What the Eye Hears, page 14
As many as twenty-one acts might appear on one bill, though the average was seven to fifteen. The guiding principle was “something for everyone.” Vaudeville was singers, comedy teams, escape artists, hypnotists, jugglers, contortionists, mind readers, acrobats, ventriloquists, magicians, monologuists, impressionists, dancers, regurgitators, sports figures, celebrities with no discernible talent, actors from the “legitimate” theater slumming for better pay, and every sort of animal act. If you didn’t like one thing, something else was coming. And the pace was quick. Exceeding the allotted time could get an act fined or fired, and the interval between performers was minimized by having a self-sufficient act perform in front of the curtain while a more elaborate act was set up behind it. Tap dancers served this purpose well.
In small time, the show might repeat three to five times each day, whereas another phrase for big time was “two-a-day.” The order and composition of a bill was an art in itself. There was no universal formula, but in the ideal, a show might open with a “dumb” act—a trained seal, a troupe of acrobats, a dancer, something that wouldn’t be too spoiled by the hubbub of latecomers. Next came something to settle the audience in, then something to wake them up. Everything built toward the headliner, who took the penultimate slot, and the show finished with a “chaser.” This was often another dumb act, since folks on their way out make as much noise as on the way in—either flashy to send them off abuzz or awful to clear them out faster. The running order was a hierarchy of salary and fame, and every ambitious vaudevillian aspired to the rank of next-to-closing in a big-time theater. The default position for a strictly dance act was the deuce spot, number two, six minutes and off.
Vaudevillians showed you what they could do, fast. “They have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in motion, and exploit it to the last possible degree in the shortest space of time,” explained the critic Gilbert Seldes. There was no room for mistakes, no chance for recovery. But if the format pushed vaudevillians toward a kind of perfection, it also provided plenty of practice. The circuits were vast and varied enough to embrace the best and the worst, and the ladder from small time to big time could extend to great length. Most bookings lasted three to six days, and then the performer started over in a new theater with a new clientele. The system gave vaudevillians opportunities to hone their acts in response to an ever-changing public and also insured that once an act was perfected, they might never need another. It could take years for a performer to cycle around to the same venue, and by then people had forgotten, or were happy to be reminded. One newspaper columnist estimated the average life of an act to be two years, but some lasted decades.
An act was a livelihood. Some vaudevillians filed theirs with the National Vaudeville Association in sealed envelopes to be opened when one trouper accused another of theft. These were scripts and sheet music; the method didn’t work as well for dance. But more important than the act was the persona. Even in the largest theaters, vaudeville put little distance between performer and audience. “Personality” was everything, for comics and singers especially, yet not even the animal acts were exempt. The audience was always right, and managers’ reports kept track of the public’s verdict.
The soft shoe was prevalent. Vaudevillians who didn’t specialize in dancing could manage one; it bestowed a little class and helped turn a comic into an entertainer, a candidate for next-to-closing. “The dance appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance,” Seldes decreed in the early twenties. He was protesting the “aesthetic dancing” that had crept in through the teens, supplementing the dominant buck-and-wing, and what he meant by stunts was gimmickry, which vaudeville encouraged in dance as it promoted speed in comedy. Milt Wood did his clogging atop a chair. Louis Stone did his upside down on his hands. Al Leach buck-danced on stairs as if drunk. The female winners of the Police Gazette championship medal for “wooden shoe buck dancing,” when they danced in vaudeville as opposed to at smokers and stag parties, tended to pair up with a man. Bertha Gleason, who won in 1902, traveled with her dancing brother, John. Since so many stages, laid over concrete, were acoustically dead, the Gleasons carried a mat of wooden slats glued to canvas as a portable shingle. To handle their tricky musical cues, they also brought along their own pianist, a young man whom Bertha soon married.
Family was an especially effective gimmick. Among the most popular of acts was Eddie Foy and the Seven Little Foys, a first-generation Irish comic with his singing-and-dancing brood, lined up by age and height. The Four Fords worked as siblings: Dora, Mabel, Ed, and Max. Their dancing father instructed the boys; the sisters spied and figured it out for themselves. Reviewers praised the quartet as without equal for their perfect time and novel steps. Handsome scenery and costumes softened their strenuous dancing, and their lobby photo was genteel, a boardwalk stroll in boaters and bonnets. In 1910, they were headliners, but the act split soon after, the sisters yearning to express themselves in Grecian dancing, à la Isadora Duncan. This venture into Art flopped, and Dora and Mabel reverted to buck dance and headlined for another decade. Max went into teaching, and a ubiquitous step in his name proved the most lasting legacy of his clan—a lunging, scissoring burst of sound known as the Maxie Ford. (If you’ve seen Gene Kelly dance, you’ve seen this step.)
Pat Rooney, Jr., was also born into the business, the son and namesake of one of the foremost clog-dancing Irish comedians of the 1880s. Twenty at the turn of the century, the younger Rooney toured first with his wife, then with his wife and their son, Pat the Third. Though billed as the premier dancing team of vaudeville, they likely wouldn’t have been headliners without their catchy songs and patter. Rooney was five feet three, a leprechaun with a bright grin. The waltz clog, a step introduced during his father’s day, became so associated with him that people assumed it was his invention. With his hands in his pockets, hitching his trousers up, he hopped, lifting one bent leg high and tucking the other underneath to click heels in flight—fixing the pigeon wing, which he called a “bell,” as Irish for the new century.
As for Jack Donahue, that Boston Irish boy, he spent the teens on the Keith and Orpheum circuits, singing and dancing and talking nonsense with a nice-looking girl named Alice. His kind of dancing was called eccentric. “Nature helped me,” he later wrote, “by endowing me with a pair of long legs and arms.” His face was long, too, and on his gaunt frame, the standard steps looked funny, so he exaggerated further and milked more laughs. He packed more eccentric steps into a routine, one Rhode Island critic attested, than three or four other dancers combined. Donahue understood what another aspiring dancer, hoping to make use of the flat-footed style he learned from “the little darkies” in St. Louis, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “There’s little enough money in dancing … you must mix comedy to get by.”
UNDER THE RAG AND OUT FROM UNDER IT
Down the same drain—or, depending on your perspective, up it. Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham, born in North Carolina in 1903, preferred the analogy of educational advancement. “Show business for a colored dancer,” he explained,
was like going through school. You started in a medicine show—that was kindergarten—where they could use a few steps if you could cut them, but almost anything would do. Then you went on up to the gilly show, which was like grade school—they wanted dancers. If you had something on the ball, you graduated to a carnival—that was high school—and you sure had to be able to dance. College level was a colored minstrel show, and as they faded out, a vaudeville circuit or even a Broadway show. Vaudeville and Broadway sometimes had the best, although a lot of the great dancers never got out from under the rag, never left the tent shows.
That was the path that led Leonard Reed to the Shim Sham and beyond. Reed was born in 1906, and when he was a child, it took exposure to only one or two of the traveling shows that came through Oklahoma—“the pretty girls and the comedians with the cork on their face, doing funny jokes”—to get him hooked. Whenever carnivals came through—“the tambourine shakers and the black comedians doing what they called their jig”—he was there every night. By the time he was fifteen, his dancing talents had earned him a summer job in a medicine show.
For whatever ailed you, a medicine show could offer a miraculous elixir. Turpentine and sugar, Coca-Cola and salt. Such outfits might be a few guys peddling a snake-oil cure-all or a hundred men traveling together by railroad, carrying an entire catalogue of dubious treatments. More commonly, the show consisted of a “doctor” and two or three assistants, a team that wandered from town to town in a wagon, on the lookout for suckers. The assistants’ job was to lure customers, which is where the dancing came in. The wagon had a small platform, upon which the assistants did their breakdown. The dancing, Reed remembered, was in “a comic, exaggerated, almost grotesque style”—whatever it took, said Markham, to “put the yokels in a buying mood.” After the doctor made his sales pitch, the assistants would roam the crowd, exchanging bottles for cash and pocketing a little for themselves. It wasn’t much of a start for a dancer, but you learned how to attract attention—how to sell.
A gilly was a small carnival, still a small-town operation, but it offered steadier work at better pay. Black performers had their own tent. (Reed remembered it as a “jig top,” the tent for people called jigs.) To entice customers, they put on a preview called the ballyhoo. Up on a platform they went, everyone clapping and singing, the dancers trying to outdo one another as a barker fast-talked people into buying tickets. Inside, events proceeded as in a minstrel show. The blackface comedian traded jokes with a straight man and flaunted funny steps. Then came a section of specialties, and the whole thing would finish with a plantation afterpiece. This might repeat fourteen or fifteen times a day; one Fourth of July, Reed claimed, the count was forty-eight.
Carnivals and circuses and even Wild West shows carried something called a sideshow annex that was essentially an all-black minstrel show. The brass band was a big draw. Magicians, human corkscrews, trick cyclists, and trapeze acts shared the tent with champion buck dancers. They came solo or double, sometimes husband-and-wife, and most of them sang. Pigmeat Markham and his partner did a sand dance, the band going quiet so people could hear the scraped rhythms. Audience members called out requests for imitations: do a racehorse, do a train. The star of these shows was the dancing comedian. Markham remembered a “very funny” one named Joe Doakes, who would “shake his head from side to side so hard and so fast that the makeup on his lips dotted his ears.” The dancers Markham rated the best were the craziest. “Exaggerating the peculiarities” was still sometimes referred to as “grotesque,” but as in vaudeville, the term of art became “eccentric.”
The activities of black entertainers were covered by the Indianapolis Freeman, often in the form of self-aggrandizing letters from the entertainers themselves. There you could also read about all-black minstrel shows that toured the South independently, under canvas. Long-enduring organizations such as the Rabbit’s Foot Company, the Florida Blossoms, and Silas Green from New Orleans, along with more fly-by-night affairs, maintained Tambo and Bones while keeping up as ragtime gave way to the blues and early jazz. In 1911, Bessie Smith was not just “a great coon shouter”; she was “the girl with educated feet.” Markham remembered “dancers who were so good you wouldn’t believe it,” such as Jim Green, known as the Human Top because he spun on his seat. Before, it had been Master Juba, Master Diamond; now it was Kid Checkers, Kid Slick, prizefighter names acquired in adolescence and then never outgrown.
They did start young. Robert Everleigh, who displayed his “eight minutes of footology” with Rabbit’s Foot in the mid-teens, was a “boy wonder.” His career was short, yet some lasted as long as minstrelsy held out. Eddie “Peg” Lightfoot was the One-Legged Dancing Wonder in 1916, a laugh machine in blackface and a squashed stovepipe; in 1923, he was nearly beaten to death by a white mob, but he would still be dancing beneath a Rabbit’s Foot tent in 1954. His early years were not exactly years of obscurity. Even the backcountry was a high-traffic zone where minstrel managers pasted posters on top of the posters of other troupes. These performers were seen by hundreds or thousands—by blacks and whites—every night. But they are the dancers who never got out from under the rag.
THE BLACK CIRCUIT
One hope of getting out was to get into a theater. This usually meant a road show. Multiple companies of In Old Kentucky were still making the rounds with pickaninny bands and buck dance contests. (The favorite tune for contestants, a Baltimore regular recalled, was “Turkey in the Straw.”) Around the turn of the century, if you wanted the gold medal, you had to get around Harry Swinton, who had a minuscule role in the play but a large reputation among black dancers. Eubie Blake joined the pickaninny band as a teenager and later painted Swinton in memory: “He came out in roustabout clothes with a paper cone full of sand and he did more dancing just spreading the sand than other dancers could do with their whole act.”
Black Patti’s Troubadours rolled on as well, with their eponymous opera singer and their own buck dance contest. Ida Forsyne, a dark and tiny dancer out of Chicago, joined the Troubadours at fifteen, doing her buck and pushing a baby carriage as she sang, “You’re Just a Little Nigger but You’re Mine All Mine.” In 1905, she went abroad, securing fame as a Topsy in England and outdoing the Russians at Russian squat-kicks in St. Petersburg. Muriel Ringgold, from Alabama, joined the Troubadours at twelve as the “greatest child buck dancer.” (Sometimes she was the “Honolulu Pickaninny Buck Dancer,” playing to the Hawaiian vogue that followed American annexation of the archipelago in 1898.) In the Ernest Hogan shows Rufus Rastus and The Oyster Man, Ringgold’s roles remained Topsy-like. She grew into a comedienne in oversized shoes, frequently dressed as a man, and danced and clowned into her fifties. She could “dance like a man,” Forsyne would recall approvingly.
A positive review of the Troubadours might look like this one from a Dallas paper in 1910: “Don’t look disgusted, they’re pretty good stuff, these coon shows.” In fact, the review continued, “a nigger that is willing to come right out and be pure nigger, to avail himself of the delicious peculiarities of his race, can be quite the funniest thing going, and the one who pompously apes the mannerisms of his brother in white can be just a tiny bit funnier.” The music was fantastic, sounds “approached by no human,” and the dancing, well—“From pickaninny days the buck-wing has been his own private possession, and the Negro comedian is in his element when his feet are describing eccentric circles.” Supremacy in the buck and wing was conceded to blacks. It was their element, like the Jim Crow car, the sideshow annex, the balcony from which colored people could watch the Troubadours. And to profit from this possession, this peculiarity, this heritage, was to “come right out and be pure nigger.”
Starting back in the 1890s, the musical comedies of Cole and Johnson and Williams and Walker had broken into the “legitimate sphere” of theaters. They had shown white audiences, as the Freeman phrased it, that black entertainers could do something “besides shouting coon songs and buck and wing dancing.” But the early deaths of Cole, Walker, and Ernest Hogan, in a demoralizing cluster around 1910, appeared to derail that train. At the same time came a boom in the construction of black theaters—venues, many owned by blacks, that presented black performers to black patrons and were first organized into a circuit in 1912. This meant performers could set up a string of engagements with a single contract and organize transportation more efficiently, a real concern considering that throughout much of the country Negroes were not welcome at the local restaurant or hotel and had to rely on boardinghouses and the kindness of black strangers. Performers at these new theaters didn’t have to worry as much about what might offend or please whites. If Keith-Albee was the big time, this was “colored time.”
It was in a black theater in Jacksonville that “Ginger” Jack Wiggins burst onto the scene. The year was 1910, and soon he was in Memphis, boasting in the Freeman of never having lost a contest. Initially, he traveled with his brother, Henry, but Jack was the true “tanglefoot artist.” Their act “All Black Stars Shine at Night” was hailed not only as the “danciest” but also the “swellest dressed.” Even in grainy newspaper photos, Ginger Jack looks sharp. He made four “shining” wardrobe changes in ten minutes (aided, it was said, by his little dog). Through the teens, he toured black theaters with stock companies, acquiring and shedding partners male and female. The Freeman praised him as “a good self-impersonator” but also for originality in “twisting and turning”; among dancers he would be remembered for his Bantam Twist and Tango Twist, tap steps that leaned and reversed. His “Pull It” ended elegantly, with his back arched and one leg curling behind, but it also involved yanking an invisible object toward his pelvis. Wiggins introduced the move by announcing, “I’m going to do it!” (One version of this step wound up in the Shim Sham under the name Tack Annie—the nickname of one of Wiggins’s girlfriends, a big, tough bouncer.)
Over the same circuits, the Whitman Sisters ran their own show, the most successful around. They wrote the sketches, composed the music, secured the bookings. Whenever they spotted a promising kid, they would ask his or her parents for permission to take on the child as part of their extended family, and in this way, a great many tap dancers—including some of the best—were reared. One reason that parents trusted the Whitman Sisters was the group’s reputation. Their father, the Reverend Albery Allson Whitman, was born a Kentucky slave around 1851, but after the war, he studied at Wilberforce University and eventually published seven volumes of epic poetry. His daughters—Mabel, Essie, and Alberta—were born in the 1880s. Reverend Whitman made sure they had music lessons, and he taught them the double shuffle, Essie remembered, “for exercise.” Soon the girls were accompanying him as jubilee singers whose camp meetings included minstrel songs and humor. By 1899, they were the Whitman Sisters Comedy Company, bolstered by a band of buck-dancing kids. In a photo from that year, Mabel and Essie are Southern belles cradling banjos, the ruffles of their hoop skirts cascading like fountains of white lace. The skin that shows isn’t much darker.
