by Liza Ketchum
For my grandfather George Ketchum, who started working when he was eleven, vaudeville was the only entertainment he could afford on his meager earnings. From the time I was four or five, Grandpa and I sang vaudeville songs together. He taught me silly, off-color tunes such as “Everybody works but Father, he sits around all day,” and “There lay Brown, upside down, lapping up the whiskey off the floor.” Grandpa described what it was like to sit in the cheapest gallery seats, high above the stage, enjoying the shows with a rowdy audience.
I have always loved theater; I enjoyed acting in high school and I went to theater school before college—so I wondered: What was life like for vaudeville performers of all ages and backgrounds? One summer, while driving across the country, I stopped in the town of Leadville, high in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, and visited the Tabor Opera House, which had been restored to its former grandeur. As my footsteps echoed in the quiet aisles, I looked up at the empty stage, with its beautiful forest backdrop, and tried to imagine the theater packed with miners and other residents who were grateful for entertainment in their remote mining town. Since my grandmother couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell her parents’ story, I decided to invent one myself.
• • •
In 1913, the year this novel takes place, vaudeville was still the country’s most popular and affordable form of entertainment. Thousands of theaters, in small towns as well as big cities across the country, hosted vaudeville troupes. Performers appeared in lodge halls, riverboats, and small opera houses, as well as in ornate, grand theaters such as Hammerstein’s Victoria in New York. People who loved vaudeville tunes bought sheet music of the most popular songs, so that they could sing and play them at home.
Imagine a world without movies or television. There were no computers, no video games or smartphones. Though inventors had discovered radio waves, and Thomas Edison had figured out how to record sound, movies were still silent, black and white, and grainy looking. Private telephones were rare and many parts of the country (especially in rural areas) didn’t have electricity, so people were thrilled when a lively vaudeville troupe came through town.
The life of a traveling vaudevillian wasn’t easy. Performers lived out of their trunks and duffels. They slept in fleabag hotels or on trains between “jumps” (the moves from one town to the next). They often performed as many as six shows a day in theaters with unheated, basement dressing rooms where the only running water came from an outdoor pump. The pay was low and audiences could be ruthless, pelting performers with rotten eggs or tomatoes when they didn’t like a performance. Yet many vaudevillians from that time spoke fondly of the camaraderie that grew among the musicians, jugglers, comedians, actors, singers, and animal trainers as they crisscrossed the country together.
The vaudeville experience was far more challenging for African-American entertainers. While prejudice wasn’t as common onstage, it was rampant throughout the country in 1913. “Separate but Equal” was the law of the land. Lynchings were common in many parts of the country and strong laws had been enacted—especially in southern states—to prevent blacks from voting. Public schools, swimming pools, restaurants, churches, prisons, theaters, hospitals, buses, funeral homes, sporting events, orphanages—and even the military, where blacks fought as valiantly as whites—were segregated. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized blacks throughout the country.
When black performers went on tour, they often had to ride in separate railway cars. They were turned away from hotels and restaurants that served white vaudevillians. Black women were sometimes forced to stay in whorehouses. And onstage, African-American performers had to hide their true identities behind blackface (burnt cork). Usually, they couldn’t appear as themselves.
Blackface had its origins in minstrel shows, where whites blackened their faces to impersonate blacks, usually to ridicule them and to perpetuate cruel stereotypes. White members of an audience didn’t want to sit below a black person—but if they knew that a white actor hid behind the black mask, they didn’t mind. This carried over into vaudeville. African Americans were expected to cover their skin with black cork or greasepaint so that audiences could imagine the actors were actually white. Black performers—such as Pietro in this novel—found the practice demeaning. The famous comedian Bert Williams complained that whites “made me a fool and now I got to go out here and make money laughing at me.” Williams’s stage partner, George Walker, was one of the few blacks who dared to perform without blackface.
In 1905, the great African-American leader W.E.B. Du Bois co-founded the Niagara Movement to address racial inequality in the United States. In 1909—soon after white rioters in Illinois burned a black neighborhood and lynched black women, men, and children—Du Bois and other concerned citizens, black and white, met in New York. As the country honored Abraham Lincoln’s 100th birthday, the people assembled with Du Bois formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which is still active today. Young people around the country—such as Pietro in this story—were drawn to the goals and ideals of the NAACP, fighting for equal rights. Sadly, our country still struggles with issues of inequality and racism that African Americans faced more than a century ago.
As sound was added to film, vaudeville slowly disappeared and movies became more popular. But talented vaudeville performers from all backgrounds made a successful transition from vaudeville to become superstars on Broadway, on the silver screen, or in recorded music. Many gained international fame. That list includes Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Julie Andrews, Louis Armstrong, Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Buster Keaton, Bert Lahr, Jelly Roll Morton, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Ma Rainey, Mickey Rooney, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Mae West, and many others.
Glossary
A cappella:
Singing without musical accompaniment.
All washed up; All wet; A fish:
A few ways of saying that the act is a flop.
Big time:
Theater that played vaudeville, without movies, and usually had only two shows a day.
Blue:
Material that was off-color, in bad taste, or obscene. Supposedly, the term arose because theater managers left blue envelopes in performers’ dressing rooms, fining them for use of bad language.
Cakewalk:
A strutting dance that originated in a nineteenth-century African American contest. Walkers with the most amusing or skillful steps won a cake as a prize.
Curtain call:
The appearance of performers, at the end of a show, in response to applause from the audience.
Death Trail:
Small-time vaudeville tours, in the Midwest or Canada, with long “jumps” between towns, performing in theaters that required five or six performances a day.
Fine pair of pipes:
A singer’s beautiful voice.
Flies:
The area above the stage; used to store lights, curtains, and equipment for raising and lowering the sets.
Gerry Society:
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which in some states kept young children from performing on stage. It gets its name from Elbridge Gerry, its cofounder.
Handcuffed:
An audience that refuses to applaud. Also described as “sitting on their hands.”
Jump:
The distance between one town or city and the next.
Next to closing:
The next-to-last act, usually saved for the biggest star on the program.
Perfect pitch:
The ability to name or sing a musical note without help.
Pitch pipe:
A small reed pipe that produces a specific pitch or tone when blown. Also: a tuning fork, a two-pronged metal fork that vibrates when struck. Both produce exact tones for tuning an instrument or to give singers the correct starting note for a song.
Scrim:
A rough gauze cloth, used as a stage backdrop.
Song pl
ugger:
A singer hired by a music publisher to sing new songs and encourage sales of sheet music.
Stage left:
The part of the stage to the actor’s left, when facing the audience.
Stage right:
The part of the stage to the actor’s right, when facing the audience.
Vaudeville (Also “Vaude” or “Variety”)
Stage entertainment offering many different acts. A typical show bill might run as follows: a “dumb act” (acrobats, jugglers, animals, or bicyclists, who were silent onstage); a female singer or minor comedian (not a choice spot); an act to “wake up the audience” such as a comedian, a dramatic sketch, a magician, or even a swimming act; a big name, top singing act, or comedy team; a skit or another big name; a solid dance team to get the audience excited before the biggest star on the program (this star would get top billing in ads); and finally, a chaser—another dumb act or a silent film, shown as the audience leaves.
Wings:
The unseen area, on either side of the stage, where performers wait to come onstage, or exit at the end of their acts.
Resources/Bibliography
Books
Atkinson, Brooks. Broadway. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Barry, Harold A., Michelman, Richard E., Mitchell, Richard M., Wellman, Richard H. Before Our Time: A Pictorial Memoir of Brattleboro, Vermont from 1830 to 1930. Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1974.
Du Bois, W.E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.
Finney, Jack. From Time to Time. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.
Furman, Evelyn E. Livingston. The Tabor Opera House: A Captivating History. Aurora, CO: National Writer’s Press, 1984.
Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Hill, Errol G., and Hatch, James V. A History of African American Theatre. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Hine, Darlene Clark, and Thompson, Kathleen. A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.
Kisseloff, Jeff. You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989.
Marks, Edward B. They All Sang. New York: Viking, 1934.
McDaniel, Melissa. W.E.B. Du Bois: Scholar and Civil Rights Activist. Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts, 1999.
McNamara, Brooks, Ed. American Popular Entertainments. New York, NY: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983.
Meltzer, Milton, Ed. In Their Own Words: A History of the American Negro 1865–1916. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965.
Rasenberger, Jim. America, 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T, and the Making of a Modern Nation. New York: Scribner, 2007.
Short, Ernest. Fifty Years of Vaudeville. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1946.
Smith, Bill. The Vaudevillians. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1976.
Snyder, Robert W. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Stein, Charles W., Ed. American Vaudeville As Seen by Its Contemporaries. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
Tate, Eleanora E. The Minstrel’s Melody. Middletown, WI: Pleasant Company Publications, 2001.
Waring: Dennis G. Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
Articles
Sullivan, John Jeremiah. “‘Shuffle Along’ and the Lost History of Black Performance in America.” New York Times Magazine, March 24, 2016.