sang their favorite song hits, “Decatur Street Blues” and “Arkansas Blues.” Each of the singers was roundly applauded and to the one receiving the loudest and longest applause a silver loving cup was given. The judges, Major [sic] La Guardia and Fred R. Moore, awarded the handsome gift to Miss Trixie Smith. The presentation was made by Mrs. Irene Castle-Tremaine, the famous dancer.

At the close of the contest the lithesome and facetious Mrs. Castle-Tremaine, favored the audience with an excellent demonstration of her profession. Charles Granville (white), a prominent actor, also entertained, by singing “Emaline” and displaying a few steps in soft shoe dancing. After a riotous call for a contribution from Noble Sissle, one of the stars in “Shuffle Along,” who acted as master of ceremonies of the program, responded by singing the “Shuffle Along” chorus. Some of the members of the company were present and joined in the chorus.⁴⁵⁵

New York Age, January 28, 1922.

I was in New York City in 1921, and was asked to participate in a competitive “blues” singing, which was sponsored by Mrs. Vernon Castle, the internationally known danseuse. All of the entrants were singers of country-wide reputation. I was merely asked to enter to swell the number. For my services as a filler, I was to receive $20, which I needed, and all that I hoped to get.

On the night of the contest … I dressed and went over. Arriving, I was slightly embarrassed to hear several of the contestants refer to me as “THE BLACK GAL,” and I seemed to be affording considerable amusement by entering. A performer, who today is an international figure, assisted the rest to the stand to sing their numbers, but let old Black Trixie scuffle along as best she could.… I sang my own number, “Trixie’s Blues,” and came very near fainting when they awarded me the prize.⁴⁵⁸

It was reported that Trixie Smith “was tendered a check for $1,000” for winning the contest, and was subsequently “deluged with offers to record for phonograph companies.”⁴⁵⁹ She was able to capitalize on her newfound fame by landing engagements in posh New York area night clubs and cabarets. A note in the summer of 1922 advised: “Trixie Smith, late of the review at Reisenweber’s, New York City, is doing her stuff at the Hotel LaMare, the swellest cabaret on the Board walk, Atlantic City, N. J.”⁴⁶⁰

Born in 1894, Lucille Hegamin was on the road by 1911, when she appeared with the Freeman-Harper-Muse Stock Company at the Globe Theater in Jacksonville.⁴⁶⁴ By the fall of 1912 she had married pianist William Hegamin and settled into Chicago’s State Street cabaret scene.⁴⁶⁵ In 1918 she joined “the big bunch from Chi who are at Los Angeles.”⁴⁶⁶ She recalled that, all along the West Coast, “The blues craze was really upon us and I had to sing plenty of blues.”⁴⁶⁷ Hegamin was living in New York City by November 1919, when she opened at the Dolphin Café in Harlem.⁴⁶⁸

Daisy Martin was a popular road show performer. She spent the season of 1909–10 with Whitney and Tutt’s Southern Smart Set, and the season of 1911–12 with S. H. Dudley’s Northern Smart Set.⁴⁶⁹ She toured in the 1916 edition of Tolliver’s Smart Set, singing “Every Man Is My Man”; and in 1917 she headlined with Whitney and Tutt’s Smarter Set, featuring “Irresistible Blues” and “Please Don’t Trifle with My Heart.”⁴⁷⁰ In 1919–20 she toured with Frank Montgomery’s Hello 1919 Company, working under cork.⁴⁷¹ Three weeks before the Manhattan Casino Blues Contest, Martin played a week at Harlem’s Lafayette Theater.⁴⁷²

Norfolk Journal & Guide, March 22, 1924.

Trixie Smith made her first record for the Black Swan label almost immediately after the contest, ostensibly becoming the first southern vaudeville blues artist to record.⁴⁷³ On her second session, two months later, she was accompanied by James P. Johnson and his band, which had played for the contest.474 She recorded about three dozen songs for Black Swan and Paramount over the next four years.⁴⁷⁵

Blackface makeup was an essential ingredient of Trixie Smith’s stage persona, but there is no evidence that she used it at the contest. She was among the last of her kind; the ennobling “blues queen” image militated against the use of cork by female performers. In the fall of 1925 Trixie appeared at the Orpheum Theater in Newark, New Jersey, on a bill with Jackie Mabley, later known as “Moms.”⁴⁷⁶ Moms Mabley’s 1960s comic persona was reminiscent of female blackface characterizations and comedy conventions of an earlier era, sans burnt cork makeup.⁴⁷⁷

While the decline of vaudeville derailed many successful 1920s entertainment careers, resourceful Trixie Smith worked through the 1930s and into the early 1940s, often as an actress, appearing in stage plays and motion pictures.⁴⁷⁸ In 1938 she rekindled her recording career, waxing several titles for Decca. Trixie Smith Muse died in New York City on September 21, 1943.⁴⁷⁹

Though her name has fallen from the historical record, Estelle Harris was a true pioneer of modern American popular music. The range of her creative associations and the chronological scope of her career encompass the transition from ragtime to blues and jazz. When Harris’s star began to rise, as a member of Mahara’s Minstrels, Black Patti Troubadours, Smart Set Company, and Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, there was no blues on the popular stage. Coon songs were still in their ascendancy. Although steeped in ragtime culture, Harris may have been the first person to sing a designated blues song on any stage in Memphis, the proverbial “home of the blues.” A few years later, she was almost certainly the first person to sing a jazz song on State Street in Chicago.

Harris was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, around 1885.⁴⁸⁰ Her career was under way by March 28, 1899, when she appeared at the Hot Springs Opera House with the Creole Nightingales Company.⁴⁸¹ Her charisma, or star quality, was evident from a very early age. By the fall of 1900 she was touring southern Kansas with W. A. Seymour’s Black 400 Minstrels, billed as “the star of the show,” singing “The Blue and the Gray,” “My Lady Lu,” “Little Black Me,” and “the song that has made her famous entitled ‘Chicken.’ Then comes the Honolulu dance, which is led by Huff and Harris.”⁴⁸² The following spring she toured with the Nashville Students Comedy Company, another W. A. Seymour enterprise, featuring blackface comedian Tom McIntosh.⁴⁸³ When they opened at the Capital Theater in Little Rock in the spring of 1901, “Miss Estella Harris, the queen of song,” was proclaimed “a hit.”⁴⁸⁴

Before the close of 1901, Harris joined the stock company at the newly opened Tivoli Music Hall in Memphis, under the direction of J. Ed Green. Green’s first Tivoli production was a burlesque of the popular play Foxy Quiller, with Harris playing the part of “Queenie.”⁴⁸⁵ A few weeks later the Tivoli presented Going to War, “a military act,” in which “Estelle Harris donned male attire … and made a hit singing ‘Zulu Babe.’”⁴⁸⁶ Billy B. Johnson, a rising young blackface comedian from Cincinnati, was another member of Green’s Tivoli Music Hall stock company.⁴⁸⁷ Harris and Johnson formed a variety act with Will Reid and Nettie Lewis, and “took numerous encores from their rendition of the Philippine dance.”⁴⁸⁸

Johnson, Reid, and Harris’s association with this organization must have been brief, because on June 7 word came that the Johnson and Reid Stock Company was in Birmingham, Alabama, “playing to a crowded house every night at Traction Park.”⁴⁹¹ The company included Rosa Payne, Elvira Johnson, Ora Criswell, and Estelle Harris, a remarkable contingent of rag shouters, all of whom had participated in J. Ed Green’s Memphis vaudeville trials. The male cohort consisted of Billy Johnson, Will Reid, James Crosby, Harry Love, and Will Scott.

Estelle Harris and Billy Johnson had become husband and wife by early July, when they arrived at Pat Chappelle’s Buckingham Theater in Tampa.⁴⁹² The Johnsons were judged “hot favorites” with the company, under stage manager Will Goff Kennedy.⁴⁹³ On July 14, they set out with the legendary A Rabbit’s Foot Company.⁴⁹⁴ The “Foots” spent the last half of August 1902 in Alabama: “The Johnsons, Billy and Estelle, are cleaning up with their sketch. Mrs. Johnson is singing ‘Hannah from Savannah.’”⁴⁹⁵ However, the couple was forced to close in Birmingham, “on account of Mrs. Johnson’s illness.”⁴⁹⁶

In the fall of 1902 they began a lengthy association with Frank Mahara’s Operatic Minstrels, whose bandleader was W. C. Handy.⁴⁹⁷ In June 1903 Mahara boasted that “Billy Johnson, principal comedian, and his clever wife, Estelle Harris Johnson, are great favorites everywhere.”⁴⁹⁸ Later that fall Estelle Harris Johnson was “making quite a hit … singing ‘These Coons are Dead in Line.’”⁴⁹⁹ While en route with Mahara’s Minstrels, Estelle received word that her mother, Mrs. Mamie Cain, had died of malaria on August 2 at her home in Hot Springs: “The deceased was 35 years of age and an ardent member of the A. M. E. church.”⁵⁰⁰

This photo appeared as an inset on the cover of Chris Smith and Billy B. Johnson’s 1905 sheet music hit, “Good-Bye, I’ll See You Some More” (Courtesy Chris Ware).

In the spring of 1904 the Johnsons headed out for a summer season at Ninaweb Park in Louisville.⁵⁰¹ A note in June said they “came highly recommended, and they have more than fulfilled all claims made for them.”⁵⁰² Tom Logan, who was in charge of Ninaweb Park that summer, wrote “a twenty minute act for Billy and Stella Johnson” before they left Louisville in July, headed to New York City to fill a stint with the Black Patti Troubadours.⁵⁰³

With the Black Patti Company in September, Billy and Estelle played three nights at Bleecker Hall in Albany, New York. Sylvester Russell submitted a review, noting: “The aristocracy turned out each night and filled several of the best boxes and some of the elite of the colored race of Albany sat in the most desirable orchestra seats unnoticed. If this is the case in Albany there would be no objection in New York or anywhere else in the North, except the managers, themselves draw the line. This show could easily run on Broadway in New York. It is the best company Voeckel and Nolan ever had.”⁵⁰⁴

Shortly thereafter, the Johnsons joined the Smart Set Company, starring S. H. Dudley, in its third road season.⁵⁰⁶ A reviewer praised Estelle Harris Johnson’s rendition of “The Barbecue,” assisted by the Smart Set chorus, calling it “a very decided feature of the show.”⁵⁰⁷ She also led the chorus in singing the “Indian Song ‘Birch Canoe’ … a fitting climax to the second act.”⁵⁰⁸

In 1905, after the Smart Set closed for the season, the Johnsons formed a trio with composer/performer Chris Smith and had a run in mainstream vaudeville.⁵⁰⁹ At their New York City engagements, white critics confessed to hearing some “agreeable ragtime piano playing,” “very acceptable coon shouting,” and “negro comedy that was worth while.”⁵¹⁰ In June 1906 the Freeman reported: “Chris Smith and the two Johnsons have done some fine work in vaudeville during the past season. They are the authors of ‘Practice What You Preach,’ ‘Goodbye, I’ll See You Some More,’ ‘Who’s There,’ and several other song successes. They will continue in vaudeville this summer as a trio, but next season they will play in Europe with a bigger act.”⁵¹¹

But by the summer of 1907, Estelle Harris had split with Billy Johnson and returned to Hot Springs, where she became stage manager of the Majestic Theater.⁵¹² She may have remained in Hot Springs until the end of 1909, when she left for Memphis and took her place among the roster of performers at Fred Barrasso’s new Savoy Theater. The Savoy featured a combination of northern theatrical stalwarts such as Charles Gilpin and intrepid “southern specialists” like Willie and Lula Too Sweet and Laura Smith.⁵¹³ In the pit was a five-piece band under the direction of pianist Henry P. “Buddy” McGill, a member of the local W. C. Handy syndicate of bands.⁵¹⁴

In Jelly Roll Morton’s opinion, Laura Smith and Stella Harris were two “great blues singers.”⁵¹⁵ They teamed in a singing act, “The Barber’s Ball,” in August 1910.⁵¹⁶ Harris spent all of that year at the Savoy, performing “Good Evening, Miss Caroline,” “Hot Corn,” “In Dear Old Tennessee,” and “I’m Just Pinin’ for You.”⁵¹⁷ A note at the end of the year said she was “still bringing out all the latest ones. Her list now comprises ‘I Love It,’ ‘Lovie Joe,’ ‘Some Of These Days,’ ‘Barber Shop Chord,’ ‘Pinin’ For You,’ ‘I’m Not That Kind Of A Girl,’ ‘Southern Rose,’ ‘Big Sensation,’ ‘Grizzly Bear,’ and several others, which are displayed on a beautiful card and hung at one side of the stage, by the request of our manager, so the audience may call for either one they like.”⁵¹⁸

In addition to her vaudeville features, Harris played character parts—often male impersonations—in a succession of comedy and dramatic skits. In May 1910 the Savoy staged two “very heavy Western dramas”:

The first week was the “Home of Harry Tanzell; or Dick Turpin, the Outlaw,” and it was a very pleasing bill, with Edward L. Howard as Dick Turpin.… Estella Harris was the hero. In male attire she played the part of Detective Britt. James Ransom was a comedy outlaw, and he played the part well. Margie Crosby played the part of Tanzell’s daughter, whom Dick Turpin, the outlaw, was determined to steal, but he was run down by Detective Britt and killed.… Laura Smith playing Dottie, a child’s part, and she made good.… Then came “The Old Nolan Gold Mine; or the Story of the Black Hills,” written by Jas. Ransom, our stage manager … Estella Harris as Elwood Nolan.⁵¹⁹

Estelle Harris and Buddy McGill were romantically linked in April 1910: “Prof. H. P. McGill, our orchestra leader, was taken very ill … after the opening act, and had to be carried to his room; but his better half, Estella Harris, left the stage and went to the piano, and she held the house spell-bound.”⁵²² Later that year Harris again presided over the orchestra during McGill’s absence.⁵²³

Harris seems to have been completely at home among the young southern blues pathfinders at the Savoy Theater. In 1910 she was twenty-five years old and had already proven herself capable in any company or theatrical context. Seasoned under the influences of Robert Cole, Sherman Dudley, J. Ed Green, Tom Logan, and Will Goff Kennedy, she was now rubbing elbows with Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, and String Beans.

In January 1911 Harris ventured out on the Tri-State Circuit, opening at the Majestic Theater in her hometown Hot Springs as a member of Barrasso’s Big Sensation Company, which included Laura Smith, Porter and Porter, Billy and Grace Arnte, Mattie Dorsey Whitman, and Buddy McGill, among others. This all-star outfit presented comedian Billy Earthquake’s original skit Girl from Dixie “to standing room only … a packed house every night.”⁵²⁴

Estelle Harris was back in Memphis at the Savoy Theater in March 1911, sharing the bill with Laura Smith, Billy Mills, Happy Howe, Dave Schaffer, and May and May: “After Prof. McGill finished playing the overture, the curtain went up on a laughable musical comedy labeled ‘The Portrait of Booker T.’” Harris “responded to several encores singing ‘I Love It.’”⁵²⁵ At the Savoy in December 1911, Harris was credited with one of the earliest known stage performances of a blues song: “Estelle Harris is … featuring her new song successes, ‘That’s My Man’ and ‘The Blues in Indian Style.’”⁵²⁶

Fred Barrasso died of a “cerebral embolus” on June 25, 1911, and his brother Anselmo took over his theater enterprise.⁵²⁷ When he opened the newly renovated Metropolitan Theater in Memphis at the end of 1912, the initial report said Estelle Harris had charge of the five-piece band.⁵²⁸

By the summer of 1913 Harris had formed a sister team with Bessie Brown and headed north. At the Monogram they put on “a splendid act. Miss Harris has a good looking wardrobe and plays the piano and sings rags just as good as one would wish to hear. ‘My Man’ is the song with which she makes a hit.… They close the bill with ‘The Princess Prance.’”⁵²⁹ At the Crown Garden in Indianapolis they opened “with a mammy and pick stunt, the pick turn being done by Miss Brown, who is in male attire throughout the act.… Miss Harris does two good turns at the piano singing in a descriptive way, ‘My Man’ and ‘Mississippi Man.’ She shows what she is as a pianist.”⁵³⁰ In the second week of their engagement Harris sang “‘If You Don’t Like My Peaches, Don’t Shake My Tree’ in a way all her own.”⁵³¹ At the Ruby Theater in Louisville, they drew encores “dancing the Grizzly Bear and the Turkey Trot.”⁵³²

Indianapolis Freeman, October 16, 1915.

The Lyric Theater Stock Company opened its summer season on May 3, 1915, with Brown and Harris, comedian Billy Higgins, and the husband-and-wife comedy team of Gretchen and Sandy Burns aboard: “When Bessie Brown and Stella Harris opened their act, it was a hit, and when they closed, they stopped the show, singing and dancing, ‘Old Si Riddle Playing His Fiddle.’”⁵³⁶ Sandy Burns produced most of the dramatic offerings at the Lyric that season, including Montana Jack and Arizona Dick, “a western comedy drama” starring Gretchen Burns, Bessie Brown, Estelle Harris, and “Funny Billie Higgins and his mule.”⁵³⁷ Higgins also made a hit singing Overstreet’s “My Place of Business.”⁵³⁸

Indianapolis Freeman, September 25, 1915.

Indianapolis Freeman, December, 23, 1916.

Indianapolis Freeman, November 4, 1916.

On September 25, 1915, Overstreet announced that he was also on his way to Chicago, “to demonstrate his latest numbers.”⁵⁴⁰ Shortly thereafter, he rejoined the Billy King Stock Company.⁵⁴¹ His arrival on the Stroll was recalled by Jelly Roll Morton: “Will Overstreet was a newcomer in Chicago, coming with Billy King’s stock company. He was rated as a great pianist. He was carved the first day he came in town by every decent pianist in town.”⁵⁴²

Overstreet’s status might be better gauged by contemporaneous press reports, which cast light into one of jazz’s more obscure corners. Shortly before he arrived in Chicago, Overstreet advised Freeman readers that he “was the originator of the long bass which was introduced in K. C. some years ago,” and that he was about to “introduce some new basses which will probably open the eyes of some of the left handed fellows.”⁵⁴³

Overstreet’s return to the Billy King Stock Company was timely. After twenty-five years in the business, King was enjoying unprecedented success. His stock company was holding forth at the Grand Theater in October 1915, when they introduced Overstreet’s “Kansas City Todelo” and “Walking Brought Me Here.”⁵⁴⁴ In November they embarked on an East Coast tour that began at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem.⁵⁴⁵

“The Sister That Shouts,” Indianapolis Freeman, September 30, 1916.

At the end of April the Billy King Stock Company, with Stella Harris and musical director W. Benton Overstreet, returned to Chicago for a record-breaking run at the Grand.⁵⁴⁷ On their opening night, King and company were preceded by Hawaiian guitar player Sam Naimoa, whose “rag music” and “native folk-lore” “actually stopped the show.”⁵⁴⁸ Billy King and company stormed the stage with The Last Rehearsal, “an improbable farce comedy song review” that clicked “from the time that Billy poked his cork-covered bean over the roof of the Pullman in scene one until the curtain was rung down on the last song number.”⁵⁴⁹ The musical numbers included Estelle Harris’s renditions of Shelton Brooks’s “Walking the Dog” and two new Overstreet numbers, “The Alabama Todelo” and “The New Dance.”⁵⁵⁰

“Walking the Dog,” “The Alabama Todelo,” and “The New (‘Jazz’) Dance” all belong to a lineage of songs whose lyrics take the form of dance instructions. Descended from old-time quadrilles for which “callers” “called the figures,” songs of this type had been inciting revolutionary developments in American entertainment since the days of Ernest Hogan’s “La Pas Ma La,” a “rag dance” favorite closely associated with the first appearance of ragtime music.⁵⁵³ Hogan’s directions in “La Pas Ma La” to “Let your mind roll far back, back, back and look at the stars” reverberated in Overstreet’s call in “The Jazz Dance” to “cast your eyes to the skies, then get way back.” The direction to “get back” seems to invoke a nineteenth-century vernacular dance figure known as “the old back step.”⁵⁵⁴

Estelle Harris never recorded her show-stopping vocal version of “The ‘Jazz’ Dance.”⁵⁵⁵ The chorus is preserved intact in the Norfolk Jazz Quartet’s 1921 recording of “Monday Morning Blues,” and the catchy couplet, “Buzz around like a bee, Shake like a ship at sea,” is embedded in Blind Willie McTell’s 1931 recording of “Georgia Rag.”⁵⁵⁶

Sylvester Russell dubbed Estelle Harris “the greatest natural rag song shouter on the American stage.”⁵⁵⁷ Her dance song specialties made her a favorite among the Billy King Stock Company’s generous lineup of female vocal stars, which included Hattie McIntosh King, Gertrude Saunders, Georgia Kelly, Theresa Burroughs-Brown, and Anna Holt, who introduced Overstreet’s ballad “I Wonder If Your Loving Heart Still Pines For Me.”⁵⁵⁸

During the second week of the Billy King Company’s summer 1916 engagement at the Grand Theater, Handy’s “Yellow Dog Rag by Stella Harris; Plantation Song, by the entire company, and The Grocery Man, one of Director W. Benton Overstreet’s compositions, all went over nicely.”⁵⁵⁹ In their third week at the Grand, the company put on The Kidnapping Case, in which “Estelle Harris, as Miss Small, done a splendid piece of comedy soubret work in the part of the buxom kidnapped widow.”⁵⁶⁰ By this time, the Chicago Defender was prepared to declare Harris the hit of the show:

Among the members of Billy King’s Stock Company there is none who has attracted the attention and gained the popularity that has Stella Harris. In commenting on her work the theatrical papers are a unit in pronouncing her in a class by herself as a “coon shouter” and singer of rag-time songs. Her reputation has grown so that it is common to see the faces of many of the prominent vaudeville performers who follow this line, at the Grand.… Will Rossiter, the song publisher, purchased outright the “New Dance” song number used by Miss Harris. It is one of the compositions of W. B. Overstreet, the musical director for Billy King.… Aside from her ability as a songstress, Miss Harris is clever in the handling of character parts, and never overdraws in dialogue or song number. Her popularity with the audiences at the Grand equals that of any of the artists seen there in the past, and she certainly is one of the stock company’s most valuable assets.⁵⁶¹

Harris’s repertoire of “rag shouts” featured prominently in the King Company’s productions. In The Darktown Journal, she gave out with “O That Todelo,” “a shout number”; and in The Other Fellow, Harris “was the usual riot with the new rag shout, Princess Prance.”⁵⁶² On the Beach included “‘Happy Shout,’ an Overstreet number, by Stella Harris.”⁵⁶³

In The Undertaker’s Daughter, Harris sang Overstreet’s “If I Said I Would Marry You, I Must Have Been Out of My Head,” and she “took two real encores” with a Billy Farrell composition, “The Frisco Bear.”⁵⁶⁴ In A Mother-in-Law’s Disposition Harris helped sing “Phoebe Green” “as a member of the Boys and Girls chorus, with Anna Holt, Georgia Kelly, Gertrude Saunders, John Gertrude, and Billy Walker.”⁵⁶⁵ And in The Matrimonial Agency, “Never Let the Same Man Kiss You Twice” was “done to screams by Stella Harris and Billy King.”⁵⁶⁶

Indianapolis Freeman, November 4, 1916.

During the course of the Billy King Stock Company’s Grand Theater engagement, Estelle Harris and Anna Holt played parts in a locally produced movie, The Barber.⁵⁷² It was screened at Chicago’s Star Theater the first week in September 1916: “This house, with Teenan Jones as proprietor … turned people away in the lineup last Sunday. Anna Holt as a special feature soloist, sang Rosamond Johnson’s ‘I Hear You Calling Me.’ ‘The Barber,’ a colored picture with Howard Kelley, Edgar Lillison, Clarence Powell, Anna Holt and Estella Harris, was also a feature.”⁵⁷³

The Billy King Stock Company’s final Grand Theater production for 1916 was A Trip to Savannah. In reviewing it, Sylvester Russell noted:

W. Benton Overstreet, musical director for Billy King and company, has recently made a good showing as a composer. He has written nearly all the music for the ensembles during the company’s record breaking engagement at the Grand Theatre … He is the composer of the only rival song to Shelton Brooks’ “Walking the Dog,” entitled “The New Dance” (“that everybody’s talking about”) introduced in the King company by Estella Harris, now looked upon as the greatest ragtime shouter now before the public. She is the author of the lyric and Mr. Overstreet is the composer of the song, and Miss Harris has featured his songs to great advantage.⁵⁷⁴

Following their unprecedented run at the Grand, Billy King and company traveled to the West Coast and back on the mainstream Pantages Circuit, but without Harris and Overstreet, who stayed in Chicago to test their accumulated star power in a vaudeville company of their own. On September 30, 1916, the Grand Theater advertised its headline attraction for the coming week—Estelle Harris and her “Jass Band.”

Miss Harris gained a great deal of popularity while with the Billy King Co., a great many of the critics and agents comparing her with such artists as Tanguay and Belle Barker. She has a distinctive manner which is all her own, and can get more out of a song, especially of the “shout” variety, than either of the stars above. She will feature Overstreet’s Loving Heart number. The composer will direct from the stage. The Jass Band consists of Robert Moten, Matt Harris and Sam Arnold, formerly of the world famous Pekin Trio.⁵⁷⁵

Estelle Harris, late of Billy King’s company, who can now claim to be the greatest natural rag song shouter on the American stage, made her first appearance at the Grand last Monday evening as a vaudeville star and made a distinct hit in her specialties. The house was full and people were lined up for both performances. She was assisted by the “Jaz” singers, dancers and players, including W. Benton Overstreet, the pianist and composer. Miss Harris, who wore a costume of blood red satin, got a big reception. Her songs: “Alabama Tango Band,” “Happy Shout” and “New Dance That Everybody’s Talking About” were her selections, all by Mr. Overstreet. Anna Holt, who was in good voice, sang two songs. Etta Gross danced cleverly and James Connelly, a fine buck dancer, who did not need to flip flop, were good numbers, including the string musicians, Sam Arnold, Matt Harris and Robert Moton.⁵⁷⁶

Indianapolis Freeman, December 23, 1916.

Spencer Williams’s up-to-the minute hit, “Shim-Me-Sha-Wobble,” became a jazz staple.⁵⁷⁸

Previously, Harris had sung to the accompaniment of theater pit bands with horns, piano, and drums; but for their signature Jass/Jaz/Jazz Band, Harris and Overstreet chose a string trio. The famous Pekin Trio was originally attached to Chicago’s Pekin Theater. In addition to playing stringed instruments, they sang in three-part harmony. Members of the 1910 edition of Pekin Trio, Clarence “Kid” Duncan on harp-guitar; William Cole Thomas, aka Will Cole, on mandolin; and Sam Arnold on cello, were veterans of the Weaver Brothers’ Mandolin Sextet of Milwaukee.⁵⁷⁹ A 1910 report claimed: “The Pekin Theater Trio … is in a class all alone. They sing operatic selections, popular songs and rag-time music.… About the first of March they will be booked on the Orpheum Circuit.”⁵⁸⁰

A report on November 25 said, “Estella Harris, the song shouter and her Jaz band, have moved from the Lida to the Victoria theater. Anna Holt is the soloist. The dancers are Etta Gross and Master Connelly and the ‘Jaz’ band, W. Benton Overstreet, leader; Sam Arnold, William Bush, Matt Harris and Robert Morton.”⁵⁸² A few weeks later, the company performed “The ‘Jazz’ Dance” and another of Overstreet’s latest song publications, “On the Rockin’ Rosa Lee” at the Haymarket Theatre.⁵⁸³

The Pekin string band may have peeled away from Harris and Overstreet during the Christmas holidays.⁵⁸⁴ In the spring of 1917, at the New Monogram, Estelle Harris, “the recognized queen of ragtime shouters … received voluminous encores in ‘On the Puppy’s Tail’ and her masterpiece, ‘The New Dance.’ She was assisted by W. Benton Overstreet … and a good trap drummer.”⁵⁸⁵ “Steppin’ on the Puppy’s Tail” was Spencer Williams’s late-breaking sheet music hit, a dance song with instructions to be played at “Tempo di Dog Walk.”⁵⁸⁶ Back in February, Harris had “created a furor” at Chicago’s States Theater, demonstrating “the newest animated dog steps” with her “Puppy Tail Dancers.”⁵⁸⁷

In May 1917 Harris and Overstreet played the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, on a bill with blackface comedians Archie and Walter Jones, otherwise known as “Bodidlie and Jasbo.” Freeman theater critic Billy E. Lewis turned in an enlightening review:

Miss Harris was all that she claimed to be—queen of the business—really seeming to leave a good wide margin between herself and other singers of her class.… Her splendid big voice is full of music, and on which she plays at will as a master trombonist on his instrument. She sings with a feeling, sometimes fairly shouting her tones, sometimes it’s the tones of love’s soft impeachment.… Her numbers were “Alabama’s Great Tango Dance,” “What Makes You Hold It So Long?” Patriotic songs and the original jazz dance, as conceived and composed by Mr. Overstreet, the author. The jazz dance was a very finished piece of work, exciting admiration in all who saw her. She also appeared to advantage at the piano.…

Indianapolis Freeman, June 2, 1917.

Later that summer Harris and Overstreet traveled to Gibson’s Standard Theater in Philadelphia: “Miss Harris is one of the most successful of the many ‘shouters’ in vaudeville and ranks right up there with such stars as Sophie Tucker, Eva Tanguay and others. Her rendition of Overstreet’s new number, ‘The Alabamalevi [sic, Alabama Levee] Glide,’ was a near riot.… The act will open in New York soon, where they will feature the great hit, ‘The Jazz Dance.’”⁵⁸⁹

By late October Harris and Overstreet had dropped into the Tidewater section of Virginia, where Overstreet became musical director of the Ivy Theater in Newport News.⁵⁹⁰ In November they made a quick jaunt to Richmond to produce a version of the old S. H. Dudley Smart Set vehicle Dr. Beans From Boston, on behalf of the local Elks Lodge.⁵⁹¹ They were still working out of the Ivy in the spring of 1918, when news came that “Miss Harris’s latest song hit, ‘The Alabama Jazbo Band,’ has been released and can be obtained from Will Rossiter Pub. Co., Chicago.”⁵⁹² That summer they returned to Chicago and topped a bill at the Monogram.⁵⁹³ By fall they were “laying off in St. Louis,” where they may have finally parted ways.⁵⁹⁴

In the spring of 1919 Overstreet served as musical director of Gibson’s New Standard Theater in Philadelphia; and he remained there, on and off, for the next several years.⁵⁹⁵ References in the entertainment columns of the African American press indicate that he enjoyed steady employment throughout the 1920s. In the spring of 1930 he was running a “nice little studio” in Milwaukee, “where he teaches piano, modern trick and jazz style of playing.”⁵⁹⁶

Overstreet is present on at least a few commercial recordings. In 1927 he backed blues singer Elnora Johnson on four sides, and in 1929 he cut four tracks with Sam Theard.⁵⁹⁷ Though confined to the role of accompanist, his playing tends to confirm his prowess.

In the spring of 1919, Overstreet’s song hit “The Alabama Jazzbo Band” was said to be “creating a sensation in the east. The song is being featured by Stella Harris, and is a real riot everywhere.”⁵⁹⁸ Late that summer, Harris appeared at the Lincoln Theater in Harlem with a “little company” headed by Sandy Burns: “Stella Harris says that she has so many offers she don’t know which one to take. She is doing very nicely with Sandy Burns. She is all right and he is all right, so she had ought to stick another season with him.”⁵⁹⁹

However, declining health began to disrupt Harris’s remarkable career. On January 31, 1920, the Defender carried news from Overstreet that Harris was “undergoing treatment by a private doctor in New York.”⁶⁰⁰ By April 1920 it was noted that, “Estelle Harris, originator of the ‘Jazz Dance,’ has recovered from her recent illness and is back on the boards again. She has eight weeks in and around New York City, doing her single. She is featuring Overstreet’s latest creation, ‘Shake That Shimmy and Shake it from Your Shoulders Down.’ Some number.”⁶⁰¹

In 1924 a report in the Chicago Defender, seemingly exaggerated for humorous effect, said Estelle Harris had recently appeared as a material witness in a Chicago police court:

Harris continued to perform through the 1920s, but without generating the same volume of press coverage that had followed her through the previous decade. When she appeared in Louisville in 1925 with the Bruce & Skinner Stock Company in a skit titled Charleston Steppers, she was described as “a jazz singer.”⁶⁰³

Sporadic reports suggest she worked steadily until 1929.⁶⁰⁴ In February of that year Chicago Defender columnist Bob Hayes noted: “Estella Harris and her ‘Jazz Fiends’ are delighting patrons of the Western theater at Oakley Blvd. and Lake St.”⁶⁰⁵ One week later the Western Theater offered “‘Flying Bat’ La Mar [sic] and his ‘Too Tight Co.,’ a fast little bunch with Estella Harris as musical director.”⁶⁰⁶ Shortly thereafter, Hayes reported: “Estella Harris and her ‘Dixie Flashes’ have succeeded ‘Bat’ Lumpkin [sic] at the Western theater for an indefinite run. Good luck to you, pal.”⁶⁰⁷

In the spring of 1929 news came that Harris had fallen ill and was unable to leave her bed: “She is daily surrounded by the old guard, who try in their humble way to look after her every need.”⁶⁰⁸ Charles “Cow Cow” Davenport and his wife Ivy Smith visited Estelle Harris that summer and, according to Bob Hayes, “gave her financial help.”⁶⁰⁹ When the Whitman Sisters played the Grand Theater in the fall, Mabel Whitman solicited donations for the “old trooper” at every performance.⁶¹⁰

Harris never fully regained her health. A report in April 1933 identified her as “one of the best known of the old school of song artists,” and assured that she was still “slowly convalescing”; but two months later she was “confined to the Cook County Hospital of Chicago.”⁶¹¹ When she passed away on August 7, 1934, Bob Hayes recalled that Estelle Harris “was at one time regarded as one of the greatest of our ragtime singers, a mode of singing that preceded the present day blues singers.”⁶¹²

In 1923 the Pathe Record Company released eight sides credited to “Sister Harris.” Since Estelle Harris had once been billed as “The Sister that Shouts,” it may be that the recordings are by her.⁶¹³ Whoever did make these recordings was a singer with a full-bodied, gravelly-edged alto voice and a sense of “attack” that would have easily delivered every word to the back of a crowded theater.⁶¹⁴

Despite being one of the first performers to be identified singing a blues song on a public stage (“The Blues in Indian Style” in late 1911), Harris was seldom characterized as a “blues singer.” She was still firmly identified as a “rag song shouter” long after “blues singer” had become common terminology. In the anecdotal account of her “day in court,” which appeared in the Defender in 1924, she brazenly described herself as a “coon shouter.” Harris may be most properly categorized as a jazz singer, or proto-jazz singer, who was on the cutting edge of ragtime becoming jazz.

Harris remained on the cutting edge through most of her long career; from her early work with Chris Smith and Billy B. Johnson in mainstream vaudeville, to her tenure at the Savoy Theater in Memphis, to her feature role with the Billy King Stock Company, and her star turn with W. B. Overstreet and her own path-finding “Jaz Band.” In an era of theatrical metamorphosis, Estelle Harris was the ultimate transitional performer; she personified the reformation of African American popular entertainment like perhaps no one else.