Kicha's photos with the keyword: Performer

British Nobility Balk At Mixed-Race American Actress: The Story of Marion Smart When Britain’s Prince Harry’s engagement to actress Meghan Markle became public, some negative reactions suggested that racism and class snobbery still persist among the British upper crust. According to news reports, Markle, whose mother is African-American and father is white, describes herself as a “strong, confident mixed-race woman.” Just such a woman caused a stir in England back in 1903, and the ripples reached as far as Cincinnati. Marion Smart visited Cincinnati frequently as an actress and singer with the Smart Set troupe. This all-African American ensemble got top billing at Cincinnati’s hottest theaters: Heuck’s, on Vine between Twelfth and Thirteenth; Robinson Opera House at Ninth and Plum; and The Walnut, on Walnut Street between Sixth and Seventh. Variously described as “pretty,” “dashing” and possessed of a “most handsome form and face,” Marion Smart was what was then known as an octoroon, meaning that she was one-eighth black. In other words, one of her eight great-grandparents was African American. Under the “one drop” standard in place at the time, Marion was considered “colored.” The Cincinnati Enquirer [25 February 1904] claimed she could easily pass as white: “Miss Smart is almost white. It would require a second glance to discover any trace of her Ethiopian origin.” Most news reports claim that she was a Louisiana native, but she consistently told census-takers that her mother was from England and her father from New York, where she was born at Utica in 1884. In the summer of 1903, Marion sailed to England with an all-African American minstrel show headed by Bert Williams and George Walker, among the most celebrated proponents of this much-derided theatrical genre. The troupe occupied rooms in the very posh Hotel Cecil and performed at the Shaftesbury Theatre in central London. Among her new fans, Marion attracted the attention of the son of an English Lord. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer: “This young scion of British nobility for a time contented himself with a nightly attendance at the London theater where the Afro-American entertainers were holding the boards. Subsequently he sought an introduction, and through a business attaché of the theater became acquainted with Miss Smart, or Marion Henry, as she was known on the London playbills. From that time on the young Englishman was the most devoted admirer of the colored singer and entertained her lavishly at the swagger Cecil.” For almost a month, Marion’s devotee followed her everywhere and rained gifts of jewelry upon her. It all ended when Marion was visited backstage by a representative of the British Foreign Office who informed her that she was being deported, immediately, on the next steamer to America. “She demurred at first, but changed her mind when transportation and a few thousand-pound notes on the Bank of England were thrust into her hand. It developed that the father of the prospective heir to an earldom had learned of his infatuation for the colored actress and had quietly invoked the aid of the Foreign Office.” Marion returned to the United States and joined the Smart Set troupe, which brought her to Cincinnati, where she told her tale to a Cincinnati reporter. She made sure to add her opinion to the Enquirer story, contrasting life for African Americans here and in Europe: “She says that prejudice against the colored race in England is nothing like it is in America and that it is more than likely that nearly half of the Williams and Walker company that went over about a year ago are so well established in England it is doubtful they will ever return to this country.” Marion Smart’s career lasted just a year or so following her 1904 visit to Cincinnati. She retired from the stage at the age of 21 when she married Moses C. Moore, the wealthiest African American in Dayton, Ohio. Moore owned a stable of fine racing horses, a Dayton hotel that served a black clientele, and was an early investor in a Negro League baseball team. In 1909, Moore opened Dahomey Park, described by the Indianapolis Freeman [6 March 1909] as: “ . . . a Colored pleasure park for Colored people, owned and operated exclusively by Colored financiers and managers.” Although the park remained open for only a couple of years, it attracted national news coverage. The name, Dahomey Park, was proposed by Marion Moore as a nod to “In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy” the first full-length musical written and performed by African Americans at a major Broadway house. The stars of “In Dahomey” were Marion Moore’s former employers, Bert Williams and George Walker. Moses Moore died in 1927 and Marion remarried a building contractor named Carl Anderson. She was active in charitable causes, notably founding a day nursery. Marion died in 1954, aged 69, and is buried in Dayton’s Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum, next to Moses Moore. Source: The Dayton Herald (Dec. 1905); Cincinnati Curiosities by Greg Hand (Bill Stolz, Archivist at Wright State University

Since 1851, many remarkable black men and women did not receive obituaries in The New York Times. With Overlooked , they've added their stories to their archives. NY Times Overlooked No More: Valaida Snow, Charismatic ‘Queen of the Trumpet’ By Giovanni Russonello Feb. 22, 2020 Popperfoto (Getty Images) She was not just a master musician, singer and dancer; she was also a teller of tall tales whose interviews could be as much a performance as her stage act. Valaida Snow in an undated photo. She was a big name in Europe and Asia as well as in black communities across the United States, often giving some of the first jazz performances on major international stages. A singer, a dancer, an arranger, a master fabulist, a virtuoso trumpeter adept at a half-dozen other instruments, too: Back when being all these things could also mean being a pop star, Valaida Snow was a sensation. From the age of 5, when she began stealing the show as a member of her father’s performance troupe, Snow lived her life onstage, and on the road. She became a big name in Europe and Asia, just as much as she was in black communities across the United States, often giving some of the first jazz performances on major international stages. And she often graced the movie screen, helping to bring black music from the vaudeville stage into the audiovisual age. African-American newspapers and the international press celebrated Snow both for her immense skill and for her novelty as a female trumpet master. She encouraged that coverage and bent it to her ends, telling tall tales and making her interviews as much a performance as her stage act. “She pursued her life and career confidently, indomitably and even defiantly,” her biographer, Mark Miller, wrote in “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm: The Life and Music of Valaida Snow” (2007). “In fact and fiction both, it is a life to celebrate.” Snow was in Denmark during an extended engagement when Nazi Germany stormed across Europe in the early years of World War II. But she refused to decamp for the United States and ended up imprisoned — though it was in a Copenhagen jail, not a German concentration camp as she later claimed. When she was finally shuttled out of the country, she returned to the United States physically diminished. Though she worked hard to reclaim the spotlight, she died in 1956, at 52, in ill health and relative obscurity. “The unfortunate thing about her legacy is that she wasn’t recorded as much as many of her peers,” Tammy Kernodle, a musicologist at Miami University in Ohio, said in a phone interview. “But she was a greatly respected musician on the vaudeville circuit, and even amongst male jazz musicians themselves.” Dashing and charismatic, Snow earned the nicknames Little Louis — a reference to Louis Armstrong’s influence on her — and Queen of the Trumpet, given to her by W.C. Handy, who himself was known as the Father of the Blues. That appellation often appeared below her name on the 78-r.p.m. records she made. Yet Snow’s stardom appeared to have an implacable ceiling. While many musicians held residencies in New York or Chicago clubs during the 1920s and ’30s, often catapulting to famous recording careers, Snow stayed on the road, possibly because club owners and promoters did not see women as viable bandleaders. “This conversation about chronicling the evolution and the progression of jazz has always been rooted in recordings,” Dr. Kernodle said. “She spent a lot of time in Europe during a key time when jazz was being documented in recordings — she’s back and forth, and that back-and-forth doesn’t give her an opportunity to amass a catalog in the way that many of her peers did.” Still, at the height of her success, Snow lived in sumptuous style. She rode in a convertible, often with a chauffeur; had a personal servant; and even acquired a pet monkey. And she kept her coterie coordinated. “The chauffeur, the footman and the monkey were all to dress alike,” the cabaret singer and pianist Bobby Short recalled fondly. Valada Snow was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on June 2, 1904, the eldest of four children in a musical family. (She later added an “i” to her name, possibly to clarify its pronunciation.) Her sister Lavada later claimed that their father, John, had been a Russophile, and named his first-born child after the city of Vladivostok. Valada’s mother, Etta, was a music teacher who had attended Howard University and taught her children to play instruments and sing. John, who went by J.V., was a minister who assembled a troupe of child performers known as the Pickaninny Troubadours, presenting them at black theaters and vaudeville stages across the South. By the time she was 5, Valada had become the show’s star. By adolescence, she was proficient on nearly a dozen string and wind instruments. Her bailiwick as a child was the violin, but her stage act also included singing, dancing and even an escape-artistry act. At 15, Snow married Samuel Lewis Lanier, a fellow entertainer, but he was physically abusive, and she soon left him. Her father had recently died and the Troubadours were no more; a period of drifting set in. It wasn’t until 1921, when she joined the popular revue “Holiday in Dixieland,” that she began to make her name on the national stage. Snow held a long residency the next year at a Harlem cabaret run by the famed proprietor Barron Wilkins, bringing her new levels of attention. Then she set off on the road again. In 1924, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle cast her in “In Bamville,” the follow-up to their smash hit musical “Shuffle Along.” It traveled to New York the next year under the name “The Chocolate Dandies,” but received unsympathetic reviews and soon closed. In many of those negative reviews there were two exceptions: Snow and her co-star Josephine Baker, whose own career was just taking off. Snow mounted a few tours of the United States with small jazz bands, but it was a three-year jaunt across Europe and Asia beginning in 1926, when she was 22, that established her as a star. She traveled to London and Paris with the producer Lew Leslie’s “Blackbirds” revue, and then joined the drummer Jack Carter’s octet on a tour of China and Southeast Asia. “She is important in terms of helping us gain an understanding of the spread of jazz to Europe, particularly after World War I,” Dr. Kernodle said, adding that Snow helped “shift the context of jazz away from the early Dixieland style.” Back in the United States, Snow took a prominent role in another musical, “Rhapsody in Black,” which Leslie had built largely to showcase her talents, though Ethel Waters was billed as its star. It gave rise to a long rivalry between the two. Snow directed the production’s 60-person stage band, though it was known as Pike Davis’s Continental Orchestra. Over the latter half of the 1930s, Snow recorded roughly 40 sides in studios across Europe, including her signature song, “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm.” But she never made a commercial recording in the United States as a trumpeter. In the mid-1930s, Snow met and married Ananias Berry, a 19-year-old dancer who performed with the Berry Brothers, a family troupe; the new couple developed a stage act and toured together. But their age difference drew negative publicity — especially after Samuel Lewis Lanier, Snow’s former husband, took her to court on allegations of bigamy, claiming their long-ago marriage had never been officially annulled. It all led to tensions between Snow and Berry, and the marriage did not last. Starting in 1940, while living in Europe, Snow found herself stuck for two years in Nazi-occupied Denmark, staying even after her manager had fled. Mr. Miller’s biography revealed that she had spent only 10 weeks in custody at two Danish prisons. She had developed a dependency on oxycodone and was said to have participated in petty robberies, though no charges were ever filed. Her imprisonment could have been an attempt by the authorities to protect and house her during difficult times, as Mr. Miller surmises, or it could simply have been unlawful. Over the latter half of the 1930s, Snow recorded roughly 40 sides in studios across Europe. But she never made a commercial recording in the United States as a trumpeter. Snow was able to leave Denmark in the spring of 1942 on an American ship that had come to rescue refugees. Back home where her return was front-page news in black newspapers she told stories of having been held at a concentration camp “for eight horrible months,” and sometimes beaten. The Amsterdam News reported that she was “the only colored woman entertainer on record to have been interned in a Nazi concentration camp.” Whatever the truth, by the time she returned, Snow was worse for the wear. Some reports suggested that her weight was down to 76 pounds. Friends said she carried an air of sadness that would never fully go away. She married again in 1943; her third husband, Earle Edwards, was a former performer who became her manager. The couple moved to Los Angeles, where she was seen as a mentor and inspiration to the young musicians turning Central Avenue clubs into a hotbed of modern jazz innovation. In 1949, performing at Town Hall in New York, she received her first and only mention in The New York Times: a paragraph-long review. Snow died of a brain hemorrhage on May 30, 1956, during an engagement at the Palace Theater in New York. “She was survived,” Mr. Miller wrote in his biography, “by her husband, Earle, her sister Lavada, her brother Arvada and her stepbrother Arthur (Artemus) Bush — as well as a mythology that had taken on a life of its own.”

Here she appears in costume for a play she co-produced, Midnight Steppers from 1930. Today Gertrude is mainly remembered as a rival for the affections of Bessie Smith's husband, Jack Gee, a situation that caused a violent reaction from the ever volatile Bessie. In 1921, however, Gertrude was one of the hottest properties in show business. Gertrude Saunders while her greatest fame and recognition came from being the original star of Shuffle Along , the groundbreaking musical and theatrical production by Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Flournoy Mille, and Aubrey Lyles in 1921, which some cite as launching the Harlem Renaissance, Gertrude Saunders went on to continue her varied show-business career in motion pictures, as well as with live stage performances. Born on August 25, 1903, in North Carolina, Saunders was still a teenager at the time she left studies at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, to tour with stage and vaudeville entertainer and producer Billy King as a featured singer and comedienne, where her performances turned a number of his songs into hits. Saunders also starred in another King production in 1919, Over the Top , which dramatized the state of African Americans at the time of the Paris Peace Conference and presaged other Harlem Renaissance efforts to stage serious theatrical works and music revues. After Saunders was replaced by Florence Mills as the star of Shuffle Along , she continued to work in other revues during the 1920s and '30s, including one financed by Bessie Smith's husband Jack Gee in 1929, which led to a fight with Smith. After suffering a nervous breakdown and returning to her home in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1931 to recuperate, Saunders resumed performing in such revues as Red Hot Mama during the 1930s. Saunders was also highly recognized for her passion and style of performing the Charleston famous during the Harlem Renaissance period and singing Sweet Georgia Brown composed by musicians Maceo Pinkard and Ben Bernie for the musical show Runnin Wild on Broadway. She appeared in several films in the 1940s, including Sepia Cinderella and in 1943 the Broadway production of Run, Little Chillun . Saunders was honored by the Negro Actors Guild of America in 1964 in New York City, the benevolent organization for African American entertainers. Gertrude C. Saunders, a trailblazing entertainer, died on April 1, 1991, in Beverly, Massachusetts. She was eighty-seven. Sources: Florence Mills: Harlem Jazz Queen by By Bill Egan; Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era edited by Lean'tin L. Bracks, Jessie Carney Smith; BlackPast by Otis Alexander; NYPL Digital Collections

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...

Emma Louise along with her older sister Anna Madah (not pictured) were pioneers of African American Musical Theater in the United States. The Hyers Sisters made their public debut in their hometown of Sacramento, California in 1867 and began touring extensively in the early 1870s to wide acclaim. This is an early photograph of Emma Louise (born circa 1857), which was spotted in an album consisting mostly of theatrical portrait photographs from San Francisco dating from the 1870s and 1880s. Emma Louise was a contralto, her sister a soprano, and over their long careers they collaborated with notable African American artists like Billy Kersands, Pauline Hopkins, and Sam Lucas on a string of successful productions. Source: Harvard Theatre Collection

Daisy Turner (photographed here in Boston, Massachusetts, circa 1915), was born on June 21, 1883 in Grafton, Vermont one of thirteen children to Alec and Sally Turner, freed slaves. Her family story is a multigenerational saga spanning two centuries, and played out on three continents. The story has been carefully preserved, anchoring the family in a distant past that details the English merchant trade in Africa, shipwreck, romance, the slave trade and capture, the obscurity of the middle passage, two generations of slavery, escape to freedom, determination to succeed and the eventual establishment of a family farm in Vermont, known as "Journey's End." Daisy was famous for her oral recordings of her family's history. Her great-grandmother was shipwrecked while traveling from England to Africa on her honeymoon during the early 19th century. She was saved by an African chieftain's son, and had a child with him (Daisy's grandfather, Alexander). Alexander was captured by a slave trader and taken to New Orleans, where he was bought by John Gouldin and taken to Gouldin's plantation in Port Royal, Virginia. There, Daisy's father, Alec, was born a slave. Alec was taught to read by the master's granddaughter, and later escaped, joining the Union Army during the Civil War. In the Spring of 1863, Turner guided his regiment to his old plantation in Port Royal, Virginia where he allegedly killed his former cruel overseer. After the Civil War, the Turner family moved north, where her father worked in a saw mill and raised enough money to purchase 100 acres in Grafton, Vermont and build Journey's End Farm. Daisy Turner was proud of her family heritage, and was a strong, outspoken woman from childhood to her death at the age of 104. She's remembered as a gifted storyteller and family historian. She is the subject of the Vermont Folklife Center's Peabody Award-winning audio documentary, "Journey's End: The Memories and Traditions of Daisy Turner". Stories from her life have also been the subject of two Vermont Folklife Center books, "Alec's Primer" and "Daisy and the Doll". Daisy Turner maintained Journey's End after her parents' deaths. The Turner family homestead is located on the "Daisy Turner Loop", a biking trail near Grafton Pond. Daisy can be seen reciting Civil War poetry, at the remarkable age of 104, in Ken Burns' critically acclaimed PBS documentary, The Civil War. One of Turner's favorite personal stories, which she recounted often, involved a school pageant when Turner was about eight years old. In the pageant, Turner's teacher had instructed Turner to recite a poem with a black doll, but at the last minute, Turner resisted and spontaneously made up her own poem: "You needn't crowd my dolly out, Although she's black as night; And if she is at the foot of this show, I think she'll stand as good a chance, As the dollies that are white..." She won first prize. This story became the subject of a children's book by Michael Medearis and Angela Shelf Medearis, and receives scholarly attention in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, by Robin Bernstein. Daisy Turner's story continues to attract wide attention as part of an effort to preserve the folk history of Vermont and the United States. She died on February 2, 1988 at the age of 104. She's buried at Brookside Cemetery, in Chester Windsor County in Vermont.

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The New York Times. There are many mysteries about the dancer Earl Tucker, but the meaning of his stage name isn’t one of them. To understand why he was called Snakehips, you have only to watch him move. Take his solo routine in the 1930 short film “Crazy House.” About 30 seconds in, Tucker rolls his hips to one side. He rolls them so far that his torso tilts in counterbalance, his ankles sickle over, and his whole body bends into an S-curve of improbable depth. He reverses the shape — first churning slowly, then at twice and four times the speed, the smaller, quicker undulations making him slither sideways on one foot. His trailing leg embroiders the glide with lariat-like curlicues, but what draws a viewer’s eye, hypnotically, is the motor: the spiraling, snaking motion of those hips. By the time he appeared in the film, Snakehips Tucker was already a name attraction in Harlem nightclubs like the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn, and he had appeared to acclaim on Broadway and in Paris. He died on May 14, 1937, when he was just thirty-one. The cause, as described in his obituary in The Baltimore Afro-American, was a “mysterious illness.” Neither that obituary nor those in other African-American newspapers — the mainstream press did not report the death — included many biographical facts about Tucker. Back then, obscurity wasn’t unusual for black entertainers, but the articles praised him as one of the most imitated artists of the day. Tucker’s influence didn’t end with his death. Elvis Presley, who was born two years before Tucker died, probably never saw him dance, yet he scandalized 1950s America with a more timid version of Tucker’s below-the-waist action, making girls in the audience scream. Elvis the Pelvis also took on the moniker “Ol’ Snakehips.” Later, Tucker’s loose kicks and unwinding spins found an echo in the signature moves of Michael Jackson. Some hip-hop dancers who came across video footage of Tucker were said to have experienced a shock of recognition: This guy was doing some of their steps decades before they were. Even if these dancers didn’t imitate Tucker directly, they drew on a style that he had heightened and popularized. He could also tap dance and do the Charleston, but it was the hip rotations and the shaking that distinguished him from black male dancers of his day, in part because the moves were associated with the sexually charged ones of female dancers; “shake” dancers were known to shimmy and grind. (This gender distinction still held when Elvis came on the scene, prompting hostile journalists to liken him disparagingly to burlesque ladies doing the hoochie coochie.) Duke Ellington, who hired Tucker to dance with his band at the Cotton Club and elsewhere, once speculated that Tucker had come from “tidewater Maryland, one of those primitive lost colonies where they practice pagan rituals and their dancing style evolved from religious seizures.” Tucker was, in fact, discovered in Maryland, dancing in the streets of Baltimore, and Ellington’s claim is probably accurate in other ways: What Ellington called “pagan rituals,” scholars would identify as African spiritual practices that informed African-American culture. Tucker’s trembling was most likely related to dances of spiritual possession, which became part of Pentecostal, Sanctified and Holiness traditions. In the film “Crazy House,” Tucker does his shaking while rubbing his hands together, as if he were shivering in the cold while skating on ice. The addition of sleigh bells to the bouncy music underlined the idea. Whatever its source, his dancing was entertainment that played to the illicit appeal of Harlem nightclubs. (Ellington’s art was promoted as “jungle music.”) When Tucker appeared on Broadway in the all-black revue “Blackbirds of 1928,” the program described his act as his “conception of the low down dance.” That low-down quality was in contrast to the upright tapping of the show’s star, Bill Robinson. Zora Neale Hurston, in her now-canonical 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” cited only two dancers by name: Robinson and Tucker. She used both as exemplars of the “lack of symmetry that makes Negro dancing so difficult for white dancers to learn.” But it’s easy to imagine that Hurston was still thinking of Tucker when she wrote: “Negro dancing is dynamic suggestion. No matter how violent it may appear to the beholder, every posture gives the impression that the dancer will do much more.” Reviewers tended to describe Tucker’s “double-jointed” dancing with euphemisms or expressions of disbelief. (His death may have been shrouded in euphemisms, too; “mysterious illness” was sometimes code for syphilis.) It took a French critic — who was less squeamish about sex and had different attitudes about race — to hail Tucker as “a marvelous artist who knows all the dances of the universe.” The best information about Tucker comes from the interviews with black entertainers that Marshall and Jean Stearns conducted in the 1960s for their seminal book “Jazz Dance” (1968). Marshall Stearns himself could remember his embarrassment when, as a white college student in the late-1920s, he took a date to hear Ellington’s band at the Cotton Club and encountered the “murderously naughty” Tucker. He spent most of his energy “trying not to look shocked,” he said. Writing in the more freewheeling cultural context of the 1960s, Stearns mocked that response as puritanical; citing the mambo and rock ’n’ roll dances, he judged that Tucker’s pelvic skill had come “too early.” Today, Tucker’s dancing would be considered less disturbing than other aspects of his behavior. The entertainers interviewed by the Stearnses remembered Snakehips as a heavy gambler and “a mean guy” with a violent temper who was nevertheless popular with women. Newspaper reports about the “bad boy of Harlem” covered his arrests as often as his performances. In one instance he was charged with stabbing a fellow gambler in the abdomen with a penknife. Another time, the charge was “forcing his attentions” on a 15-year-old girl. Yet another time, it was rape. All these charges seem to have been dropped, as was the assault charge filed by his dance partner, Bessie Dudley. A few years later, newspapers reported that he had stabbed the performer Lavinia Mack, and that she had stabbed him back. A gossip columnist for The Pittsburgh Courier wrote — falsely — that Tucker died from that stabbing. It must have seemed true to Tucker’s character that he would meet his end in such a violent manner. Whatever the cause, when he died, he left behind his wife and a 10-year-old son. What remains, beyond these fragmented memories, are a few seconds of him at the end of the 1935 musical short “Symphony in Black” and his two-minute routine in “Crazy House,” a comedy set in the Lame Brain Sanitarium. He doesn’t look so menacing there. His snaps and claps draw attention to a musicality that runs through all his hip rolling, through his every sinking to the ground and miraculously rubbery recovery. He wasn’t a contortionist. He was a dancer, one of a kind. Tucker's style of dancing in a 1935 musical short called "Symphony in Black" www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4ww-MmAY4&t=49s Source: New York Times: Overlooked No More (article written by Brian Seibert) Dec. 18, 2019

The young Miss is a native of Detroit, Michigan. She was born the 3rd of May, 1880. At an early age little Bessie showed market talent for the stage, and being of an apt and musical family, she was naturally encouraged in her natural vocation. At the age of three she participated in a concert in which she sang that ever popular song "Peek-a-boo," at that she had to be placed on a stool in order to be seen by the audience. After that from time to time she appeared in home talent concerts, until finally her marked advancement demanded recognition and in consequence of that she had the pleasure of holding the boards for eight weeks at the Wonderland Theater, (in Detroit) which speaks for itself. At that time she was only five years of age. At the end of this unprecedented engagement she was put in school, and at the same time she was given a musical education by her mother, (Georgie E Gillam, a very accomplished pianist). After receiving a good school education and the art of music, she was still haunted by the desire to become an actress, to that event she was fortunate in receiving an engagement in connection with her brother, (Harry L Gillam), from the Georgia University Graduates, under the direction of J. Edward George. They started on the road on Dec. 16, 1895, to tour the country. After a successful tour of thirty weeks, she returned home and had to remain home for a long while to patch up a sprained ankle received while in the act of performing. After taking a good rest she rejoined her brother at Eureka, Kansas on Dec. 10, 1897, to work as a team with the Nashville Students and P.T. Wright's Colored Comedy Co. She is receiving praise from press and public for her artistic rendition of coon songs and refined dancing. Being a young lady she has a bright future and we look forward to see her hold positions among the many bright lights now lighting the dark pathway on to the road of success for the colored race. Source: Indianapolis Freeman (April 9, 1898) issue

Historically, some of the most visible queer people in America have been performers, particularly male and female impersonators. On the vaudeville and variety stages of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, performers that transgressed the gender binary were a common sight. For the most popular among them — people like Ella Wesner, Annie Hindle, and Julian Eltinge — doing drag could be a lucrative and fame-making endeavor. Eltinge, for instance, published three different magazines with his name on them, including “Julian Eltinge's Magazine of Beauty Hints and Tips,” which offered beauty advice and sold Eltinge-branded products to women. Wesner was so famous that she was hired by cigarette and champagne companies to hock their wares from the stage — the Little Beauties Cigarette company even went so far as to produce promotional cards featuring Wesner smoking their products. Not all of these performers were queer. For some, drag was simply a business; Eltinge, for example, cultivated the masculine public persona of a good college boy who just happened to discover he was skilled at female impersonation (although rumors dogged the bachelor Eltinge for his entire career). But life on the stage did offer some particular inducements for queer people: living on the road could be a way to avoid prying eyes, the police, or one’s family; fame could provide a measure of protection to those who transgressed gender norms off the stage as well; and traveling from city to city allowed them to forge connections with nascent queer communities around the country. By virtue of their work, we have more complete records of their lives than we do of other Victorian- and Progressive-era gender non-conforming folks. Yet even some of the most famous male and female impersonators of their time have been mostly forgotten today, even by historians — particularly performers of color. So it is with Florence Hines, a Black singer and drag king who got her start on the stage sometime around 1891, when she began to receive particular notice for her performances with Sam T. Jack’s Creole Burlesque. When the show came to Paterson, NJ, on November 23, 1891, “hundreds were turned away from the doorway” before the Creole Burlesque was even scheduled to take the stage, according to the Paterson Daily Caller. In their review, they called out Hines in particular for being an “excellent male impersonator.” The Creole Burlesque was a standard minstrel show, featuring all Black performers, led by a white manager, giving skits, songs, and scenes that featured standard variety acts (everything from clog dancing to drag) set in a pre-Civil War Southern plantation fantasy. But within a few years, Sam T. Jack would launch The Creole Show, an important milestone in Black performance in America. For the first time, an all-Black revue was presented as a modern, staged performance — not as an “authentic” recreation of Black life. According to Whiting Up, a history of white face entertainment by Black theater historian Marvin McAllister, The Creole Show was “a major outlet for Black artists interested in… developing a comedic tradition that was racially grounded but not riddled with stereotyping.” In another important departure from tradition, instead of hiring a man to play the traditional lead role of interlocutor or master of ceremonies, Sam T. Jack hired Florence Hines. As a drag king, Hines performed a routine that made mock of the “dandy” — flashy, modern, young men who drank and dated openly, and wore the latest clothes. One of her most famous numbers was “Hi Waiter! A Dozen More Bottles,” whose first verse went: Lovely woman was made to be loved, To be fondled and courted and kissed; And the fellows who’ve never made love to a girl, Well they don’t know what fun they have missed. I’m a fellow, who’s up on the times, Just the boy for a lark or a spree There’s a chap that’s dead stuck on women and wine, You can bet your old boots that it’s me. Many white drag kings of the day also performed this song, and similar dandy characters. For these performers, the dandy was a way to needle the men in the audience. But for Black performers, taking on a dandy role was also a way of resisting degraded depictions of Black people that were common on stage at the time. As Kathleen B. Casey wrote in The Prettiest Girl on the Stage is a Man, “when worn by a Black performer, the tuxedo with tails, cane, cape and a top hat countered the image of the ragged, shoeless plantation slave.” Thus, Hines made a natural choice for a show that wanted to show an entirely new kind of Black performance. By 1904, The Indianapolis Freeman would report that Hines “commanded the largest salary paid to a colored female performer.” In their book, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895, Lynn Abott and Doug Seroff wrote that “Hines’s male impersonations provided the standard against which African American comediennes were compared for decades.” Yet today, little is known about Hines. It is impossible to establish a place or date of her birth. Unlike her white counterparts, Hines seems not to have been profiled in major newspapers of her day, nor did she have promotional products with her face on them, or even posters. How she got her start on the stage is unknown. Her time in the Creole Show provides one of the few insights into her life off the stage: While in Ohio in 1892, Hines got into a fight with one of her co-stars, a singer named Marie Roberts. The Cincinnati Enquirer covered the incident with a healthy dose implication that Hines and Roberts were lovers, writing “the utmost intimacy has existed between the two women for the past year, their marked devotion being not only noticeable but a subject of comment among their associates on the stage.” Hines’s career seems to have lasted about 15 years — at least, her career as a male impersonator did. According to a letter to the editor written by a traveling vaudevillian from the Famous Georgia Minstrels, which was published in The Chicago Defender in 1920 (the year Prohibition was enacted), Hines became a preacher, now that her home city of Salem, Oregon had gone dry. “She would be pleased to hear from old friends,” the letter write wrote. But three years later, the Defender would publish a short column about Hines, “recognized as the greatest male impersonator of all times and all races,” in which they wrote that she had been paralyzed and an invalid since 1906. The final mention of Hines that I can find is also from the Defender, who carried a letter on March 22, 1924, from a Santa Clara, California woman named Nunnie Williams, saying “My mother was Florence Hines… called by many the mother of the Colored show business… she died on March 7th and was buried in Santa Clara cemetery on the 10th.” Today, Florence Hines deserves to stand in the long line of queer, Black, stud performers, from Gladys Bentley all the way up to Lena Waithe, whose incredible talent has won them acclaim from audiences all too ready to dismiss them for their race, their gender, and their queerness. Sources: themstory: This Black Drag King Was Once Known As the Greatest Male Impersonator of All Time Florence Hines deserves recognition in the long line of queer, Black, stud performers, from Gladys Bentley to Lena Waithe, article written by Hugh Ryan (June 2018)

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)

According to European press, she was the prettier alternative to Josephine Baker. Ruth Bayton (1907 - ? ), was an entertainer who first went to Europe as a chorus girl with Florence Mills in the hit play, Blackbirds. In 1927, she also appeared as an opening act for comedic actor Valeriano Ruiz Paris, dancing the "Black-Bottom Stomp" and the "Charleston" at the Teatro Comico in Barcelona, Spain. A painting of her still exists on the walls of the Paris Odeon. Throughout her career Ms. Bayton tried in vain to ride on Josephine Baker's coattails. Following Baker she also performed on stage wearing nothing but a girdle of bananas and a smile. [Afro American newspaper (March 3, 1928 edition]: Miss Ruth Bayton, most recent arrival from Harlem, is to take the place of Josephine Baker in the New Revue that is soon to appear at the Folies-Bergere, and has a year's contract with them in her bag. Miss Bayton has had much success in Madrid, Vienna, and Berlin in which latter place she played for eighteen months. Josephine Baker is now in Vienna but her picture (Baker's first film, Siren of the Tropics), at the Aubert Palace is still drawing large audiences. One critic said of her: Ruth Bayton, American dancer, whose reported romance with a Spanish monarch (King Alphonso of Spain), has caused society here and abroad to gasp, will cause a "tragedy" in France, according to David Sturgis, white critic, writing of her from paris. Sturgis says in the current issue of Variety: "I can't write anymore tonight. I have just seen Ruth Bayton dance. She is the colored artist at the Folies Wagram. She was once a stenographer in Virginia. Won a beauty prize offered by a New York newspaper. She is appearing this summer at a French channel resort. "I predict a tragedy on the coast. The nymphs, mad with jealousy, will strangle this creole goddess." [As reported in the Afro American newspaper on June 16, 1928] As reported in the The Afro American newspaper (May 29, 1937) edition: Ruth Bayton, playgirl of two continents, who created a sensation several years ago when she was reported to be a close friend of the then King Alphonso of Spain, is believed to be missing in the war torn country, according to relatives in New York. Miss Bayton has not been heard from since the outbreak of the conflict, and all efforts of her sister, Mrs. Julia Bayton Banks of 75 St. Nicholas Place to locate her have been futile. Miss Bayton, who first went to Europe in 1928 with Florence Mills in "Blackbirds," proceeded to Spain after the close of that production. Following her alleged sensational affairs at the Spanish Court she returned to America in 1932 and opened an exclusive dress shop for the Sugar Hill elite. Abandoning this enterprise, she returned to the night club world and again struck it rich when she foiled a holdup in a ritzy Broadway cabaret and was rewarded handsomely. With this money she returned to Spain and has not been heard from since. She was sought when her uncle, Dr. George Bayton, Philadelphia physician, died recently. (May 1937) Although Miss Bayton was always accepted as a New Yorker she was actually born in Tappahannock, Virginia where her father, the late Hansford Bayton, (1863 - 1927), was a well known river boat captain who operated an excursion steamer in the Tidewater section. Her family members are buried in the Bayton Family Cemetery in Essex County, Virginia. Photo: Getty Images, S. Ora, Photographer

Katherine Dunham as she appeared in the 1956 production of "Floyd's Guitar Blues." Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Born in Chicago, and raised in Joliet, Illinois, Katherine Dunham did not begin formal dance training until her late teens. In Chicago she studied with Ludmilla Speranzeva and Mark Turbyfill, and danced her first leading role in Ruth Page's ballet "La Guiablesse" in 1933. She attended the University of Chicago on scholarship (B.A., Social Anthropology, 1936), where she was inspired by the work of anthropologists Robert Redfield and Melville Herskovits, who stressed the importance of the survival of African culture and ritual in understanding African-American culture. While in college she taught youngsters' dance classes and gave recitals in a Chicago storefront, calling her student company, founded in 1931, "Ballet Negre." Awarded a Rosenwald Travel Fellowship in 1936 for her combined expertise in dance and anthropology, she departed after graduation for the West Indies (Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba, Haiti, Martinique) to do field research in anthropology and dance. Combining her two interests, she linked the function and form of Caribbean dance and ritual to their African progenitors. The West Indian experience changed forever the focus of Dunham's life (eventually she would live in Haiti half of the time and become a priestess in the "vodoun" religion), and caused a profound shift in her career. This initial fieldwork provided the nucleus for future researches and began a lifelong involvement with the people and dance of Haiti. From this Dunham generated her master's thesis (Northwestern University, 1947) and more fieldwork. She lectured widely, published numerous articles, and wrote three books about her observations: JOURNEY TO ACCOMPONG (1946), THE DANCES OF HAITI (her master's thesis, published in 1947), and ISLAND POSSESSED (1969), underscoring how African religions and rituals adapted to the New World. And, importantly for the development of modern dance, her fieldwork began her investigations into a vocabulary of movement that would form the core of the Katherine Dunham Technique. What Dunham gave modern dance was a coherent lexicon of African and Caribbean styles of movement -- a flexible torso and spine, articulated pelvis and isolation of the limbs, a polyrhythmic strategy of moving -- which she integrated with techniques of ballet and modern dance. When she returned to Chicago in late 1937, Dunham founded the Negro Dance Group, a company of black artists dedicated to presenting aspects of African-American and African-Caribbean dance. Immediately she began incorporating the dances she had learned into her choreography. Invited in 1937 to be part of a notable New York City concert, "Negro Dance Evening," she premiered "Haitian Suite," excerpted from choreography she was developing for the longer "L'Ag'Ya." In 1937-1938 as dance director of the Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago, she made dances for "Emperor Jones" and "Run Lil' Chillun," and presented her first version of "L'Ag'Ya" on January 27, 1938. Based on a Martinique folktale (ag'ya is a Martinique fighting dance), "L'Ag'Ya" is a seminal work, displaying Dunham's blend of exciting dance-drama and authentic African-Caribbean material. Dunham moved her company to New York City in 1939, where she became dance director of the New York Labor Stage, choreographing the labor-union musical "Pins and Needles." Simultaneously she was preparing a new production, "Tropics and Le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem." It opened February 18, 1939, in what was intended to be a single weekend's concert at the Windsor Theatre in New York City. Its instantaneous success, however, extended the run for ten consecutive weekends and catapulted Dunham into the limelight. In 1940 Dunham and her company appeared in the black Broadway musical, "Cabin in the Sky," staged by George Balanchine, in which Dunham played the sultry siren Georgia Brown -- a character related to Dunham's other seductress, "Woman with a Cigar," from her solo "Shore Excursion" in "Tropics." That same year Dunham married John Pratt, a theatrical designer who worked with her in 1938 at the Chicago Federal Theatre Project, and for the next 47 years, until his death in 1986, Pratt was Dunham's husband and her artistic collaborator. With "L'Ag'Ya" and "Tropics and Le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem," Dunham revealed her magical mix of dance and theater -- the essence of "the Dunham touch" -- a savvy combination of authentic Caribbean dance and rhythms with the heady spice of American showbiz. Genuine folk material was presented with lavish costumes, plush settings, and the orchestral arrangements based on Caribbean rhythms and folk music. Dancers moved through fantastical tropical paradises or artistically designed juke-joints, while a loose storyline held together a succession of diverse dances. Dunham aptly called her spectacles "revues." She choreographed more than 90 individual dances, and produced five revues, four of which played on Broadway and toured worldwide. Her most critically acclaimed revue was her 1946 "Bal Negre," containing another Dunham dance favorite, "Shango," based directly on "vodoun" ritual. If her repertory was diverse, it was also coherent. "Tropics and le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem" incorporated dances from the West Indies as well as from Cuba and Mexico, while the "Le Jazz Hot" section featured early black American social dances, such as the Juba, Cake Walk, Ballin' the Jack, and Strut. The sequencing of dances, the theatrical journey from the tropics to urban black America implied -- in the most entertaining terms -- the ethnographic realities of cultural connections. In her 1943 "Tropical Revue," she recycled material from the 1939 revue and added new dances, such as the balletic "Choros" (based on formal Brazilian quadrilles), and "Rites de Passage," which depicted puberty rituals so explicitly sexual that the dance was banned in Boston. Beginning in the 1940s, the Katherine Dunham Dance Company appeared on Broadway and toured throughout the United States, Mexico, Latin America, and especially Europe, to enthusiastic reviews. In Europe Dunham was praised as a dancer and choreographer, recognized as a serious anthropologist and scholar, and admired as a glamorous beauty. Among her achievements was her resourcefulness in keeping her company going without any government funding. When short of money between engagements, Dunham and her troupe played in elegant nightclubs, such as Ciro's in Los Angeles. She also supplemented her income through film. Alone, or with her company, she appeared in nine Hollywood movies and in several foreign films between 1941 and 1959, among them CARNIVAL OF RHYTHM (1939), STAR-SPANGLED RHYTHM (1942), STORMY WEATHER (1943), CASBAH (1948), BOOTE E RIPOSTA (1950), and MAMBO (1954). In 1945 Dunham opened the Dunham School of Dance and Theater (sometimes called the Dunham School of Arts and Research) in Manhattan. Although technique classes were the heart of the school, they were supplemented by courses in humanities, philosophy, languages, aesthetics, drama, and speech. For the next ten years many African-American dances of the next generation studied at her school, then passed on Dunham's technique to their students, situating it in dance mainstream (teachers such as Syvilla Fort, Talley Beatty, Lavinia Williams, Walter Nicks, Hope Clark, Vanoye Aikens, and Carmencita Romero; the Dunham technique has always been taught at the Alvin Ailey studios). During the 1940s and '50s, Dunham kept up her brand of political activism. Fighting segregation in hotels, restaurants and theaters, she filed lawsuits and made public condemnations. In Hollywood, she refused to sign a lucrative studio contract when the producer said she would have to replace some of her darker-skinned company members. To an enthusiastic but all-white audience in the South, she made an after-performance speech, saying she could never play there again until it was integrated. In São Paulo, Brazil, she brought a discrimination suit against a hotel, eventually prompting the president of Brazil to apologize to her and to pass a law that forbade discrimination in public places. In 1951 Dunham premiered "Southland," an hour-long ballet about lynching, though it was only performed in Chile and Paris. Toward the end of the 1950s Dunham was forced to regroup, disband, and reform her company, according to the exigencies of her financial and physical health (she suffered from crippling knee problems). Yet she remained undeterred. In 1962 she opened a Broadway production, "Bambouche," featuring 14 dancers, singers, and musicians of the Royal Troupe of Morocco, along with the Dunham company. The next year she choreographed the Metropolitan Opera's new production of "Aida" -- thereby becoming the Met's first black choreographer. In 1965-1966, she was cultural adviser to the President of Senegal. She attended Senegal's First World Festival of Negro Arts as a representative from the United States. Moved by the civil rights struggle and outraged by deprivations in the ghettos of East St. Louis, an area she knew from her visiting professorships at Southern Illinois University in the 1960s, Dunham decided to take action. In 1967 she opened the Performing Arts Training Center, a cultural program and school for the neighborhood children and youth, with programs in dance, drama, martial arts, and humanities. Soon thereafter she expanded the programs to include senior citizens. Then in 1977 she opened the Katherine Dunham Museum and Children's Workshop to house her collections of artifacts from her travels and research, as well as archival material from her personal life and professional career. During the 1980s, Dunham received numerous awards acknowledging her contributions. These include the Albert Schweitzer Music Award for a life devoted to performing arts and service to humanity (1979); a Kennedy Center Honor's Award (1983); the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award (1987); induction into the Hall of Fame of the National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (1987). That same year Dunham directed the reconstruction of several of her works by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and "The Magic of Katherine Dunham opened Ailey's 1987-1988 season. In February 1992, at the age of 82, Dunham again became the subject of international attention when she began a 47-day fast at her East St. Louis home. Because of her age, her involvement with Haiti, and the respect accorded her as an activist and artist, Dunham became the center of a movement that coalesced to protest the United States' deportations of Haitian boat-refugees fleeing to the U.S. after the military overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. She agreed to end her fast only after Aristide visited her and personally requested her to stop. Boldness has characterized Dunham's life and career. And, although she was not alone, Dunham is perhaps the best known and most influential pioneer of black dance. Her synthesis of scholarship and theatricality demonstrated, incontrovertibly and joyously, that African-American and African-Caribbean styles are related and powerful components of dance in America. Snippet from Floyd's Guitar Blues (no sound): loc.gov/item/ihas.200003819 Source: PBS.ORG bio by Sally Sommer

Aida Overton Walker (1880 - 1914), dazzled early-twentieth-century theater audiences with her original dance routines, her enchanting singing voice, and her penchant for elegant costumes. One of the premiere African American women artists of the turn of the century, she popularized the cakewalk and introduced it to English society. In addition to her attractive stage persona and highly acclaimed performances, she won the hearts of black entertainers for numerous benefit performances near the end of her tragically short career and for her cultivation of younger women performers. She was, in the words of the New York Age's Lester Walton, the exponent of "clean, refined artistic entertainment." Born in 1880 in New York City, a city in which she gained an education and considerable musical training. At the tender age of fifteen, she joined John Isham's Octoroons, one of the most influential black touring groups of the 1890s, and the following year she became a member of the Black Patti Troubadours. Although the show consisted of dozens of performers, Overton emerged as one of the most promising soubrettes of her day. In 1898, she joined the company of the famous comedy team Bert Williams and George Walker, and appeared in all of their shows—The Policy Players (1899), The Sons of Ham (1900), In Dahomey (1902), Abyssinia (1905), and Bandanna Land (1907). Within about a year of their meeting, George Walker and Overton married and before long became one of the most admired and elegant African American couples on stage. While George Walker supplied most of the ideas for the musical comedies and Bert Williams enjoyed fame as the "funniest man in America," Aida quickly became an indispensable member of the Williams and Walker Company. In The Sons of Ham, for example, her rendition of Hannah from Savannah won praise for combining superb vocal control with acting skill that together presented a positive, strong image of black womanhood. Indeed, onstage Aida refused to comply with the plantation image of black women as plump mammies, happy to serve; like her husband, she viewed the representation of refined African American types on the stage as important political work. A talented dancer, Aida improvised original routines that her husband eagerly introduced in the shows; when In Dahomey was moved to England, Aida proved to be one of the strongest attractions. Society women invited her to their homes for private lessons in the exotic cakewalk that the Walkers had included in the show. After two seasons in England, the company returned to the United States in 1904, and it was Aida who was featured in a New York Herald interview about their tour. At times Walker asked his wife to interpret dances made famous by other performers—one example being the "Salome" dance that took Broadway by storm in the early 1900s—which she did with uneven success. After a decade of nearly continuous success with the Williams and Walker Company, Aida's career took an unexpected turn when her husband collapsed on tour with Bandanna Land. Initially Walker returned to his boyhood home of Lawrence, Kansas, where his mother took care of him. In his absence, Aida took over many of his songs and dances to keep the company together. In early 1909, however, Bandanna Land was forced to close, and Aida temporarily retired from stage work to care for her husband, now clearly seriously ill. No doubt recognizing that he likely would not recover and that she alone could support the family, she returned to the stage in Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson's Red Moon in autumn 1909, and she joined the Smart Set Company in 1910. Aida also began touring the vaudeville circuit as a solo act. Less than two weeks after Walker's death in January 1911, Aida signed a two-year contract to appear as a co-star with S. H. Dudley in another all-black traveling show. Although still a relatively young woman in the early 1910s, Aida began to develop medical problems that limited her capacity for constant touring and stage performance. As early as 1908, she had begun organizing benefits to aid such institutions as the Industrial Home for Colored Working Girls, and after her contract with S. H. Dudley expired, she devoted more of her energy to such projects, which allowed her to remain in New York. She also took an interest in developing the talents of younger women in the profession, hoping to pass along her vision of black performance as refined and elegant. She produced shows for two such female groups in 1913 and 1914—the Porto Rico Girls and the Happy Girls. She encouraged them to work up original dance numbers and insisted that they don stylish costumes on stage. When Aida Overton Walker died suddenly of kidney failure on October 11, 1914, the African American entertainment community in New York went into deep mourning. The New York Age featured a lengthy obituary on its front page, and hundreds of shocked entertainers descended on her residence to confirm a story they hoped was untrue. Walker left behind a legacy of polished performance and model professionalism. Her demand for respect and her generosity made her a beloved figure in African American theater circles. Sources: Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890-1915. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989, Thomas L Riis

Ernest Hogan, (1860-1909), a minstrel show and vaudeville entertainer and songwriter, was born Reuben Crowder (or Crowdus) in the African American "Shake Rag" district of Bowling Green, Kentucky. Nothing is known of his family or early youth, but by his early teens he was supporting himself as an actor, singer, dancer, and comedian. He appeared with a traveling "Tom show"--a repertory company presenting Uncle Tom's Cabin on the road--as a young child, and he was a member of such traveling tent shows as Pringle's Georgia Minstrels in his middle teens. A versatile youth, he excelled in all aspects of minstrelsy, and by 1891 he had found a distinct theatrical identity. In about that year he took the stage name of Hogan because the Irish were the most successful comedians of the time, and with a partner founded a company of his own, Hogan and Eden's Minstrels, in Chicago. Within a few years he graduated from stylized minstrel acts and found success in solo performances in New York City vaudeville. A singer, improvisational dancer, and comic with his own distinctive style, Hogan was described by poet James Weldon Johnson as "expansive, jolly, radiating infectious good humor, provoking laughter merely by the changing expressions of his mobile face." In 1895 Hogan published his first song, "La Pas Ma La," based on a comic dance step he had created as the "pasmala" while still with the Pringle troupe. Featuring a jerky hop forward followed by three quick backward steps, it met with a warm reception in the African American community. The next year, however, Hogan became a national star with the song for which he was to be known for the rest of his life, "All Coons Look Alike to Me." Adapted from a song he had heard in a bar in Chicago and written for the white show Widow Jones, it was the hit of the season, ultimately selling over a million copies. The word "coon" was not yet universally heard as a racial slur--as late as 1920 the Victor record company's catalog defined "coon song" as an "up-to-date comic song in Negro dialect"--but the image of African Americans as licentious and lazy as presented in the popular genre was becoming socially unacceptable by the end of the century, and Hogan was widely criticized among blacks for the song, which, according to Arnold Shaw, "did not embody the prejudicial stereotype implied by its title" (p. 41). Though the song made him famous and paid him well, he was to have mixed feelings about his association with it for the rest of his life. With this sensational hit to his credit, Hogan quickly became one of the country's leading black entertainers. In 1897 he was the comedy star and master of ceremonies of Black Patti's Troubadours, for which he wrote some of the music and all of the comedy routines. The next year he played the leading role and edited the script of Clorindy: or the Origin of the Cakewalk, the first African American musical to appear in a Broadway theater. With music by noted composer Will Marion Cook and script by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, it ran the entire summer season and was a major breakthrough for African Americans in show business. Following this triumph, Hogan returned to Black Patti, billed as "The Unbleached American," for a season, and after that began a tour of Australia and Hawaii with Curtis's Afro-American Minstrels. Costarring with minstrel Billy McClain in My Friend from Georgia, a musical comedy that he cowrote, he was warmly received throughout the run. In 1900 Hogan worked with youthful singer Mattie Wilkes, fifteen years of age at the time, in The Military Man in New York City. He and Wilkes were reportedly married for a short time. Hogan was said to have been later married to a woman named Louise (maiden name unreported), who worked with him in organizing concerts in New York City in 1905. The dates of these marriages are unrecorded, and there were no children from either. Hogan's activities extended beyond the writing and performing for which he was famous. In 1901 he was one of one of the first African Americans to buy a home in New York City's Harlem. On returning from his Hawaiian tour he and his costar, Billy McClain, organized the Smart Set Company, a highly successful black road show, which produced Enchantment in 1902. In 1905 he and his wife Louise established an orchestra called the Memphis (or Nashville) Students who presented a "syncopated music concert" at Hammerstein's Victoria Theater on Broadway that ran for a hundred performances and went on to tour Europe as the Tennessee Students. That year he starred in a musical comedy considered by many to be his crowning achievement, Rufus Rastus, for which he wrote the script and cowrote the music. Immensely popular, it toured the country for two years after its successful New York run. In 1907 he and comedian Bert Williams were instrumental in the formation of the Colored Actors' Beneficial Association, a professional union for black performers. During that year Hogan prepared his last musical vehicle, The Oyster Man, but fell ill with tuberculosis and collapsed during a performance. The troupe was dissolved when he withdrew in March 1908, and Hogan died the next year in Lakewood, New Jersey. The most popular African American entertainer of his time and the first to star in a Broadway production in New York City, Ernest Hogan was a transitional performer whose career spanned minstrelsy, vaudeville, and musical theater. He was a major influence in popularizing the emerging musical styles. He is credited with coining the term "ragtime" for the strongly syncopated rhythm that became the pop-music rage of the 1890s, and his songs were the first to feature the word "rag" on their sheet music. Hogan did much to bring African American music styles to a larger audience and to open the doors of mainstream American theater to later African American performers. Sources: Alexander's Magazine. v.001 (1905-06 edition); American National Biography by Dennis Wepman

W. Henry Thomas, originally of Charlottesville, Virginia, was a dramatist, actor, and manager of the Thomas Newark Dramatic Company in New Jersey when he was credited with writing five dramas, three of which had been staged by August, 1900. Since neither scripts nor production reviews are available, one lists the titles of his plays: The Duel That Didn't Come Off, Thister, A Sad Discovery, On the Brink, and The Oldest Title in France. Sources: The Colored American Magazine, vol. 1-2, 1900-01]; McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama: An International ..., Volume 1, By Stanley Hochman , McGraw-Hill, inc

Jennie Scheper Haston, Pioneer Stage Star, Dies Suddenly in New York, Jennie (Scheper) Haston, born in Washington, D.C., 1878, retired theatrical star who was among the pioneer colored entertainers abroad, died at Harlem Hospital Saturday where she had been taken three hours before, following a paralytic stroke. While playing under the name of Jennie Scheper, she once made a command appearance before the czar of Russia. She went abroad in 1909 and toured all of Europe up to the outbreak of WWI in 1914. She served as an entertainer and did Red Cross work among the American doughboys. She appeared on the continent with the vaudeville team of Rastus and Banks as a singer and dancer. Later she appeared in her own act in Paris and later became a drummer and organized a female band which appeared with great success at the Cafe Cecil, in Paris and also Madrid and London. After her marriage to A.A. Haston, she made her headquarters in London and their home was always open to American Negro performers who came to that city. Her husband was for twenty years manager for the Versatile Three, which act was for many years the most prominent colored act in the British Empire. She gave up her own stage career to serve as her husband's secretary and his success was in a large measure due to her ability in this direction. In infrequent appearances in this country she played in several of the shows produced by the late J. Leubrie Hill, and her last New York appearance was with one of these shows at the Lafayette Theatre. The deceased was known throughout the profession for her big-heartedness and often aided financially performers of her race who were stranded. She made a hobby of collecting theatrical programs and souvenirs of all kinds that related to the stage and has a valuable collection of things of this kind. Funeral services were from the chapel of Henry W. Payne , 233 Lenox Avenue, on Tuesday and burial was in the Frederick Douglass Cemetery, Staten Island. Besides her husband, several distant relatives in Washington, DC., her native home, survive. Photo: Leslie's Weekly Newspaper (July 22, 1897) Obit: The New York Age (January 30, 1937)

A 1922 publicity photo of Gertrude Saunders, born on August 25, 1903 in North Carolina. She was an actress, known for Big Timers (1945), Sepia Cinderella (1947) and The Toy Wife (1938). She died in April 1991 in Beverly, Massachusetts. Saunders is also infamously known for her affair with Empress of the Blues , Bessie Smith's husband, Jack Gee. Smith had given her husband money to produce a show for her. Jack threw together as cheap a production as possible for Bessie and decided to use the remainder of the money for personal gain—not to enrich himself financially, but to win the heart of Gertrude Saunders, a singer of striking looks and impressive past accomplishments. Ms. Saunders had starred successfully in the title role of Irvin C. Miller’s Red Hot Mama show during the 1926 season, and headed the cast of various subsequent editions, but her most successful shows had been Liza and the 1921 Sissle and Blake hit, Shuffle Along (which included Josephine Baker in the chorus line). The latter production would probably have secured Ms. Saunders’ stage future, but she made a fateful decision and allowed herself to be lured away from the original cast by an offer that never materialized. Gertrude Saunders’ bad move opened the door for the ultimate black beauty of the day, Florence Mills, who took over the role and was such a hit that she became the toast of Broadway. Ms. Mills career was cut short in November,1927, when she died at the age of 35, but the bright spotlight Gertrude Saunders so foolishly relinquished was never restored to her. It is not known when Jack’s relationship with Ms. Saunders began, but Bessie's niece Ruby Walker Smith, thought it had gone on for some time before Jack produced her show, and that it accounted for some of his “hunting” trips. Gertrude Saunders was the antithesis of Bessie Smith, their personalities and looks contrasted sharply: Gertrude’s complexion was light, her hair long and her disposition gentle. She was also slim and quite a bit younger than Bessie. The artistic gap that separated the two was equally wide: Gertrude Saunders relied more on her looks than on her voice. “She was the opposite of Bessie,” said Ruby (Bessie's niece), making no secret of her disdain. “She had light skin and long curly 'good' hair and a gorgeous figure, and she knew it. In fact, she thought her shit didn’t stink." In a 1971 author Jack Albertson interviewed Ms. Saunders asking her if she had known that three thousand dollars of Bessie’s money went to back her show. “No,” she replied, emphatically, “but Jack could very well have put the money in my show without telling Bessie. Naturally he wouldn’t tell me if it was her money, he’d want to act like a big shot.” Which, of course, was exactly what he was doing. “I don’t know how he thought he could get away with it,” said Ruby, “but he wasn’t never too bright and he didn’t know anything about show business. He should have known that you can’t keep something like that a secret, not with all them blabbermouths around. His show only lasted about five or six months, then it folded up. He couldn't get enough bookings. And,” she added acerbically, “his star wasn’t strong enough to hold it up.” Bessie and Gertrude had two run-ins, the second left Gertrude beaten and bloody on a sidewalk and Bessie charged with assault. Afterwards, Gertrude vowed never to have anything to do with Jack again. Although she denied it, word was that she did not keep her vow. Source: Bessie, by Jack Albertson; IMD; Frank Driggs Collection

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...