Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  A NEW, BLUE WOMAN

  Young lovers, especially female ones, needed role models in uncovering what they’d been raised to tastefully repress. That’s what the era’s “It” girls provided, from Irene Castle in her husband’s arms to shimmy dancers like Bee Palmer and the heroines, like Louise Brooks and Clara Bow, who sparkled on the silver screen. One “It” girl had a jump on this new way of being. At the very beginning of the 1920s, she set an example that would influence artists across the lines of race, class, and performance style. Yet she has been largely forgotten. Her name was Florence Mills.

  “Dresden China and she turns into a stick of dynamite”—that’s what Noble Sissle, one of her mentors, called Mills. She exploded one night in the summer of 1921, on the stage of Cort’s 63rd Street Theatre in Manhattan. Mills, a woman the size of a girl, stood there for a moment on what an admirer had called “her canary legs.” A thousand people gazed into her wide brown eyes. She had been performing for most of her twenty-five years, but this was her chance to leave behind the trials of the vaudeville road and the degradation of playing a pickaninny—a cartoon kid—in minstrel shows, and become a part of the progressive African American theater scene that was then storming New York. Sissle’s partner, Eubie Blake, had given her this part in his new musical Shuffle Along, though he’d been slightly skeptical about whether such a slender, boyish young lady could replace the bawdy Gertrude Saunders, who’d been a sensation on the road. Now she had to do it: to use her little voice to warm up the show’s most lascivious number, “I’m Craving for That Kind of Love,” until it cracked her open, along with everyone around her.45

  She was so slender. The broad bodily movements of a buxom barmaid type just didn’t make sense for her. Mills just walked. She strolled ever so slowly out of the spotlight, letting it stalk her, as she sang Noble Sissle’s funny lyric about wanting “a modern Romeo—I do not want a phoneo.” As the song implored the lover to get closer, Mills inched toward those watching her. “Kiss me”—another step. “Whisper”—two more. “Honey, when there’s no one near . . .” The front-row Johnnies could almost touch her now. By this time the crowd was going crazy, each member reaching toward Mills, in dreams at least, through a suddenly shattered fourth wall. A star was born by the time Mills sang the song’s final line. This was a new kind of dream girl with a bubbling energy expressive of women’s raging struggle to balance self-possession and lingering propriety with the temptation, or perhaps the imperative, to let go.

  Florence Mills arrived at this juncture fully prepared to embody the era’s transformative possibilities. Her story is one of mobility: she ascended from the working class, defied the strictures that afflicted many African American performers, and startled the world with her new, androgynous, and innately assertive way of being female. Her place in history has been compromised because she never made any records or appeared on film. But even more than her friend Irene Castle or her admirers Ethel Waters and Josephine Baker, Mills expressed the sense of possibility women felt in this age of unanticipated freedoms and risks.

  Born in 1896 in Washington, DC, Mills had played the boyish, hardly human characters called “pickaninnies” in traveling tent shows as a child. Before that, her mother took in laundry for local sporting women, and Florence, a preschooler, would sing Irish ballads for the prostitutes, who rewarded her with coins as they waited for their clean clothes. Her construction worker father had a friend who owned a nearby theater, and that’s how Florence went from workroom serenades to a real stage. She was a showbiz kid from then on. By her teens, she was in an ersatz sister act and had met her future husband, Ulysses “Slow Kid” Thompson, a dancer with the group the Tennessee Ten.46

  She was twenty-five when she nabbed the part in Shuffle Along. Soon, Mills was New York’s biggest African American female star. Irving Berlin sent her a telegram lauding her as “the greatest of all colored performers” when she first traveled to Europe in 1923. Irene Castle envied her enough to emulate her in a gesture of spectacular bad taste, wearing blackface to a London party both attended that same year. (Mills accepted this cruel flattery without comment.) Charlie Chaplin took in her show at New York’s Plantation Room, a theater built just for her, the first constructed for a female headliner. Back in Europe, the Prince of Wales attended her star vehicle, Blackbirds of 1926, more than a dozen times in one season. She was equally beloved by African Americans and became a spokesperson for racial equality, turning her signature love song, “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird,” into a call for African Americans to be treated with respect and empathy.47

  Florence Mills was an electric figure at the beginning of the Jazz Age because she turned the broad strokes of contemporary theater into something more intimate and relatable. She was a modern woman, acting like one. “Her slender body is all rhythm; her artistry is instinctive; her power of improvisation—she never sings two verses alike, and frequently interpolates embellishments that would make many a prima donna green with envy—belongs to genius, and that she has in her very eyelids,” wrote the British critic Herbert Hughes upon seeing Mills in the New York production of Shuffle Along in 1922.48 In his book Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson extolled her naturalness as magical. “One might best string out a list of words such as: pixy, elf, radiant, exotic, Peter Pan, wood-nymph, wistful, piquant, magnetism, witchery, madness, flame; and then despairingly exclaim: ‘Oh, you know what I mean.’ She could be whimsical, she could be almost grotesque; but she had the good taste that never allowed her to be coarse.”49 In photographs, she looks more like a modern pop star—angular and quick-limbed and instinctively chic—than a voluptuous vaudeville-born big mama. Gilbert Seldes wrote in The 7 Lively Arts, “She remains an original, with little or nothing to give beyond her presence, her instinctive grace, and her baffling, seductive voice.” What could be more modern than a woman who could enrapture crowds just by being herself?50

  Mills clowned and mugged with all the vigor of her vaudeville training, but her irresistible naturalness allowed her to express overt sexual longing in a way that made audiences identify with her. “May I pay you this compliment,” wrote one fan, Lena Trent Gordony. “Even in the number where the music is given to the wildest abandon of jazz rhythm you maintain a refined interpretation that lends a world of color beautiful to all you do . . . And last night you made me feel an intense throb of great pride, Robert Hichens would call it the call of the blood, I do know that I found a great contentment in the knowledge that you and I were akin.”51

  Gordony’s pride is that of an African American delighted by Mills’s gift for turning the broad strokes passed down through the minstrel line into something relatable and, by her judgment, respectable; but it is also that of a woman who felt her own complicated yearnings mirrored by Mills. “Here we have the key to her magic control of an audience,” wrote the African American critic Theophilus Lewis of Mills in 1927, “her ability to express the vulgar and commonplace in terms of delicacy and beauty.”52 If Bessie Smith became what the jazz critic Will Friedwald identifies as “the first fully three-dimensional recording artist” when she claimed the title of Empress of the Blues in 1923, Florence Mills brought the same complete way of being to musical theater two years before that. She was the agent of the modern spirit of unmasked feeling, moving into a space that felt immediate and unplanned.53

  Mills rode her success in Shuffle Along to heights never before achieved by an African American woman in theater, but her triumph was short-lived. Refusing to take a break in her concert schedule to rest, she contracted severe pelvic tuberculosis and died after surgery on November 1, 1927. She was thirty-one years old. Her one reported visit to a recording studio, in 1924, had been a failure; those test pressings are lost. Too busy touring to try again or take advantage of Hollywood’s interest, she left no permanent legacy.54 But 150,000 thronged the Harlem streets where her funeral procession took place. An account in the Baltimore Sun revealed the breadth of the mourners, and that, just as sh
e had as a child in her mother’s laundry room, she left the world singing across the color line: “The theater and business [sic] began to mix in the swelling crowd. An actress would file by between a grocer, able for the first time to leave his store, and a plasterer, with the overalls of his trade across his arm. A white girl came in. She was the Irish nurse to whom Miss Mills sang ‘Where the River Shannon Flows’ just two hours before she died Tuesday morning.”55

  Today we can only wonder about the particularities of Florence Mills’s talent, which made her such a meteorite during the six years she held the theater world in her small hand. One way to understand her is as the harbinger of authenticity in pop, specifically serving as a bridge between vaudeville and the blues. The moment of her rise was the one in which authenticity began to grow in currency as a new artistic ideal, and in music, this quality was tied to the realm of the erotic. Still the least comfortably shared aspect of most people’s lives, sexual feeling as expressed in song or dance often takes on the nature of a secret being revealed.56 In the words of songwriters like Noble Sissle and the voices of singers like Mills, the personal began to assert itself as the most real aspect of anyone’s life. In the tiny nightclubs and hotel ballrooms where couples like the Castles danced right past revelers’ tables, people felt changed by the way a song hit them—as long as that song seemed natural and therefore true. It was up to the performer to invent a body language that felt more trustworthy than the broad gestures of earlier times.

  GOLD-NECK WOMEN

  As the 1920s fizzed on, the most sophisticated performers in show business, using the revolutionary new technology of the recording studio to reroute the pathways of American popular music, were the queens of the classic blues: the great innovators in the regional, mostly segregated culture of roadhouses and tent shows, where Florence Mills had begun her journey to bigger and more glamorous stages. Mamie Smith was the first to gain national recognition, beginning the craze with her recording of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920. Bessie Smith became the most legendary. Her mentor, Ma Rainey, most effectively carried the stage savvy of vaudeville into the blues form. There were many others, from the bawdy Lucille Bogan to the enterprising Victoria Spivey and the elegant Lucille Hegamin, a friend of Mills who occasionally covered the songs Florence made famous. These women turned what the blues was then—a hybrid song form combining Southern folk traditions with vaudeville flourishes and the instrumentation of small-ensemble jazz—into the cornerstone of what would later become rock and roll.

  Recording is what made the blues more significant than any other early-twentieth-century popular music style besides jazz. Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and the other stars of the burgeoning “race records” business provided the soundtrack for the Great Migration that brought African Americans out of the South and across America, changing the nation’s culture and character on a fundamental level. With lyrics focusing on everyday burdens and pleasures—sexual encounters chief among them—the blues did away with the clever tricks of theatrical singing as well as the technical fussiness of the classical approach. Blueswomen used lung power, bent notes, and conversational phrasing to make the repetitive verses of the form sound like language ripped from real life. Increasingly, the recorded blues became an illicit portal connecting white fans to the voices who had originally described those new sensations. Embodied, disembodied, and re-embodied, shared and borrowed and stolen and reclaimed so many times that it became a common tongue—constantly contested, with room for infinite minute variations—the blues permeated the 1920s. Classic blues stars like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey served as erotic ambassadors.

  But the blues queens did not merely exist in a separate sphere ruled by the patterns their voices cut into shellac. Bessie Smith, remember, was a “whopping good flat foot dancer,” and Ma Rainey was as known for her flamboyant personal style and “gold neck” covered in coin jewelry as she was for her songs. As one contemporary writer has noted, “Historically speaking, recording the blues made Black women socially visible, and physically invisible, for the first time . . . Song became a smooth, black, grooved body.” The facts of women’s flesh, which comes in all sizes and shades of brown, peach, and tan, are sometimes lost as we fetishize the distance and mystery that recordings can create.57 Scholars working today, like Daphne Brooks, Paige McGinley, and Jayna Brown, have begun to correct this isolated view, noting that while blues recordings certainly were a mass phenomenon that cemented the genre’s primary place in popular music history, the women who made them also danced, did comedy routines, flamboyantly narrated their performances, and interacted with their fans in all of their fleshly glory. Some began their careers as chorus girls in traveling revues, dancing more than singing, or led troupes that had as many clowns as guitarists. And though the women we most strongly associate with the classic blues were certainly marketed as owning the form—the phrase “queen of the blues” was thrown around on countless record labels and music sheets—it’s clear that no limiting notions of authenticity kept performers within a strict genre definition. Like ragtime, the classic blues was more an approach than a set of songs.

  Ethel Waters, who began singing blues at the Harlem dive Edmond’s Cellar around 1919, recalled in her autobiography that the pianist Lou Henley convinced her to add Tin Pan Alley songs like Fanny Brice’s other signature, “Rose of Washington Square,” to her repertoire. “To my surprise, I found out that I could characterize and act out these songs just as I did my blues,” Waters wrote.58 By broadening her repertoire but sticking with a blues approach, Waters both distinguished herself and maintained the deep spirit of truth telling that audiences demanded. This slim, tall, androgynous shimmy dancer came up with her own style, one that borrowed from the era’s biggest sellers without imitating them. Waters felt confident enough in her take on the blues that, in some shows, her first line would be to answer the orchestra leader’s question “Are you Ethel Waters?” with the sassy “I ain’t Bessie Smith!”

  This catholic definition of the blues represents how it infused American culture during the Jazz Age. An index of American popular songs for the decade of the 1920s compiled by the jazz producer Nat Shapiro noted more than two hundred tunes with “blues” in the title, including ones by every major Tin Pan Alley composer.59 That number would top five thousand by 1942. In its early years, the essence of the blues remained unbottled, a bootlegger’s brew. Its dynamic nature as a symbolic site of the most adventurous outpourings of emotion made it something more than simply a song form. The blues did away with the distancing elements of the stage and brought uncorked emotion into the grasp of the avid listener.

  By this definition, Florence Mills was a blueswoman, too, though she’s not remembered as one. She brought to life that new sense of music as a personal, provocative force. Bessie Smith herself recorded a song with the same title as one of Mills’s signature numbers—the double entendre–laced streetwalker’s confession “I’ve Got What It Takes, But It Breaks My Heart to Give It Away”—though the two lyrics differ somewhat. Both songs tell the same story, a kind of narration of the apache dance: the singer claims her right to the money she’s earned by selling her body, singing in defiance of the shiftless boyfriend who harasses her. The version Mills performed in her 1923 Plantation Revue was so hot that one critic declared it “the most suggestive song ever heard on a Broadway stage.” Did the future Empress of the Blues stand in the back of that Broadway theater absorbing Mills’s delivery? It could have happened—Smith was in Manhattan that year, making her first recordings for Columbia.

  The blues took shape through such hidden exchanges—women comparing techniques, as they did in every aspect of their lives, and taking words or ideas shaped by men and correcting them to better reflect their own experiences. Female singers and their male accompanists performed a sonic tango. Similarly, theatrical songwriters and improvising actresses sparred and followed each other, holding on tight as they came up with new steps. In midsized theaters and ti
ny after-hours clubs, listeners joined in, too, shouting back at the stars they loved. Hot trotters crowded close to the bandstand. They’d left their dog-eared sexology books by the bed stand and were trying to bring the ideas zinging through their heads to blood-rushing life.

  3

  LET IT BREATHE ON ME

  SPIRITUAL EROTICS

  from the collection of Kip Lornell

  CHICAGO, BIRMINGHAM, MEMPHIS, 1929–1956

  Even as more and more dancers and fans of “hot” music moved through the 1920s charging themselves up, America’s musical-erotic revolution still mostly lacked a key element: the kind of depth that could turn profanity profound. The musical erotic needed a reckoning with spirituality, the other fundamental human activity through which Americans came to understand themselves. As Audre Lorde would later write in her clarifying 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”—a central text of second-wave feminism—eroticism is, in essence, both sensual and sacred, self-fulfilling and interpersonal. Spirit plays a central role in meaningful desire, though it need not be named “god.” One word Lorde connects to the spiritual erotic is joy—the rush that comes forth, unnamable, from within. The shimmy dancers of the Jazz Age had few feminist theorists to make these connections explicit, but they felt them. The spiritual erotic also makes room for sadness that challenges people to grow: the vein that ran from slaves’ laments to the “sorrow all on your mind” of Bessie Smith.

  Secular performers faced a challenge when trying to convey the seriousness of this inmost power source. They were entertainers. How could they keep fun intact while conveying the release of what Lorde calls “the kernel within myself” that “heightens and strengthens all my experience?”1 Popular music’s lewd gestures and double entendres—however sensual and emotionally rich—were still, at core, outwardly focused. How could performers infuse their down and dirty ways with the expansiveness of the sacred?