Prejudices and All

As the 20th century dawned, one of the most popular entertainment venues, especially in big cities, was vaudeville. The roots of vaudeville were in mid-century France, but it arrived in America on 14th Street, New York City, in 1881, the same year a song with the word “coon” in the title first appeared. One reason for its popularity was that it provided “clean” entertainment and no sales of liquor, making it appropriate for women and children, allowing true mass appeal. Variety was the keynote. Featured in vaudeville were songs and music, both classical and popular, highbrow and lowbrow, comedy, animal acts, magic, sketches, excerpts from plays, male and female impersonators, jugglers, acrobats and more.

It’s hard to define the primary thread of American music. First, there was Native American music, and then Spanish and African music, not to mention the French, who gave us all our square-dance terminology, and the Central Europeans who gave us the waltz and polka. It’d be easy to think that the British Isles had the strongest influence on American music, but I’d guess waltzes and polkas probably had at least as much and likely more influence. German bands are one of the great under-explored factors in US music, along with Italian singers, mandolinists, organ grinders, etc.

As immigrants from Europe arrived, many gravitated towards the field of entertainment, that being, besides sports, the only pursuit that was a true meritocracy, hence open to anyone with genuine talent. The Irish were the first group to take advantage of these possibilities, on stage and in the boxing ring. Vaudeville was also a great teaching tool for greenhorns, for newly arrived immigrants. Each new immigrant group was depicted as being naïve, and vaudeville was a rough course in learning to become an American, which, of course, required learning American prejudices, racial and otherwise.

This involved some very strange combinations, as I learned from guitarist and music historian Elijah Wald. Arthur “Dooley” Wilson, who sings “As Time Goes By” in the film Casablanca, acquired the name “Dooley” by his popular performance of an Irish dialect song, “Mr. Dooley”, which he did in whiteface. It’s a little-known fact that there were many “ethnic delineators” on the Black Vaudeville circuit, like Louis Vasnier, a singing dialect comedian who presented, as Wald explains it, “natural face expressions in five dialects, with no makeup-Negro, Dutch, Dago (sic), Irish, and French.” Joe Moore, another Black, topped that, doing Italian, Hebrew, Indian, Chink (sic), Turk, Villain (high and low class), straight man, and blackface. Yellowface, that is, depiction of Asians, was also popular on the Black vaudeville circuit, being performed by at least 10 men and a number of woman. The ‘50s R&B hits, “Japanese Sandman” (I’m the Japanese Sandman and I know what’s cool, I follow behind all of the Playboy rules) and “Ling Ting Tong” perpetuated that tradition. Ethnic delineation was an equal opportunity endeavor. By the second generation––the American children of immigrants––the process was complete. Hey, presto, they were Americans, prejudices and all.

In the first decade of the new century, the center of the new Black musical movement was the Hotel Marshall on West 53rdStreet, an area then known as Black Bohemia. Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson, who wrote “Under The Bamboo Tree” were based there, as was Ernest Hogan, Bert Williams, who sang “Nobody”, and his partner, George Walker. In 1908, Walker formed a counterpart to the American Actor’s Beneficial Association, a recently formed Actor’s Union. They called themselves The Frogs, after the Aristophanes play, which featured an intelligent slave and his stupid owner. The original group had just 11 members. James Reese Europe was the youngest.

At that point, The White vaudevillian and theatrical community felt threatened by Blacks, who were no longer willing to simply “take what was given”. Suddenly Black talent, in composing, performing, and production, was in great demand, and those artists had a plan. Several plans, in fact. Basically, the Marshall Community was promoting Black Culture and modernity. Bert Williams and Walker were a duo until Walker died in 1911. But their then subversive idea was to portray Blacks as themselves, as opposed to being forced to only depict negative and demeaning stereotypes. Their breakthrough idea was to call themselves, “Two Real Coons”. Walker’s epiphany was that he “could entertain in that way that no White boy could”, and that nothing in White minstrels’ actions were natural, and that therefore, “nothing was as interesting as if Black performers had been dancing and singing their own songs in their own way.” This concept manifested in their 1902 musical, In Dahomey, a minstrel-based play that mocked, or maybe one could say deconstructed, the most racist minstrel themes. Less subtle and more obvious were the play’s technical and artistic innovations in lighting, set design and musical orchestration. The ingenuity of the Marshall Community’s new approaches provided a bandwagon the White theatrical establishment was eager to jump on to. Another aspect of this immense change Black entertainment was going through was the new emphasis on rhythm and dancing, as opposed to on singing, as it had been throughout the 19th century. Now Whites were dancing to Black rhythms, literally, being moved by them. (That all said, there were earlier Black minstrel troupes, including the Georgia Minstrels in the 1870s, led by their star Billy Kersands.)

In the 1890s, society parties were going through a craze for live Gypsy music, but as the 20th century dawned new Black bands began playing at parties for “The 400”, which was a euphemism for the highest of high society. The Gypsy bands played waltzes, and other period dance music like mazurkas, polkas and schottisches, opening for the Black bands, which for their first number would play the last selection the Gypsy band had played, but ragging it up. They would then proceed to play in four/four time as opposed the three/four waltz. The primary ragtime dance was the one-step, which was simply taking a step for each beat of the music, offering the rest of the body improvisational freedom in movement of the arms and the rest of the body. By around 1910, the dominant version of the one-step was the Turkey Trot. “Everybody’s doing it, doing it, doing it…” went the song, and almost everybody was. This inspired a raft of “animal dances”: the Grizzly Bear, the Horse Trot, the Kangaroo Hop, the Squirrel, the Duck Waddle, the Chicken Scratch and the Bunny Hug, among others. Most of these were based on Black dances that had been done for decades, and a few were hokey White attempts to work the style. The Fox Trot was the ultimate survivor. The pearl-clutching crowd, who were clutching actual pearls, denounced these dances, and President Wilson’s 1913 Inaugural Ball was cancelled, for fear the evening would be defiled by the base, vile demonic, Turkey Trot. Many believed the dance led to prostitution and eternal damnation.

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