McIntosh and King

Kansas City Sun (June 1915): Hattie McIntosh, who is giving a remarkable exhibition of her histrionic ability in the classical plays now being put on at the Criterion theater. She is queen of her profession not only in physique but in art as well.

The Only "Billy" King. The greatest of them all, who is now the sole proprietor of the Criterion theater, and who is crowding the house nightly with his excellent play.

Hattie McIntosh
From minstrelsy to vaudeville to the Broadway stage, Hattie McIntosh was one of the first black women to make a profession of the theater. She was born in Detroit, Michigan around 1860. She first performed in 1884 in McIntosh and Sawyer's Colored Callender Minstrels. Her husband, Tom McIntosh, was part-owner of the company and one of the country's leading black showmen. At a time when there were few black women onstage, many were wives of performers and producers; it was considered somewhat more respectable for a woman to go onstage with her husband than alone. There was very real protection in marriage, as well, from the hardships and dangers of touring.

In the early 1890s, the McIntoshes created a vaudeville act called "Mr. and Mrs. McIntosh in the King of Bavaria." In the next few years, they performed with the three important companies that broke out of the minstrel format and included women in their casts as well as men. In 1894, their act played with Sam T. Jack's Creole Shows, and they joined the legendary Black Patti's Troubadours in 1896. After that, they toured with John Isham's Octoroons Company. Hattie McIntosh soon had a leading role in Isham's King Rastus Company.

After the turn of the century, she joined the Williams and Walker Company, going to England in 1902 In Dahomey. Her husband, Tom McIntosh died in 1904. The following year, Hattie was in Chicago, as a member of Bob Mott's Pekin Theater Stock Company. Bob Mott was a saloon owner who turned his saloon into a music hall in 1904. He built a new building in 1905 calling it the Pekin Theater. He then formed a stock company to perform at the Pekin; eventually the company also toured the East and Midwest. It is not clear how long McIntosh stayed at the Pekin, but in 1909 she was back with Bert Williams in Mr. Lode of Koal. That was her last performance with the musical comedy great. In about 1911, she formed a vaudeville team with another woman, Cordelia McClain.

McClain and McIntosh took their act to the Billy King Stock Company in 1912, which toured the South and then opened at the Grand Theater in Chicago in 1915 or 1916. McIntosh married Billy King the same year that she and McClain joined the company. Hattie McIntosh died in Chicago in December of 1919.

Billy King
Born in Whistler, Alabama, in 1875 on a large farm, where at the gae of ten he was considered one of the best plough hands. But this rural labor dd not satisfy little Billy, who dreamed of being a show performer. So one day, he ran away from home, hopping a freight car for he knew not where. Drifting about the country, Billy eventually fell in with some actors. A little later, he organized his own minstrel company, which was billed as "King and Bush, Wide Mouth Minstrels." They toured the South in the early 1890s. After the closing of his company, Billy joined Richards ad Pringle, Rosco and Holland's Georgia Minstrel Company. At the time, Billy Kersands was the star. After a season with this company, King became stage manager and producer of the company, Billy Kersands, Clarence Powell, James Crosby, and King were known as the "Big Four" comedians.

After King quit the Georgia Minstrels, he made his home in Chicago, where he opened an office for booking and producing shows and vaudeville acts. The season of 1911 found Billy King teamed with James Mobley in a successful vaudeville act. The next season King formed his first stock company in Atlanta, Georgia. Billy wrote and produced all of the company's plays and engaged a very talented group of artists. In 1913, he went to the Lyric Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri, and organized another successful stock company.

In 1915, King moved his company to the Grand Theatre in Chicago, where he produced shows for the next eight seasons. King's company put on a new show each week and King was responsible for bringing many new innovations into musical comedy, including girls clowning at the end of chorus lines. The latter routine was used by Josephine Baker to gain her first real notice in the chorus of Sissle and Blake's "Chocolate Dandies." King also wrote popular songs, several of which were introduced by his protegee, Gertrude Saunders. He married fellow vaudevillian Hattie McIntosh in 1912. King died in 1951.

Sources: Kansas City Sun (June 1915); Black Women in America: Theater Arts and Entertainment, Encyclopedia of Black Women in America by Kathleen Thompson; Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows by Henry T. Sampson