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

By Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff

Blues Book of the Year —Living Blues

Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence
Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018)

2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature category

With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance.

At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity, ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience.

The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler “String Beans” May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the “blues master piano player of the world.” His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era.

While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the “blues queen.” Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes.

In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before—a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Feb 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781496810038

Lynn Abbott

Lynn Abbott is an independent scholar living in New Orleans. He is coauthor (with Doug Seroff) of Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895; Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz; The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville; and To Do This, You Must Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Quartet Tradition, all published by University Press of Mississippi. His work has also been published in American Music, 78 Quarterly, American Music Research Center Journal, and The Jazz Archivist.

Book preview

THE ORIGINAL BLUES

THE ORIGINAL BLUES

The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville

Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

American Made Music Series

Advisory Board

David Evans, General Editor

Barry Jean Ancelet

Edward A. Berlin

Joyce J. Bolden

Rob Bowman

Susan C. Cook

Curtis Ellison

William Ferris

John Edward Hasse

Kip Lornell

Bill Malone

Eddie S. Meadows

Manuel H. Peña

Wayne D. Shirley

Robert Walser

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2017 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2017

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Abbott, Lynn, 1946– | Seroff, Doug.

Title: The original blues : the emergence of the blues in African American vaudeville / Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2017] |

Series: American made music series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016021457 (print) | LCCN 2016020375 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496810038 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496810045 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496810052 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496810069 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496810021 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Blues (Music)—To 1931—History and criticism. | Vaudeville—United States—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML3521 (print) | LCC ML3521 .A23 2017 (ebook) | DDC

781.64309/041—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021457

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Saloon-Theaters and Park Pavilions: The Birth of Southern Vaudeville, 1899–1909

FIRST INTERLUDE

The Death of J. Ed Green and the Birth of State Street Vaudeville

CHAPTER TWO

The Life, Death, and Untold Legacy of Bluesman Butler String Beans May

CHAPTER THREE

Male Blues Singers in Southern Vaudeville

CHAPTER FOUR

The Rise of the Blues Queen: Female Blues Pioneers in Southern Vaudeville

SECOND INTERLUDE

Theater Circuits, Theater Wars, and the Formation of the T.O.B.A.

CHAPTER FIVE

Yours for Business: The Commercialization of the Blues, 1920–26

♦ ♦ ♦

Notes

Bibliography

General Index

Song Index

Theater Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Original Blues is a detailed account of the appearance and popularization of the blues on the black professional stage. It commences with a survey of the black vaudeville platforms that took hold in the South at the end of the nineteenth century, and goes on to trace the evolution of the blues in black vaudeville, 1910–30, concluding with a consideration of how vaudeville blues helped shape the country blues guitar phenomenon.

While The Original Blues is a self-contained work, it makes a logical companion to our first two books, Out of Sight and Ragged but Right. It was not our original intention, but we find ourselves completing what could be considered a trilogy, covering the development of black popular music from the period immediately preceding the appearance of ragtime to the full fruition and commercialization of the blues. Of course, we have only begun to tell the whole story; much ground is left to cover.

The research that connects Out of Sight, Ragged but Right, and The Original Blues has consumed more than a quarter of a century. It has enabled a chronological perspective on the early blues—a counterpoint to retrospective analyses that use recordings from the 1920s as a touchstone.

♦ ♦ ♦

Research for The Original Blues involved pilgrimages to many different libraries and archives. We would like to acknowledge assistance received at:

Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans.

Bradley Memorial Library, Columbus, Georgia.

Bull Street Library, Savannah, Georgia.

Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro.

Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.

Goodlettsville Public Library, Goodlettsville, Tennessee.

Florida State Library and Archive, Tallahassee.

Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans.

Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans.

Jacksonville Public Library, Florida.

John Hope and Aurelia Elizabeth Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville.

Lila D. Bunch Library, Belmont University, Nashville.

Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library.

Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans.

McWherter Library, University of Memphis.

Memphis Public Library.

Middle Georgia Regional Library, Macon.

Nashville Room of the Nashville Public Library.

Nassau County Public Library, Fernandina Beach Branch, Florida.

Schomberg Research Center, New York City.

Smathers Library, University of Florida, Gainesville.

Tampa Bay History Center, Florida.

Tennessee State Library and Archive, Nashville.

Thomas G. Carpenter Library, University of North Florida, Jacksonville.

University of South Florida Library, Tampa.

Williams Research Center, New Orleans.

We also wish to thank the many individuals who took time assisting us, including:

Hayden Battle, Nicholas Benoit, Pen Bogert, Joey Brackner, Charles J. Elmore, Alaina Hebert, Vic Hobson, Jeanette Hunter, Muriel McDowell Jackson, Michael Jones, Annie Kemp, Johnny Maddox, Arely del Martinez, Tom McDermott, Roger Misiewicz, Michael Montgomery, Bruce Nemerov, Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Richard Raichelson, Keli Rylance, David Sager, Wayne D. Shirley, Richard Spottswood, Adam Swanson, Gaile Thomas, Kevin Williams, and Patti Windom.

We owe a particular debt of gratitude to David Evans for his advice and assistance, as well as for his informative reading of the manuscript. Wayne D. Shirley also contributed a valuable critical reading. Special thanks are due as well to Chris Ware for the cover design.

Preliminary formulations of the research that culminated in The Original Blues have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Bessie Smith: The Early Years, Blues & Rhythm: The Gospel Truth, no. 70 (June 1992); ‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me’: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues, American Music 14, no. 4 (Winter 1996), reprinted in David Evans, ed., Ramblin’ on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); and The Life and Death of Pioneer Bluesman Butler ‘String Beans’ May, Tributaries: Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association, no. 5 (2002).

THE ORIGINAL BLUES

INTRODUCTION

At the dawn of the twentieth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete racial vaudeville theaters. The African American vaudeville theater movement filled a void by providing the first professional platforms for black performers to present worldly entertainment to audiences of their own race. This movement had its greatest effect in the racially divided, Jim Crow South, the historic homeland of black vernacular song, dance, and humor. From tentative beginnings in saloons and parks, black southern vaudeville outlets grew into a network of free-standing, independent African American theaters. These little theaters represented an emerging entertainment market, and a rich new field of opportunity for aspiring young performers and entrepreneurs.

The newly made dynamic of black theater entertainment for a black audience was amazingly liberating, as this 1909 commentary makes clear: Don’t you know that you can enjoy yourself better, because the average colored performer can say things in that theater that place him three times funnier than he would be at a white house—he is natural there, and any one is a good deal better, whether singing, dancing or acting, when natural. Every slang phrase we understand, and of course he opens his heart to us, because he is among his own people.¹

Performers were far more at home in the absence of white folk; and audiences were validated by authentic representations of African American music and culture. Vernacular expressions and coded references excited howls of recognition, encouraging performers to dig deeper in the storehouse of shared cultural experience. This emboldened the coming generation of stage performers to unleash creative energies that accelerated the development of the blues.

When southern vaudeville first gained traction at the end of the nineteenth century, ragtime coon songs were the popular fare; blues was not yet in sight. By 1910 there were racially insular black vaudeville theaters strung across the Southeast. The proliferation of these theaters created a safe haven for the rehabilitation of coon songs and the concrete formulation of blues songs appropriate for the professional platform. To assert that the blues was incubated in black southern vaudeville theaters is not hyperbole.

Southern vaudeville theaters were part of the black community, not distinct from it; they were cultural landmarks in their various locales. Vibrant creative interchange between performers and local community audiences was an ongoing process. Performers were guided by the dynamic force of the audience.

The Stage columns of the Indianapolis Freeman and other black weeklies contain a useful enumeration of songs favored by early blues pioneers. The mosaic repertoire of this transitional period, distilled from distinct yet interwoven compositional approaches, discourages attempts to identify defining characteristics. Unlike Baby Seals Blues and The Memphis Blues, which were conscious efforts to construct a blues, roughly contemporaneous ragtime-cum-blues vehicles such as Shelton Brooks’s Some of These Days, Joe Jordan’s Lovie Joe, and even Chris Smith’s I Got the Blues, But I’m Too Mean to Cry, were not intended to be blues songs. These and other hits of the early southern vaudeville stage were integral to the ragtime genre; yet they represent an incremental transition, harboring presentiments of the blues, either in their formal structures, idiomatic conventions, or lyrics and phraseology.²

Between 1905 and 1908, social scientist Howard W. Odum collected Negro folk songs in Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee. He transcribed 115 songs and song fragments for a two-part essay which appeared in the Journal of American Folklore in 1911.³ Odum’s study has been called the most important early account of blues.⁴ His findings included many phrases that later became associated with blues tradition, such as I’m going where the water drinks like wine, If you don’t want me, please don’t dog me around, I got the blues, but I’m too damn mean to cry, and many more.

However, in the course of his path-breaking research Odum apparently did not hear the word blues used as a musical term.⁵ While some of the songs he collected were infused with elements and characteristics of the blues, they apparently were not recognized as blues, either by the performers or by Odum. It remains an open question whether the disjointed blues phrases scattered among bits of forgotten doggerel and snatches of ragtime lyrics should, in retrospect, be classified as blues per se, or simply black folk song on the verge—or in the process—of becoming blues. It may be that Odum’s fieldwork provides a snapshot of the state of southern folk music in the moment before the embryonic folk lyrics he collected were formulated into fully realized blues songs.⁶

Odum’s survey flows chronologically into the earliest African American press reports of blues songs performed on southern vaudeville stages. The southern folk songs he collected before 1909 are pregnant with the blues; stage reports in 1910 editions of the Indianapolis Freeman describe the blues emerged and denominated. Together, these two sources constitute sufficient evidence to tentatively proffer 1909 as the year blues came up for public recognition as a musical term and, by extension, the year blues music achieved a distinct, recognizable identity.⁷

Black vaudeville performers and songwriters of the era fitted up unpolished, fragmentary folk material for the professional platform. But the blues did not emerge onstage fully formed.⁸ The blues remained mutable and multiform long after it was institutionalized on the black professional stage. Gifted artists put their personal stamp on the blues songs they sang, and played a big part in the development of modern blues style.

Black vaudeville served as a filtering agent through which the residue of nineteenth-century Ethiopian minstrelsy was eventually expunged. However, some of minstrelsy’s trappings were not immediately banished. In the context of insular southern vaudeville, certain vestiges of old racist stage conventions were subtly transformed into self-conscious jokes infused with innuendo.

Blackface makeup was part of an old comedic formula. Black and white audiences were conditioned to expect it. Clearly, many black performers felt that the blackface mask still had useful purposes; some employed it with stunningly subversive effect. Blackface comedy was a prominent vehicle in the formative years of blues singing on the black professional stage. The amelioration of the lowly blues street song for use on the stage seems to have required a refractive channel; blackface makeup sometimes served that function.

Despite seeming anomalies, the emergence of the blues in black vaudeville figured powerfully in reforming perceptions of black music and culture. The ascendance of blues queens signified a dramatic shift in the status of both African American vaudeville divas and the blues itself. The royal honorific indicated a step away from the blanket designation coon shouter, and also worked against the use of cork by female performers in black vaudeville.

In 1911 a new generation of southern vaudevillians brought their bluesy style of entertainment to northern audiences, changing the course of black popular music and effectively nationalizing African American vaudeville activity. Efforts to consolidate and stabilize northern and southern theater circuits culminated in the formation of the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) in 1921. This coincided with the inauguration of the race record industry. For the next several years the T.O.B.A. circuit featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to promote. As the popularity of African American vaudeville began to wane, the race record industry shifted its emphasis from vaudeville blues to country blues.

If the 1920s recording era was the most celebrated, remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the 1910s were arguably an even more creative decade, witnessing the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues in southern playhouses. Blues singers in black vaudeville were typically accompanied by piano, usually augmented by a trap drum kit, and sometimes a brass instrument. The guitar was not popular on the early African American professional stage. Nevertheless, the songs and styles of vaudeville blues singers left a deep impression on the first stars of the country blues. Adaptations of the music of the early black vaudeville stage are prominent in country blues recordings of the 1920s and 1930s.

In his seminal book Big Road Blues, David Evans reflected that The main aesthetic standard … for early folk blues was truth. But it was a truth based in … a kind of experience that was known to the singer and audience.⁹ Likewise, the essence of the blues in early black vaudeville was an honest, forthright expression of shared experience. Against the historical backdrop of Ethiopian minstrelsy and the coon song craze, the original blues signified a righteous compact between the performer and the black community audience, an entente that personified the triumph of the real over the false.¹⁰

When we began conducting the research for our books, few if any black community newspapers had been digitized. We spent many hours sitting in front of mechanical microfilm readers, pouring over extended runs of the Indianapolis Freeman, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Kansas City Call, Savannah Tribune, Louisiana Weekly, Nashville Globe, and other historical black community weeklies, generating voluminous stacks of photocopies.

Systematically reviewing historical newspapers in this manner is a process of immersion. It helps put data and phenomena in a contextual perspective, and fosters objectivity by demolishing preconceptions. Newspaper reviews provided the fundamental substance for what we conceive as a document-driven study. Now that many African American newspapers can be accessed on searchable databases, we have been able to back-check and augment our original microfilm research with digital findings.

We came to this study just too late to question actual participants in the black vaudeville phenomenon, who could have cleared up questions unanswered by the newspaper documentation and provided perspectives beyond the journalistic scope.¹¹ On a brighter note, the exhaustive Document Records reissue project has allowed us easy access to a vast archive of commercial recordings from the 1920s vaudeville era. The Original Blues contains hundreds of references to historical sound recordings which are now largely accessible on several music streaming services. We encourage readers to use this resource to illuminate our text.

CHAPTER ONE

Saloon-Theaters and Park Pavilions: The Birth of Southern Vaudeville, 1899–1909

The earliest black vaudeville shows in the South were staged in two types of venues: saloon-theaters and park pavilions. Musicians of both races had long provided entertainment at saloons and parks: playing for dances, picnics, holiday celebrations, sporting events, and general background ambience. The popularity of ragtime created a demand for a new kind of grassroots black southern vaudeville entertainment. This emerging field of opportunity attracted northern road-show veterans into southern cultural environs to produce the shows, manage the stages, and direct the bands and orchestras. They quickly formed working alliances with the rising generation of inspired young southern performers.

The essence of vaudeville was a heightened atmosphere of variety and change. Performers held the boards for ten to twenty minutes and then quickly made way for the next act, allowing a wide variety of singers, dancers, comedians, vocal quartets, acrobats, contortionists, magicians, ventriloquists, wire walkers, fire eaters, and male and female impersonators to cross the stage in random procession. With an eye on late-breaking trends and fashions, performers regularly updated their acts, and theater managers repopulated their rosters every few weeks.

The first commercial adventures in black southern vaudeville were in more than one respect experimental. While testing the waters for economic viability, investors struggled to identify their target audience. Some of the earliest venues were reserved exclusively for white patrons; others catered only to African Americans; and still others were wide open to all regardless of race. In time, these provisional platforms made way for southern vaudeville theaters dedicated to providing black variety entertainment exclusively for black audiences. These theaters became the focal point for the professional adaptation of black folk music and dance.

There was an underground aspect to this phenomenon, attached as it was to saloon culture. That any sense of its early history survives must be credited to the black weekly Indianapolis Freeman.¹ Beginning in 1899 the Freeman published reports from cities scattered throughout the South, where aspiring black vaudeville performers and musicians were employed at saloon-theaters and park pavilions. Some locales left nothing more than one-shot announcements, like this 1902 report from Monroe, Louisiana: Our town has been greatly enlivened by the opening of a new colored vaudeville show in the rear of the two Brothers saloon under the management of the late ‘Billy’ Nichols of King and Bush’s big colored minstrels.² Sporadic reports from Houston and Galveston, Texas, furnish an abbreviated sketch of early saloon-theater activity there. More substantial documentation accrued from saloon-theaters and park pavilions in Jacksonville, Tampa, and Fernandina, Florida; Savannah and Macon, Georgia; Louisville, Kentucky; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Memphis, Tennessee. These reports amount to a keyhole view of the original black southern vaudeville environment and its inhabitants.

Houston and Galveston

During the last week of September 1899, Rusco and Holland’s Big Minstrel Festival played a one-night stand in Houston and found an after-hours oasis at the Little Solo saloon-theater:

Mr. Wilson is proprietor of the Solo, one of the finest equipped saloons and theater annex in the South … the show was put on after hours for our special benefit. The company contains some of the best in the profession. An original first part is set, showing Jas. Campbell in the middle, Buddy Glenn and Emmet Davis on bones and Chas. Williams and Aaron Nelson on tambos … Miss Willie Campbell’s Bred in Ole Kaintuck was fine. Chas. Williams’ Bring You Back was an encore producer. Sallie Cottrell sang Write a Letter Home pleasingly; our Buddie of course made us all laugh at Close dem Windows. Emmit Davis made a decided hit telling us in song of Silver Slippers. B. B., a former member of the Patti company [Black Patti Troubadours] closed the first part with, When a Coon Sits in the Presidential Chair, and was compelled to take a curtain call. The olio was strong, including Frederica Ward, male impersonator; Davis and Hayes, sketch artists and Chas. Williams, monologue artist. We were then invited to a spacious dance hall and fantastic toe movements were next on hand and a good old time was had by all the gang until early hours.³

It should come as no surprise that conventions of minstrelsy figured prominently in the offering. The earliest southern vaudeville platforms were largely populated by fugitives from itinerant minstrel companies. There was no prior history of black vaudeville to guide them. The rise of aspirational vaudeville shows corresponded with the desperate need for black popular performance venues in southern cities. While there was no sense of permanency in facilities such as the Little Solo Theater, vaudeville remained full of promise, a new avenue of opportunity.

Among the performers at the Little Solo, comedian Buddie Glenn—our ‘Buddie’—appears to have been a native Texan.⁴ In Florida in 1905 he was heralded as the Southern favorite and father of Negro comedy.⁵ The performer identified as B. B. was Charles Wright, familiarly known as Bee Bee, the ‘Coon’ shouter.⁶ Willie Campbell, Fredricka Ward, and Sallie Cottrell were but three of the Little Solo’s abundant complement of female performers.⁷ The theater also maintained an impressive band and orchestra, led respectively by R. J. Dickie Anderson and George B. Rhone, both of whom became stalwarts of tented minstrelsy.⁸

A pool table at the Little Solo harbored several resident hustlers: Frank Itson, the champion pool player, would like to hear from some of the pool sharks of the east. Shorty George is still stepping into the money.⁹ Ed Ford and George Coleman are the coming pool sharks at the Little Solo theatre.¹⁰ The Little Solo’s theater annex survived into the autumn of 1900.¹¹ In October news came that The employees at the Little Solo Theatre regret the death of the proprietor’s wife.¹² There were no further dispatches from Houston’s Little Solo saloon-theater.

The Little Solo’s counterpart in Galveston was the Olympic saloon-theater. In February 1899 the Olympic flashed this news: The Island City is still on the boom. Sherman Dudley, comedian, late of the team of Dudley & Harris, is with us and is doing his best to bring the Olympic theatre up to its old standard. We have a very good small orchestra of six pieces George Rhone, 1st violin; Ed Walker, 2nd violin; Geo. Davis, trombone; Walter Mitchell, cornet, and Leon Granger, pianist.¹³ Sherman H. Dudley eventually moved into the national limelight, starring in 1904–12 editions of the legendary Smart Set Company.¹⁴

On September 8, 1900, a cataclysmic hurricane ravaged Galveston, leveling the Island City and killing thousands of its citizens. Surprisingly, the Olympic Theater appears to have reopened just six weeks later, and in December it resumed communication with the Freeman: "From the Olympic Theatre, Galveston, Tex.; R. L. Andrews, proprietor; P. C. Clark, manager; Buddie Glenn, stage manager. Johnny Green has closed after two successful weeks. Mr. Almo, the human alligator, and Mack Allen, the slack wire walker, are making hits nightly. Terry C. Rogers, the mixologist, is alright. G. R. [sic] Rhone, the orchestra leader, says he was not lost in the storm."¹⁵

Indianapolis Freeman, December 22, 1900.

On December 10, 1900, Lew Payton and Hattie Harris, late of Harrison Bros. minstrels, opened at the Olympic, and on January 4, 1901, they got married there.¹⁶ That week’s stage presentation featured a minstrel first part with six end men: Payton, Buddie Glenn, Sonny Marshall, Charles W. Bebee, George Helm, and E. B. Brown.¹⁷ Every evening before the show, Prof. R. J. Anderson’s brass band was drawing large crowds in front of the theater.¹⁸

Early in 1901, friends of the Olympic Theater sponsored a train excursion to Houston, to attend a performance of Rusco and Holland’s Minstrels.¹⁹ In August the Olympic announced the opening of a new season of vaudeville, with Buddie Glenn as stage manager.²⁰ However, no further news was relayed from the Olympic saloon-theater.

Jacksonville

Reports of saloon-theater activity in Jacksonville started cropping up in the spring of 1899. Over the next few years, a tentative circuit of vaudeville platforms took shape in the region, connecting Jacksonville to Tampa in one direction and to Fernandina, Florida, and Savannah, Georgia, in the other.

Jacksonville’s earliest saloon-theaters were located in the LaVilla community, a thriving black business and cultural center, birthplace of James Weldon Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, and childhood home of A. Philip Randolph. LaVilla was also known for its saloons and houses of prostitution. One of the first black vaudeville venues in Jacksonville, the Excelsior Concert Hall and Saloon, was located at 125–127 Bridge (now Broad) Street, near the corner of Ward (now Houston), in LaVilla’s notorious old red-light district.²¹

The Excelsior Concert Hall’s proprietor, Pat Chappelle, was a Jacksonville native.²² Just prior to opening the Excelsior Concert Hall, he was managing August Blum’s saloon, on another corner of the same LaVilla intersection.²³ Chappelle leased the 125–127 Bridge Street location, opening for business no later than March 1899. His concert hall reportedly seated 500 people, employed only professional talent, and enjoyed a liberal patronage from both races.²⁴

In the fall of 1899 Chappelle suddenly abandoned the Excelsior Concert Hall and moved to Tampa. In the wake of his departure, white entrepreneurs Thomas Baxter and James E. Cashin took over the Bridge Street location and renamed it the Exchange Garden Theater.²⁵ Under their watch, the Exchange Garden remained a beacon of black vaudeville activity in Jacksonville for the next ten years. In the spring of 1900 they were featuring an all-star bill, rich in ragtime coon songs and comedy:

Mr. Sam Robinson, one of our comedians is making a big hit nightly in his different specialties and doing his baton manipulations. He is par excellence. Billy Reeves, a natural born comedian is making a big hit singing The Ghost of a Coon, and his latest parody, I am Happy When I’m By My Baby’s Side. Miss Pauline [Crampton] is singing with great applause, After All, and The Moth and the Flame. Miss Carrie Hall the Queen of coon song singers, is making good with Since You’s Got Money, and I’m Tired of Dodging dat Installment Man. Mr. Jersey, our buck dancer never fails to please. Last but not least Mr. Clifford D. Brooks, who has been here some time is still a favorite is singing, with great effect this week, The Blue and the Gray and My Lady Lou. … This is the best colored vaudeville show in the South, as every member is a star in his or her line.²⁶

Back at the Exchange Garden in 1902, Sam Robinson scored as Ticklish Dan, the drum major king: He can imitate all the leading drum majors of the profession.²⁷ In November 1903 the Exchange Garden’s vaudeville show concluded with a cake walk in which Dennis Mitchell and Florence Harris carried off the honors.²⁸ Dennis Mitchell was also a popular singer; in the spring of 1905 he was making good singing Bob Russell’s latest songs, ‘Ragged, but Right’ and ‘You Got to Cut That Out.’²⁹ Mitchell’s cake walking partner, Florence Flozo Harris was better known as a contortionist, one of several performing on southern vaudeville platforms.

In May 1905 Prof. C. E. Hawk, proprietor of Hawk’s Moving Picture Show, took the Exchange Garden Theater stage and made a grand display with his moving pictures.³⁰ An earlier report described: Prof. C. E. Hawk of Atlanta, Ga.… the only young colored man that travels South with a clean up-to-date scenery of life moving pictures that will please any audience … Biblical, historical, sentimental, instructive from beginning to end … with a record from Frisco to Cuba.³¹

Vocal quartets were a mainstay of turn-of-the-century black entertainment, and they were very popular at the Exchange Garden Theater, as this November 24, 1900, report attests: The Wig Wam quartette of Louisville, Ky, late of the Rusco & Holland Big Minstrel Festival opened here on the 12th inst., and is quite a card. The boys are in fine shape now and are compelled to respond to three and four encores.… James Smith the leader of the Wig Wam quartette, has made quite a reputation for himself singing ‘Just Because She Made Them Goo Goo Eyes,’ and ‘I Don’t Care if I Never Wake Up.’

The Exchange Garden even had its own house quartet: The Exchange Quartette, one of the best in the business, can be heard rendering fresh harmonies once a week.³² This band of singers have been trained by our distinguished professor, J. M. Robinson Jr., and he needs to be praised for his thorough training.³³

Jacksonville city directories of 1902–05 identify Robinson as a music teacher.³⁴ He was also a ragtime piano professor: Prof. J. M. Robinson, Jr. has his audience with him when he plays his original ‘Rags.’ In this particular line he is a phenomenon.³⁵Prof. J. M. Robinson, Jr., director of the Exchange Theatre, has just received a bunch of the latest of Scott Joplin’s rags. He held his audience spellbound when he introduced the latest, ‘A Breeze From Alabama,’ dedicated to P. G. Lowery. All pianists that can interpret a different idea in characteristic piano playing will do well to write and order a few from John Stark & Son, Publisher, St. Louis, Mo.³⁶

A 1905 Exchange Garden Theater report claimed, The late orchestra of Prof. J. M. Robinson and J. Haywood with their latest music selections, are bringing down the house nightly.³⁷ John C. Haywood, the theater’s violinist and assistant stage manager, was a native of Raleigh, North Carolina. He had previously served with the People’s Orchestra of Ohio and directed the challenge orchestra of twelve pieces with F. L. Mahara’s Operatic Minstrels.³⁸

The Exchange Garden Theater almost always concluded its vaudeville entertainment with a short musical-dramatic skit. One popular skit for 1900 was Sam Robinson’s Colored Sporting Life. That fall they presented Saw Dust Bill with telling effect. In this act Dan Roberts, who is playing the part of Saw Dust Bill, makes a daring leap from the balcony to the stage, which is quite a feat.³⁹

For about a year the Exchange Garden Theater drew competition from the Little Savoy Theater, which opened its doors on October 3, 1904, at 26 Bridge Street, catering exclusively to black clientele. The Little Savoy was originally operated by Martin J. O’Toole, a white man who also ran a grocery store at 22 Bridge Street.⁴⁰ Another white man, William E. Gillick, whose background included theatrical experience in New York City, became the Little Savoy’s general manager, and in September 1905 he produced an original melodrama with the unlikely title, Kit Carson, the Female Detective.⁴¹

The Little Savoy was in its glory in the spring of 1905, when a reporter noted:

[T]he rush for admittance is so great at times that we are afraid we will have some funeral expenses to pay. We are simply killing them and Mr. O. Tool [sic] the proprietor is burying them. Billie Reeves is making a decided hit with his latest coon song, I Only Had a Dollar to My Name. Miss Carrie Hall, the greatest coon song shouter of the age, is taking five and six encores nightly.… Pauline Crampton, everybody’s favorite, is also taking four and five encores. Miss Brown, the second Black Patti, is always in for her share of applause. Billy Bradley, New York’s favorite, is still getting his with his monologue and funny sayings. Will Goff Kennedy, our genial manager, has never had a chance to put a fine on any of his performers and is well pleased with his talent on and off the stage. Miss Louise Stevens, of the Rabbit Foot company, has signed for six weeks and is doing nicely.… Chink Floyd, the Southern comedian, after having a fuss with a friend fell asleep and while he was asleep stopped a brick with his jaw breaking it in three places. Pearl Woods is getting much better after a few weeks illness. She is better known as the talking machine as she can express a thousand words in ten seconds.… Little Baby Annie Jone [sic], the child wonder, is much improved after a severe spell of sickness.… we had the pleasure of enjoying ourselves immensely at the home of Miss Carrie Hall the southern coon song shouter, recently at a birthday dinner, which was par-excellence. After dinner we repaired to the cozy little parlor and entertained ourselves with song and dance. We all join in thanks to the hostess Miss Carrie Hall who spared no pains in making everything lovely.⁴²

In addition to the Exchange Garden and Little Savoy theaters, there were early vaudeville platforms at three black parks in Jacksonville: Mason’s, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. The opening of Mason’s Colored Park at Jamison Avenue near Durkee for a season of vaudeville was announced in the Freeman of September 26, 1903. The following month news came that Walter Crampton had taken the management of Mason’s Park and was booking people from all parts of the United States. He is a number one hustler and has some clever ideas in store for the future.⁴³ A November 14, 1903, report informed that, Miss Carrie Hall, the ‘coon shouter,’ sets them wild with her coon songs.… Prof. W. H. Dorsey is musical director, and that is sufficient.

In July 1905 players at the Little Savoy Theater revealed that they were moonlighting on the open-air stage at Roosevelt Park during the hot Florida summer: [W]e play two performances every Sunday. We draw from 15,000 to 16,000 people.… Our comedians, Billy Reeves and Webster Williams are turning them away screaming. Nettie Borden, the little soubrette, is still holding her own. Will Goff Kennedy, our stage manager, says he has a good company and he will try hard to keep them together.⁴⁴

Lincoln Park was situated at the head of Highway Avenue, just west of McCoy’s Creek.⁴⁵ On December 9, 1906, barnstorming southern vaudeville pioneers William H. Henderson and Beulah Washington got married at Lincoln Park, before a public audience. They continued touring as the Jolly Hendersons.⁴⁶

During the summer of 1908 Lincoln Park was touted as a second Coney Island. The twenty-piece Enterprise Cornet Band under the direction of solo cornetist George Popirro was a great drawing card.⁴⁷ The star comedians were Richmond (or Richard) Poor Boy Cross and Buddie Glenn.⁴⁸ The female stars included Ada Harris and Virgie Deo. Of the other noteworthy participants, Prof. Jno. C. Haywood is well and making the violin speak like a human.… L. D. Bradford is not well. He has a beautiful eye. It’s a perfect star-spangled banner. He got it through an accident in the play.… Still, he is holding up well.⁴⁹ At the time of his accident, Bradford was enacting the role of One Long, Chinaman in a musical comedy skit called The Chinese Jungles, with a chorus of ten singing girls. Sam Robinson played an Irish policeman: They all like his work in the ‘cop biz.’⁵⁰

Jacksonville soon became a stronghold for a more modern brand of southern vaudeville, anchored by Frank Crowd’s Globe Theater, 615 West Ashley Street. Originally from Boston, Crowd was an ambitious African American entrepreneur who came to Jacksonville around 1885. In 1908 he established the city’s first reputable black moving picture house, the Bijou. He also ran a first class barber shop and an up-to-date shooting gallery. Crowd installed a stage at the Bijou and introduced light vaudeville, to the extent that the facility and his resources allowed.⁵¹

In 1909 a white man, L. D. Joel, opened the better-equipped and better-financed Air Dome Theater directly adjacent to the Bijou, and began booking name vaudeville acts. The Bijou soon folded. Gamely, Frank Crowd recruited wealthy backers and remodeled the old Bijou, reopening on January 19, 1910, as the Globe Theater. In a published statement, he declared his intention to give [the] race what is sadly needed before the footlights here, ‘native ideals’ and all modern appointments for the patrons’ comfort.⁵²

Crowd’s Globe Theater represented one of the biggest remodeling jobs ever attempted in Jacksonville:

The first and second floors … were torn out and a balcony arranged in true theater style, with inclined floors, two private boxes seating six persons each, a stage large enough to group the largest traveling minstrel (first part).… The third floor over the stage was taken out, forming a tower. The curtains all drop.… Tungsten lighting system being used exclusively.… Six hundred comfortable theater chairs occupy the orchestra and dress circle space, while four hundred fill the balcony.⁵³

Through the spring and summer of 1910, Joel and Crowd competed head-to-head for patronage. The Globe held its ground, and Joel eventually quit the city and relocated to Atlanta, where he established an important booking chain and theater circuit.

Tampa

In Tampa, early black vaudeville activity emanated from William Fowler’s Central Saloon and Concert Hall at 302–304 Central Avenue. The Central was up and running by the summer of 1899, when Fowler announced in the mainstream Tampa Morning Tribune that he was offering the Greatest Vaudeville Show on Earth. He also let it be known that his Concert Hall was WIDE OPEN to all law abiding citizens of South Florida.⁵⁴

Throughout that summer the Central Concert Hall’s vaudeville offerings were couched in the old three-part format of Ethiopian minstrelsy, but with up-to-date ragtime coon songs and vernacular dances finding expression throughout. Among the dances performed were a Champion Buck Dance, Lightning Buck and Wing Dance, Georgia Brake Down Dance, Ragtime Dance, and Jennie Cooler Dance, double turn.⁵⁵

The house comedian was Arthur Happy Howe, who quickly earned a reputation as a wild terror for all Southern comedians.⁵⁶ Over the course of his long run as leading comedian with the Rabbit’s Foot Company (1900–13), and his intermittent stints in southern saloon-theaters, colored parks, and vaudeville houses, Happy Howe set a tone in comedy coon songs that carried directly into the blues age. A string of ads in the Tampa Morning Tribune enumerated his offerings at the Central Concert Hall during the summer of 1899: Original Laughing Song—One Morning in May; Old Age Specialty—Stick Dance; Chinese Act, Original, Introducing the Latest Chinese Ballads; Lightning Express Excursion, original, and his original specialty—Sugar Babe.⁵⁷

The fall of 1899 witnessed something of a boom in the city of Tampa. The leading manufacturers of clear Havana cigars in the United States and Cuba formed a trust, with Tampa as the base of operations, and the Morning Tribune of September 17, 1899, editorialized: There is no longer any reason for doubting the future of Tampa. When it becomes the center of such an enterprise as a cigar trust, it becomes a city ‘built upon the rock.’ … You can take your faith and your money to Tampa. It has passed the experimental stage.

Tampa Morning Tribune, August 15, 1899.

Tampa Morning Tribune, August 29, 1899.

Tampa Morning Tribune, October 6, 1899.

Pat Chappelle moved his concert-saloon business from Jacksonville to Tampa on the leading edge of this boom. On September 24, 1899, he and R. S. Bob Donaldson, one of Florida’s most progressive Afro-American capitalists, opened the Buckingham Theater Saloon, a new vaudeville showhouse at 416 Fifth Avenue, corner of Fourteenth Street, in the Fort Brooke community.⁵⁸ The Freeman of October 14, 1899, described their immediate success in this location: Tampa is a city which has a number of large cigar factories, their pay roll averages about $50,000 per week, among Cubans, Spaniards and Americans, and [Chappelle] has found business much better than in his former location [in Jacksonville].

Chappelle and Donaldson placed their first ad for the Buckingham Theater Saloon in the Tampa Morning Tribune of October 6, 1899, announcing an Admission Free to All policy that indicated their confidence in vaudeville as an inducement to patronage of their saloon. Like the Central Concert Hall, the Buckingham stood wide open to Tampa’s ethnically diverse citizenry, but with a caveat: Special attention will be shown to white visitors.⁵⁹

At the head of the Buckingham’s roster of performers was Happy Howe, the people’s favorite. Also on board was Billy Cheatham, late of Cheatham Brothers’ Black Diamond Minstrels, which included ragtime pianist Tom Turpin and his protégé Louis Chauvin.⁶⁰ Newcomers to the Buckingham during the final weeks of 1899 included Kittie Brown, the renowned coon song and dance artist; Jessie Thomas, in her great boy impersonation; and the comedy team of Ernest Holmes and Clarence Bush, just arrived from Mobile.⁶¹

In January 1900 Central Concert Hall owner William Fowler announced a special appearance of his players at the Spanish Casino in Ybor City, in the greatest Minstrel Festival ever produced in Tampa by Vaudeville Artists. On the day of the show, Fowler sponsored a Grand Parade at 12 Noon.⁶² Not to be outdone, Chappelle and Donaldson advised the public to Watch out for the Buckingham parade at 2 o’clock. Men dress[ed] in yellow coats, ladies riding in carriages, led by Master Arthur Howe, on horseback, with the Buckingham brass band. After the parade, if any one wants to see a first class vaudeville show by trained artists and people with reputations, they will see it at the Buckingham theater.… Our orchestra you all have heard, which is wintering here with the Cooper circus. They are Professor Carl Wood, violinist; Professor Parkhurst, cornet; Professor Shamber, flute and drums; Professor A. W. Ross, pianist. And this is no fake. See?⁶³

In December 1899 Chappelle and Donaldson opened a second vaudeville platform, the Mascotte Theater Saloon, at the corner of Polk and Pierce streets in Tampa proper.⁶⁴ The Mascotte’s original bill included coon song singers and vernacular comedians backed by a fine Orchestra, from Topeka, Kansas. Advertising assured: The best of order is always preserved, and there is no charge for admission. The very best of wines, liquors and cigars are served. Special attention to white patrons. No extra prices for refreshments in the hall.⁶⁵

From March through July 1900 the management shuttled players between the Buckingham and the Mascotte. In April A. W. Ross was leading the Mascotte orchestra, and the leader of the Buckingham orchestra was Joe Levy.⁶⁶ One week later, Levy was at the Mascotte and Ross at the Buckingham.⁶⁷ At the end of June, Joe Levey, the famous rag time piano player was back at the Buckingham.⁶⁸ Meanwhile, it was reported that Levy would soon publish some of his latest rag-time compositions.⁶⁹

Tampa Morning Tribune, December 5, 1899.

During the spring of 1900, Clarence Bush served as stage manager at the Mascotte, where he performed his original Louisiana buck dance in a plantation musical act.⁷⁰ Male impersonator Jessie Thomas and coon shouter Kittie Brown were also on the bill. Over at the Buckingham, James Carter was stage manager, and versatile comedian D. Ireland Thomas headed the bill, which included Joseph A. McMurray in his original musical act.⁷¹ At the Mascotte several weeks later, McMurray performed My Money Never Gives Out and his own composition, The Gambling Coon.⁷²

Clarence Cissel, blackface comedian, and Augusta Mines, soprano, also appeared at the Mascotte and Buckingham theaters. Billed as Colored Magnets, they were an early model of the increasingly popular black vaudeville husband-and-wife stage team. An article of June 23, 1900, said they had toured with such shows as the Black Patti Troubadours, and last season were headliners of the ‘Darktown Swells.’ … Mr. Cissel is a clever comedian, and has his own peculiar way of working, and his make up is entirely original. Miss Mines is the possessor of a very sweet voice, and can easily reach high C. They are at present filling a twelve weeks engagement at the Buckingham Theatre, Tampa, Fla.

On August 20, 1900, Chappelle and Donaldson premiered their new road show, A Rabbit’s Foot, in Paterson, New Jersey, only to close in Brooklyn, New York, four weeks later, on account of poor business.⁷³ It was an inauspicious beginning for what proved to be one of the longest-running tented minstrel shows of the twentieth century.⁷⁴ Chappelle and Donaldson’s partnership was an apparent casualty of that short-lived opening season. Back in Tampa, Pat and his brother James Chappelle took over the Buckingham Theater. A November 7, 1900, ad for their Grand Opening promised excellent performers direct from New York City, including Florence Hines, the queen of all ‘male’ impersonators. Hines was a veteran of Sam T. Jack’s landmark Creole Burlesque Company and a living legend among black performers.

Indianapolis Freeman, May 12, 1900. An accompanying paragraph explained: "The picture … shows D. Ireland Thomas and Jos. A. McMurray in their new act, entitled ‘Rapid Transit.’ They are at present playing dates in Florida. This being their 10th successful week at Chappelle and Donaldson’s Buckingham Theatre, Tampa, Fla. Mr. Thomas was with Melroy and Chandler’s Minstrels as stage manager last season, he will also be remembered with Mobile Minstrels, Great Southern Minstrels, Nashville Jubilee Singers and many other shows. These gentlemen are the composers of many songs, among their latest success is the beautiful proverbal [sic] ballad, ‘Time and Tide Waits for No One,’ which promises to become quite popular. Mr. McMurray is beyond a doubt one of the best musical comedians on the stage. He is the inventor of quite a number of novelty musical instruments."

Clarence Cissel and Augusta Mines, Indianapolis Freeman, December 29, 1900.

The most prominent male impersonator on the incipient vaudeville stages of Florida and southern Georgia was Jessie Thomas. At the Mascotte Theater in July 1900 she sang a hot combination, Baby Want More Milk and Happy Coons.⁷⁵ Later that fall she and Kittie Brown opened in Jacksonville with an act titled The Rich and Poor Girls.⁷⁶ An April 5, 1902, correspondence from Tampa said, Happy Jessie Thomas appears in a fetching costume of the latest in London ideas of dress and gives a male impersonation that reminds one of dear Flo Hines in the good old Creole days. At the Domino Theater in Fernandina later that summer, a correspondent quipped, Miss Jessie Thomas … is raising a mustache.⁷⁷

In November 1900 Pat Chappelle took possession of Will Fowler’s Central Concert Hall and reopened it as the Bijou Theater, offering A big array of colored professional talent and special boxes for white patrons.⁷⁸ He hired D. Ireland Thomas as manager and installed an orchestra under Prof. C. A. Jones.⁷⁹ In February 1902 Chappelle advised that he had closed contracts to furnish attractions to all the Street Railway parks in the South, and in March he announced the advent of the Chappelle Bros. Circuit, which includes Tampa, Fla., Jacksonville, Fla., and Savannah, Ga.⁸⁰

Veteran minstrel performer Ben Hunn praised the energy and pluck of Mr. Pat Chappelle and his circuit initiative:

I dare say he … is now doing more good for the colored performer than any other manager in the business. He has more people working at the Buckingham than any of the traveling colored companies carry.… [E]ver since I have been here everybody has been paid every Wednesday at 12 o’clock.… Of course the Chappelle Bros. circuit can not pay the salaries that are paid by the [mainstream] Keith, Proctor and Orpheum circuits, but the performers will find the difference in the length of the engagement.… This is my first time in the South and I’m sorry I did not find this field before now.⁸¹

While attempting to expand his vaudeville holdings, Pat Chappelle continued to make improvements on A Rabbit’s Foot. The Buckingham doubled as a winter headquarters and rehearsal hall for this increasingly important touring company. A minstrel show atmosphere prevailed at the Buckingham during the spring of 1902 when Chappelle announced, Our uniform brass band gives a street parade every Monday.⁸²

Meanwhile, R. S. Donaldson took control of the Mascotte Theater, operating it, for a while at least, as a simple saloon. He got some unwelcome press on January 16, 1901, when the Tampa Morning Tribune reported a stabbing affray over a crap game at Bob Donaldson’s saloon. That fall, when Chappelle left town with the second edition of A Rabbit’s Foot, Donaldson restored vaudeville to the Mascotte, with Fred Sulis at the piano and a roster of performers that included Kittie Brown and Jessie Thomas.⁸³

Early in 1902 Tom Logan served as general manager of the Mascotte.⁸⁴ Logan staged a skit said to be head and shoulders above the average road attraction that visits our city. The first act depicts the ‘ups and downs’ of the average ‘Jig-walk’ [i.e., black] performer—his ‘flush times’ when the ‘Ghost’ walks, his ‘medium’ times between pay days, his ‘tough’ times when the manager has ‘ducked with the coin,’ and the ingenious plan they adopt to get back to ‘Good Old New York Town.’ All ends well, however, and the curtain falls on the Buffalo spread at the Douglass Club.⁸⁵ Later in 1902 Logan moved on to Savannah, and vaudeville at the Mascotte was temporarily discontinued.

Stage managers and musical directors were the blood and brains of the new southern vaudeville platforms. When Will Goff Kennedy and William H. Dorsey joined forces in 1904, they formed the greatest stage manager–music director team in southern vaudeville to date. Born in Nashville in 1879, Kennedy reportedly set out with a minstrel show at the age of sixteen. He rose to prominence as a baritone singer and then as a producer. Kennedy was managing the Buckingham Theater at the start of 1901 and was still there in the summer of 1902, when the Freeman noted, W. Goff Kennedy has won considerable reputation as a music teacher.⁸⁶ Shortly thereafter, he was appointed stage manager of the third edition of the Rabbit’s Foot Company.

Will Dorsey was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1878. In 1900 he was living with his mother in Louisville and working as a musician.⁸⁷ In the spring of 1901 he directed the Enterprise orchestra of 9 pieces in conjunction with a stock company that included Will Able and Florence Hines.⁸⁸ Dorsey left Louisville in the spring of 1902, surfacing in Tampa at Bob Donaldson’s Mascotte Theater in company with comedians Billy (also known as Will) Reeves and Chink Floyd. In May, Donaldson leveled charges against the three new arrivals:

The crowning point of baseness and treachery, ingratitude and low cunning was reached last Monday when a lovely trio composed of one W. H. Dorsey, a pianist of Louisville, Ky., and a team of alleged comedians known as Reeves and Floyd, served me a trick that ought to go down on the tablets.… [T]hese three innocents abroad came to my office, received and signed for their salaries; attended rehearsal.… After receiving their money they (Reeves & Floyd) slipped away from town to go to Savannah to accept a date.…

This man Dorsey, whose only grievance lies in the fact that I suggested he pay more attention to his work than to the mulatto lady patrons, entered into an abominable compact with these Hamfat actors (?) and without a moment’s warning, left my services. Nothing was known of this affair until nearly show time, when it was discovered that these three worthies had closed.⁸⁹

Despite his bad beginning, Dorsey became an important creative influence in Florida’s fledgling black vaudeville theaters. He and Will Goff Kennedy may have first paired up at the Red Fox Music Hall in Tampa, which opened May 2, 1904, with a roster that included Carrie Hall, Billy Reeves, and a chorus of six creole show girls.⁹⁰ Kennedy drew particular praise for his operatic duets with Sarah Price and his musical comedy skit, O’Brien in Coon Town.⁹¹

That fall Dorsey and Kennedy took up at the Little Savoy Theater in Jacksonville, where they stayed for a solid year: Prof. Dorsey is doing his best on the white ivory and is playing everybody’s rags and a few of his own.⁹² Will Goff Kennedy, our good natured stage manager is trying by the application of intelligence, originality, energy, tact, common sense and the Golden Rule, to make the show a success.⁹³

In 1906, three years after Pat Chappelle closed the Buckingham Theater, Bob Donaldson reopened it as the Budweiser: It has been rebuilt with a large stage 20 × 24 and a new gallery.⁹⁴ Donaldson brought in many familiar faces: phenomenal female baritone Pauline Crampton, charming burlesque queen Kittie Brown, Buddie Glenn, and Sarah Price; plus comedy team Chintz Moore and John H. Williams, scoring a hit with ‘On the Rock Pile.’⁹⁵ To lead his orchestra and manage his stage, Donaldson tapped Will Dorsey and Will Goff Kennedy. That summer, Dorsey composed a new march, Tweed King, which he dedicated to Kennedy.⁹⁶ During the fall of 1906, Dorsey directed a twelve-piece orchestra at the Budweiser.⁹⁷

At the end of the year, Donaldson reached into his deep reservoir of vaudeville performers and musicians to field the Florida Blossom Minstrel Company, packing them off to Georgia with Dorsey and Kennedy in charge of the band and stage.⁹⁸ After one successful season, he sold the Florida Blossoms to fellow race businessman C. H. Douglass of Macon. Will Goff Kennedy continued in the tent show game, while Will Dorsey went on to join the promising black vaudeville theater scene in Chicago.

These developments illustrate the ephemeral nature of the early saloon and park vaudeville platforms. The initial wave of southern vaudeville in Tampa, and elsewhere in Georgia and Florida, was closely associated with the major tented black minstrel organizations. A Rabbit’s Foot, Silas Green from New Orleans, and the Florida Blossom Minstrels were all piloted by entrepreneurs who had previously managed concert-saloons and park pavilions.

Fernandina

At the turn of the century, Fernandina was a bustling Florida seaport town, situated about twenty miles north of Jacksonville, on Amelia Island. As described by a local historian:

Fernandina was a major seaport and railroad terminus for shipping lumber, phosphate and naval stores throughout this country and all over the world. Foreign as well as American schooners clogged the waterfront, and it usually took 10 days to load the big ships with their cargo. The foreign ships paid off their crews here, knowing the money would be squandered on wine, women and song, so that sailors returning home broke would have to sign on for another hitch.

Fernandina catered to these seagoing customers with either 17, 20, 22 or 25 saloons at the time—the number depending upon which old-timer you interview. Most of the saloons were connected with a house of prostitution and thrived on the patronage of brawling sailors and waterfront roustabouts.⁹⁹

North Second Street was the focal point of Fernandina’s storied saloon culture. Freeman reportage preserves the names of three saloon-theaters that staged black vaudeville shows in Fernandina: the Collie, the Domino, and the Gem. The Collie Theater, 123 North Second Street, issued a solitary report in January 1901 that indicated: John M. Collie, sole owner; Joseph Martin, general manager, while Robert Marshall looks after the stage, head liners as follows: Henry Thomas, Thomas Breze, Miss Jennie Woodard, Amy Paris, Joseph Mitchell, C. B. Roberts, Theodore Johnson, Robert Smiley, Madame Ellis of New York City, pianist.… We also have our friend Richard H. Barnett, the little favorite singing comedian.¹⁰⁰

On May 3, 1902, a report from Tampa’s Mascotte Theater informed: The Crosby’s, Oma and Harry; Jess Thomas, Paul Simmons, Payton and Harris and Fred Sulis left last week to open John Smith’s new theatre, Fernandina, Fla.¹⁰¹ Two weeks later, the Freeman carried its initial report from Fernandina’s Domino Theater:

One of the finest little vaudeville theatres in the south has just opened to a large business in Fernandino [sic], Fla. under the management of John Smith. It is … situated near the harbor and the audiences are all ofays, principally foreigners. The roster consists of Lew Peyton of the well known team of Peyton & Harris, stage manager; Harry Crosby of the team of the Crosbys is at present presiding at the piano.… They are using the whole company in the first part.… Miss Oma Crosby holds the audience spellbound with her sweet rendition of Mazy My Dusky Daisy. The ghost walks promptly at Monday morning.¹⁰²

At this point in its history, Fernandina had a majority black population. The performers at the Domino Theater were all African American, yet the Domino’s audience was all ofays.¹⁰³

Before Florida gained statehood in 1845, Fernandina was a center of the African slave trade. Local slave traders became very wealthy, and a large African population existed on Amelia Island. During the war the island became a sanctuary for blacks, finding safety there with the protection of Union troops.… Much of the white population had evacuated within the first year of the war, and so the population tilted heavily on the side of the black.¹⁰⁴ Confederate sentiment continued strong among whites in this region, long after the end of the war.¹⁰⁵

The Domino Theater may have taken over the 123–125 North Second Street location previously tenanted by the Collie. On June 14, 1902, a Domino Theater reporter noted:

The show opened this week with a minstrel first-part, closing with the finale, Uncle Tom’s Cabin for five minutes. Messrs. Lew Peyton and John W. Dennis, working extreme ends in the first part went in a roar from start to finish. Lew Peyton opened the olio with a popular coon song. Together with Miss Harris they keep them screaming with their big act. Johnson and Bluford have won admiration with a clever sketch, introducing Mr. Johnson’s acrobatic work and Miss Bluford’s coon shouting. Miss Oma Crosby is rendering descriptive songs this week and the audience shows its appreciation of her sweet voice and refined rendition of James T. Brymn’s My Clo, by repeated applause. The charming soubrette, Miss Ida Larkins is the life of the company with clever dancing and elegant rendition of Josephine My Joe. Miss Jessie Thomas, the clever male impersonator is keeping them screaming with Every Darkey Had a Raglan On. Miss Thomas is undoubtedly one of the most clever colored male impersonators on the stage. The clever comedian John W. Dennis gets his singing The Phrenologist Coon. The show closes with a farce, Miss Hannah From Savannah, by the whole company.… Harry Crosby is still presiding at the piano and has won great praise for his excellent rendition of classic overtures.

This portion of a 1903 Sanborn Insurance Map shows the saloon-theater location at 123–125 North Second Street, between Broome and Alachua streets, in Fernandina (Courtesy Marston Library, University of Florida, Gainesville).

The song Hannah from Savannah, which apparently served as the basis for the farce comedy skit staged by the Domino players, was first popularized by Aida Overton Walker in 1900, in Williams and Walker’s The Sons of Ham. In the spring of 1903, Miss Hannah from Savannah was again presented as a musical skit, staged by Miss Vida DeVine, leaving them screaming. Which is a credit to our Domino Stock Co.¹⁰⁶ A skit by the same name went big at the Exchange Garden Theater in Jacksonville that fall.¹⁰⁷ As late as the summer of 1908, at Ocmulgee Park in Macon, Georgia, veteran comedy producer Carrie Hall presented "an up-to-date version of ‘Hannah from Savannah,’ ably