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

New York City’s appetite for black music and performers had waxed and waned since the late 1890s. The crossover appeal of blues and jazz in the 1920s had everything to do with its commercialization. An explosion of white interest created a demand for black singers, musicians, and dancers in historically segregated venues, just as it had during the ragtime revolution twenty years earlier. Broadway did get darker—all of American entertainment got darker—but the same racist machinery that had institutionalized coon songs during the ragtime era remained in place.

In the 1920s, commercialization shifted the center of blues activity north to New York City. But New York was an alien environment for the blues. As Mamie Smith, undoubtedly an authority on the subject, pointed out in a conversation with musician and journalist Dan Burley: “No real blues ever came out of New York.” Burley qualified: “The reason New York and Harlem weren’t productive in pure blues is an interesting sidelight on the situation in music in that period. Made up as it was and is of a cosmopolitan population, Harlem and New York were best suited as mediums for finished musical forms, highly polished and as commercially acceptable as expensive jewelry or other streamlined articles for sale.”⁴

High polish was of little concern to the masses of southern vaudeville theater patrons who had been privileged to witness the concrete formulation of the blues in the persons of Baby Seals, String Beans, Clara Smith, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and their many comrades. The blues was not a fashionable commodity to these sons and daughters of the South; it was the ripening of their regional music culture.

Perhaps the most succinct differentiation between southern and northern vaudeville was provided by a Freeman correspondent who was attempting to explain String Beans’s “comedianism”:

[W]hen String Beans and his Sweetie May came north from their Southern scenes of triumph they brought with them the best of the line of purely Negro oddities, and which were directly developed under purely Negro influence. Their offering appeared crude to the senses of Northern Negroes who had seen nothing of purely Negro origin. They had seen comedians and comedians, but these were made under the influence of white performers, consequently their impress was on them. The Northern white comedian and the Northern Negro comedian did similar work and yet do similar work. But when Beans came he introduced a different comedianism, the likes of which had never been seen in the North.⁵

Not long before the death of String Beans in November 1917, a New York City–based Freeman correspondent observed that his “songs, actions and name are ordinary conversation in every other person’s home.”⁶ Unlike in the South, however, String Beans’s music left no obvious imprint on subsequent blues development in New York City. The blues-singing style of New York’s race recording pioneers was a jazzy sort of “polite syncopation” that was significantly removed from the blues heard in southern vaudeville. Prior to the importation of Trixie Smith, New Yorkers seem to have preferred their blues “toned down,” “polished up,” and otherwise leavened by cosmopolitan sensibilities. J. A. “Billboard” Jackson expressed the sentiment “that ‘down-home shows’ rank right along with other ‘down-home’ features and have to be revised for New York’s adaptation.”7

Shuffle Along undoubtedly suited the taste of New York’s sophisticated, multi-racial theater audiences. Over the years, Broadway had been virtually closed to Negro musical comedy shows. Williams and Walker broke through the barrier with In Dahomey in 1903; their Abyssinia lasted three weeks at the Majestic Theater on Broadway in 1906; and they finally experienced actual success on Broadway with Bandanna Land in 1908. Equally notable black musical comedies such as Ernest Hogan’s Rufus Rastus, Cole and Johnson’s The Red Moon, and S. H. Dudley’s His Honor the Barber never made it to Broadway.⁸

Shuffle Along was conceived by Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller, who were also its star comedians. It featured original music by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. More than ten years after Bandanna Land took its final curtain call, Shuffle Along elbowed its way onto the uppermost reaches of the Broadway theater district and proceeded to turn New York City on its ear. Following a brief trial run in out-of-town theaters, it premiered at Broadway’s Sixty-Third Street Theater in May 1921 and remained for more than 500 performances.⁹

To many minds, Shuffle Along revived the spirit of Williams and Walker.¹⁰ It became an extraordinary symbol of the jazz age in New York. There was nothing particularly original about its plot or cast of characters; nevertheless, northern audiences were ready for a successful black show, and the merits and qualifications of Shuffle Along defied disapprobation. New York’s theater critics, who seldom had anything good to say about African American plays or players, had to acknowledge that everything about this show was effective.

Shuffle Along took off when the rest of show business, black and white, was in its worst economic crisis in years.¹¹

This summer has been just awful, and yet, in a little meeting hall, a mile from Times Square, a Negro musical show is selling out mostly to white people who find it altogether too hot to spend an evening at one of the regular attractions on Broadway.…

Further, after years of the imitation, New York is now learning for the first time just what color of blue is the real Negro blue song.

Prospects for “the real Negro blue song” in Shuffle Along were mainly filtered through Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, and Gertrude Saunders. Sissle sang “Oriental Blues,” and Blake, “who directed the orchestra from the piano, went to the stage for a specialty with Sissle. Their first number was ‘Low Down Blues.’”¹³ Ingénue Gertrude Saunders made a pronounced hit with her “urban blues.” According to one reviewer, “Jazz with more pep than ever seen here before was featured by Gertrude Saunders … with her singing of ‘Daddy’ the show was stopped for ten minutes or more.”¹⁴

Noble Sissle recalled: “The first soubrette we had was Gertrude Saunders, for whom ‘Daddy, Won’t You Please Come Home’ and ‘I’m Craving for That Kind of Love’ had been written. She was the sensation of our show—stopped it cold every night. But like so many artists in show business who had become a sensation overnight, Gertrude, in spite of our efforts at persuasion, left the show, and we had just got started.”¹⁵

Saunders was adamant in later years that she “never missed a thing by walking out of Shuffle Along.”¹⁶ On September 3, 1921, the Chicago Defender published an upbeat letter from her: “I closed with ‘Shuffle Along’ two weeks ago and am now entertaining at Reisenweber’s.… Will close here on September 4, then open with Hurtig & Seamon for 35 weeks. I made a moving picture since leaving ‘Shuffle Along,’ and also made two records last week.”¹⁷

Chicago Defender, December 31, 1921.

Possibly the most incongruous element of Saunders’s blues singing is her neo-operatic, mezzosoprano tone. Saunders was very frank in contrasting her own voice with that of her successor in Shuffle Along, Florence Mills: “She sang a song with soul. I was a trickster. I just did tricks.”²⁰ Sylvester Russell described Saunders’s “Daddy, Won’t You Please Come Home” as “an art-called-for novelty.”²¹ But David Evans has characterized her recorded rendition of the song as “absurd histrionic screeching and at best a parody of blues singing.”²² To the modern ear, it represents an example of “Colored folks opera” run amok. At the very least, it suggests a misjudgment of where the blues was headed.

Sissle and Blake and Miller and Lyles made history a second time when they replaced Gertrude Saunders with Florence Mills. Mills and her husband, dancer and minstrel man U. S. “Slow Kid” Thompson, joined Shuffle Along together in August 1921.²³ Mills “was hardly the earthy creature ‘I’m Craving For That Kind of Love’ had been written for, but she gave to the part, by all accounts, an ingenuousness that added greatly to the ensemble.”²⁴

Like Gertrude Saunders, Florence Mills did not stay long with Shuffle Along. In the spring of 1922 she became the centerpiece of the inaugural edition of the Plantation Revue, assembled by New York entertainment broker Lew Leslie for the fashionable new Plantation Club on Broadway: “The show has … created a wonderful impression in circles that count in creating favor for the Negro artist in his effort to break into the big street on his merit and on that alone.”²⁵

It was in the Plantation Revue that Florence Mills earned her full measure of celebrity and “achieved that for which all artists strive, viz.; her name in lights on Broadway.”²⁷ Mills captured New York, and London, too, before her untimely demise in 1927. Blues, even of the New York City stripe, hardly figured in her popularity.²⁸

Eva Taylor’s OKeh tribute to Florence Mills.

Florence Mills left no recordings. She was memorialized on race records by Eva Taylor, Juanita Stinnette, and others, and was subsequently enshrined as the ideal model of a “Harlem Jazz Queen.”²⁹ If the Plantation Revue included a “Harlem Blues Queen,” it was Edith Wilson. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Wilson was introduced to the stage in 1910 by local musicians Joe and Jimmy Clark. By 1920 she had made her way onto big-time New York City stages. In the fall of 1921 she appeared in Irvin Miller’s unsuccessful Broadway production Put and Take: “This blues singer was one of the chief assets of the ‘Put and Take’ liability, and it could not have been through any fault of hers that Irvin’s show ‘blowed,’ for she is a complete knockout. ‘Vamping Liza Jane’ and ‘Nervous Blues’ are her specialties.”³⁰

Chicago Defender, November 12, 1921. When this ad appeared in the Defender, Wilson was featuring “Nervous” Blues” and “Vampin’ Liza” in her vaudeville act at the Dunbar Theater in Philadelphia. The ad, which most likely was placed by Perry Bradford, reveals some of the ways in which various commercial interests were beginning to cooperate in promoting the blues.

Edith Wilson’s 1921–22 Columbia recordings are jazzy interpretations of blues, representing the style that suited the market in New York City. Music biographers Howard Rye and Derrick Stewart-Baxter have both opined that Wilson should be regarded more as a jazz singer than a blues singer; Daphne Duval Harrison has asserted that “Wilson’s blues singing was often the only kind heard by the many whites and upwardly mobile blacks who attended the Broadway theaters and Harlem clubs.”³³ Wilson continued to record until 1930, and she lived long enough to enjoy a second career, making records again in the 1970s with such stalwarts as Little Brother Montgomery and Eubie Blake.³⁴

The women who constituted the first wave of African American blues recording artists were all based in New York City. Commercial recording facilities were available in New York, and there were numerous black performers, composers, and producers there seeking professional opportunities. Lucille Hegamin, Alice Leslie Carter, and Daisy Martin (Trixie Smith’s three adversaries in the Manhattan Casino blues contest); Mamie Smith, Mary Stafford, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Essie Whitman, Edith Wilson, Lena Wilson, Katie Crippen, Inez Richardson, Inez Wallace, Etta Mooney, Josephine Carter, Anna Meyers, Leona Williams (Leonce Lazzo), Julia Moody, Lulu Whidby, Mary Straine, Lillyn Brown, and others recorded blues in New York in 1921 and 1922, a full year or more before Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Virginia Liston, or Laura Smith ever set foot in a recording studio.

The pioneer recordings of northern blues women reflect the urbane tastes of metropolitan theatergoers and the cultural context of the Harlem Renaissance. Typically, their singing is more self-conscious than the southern blues shouters, smoothing over the rough edges in the manner of “light entertainment.” The resonance of folk style is stronger in the recordings of southern singers, as are patterns of black vernacular speech and phraseology. Blues sentiments may be universal, but they are conveyed more convincingly by a singer with a southern accent.

Not all of the New York recording pioneers were northerners by birth; some had begun their careers in southern vaudeville. Be that as it may, these women were essentially sentimental ballad and ragtime singers who put on the blues in response to the current rage. None of the singers who dominated New York’s fashionable theaters, cabarets, and night clubs had been involved in the development of the blues. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith’s blues evolved over the course of a decade in southern vaudeville and minstrelsy, where an endless variety of approaches were trotted out—from a barefoot trombonist to a ventriloquist’s drunken dummy to various individual takes on “Colored folks’ opera.”

Early in the twentieth century, formal disciplines and Western musical ideals stimulated the development of black folk and popular music culture. This constructive dynamic between African American folk music and the academy had existed for decades.³⁶ A shared cultural understanding that black folk music ought to be “uplifted” contributed to the concrete formulation of the blues. Things changed, however, after the advent of “race records,” a powerful mass media for the commodification of the blues. Once the commercial promotion and exploitation of the blues began in earnest, intellectual and cultural elevation had to take a back seat.

It was sensual excitement that propelled New York City’s enthusiasm for blues and jazz. This fact was provocatively interpreted in an essay that attempted to define “the characteristic that gave vogue to the Colored Music Comedy production”:

It has been the infectious joy of the vari-colored Negro girl as she sang and danced that has prevailed over the audiences who have patronized these shows, and sent them talking. They were a genuine tonic to which amusement jaded nerves responded. It was action, incessant and joyous action, that reached the very keynote of American life and mentality that has given the colored chorus girl her place in the affections of the big impersonal American public.³⁷

The burlesque wheels of the 1920s provided another avenue for mainstreaming blues and jazz. Count Basie’s clear-eyed description of his early experience in a burlesque show sheds some light on the murky nature of this form of entertainment:

When people went to a burlesque they were looking for a very special kind of entertainment. They expected a lot of singing and dancing and a lot of comedy, and some of the songs and jokes had to be kind of off-color and kind of racy and suggestive. There were also a lot of fancy sets and costumes, but I would say the main difference between the burlesque show and other vaudeville and variety shows was the way it featured striptease dancers. The prima donna of the burlesque show was the top stripper.³⁸

Southern vaudeville had its “smutty sayings” and suggestive dancing by both men and women, but scantily clad performers were not much noted in black vaudeville before 1920. Sylvester Russell, the presumptive moral arbiter of State Street, was very specific in laying blame: “It was the Columbia Burlesque Wheel of New York that had put one over on us in forging common low life burlesque shows to the front. When they creeped into the first class white combination houses and best colored theaters, there came another story to tell.”³⁹

Gonzell White never saw her name in lights on Broadway, and she never made phonograph records. She did, however, create a sensation in big-time burlesque, and she did sing blues from a very early date. In his “Annual Review of the Stage” for 1914, Freeman columnist Will Lewis judged: “Gonzell White & Virginia Liston led as singers of the blues.”⁴⁰ At the Washington Theater, Indianapolis, in 1918, a correspondent noted: “Gonzell is especially full of pep when she does her ‘Walking the Dog.’ She does it as no one else does, getting herself recalls each evening. She showed her splendid physical condition by her agility of limbs.”⁴¹

Gonzell White and Edward Lankford, Indianapolis Freeman, October 25, 1919.

In 1919 Gonzell White formed a team act with performer/manager Edward Lankford.42 Their act consisted of “singing, dancing, talking, and playing saxaphones. Gonzell has just purchased a new Holton saxaphone, C melody. Edward is still playing his old Henri Goldpani saxaphone. Wardrobe is up-to-date, everything clean and classy.”⁴³ Their song repertoire included “Mama and Papa Blues,” “Sweet Daddy,” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”; their saxophone specialties included “Has Anybody Seen My Corine.”⁴⁴

White and Lankford married in 1920, and the following year they assembled a large touring company with White as its star.⁴⁵ The Gonzell White Revue broke into white entertainment circles in 1922 as the African American feature with Jimmie Cooper’s Beauty Review on the Columbia Burlesque Wheel. According to report, they “made good with a vengeance,” and were re-engaged for a second season of forty consecutive weeks.⁴⁶ For that second season, Cooper “introduced the half and half entertainment … giving his white entertainers the first half of the show and the other artists the second portion.”⁴⁷ Cooper’s African American contingent fared well by comparison, as Gonzell White reported: “The ofays eyes have been opened on the show. We all work hard and try to please our manager as well as the public.”⁴⁸

Kansas City Call, August 31, 1923.

“Billboard” Jackson called Gonzell White’s company “the greatest draw in burlesque.”49 Variety conceded that the Cooper Revue “tops all of the 38 Columbia shows for the season’s high total gross receipts to date by a considerable margin.”⁵⁰ In consequence, the Pittsburgh Courier informed: “The Columbia Burlesque circuit has arranged to place several big colored acts as its added attractions on the circuit”; and the Chicago Defender confirmed: “The invasion of burlesque by the Race artist was started by the success of Jimmy Cooper’s Revue, which led the circuit in grosses for two seasons.”⁵¹

On May 19, 1923, Gonzell White and her “‘Jazzers of Real Jazz’ Company” ducked out of burlesque and sailed for San Juan, Puerto Rico.⁵² After one month, they traveled by Spanish Royal Mail steamer to Havana, Cuba, where they performed for at least three weeks at the Capitola and Actualidades theaters.⁵³ The jazz band also played between bouts at a boxing exhibition in Havana, “to the delight of the big audiences.” Afterward, they were booked by promoters Santos & Artigas for an extended tour of “two and three night stands” in “some of the principal interior towns of the island.”⁵⁴ The troupe had their Cuban contract extended numerous times and did not return to New York until the middle of December 1923.⁵⁵

For the season of 1924, they joined Ed Daley’s Running Wild, back on the Columbia Burlesque Wheel. In October they closed with Running Wild to accept a mainstream vaudeville tour: “The Gonzelle White act has started on the Pantages Time at an even bigger salary than it was receiving in burlesque. It will go to the Pacific Coast and back.”⁵⁶ At the Rivoli Theater in Toledo, Ohio, the local daily paper gave them “such a great top notice that the ofay acts on the bill all let out a yell.”⁵⁷

In April 1925 the Gonzell White Company moved onto the Keith Vaudeville Theater Circuit.⁵⁸ The current band included cornetist Gus Aiken and trombonist Jake Frazier, veterans of the Cuba trip, and two of the busiest New York City studio sidemen of the early years of blues and jazz recordings.⁵⁹ Comedian Clinton “Dusty” Fletcher was with the show that spring, and he stayed until November, when he jumped to the Mamie Smith Revue.⁶⁰ Kansas City notable Buster Moten was the show’s pianist that fall, and Will Basie, who was not yet known as “Count,” joined the following year.⁶¹ Basie remembered Gonzell White with respect and admiration:

She sang and danced and did her number and encore on the alto sax, which was a big novelty in those days. She was more of an entertainer than a musician, but entertainment was what the act was really all about. She had a lot of personality, and she knew just how to come out there and get that audience with us. She was a real pro with a lot of class, and she was not hard to get along with. It was just a great experience for me to be working with her.

I don’t know how old she was at that time, but I’d say she must have been in her late twenties or early thirties. She was very light-skinned, and she had curly red hair and was very well put together. She was not a large woman. She was the kind of small, nice-looking woman that you think of as being very cute. And, of course, she always wore fine, stylish clothes and costumes, and she also sported a diamond in one of her front teeth.⁶²

Ed Lankford did not make the Chicago date. He had fallen ill in Indianapolis, and stayed behind to recuperate. Nine days later, on December 15, he died of pneumonia.⁶⁵ By one account, he was “a victim of poor back-stage facilities.”⁶⁶ Of all the trials and challenges associated with the T.O.B.A. circuit, Salem Tutt Whitney found most pernicious the condition of the dressing rooms:

The death of Edward Lankford, general manager of Gonzell White’s Revue, is a shame.… Only a short time ago he was well and hearty, but contracted a deep cold from bad and inadequate stage appointments and died in Indianapolis. My big criticism of the theater, especially the house catering to Negroes, is that they treat the performers worse than they would animals. They usually have nice auditoriums, but the stage facilities are very bad. This condition is ruining the health of the performers. On the T.O.B.A. time two-thirds of the performer’s time is spent in the theater, and the places provided are hardly fit to stay in. The dressing rooms are badly ventilated, there are no chairs in which you can sit comfortably, and the general appearance is bad and unsanitary.⁶⁷

Ed Langford [sic] was such a hell of a guy that you couldn’t help worrying about how the show was going to get along without him.… Because he was a good businessman, and he knew the circuits, and was such a fine cat to work for. But Gonzelle White herself was a real pro, too, when it came to the business angles of show biz. Her husband had been the manager, but it was her show, and she knew as much about running things as he did.… when she came back after about a week we knew she still had every intention of keeping the show going.⁶⁸

Ada Brown, Pittsburgh Courier, March 19, 1927.

After Lankford’s death, the show swung south on the T.O.B.A. circuit. According to Basie, they played Macon, Birmingham, New Orleans, Mobile, Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City, where the old wagon seems to have given out.⁶⁹ Basie stayed “right on up to the end,” but he did not describe how the show broke up.⁷⁰

Chicago Defender, November 7, 1925.

Ada Brown was probably the first black “record star” to roll on the Columbia Burlesque Wheel. She recorded her first session for OKeh in September 1923, singing blues songs accompanied by Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra; the records reveal a song shouter with a big, rich voice.⁷⁵ Some twenty years later Brown recorded a duet with Fats Waller.⁷⁶ She never recorded with Harry Swanagan, her longtime accompanist in burlesque and on the Orpheum Vaudeville Circuit, despite the fact that his “work on the ivories” was judged to be “of the sensational sort.”⁷⁷ A Defender reporter caught their act at the Orpheum Theater in Champaign, Illinois, in 1926:

Ada Brown, the well known blues singer, was the headliner.… When she came on the stage the applause was thunderous.… She sang a well selected repertoire of character songs which went over with a wow and a little musical skit finish between Miss Brown and her pianist based on the song hit “Mean Papa” broke up the proceedings. She has really gone over the top. The Orpheum circuit is the highest goal that actors can reach in the variety field. Mr. Swinnegan [sic], her accompanist sells his piano solo well and shares the honors given the turn.78

Some of the finest black jazz bands of the era played in burlesque. In 1925 Joe Jordan and his orchestra joined Ed Daley’s Rarin’ to Go, another big Columbia Burlesque Wheel show.⁷⁹ The following year a Dave Peyton report in the Defender said Jordan “directs the white orchestra in the pit for the white part of the show, then goes on the stage with his own wonderful orchestra, made and coached in Chicago.”⁸⁰

Legendary 81 Theater pianist Eddie Heywood Sr. led the band for the Jimmie Cooper Revue in 1926.⁸¹ Thornton G. Brown directed the black band with the popular 7–11 burlesque company; a band member reported in September 1925: “Six pieces of the band are recording for the Columbia Record company under the name of the Original Jazz Hounds. Their numbers will be released this month.”⁸²

New York City was already in the throes of its romance with black musical culture when southern vaudevillian Trixie Smith captured the silver loving cup at the Manhattan Casino Contest of January 20, 1920. By virtue of her victory, Smith secured a recording contract with Black Swan Records. Black Swan was the brainchild of Harry H. Pace, who announced in January 1921 that he had formed a corporation “for the purpose of making phonograph records, using exclusively the voices and talent of our people.”⁸³ Black Swan was a decidedly “racial” enterprise with high-minded aspirations and intentions.⁸⁴ The label name bore tribute to nineteenth-century black classical singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, who was internationally known as “The Black Swan.” Pace stipulated that “the new corporation proposes to furnish every type of Race music, including sacred and spiritual songs, the popular songs of the day and the high class ballads and operatic selections.”⁸⁵ He chose young Fletcher Henderson as his music director and William Grant Still as staff arranger.⁸⁶

Pace was convinced that “Our people of the United States are at the point where they will buy any article manufactured by us provided it has merit and quality.”⁸⁷ He let it be known that, in order to reach this previously untapped market, Black Swan was publicizing extensively. “Among other activities it has arranged to have exhibition booths at the convention of the National Negro Business Men’s League in Atlanta, and at the meeting of the National Association of Negro Musicians in Nashville.”⁸⁸ Pace aimed his advertising directly at the African American record buying public, stressing race pride and solidarity: “When You Buy a Black Swan Record you buy the Only Records Made by Colored People—Patronize Race enterprises when you get the same value for your money.”⁸⁹

A sympathetic white journalist who visited Pace’s offices in 1921 noticed “something of the pathetic and also something of the accusatory in this practical venture, being the outgrowth of the denial on the part of the ‘white’ Americans to give commercial encouragement to any but the ‘coon’ songs of the one race which contributed original song-forms to this country.”⁹⁰

Early the following year Black Swan issued two single-sided 78s by Antoinette Garnes, advertised as the “First Grand Opera Record Ever Made By A Colored Singer.” From his vantage point in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, Pace may have misjudged the market potential for his product. True to his expressed intent, he recorded a broad spectrum of music styles: African American concert soloists, dance bands, musical comedy and cabaret performers, pianists, vocal quartets, etc., along with several female blues singers. Pace’s roster represented the range of performers active in the New York area; he made no attempt to dip into the southern vaudeville milieu, with the sole exception of Trixie Smith.

Chicago Defender, April 29, 1922.

Ethel Waters was performing at Edmond’s Cellar, a popular Harlem nightclub, when she was cast in Frank Montgomery’s musical comedy Hello 1919, which played the Lafayette Theater in October 1919. Waters remembered: “Frank said he could use me for blackface comedy. That meant working in burnt cork.… I sang and did a crow-jane character with Brown of Brown and Gulfport.… The white audiences thought I was white, my features being what they are, and at every performance I’d have to take off my gloves to prove I was a spade.”⁹³ Black New York journalist Billy E. Jones remarked: “Miss Ethel Waters, newcomer, bears watching.”⁹⁴

(Courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University)

Waters’s fortunes seem to have turned on her first Black Swan recordings, made in May 1921. Her big hit “Down Home Blues” is a distinctive, compelling blues rendition. Clearly, she was capable of singing a great blues; nevertheless, nearly all of her subsequent recordings are in the New York “jazz sentimental” style, either out of personal preference, or at the urging of outsiders.95 Her rise to celebrity was meteoric. “Ethel certainly changed the financial fortunes of Black Swan—prior to her recording the business was in bad shape. The first month’s sales brought in a meager $674.64. After Down Home Blues was released, average monthly receipts leapt to $20,000 and by the end of the first year of trading the total income from record sales amounted to $104,628.74.”⁹⁶

Black Swan was fully cognizant of Waters’s potential value. According to a press report, her contract included a unique stipulation: “that she is not to marry for at least a year, and that during this period she is to devote her time largely to singing for Black Swan records and appearing with the Troubadours.”⁹⁷ Before the end of the year Waters had to turn down an offer to become a feature attraction on one of the big-time vaudeville circuits: “Her managers admit that they received a flattering offer to put this great singer of the blues in vaudeville, but say it was refused owing to the many contracts made for the appearance of the Black Swan Troubadours throughout the country. These contracts run into the spring.”⁹⁸

In January 1922, Ethel Waters and Fletcher Henderson’s Black Swan Troubadours opened a big tour of midwestern and southern black vaudeville houses. “They said such a tour would sell a lot more of my records,” Waters wrote.⁹⁹ The gravity of the enterprise is emphasized by the fact that Lester Walton joined as tour “manager in advance.” The former New York journalist and Lafayette Theater manager was also said to be “financially interested in the tour.”¹⁰⁰

According to Waters, “There was so much music day and night on that tour.… We had a jolly bunch of musicians in Fletcher Henderson’s Jazz Masters. The trumpets were Joe Smith and Gus Aiken. Gus’s brother Buddy and Lorenzo Brashear were the trombones, and a boy named Raymond Green was at the drums. Our clarinet was Garvin Bushell.”¹⁰¹

Waters and the Black Swan Troubadours appeared at the Grand Theater in Chicago and then veered south.¹⁰² According to a press report, four members of the band quit rather than make the southern tour. On the other hand, Waters “felt it her duty to make sacrifices in order that members of her Race might hear her sing a style of music which is a product of the Southland.”¹⁰³

The Waters troupe reported in April that they had “just finished a tour of Texas under the guidance of J. I. Dotson, of Fort Worth, whose booking and publicity methods in Arkansas and Texas were highly profitable to the Walton-Pace Producing Company, which owns the attraction.… This is the second tour of the sort that the Dotson office has handled, Mame [sic] Smith having been as successfully routed by them.”¹⁰⁴

The show went into the Lyric Theater, the T.O.B.A. house in New Orleans, on April 17; there, potent new promotional mechanisms were put into effect. A front-page article in the New Orleans Item reported that Waters had sung her Black Swan hit “Down Home Blues” during a “live” broadcast from radio station WVG: “Every shoulder twitched and every foot beat time … when Ethel Waters, the nationally known Negro singer and her famous Black Swan jazz masters opened up on the radio transmitter.… Ethel herself will appear Saturday night at a midnight frolic for whites in the Lyric theater, where they have made almost a phenomenal success.”¹⁰⁵ A follow-up report claimed they had “broken the attendance record at the Lyric Theater, and are doing the same the present week at the Bijou theater, Nashville, Tenn.”¹⁰⁶

The blues attracted even more white interest in the South than in the North. As Ethel Waters pointed out in her autobiography: “I’d sung the blues at those midnight performances given for whites—but that had been in the South, where the white people are hep to everything about the Negro, his blues, moods, and humor.”107 Many white southerners found the allure of race entertainment hard to resist, but Jim Crow demanded complete racial segregation. Hustling southern vaudeville theater owners resolved the situation without disturbing the Jim Crow laws, by opening their theaters to occasional late-night shows—“midnight frolics”—in which they offered their regular casts of black performers, with admission restricted to whites only.¹⁰⁸

By 1921, when the Theater Owners Booking Association took control of the southern territories, midnight frolics were prospering up and down the line. In addition to advertising in local daily papers, southern vaudeville theater owners issued “invitations … to the newspapers and hotels, which give them out to their friends,” and arranged for local radio stations to aid in promoting their midnight frolics. The fact that so many daily newspapers were early investors in the radio business made this an easy alliance.

After attending a midnight frolic at the Lyric Theater, New Orleans, during the summer of 1923, a reporter for the white daily New Orleans Item was moved to confess: “There is a haunting, pulling, minor strain in the true Negro melody and jazz that the white man cannot imitate.… The Negro has his art, and there is something pathetic in the picture of a true artist denied expression of his art because of a black skin.”¹⁰⁹ A local black reader responded to the article with a provocative rhetorical question: “Would the management of the Lyric theater have a midnight show for Negroes only, if he was running a white theater, with white performers? … No, the white performers would refuse to work.”¹¹⁰

Salem Tutt Whitney went on record with his belief that southern midnight frolics “have increased the white patrons’ interest in our group and have tended to make for mutual understanding.”¹¹¹ The underlying, disappointing reality of the southern midnight frolics phenomenon was perhaps best summed up by Ethel Waters: “When your act went over good in these showhouses you gave two performances at midnight for exclusively white audiences.… So we found ourselves applauded by the ofays in the theater and insulted by them on the streets.”¹¹²

On the way back north to New York City, Ethel Waters’s Black Swan Troubadours played through Virginia, spending four days in Norfolk and three in Richmond, where she reportedly “showed to over four thousand people daily and netted quite a sum of cash and left the town talking of her and her vaudeville road show.… Yes, she made quite an impression on the natives here.”¹¹³ While black press reports portrayed the record promotion tour as an unbroken series of triumphs, Waters characterized it differently: “We were stranded everywhere on that trip, though we had a lot of fun.… We staggered back to New York, finally, after six haphazard months, and with Lester Walton still in advance.”¹¹⁴

Ethel Waters continued to make records for Black Swan until the summer of 1923.¹¹⁵ In 1925 she began a long recording relationship with Columbia. By that time she was heading up her own touring company, playing both black and white circuits. One report noted that, “Owing to a previous three-year contract with the Keith-Albee Office, Ethel Waters, singing comedienne, has refused the offer of Milton Starr, president of the T.O.B.A. Circuit, which controls 15 theaters throughout the South, who was willing to give her a contract covering his time at $1,500 a week.”¹¹⁶

The first company to publish a bona fide race catalog, and the first to release a blues record by a black artist, was OKeh Records.¹¹⁸ Even more than Black Swan, OKeh was responsible for establishing the standard practices that propelled the new market. As white-owned-and-operated record companies gained influence in the black entertainment world, cultural outsiders assumed control of the terms, or meaning of the blues. It was a process fraught with distortion and manipulation. The blues had emerged in the context of insular southern vaudeville as a coded, in-group communion. As popular entertainment for a general, national audience, it served a very different function.

Perceiving a potential market for blues across the race line, record companies promulgated a realignment of the blues firmament, inventing a new genesis, a commercial narrative in keeping with white concepts of black culture and creativity. Realignment gained traction when Mamie Smith became the first black woman performer to record a vocal blues.¹¹⁹ Her singing style and professional history were more in line with northern “jazz sentimental” singers than southern vaudeville blues shouters; nevertheless, widespread popular acceptance of Mamie Smith’s OKeh label recordings represented a pivotal event in the commercialization of black vernacular music.

There was a rush to take credit for Mamie Smith’s success. The Pace & Handy Music Publishing Company was quick to “claim the distinction of having the first popular song ever recorded on the Phonographs by a colored singer”:¹²⁰

Miss Mamie Smith, a Harlem young lady, has recorded for the Okeh two numbers published by Broadway’s large Race publishing house, Pace & Handy Music Company, Inc. The two songs are “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,” which appear on Okeh record No. 4113. This unusual event was secured through the influence of Pace & Handy Music Company, who in two years on Broadway, have taken their place among the largest and oldest publishers in America.¹²¹

The OKeh Company laid out its own self-congratulatory account of the momentous event. This version appeared in 1923:

A few years ago in a small cabaret in uptown New York a little Race artist was singing eight or ten times a day, earning a small salary and struggling nobly to “do something with her voice.” …

Then at last she had her reward. The manager of a large phonograph record company, the Okeh, heard Mamie sing and was very much impressed with her remarkable voice. “I believe,” he said, “that the Colored people would like to have phonograph records of singers like this. They would like to hear their own stars sing in their own way.” So he sent for Mamie Smith and had a test record made. When the test was finished all the executives of the Okeh company were delighted with the results.¹²²

Chicago Defender, November 12, 1921. This ad may have been placed by Spencer Williams.

Bradford had a long track record of vernacular song hits, including “Lovin’ Sam From Alabam’,” “Lonesome Blues,” “Jacksonville Rounder’s Dance,” and “Scratchin’ the Gravel.” He often warned that his songs had been copyrighted, and that he aimed to protect his intellectual property.¹²⁴ His proprietary and entrepreneurial tenacity earned him the nickname “Mule.”¹²⁵ Early in 1921 the Chicago Defender acknowledged, “‘Mule’ is the composer of all the blues that are sung by Mamie Smith for the Okeh Record Company, and on the stage during her present tour. He carries a bank roll big enough to choke a crocodile.”¹²⁶

Variety magazine explained: “the music men are making their two-cent royalty income from the mechanical reproductions major to the sheet music sales, which has always been the biggest revenue getter in which most of the profit lies.”¹²⁷ It was the “music men”—composer-publishers such as Bradford, Clarence Williams, and Spencer Williams—not the record companies themselves, who first advertised race records in the black press. As early as the spring of 1920, Alex Rogers and Lucky Roberts placed ads in the Indianapolis Freeman promoting their latest song compositions, which had been recorded on discs and piano rolls by Bert Williams, Edith Baker, and Pete Wendling.¹²⁸ These ads were an early indication of the sea change in the music publishing business precipitated by the blues record “boom”:

Indianapolis Freeman, April 12, 1913.

Seymour and Jeanette, Pittsburgh Courier, November 20, 1926.

In company with performer Will Smith, Mamie Gardner left Sam Gardner during the theatrical season of 1914–15 and was henceforth known as Mamie Smith.¹³² She entered into a professional relationship with Perry Bradford in the summer of 1916, when she opened with his Made in Harlem Company at the Lincoln Theater in New York City.¹³³ According to one reviewer, Smith “received three and four encores at every show” singing Bradford’s “No One Knows What The Thing Called Love Will Do,” the song that launched her recording career four years later.¹³⁴

Billboard, March 24, 1923.

The star of Made in Harlem was Bradford’s longtime stage partner Jeanette Taylor, an accomplished singer, dancer, and male impersonator.¹³⁵ The team of Bradford and Jeanette developed an act that suited Jeanette’s blues singing talents. In 1918 Sylvester Russell proclaimed her “one of the best of the ‘blues’ singers and an artist.”¹³⁶

By all accounts, Bradford and Jeanette were one of the top acts on “colored time”; but Jeanette was known to leave occasionally, once with String Beans, and later with “Cry Baby” Godfrey.¹³⁷ She spent most of 1918 teamed with her sister Helen in a blues-singing act that featured “one of Mule Bradford’s compositions, ‘The Harlem Blues.’”¹³⁸

The team of Bradford and Jeanette was permanently terminated in 1919, when both parties married other persons.¹³⁹ Jeanette formed a highly successful act with her husband Seymour James, touring big-time white vaudeville circuits with their own band, the Synco-Jazzers.¹⁴⁰ Billed as Seymour and Jeanette, they remained popular until Seymour James’s untimely death in 1926.141 Jeanette continued touring with the Synco-Jazzers, and the Paramount recordings they made together in 1927 document the well-seasoned blues singing talents and technique of the singer who almost got the groundbreaking OKeh record deal that fell to Mamie Smith.¹⁴²

In 1920 Perry Bradford all but abandoned his stage work to concentrate on songwriting and publishing. The Defender explained: “Mule Bradford, who was married a year ago and who has now quit the show business and has accepted a regular job at a regular salary with a player roll concern in New York. Mule says that he and the madam now have a little Mule, so it behooves him not to accept any open time.… Sophie Tucker is singing Mule’s latest song hit, ‘The Thing Called Love.’”¹⁴³

Bradford had been aggressively promoting “That Thing Called Love” since 1916, when Mamie Smith introduced it in his Made in Harlem revue. Marie Cahill, “the most popular and well known coon shouter on the stage,” featured the song in her vaudeville act in 1919.¹⁴⁴ In January 1920 the Freeman reported: “The song, ‘The Thing Called Love,’ by Perry Bradford, is gaining in popularity with the public and the performers are scoring a big success with it and is sure to be the hit of the year, and now also on music rolls and on records sung by Mammie [sic] Smith, that incomparable singer of syncopated melodies.”¹⁴⁵ This premature announcement refers to an unproductive venture with the Victor Recording Company. Bradford confessed in Born with the Blues that it was Jeanette Taylor, not Mamie Smith, who he first tried to get into a recording studio. He said his initial plan was to hook her up with Wilbur Sweatman:

Sweatman rehearsed my vaudeville partner Jeanette and went downtown and tried in vain to sell her to Columbia, singing vocals with his jazzband.… After Columbia gave Jeanette the works, I contacted Mr. King, the Victor top man. He … set a recording session for Jeanette, but we went out of town to do some vaudeville dates. As soon as we came back I doubled back to see Mr. King again, not for Jeanette, but for Mamie Smith who had sung in the show Made in Harlem. Mr. King let Mamie make a test record of “That Thing Called Love,” with me playing piano for her, but it was never released.¹⁴⁶

One month after the failed session for Victor, Mamie Smith recorded “That Thing Called Love” for OKeh. Sales quickly dispelled the notion that a sufficient market did not exist for popular music recorded by black artists.¹⁴⁷ In August, Smith cut her second record for OKeh, featuring Bradford’s “Crazy Blues,” and it became a smash hit.¹⁴⁸ Her progress was chronicled in the African American press via a series of “news” reports that may have been generated by OKeh’s advertising department. Early in 1921 the Defender published an article calling Mamie Smith “the rage of the east” and “the supreme phonograph star.… During her comparatively short career as a star, Miss Smith has done more than any other singer in America to popularize the genuine jazz and blues songs.”¹⁴⁹ According to this same article:

Miss Smith was asked the secret of her perfect mastery of the “blues” song. “The typical blues song,” said Mamie, “comes from the very heart and to sing it well you have to feel it. It is a peculiar and individual type of music which goes back for generations. In my opinion it is the foundation of real American folk music, much more so than the Indian or plantation melodies, for the real ‘blues’ music has a fascination about it which gets into the blood and is certainly the most popular form of syncopation today, not only in America but, I am informed, in London and Paris.’”¹⁵⁰

From Chicago, Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds headed south, where they appeared in large mainstream theaters. Their stop at the Coliseum Theater in Dallas was ballyhooed in the Dallas Journal: “Lovers of jazz music who miss Mamie Smith’s Revue tonight at the Coliseum will overlook one of the best accelerated musical treats of the year.… Her ‘Hounds’ give more spontaneous, shoulder-shaking harmony in a minute than the average so-called ‘jazz’ orchestra could give during an entire year of effort. But this is only natural, as since time immemorial, Negroes have been masters of folk melodies and ragtime tunes, and modern jazz is nothing more than ragtime with a little moonshine jazz.”¹⁵²

In this atmosphere of distorted characterizations, Mamie Smith began to gain celebrity as a national crossover record star. Three years after “Crazy Blues” was released, the OKeh Record Company bragged, “Thousands upon thousands fell in love with this great blues number, bought it, and today it still stands as the greatest selling Race record of all time.”¹⁵³ Before long, however, Mamie Smith began to hear footsteps coming from behind. At the Lafayette Theater in January 1923 she made a big hit, but drew criticism, “because [of] some of the lines of the catchy ‘Mame [sic] Smith Blues,’ which referred to imitators. That was at least bad taste. On the whole the act is a great one.”¹⁵⁴ Late that same year Smith disclosed to a Billboard interviewer that “her pet aversion is the fear that the public will regard Bessie Smith, another blues singer, as a sister, a fact she most strenuously denies.”¹⁵⁵

By 1923, Variety was obliged to acknowledge that blues records were changing the nature of music-industry economics:

Colored singing and playing artists are riding to fame and fortune with the current popular demand for “blues” disk recordings.…

Mamie Smith is generally credited with having started this demand on Okeh records. Not only do these disks enjoy wide sales among the colored race, but have caught on with the Caucasians. As a result, practically every record making firm from the Victor down has augmented its catalog with special “blues” recordings by colored artists.¹⁵⁶

The power of record company publicity was such that when Smith appeared at the Elmore Theater in Pittsburgh in May 1925 she was advertised as “the originator of the blues.”¹⁵⁷ That same year, a report from the Washington Theater in Indianapolis reflected: “At one time Mamie was the queen of the blues without question, but numerous record manufacturing companies have put before the public a number of blues singers, some heretofore unheard of, and have acclaimed them as queens and empresses of the blues. Mamie has apparently forsaken the blues and has turned to the jazz sentimental.”¹⁵⁸ Though her early OKeh recordings include a few convincing blues renditions, most notably “Crazy Blues,” Smith had never really turned away from New York–style “jazz sentimental.”

Kansas City Call, December 14, 1923.

Mamie Smith and Edith Wilson both gained entrance to recording studios through the intercession of blues composer Perry Bradford. Sarah Martin’s first OKeh recordings, made in New York City in October 1922, were the result of her professional association with another conspicuous blues composer, Clarence Williams. At the time of her first session, Martin was reportedly “demonstrating numbers for the Clarence Williams Publishing Company in the McCrory five and ten-cent stores.”¹⁶¹

Like Edith Wilson, Sarah Martin was a product of Louisville, Kentucky’s rich black music culture. Unlike Wilson, Martin’s blues was not of the New York sort. Her overnight rise to national prominence obscured two full decades of varied stage experience, mostly in southern vaudeville.¹⁶²

No doubt encouraged by their successful incursion into the white record-buying market with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” OKeh Records energetically promoted Sarah Martin. The Defender informed that she was “under a heavy contract with the Okeh people, and Mr. Heineman (white) president of the concern, is sparing no pains or money to make her the topnotcher in her line. In the ‘Record Trade’ of this issue you will find [a] one page ad, also a likeness of Miss Martin. This is lots of publicity to get, and in an ofay paper too.”¹⁶³

Chicago Defender, May 5, 1923. This ad contains a very early appearance of the term “Race Records.” The term appeared again in a June 2, 1923, Defender ad commemorating the “Second Anniversary [of] Black Swan Records,” as well as in the Pittsburgh Courier of that same date, in an ad for the J. Kapp Company: “Get the Latest Race Record … We have all the Columbia, Okeh and Paramount Race Records.”

Kansas City Call, September 14, 1923.

They played in large white theaters and concert halls, attracting capacity audiences of both races.¹⁶⁵ The Defender emphasized that: “In the concert tour of the Handy-Martin forces they play and sing selections which they have recorded for Okeh records.”¹⁶⁶ The presentation incorporated pedagogic as well as promotional elements, with Handy delivering a “curtain speech on the history of the Negro folk lore music and its relation to present-day blues.”¹⁶⁷

Brandishing his baton in front of an eight-piece band, Handy was classy company for a “blues queen.” His incomparable songwriting talents and aggressive self-promotion had established him in the public consciousness not only as “the originator of the blues idea in musical composition,” but a recognized agent of Dvořák’s prophesy about the elevation of African American folk music.¹⁶⁸ Caught up, perhaps, in the spirit of the program, the mainstream Nashville press wrote of Martin’s performance with Handy’s Band at the Ryman Auditorium: “Sarah Martin, phonograph star, sang ‘Blues’ galore, in a rich, resounding voice, which not only filled the auditorium, but was probably heard on Church street. When she reached the ‘Laughing, Crying Blues’ the 3,000 persons assembled for the celebration of Blue Thursday showered her with applause such as any prima donna might be very proud of. It was the ultimate in artistry of its kind.”¹⁶⁹

Evidently, OKeh’s heavy promotion of Sarah Martin produced the desired result: “Okeh record dealers in the cities where she has appeared are having more calls for her records than they can take care of.”¹⁷⁰ While admiring the commercial boon, some African American music critics began to openly question the public’s enthusiasm for the style and quality of vaudeville entertainment currently being presented by what they saw as a surfeit of blues queens. “Billboard” Jackson complained of “Too Much Sameness”; adding that, “the record companies have just about plugged these folks so persistently that the public is growing a bit tired of them”:

Sarah Martin succeeded in differentiating herself from other aspiring blues queens by incorporating histrionic effects and expositive “demonstrations” in her stage act, first noted in connection with the Porter Grainger–Bob Ricketts composition “Laughin’ Cryin’ Blues”: “more than a jazz rendition, her acting made it quite dramatic, tense and thrilling, and the audience yelled, applauded and cat-called.”¹⁷² At New York’s Lafayette Theater, “Miss Martin proved an artist of rare dramatic ability in emotionalizing the blues songs, which provoked uncontrollable tears and laughter from her audience.”¹⁷³ Such dramatizations earned her a reputation as “the most emotional blues singer appearing before the public today.”¹⁷⁴

In Kansas City, Martin introduced “something new—a surprise for blues fans … Sara’s own special interpretation of how one feels blue, and it certainly registers a hit.”¹⁷⁵ In advance of a midnight ramble at the Lyric Theater in New Orleans, she went so far as to “declare that very few white persons know what the word ‘blues’ means, although they have been using the word for years. She will not only sing the blues, but will have the blues on the stage.”¹⁷⁶

Chicago Defender, January 5, 1924.

Capitalizing on the powerful mystique that surrounded record-making, Martin came up with an illustrative stage sketch titled “How Records Are Made.”177 Publicity for a midnight ramble at the Lincoln Theater in Kansas City promised: “Miss Martin will actually make records on the stage under the direction of Winston Holmes, who has recently managed the recording of Kansas City artists for the Okeh company.”¹⁷⁸

Not long after her celebrated tour with W. C. Handy, OKeh Records decided to record Sarah Martin with a more fundamental type of blues accompaniment. Late in 1923 OKeh released her “Roamin’ Blues,” which they advertised as: “The first blues guitar record out.”¹⁷⁹ The guitarist was fellow Louisvillian Sylvester Weaver. OKeh recording engineer Ralph Peer, a white man, wrote a personal letter to Sarah Martin: “‘Roamin’ Blues’ with guitar accompaniment is the biggest seller you have had since ‘Sugar Blues.’ It might be well for you to rearrange your act so that this is your feature number using guitar accompaniment. It seems to me that this would make a wonderful encore number to be used very near the end of your act.”¹⁸⁰

In its buildup of “Roamin’ Blues,” OKeh declared: “Three years ago OKeh put over a big idea: the making of real, honest-to-goodness Race records. First came ‘Crazy Blues’ by Mamie. Thousands upon thousands fell in love with this great blues number.… OKeh next developed the standard Race record accompaniments by famous colored orchestras and by noted pianists. The latest OKeh novelty—just out—is a remarkable blue guitar number—the first ever recorded in America. New OKeh Race artists have been discovered by special recording expeditions into the South.”¹⁸¹

There was nothing particularly original about OKeh’s “standard Race record accompaniments”; they simply reflect the typical configuration of vaudeville theater pit bands and pianists. “Special recording expeditions into the South,” however, were a new development, and may have alerted record makers to “blue guitar numbers” and the latent talent present in southern black communities.

Following the success of “Roamin’ Blues,” Sylvester Weaver accompanied Sarah Martin on several more sessions, and she also recorded with Clifford Hayes’s Louisville Jug Band. However, no mention has been found of either Weaver or the jug band appearing on a vaudeville stage with Martin. In 1924 she went on tour with Henry C. Callens at the piano and her husband William J. Myers on banjo. When she sang “Roamin’ Blues” at the Monogram Theater that spring, “She was accompanied by her husband, who is an accomplished banjoist.”¹⁸²

At the end of 1923 the great blues comedy team of Butterbeans and Susie traveled as a supporting act for Sarah Martin, an arrangement that accentuated the artificiality of the “blues record star” system. “Butter and Sue” had been headliners in African American vaudeville for years before Martin achieved recognition, but their charismatic appeal was late to dawn on the record-makers. The enthusiasm they provoked from theater audiences was bound to pose a problem for any featured star. When the Sarah Martin Revue appeared in Shreveport, Louisiana, a Billboard writer went so far as to claim: “Her act was injured by the fact that Butter Beans and Susie, preceding her, used blues numbers very effectively, and therefore took the edge off of her work.”¹⁸³

In another sense, Sarah Martin and Butterbeans and Susie were well-matched traveling companions; equally respected in the profession for their fundamental decency and uncommon consideration toward fellow performers. When Martin became ill on tour in Alabama, Butter and Sue “retained their rooms at Birmingham, in order to spend the week with her.”¹⁸⁴ Martin returned the favor by recommending them to the OKeh Record Company.¹⁸⁵ They were already top box-office attractions on the black theater circuit, but, as Butterbeans acknowledged: “when we made the records, that made us draw double.”¹⁸⁶

Chicago Defender, August 23, 1924.

On a certain night, probably, sometime it might be a Wednesday or a Friday night, they’d have a midnight show, for the whites. The biggest of officials, like the mayor, either I played in front of the governor in some of them places like that. The best of people used to come to those theaters to see that midnight show.…

If you was getting 75 cents for your show, for the Colored, for your regular show, that midnight show probably you might be getting two dollars and a half, per person; and turn ’em away. Because evening time, they come back stage … not no one or two—forty and fifty, as many as they could get back there, and looking out from the wings. That’s the way it was.¹⁸⁹

In July 1925 Bailey staged a big summer blowout featuring Butterbeans and Susie, Bessie Smith, and other well-known performers, which he advertised with a special parade “featuring all the stars on the bill, with the result that the crowd flocked to the theater.” At the midnight show Butter and Sue “had things their own way.… Susie sang ‘When My Man Shimmies.’ Butterbeans rendered the ‘A-B-C Blues’ and in a conversational number they brought on a red-hot finish, which worked them almost as hard as did their opening number, which was their famous ‘Hellish Rag.’ Their appearance was the signal for a big ovation. Every number brought an encore, and their finish worked them silly. What more does an artist want from an appreciative audience?”¹⁹⁰ Butter and Sue packed the 81 Theater’s midnight frolics for years thereafter.¹⁹¹

Jodie “Butterbeans” Edwards readily acknowledged Butler “String Beans” May’s patrimony: “I took mostly all his style, and his songs, and stuff like that.… He could do anything.”¹⁹² Susie Edwards may have seen String Beans in a somewhat different light. When theater owners began billing their act simply as “Butterbeans,” just as the team of May and May had often been billed as “String Beans,” Susie strongly protested:

I seen String Beans get mad at Sweetie, his wife, then, grab any little girl and go on and do the show, you know. You don’t do that. So we went to a playhouse, had a big sign out: “Butterbeans.” And it was time for the show, almost. I told him [the theater manager], I said, “Listen, you got your billing wrong: ‘Butterbeans and Susie.’” He said, “It’s too late now.” I said, “Well, it’s too late for me to go on. I’m not going on until you put out there: ‘Butterbeans and Susie.’”¹⁹³

Between May 1924 and August 1930 Butterbeans and Susie recorded seventy sides of lively, confrontational, domestic comedy blues, framed on boasts, toasts, gross insults, threats of violence, and double entendre. String Beans’s irreverent language and intensely cynical comic spirit hovers around these recordings. His influence is conspicuous on their 1925 record “Brown Skin Gal,” which not only contains an example of the “Elgin movements” metaphor, but also the “words of different colors of race,” for which Beans was criticized ten years earlier:

Chicago Defender, June 12, 1926.

Another distinct echo is heard in their famous song “Get Yourself A Monkey Man, Make Him Strut His Stuff,” wherein Sue warns Butter: “I’d keep you looking like something that the buzzards had.”¹⁹⁵ Their 1924 OKeh hit “A to Z Blues,” with its gleefully detailed threat of torture with a razor, is darkly redolent of Butler May’s notorious use of his own “carving implement.”¹⁹⁶ On paper, many of Butterbeans and Susie’s song lyrics seem extraordinarily crude and even sadistic; however, the key to the team’s unique artistry and appeal lies in their irresistible charm, a loveable quality that, along with their potent vernacular humor, lubricates every shocking, roughhouse indignity they casually let fly.

String Beans’s impress on Butter and Sue did not dissipate over the course of their lengthy career. Their final LP recording from 1960 includes a selection titled “Street Piano,” which the album producers erroneously credited to LeMay (i.e., “Bud LeMay,” the entrenched phonetic misinterpretation of Butler May).¹⁹⁷ The scenario depicted in the lyrics—“They threw pennies out the window, crying ‘Play some more’ / My sister started eagle rocking around the floor / When the street piano played that ragtime melody”—evokes String Beans’s own childhood experience playing from the back of a truck on the streets of his hometown Montgomery, Alabama.¹⁹⁸

String Beans never experienced the crossover celebrity or the degree of commercial success enjoyed by his greatest disciples. In 1926 a Pittsburgh Courier columnist said Butterbeans and Susie were “without a doubt the biggest individual box-office attraction of which the T.O.B.A. boasts and the salary demanded and received is far above 99% of that paid Ofay teams on the biggest circuits.”¹⁹⁹

On Saturday night, June 12, 1926, the Consolidated Talking Machine Company—the parent company of OKeh Records—in association with the Musicians Union, Local 208, staged an elaborate OKeh “Cabaret and Style Show” at the Coliseum in Chicago. The Defender added a four-page section to its regular edition of that date, to cover and publicize what had to be the biggest race record promotion yet attempted: “there will be at least 25,000 persons on hand to witness an event, the likes of which has never been seen west of New York.”²⁰⁰ OKeh’s roster included Louis Armstrong, Sarah Martin, Lonnie Johnson, Shelton Brooks, King Oliver, and other luminaries of the jazz and blues age; yet a front-page headline noted: “Butterbeans And Susie To Head Line-Up—Galaxy of National Stars on Bill.”²⁰¹

Columbia’s advertising department heralded Bessie Smith’s recording career with a rustic greeting: “Folks—Say ‘Howdy’ to Bessie Smith … a bright new star in the firmament of colored vocal artists.”²⁰⁵ Shortly after the release of her first records, Smith made a southern tour, appearing at T.O.B.A. theaters in Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville, New Orleans, Macon, Memphis, and elsewhere. She had traveled this route many times before; but this time, with the prestige and influence of Columbia Records added into the mix, her professional appearances were distinguished by radio broadcasts, advance publicity in mainstream newspapers, and sold-out midnight shows for white audiences.

Atlanta’s Decatur Street theater district had been Bessie Smith’s base of operations for fifteen years, but when she brought her revue back to the 81 Theater as a record star in June 1923, the local white populace suddenly took notice. The mainstream Atlanta Journal tempered its obvious enthusiasm with a note of condescension:

Of all the excellent programs by Colored talent that have won high favor with WCB’S [sic, radio station WSB] audiences the entertainment by Bessie Smith, singer of “blue” songs for the Columbia records … stands unique in its welcome departure from orthodox broadcasting.…

The Bessie Smith revue, by the way, an attraction touring Colored theaters, is going to give a special performance for white people only, it is announced on Friday night at 11:15 at 81 Decatur St.

“Blue” songs originated down in Memphis, where Handy’s adaptations of the old-time levee melodies started a new trend in Tin Pan Alley technique. Genuine “blues” and the Broadway version all base their tune and verses on what is supposed to be darky dialect, superstition and custom, wherefore Tuesday’s entertainments were eminently qualified for their places.

Among the numbers recognized by phonograph owners are: “The Gulf Coast Blues,” “Aggravatin’ Papa,” “Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” and “Oh Daddy Blues,” all by Bessie Smith and all sung in a way that evidenced why the records are about the most popular of their kind before the public.²⁰⁶

A novel method of record marketing was noted a few weeks later, when Bessie Smith and company hawked her latest disc in the aisles of the Frolic Theater in Birmingham: “Bessie Smith, with Irvin Johns at the piano, before their own special drop, opened full stage with ‘Nobody’s Bizness If I Do,’ with the ‘Gulf Coast Blues,’ which received heavy applause, leaving the house in a riot, following. During this act Irvin Johns, the pianist, offered an instrumental rendition that drew hands. ‘Buzzing’ Harris announced ‘The Gulf Coast Blues’ for sale and went down into the audience to sell copies.”²⁰⁷

Midnight frolics were often advertised as an opportunity for white folks to see in person the great singers whose names they recognized from race records. Promotion for a midnight frolic at the Lyric Theater in New Orleans touted: “Bessie Smith, world famed record maker, will be the chief luminary.… Bessie is a caramel heavy of Ethiopia’s stageland, with a voice that drags out the last ounce of enthusiastic applause from white witnesses. Her records are played in nearly every home with a phonograph in the country.”²⁰⁹

Bessie Smith was easily the most popular of all midnight frolic blues stars.²¹⁰ At the Bijou Theater in Nashville, “she played a special show for white only and knocked all the tin off the roof of the theater. Trouble was had in getting the people to leave the theater as they cried for more.”²¹¹ In Memphis, Thursday-night midnight frolics at the Palace Theater on Beale Street were often previewed over WMC radio’s Wednesday-night programs, which were also called midnight frolics. When Bessie Smith brought her revue to Memphis in October 1923, she gave “a concert of Negro folk songs that will be remembered by WMC as long as a midnight frolic is broadcast from the roof of the Commercial Appeal”:

With a talented group of entertainers, Bessie let her crack jazz orchestra open the frolic, with Baby Cox singing “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” Her drawls were delicious and the spirit of jazz was at home when she gave vent to the popular song. She appears with Bessie at the Beale St. Palace theater with a special midnight frolic, which was given at 11 o’clock Thursday night for white people only.… The star of the frolic, Bessie Smith, greeted the atmosphere with “Tain’t Nobody’s Business but My Own,” which she gave with unction and a rich Negro Accent. Accompanied by Irvin Johns, her pianist, she followed with “Beale Street Mamma.” … The program was arranged with the courtesy of A. Barrasso of the Beale St. Palace theater.²¹²

The Theater Owners Booking Association, of which Anselmo Barrasso was a prominent member, was instrumental in promoting race record stars. The newly developed record star system squarely aligned the commercial interests of T.O.B.A. managers with those of record manufacturers. In May 1925 the T.O.B.A. announced that, “in co-operation with Frank B. Walker of the Columbia Phonograph company, they have gotten out a complete new and attractive line of lithographs of the two stellar Columbia favorites, Bessie and Clara Smith. These lithographs will be supplied gratis to all T.O.B.A. theaters playing these two stars.”²¹³

Newspapers, radio stations, and music stores also collaborated with the record companies to fully exploit the commercial potential of the blues. When the Bessie Smith Revue visited Pittsburgh in March 1924, the power of the airwaves was again brought to bear, “through the courtesy of the Goldman & Wolf Music Company”:

On next Friday evening, arrangements are being made to have Bessie Smith sing over either station KDKA or station WCAE, accompanied by her pianist. Bessie Smith is playing at the New Lincoln theater next week, and from all indications there will be a sell-out of the house on every evening.…

Kansas City Call, November 30, 1923.

Similarly, when Clara Smith came to Pittsburgh, “Goldman and Wolfe [sic], uptown race record headquarters … arranged to hold a concert on Saturday afternoon at 2:30 P.M. at which time Clara Smith and her pianist Stanley Miller, will be present to meet the many friends who are desirous of meeting them and hearing them.… The concert has been arranged at the request of many patrons of the above dealers, and many of Clara Smith’s famous and well known records will be placed on sale during this concert.”²¹⁵

Urban community music shops represented the retail element of a complex commercial network supporting and profiting from the blues record star system. Record shop advertisements in black weeklies were typically tied to activity in local T.O.B.A. theaters. Some record shops of the era were owned by African Americans. A number of more engaged black record shop proprietors served as unofficial agents for aspiring recording artists.

In Dallas, Texas, R. T. Ashford was the African American proprietor of a record shop on the corner of Central Avenue and Elm Street. Ashford’s daughter, Lurline Holland, described: “In the music shop, three soundproof rooms—they called [them] booths or cubicles to play on the Victrola before buying the records. Two or three people could sit in and hear.” In the 1920s Ashford “facilitated a recording contract” with Columbia Records for local blues singer Lillian Glinn, and accompanied Blind Lemon Jefferson to Chicago on his first Paramount recording session.²¹⁶

Kansas City Call, March 20, 1925.

Kansas City Call, June 11, 1926.

In Kansas City, black record shop proprietor Winston Holmes left his imprint on several facets of the record business.²¹⁸ He advertised Trixie Smith’s Black Swan records for sale in his store as early as February 1922, and he actively supported her appearance at Kansas City’s Lincoln Theater that fall.²¹⁹ In 1923 he arranged for Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, with vocalists Ada Brown and Mary H. Bradford, to record in Chicago for OKeh Records: “It was Mr. Holmes’ original idea to have Kansas City talent record for the Okeh company and it was solely through his efforts the negotiations were successfully completed for the trip.”²²⁰ After the session, “Recording engineer, R. S. Peer, of the General Phonograph corporation congratulated Mr. Holmes on the excellence of the artists which he presented.”²²¹

Black-owned record companies were an anomaly in the 1920s; the recording industry was almost entirely under white control. Labels like Meritt and Black Swan could only offer weak competition against companies such as OKeh and Columbia, which had access to nationwide networks for the advertising, manufacture, and distribution of their product.

In the spring of 1926 Holmes issued a Meritt record featuring two sermons preached by Kansas City–based Rev. J. C. Burnett, “The Downfall of Nebuchadnezzar” and “I’ve Even Heard of Thee.”²²⁵ Sensing that Holmes had a potential hit record, Columbia enticed Rev. Burnett to record the same two sermons for release in their 14000-D series catalog. Columbia’s “cover” of Holmes’s original Meritt production became one of the biggest-selling sermon records of the race record era.²²⁶ Not long thereafter, Holmes abandoned Meritt Records, leaving a catalog of just six known discs.

Within a year of her 1923 recording debut, Bessie Smith was deemed “Empress of the Blues,” a designation that has stood the test of time.²²⁷ Press reports were quick to extol her popularity and financial success: “she boasts an enviable salary. In every city in which she has appeared since her debut in ‘Jazz Land’ her coming has been so heralded that police reserves had to be called out to hold the crowds in line.”²²⁸ T.O.B.A. theater owner and dean of black theatricals Sherman H. Dudley declared that Bessie Smith and her sister record stars were “all getting good salaries, more than any acts have been paid before. The managers want more box office attractions and are willing to pay for them. I think this is the greatest achievement in the history of Colored vaudeville.”²²⁹

However, not all black music critics and performers held the blues queens in high esteem, or even wished them well. Billy McClain, grand old man of the African American stage, engaged in a bit of fogyism when he complained in an open letter to the Defender: “Performers, for the love of Mike, please draw a gun on the blues and jazz numbers. People are tired of them. Bring them something new.”²³⁰ Culturally conservative northern commentators began making predictions in the black press—a manifestation, perhaps, of “wish-fulfillment journalism”—that “The twilight of blues songs is at hand.… Some years ago everybody was singing something about the moon.… Then came the blues—a million kinds. I see the passing of the ‘ebony grand opera.’”²³¹ Record envy may have motivated another writer-performer to draw the novel conclusion that “People will not go to the theaters to hear a blues singer. They have their radios and phonographs and they don’t have to attend the theater to hear them.”²³²

Chicago Defender, November 22, 1924.

Salem Tutt Whitney countered the negativity in a column headed “What Hypocrites We Mortals Be”:

We rave about the classics and when one of our great artists is giving a recital we slip around the corner and go to hear Mamie Smith, Sarah Martin or Bessie Smith sing the blues. Just now we hear folks howling, “Down with the blues,” and the blues factories are working overtime trying to supply the demand. For every record of the classics you will find 50 records of jazz and blues. We plead for clean shows, yet a lewd show will pack the theater, while the clean show is likely to have to borrow money to get out of town. “String Beans” was notorious for his vulgarity, yet he was the biggest drawing card on the Colored time, and most of us went to see him, and the reason the rest of us didn’t see him was because we couldn’t get in the theater.²³⁴

In hindsight, it does seem that the T.O.B.A.’s fortunes rested too heavily on the celebrity of the blues queens. By mid-decade the novelty value of race record stardom was beginning to wear thin, and the effects were starting to show at the box office. Likely as a response to the theatrical situation, in the summer of 1926 Bessie Smith formed a revue and set out to tour the rural South, “under a tent which has a seating capacity of 1,500 people.”²³⁵ Her “Harlem Frolics Revue” consisted of three dozen performers, featuring comedian/stage manager Dinah Scott; a female dancing chorus; and a small orchestra headed by William H. “Bill” Woods.²³⁶ Like the big tented minstrel shows, the Bessie Smith Revue traveled in their own Pullman car: “The car has seven state rooms and lower accommodations for 35.”²³⁷

That summer, a music columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, who identified himself as “Observer,” observed: “Bessie Smith, erstwhile ‘Blues Queen,’ is touring the South under canvas. She has an excellent show and bids fair to report a successful season.”²³⁸ Earlier, the same critic had recommended just such an approach, as a remedy to what he saw as the current over-plentitude of blues queens in vaudeville:

[I]t would be a relief, to say the least, to thousands of ticket buyers who have had their fill aplenty of this form of work and at the same time it would take [the blues queens] off the circuit entirely, giving the managers a breathing spell and themselves a chance to reform their turns so that when they do hop back on the “time” they will not appear shopworn, tiresome or unwelcome.…

For years the thousands upon thousands of people who crave “different” amusement have been reading of this “Star” or that, have been buying records carrying their blue and topical numbers, but have never had a chance to view the artists in person, for the simple reason that they live in small towns in districts never played by them. These ruralities have plenty of money and are more than willing to spend it.… The blindest can readily see that a “Blues Tent” should hit from the start.… In other words, a good show of the kind is certain to make big money and at the same time … would not interfere with any existing circuit. We’re for it sink, line and hooker.²³⁹

Kansas City Call, November 23, 1923.

Bessie Smith proved to be the best-selling artist in the Columbia Record Company’s race series, and Clara Smith followed not far behind. When Clara Smith came to the Elmore Theater in Pittsburgh early in 1925, the Courier declared: “This Columbia record star … is one of the leading blues singer [sic] of the day and will sing the blues, and not try to sing semi-blues in musical comedy fashion, as has been tried by several black singers who have played here recently.”²⁴²

Pittsburgh Courier, March 15, 1924.

Clara Smith also retained her earlier southern vaudeville reputation as “a rattling good talker.” At the Lincoln Theater in Kansas City, a reviewer praised her as “Columbia record’s most entertaining star” and an “ace of harmonistic humor.… She proceeds to advise both sexes on how to obtain domestic peace and happiness by each doing as they please and when she asked if any man or woman in the house loved his wife or her husband, not a soul arose.”²⁴³

Ma Rainey began her recording career in 1923, the year of the commercial ascendancy of southern vaudeville blues. Rainey was the quintessential southern singer; in her twenty years on vaudeville and tent show routes she had attained iconic status in the South, but she seldom ventured north of the Mason-Dixon. Even after she became a record star, Rainey was rarely observed in a midnight frolic for white people. Her style of blues singing appealed primarily to southern black folks.

Clara Smith, Kansas City Call, June 12, 1925.

Strikingly characteristic Paramount ads appeared regularly in the Chicago Defender and other widely circulated black weeklies. Paramount’s publicity for Ma Rainey is an example of effective “re-branding” of a blues artist for popular consumption. Without concern for history or tradition, Paramount introduced Ma Rainey—like an archaeologist unveiling the Venus of Willendorf—to what they must have assumed was a clueless public. A February 2, 1924, Chicago Defender ad blathered: “Discovered at Last—Mother of the Blues.” Gertrude Rainey had been known as “Ma” since the fall of 1913, but the title “Mother of the Blues” was a 1924 advertising invention with no historical basis. Nevertheless, it stuck.

A brief dust-up over sloppy publicity arose in 1925, when Variety ran a short article about Ma Rainey in which, according to the Defender, she was “accused of having reached the fine age of 60 years. While we knew that Ma had been in our midst for a long time, we had an idea that she was only 59.… Ma is a native of Pensacola, Fla, according to the same writer.”²⁴⁵ Rainey responded in an open letter “to those inquirers who want to know her age that she may have gone to school with their mothers, but she is not too old to be a box office attraction. Nuff sed.”²⁴⁶ Rainey had no difficulty backing up her claim:

“Blues” singers come and they go, but the way Ma draws them in she should be called the “mother of packin’ ’em in” along with her title of being the mother of the “blues.”

The entertainment columns of black community newspapers had long been crucial to the development of the black entertainment profession. The Indianapolis Freeman was an especially important instrument for growth, as well as an outlet for reports from itinerant performers, and a platform for frank communication between African American players, critics, and theater owners. After 1920, however, there was a passing of the entertainment news torch from the Freeman to the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and to a lesser extent, other local weeklies.

With the dawning of the race record industry, the African American press was bombarded with advertisements from record labels touting their latest releases in large, eye-catching block ads.²⁴⁸ Mainstream commercial interests saw the black community press as a ready-made conduit to the black consumer. The Freeman did not carry race record ads, nor did it publish related “puff” pieces, pseudo-news articles promoting record artists.²⁴⁹ Perhaps this was a factor in the Freeman’s imminent demise; in any case, the “old standby” for African American performers faltered and failed by the mid-1920s, while the Defender, Courier, and others prospered.²⁵⁰

The flood of new record company advertising introduced distortions that infected entertainment news reportage. “Billboard” Jackson drew attention to this tendency in his December 23, 1923, survey of “The Gifts of the Year in Colored Amusements”: “The paid-for ‘write-up’ and the purchased review, the price of which is sometimes cleverly and sometimes not so cleverly concealed in the advertising charges, is morally dishonest, and is such a shameful practice that one actually wonders at the prevalence of these faults in otherwise editorially erect publications.” Record company promotions of blues singers demonstrate a troubling proclivity to fictionalize biographical and historical details, creating a bizarre dissonance with the expertise of in-group entertainment columnists.

The enormous success of Bessie Smith’s initial Columbia record releases was followed by an effort to portray her as a fresh new face. Smith had been playing theater dates in Chicago since 1912; nevertheless, in May 1924 the Defender carried this announcement: “Chicagoans will have their first opportunity to give the famous Columbia record star, Bessie Smith the once over Monday night at which time ‘The Empress of Blues Singers’ opens a week engagement at the Avenue.”²⁵¹ Before the end of her Avenue Theater engagement, she paid a “pleasant visit” to the Defender: “The famous Columbia Blues Empress was looking the picture of health and stated that she was more than enjoying her first visit professionally, to the Windy City.”²⁵² In 1925, when she appeared at the Liberty Theater in Chattanooga, a “T.O.B.A. News” column claimed, even more disingenuously, that it was “the ‘Empress of Blues’ first appearance in Chattanooga, which is the singer’s home town. Likely she’ll receive a big reception.”²⁵³

Record companies seemed determined to present all their southern blues artists as “new discoveries,” irrespective of their prior reputations in vaudeville. The companies apparently saw no advantage in drawing attention to past history; perhaps they lacked the necessary background information. In any case, they sustained the ruse as a promotional strategy, and none of the interested parties seem to have objected. If the intention was to obliterate any recollection of the blues in southern vaudeville prior to the arrival of race records and the T.O.B.A., then the effort was a smashing success. It explains why so many histories of the blues begin with Mamie Smith’s first recording session.

On T.O.B.A. time the average vaudeville single received $45 to $60 per week, while the average team (generally two performers) was paid $80 to $90; but if they wanted to work they were obliged to travel wherever the booking agent sent them, and absorb the high cost of railroad fares themselves. Theater owners did not pay for transportation, as had sometimes been the case during the previous decade. All acts on the T.O.B.A. had a 5 percent booking commission automatically deducted from their paycheck and forwarded to the T.O.B.A. office. Theater owners were notorious for finding excuses to make further deductions from the payment promised.

As the 1920s progressed, high transportation costs and capriciously applied deductions were responsible for reducing the majority of T.O.B.A. performers to virtual poverty. From Kansas City, performer Charles O’Neal remonstrated: “The money they pay make a talented performer become a traveling tramp … acts and companies traveling on contracts that will not meet the necessary expense account.”²⁵⁵ “Billboard” Jackson spelled out conditions in a 1922 essay titled “Traveling The Colored Circuits”:

It is … decidedly unfair to engage acts at salaries that provide only a mere living in these times of high prices and then to completely nullify its value to the act by routing the artist as to compel the spending of virtually all of it in transportation costs.…

An act was offered St. Louis to follow Philadelphia. The act gets around $400 for ten people. The fare is $34.00 each …

Let the officials get together, lay out the circuits so as to permit the artists to have something more than just “eats” money after paying their fares, and there is no doubt that the result will be improved acts.²⁵⁶

It is fair to say that during the heyday of the T.O.B.A., short-term profit, not “improved acts,” was the guiding principle.

In the earlier era, when theater stock companies were in vogue, players could settle into a town for months at a time and draw an ostensibly regular paycheck, while incurring no travel expenses. Theater-based stock companies virtually disappeared during the T.O.B.A. era, replaced by itinerant vaudeville acts; vaudeville “units” of three or four acts traveling in support of record stars; and most commonly, tabloid (“tab”) companies, consisting of ten to sixteen players, typically organized around a few name performers surrounded by a cast of unknown actors and chorus girls.

The blues queens/record stars were the only performers who experienced actual economic benefit under the T.O.B.A. system. Artist contracts and booking correspondence indicate that record stars such as Butterbeans and Susie commanded $200 or more per week; George Williams and Bessie Brown got $175 or $200; the Clara Smith unit and the Ida Cox unit were each paid $275; Ma Rainey and her Georgia Wildcat Band of five musicians commanded $350; while the Bessie Smith Revue topped all black vaudeville attractions at $600 per week.²⁵⁷

Letter from Samuel E. Reevin to Charles H. Douglass (Courtesy C. H. Douglass Business Records Collection, Middle Georgia Regional Library).

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

Unprecedented publicity helped create a rush of box office furor not seen since the salad days of Butler May:

Time was when once in a while word would come that this or that artiste drew crowds that required special police attention, but within one week mail has come to us that shows that the thing has become epidemic with the blues singers of the race.

Just last week newspaper clippings and private advices from St. Louis, Mo., prove that Charles Turpin … had to call upon the police of that city to help control the mob that wanted to hear Sarah Martin.

At the same time Mr. Horowitz was pleading with the Cleveland (O.) police to come out to his Globe theater to stabilize the stream of people who insisted upon hearing Bessie Smith.

From Macon, Ga., comes word that Mr. Douglass had to ask the bluecoats to maintain lines for the patrons who wanted to hear Clara Smith.

Ida Cox, Esther Begou [sic] and Ethel Waters, all playing in T.O.B.A. houses, have been the causes for similar reports from time to time. That’s why we may need a “Blues Squad.” Besides the talent the girls possess, the tremendous publicity released by the record companies concerning them about half of which went into the 217 Negro-owned publications is responsible.²⁵⁹

There were, however, nowhere near enough “blues queens” to accommodate the circuit, and there were hundreds of worthy performers who were not record stars; the latter group was suffering.²⁶⁰ In September 1923 Paul Carter, an old stalwart of the vaudeville highway, submitted an upbeat report from the semi-annual meeting of the T.O.B.A. to Billboard columnist J. A. Jackson: “Paul Carter … is very optimistic about the results that will accrue. He mentions the fact that there are acts now on the circuit that are drawing from $150 to $450 and that some companies are getting a thousand dollars or more for touring the time. He himself is preparing to put out a comedy sketch, called ‘Mariah,’ that has already been passed on by the powers that be and been booked at a salary that is satisfactory.”²⁶¹

Little more than one year later, Carter wrote Jackson again with far less sanguine news:

Paul Carter, erstwhile owner of the “Mariah” Company, a tabloid that he starred over the T.O.B.A. Time … informs in a letter from Chicago that he has been obliged to close the show and release his people.

In discussing the reasons … Paul, who has played every theater on the circuit … declares … that there is not a Negro performer who would not be glad to tour this time, if travel was reasonably arranged and some other conditions improved.

“I have worked five straight weeks and am no better off than when I started, and there are plenty of shows in my shape, only they are too proud to admit it.…

Adjustments were not forthcoming; low fees were the very thing that made tab companies attractive to theater managers. There is every indication that the quality of presentations in black theaters suffered, for the reasons raised in Paul Carter’s letter. Another performer expressed his outrage by asking, “Is the T.O.B.A. circuit for ‘tab’ shows altogether? … I have often heard it said (and rightfully too) that all ‘tab’ shows are identical in structure and rendition. There are, of course, ‘tabs’ that show constructive thought.… The type I have reference to is the usual one that seems to thrive over the T.O.B.A. circuit, whose comedians for no rhyme or reason cork their faces, and mistaking vulgarity for art, simply wallow in filth. Yet they work continuously, insulting the intelligence and morals of our people week after week.”²⁶³

It seems to me that the days for our vaudeville acts are nearing the end. I speak … as a booking agent and a manager. I have a very good three-act bill this week and good pictures … and with plenty of good advertisement.… I will lose money … and have lost each week I used a vaudeville bill.…

On the contrary, the worst little tab we get will get by, and the good tabs make money for any theater they play.… My advice to all vaudeville acts is to organize tabs for the present, as that is what the managers want; so give it to them. It is what the public wants also.²⁶⁴

Dudley was a charter member and official representative of the T.O.B.A.; at the same time, he was a veteran performer and the organizer of a “Colored Actors Union.”²⁶⁵ Dudley insisted that the aim of his union was to get the “Colored Actor” to “work in harmony with the Manager to help build up the show business in general.”²⁶⁶ To achieve this goal, he wanted to “classify acts” and institute a sliding pay scale that reflected their comparative “worth.”²⁶⁷ Fellow performers may have wondered where his real loyalties lay; at least, this was the underlying attitude reflected in a “Shot from the Lake Shore” that landed on the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier:

In a recent issue of the Courier there appeared an article written by our old friend, S. H. Dudley, regarding the decadence of vaudeville and the advance of tabloids as attractions on the T.O.B.A. circuit.…

We are forced to disagree with this idea; we cannot speak for the class of theaters and audiences who would rather see a set of barelegged choristers, backed by a team of so-called “comedians.” … We can, though, speak for the business as typified in the class of houses and with audiences of the sort drawn to the Koppin, Detroit; Grand, Chicago; Globe, Cleveland; Lyric, Louisville.… Managers at these houses report that when they are able to get a worthwhile vaudeville bill they do a jamup business.…

There are several very meritorious tab companies on the T.O.B.A. They are more of an exception than a rule, however … we think the advice for all acts to form tabs is not only illogical but untimely, inasmuch as both branches are notoriously underpaid, with the vaudeville end of it getting the best of it.

One of the T.O.B.A.’s distinctive letterheads (Courtesy C. H. Douglass Business Records Collection, Middle Georgia Regional Library).

The trend toward tab companies only increased as the 1920s wore on.²⁶⁹ Percentage dates also became increasingly common. Their profitability depended on energetic advertising, but T.O.B.A. engagements were often contracted less than a week in advance, leaving little time for adequate promotion. Payment on percentage was less of a gamble for big-name artists and record stars, who could sometimes demand a 60 percent share of gross receipts. Most companies however, only got 50 percent, and the results were often disastrous. It was not unusual for acts to finish a weeklong percentage date without sufficient funds to pay transportation to their next scheduled gig. In such cases, they often wrote an I.O.U. to the theater owner, with the T.O.B.A. arranging payback from the ensuing engagement. A letter from the Liberty Theater in Greenville, South Carolina, to the proprietor of the Douglass Theater in Macon, Georgia, written by Annie Mae Cox of Jimmie Cox’s Georgia Red Hots, a tab show, rather pathetically implored: “Dear Sir: In close [sic] find contracts please addvance [sic] fifteen dollars as we have been working three weeks percentage + lost. Yours for Business.”²⁷⁰

The Theater Owners’ Booking Association constituted an improbable confederation of shareholders, some of whom had been engaged in African American theater enterprises for more than a decade prior to its organization. Principals constituted Old South diehards, first-generation eastern European immigrants, and a number of African American theater owners and managers. Among the African American contingent were Sherman H. Dudley, E. B. Dudley, “Chintz” Moore, C. H. Douglass, and Charles Turpin.²⁷¹

Texas native S. H. Dudley had a memorable stage career before settling in Washington, D.C., in 1911, to launch his theatrical empire. E. B. Dudley (no relation) and “Chintz” Moore also both came up from the performers’ ranks. Adept on both violin and trumpet, E. B. Dudley was the orchestra leader with Pat Chappelle’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels in 1905.²⁷² In 1908, after leading the band and orchestra with Millican’s Plantation Minstrels, the Rufus Rastus In Dixie Company, and the Dandy Dixie Minstrels, Dudley took charge of the bandstand at Ocmulgee Park in Macon.²⁷³ In 1910 he left the orchestra of the Airdome Theater in Jacksonville to tour with Billy Kersands’s Minstrels.²⁷⁴ He got into theater management as early as 1911, at the Imperial Theater in Jackson, Tennessee.275 In 1914, following stints as manager of the Palace Theater in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Dunbar Theater in Columbus, Ohio, Dudley settled in as manager of the Vaudette Theater in Detroit.²⁷⁶ Later he managed Detroit’s Koppin Theater, a main stop on the northern end of the T.O.B.A.²⁷⁷

Allen “Chintz” Moore claimed Galveston, Texas, as his hometown.²⁷⁸ His nickname probably derived from his “human bed bug” (chinch) comedy routine, very popular on the southern vaudeville and minstrel routes during the first decade of the twentieth century.²⁷⁹ By the autumn of 1915, Chintz and wife Ella B. Moore were managing the Park Theater in Dallas.²⁸⁰

C. H. Douglass was engaged in show business long before opening his Douglass Theater in Macon, Georgia, in 1912. In 1905 he managed the vaudeville stage at Macon’s Ocmulgee Park, and in 1907 he became co-owner with Peter Worthy of the Florida Blossom Minstrels.²⁸¹ Charles Turpin also came into the T.O.B.A. with years of theater management experience. Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1870, he was in St. Louis with his family by the age of ten.²⁸² His brother, Tom Turpin, the ragtime pianist and composer, owned a saloon, the Rosebud, where in 1903 Charles Turpin served as “mixer.”²⁸³ By 1910 he was running the Booker T. Washington Airdome, which he transformed into a permanent “brick-front” theater in 1913.²⁸⁴

White theater boss Charles P. Bailey was the archetypal villain of the T.O.B.A.; yet his Arcade (“81”) Theater was the most significant southern platform in the early history of African American vaudeville—without the 81 Theater it is conceivable that no one would ever have heard of Bessie Smith!²⁸⁵ To call Bailey “a colorful character” would be a gross understatement. Tim Owsley once tried to come to Bailey’s defense, portraying him as “a business man to the letter”; but he nevertheless conceded that “For years Chas. P. Bailey has been the most feared man of all the South.”²⁸⁶

Ethel Waters’s autobiography includes an account of a confrontation with Bailey, which probably took place in 1923.²⁸⁷ When she insisted that Bailey have the stage piano retuned to suit her accompanist, he snarled, “No Yankee nigger bitch is telling me how to run my theater.” Their argument escalated, and Waters became so fearful for her safety that she snuck out of Atlanta early one morning, without collecting her pay or even retrieving her costumes, props, or stage drop.²⁸⁸

Owsley was not the only black performer who attempted to excuse Bailey’s behavior. Frank Montgomery once actually claimed Bailey as a friend; and Salem Tutt Whitney, who knew as much about the realities of African American theater business as anyone, penned this rationale in 1928:

Chas. P. Bailey is one of the richest and most unique figures in Race show business. From a little house where umpteen shows a day was the policy, he built two large theaters on Decatur St. He still retains his 81 theater, which is now managed by his brother, Tom Bailey.

Mr. Bailey, known in these parts as the theatrical king, seems to delight in the role of a tight-fisted, hard-boiled showman. But … once when we needed money badly he loaned us the amount required.… Again when we played his house on a guarantee and the business was good he gave us quite a sum of money over the amount called for in the guarantee.²⁸⁹

Another notoriously unregenerate southern manager was E. L. Cummings, who operated the Belmont Street Theater in Pensacola. Not long after the T.O.B.A. organized, a letter of protest came from performer Garnett Warbington, who claimed: “The salaries of nearly all the acts that recently played for him [Cummings] were cut under all kinds of pretenses and excuses. He closes acts at his will, not even giving them a satisfactory reason why, and you can’t say anything for fear of landing in jail, as a police captain (a family friend) is always in and around the theater.”²⁹¹ Another performer advised members of the profession that “Florida is a good State to stay away from, as the colored companies are not getting a fair deal from house managers.” The writer complained “that his company was fined $75 and the amount collected because two chorus girls went to a dance while playing a house on the M. & P. Circuit. Appeals to the heads of the circuit failed to obtain an adjustment.”²⁹²

The “M. & P.,” or Managers and Performers’ Co-Operative Circuit, was organized by E. L. Cummings in 1922 as an early challenge to T.O.B.A. sovereignty. Bailey and Cummings were so hard-boiled that they were habitually locking horns with T.O.B.A. officials, and on occasion, organized their own independent booking agencies in opposition. Cummings’s M. & P. Circuit bucked the T.O.B.A. from February through October 1922, when “for a certain consideration Mr. Cummings was willing to close his office and to transfer to the T.O.B.A. the entire M. and P. circuit and to bind himself not to re-enter the booking game after the life of the contract.”²⁹³

Milton Starr of the Bijou Theater in Nashville was the first president of the T.O.B.A., but at the annual meeting on January 5, 1922, Clarence Bennett, joint proprietor with L. S. Boudreaux of the Lyric Theater, New Orleans, was unexpectedly elected president.²⁹⁴ The questionable wisdom of his selection immediately became apparent in his acceptance speech. Bennett said:

There is a condition prevailing especially in the South, which, despite any personal opinion we may hold, must be met, and that is the necessity, now recognized by all sane statesmen, of the segregation of the races, with honor to all. This segregation must infallibly make for the best interests of the white and the colored races. The colored man must be taught to respect his own color, and, while not infringing on the white, that he will find the open road to the best interest of his people.…

It must be plain to all managers that this is the method that we must pursue to gain in the whole theatrical world the recognition which our collective investment means.… every manager must adopt a permanent policy, not being led astray for the moment by the prospects of quick profits.

It could not be expected that the colored performers of the present day could hope to compete with those of the white race who have engaged in the theatrical profession for some centuries. In words of an ancient humorist, “Don’t shoot the musician—he is doing the best he can.”²⁹⁵

In his enthusiasm, Bennett was entirely too frank, and his words inspired an immediate backlash from those most affected: “The colored members of the profession and the press of the race has taken exception to some of the opinions expressed in the article, particularly that part of the statement that would encourage closing the door of equal opportunity to the colored artist.”²⁹⁶ Before October 1922, Milton Starr was reinstalled as T.O.B.A. president, and he held that post for the greater part of the decade.²⁹⁷

Milton Starr was one of several Jewish theater owners and managers on the circuit. According to the 1940 U.S. Census, Starr was a native Tennessean.298 His brother Alfred Starr established the Bijou Theater at 412 Cedar Street in Nashville in 1913.²⁹⁹ Milton Starr must have been an astute manager and businessman: by 1925, he also owned African American theaters in Charleston and Columbia, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia.³⁰⁰ Although he was never described as “the performers’ friend,” Starr rarely ran afoul of the African American press. One occasion that did inspire adverse criticism concerned the complex politics of a midnight frolic at the Bijou featuring Ethel Waters and her Vanities, at which he tried to accommodate both races:

Manager Milton Starr hit upon the novel idea of presenting a midnight performance on Friday night and insulted Race patrons and placated the whites by giving them the main floor—and this, too, in a strictly Race theater.

Patrons who resented being seated in the gallery were forced to purchase box seats at enormous prices and to this humiliation was added the presence of policemen who insulted Race patrons who attempted to purchase orchestra seats.

The situation is unprecedented here and is rendered the more embarrassing in that our people are barred from all white theaters except one.³⁰¹

After this report appeared in the Chicago Defender, Tim Owsley put another face on the affair:

Milton Starr, president of the only Race vaudeville circuit, jim crowed a midnight performance at his theater in Nashville.… Nashville is in Dixie. Milton Starr is a white man—what else could he do in Dixie? … He has got to obey the laws of the state of Tennessee when it comes to allowing our people and white people to mix.… What happened in Nashville can happen and would happen in the following cities if it was not for the civil rights law controlling the cities of the different states: Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.³⁰²

Samuel Elias Reevin, treasurer and general manager of the T.O.B.A. for the entirety of its history, was another Jew living in Tennessee. Born in Russia in 1881, he immigrated to the States before 1905 and was in Chattanooga in 1907 when he became a naturalized citizen.³⁰³ Reevin was owner of the Liberty Theater in Chattanooga.

The T.O.B.A. was neither an artists’ agency nor an arts agency; it represented the managers and their pursuit of profits. Nevertheless, as the association’s most visible representative, Reevin consistently demonstrated his respect for black talent, which he understood must be reasonably compensated. In other words, Reevin was genuinely concerned for the condition of African American vaudeville. Salem Tutt Whitney described him as “a credit to Colored show business”; Pittsburgh Courier columnist William G. Nunn praised him as “sincere … honest … popular.… Those in the theatrical world, from the owners and managers … [and] actors … will testify to that fact.… Reevin is heart and soul for the T.O.B.A.—He has an almost-uncanny grasp of the theatrical situation from every possible angle.”³⁰⁴

Charles Henry Douglass of Macon, Georgia, was one of the South’s outstanding black businessmen. He built his Douglass Theater in 1911 or 1912, on property adjacent to the Colonial Hotel which, with renovations, became the Douglass Hotel.³⁰⁵ Like many black theaters in the 1920s, the Douglass often presented a mixed bill of movies and vaudeville, but at other times only movies.

Strict segregation was apparently not enforced at the Douglass Theater. There are several references to white people attending the regular performances, though it seems they were restricted to the theater box seats.³⁰⁶ The Douglass Theater also held special midnight shows for whites only.³⁰⁷ Bessie Smith played the Douglass in the fall of 1923, while on the triumphant southern tour that followed her initial Columbia record releases:

Interior and exterior views of the Douglass Theater (Courtesy Douglass Business Records Collection, Middle Georgia Regional Library).

When he reported this news in Billboard, J. A. Jackson commented, “This sort of thing will bring prosperity to T.O.B.A. houses and contribute no little towards the amity of the races.”³⁰⁹

Douglass was well qualified to attest to the fact that Macon could stand a dose of racial “amity.” Only a little more than a year before this report was published, his life was threatened by a lynch mob, as an orgy of racial violence converged on his theater. On July 29, 1922, John Glover, a young black man, created a disturbance at a local poolroom, threatening the patrons with a pistol. When the police arrived Glover shot and killed a deputy sheriff and two patrons. His escape initiated a manhunt that devolved into a blanket search of black homes and businesses, including the Douglass Hotel. Something like a white race riot ensued; blacks were randomly beaten, arrested, and shot at. Douglass’s life was threatened, “and twenty police officers guarded his home through the night.”³¹⁰

After Glover was finally captured two days later, he was grabbed up by a mob of “400 angry white men” and lynched. His mutilated body was then taken to the downtown area “and dumped … in the street, where his clothing was cut to shreds and sold as souvenirs. Later, the nearly nude body was dumped in the foyer of the Douglass Theater. Someone shouted, ‘Get the gasoline,’ but the police arrived just before the body could be incinerated inside the theater.” The local daily Macon Telegraph referred to the event as “Macon’s Orgy.”³¹¹

C. H. Douglass’s property holdings made him a prominent citizen, but also a target of racists who “had pent up disgust for successful blacks.”³¹² In 1925 he received praise from a white woman “studying conditions of the Colored race” in the South, who wrote to the Chicago Defender because, she said, “I want you to know what a clean, modern house [Douglass] has and the good will he is creating between the races.… I don’t know of a single organization or institution that is doing as much as his theater to promote better feelings between the races.”³¹³ J. A. Jackson and Defender music editor Tony Langston echoed this sentiment in their columns.³¹⁴

When Douglass died in 1940 his obituary stated, “As a member of the local Business Men’s League and Chamber of Commerce, he was instrumental in getting many things for his race.”³¹⁵ A 1978 retrospective claimed: “no benevolent appeal ever failed to meet his prompt and generous response … he should be remembered because of his shrewdness as a businessman and a philanthropist.”³¹⁶ As a member of the Theater Owners Booking Association, however, he demonstrated more shrewdness than philanthropy.

Personal grudges and vendettas were often aired in the black entertainment press. This account might be dismissed, were it not for the voluminous evidence Douglass left behind in the basement of his theater, in the form of artist contracts, and correspondence with the T.O.B.A.³¹⁸ The bulk of the correspondence is between Douglass and Sam E. Reevin, who, in addition to his responsibilities as treasurer and general manager, served as the T.O.B.A.’s southeastern booking agent.³¹⁹

Extant correspondence between Reevin and Douglass constitutes a one-sided conversation, for the most part limited to Reevin’s letters to Douglass.³²⁰ It is nonetheless clear that Douglass’s stinginess regarding performers’ fees caused friction between the two. T.O.B.A. theater managers were not obliged to accept all acts offered them by the booking agent. Douglass frequently refused to accept higher-price acts, and complained about the quality of the acts he was getting. Reevin responded: “I cannot agree with you in the paragraph of your letter, that if I continued sending shows like the ones I have been sending, many Theatres will be forced to go into pictures.… I am giving the Managers just what they want, and willing to pay for—I cannot send a thousand dollar show for three hundred dollars, or a three hundred dollars show cannot be as good and cannot do the business that a thousand dollar show can and will do—the T.O.B.A. is booking the best shows in the business, and the Theatres that are willing to pay the price are getting them.”³²¹

Macon constituted a smaller vaudeville market than Atlanta, Birmingham, and some of the other cities Reevin was booking, which may explain why he sometimes agreed to “cut salaries of … acts for Macon.”³²² But judging from the letters, it appears that he was never able to satisfy Douglass. Reevin wrote: “the harder I try to prove that it is my desire to have you as a friend, the worse matters get.”³²³

Letterhead used by Charles P. Bailey in his T.O.B.A.-era attempt to run an opposition circuit (Courtesy C. H. Douglass Business Records Collection, Middle Georgia Regional Library).

In the summer of 1927 Douglass leased his theater to a white man named Ben Stein.324 Stein’s brother Louis owned an African American theater in Valdosta, Georgia, and the brothers reportedly had other theater interests in Lake City, Florida.³²⁵ Business at the Douglass Theater suffered under Stein’s management, and there was a corresponding shift away from vaudeville in favor of motion pictures.³²⁶ Stein’s correspondence with the T.O.B.A. was, if anything, more contentious than Douglass’s had been. While Stein employed the booking services of the T.O.B.A., he was neither a stockholder nor a franchisee. In the latter part of 1927, he booked vaudeville acts through Charles and Tom Bailey’s rival vaudeville circuit.³²⁷

When Stein did book performers through the T.O.B.A. it was sometimes on a “split-week” (three-day) basis, with theaters in Augusta, Georgia, or Columbia, South Carolina, booking the same attraction for the balance of the week. Most dates were contracted on a 50/50 percentage basis rather than a set price. A June 1928 appearance by “Bessie Smith’s Unit” of nine performers, contracted at 60 percent of receipts to the artist, is the last act booked by the T.O.B.A. at the Douglass Theater for which documentation exists. After the stock market crash of 1929, C. H. Douglass regained control of his theater.³²⁸

The demise of black vaudeville cannot be attributed to a single cause; numerous factors contributed. Greed and shortsightedness on the part of many theater owners may have accelerated the process, but it is doubtful that there was anything T.O.B.A. officials could have done to reverse the trend. Over the course of the 1920s, vaudeville entertainment became passé; it lost its appeal, overshadowed by the novelty of motion pictures, especially “talkies.”

Sherman Dudley was a theater manager and T.O.B.A. officer, but he cast a stone anyway: “The managers never encouraged the producers of these shows for the T.O.B.A. to put out shows of the better kind by classifying them and paying a decent salary to those who would and could produce better attractions. Nor would they do things to build up their business. All they cared for was to count the receipts and live for the day without looking in the future.… Of course, I know there is a depression but even before this depression came the colored stage show was gone.”³³⁰

In Salem Tutt Whitney’s opinion, “the selfishness, greed and pig-headedness of some of the managers were the basic reasons for the decline.… ‘Keep ’em broke (referring to the actors) and you can handle ’em,’ proved to be an asinine as well as an unprofitable slogan.… The methods of these managers not only cheapened the actor, but it cheapened the class of entertainment with the inevitable result that the patronage fell below a paying basis.”³³¹

The entertainment editor of the Pittsburgh Courier expressed bitter condemnation:

At one time a fairly decent organization insofar as the road shows were concerned; the [T.O.B.A.] has now become the laughing stock of the country … the miserable exhibition of starved actors and actresses who are “bumming” their way from town to town.…

[The public] wanted class and artistry and something new in the way of jokes.… They didn’t relish the idea of girls appearing on the stage in frayed, dirty costumes—and with run-over shoes. Why these conditions prevailed, they did not know, but they did know that they weren’t to spend their money going to such shows and then wishing they hadn’t come.³³²

To cast the failures of the T.O.B.A. simply in terms of white theater owners exploiting black actors is an oversimplification; after all, the organization had a representative number of black participants. At the February 1930 annual meeting of the T.O.B.A. in Memphis, Charles H. Turpin was re-elected president; S. H. Dudley, vice president; Dr. J. A. C. Lattimore, secretary; and Sam E. Reevin, treasurer and manager. “The officers, with the exception of Mr. Reevin, are all race men, and no one doubts the sincerity and force of the big Tennessee theatrical magnate.”³³³

In 1930, the T.O.B.A. faced “the biggest crisis of its career.”³³⁴ Reevin made a heroic, if ultimately futile, effort to rescue the black vaudeville profession from the brink. Even S. H. Dudley seemed to lack the stomach for a fight to save the circuit. Not long after the Memphis meeting, Dudley sold his flagship Mid-City Theater in D.C. to a white corporation.³³⁵

The writer revealed that when Reevin made his tour of northern T.O.B.A. theaters earlier in the year, he took the radical step of advising managers to close their theaters for the summer: “He early felt the power which the talkies would have over a public longing for some change, and he prepared to meet it in the most effective way.… He decided to give them their fill of ‘canned music’ as he called it. He wanted to satiate them with this brand of amusement, so that when his ‘in-the-flesh’ revues started coming though again, there would be a real demand.”³³⁷

By “canned music,” Reevin was referring to talking pictures and related technologies. As talking films increasingly supplanted vaudeville, miserly theater owners replaced their bands and orchestras with electric musical devices and synchronized phonographic soundtracks. In the fall of 1928, pianist Caggie Howard reported that, after more than a decade of “faithful service” to the Hippodrome Theater in Richmond, Virginia, he had been laid off: “The Vitaphone and Movietone took my job.”³³⁸ In May 1929 Dave Peyton reported: “Hundreds of musicians have been put out of theaters all over the country due to the coming of the Vitaphone and Movietone.”³³⁹

Sam Reevin seems to have had a thorough understanding of the perils threatening the T.O.B.A., but he found no practical solution and eventually resorted to a somewhat awkward, yet obviously sincere, appeal to race pride:

It is up to the public to do its share, if the heritage of the Negro on the stage is to be perpetuated. You and I know that the Negro contributes humor, comedy, pathos and strange harmony, which are gifts which God gives to no other race. There is a haunting strain of tragedy, covered by an assumption of light-heartedness, which makes of your people a truly theatrical group.…

People must realize that the show game in this country—not only among colored people, but among all classes, is facing a crisis.…

We are asking the theatrical editors of the various papers with national influence to do all they can to awaken that race consciousness which is necessary to perpetuate the profession. We are trying to do our part, and if we can get the proper co-operation and help from the public, we feel sure that it won’t be long before we give them just what they want—if they want anything—at a price which will be in keeping with their wages … if the public feels that they need recreation, go to the houses that want your patronage—and not to houses which segregate you and send you to “peanut heaven.” They show by this that they don’t want you. And in the final analysis, you find no more talent on those stages than you do right in your own home neighborhood. Remember, let’s pull together. If you attend, then we can give you the best.³⁴⁰

In the 1930s performers no longer had the option of traveling full-time on a vaudeville circuit. Vaudeville in general was all but finished as a viable entertainment medium. The principal causes of its demise are clear: “talking pictures,” the Great Depression, and changes in popular taste, compounded by the avarice and short-sightedness of T.O.B.A. theater owners. Key southern vaudeville houses such as the 81, Bijou, Palace, Douglass, and others remained in operation for many more years, sporadically featuring road show variety companies, but their primary importance was as movie houses for the African American public in the stubbornly segregated South.

Naturally, the roster of African American vaudeville professionals significantly diminished as a result of this contraction. Then again, the grueling vaudeville life was not conducive to longevity. Over the course of the 1930s Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, and Ma Rainey all met their end.

As Whitney pointed out, however, some African American stars succeeded in prolonging their careers. They survived by diversifying their activities and seizing the professional opportunities still available to them; tent shows, burlesque, cabarets, and dabbling in motion pictures and legitimate theater. Some former T.O.B.A. artists continued to make records well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Not so many years earlier, blues queen record stars and the extravagant publicity they received were considered to be the salvation of the T.O.B.A. In the second half of the 1920s the recording industry turned its attention toward guitarists, jug bands, barrelhouse piano players, and other practitioners of what became known as the country blues. The elevation of these rustic, down-home artists to the position of record celebrities was a novelty in itself. It is worth noting that the market for country blues records did not extend nearly as far across the race line.³⁴⁴ A commercial model based to some extent on white folks’ voguish interest in the blues, which had briefly prevailed during the first half of the 1920s, imploded; and the blues became again black music for an exclusively black audience.

Guitar players had long been present in black southern communities; their association with proto-blues songs went back at least as far as Howard Odum’s study, twenty years prior to the first country blues records. “Parlor” guitarists and Hawaiian guitar specialists also preceded and informed the new wave of blues guitar recordings. To what degree and what proportion these forces mingled in the development of blues guitar defies objective analysis.³⁴⁵

It remains a mystery why guitarists did not play a greater role in early black vaudeville. One rather curious explanation for the scarcity of the guitar on the early black professional stage comes in a Chicago Defender column written by veteran minstrel man Coy Herndon:

The “jinx” factor Coy Herndon described has yet to be corroborated. An almost unfathomable aspect of Herndon’s testimony is that when he wrote it, in 1925, he was traveling the southern states with the Silas Green Minstrels! Herndon was surely referring to African American show folk in particular when he wrote “our people have almost forgotten how to play” the guitar. Notwithstanding his unquestionable expertise—Herndon had been traveling with minstrel companies since 1909—his fascinating commentary may simply reflect his own perspective. The “pocketknife” style he refers to as “Hawaiian music” was elsewhere recognized as “southern guitar.” A late 1916 report from Culligan’s Nashville Students testified: “Ray Williams, trombone player, joined the show in Portland [Oregon], and has added a great deal to both show and band. He is playing a southern solo in the last act on the guitar, with the steel.”³⁴⁷

Chicago Defender, June 22, 1929.

Howard Odum was not reminded of Hawaiian guitarists when he observed “knife songs” performed in rural Mississippi during the course of his 1905–08 field research: “Its name is derived from the act of running the back of a knife along the strings of the instrument, thus making it ‘sing’ and ‘talk’ with skill.… It is undoubtedly one of the negro’s best productions.”³⁴⁸

Ed Andrews, as depicted in an OKeh Record Company ad, Chicago Defender, June 21, 1924.

The fact remains that blues guitarists very seldom performed in theaters, even after achieving record stardom.349 In the rare instance when blues guitar was heard on the black vaudeville stage, it was presented as a “novelty.” The African American profession was still under the influence of an urge to elevate folk music sources, rather than reproduce them in raw form. Vaudeville audiences happily accepted folk songs arranged for the stage, but, it seems they would not pay a theater admission to hear the same sort of guitar players they saw and heard on the street. The urban theatergoing public and management expected professionalism from stage performers. The public was unfamiliar with the concept of a “folk singer,” but they were quite familiar with African American street singer-guitarists, who were generally perceived as beggars.

At first, record companies took a tentative, haphazard approach to recording blues guitarists. Sylvester Weaver, credited as the first, accompanied Sarah Martin and also recorded two slide guitar solos for OKeh in October and November 1923.³⁵⁰ His solo efforts represent a distinctive amalgam of blues, folk, Hawaiian, and parlor guitar elements, judged by David Evans to be “well within the stylistic spectrum of southern folk-blues guitar.”³⁵¹ Less well-remembered early blues guitar recordings include those by Reese Dupree, Ed Andrews, and Hezekiah and Dorothy Jenkins.³⁵²

When Reese LaMarr Dupree started making records in 1923, he was a New Jersey–based “singing cabareteer” and dance hall operator. Born on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia, in 1883, Dupree landed in New York City before 1910.³⁵³ In 1916, at the Lafayette Theater, he appeared with a piano accompanist singing “The Call of Dixie Land,” “Bachelor Days,” “Honolulu Blues,” and “Walking the Dog.”³⁵⁴ After recording two piano-backed blues songs for OKeh in December 1923 he was plugged as the “first man of our Race to record blues songs for this company.”³⁵⁵ A January 1924 report noted: “Fletcher Henderson, the Columbia star, and Reese DuPree of the Okey [sic] Recording Co. of New York will make their first appearance at the Laurel Garden.… They will be assisted by Miss Clara Smith, the well known artist of the Columbia Recording Co. of New York.”³⁵⁶ At his second OKeh session in February 1924, Dupree recorded “Norfolk Blues” and “One More Rounder Gone,” accompanied by guitarists J. M. “Doc” Miller and Kelly Thompson, playing perfunctorily in ragtime-cum-blues style.³⁵⁷

In the spring of 1924, Ed Andrews recorded two blues songs for an OKeh field unit in Atlanta, the earliest recordings of a blues singer accompanying himself on guitar.³⁶¹ David Evans notes: “Andrews was certainly a folk-blues performer; but his record suffers from pedestrian performances.”³⁶² Biographical information about this recording pioneer may not be retrievable.

Certainly the most prominent act—one of the only acts—known to have featured blues guitar playing on T.O.B.A. time was the team of Hezekiah and Dorothy Jenkins. Hezekiah Jenkins, whose given name was Zeb Manigault, was born in Columbia, South Carolina, sometime between 1888 and 1894.³⁶³ During the mid-1910s he toured the South with Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels, singing “Poor Me,” “My Own Rag,” and other original compositions.³⁶⁴ In 1917, at the Washington Theater in Indianapolis, he introduced two more originals, “I’m Goin’ to Pizen You” and “Florida Blues.”³⁶⁵ In 1922 he wrote from the 81 Theater in Atlanta to “warn the world at large to lay off ‘Hen-Pecked Man,’ which he says carries a copyright.”³⁶⁶

By 1922 Jenkins was traveling in company with Dorothy Owens Jenkins.³⁶⁷ Known as Jenkins and Jenkins, they developed a blues singing act that featured Hezekiah on harmonica and Dorothy on guitar. At the Lincoln Theater in Baltimore that summer, they pleased with “humorous chatter, imitations of musical instruments and some fine harmonica jazzing by the former.”³⁶⁸ Back at the Lincoln in early 1923, “Jenkins played the harmonica in a gifted manner, while his partner … accompanied on guitar.”³⁶⁹

In the fall of 1924 Jenkins and Jenkins made their first recording for Columbia, singing “Mouth Organ Blues” and “Hen Pecked Man,” with their own harmonica and guitar accompaniment.³⁷⁰ At Chicago’s Grand Theater in 1926, their “guitar and mouth organ finish was out of the ordinary and the man’s ‘Keyhole’ song went over fine.”³⁷¹ Dorothy and Hezekiah Jenkins’s professional relationship appears to have ended that year, with Dorothy moving into the shadows and Hezekiah continuing as a harmonica soloist. At the Lincoln Theater, Baltimore, in 1928 and again in 1929, he “almost stopped the show” with his “rendition of ‘blues’ on a mouth organ.”³⁷² “Deviating from the procedure of the regular Lincoln shows … He just ‘wow-wowed’ those ‘Bugle Blues’ out of this world.”³⁷³

Meanwhile, in August 1924 Papa Charlie Jackson began his prolific recording career for Paramount, singing blues songs to the accompaniment of a six-string banjo, which is strung like a guitar. Jackson’s playing weds old-time banjo strumming effects with what were becoming recognizable blues guitar strategies. An ad for his debut recording touted “the famous Blues-singing-Guitar-playing man. Only man living who sings, self-accompanied for Blues records … can sing and play the Blues even better than a woman.”³⁷⁴

While Jackson’s records were obviously popular, little is known of his stage career. During the summer of 1925 he played with Jimmy O’Bryant’s Washboard Band at the States-Congress Theater in Chicago, his adopted hometown.³⁷⁵ In February 1926 he headlined a bill at the Lyric Theater in his native New Orleans.³⁷⁶ Jackson was 51 years old when he died in Chicago in 1938.³⁷⁷

Another New Orleans native, the famous guitarist Lonnie Johnson began recording blues for OKeh in November 1925.³⁷⁸ Johnson was an excellent singer and a master of his instrument. David Evans has suggested that Johnson “helped to pave the way for the rise of country blues on records by providing a model of the male guitar-accompanied blues singer in a more sophisticated form.”³⁷⁹

(Courtesy Kip Lornell)

Blind Lemon Jefferson was also perceived as coming forth with the “real blues.” Texas blues songster Mance Lipscomb declared Blind Lemon was the “First man that ever knowed what ‘The Blues’ was made outa.”³⁸¹ According to Evans, “If the titles were not enough to convince a potential record buyer that Jefferson represented something different, the buyer only had to listen to the first lines of these songs followed by dazzling guitar responses: ‘Well, the blues come to Texas loping like a mule.’”³⁸² This is the opening line of Blind Lemon’s first blues record, “Got the Blues,” and the “dazzling guitar response” he followed it with is the “String Beans Blues.”

String Beans and Blind Lemon performed their blues in very different contexts, Beans in theaters and Jefferson on the street: “He hung out round on the track, down on Deep Ellum.… They give him privilege ta play in a certain districk in Dallas. They call that ‘on the track.’ Right beside the place where he stood round there under a big old shade tree.… An people stawted ta comin in there, from nine-thirty until six o’clock that evenin’. It was jest hunnuds a people up and down that track. They went fur that. Country people, an a lot of town people.”³⁸³

A passage from the first verse of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s initial Paramount recording, “Got the Blues,” incorporating both vocal and instrumental phrases (Transcribed from the recording by David Evans. Transposed to the key of G for comparison).

By the time Blind Lemon made his first record, in 1926, String Beans had been dead for nine years. Young country blues guitarists might never even have heard of String Beans. Regardless, the “String Beans Blues” theme appears in a remarkable number of country blues guitar recordings of the 1920s and 1930s, largely as a result of Blind Lemon’s influence.

Links between southern vaudeville stage blues and the country blues that subsequently predominated are found in the songs, metaphors, and melodies that passed from one blues style directly into the other. Adaptations of the music of String Beans, Baby Seals, Virginia Liston, Benton Overstreet, and countless other early black vaudevillians are prominent in country blues recordings of the 1920s and 1930s; leading to the conclusion that even if there was practically no guitar blues in African American vaudeville, the songs and styles of vaudeville stage stars left a deep impress on blues guitarists. Country blues came of age in the shadow of popular vaudeville blues.

Sylvester:	I’m going to ask one question, Sweet mama don’t you lie to me. Now, whose head is on that pillow, Where mine ought to be?
Lena:	Lord, Lord daddy, You blind and surely cannot see. That’s nothing but a cabbage head Your mama gave to me.
Sylvester:	Lord I’ve traveled this country Twenty-five long years or more, But I’ve never seen a cabbage With a moustache on before.