The Original Blues. The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff (2017)

To the rather limited selection of venues that blacks could attend in the late 19th century, African-American vaudeville contributed a valuable part. As some important saloons, bars, theaters or pavilions were ”devoted to the exclusive amusement of colored patrons.” Segregation and racist behavior were the main reasons for this new branch of entertainment at that time. Black citizens would not be served or admitted in bars, restaurants and theaters. Naturally, the black vaudeville also offered business opportunities for the theater owners, who in the early days of the 20th century were mostly white.

Simultaneously, minstrelsy was replaced by this new vaudeville style that featured blues as a main attraction next to the coon songs and blackface performers. Many (mostly female) blues artists spent years in the vaudeville before receiving massive attention, as did Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Ora Criswell to name but a few.

Usually, booking was done by the theater owners individually, but when in 1921 the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) took over national booking for those vaudeville acts working in the South exclusively, many black artists would find this their door opener to larger crowds, both white and black. The showmen, particularly the blues artists, now easily could reach new audiences in the urban northern cities while selling recorded blues to that same audience.

In very elaborate examples of once famous but today forgotten artists, Seroff and Abbott expose the many factions that enabled commercial success for the first starts of the blues. The line went from talent scouts to minstrelsy, vaudeville bookings, recording scouts, race records marketing in black newspapers to large ads in national trade papers.

Covered here is the era from roughly the 1890s to the mid-1920s, when blues got commercialized and sold as race records by various pioneering labels. The volume covers those recording artists who later became known as “blues queens” (marketed as female “coon shouters” at that time) and blues piano players. With very few exceptions, male vaudeville acts were considered and labeled mostly as (blackface) comedians; they also hardly ever recorded phonograph records. Furthermore, interesting in this context is the fact that even though blues guitarists were present in black communities long before the 1890s, in early black vaudeville, they never played a role, since the main instrument to accompany vaudeville singers was the piano.

Main tools for research were the archives of several important black newspapers of the South, such as the Indianapolis Freeman, Chicago Defender, Savannah Tribune and others. In those papers, every mention of vaudeville and blues acts, new locations and proprietors of theaters and dance halls, traveling shows, coon acts and vaudeville announcements as well as reviews thereof were thoroughly checked by Seroff and Abbott.
This huge piece of work revives not only old times but gives the vivid background (in the idiom of the times) to the additional research that enlarges on band arrangements, travel and show schedules, the introduction of new songs and themes as well as changing management of theaters, booking organizations and marketing personnel. So we learn of exact dialogue descriptions and lineups, as to who did what comedy routine, sang which songs, played cornet in which outfit and what dance routines were performed from musical shows to “novelty” acts such as moving pictures and balloon rides.

The chronologically arranged sections also feature a chapter on the very interesting life and “…untold legacy of Bluesman Butler ‘String Beans’ May. A comedian/dancer/piano player and “original blues” (the 12-bar blues) superstar of his time and vaudeville professional who performed the latest blues songs. His “Get You a Kitchen Mechanic” and “Alabama Bound” became theater and black vaudeville hits (and had easily made the charts or billboard, if only they had existed back then.) The sheet music to “Alabama Bound” (1909) shows the first appearance of the generic term “blues” in print.

In the final chapter “Yours for Business: The Commercialization of the Blues, 1929-26,” the authors conclude that there definitely would not be today’s blues history without black vaudeville. “Adaptations of the music of String Beans, Baby Seals, Virginia Liston, Benton Overstreet and countless other early black vaudevillians are prominent in country blues recordings of the 1920s and 1930s; leading to the conclusion that even if there was practically no blues in African American vaudeville, the songs and styles of vaudeville stars left a deep impress on blues guitarists. Country blues came of age in the shadow of popular vaudeville blues.”

This is a massive work of research and documentation. The present volume could indeed be looked at as the third part in a trilogy on the development of the blues or African-American popular music as such. The two authors have already published two large and excellent volumes on black traveling shows, “coon songs,” African-American popular song and blues as a milestone in the development of American music.

The Original Blues comes with almost 200 b/w reproductions of vaudeville ads, sheet music covers and incredibly rare publicity photographs. Furthermore, it provides a general index, as well as an extra songs index and a theater index, which will be much appreciated by music investigators and musicologists.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2018

Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. The Original Blues. The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville. University of Mississippi Press, 2017, 480 p.