Kicha's photos with the keyword: Vaudeville

At one time working as a housemaid in Virginia she became an international ballerina and singer. She arrived in Europe February 1902, and settled in Imperial Russia in 1904. At one point she was the mistress of Count Aleksandr Dmitriyevich Sheremetev and established a successful career for over 15 years before her tragic death in Finland from Typhus on June 4, 1919. She was just 39, A more thorough bio can be found on Dulcé Bayrón's phenomenal site Black Jazz Artists Across the World: blackjazzartists.blogspot.com/2019/07/pearl-hobson-1879-1...

Mattie Wilkes was born on February 14, 1875 in Montclair, New Jersey. She was a soprano and character actress of the musical and dramatic stage; active 1890s - 1920s. At the high point in her career, the Indianapolis Freeman in a March 9, 1901, article called her "a meritorious prima donna whose singing carried the house at every appearance." During the decade of the 1890s, after receiving some training as a member of Bob Cole's All-Star Company at Worth's Museum in New York City, she was a character actress and wardrobe mistress with The Octoroons (1895) and the leading soprano of the Oriental America Show (1896), where her singing was usually greeted with great applause. In 1900 she toured as a soprano with Williams and Walker's The Policy Players, and in 1901 she was a prima donna and special feature with L.E. Gideon's Minstrels. By 1902, having "toured abroad in all European capitals," she was already a famous singer and was then performing as a soubrette with the Smart Set Company in a show called Enchantment, of which Ernest Hogan and Billy McClain were the stars. During the tour of that show, she married Hogan; however, the marriage was short lived. During the summer of 1903, after they had performed together in a vaudeville sketch called "The Missionary Man," in which Mrs. Wilkes-Hogan played the role of Mrs. Angelica Scattergood the couple parted. In later life she acted in at least two films by famed African American director Oscar Micheaux, which includes: The Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), and The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921). For His Mother's Sake (1922) was made by Blackburn-Velde Pictures. She died on July 9, 1927 in Montclair, New Jersey at just 52. Sources: Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960, by Bernard L. Peterson; Fred J. Hamill and Paul Cohn, “Of Course” / Introduced by Mattie V. Wilkes, with Williams & Walker (Windsor Music Co., NY. c/1900)

She was as huge as Josephine Baker was in France. Miss Fields gained her fame throughout Europe, learned their language, and became one of the first women to make a record. She also starred in two silent European films. Arabella Fields came to be known in Europe as The Black Nightingale . A contralto, she was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 31, 1879. She initially came to Europe as one half of a brother and sister singing act (James and Bella Fields) in 1889. From the 1890's to the 1920's she toured as a single act throughout Europe and became one of the most prolific African American entertainers outside the States. Fields was one of several women to make records in the 1900s. Her first recording was for the Anker label in Berlin in 1907; reissued many times, her twenty year old original records were listed in a 1928 catalogue. In this respect, the only artist comparable to Fields is Enrico Caruso, whose acoustic pre-1914 recordings were available well into the 1920s era of electric recording. To attract attention of her German audiences Fields often dressed in German style attire. She was also featured in many adverts in Europe (the photo is from an advert where she is dressed as an 'Alpine Cowgirl,' in 1910). In 1907 she was featured in two silent European films. In the first two decades of the 20th century she toured widely singing German lieder and Swiss yodels as well as English language songs. During the 20s and 30s she appeared in various black musicals that toured Europe. Among them, Sam Woodings 'Chocolate Kiddies' and Louis Douglas's 'Black Follies Girls and Negro Revue.' According to newspapers of that time she was in Amsterdam in 1915, 1916, and 1917. And made tours in the Netherlands in 1926, 1928, and 1931. It appears she was in at least one American film, Love in Morocco (1933) in which she portrayed an enslaved woman named Mabrouka. The social climate encouraged many African American entertainers performing in Europe to remain there permanently. Miss Fields lived the rest of her life in Germany. Source: Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe by Neil A Wynn A more extensive and well researched bio can be found here: blackjazzartists.blogspot.com/2020/03/arabella-fields-sch...

These young ladies were known as the Florida Creole Girls who performed at the Casino de Paris shortly after the turn of the 20th century. They were part of an American dance troupe who helped introduce and popularize the Cake Walk Dance in Europe. Founder of the dance group is Miss Shippert standing in the center. I'm only able to name five other ladies but have no clue who is who: Miss Stafford, Miss Hobson, Miss Adams, Miss Hall and Miss Fitch. Walery, Photographer

She was born May C. Reynolds in Tioga, Pennsylvania. She was little more than a teenager when she persuaded her father to allow her to join the Hyers Sisters Act in 1882. The very next season she was married to Sam Hyers, (Anna and Emma's dad) then 53yrs old and manager of the company. For some insane reason there is information on the web indicating that she is one of the Hyers Sisters which happens to be false. At one point she was part of the act but she was NOT Anna or Emma's sister. She was the girls (extremely young) stepmom. NY Dramatic Mirror, Oct. 1898 : "May C Hyers desires it to be understood that she is not one of the Hyers Sisters. She is the young widow and was the second wife of S.B. Hyers, father of the Hyers Sisters, and heads a company of her own." May Hyers was a contralto singer and thus in direct competition with her step-daughter, Emma Louise. As the young wife of the company manager, it is possible that her sudden acquisition caused a rift between Sam Hyers and his daughters, by the Spring of 1883 the sisters (Anna and Emma) had left their father's company which thereafter was called by his name, the S.B. Hyers Company. She and Sam had at least two daughters. She died February 1920. Trivia: She was the first African American female singer to make recordings ... the records were cut as brown wax cylinders. Unfortunately, none of her recordings survived. Source: NYPL

Here she is dressed as Prince Zurleska in the opera Urlina the African Princess from 1879. The Hyers Sisters were important performers of musical theatre in northern California. They lived in Sacramento and started out as musical prodigies. Anna Madah was 12yrs and Emma Louise was 10yrs (although they were billed as ages 10 and 8) at their concert debut in 1867 at the Metropolitan Theatre in Sacramento. Their parents, Samuel B. Hyers and Annie E. Hyers (nee Cryer), had come west from New York. As singers themselves, they had first trained their daughters before sending them for instruction to a German professor, Hugo Frank, and then to the opera singer Josephine D'Ormy. Anna was a soprano; Emma a contralto and gifted comedienne noted for her character songs. They performed for several years in the San Francisco and Oakland areas before embarking on their first transcontinental tour in 1871, under their father's management. For their east coast performances, including an appearance at the Steinway Hall in New York, Samuel Hyers engaged the services of Wallace King, tenor and John Luca, baritone. Mr. A.C. Taylor pianist of San Francisco, traveled with the sisters as accompanist. Early in their repertoire the sisters had included 'dialogues in character' and were said to possess 'great dramatic ability.' It was no surprise, when on March 26, 1876 at the Academy of Music in Lynn, Massachusetts, they presented a musical drama entitled, 'Out of the Wilderness,' which had been written for them by Joseph Bradford of Boston. For this show the quartet of singers was joined by Sam Lucas, a sometime minstrel actor slated to become a veteran comedian of the African American stage. Billed as the Hyers Sisters Combination, the troupe toured their show to New England towns, playing mostly one-night stands. In June the play's title was changed to 'Out of Bondage.' It was a simple tale of a slave family before and the Civil War. Four younger slaves go North as older folk hold back when Union troops arrive to liberate the South. In the end the family is reunited as the elders, who had stayed behind, visit their children, who have become professional vocalists. In 1883 the sisters decided to leave their father's management. Their parents had long been estranged, mother Annie Hyers having moved away from the family home in Sacramento, first to San Francisco then to Stockton. The breach with their father came in 1881 when he admitted into the company a young woman, 'little more than a teenager,' named Mary C Reynolds, whom he married two years later. He was then 53. Reynolds, billed as Mrs. May Hyers, was also a contralto and competed with Emma Louise (her stepdaughter) for roles. As the situation became untenable and likely to generate controversy, the sisters felt it incumbent on them to leave. At ages 17 and 19, they chose to be on their own. The sisters found new engagements for their combination of vocalists, at times in league with other managements, at other times contributing special items in companies of so called minstrels. Both sisters entered first marriages in 1883: Anna Madah to cornet player Henderson Smith and Emma Louise to bandleader George Freeman. The latter wedding took place in full view of the audience on the stage of the Baldwin Theatre in San Francisco during a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin by Callender's Minstrels. By the start of the 1890s the sisters had been performing professionally for more than twenty years and had won recognition and respect for their talents and skills. Sources: A History of African American Theatre by Errol G Hill and James V Hatch; The Huntington Library

One of the first African American women to specialize in ragtime coon song singing was Bessie Gillam, a product of one of Detroit, Michigan's premier black musical families. Her father, barber musician Charles Gillam, had been prominent in the local black string and brass milieu until his death in 1890, while her older brother Harry appeared in local community productions like Ed Rector's Juvenile Minstrels before venturing out with some of the major black road shows of 1890-1910. Source: Indianapolis Freeman; PosterMuseum, Greve

1. Bessie Vaughn 2. Ida Day 3. 'Tiny' Jones 4. Charles Moore 5. Kate Jones 6. ? 7. Jessie Ellis 8. Maggie Davis 9. Hattie Hopkins 10.Bert Williams 11.? Harris 12.George Walker 13.Hattie McIntosh 14.? 15.Renie Norris 16.? 17.Daisy Tapley 18.Lottie Williams (Bert Williams' wife) 19.? Tuck 20.Aida Overton Walker (George Walker's wife) 21.Ella Anderson 22.Lizzie Avery 23.Lavina Rogers 24.Jim Vaughn 25.William C. Elkins 26.Walter Richardson 27.Richard Conners 28.? Barker 29.Will Accoe 30.George Catlin 31.Chip Ruff? 32.Jimmie ? 33.John Lubrie Hill 34.Henri Green Tapley (Daisy Tapley's husband) 35.Henry Troy 36.Marshall Craig 37.Theodore Pankey 38.Harry Stafford 39.Charles L. Saulsbury? 40.Alex C. Rogers In Dahomey was the first full-length musical written and played by an entirely Black cast to be performed on Broadway. The play was based on a libretto by Jesse A. Shipp, with music by Will Marion Cook and lyrics by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alex Rogers. Cook’s music would become to be considered by many as the ‘turning point for African American representation’. Source: Robert Kimball Archives More information can be found here: www.africansinyorkshireproject.com/in-dahomey.html

Dancer Ida Forsyne as "Topsy," with Abbie Mitchell's Tennessee Students in London, England. Ida Forsyne, jazz dancer who was named by poet Langston Hughes as one of the twelve best dancers of all time, was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother became a domestic servant when she was two years old, after the disappearance of her father. At the age of ten, she was dancing and singing for small sums of money at the local candy store and house-rent parties, and she cakewalked for twenty-five cents a day at the Chicago World's Fair, traveling through the festival site in a wagon with a ragtime band to drum up trade. Many shows originated in Chicago at the time, and so Forsynes haunted the Alhambra Theater, watching rehearsals of such shows as Coontown 400 and The South before the War. At age fourteen Forsyne ran away with a tab show, The Black Bostonians, in which everyone did their own specialties. She sang "My Hannah Lady" and also performed a Buck Dance in her inimitable eccentric style that includes rhythmic stepping and legomania. The finale of the show was a plantation scene that included the entire cast. When the show broke up in Bute, Montana, Forsyne adopted a five-year-old boy as a "prop" and sang her way back home to Chicago by walking down the aisles of the railroad coaches, hand-in-hand with him, harmonizing "On the Banks of the Wabash" as she passed the child's hat and collected enough money to pay fare and little more. In 1898 the fifteen-year-old joined Sisseretta Jones' Black Patti Troubadours. "A girl in the show was sick, so I went down and did my number, ‘My Hannah Lady,' and got the job at $15 a week," Forsyne told Marshall Stearns. "I was the only young girl in the company of twenty-six. For my specialty, I pushed a baby carriage across the stage and sang a lullaby, ‘You're Just a Little Nigger but You're Mine All Mine,' and no one thought of objecting in those day." The show had a cakewalking contest at every performance and Forsyne and partner won it seven nights straight in a row by adding legomania and tumbling in the breaks. Forsyne had the ability to perform any step she saw. In 1899, on her sixteenth birthday, Forsyne and the Black Patti troupe arrived in San Francisco, and remembers that they stayed at a fine white hotel and ate together at a long table, and that "everyone was so nice to us." Returning to New York, she easily got jobs working in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Coney Island, working in minstrel-styled shows such as Henderson's Big Theater (at Coney Island) with famous acts like Eddie Cantor. It was at Coney Island that Forsyne lost her voice in an "all song-and-dance" format in which performers would sing a verse of the song, then a chorus, and then dance a chorus. "I was like a coon shouter until my voice gave out," she said about her voice which was in a strong alto-range. She thereafter learned how to put a song across by "sort of talking it." In 1902, Forsyne joined the original Smart Set, an all- colored show by the white producer Gus Hill and featuring Ernest Hogan, Billy McClain, and the Hun Brothers, and in which she talked the song, "Moana" and performed a solo jazz dance. She then joined Will Marion Cook's The Southerners on the New York Roof Garden, with a mixed cast of thirty-five performers. In 1905 she went abroad with The Tennessee Students, a troupe of seventeen performers (including Abbie Mitchell, comedy dancer Ernest Hogan, and sand dancer Henry Williams), many of whom played stringed instruments and sang in a transitional style between ragtime and jazz. When the show opened at the Palace Theater in London in 1906, Forsyne (her picture on the front cover of the program) was the billing star, singing "Topsy, the Famous Negro Dancer." With her radiating personality and facial expression, she was immediately noticed. Wrote the Daily Telegraph: "If Topsy is not soon the talk of the town we are very much mistaken." For the succeeding nine years. Forsyne toured Europe under the management of the Marinelli Agency, the largest in Europe, in what would be the peak of her career. The entire first year she played the Moulin Rouge in Paris, singing and dancing her fast mixture of eccentric steps. She was then booked throughout England where for the first time she saw Bill Robinson and Ralph Cooper. At the Alhambra Theatre in London, she introduced her Sack dance to special music with a ballet company. A stagehand carried her onstage in a big potato sack; she threw one leg out, then an arm, and so on until, dumped in the middle of the stage, she danced before a backup chorus line of ballet dancers who were paid extra to appear in blackface. While the performance was considered "arty," Forsyne was improvising jazz steps. She quickly rose to such fame that she gave a command performance for the Royal family. In 1911, in the middle of her Moscow dance program, tiny Forsyne (she wore a size two shoe) suddenly inserted a series of improvised kazotsky kicks into her routine and brought the house down; she was immediately hailed as the "greatest Russian dancer of then all." She thereafter closed her act with kazotsky kicks-- which began from a squat, arms folded at the chest, and legs kicking out, first one leg and then another. Though Russian dancers usually stood up between steps, Forsyne could not wait. She changed steps and traveled across the stage in a crouch, working out new combinations. She flung both legs out in front of her and touched her toes with her hands before coming down in time with the music. She also mixed down-steps with up-steps, and cross-ankle steps, and as a finale, would kazotsky all the way across the stage, and return backwards. European theaters booked Forsyne for nine years without a break. Forsyne popularized Russian dancing in the United States, after pioneering that style abroad. But she was, above and beyond, a jazz dancer. She remembered many early jazz tap steps, among them "Going to the World's Fair," which was strut in which one put both feet together and moved forward on the toes. Another step was "Scratchin' the Gravel," or the "Sooey," a short sliding motion alternately on each foot; Forsyne described it as a two-step with a dip. In 1914, Forsyne returned to New York from touring abroad and performed at the Lincoln and Lafayette theaters. High class society people went to the Lafayette and the management didn't present of-color blues singers, comedians and Shake dancers from T.O.B.A., as did at the Lincoln." In 1916, Forsyne saw Darktown Follies and remembers that it was the talk of the town. "Eddie Retor was featured in his smooth military routine, and Toots Davis was doing his Over the Top and Through the Trenches, and they were new steps then," she told Marshall Stearns. For two years (from 1920 to 1922), Forsyne worked as a personal maid, onstage and off, to Sophie Tucker, earning $50 a week. Onstage, Tucker sang thirteen songs, accompanied by pianist Al Seeger, and wanted a dancer to help whip up applause at the end of the show—and Forsyne filled that position. The act broke up in Washington, D.C. where, on the Keith circuit, new rules disallowed black performers to appear onstage with a white performer unless they wore blackface. Furthermore, no performer of color working backstage was permitted to watch the show. Tucker refused to have Forsyne don blackface, and while Forsyne was banned from the show, she was permitted to watch the show from the wings. By 1924, Forsyne was back on the T.O.B.A. black vaudeville circuit as one of six dancing girls with blues singer Mamie Smith's act. After touring the South with the late version of The Smart Set, Forsyne returned to New York where Harlem nightclubs were thriving. Refused after auditioning at the Cotton Club, Connie's Inn, and the Nest, because of the preference for light-skinned and scantily-clad chorus girls, Forsyne was promised a job at Small's Paradise, which never panned out. As did a job working at the New World Club in Atlantic City in 1927, which was recommended to her by Jack "Legs" Diamond. Forsyne was apparently rejected for not approving of the abbreviated costumes which were de rigeur for female jazz dancers. Back on T.O.B.A., Forsyne earned $35 a week working with Bessie Smith, a show that allowed her to reprise her Russian specialty. She left Smith's company in 1928, vowing she would never tour the South again. After working three-and-a-half years as a domestic, and then as an elevator girl, Forsyne quit dancing. In 1963, however, she played the part of Mrs. Noah in Green Pastures. That same year, she appeared with Rex Ingraham in The Emperor Jones. As late as 1951, Forsyne assisted Ruthanna Boris for the choreography for the New York City Ballet's "The Cakewalk," choreographed by George Balanchine. In 1962, at the age of seventy-nine, Forsyne could still perform a cartwheel. She devoted most of her spare time to visiting various hospitals where she entertained and cheered up sick friends. By 1966 she herself retired to the Concord Baptist Nursing Home in Brooklyn, where she died in 1983, at the age of 100. Sources: Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (1968); Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Vol I. (2004); Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows (Vol 1, 2nd ed.) by Henry T Sampson