Ep. 42: The Legacy of Black Vaudeville with Dr. Michelle Scott

3:19PM Jun 15, 2023

Speakers:

Dr. Ian Anson

Dr. Michelle Scott

Keywords:

toba

circuit

umbc

black

history

vaudeville

scott

research

bessie smith

fascinating

anson

period

hollywood

ledgers

archive

story

historian

performers

entertainers

social sciences

Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting speakers, and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times. Qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative. On Retrieving the Social Sciences, we bring the best of UMBC's social science community to you.

The final grades have been entered. The seniors have graduated. Awards and accolades have been handed out. And many of our students have moved off campus for the next few months. That's right, it's summer, and here at UMBC, the campus is suddenly really quiet. Well, I find that makes it a lot easier to record a podcast what with the ambient noise being surprisingly low aside from a stray lawnmower or two. It does give one a tinge of anticipation for late August when the students move back in and we all do it over again.

But I will tell you one thing that makes summer uniquely enjoyable for someone like me. In June, July and August, the summer blockbusters are coming. You know, I'm someone who really loves a good movie, be it a silent film from the 1920s or an arthouse flick from the 2020s. I'm really fortunate to live in Baltimore, which has a couple of incredibly great movie theaters that continuously show revivals of cool films from all these different eras. Speaking of which, I recently had the good fortune to have a captivating conversation with a UMBC faculty member who studies some of the individuals who helped to initially make Hollywood into the entertainment powerhouse that it is. Now while you might be thinking of early cinema giants like Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin, my conversation revealed that Hollywood's ascendancy actually had a lot to do with a far different sphere of entertainment, one that helped create not only stars of screen and stage, but also a bevy of powerful black entrepreneurs, who came to influence American show business far before the Civil Rights era. This is the world of black vaudeville. And my guide to its fascinating origins and its powerful effects in American culture is Dr. Michelle Scott, Professor of History at UMBC. Dr. Scott, who's also an affiliate faculty member in Gender and Women's Studies, Africana Studies, and Language, Literacy, and Culture, has recently published a book on black vaudeville and its ascendancy. I was fascinated to learn about the origin stories of stars like Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, and Sammy Davis, Jr. and how their time with TOBA, or the Theater Owners Booking Association, led to their ascendance. Let's listen in, as Dr. Scott explains his fascinating history, as well as the social science methods that she uses to draw these important narratives from historical archives.

All right, once again, I'm here with Dr. Michelle Scott. And I'm so grateful, first of all, Dr. Scott, for your time and for your willingness to come on the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Awesome. So I'm really fascinated, I've got to say by the subject matter that you've chosen to study, and I feel like your path to this research must have some kind of backstory, right. So I want to know a little bit about this. What first sparked your interest in TOBA and in the history more broadly, I guess, of black vaudeville?

Sure. My research trajectory has always involved some level of American entertainment history, African American history, mixed in with a little bit of curiosity about how people did things and how they were successful or not successful. And so TOBA Time actually came out of my first book, which was on blue singer Bessie Smith, a 1920s pop culture icon in the African American community. She was one of the few African American women to be recorded, and she was one of the most profitable entertainers in the 1920s. She did most of her shows across the country on the TOBA circuit, the Theater Owners Booking Association, and so TOBA kind of came to me, which was a study that was four pages in my first book on Bessie Smith. I was really interested in how do you actually make a profit? How do you keep a profit? How do you travel successfully during the period of segregation? And so what had been a story about one woman and her kind of musical consciousness and development in the 1920s became a focus on an entire institution. So I was able to merge my love of American entertainment history along with my also kind of forages into performing myself in terms of singing. So

Oh, fantastic. Right. So great this. So you're telling me you've also got this tie in also with your own musical performances? (Dr. Scott: Yes, yes). Yeah. Wow, that's, that's really cool. We love it, you know, when we get to hear from academics who also have sort of additional talents, right. And it's really cool to think about how you're able to merge those sort of personal interests with this rich and incredible history that, obviously has maybe been left by the wayside by too many folks over over time, right. Yeah. So speaking of that point, right, I want to think a little bit also about the broader representation, maybe vaudeville or at this time period, in American culture, I know that there's a lot of folks out there who have probably seen TV shows that seem to represent this period, or movies. And, you know, you can think about some of these different representations. I don't need to list them out here. But I can imagine that as a historian, you probably sometimes feel a sense maybe of of being irked, or potentially being a little bit frustrated by the portrayals or the depictions of these periods. And I want to ask you a little bit about your take on this right? Your research points, maybe to some inaccuracies, or maybe some gaps, some some missing stories in this depiction. What in your mind, do you think Hollywood representations of the Jazz Age get wrong?

Sure. I always tell my students that being a historian will mess up popular culture for the rest of your life. Never look at another movie the same. You never listen to music the same.

I think the same is true for being a political scientist.

But you know, so kind of cast the veil aside. The Jazz Age on the Hollywood screen is one of rebellion and images of flappers and excessive drinking, and even in the midst of prohibition. Great music, generational divide, kind of like a free for all period, right. So if you think of more recent movies like Babylon, which casts a lense on what the 1920s is, and for a certain demographic of Americans, that was the Jazz Age, particularly if you're middle class, white, 18 to 24. Those are largely representations of a period that are true. But the Jazz Age, roughly the period between 1919 to 1929, for working class Americans, for African Americans is not that period of wild freedom and exploration. The Jazz Age mirrors in African American communities, the rise of Red Summer, if we're thinking about the summer that happens after World War One when African Americans are returning to the United States, and facing a heightened level of violence, and that summer of 1919. Violence in terms of race riots, lynchings, personal violence, all geared at African American communities. But that same time period also mirrors the Harlem Renaissance and other prospective Renaissance or reflect cultural flowering movements in Chicago, for example, or even in Washington, DC. And so all of this is happening at the same time. And so to only get the Jazz Age, and the flappers and the prohibition is just one part of the story. And with TOBA Time, I really got to explore how African Americans are still striving for that freedom, that exploration, but they're dealing with it in a period of heightened violence. So how do you find what I call black artistic excellence in the middle of increasing repression, right, so it's a movement where this is also the time of what they call the new Negro movement in the 1920s, where those same African Americans who are returning in that period of World War One, are also unwilling to come back to the same levels of repression that they had had before the war. And so, again, another perfect storm moment or all of these things are happening at the same time. And you have the sensibilities of a new Negro movement happening during the creative exploration of TOBA Time, all at the same time.

Wow. And so, I mean, this this description of this perfect storm moment as you're describing, it really fascinates me I'm so so captured to think about this, this what it must have felt like right to return home to think about returning to the society that is full of such fraught things and such animosity. And to navigate this is such a such a powerful lesson in resilience. I think it's really striking. I don't want to think about this. Right. So obviously, the the first book that you're writing is about black Chattanooga, right? Yeah. And specifically this, this physical space, this location, the city. But you're mentioning all these other places where music and where black culture are having this sort of explosive influence on the broader culture and also the reimagining of the black experience, right, Chicago, obviously, Harlem, all these other places. Tell me a little bit about if you wouldn't mind TOBA and how place plays a role in the circuit of black vaudeville and the way that it's being propagated across the country.

Sure, I actually say in the introduction, that place is a second leading character in, in the overall text. (Dr. Anson: so true). So whereas the first work that I spent a good deal of time on took place in Chattanooga, and centered through the lens of the life of Bessie Smith, TOBA is kind of an opposite. It's like looking at the nation as a whole through the lens of this one circuit, for example. So it just so happened, good fortune for me, that TOBA, one of its headquarters cities was Chattanooga, Tennessee, and so I can kind of stay in the same physical place when I was beginning the research. But then the other headquarter cities were Chicago and Washington, DC. And so in the life of the circuit between 1920 and 1931, there were over 100 theaters cast across the south, the Midwest, and somewhat of the Northeast. The only place that did not have any theaters was the West Coast. And so you're really learning about the racial interactions that happen in city spaces, but also in some rural spaces as you're following the circuit. So if you're taking a show that begins in the East circuit, and the East is including Washington, DC and Baltimore, and that one show was traveling all the way through the Midwest, which means you end up in Chicago, you would end up in St. Louis, Columbus, Ohio, and then you traveled down to the heart of the circuit, which was the South. You're going everywhere from Jackson, Mississippi, to Dallas, Texas, all the way to Pensacola, Florida. But you really get an overview of what it would have been like, first of all to travel with was a rarity for most Americans, let alone African Americans.

Yeah, there's not a Southwest. Yeah, that's not how it is. Yeah, it's It's remarkable to think about the degree to which this travel is both physically difficult, but also socially, very challenging, right,

It is, but also an opportunity for people who wouldn't have been outside of their county in most places, to see the country. And most of these entertainers are traveling by rail. And they're really forging new communities in each city or location that they travel to. So again, place and space are its own character in the texts.

Wow, that's fantastic. It's such an interesting thing to think about is just the degree to which these performers are having to move around and then (Dr. Scott: everyday!) Yeah, everyday right, to it to be able to do this, this this job and changing the narrative as they go. And, obviously thinking about places being one of the characters, but also want to think about some of the main characters of this of this text as well. We don't want to leave them by the wayside. And I think it's interesting that in some of your writing about this, you talk about these figures as both entrepreneurs and entertainers, and I wanted to ask you a bit about how these folks sort of break through and these these dual roles, and then the what the stories might tell us about American society, both at that time and about the present.

I found that many of the entertainers had to become entrepreneurs because of the few spaces that were actually open for black autonomy, black performance in general. So someone like the leader of the circuit, SH Dudley, had started out as a comedian in Dallas, but then he eventually in the 19th century, eventually moves to Chicago, where he becomes a performer. Again, still doing comedic acts in Chicago. But then he moves in his own career from being a stage manager to a theater manager to actually making a theater circuit of his own that predates TOBA. So in his mind, he could have waited for an opportunity for the big time, or vaudeville based in New York to kind of capture him, like his counterparts like Bert Williams, for example, another African American comic of the time. But he instead he chose to kind of forge his own path so that if the theaters weren't asking for his performance, he was going to create the theaters and the circuits for himself and like-minded entertainers. So it kind of went hand in hand, the circuit on the majority of the people who were on the leadership board had some involvement in being performers themselves.

Wow, that's really incredible. So are there any specific other characters maybe that stand out to you in this history as being, maybe those that we might not have heard of as non historians very often, but are maybe deserving of some, some shoutouts, maybe on the podcast.

Sure. In addition to Dudley, who was kind of my favorite guy, mainly because a lot of his resources are his paper trail is actually in DC, so it was easy to get to (Dr. Anson: Okay, interesting. Yeah). Yeah. But, um, he's followed by a host of other women, which I was actually surprisingly found who were in leadership. People like the Griffith sisters, who again, were vaudevillian comics and dancers on the circuit, who then decided to lease out their own theaters in Chicago and Washington DC in the early 19 teens, right before TOBA got started. But then I don't want to short change all of the entertainers that we do know who actually begin their career on the TOBA circuit. So people like bandleader Cab Calloway who actually graces the cover of my book, but also all of the host of blues singers. In addition to Bessie Smith, like Ida Cox, like Victoria Spivey, like Ma Rainey are able to be headliners on the circuit and really not only perfect their craft artistically, but they are able to kind of really hone their business acumen and become business women in their own right. Many of the dancers that we're going to see in Hollywood's 1930s films, people like Bill Bojangles Robinson, for example, the one who's dancing with Shirley Temple. They are headliners on the TOBA circuit. And people like Sammy Davis Jr, who starts out at three years old as a tap dancer with his uncle and his godfather. They are child performers on the circuit. So it's really a training ground for some of the best and brightest artists that we see in black America going on from the 1930s through roughly the 1950s. Even someone like Hattie McDaniel, the first woman to win the Academy Award, she begins on the TOBA circuit.

Wow, that's fascinating to think about this jump to Hollywood. The Hollywood's Golden Age kind of coincides very neatly with this kind of as, as TOBA starts to sort of get going, right. The Golden Age of Hollywood starts to really ramp up as well. And you can see that sort of talent magnet happening. The kinds of names that the average American might have heard in these kinds of contexts, or in the Hollywood context, it's so fascinating to to trace their origins to this to this specific circuit. So that's fascinating. And, you know, I think about the anecdote that you shared, where just one individual had this paper trail right in DC, I wanted to ask a little bit about your research methods, if you wouldn't mind telling me about, obviously, as a social science podcast, right? We we get into this discussion frequently. But so how is it that you're actually uncovering these stories and understanding the evolution of TOBA and the work of these individuals as both performers and as entrepreneurs?

Sure, this process, the research process is a labor of love. I love that even more than the writing. But this is a two fold process. So I'm a trained as a social historian. So I'm looking at the lived experiences of the entertainers, the entrepreneurs, but also the audience members. So in order to find that type of story, that of the day to day, I really have to dive deep into archival research. And so that means I'm looking at everything from playbills, to advertisements, to photos, to scripts, to song lyrics, definitely deeply into black newspapers, which actually had a partnership with TOBA. There were articles in the Afro, the Baltimore Afro American, as well as the main paper that has a connection with the circuit, the Chicago Defender. And so I'm deeply involved in newspaper research and media analysis, on the one hand, but then the second part of the story is this is a business history. And I'm definitely not a business historian by training. So that was the learning curve for me, diving into things like probate records, incorporation charters, ledgers, contracts. Trying to find any sense of autonomy, black autonomy, within the circuit, to really kind of cast out the idea that TOBA was a circuit that was essentially a story of white management exploiting black entertainers, right. So in order to kind of cast against that argument, I had to figure out what where are these people, you know, how are they making money, retaining money? Who are the characters when they're not on stage, right. And so that two fold process was a deep dive into archival research across the country. So Georgia, Tennessee, Washington, DC, New York. If they have there is no one TOBA archive. And I think that was the most challenging thing. But if you're looking for business records, or even institutional records, often you can go to one location and there's a file of records. Here, it might be, you know, a collection of advertisements in Macon, Georgia, or it might be some contracts in Nashville, Tennessee, and you really kind of had to sift and put them all together to create this fuller picture that becomes TOBA Time.

Wow, that's really interesting to think about the technical nature of some of this documentation. And so I mean, what are these kinds of documents look like? Are they just like, bullet points? Are they Ledgers? I mean, what what kind of,

It's a mix. Some of them are like, microfilm records, right? So you have fragments of information. But then I found one archive that was very fascinating, and it had like four boxes of information dedicated to TOBA. But there were the physical contracts and handwritten Ledgers and how much each performer was paid and the percentage that was paid to TOBA. And, you know, I'm a historian. I'm nosy. So I'm going to turn the paper over if I can, right and the margin information you can tell the circuit was actually going through a downturn when you flip the page over. And the ledgers had the pre printed listing of the Keith vaudeville circuit, which was the mainstream white circuit, in based in New York. So that means they're casting aside literally their stationery and sending it off to the black circuit in in Georgia. And we had those managers there who were handwriting in how much each performer is going to get paid. And so a lot of it is just the fascination of you know, being the the nosy historian right. What are they writing? Where are they keeping it? Obvious ephemera things that you think, you know, aren't really not that important what people write on the back of a playbill or a program can tell a whole nother story.

That's incredible. It's it strikes me as sort of detective work in a way right

It is, it is. It's definitely like the historical treasure hunt I call it . You're always looking for the next thing.

Historical treasure hunt. I love that, yeah. And in terms of the next thing I also wanted to ask you about what is next for this stream of research as well. I mean, are you continuing to work on TOBA? Are there other outcroppings of this that you're starting to investigate?

Sure, so since the book just came out, I can't really leave TOBA alone altogether (Dr. Anson: of course, of course). Only couple of months in, but I'm actually fascinating. I'm working on a couple of articles now. One on Count Basie, who figures in as one of the musicians in chapter five of the of this text, I'm actually looking at his wife, Katherine Basie, who starts out as a burlesque dancer in the 1930s and 40s, and then becomes a civil rights activist in the 1950s. And so again, that kind of well, how are we using the arts and arts that are challenged and often ridiculed for being risque, and how they actually turn things on their head, and this person becomes an activist. Another project that again, kind of sifted out of TOBA is that one of the women who was involved in Nexi dancing on the circuit, eventually becomes involved with a social organization that spawns a group of women talent managers in the 1940s and 50s. So women who are kind of tangentially related to black performance, are then promoting people like Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway by the time we get to the 1950s and 60s and 70s. So I'm still interested in that management side. So we're not going to leave TOBA behind. It still kind of stands as the foundation for my future research.

Yeah, nor should we, it seems, I mean, that's incredible. Some of these names that you're mentioning, and it really does strike me that this history, you know, 100 years plus or minus ago, but really not that long. When we think about the sort of generations of talent, we're very much still so strongly affected by this exact period. And I'm also so struck by the notion that this account moves us into so many different fields and dimensions, right, not only the actual performance and the history of music and the history of culture, essentially. But also we think about this entrepreneurship piece, and about the kind of formative models of what it looks like to be a black entrepreneur. That's fascinating to me. And then also this political dimension that you're bringing in as well now, right, it was just to say, like, here comes the civil rights movement. And obviously, some of these figures are becoming sort of leading voices in the black community through their entrepreneurship and their talents (Dr. Scott: most definitely) and finding this political voice. So what a fascinating period to study what a fascinating approach. And I'm really grateful that you're able to bring some of this to us today, as part of the podcast (Dr. Scott: Thank you so much). Yeah, of course. So before I let you go, I know obviously, you're very busy, you got a lot more, a lot more research, to do, more archives to get into, more, more treasure hunting, to take care of. I wanted to ask you a question that we ask everybody who comes to the podcast who has some sort of academic role, and that is, if you had any advice for students who might be listening into this podcast today, and you're thinking themselves, you know, Dr. Scott's pretty cool. This kind of research is pretty awesome. I want to do this for a living one day. I'd love to go pro in the social sciences, so to speak. Do you have any words of advice for students who might be thinking along those lines?

Sure, I would say find a project that's going to sustain your interest (Dr. Anson: Sure). Even if you think I don't have enough research for this, or I don't have the skills to do the research for this. To find something that you can't stop thinking about, because that usually makes the best project. I would also tell students to not be afraid of the archive, right? That people are like, okay, it's a dusty room full of papers. What am I supposed to do with that, right? But if you kind of frame it in a way of that, these are kind of, again, puzzle pieces that people from yesteryear have left behind for us. And we're just kind of putting them together to make a fuller picture. That qualitative research is not something that you need to steer away from. So even of those folks who are deeply involved in STEM projects, but still have a kind of an interest in history in the social sciences. I would tell them to start with the archive, right. I take students to the Library of Congress and we just go out into the manuscript room and to see what you might be able to find. And that you can kind of definitely be interdisciplinary in your approach and pull all of these skills together, right. But at the end of the day, always come to the dark side, come to social sciences and historians.

You're very much patient with the choir here. I agree entirely. And I love that that idea of getting lost in the archive, and then maybe finding what you're looking for, in an unexpected way. That's such a cool idea. I'm ready to start doing historical research. I'm not sure the extent to which I'll be able to, obviously, with all of my existing commitments, but that that sounds like such a fascinating process. And really, it's so cool to see it, bear fruit in the incredible publication that you've recently produced. So Dr. Scott, thank you. We're really appreciative of your time on the podcast. And yeah, thanks again. The book once again is TOBA Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners Booking Association in Jazz Age America. Thanks again for your time.

Thank you.

That's all for today's episode. I hope you had as much fun as I did learning about TOBA and the fascinating world of black vaudeville. Until next time, I hope you'll get a chance to enjoy some summer entertainment. But don't forget to keep questioning.

Retrieving the Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our director is Dr. Christine Mallinson, our Associate Director is Dr. Felipe Filomeno, and our production intern is Alex Andrews. Our theme music was composed and recorded by D'Juan Moreland. Find out more about CS3 at socialscience.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 events. Until next time, keep questioning.