The performing arts included some of the few professional avenues available to African Americans before and after World War I. African American performers and musicians who participated in the popular vaudevillian and minstrel blackface numbers, that mocked the experience of black people in America, would often strive to layer on irony, humanity, and depth to the depiction of black life on stage. African American musicians of this era would sculpt vaudevillian ‘novelty’ music into new forms, jazz and blues, that would reshape the history of
music.
A number of the metropolitan vaudeville theaters opened from the 1900s to the 1920s catered mostly to black audiences, giving African American artists greater opportunities for performing their music and acts. However, African American composers producing songs that would be performed by multiple races, on stage and in living rooms, were often visually absent from popular music. The covers of published sheet music
by African American composers mostly featured portraits of white performers instead of the song writers themselves (Booker, 2015 p234).
Bob Cole, one half of the Cole and Johnson song writing and performing duo, would remark on the absence and prejudice of the depiction of African Americans on the stage:
“The Negro has been left out of the history of the drama for the same reason, I suppose, that he has been left out of other recorded things, historiographers and instances where he does accidentally appear are noticeably marked by active prejudice.”
Shelton Brooks taught himself to play pump organ at his father’s church in Ontario, Canada (Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, n.d.), and was considered a child prodigy by the scholars who have studied his career (Larkin, 2006). As the son of a black mother and Native American father with a partial upbringing outside of the United States, Brooks’ background has been termed ‘complex’ but not unusual among his contemporaries (Garber, 2010). When he moved to Detroit with his family in 1901, the 15 year old Brooks continued to develop what would become his stage act, working as a café pianist (“Shelton Brooks,” 1976). After Detroit, Brooks appeared in Chicago, participating in the Pekin Stock Company, an early African-American owned and operated venture that employed more than thirty actors between 1906 and 1908 (Garber, 2010).
Newspapers alternately billed Brooks as a popular song writer or “The Funniest Comedian in America.” He starred in several 1920s musical comedies (“Shelton Brooks,” n.d.) and toured Europe performing musical theatre (Larkin, 2006), where he appeared in Lew Leslies’ Blackbirds in a command performance for King George of England in 1923 (“Shelton Brooks,” 1976).
His performances on the vaudeville circuit were often in imitation of Bert Williams. However, his act stood well on its own, and when Bert Williams once attended one of Brooks’ performances, he said, ‘If I’m as funny as he is, I got nothin’ to worry about’ (Jasen, 2003).
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Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
Little is written of James Tim Brymn’s childhood or early life in his birth town of Kinston, NC, though newspaper reports of the social life of Kinston hinted at an apparent scandal that labeled him as a ‘worthless sort of boy’ (Lefferts, 2016). After leaving Kinston, Brymn put himself through schooling in New York, playing piano, cello, and
brass instruments, and later studying at the National Conservatory of Music and working with Cecil Mack (“James Tim Brymn,” n.d.). By the 1910s, James Tim Brymn established himself as a bandleader in Chicago
and in well-known hotels and clubs in New York City. He then made a name for himself as a composer, conductor, and music director while touring with the Williams and Walker Company in their London exhibition of Dahomey (Gates & Higginbotham, 2009).
When the First World War broke out, Brymn joined the army and became a bandleader of the 350th Field Artillery regimental band, the “Black Devils” (“James Tim Brymn,” n.d.), reported as the largest music unit serving in the war (Lefferts, 2016). The exploits of Brymn and his “Black Devils” were followed eagerly by those at home. In an open letter to the States, “"TIM" BRYMN
SENDS GREETINGS FROM FRANCE,” shared by Lester A. Walton in the New York Age, he wrote:
“I am still in the land of the living and enjoying the best of
health. We are doing excellent work in my regiment perhaps you have heard. My band now is increased to one hundred musicians, as we are considered A-l in the army. I am working pretty hard to bring to America a fine organization. The colored officers and men are performing what seems almost a miracle in the way of nines and discipline. I was in Paris some weeks ago and I saw "Jim" Europe. He is well and doing fine.
LIEUT. JAMES TVBRYM”
The 350th Field Artillery unit was part of the 92nd Infantry Division, organized with African
American soldiers from all states. It’s nickname, the Buffalo Soldiers Division, was inherited from the 366th Infantry, one of the first units the division organized. (“92nd Infantry Division,” n.d.).
In 1919 Brymn’s Black Devils performed at the opening of the Paris Peace Conference in front of Woodrow Wilson and John Pershing, earning him notoriety for introducing jazz to France. It was widely reported afterwards that the president was so invigorated by the performance of the Black Devils during the parade procession to the conference that he got out of his limousine to walk the route, saying, “I simply must march to that music, it is irresistible.” W.E.B. Du Bois, observer at the Peace Conference, would report:
“In France . . . .Tim Brimm [sic] was playing by the town pump. Tim Brimm [sic] and the bugles of Harlem blared in the little streets of Maron in far Lorraine. The tiny streets were seas of mud. Dank mist and rain sifted through the cold air above the blue Moselle. Soldiers ---soldiers everywhere---black soldiers, boys of Washington, Alabama, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Wild and sweet and wooing leapt the strains upon the air. French children gazed in wonder ---women left their washing. Up in the window stood a black Major, a Captain, a Teacher, and
I--- with tears behind our smiling eyes. Tim Brimm [sic] was playing by the town pump."
Brymn’s style was ‘northeastern hot style jazz’ (“James Tim Brymn,” n.d.) and he brought it and his Black Devils, including the “great Harlem stride pianist” William H. Smith, or Willie the Lion, to tour the U.S. after the war (Lefferts, 2016). He was an early member of New York’s Clef Club, “a professional and fraternal organization that not only helped improve working conditions for black musicians, but also showcased their talents" (North Carolina Arts Council, 2013), worked with W. C. Handy, and later became manager of the publishing house of Clarence Williams and Armand Piron (Gates & Higginbotham, 2009). He would be billed as “Mr. Jazz, himself” in newspapers that would also report that “Tim Brymn and jazz are as one” (“Phonograph House to be Opened…,” 1921). Reports of Brymn’s performances and activities waned in newspapers at the onset of WWII and his public performances lessened after he enlisted to work for the Works Progress Administration at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, NY (Lefferts, 2016).
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Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
According to those who knew Charles Leonidas “Doc” Cooke, he had begun composing music when he was only eight years old and organized his first combo when he was 15. Cooke had received early musical instruction
from his mother, a music teacher, while attending public schools in Louisville, KY and Detroit, MI. When he moved with his parents to Detroit at the age of 18, he played both in Fred Stone’s Orchestra and Ben Shook’s Band. He continued his studies of music and music theory under other teachers (“Charles ‘Lee’ Leonidas ‘Doc’ Cooke,” n.d.) and eventually earned a Doctorate degree in music from the Chicago College of Music (“Charles ‘Doc’ Cooke,” n.d.).
“The Dreamland was a cavernous, barnlike dance hall/building which also functioned as a roller rink located beneath the Elevated Railroad tracks at the junction of Paulina and Van Buren streets on Chicago’s West Side (a site which today is the north embankment of the Eisenhower Expressway), and catered to an exclusively white audience / a mostly
Jewish & Italian audience, being about equidistant from what is now called “Little Italy” and a nearby Jewish neighborhood.”
By 1910 Cooke was working as a staff composer for Detroit publishing houses, before moving to Chicago and organizing his own band (“Charles ‘Lee’ Leonidas ‘Doc’ Cooke,” n.d.). Through his connection with Shook,
Cooke became the conductor and musical director of the Orchestra at Paddy Harmon’s Dreamland Ballroom, the Municipal Pier, and the White City Ballroom in Chicago (“Charles ‘Doc’ Cooke,” n.d.).
The ensemble that Cooke toured with recorded under several names, from Cookies Gingersnaps, Doc Cook and his 14 Doctors of Syncopation, to Doc Cook’s Dreamland Orchestra (“Doc Cook,” n.d.). The ensemble scattered after their instruments were stolen during a break-in at a multi-week dance marathon at the Chicago Coliseum in 1930. Cooke chose to relocate to New York where he had several connections, and a previous orchestration of his had created demand for his arrangements. Soon, Cooke was put on staff as an arranger for Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO) and Radio City Music Hall (Edwards, n.d.). He retired from these positions in the mid 1940s and proceeded to work on various projects until he had a stroke in 1954 at the age of 63 while adapting The Boy Friend, a British hit, to the American stage. The stroke partially paralyzed him, but Cooke learned to use his left hand in order to finish his work. He died in 1958 as the result of a second stroke.
Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
When the acting Dean of Howard University School of Law, and father of Will Mercer Cook died, he was sent from his home in Washington, D.C. to live with his grandparents in Chattanooga; he was ten. Within a year, his grandfather sent him home to his mother “believing it best for Will to not be in the south.” Cook’s brief time with his grandfather, however, has been pointed out as being potentially influential on his later compositions.
Cook’s initial musical education was classical. He studied violin at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, then with Antonín Dvořák at the National Conservatory of Music. Through performances in churches and community events, Cook had acquired a following of fans and supporters in the community. One of those supporters, Frederick Douglass, led a campaign to fund his enrollment at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik (Library of
Congress, n.d.). Douglass was also the person who encouraged Cook to change his name to Will Marion Cook.
Upon returning to the States, Cook found his career as a solo classical violin performer was hampered by segregation (“Will Marion Cook,” n.d.). He turned instead to musical theatre and would work as a conductor and musical director for Bert Williams and George Walker while writing and publishing many songs on his own (Library of Congress, n.d.). Cook was one of many distinguished and well-regarded African American composers, lyricists, and performers to gather regularly at Marshall’s Hotel on West Fifty-Third Street in
Manhattan to discuss how to remove the minstrel mask from the musical stage. Cook would collaborate with one of these fellow artists, Paul Laurence Dunbar, in the writing of Clorindy, which would become a great success even though “Dunbar would later be embarrassed by his lyrics and Clorindy's adhering to the 'worst of the minstrel tradition'” (Carter, 2000). Cook, on the other hand, would declare upon Clorindy’s success, that:
"Negroes were at last on Broadway, and there to stay. Gone was the uff-dah of the minstrel! Gone the Mass Linkum stuff! We were artists and we were going a long, long way!"
Though criticized in his time for adopting the demeaning aspects of ‘coon’ songs that were popularly written and received by whites, Cook was also regarded by his peers as a musical genius. W.E.B. DuBois would write about this apparent conflict:
"One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
Cook and Dunbar would collaborate again on the musical, Dahomey, which traveled with the Williams and Walker Company from Broadway and the New York Theater in Times Square to Buckingham Palace. Cook would become known to those who studied him, and the times during which he developed his art, as “one of the most important figures in pre-jazz African American music” (Library of Congress, n.d.). Duke Ellington, who studied under, and was greatly influenced by, Cook would recall some advice he received when he was attempting to develop a theme:
"You know you should go to the conservatory, but since you won't I'll tell you. First you find the logical way, and when you find it, avoid it, and let your inner self break through and guide you. Don't try to be anybody but yourself."
Allowing the “inner self to break through” was echoed in how he later described one of his own experiences writing music. After writing the song “Swing Along” he wrote to his son:
"Swing Along' came almost all at once...and when I sat at the piano to work it out I made very little if any change. I felt as if 'Swing Along' was exactly what we were to do - no obstacles - nothing could stop us."
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Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
"Little is known of Davis's early life except that he was a quiet, unobtrusive individual who grew up in poverty and never finished high school" (Library of Congress, n.d.).
Like so many of his contemporaries, recorded information of Gussie Lord Davis’s life are rare and hard to find. It is known that Gussie Lord Davis was born in Dayton, OH; that, at some point, he moved to New York where he became the first black songwriter to become famous on Tin Pan Alley, and that he published more than 300 of the over 600 songs he wrote by the time he died at the age of 36 (“Gussie Davis,” n.d.; Southern, 2013). When his application to study at Nelson Musical College in Cincinnati, OH was rejected due to his race, he worked out a deal with the college to receive private lessons in exchange for janitorial services. In his early twenties he organized the Davis Operatic and Plantation Minstrels that would continue to perform and tour until shortly before his death. In 1895 he placed second in the New York World’s ten best songwriters of the nation contest with “Send Back the Picture and the Ring” (“Gussie Davis,” n.d.).
His songs included comic minstrel songs, art songs, choral music, and highly popular sentimental ballads.
"Gussie Davis reached for the tender spots that lurk deep within all of us, no matter how thick or tough our outer crusts may be. In an era of 'sing-em-and-weep; melodies, Davis did more than his share to open up the tear ducts of America."
However, his critics would point out that his talent went hand-in-hand with an opportunistic-ness that aimed at popularity over substance:
“Almost all of Davis's songs devolve on hackneyed melodramatic situations, and many of them make use of racial stereotypes offensive to many Americans even before the turn of the century.”
He would also be condemned for catering to prejudiced white tastes. Davis would seem to have been operating toward the goal of popular composition and popular career, alone, regardless of what his fellow musicians and composers may have felt. In an interview piece featured in the Cleveland Gazette on February 4, 1888, “‘Irene, Good Night” the composer of this beautiful song talks,” Davis says:
"They tell me that all song writers, as a rule, die in the poorhouse, broken down in health and empty in pocket. ...I was thinking what a fickle old jade fortune really is and as a topical song aptly puts it, 'I remember, I forgot,' that when I first gained an inspiration to follow the stage as a profession, I was just eighteen years old, and not caring to enter in the rear, I set to work to study music, and before long I managed to get together a pretty air and had it arranged. It was the 'Maple on the Hill,' and became quite popular throughout the West. Music publishers are not over generous in taking to publishing or even handling music from an unknown person, and I found a great deal of trouble, but I gave one publisher money to get it out, and he took pity on me. The song proved a great go."
Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
William Christopher Handy worked various jobs and apprenticeships from an early age. He was also enamored of music from an early age, if his tenacity at saving money to buy his first guitar is any indication. His father, a Methodist minister who had been enslaved prior to emancipation, believed that all secular “musical instruments were the tools of the devil” (“W.C. Handy,” n.d.). He ordered Handy to return the guitar immediately, and, perhaps as a concession to Handy’s musical drive, arranged for Handy to receive organ lessons at the church. However, Handy’s musical interests were not so easily bound to religious music; as a teenager he secretly joined a band playing coronet.
Handy continued to move among and organize musical groups similar to the way he also moved through various apprenticeships and jobs, eventually teaching music at the Alabama Agriculture & Mechanical College (“W.C. Handy,” n.d.). In 1892 his band set off with the goal of
performing at the World’s Fair in Chicago only to discover it had been postponed for a year. Without enough money to get all the way home, the band separated temporarily and Handy got stuck in St. Louis, sleeping in vacant lots and singing on the corners for food money. Historians and Handy himself point to these hard times as setting the ground work for his future musical legacy (Pruitt, 2009). Eventually, Handy and his band would tour the U.S., Canada, Cuba, and the black vaudeville circuit performing what was then called novelty music (Booker, 2015 p 234; Pruitt, 2009).
Though initially ambivalent about blues music, Handy began to arrange blues songs for his band after he had been, reportedly, hearing it played “everywhere.” He would say: “It was the weirdest music I ever heard” (Wischusen, 2016). By 1907 Handy and his band were performing his blues numbers in Memphis, and were popular on Beale Street. He wrote his first blues hit there, in support of Edward Hull Crump’s mayoral campaign in 1909, called “Mr. Crump,” later known as “The Memphis Blues” (Wischusen, 2016). Handy would not publish “The Memphis Blues” until 1912 when, finding persistent denial from music publishers and shops, Handy worked out a deal with a store manager to publish the music in exchange for the copyright. Immediately after the deal was in place, the music sold thousands of copies and spread across the country, making a great deal of money for the music store manager. Handy, however, was denied the royalties and the rights to control his own work (Pruitt, 2009). Later, Handy would co-establish the Pace and Handy Sheet Music Publication Company with Harry Pace, a student of W.E.B. Du Bois (“W.C. Handy,” n.d.).
Memphis Blues : The Dixieland Jazz Group : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954)
photo of J. Rosamond Johnson
J. Rosamond Johnson. (1902) Here and There. The Colored American Magazine. 4(4) pg. 307
John Rosamond Johnson began playing the piano at the age of four before leaving his hometown in Jacksonville, Florida, to study music at the New England Conservatory and in London (Library of Congress, n.d.). He returned to Jacksonville and served as a public school teacher
briefly before deciding to move north and become involved in the vaudeville circuit (“J. Rosamond Johnson,” n.d.). In 1900 he turned his brother’s poem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” into what would later become known as the Negro National Anthem before forming a song writing team with his brother, James Weldon Johnson, and Robert Cole (“Johnson, J(ohn) Rosamond,” 1999). Though James Weldon Johnson would sometimes join them, it was Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson that would make a name for themselves as a popular songwriter and performer duo, distinguishing their act from others by performing in formal evening clothes and eschewing all caricature (African American Performers.., n.d.).
Johnson continued to command popularity touring with Charles Hart and Tom Brown after Bob Cole’s death in 1911. At the onset of WWI he put his performing career on hold and accepted a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the 15th Regiment. The 15th New York National Guard Regiment, later renamed the 369th Infantry Regiment, consisted mostly of African Americans and spent more days in the front line trenches than any other American unit, also suffering the most losses. The unit was nicknamed the Black Rattlers by the U.S., Men of Bronze by the French, and Hell-fighters by the Germans. (‘369th Infantry Regiment,’ n.d.).
Johnson returned from the war alive to create, and tour with, his own performance groups; he also returned to teaching, serving as a director of the Music School Settlement for Colored People (“Johnson, J(ohn)
Rosamond,” 1999; Library of Congress, n.d.). In the 1920s, Johnson began to split his attentions between performing and writing about the music he studied. In his first book, The Book of Negro Spirituals, and its companion volume, The Second Book of Negro Spirituals, Johnson presented a collection of various spirituals and song versions collected during his musical study. In an introduction to a third book on the same topic, Rolling Along in Song: A Chronological Survey of American Negro Music, Johnson would dedicate the songs to “the musical youth of America--especially to those who are interested in the development of musical composition with a distinctive American treatment based on the idioms and characteristics of the American Negro" (“Johnson, J(ohn) Rosamond,” 1999).
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Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. (1800 - 1990). The Frogs, an organization for African American theater professionals: (standing, left to right) Bob Cole, Lester A. Walton, Sam Corker, Bert Williams, James Reese Europe and Alex Rogers; (seated, left to right) Tom Brown, J. Rosamond Johnson, George W. Walker, Jesse A. Shipp and R.C. McPherson (Cecil Mack), 1908. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0abebc80-e021-0130-3925-58d385a7b928
Richard Cecil McPherson studied medicine for two years at the University of Pennsylvania after attending Norfolk Mission School and Lincoln University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was born. Perhaps it was due to his medical connections that he met and married Dr. Gertrude Curtis, mentioned in newspapers as the first African American dentist in New York, before deciding to embark on a career in music (“Cecil Mack,” n.d.; “Cecil Mack, famous choir leader, dead,” 1944). Beyond this
scant information, biographical sketches of R. C. McPherson mostly recount his prolific output of songs and his business associations, along with the hypothesis that the connections he made among New York musicians would give him his working name: Cecil Mack.
Mack was primarily a lyricist and would collaborate with many of his contemporaries. He was also one of the original members of the Frogs: a well-known theatrical group in New York, the Crescendo Club: an association of African American composers in Harlem, and a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publisher (ASCAP) (“Richard Cecil McPherson (Cecil Mack),” n.d.; “Cecil Mack, famous choir leader, dead, 1944). Vocal groups that he arranged, Cecil Mack’s Southland Singers and the Cecil Mack Choir, would be used in various stage productions and Broadway musicals (“Cecil Mack – R. C. McPherson,” n.d.; James, 2003).
Mack teamed up with Will Marion Cook, early in 1905, to organize the Gotham Music Publishing Company. Soon after their company was established, Mack and Cook acquired the “first black-owned and operated Tin Pan Alley firm” called Attucks Music Publishing from its owner Shepard N. Edmonds. Mack and Cook merged the two into the Gotham-Attuks Music Company and signed, the wildly popular and successful, Williams and Walker to an exclusive contract (James, 2003). Mack continued with Gotham-Attucks until 1911 before refocusing on lyric writing.
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Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
Maceo Pinkard avoided fads in his musical compositions and was considered more of a pop music traditionalist. This undemanding style would, no doubt, serve him well as he was teamed up with both black and white lyricists by the publishing houses for which he worked as a staff
composer (Jasen, 2013). Pinkard’s work is considered “an excellent example of how vaudeville and early jazz became intertwined during the 1920s” (Kenney, 1986 p238), and eventually he would be called “one of the greatest composers of the Harlem Renaissance (“Maceo
Pinkard,”n.d.).
Pinkard, the author, is even more visually absent from his music than many of his contemporaries. He chose to focus on writing music over performing it after a brief foray into stage and live entertainment when he left home to lead a dance band in a tour of the Midwest. At seventeen he founded Pinkard publications, and continued to function as the executive head of this publishing house for years to come, though the catalog was primarily Pinkard’s own work (Jasen, 2013). Pinkard also ran a talent agency for other musicians and performers, and gave music lessons in order to pay the bills while he created and promoted his original compositions. After WWI, his name would show up in newspapers as an agent/advertiser for various songs (Kenney, 1986).
The stock market crash and the great depression had a vast effect on the popularity and careers of vaudeville musicians; Pinkard was no exception. The drastic drop in his publication output reflects this change and he largely vanishes from being mentioned in newspapers (Jasen, 2013).
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Liza : Zez Confrey and His Orchestra : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Tom Wiggins (1849-1908)
portrait of Tom Wiggins
By Photoprint by Golder & Robinson, N.Y. Copyrighted by John G. Bethune. - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b30858. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16289681
Tom Wiggins, later known simply as Blind Tom, was born into slavery and sold with his parents to General James Neil Bethune, a lawyer and newspaper editor in Columbus Georgia. His blindness restricted him from the jobs that would normally be given to an enslaved child, so he was reportedly left to play and explore in the Bethune house. It was at this time that his interest in music was discovered, perhaps by General Bethune’s daughters. He was considered a musical prodigy on the piano, and by age five had composed “The Rain Storm” as a partial interpretation of the sound of rain on the roof. He was an excellent mimic and could recreate entire conversations and sounds. Scholars who have studied Wiggins have suggested that his reported
behavior and abilities could have been indicators of autism, and that, should he have been living after autism was described, he would have been considered an autistic savant (“Blind Tom Wiggins,” n.d.).
General Bethune contracted Wiggins to a talent manager who took him on tours all over the south, prior, during, and after the Civil War. Hostilities between North and South kept Wiggins from touring in the North. His performances were often seen to benefit the Confederacy in a way that would lead his contemporaries to criticize his shows as reinforcing negative stereotypes. However, his musical feats remained front and center in articles about him and his scheduled engagements. A soldier in North Carolina described some of Tom's eccentric capabilities:
"One of his most remarkable feats was the performance of three pieces of music at once. He played 'Fisher's Hornpipe' with one hand and 'Yankee Doodle' with the other and sang 'Dixie' all at once. He also played a piece with his back to the piano and his hands inverted."
Though often advertised as unstudied, Wiggins did have a series of tutors who helped him develop his own musical style. Musical scholars could not deny Tom Wiggins’ extensive skill and insight in music: “Any doubt of Tom’s musical genius is swept away upon examination of the content of his individual compositions” (Grimsley, 2006). His performances would also include playing other instruments, singing, giving recitations in multiple languages, and imitations of political oration (Smith, 2016). Tom would also begin to introduce himself in imitation of the managers who had introduced him in the past. Willa Cather attended such a performance and remarked:
"It was a strange sight to see him walk out on stage with his own lips—another man's words—introduce himself and talk quietly about his own idiocy. There was insanity, a grotesque horribleness about it that was interestingly unpleasant. One laughs at the man's queer actions, and yet, after all, the sight is not laughable. It brings us too near to the things that we sane people do not like to think of."
Wiggins was a minor at the end of the Civil War and General Bethune snatched his opportunity to retain a lucrative and popular charge after emancipation by convincing Wiggins’ parents to sign over control of Wiggins’ career for five years. After this initial contract, when Wiggins was of legal age, he would be retained by the Bethune family, or associates thereof, through more conventional business contracts that surrendered the majority of the money he earned and control over his own life to his employers. During his career, multiple custody battles for Tom Wiggins made the news, but Wiggins remained connected to the Bethune family (“Bethune, Thomas Greene Wiggins (“Blind Tom”),” 1999) until his retirement. Wiggins’ legal status and custody issues would lead his biographer, Geneva H. Southall to title her work: Blind Tom, The Black Pianist-Composer: Continually Enslaved.
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Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
Egbert Austin "Bert" Williams met George Walker in California after moving there with his family from the Bahamas (Tracy, 2004; “Bert Williams,” n.d.). He and Walker soon began to develop what would become known as perhaps the most famous black entertainer duo of the 19th and 20th centuries (Library of Congress, n.d.). Williams and Walker adopted the burnt-cork blackface that was customary of minstrels and vaudevillian entertainers of the time, advertising themselves as “Two Real Coons” to distinguish their act from those performed by white entertainers (“Bert Williams,” n.d.). While conceding to public demand
for prejudiced caricature, Williams and Walker added nuance and layers of irony to their blackface routines (Tracy, 2004). This depth of performance would not always be accepted by or clear to their contemporaries, who would criticize them for reinforcing prejudiced
stereotypes (“Bert Williams,” n.d.).
After the death of George Walker, Williams became part of the Ziegfeld follies and his popularity continued to grow. However, he would still struggle with being excluded from realms of mainstream respectability for which he dreamed. “He was quoted as saying in his understated way that there was nothing disgraceful about being "colored," but he "often found it inconvenient--in America"” (Tracy, 2004). After being threatened with expulsion from a segregated bar because of his race, Williams told a reporter, "They say it is a matter of race prejudice. But if it were prejudice a baby would have it, and you will never find it in a baby... I have noticed that this "race prejudice" is not to be found in people who are sure enough of their position to defy it." This conflict contributed to a tension in Williams’ performances that was noticed by theater critics, though it did nothing to harm their glowing reviews. W.C. Fields, a fellow vaudevillian, would describe him as: "the funniest man I ever saw – and the saddest man I ever knew." (“Bert Williams,” n.d.). At the height of his popularity his income was more, annually, than that of the president of the United States (Tracy, 2004).
In an essay for The American Magazine in 1918, Williams thoughtfully explored his own comic persona:
"The sight of other people in trouble is nearly always funny. This is human nature....I am the 'Jonah Man,' the man who, even if it rained soup, would be found with a fork in his hand and no spoon in sight, the man who’s fighting relatives come to visit him and whose head is always dented by the furniture they throw at each other. There are endless variations of this idea, fortunately; but if you sift them, you will find the principle of human nature at the bottom of them all."
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Songs in the USF Libraries digital African American Sheet Music Collection:
Hot jazz: a blend between ragtime, blues, and brass band marches originating in New Orleans, migrating to and evolving further in Chicago. - Verity, M. (2017) Everything You Never Knew About Hot Jazz. ThoughtCo. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/hot-jazz-2039523
Jazz: often improvisational musical form developed by African Americans partially from ragtime and blues; characterized by syncopated rhythms and deliberate deviations of pitch. - Jazz. (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/jazz/110142
Minstrelsy: American theatrical form based primarily on the comic representation of racial stereotypes popular from late 19th to early 20th century that influenced vaudeville, music, radio, television, and film. - Minstrel show. (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/minstrel-show/476810
Novelty music: popular music, often humorous, that is unique from other popularly consumed music. Novelty songs are often linked to the comic song tradition of British Music Hall and Variety shows as well as American Vaudeville. Novelty piano style has ties to ragtime piano style, sometimes called novelty ragtime, and developed as a sped of parody of ragtime piano. - Novelty song. (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/novelty-song/117589 and History of Ragtime. [Online Text] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200035811/
Stride piano: similar to ragtime or novelty piano, and was developed in and around Harlem, New York during the 1910s, primarily by African American pianists. - History of Ragtime. [Online Text] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200035811/
Vaudeville: a farce with music, popular in the U.S. from 1890-1930. It included several unrelated acts including acrobatics, juggling, magicians, comedians, trained animals, singers,
and dancers. - Vaudeville. (2019). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/vaudeville/74912
Garber, M. (2010). “Some of These Days” and the Study of the Great American Songbook. Journal of the Society for American Music. 4(2): 175-214 http://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196310000027
Gates & Higginbotham (2009). Harlem Renaissance Lives. Oxford University Press; New York.
Library of Congress (n.d.) African American Performers on Early Sound Recordings, -1916. [Online Text] Retrieved from the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200038862/.
Smith, W. W. (2016). ‘Blind Tom’ abroad: race, disability, and transatlantic representations of Thomas Wiggins. Journal of Transatlantic Studies (Routledge), 14(2), 164–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2016.1169873
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. (1800 - 1990). The Frogs, an organization for African American theater professionals: (standing, left to right) Bob Cole, Lester A. Walton, Sam Corker, Bert Williams, James Reese Europe and Alex Rogers; (seated, left to right) Tom Brown, J. Rosamond Johnson, George W. Walker, Jesse A. Shipp and R.C. McPherson (Cecil Mack), 1908. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0abebc80-e021-0130-3925-58d385a7b928
By Photoprint by Golder & Robinson, N.Y. Copyrighted by John G. Bethune. - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b30858. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16289681
