Shuffle
Below is an excerpt from “Shuffle Along’ and the Lost History of Black Performance in America” by John Jeremiah Sullivan originally published in the New York Times in March 2016. The excerpt below shares the history of two actors who frequently performed in blackface, Bert Williams and George Walker. Their work preceded “Shuffle Along,” though does not always receive the same recognition as the “first” Black show on Broadway. The full article -. contextualizes “Shuffle Along” in the lineage of American Black Performance.
Williams was Bahamian born, a strikingly handsome man when he wasn’t in cork. He grew up in Florida and California. In San Francisco, in his late teens, he fell into the medicine-show world. Around 1893, he joined a troupe called the Mastodon Minstrels, and it was while performing with them that he came to know a fellow cast member named George Walker, a young man from Kansas who was to become his closest friend and creative partner for nearly 15 years. Williams and Walker — the black theatrical world at the start of the 20th century is unimaginable without them, and so is “Shuffle Along.”
When Williams and Walker started out in the 1890s, they were billed as “two real coons” who did “buck dancing.” But as the decade progressed, their ideas found some range, and they started producing musical comedies. In 1900, they did “Sons of Ham, ” a sort of variety-farce, full of “oddities hard to describe.” It boasted a “carload of special scenery and electrical effects, ” as well as “a chorus of handsome colored girls, 30 in number.” Besides that, it featured “a company of picked talent, ” among whom was one Aida Overton. Walker fell in love with her and married her, and she became Aida Overton Walker, the greatest black actress in America before the First World War. Her “Salome” dance took over New York for about a year, around 1912. In the new “Shuffle Along, ” Wolfe has Audra McDonald’s character, Lottie Gee, reminisce at one point over having shared the stage with Aida Overton Walker and a piece of singing advice she received from this mythic woman.
Some of the Williams and Walker shows were enormously popular. In fact, most of the claims that are made for “Shuffle Along” — that it was the first black Broadway show, or the first successful one — are really true of earlier Williams and Walker productions. Their 1907-9 show “Bandanna Land” played for capacity houses on tour and at the Majestic Theater at Columbus Circle, a much more legitimate “Broadway” house than the Sixty-Third Street Music Hall could ever aspire to be, and those audiences included, according to a much younger Lester Walton, “hundreds of white theatergoers.” Williams and Walker were so successful that they changed the profile of black entertainment in America, vastly for the better, but also in ways that pushed up against boundaries. A forgotten incident from their “Policy Players” tour of 1899-1900 makes clear how real the tensions were. The show was booked to run at the Grand Opera House in Washington, but according to a
newspaper report, the manager of the house had objected to Williams and Walker’s having an “orchestra leader who was a colored man.” The musicians, it was felt, wouldn’t like to see “a black director.” The New York Morning Telegraph of Nov. 18, 1899, ran a startling headline, “WILLIAMS AND WALKER, SENEGAMBIAN COMEDIANS, CAUSE TROUBLE, ” on top of its report:
Not so long ago they were content to fill a place upon the vaudeville stage at rapidly increasing compensation. But since then, they have been advanced to a position at the head of their own company, and they are now beginning to tell managers of theaters how they want things conducted during their various engagements. . .. [One] kick that arose was upon the question whether colored people should be admitted to all parts of the house or should be restricted to the balcony and gallery. The manager of the theater took a positive stand this time, and said he would close his doors rather than violate the rule against letting Negroes occupy the orchestra chairs. When Williams and Walker found they were really “up against it” they receded from their position, and consented to go on. The report concludes menacingly: “These young men are likely to wake up with a start some morning.”
Williams often remarked that although he was proud of having made people laugh for many years, he wanted to show that he could make them cry. But his and Walker’s ambitions for their material grew during that first decade of the century. When their “In Dahomey” debuted in 1903, they advised audiences to read a book about Ethiopia before going to see it, so they’d understand what was happening. Critics began to complain that they were no longer black enough. No longer blackface enough. In trying to be intellectual, the comedians had left behind what made them fun.
This reaction elicited from Walker a remarkable, slashing reply. He told The Toledo Bee (this is in Camille Forbes’s excellent “Introducing Bert Williams’): “There is no reason why we should be forced to do these old-time n*gger acts. It’s all rot, this slap-stick-bandanna handkerchief-bladder in the face act, with which Negro acting is associated. It ought to die out, and we are trying hard to kill it.” Walker said that 110 years ago.