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Sophie Tucker, Racial Hybridity and Interracial Relations in American Vaudeville

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2019

MARIA DE SIMONE
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Abstract

This article discusses Sophie Tucker's racialized performance in the context of early twentieth-century American vaudeville and black–Jewish interracial relations. Tucker's vaudeville musical acts involved mixed racial referents: ‘black-style’ music and dance, Jewish themes, Yiddish language and the collaboration of both African American and Jewish artists. I show how these racial combinations were a studied tactic to succeed in white vaudeville, a corporate entertainment industry that capitalized on racialized images and fast changes in characters. From historical records it is clear that Tucker's black signifiers also fostered connections with the African American artists who inspired her work or were employed by her. How these interracial relations contended with Tucker's brand of racialized performance is the focus of the latter part of the article. Here I analyse Tucker's autobiography as a performative act, in order to reveal a reparative effort toward some of her exploitative approaches to black labour and creativity.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 153 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2019 

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Footnotes

Archival research for this article has been carried out at the Museum of the City of New York (Sophie Tucker Collection), Billy Rose and Manuscripts and Archives Divisions of the New York Public Library (Sophie Tucker Scrapbooks and Autobiographical Writings), and the Shubert Archives (General Correspondence and Script Series). A special thanks to Shubert archivist Sylvia Wang for her bright intuition, commitment and generosity.

References

Notes

2 These appellatives were frequently used to title reviews of Sophie Tucker's stage works in theatre and entertainment publications such as the New York Clipper, Variety, and The Billboard.

3 Antelyes, Peter, ‘Red Hot Mamas: Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, and the Ethnic Maternal Voice in American Popular Song’, in Dunn, Leslie C. and Jones, Nancy A., eds., Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 212–29, here p. 228Google Scholar.

4 Tucker, Sophie, Some of These Days: The Autobiography of Sophie Tucker (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1946), p. 139Google Scholar.

5 Throughout the article, I employ the adjective ‘American’ only to reference vaudeville, while I use the shortened ‘US’ in its adjectival form to characterize the culture and people of the United States of America.

6 New York Clipper, 20 September 1922; Variety, 21 September 1922. Sophie Tucker Scrapbooks, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library. ‘Lovin’ Sam Sheik of Alabam’, lyrics by Jack Yellen, music by Milton Ager (New York: Ager, Yellen & Bornstein Inc., 1922). Both lyricist and composer were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

7 See Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. See also Brodkin, Karen, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

8 Harrison-Kahan, Lori, The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), pp. 24–5Google Scholar.

9 Ibid.

10 Casey, Kathleen B., The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015), p. 112Google Scholar.

11 Mock, Roberta, Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 The colloquial expression ‘to hit the big time’ likely entered American English from the context of vaudeville, where ‘big time’ was the circuit of wide and elegant vaudeville theatres, as opposed to the smaller and more modest houses making up the ‘small-time’ circuit.

15 Monod, David, The Soul of Pleasure: Sentiment and Sensation in Nineteenth-Century American Mass Entertainment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), pp. 171–205Google Scholar.

16 See DesRochers, Rick, The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 See Cherry, Robert, ‘Jewish Displacement of Irish Americans in Vaudeville: The Role of Religious and Cultural Values’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 25, 3 (25 December 2013), pp. 344–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Mooney, Jennifer, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Racial impersonation became a speciality also for African American performers, especially in the context of blackface and whiteface minstrelsy. See McAllister, Marvin E., Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels & Stage Europeans in African American Performance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

19 A transition from stereotypical and clownish to elegant and glamorous was evident in the clog dancing of Irish Pat Rooney Sr in the 1880s, and his son and daughter-in-law Pat Rooney Jr and Marion Bent a generation later. Famous among the Jewish impersonators in blackface were Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Among the Jewish ‘beggar’ types were Joe Welch and his brother Ben Welch, Frank Bush and, later, Willie Howard.

20 See Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. See also Steen, Shannon, Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 33–64Google Scholar. On blackface minstrelsy and nationhood see Roediger, David R., The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 115–32Google Scholar.

21 Ibid.

22 As Michael Rogin put it, ‘by joining structural domination to cultural desire, [racial impersonation] turned Europeans into Americans’. Rogin, Michael Paul, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 12Google Scholar.

23 Tucker, Some of These Days, p. 33.

24 Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress, p. 17.

25 Sophie Tucker Collection, Series I: Sheet Music, Lyrics and Orchestration, 1919–1940, Museum of the City of New York.

26 See Renton, Edward, The Vaudeville Theatre, Building, Operation, Management (New York: Gotham Press, Inc., 1918)Google Scholar.

27 This rule could not be applied to the TOBA circuit, which was managed and staged exclusively by African Americans. Even on the TOBA, however, and famously in early African American musical comedies, racial impersonation was a regular presence. See Brown, Jayna, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 92–127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 My survey of vaudeville programmes at the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library has shown an average of three impersonators per bill.

29 See Glenn, Susan A., ‘“Give an Imitation of Me”: Vaudeville Mimics and the Play of the Self’, American Quarterly, 50, 1 (1 March 1998), pp. 47–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Mock, Jewish Women on Stage, pp. 49–76.

31 Many of such reports are archived in the Keith and Albee Papers at University of Iowa's Special Collections. Edward F. Albee and Benjamin F. Keith owned the widest and most prosperous chain of vaudeville theatres in the United States.

32 Tucker, Some of These Days, pp. 40–1.

33 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

34 Ibid., p. 135.

35 Amy Leslie, Chicago Daily News, 18 December 1922. Sophie Tucker Scrapbooks, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.

36 Piercy Hammond, ‘Predicting Popularity for Louisiana Lou’, Chicago Tribune, 4 September, 1911, p. 4. Addison Burkhardt and Frederick Donaghey, Louisiana Lou, 1912. Manuscript Division, US Copyrighted Dramas, Microfilm Reel 69, Library of Congress.

37 An undated clipping titled ‘Louisiana Lou at LaSalle’ in Sophie Tucker's September 1911–August 1912 scrapbook defines Tucker as ‘the best singer of ragtime tunes on the stage’. Sophie Tucker Scrapbooks, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.

38 Amy Leslie, Chicago Daily News, 12 May 1912. Sophie Tucker Scrapbooks, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.

39 Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress, p. 12.

40 See Savran, David, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Brown, Babylon Girls.

42 Ibid., pp. 157, 213–14.

43 Tucker, Some of These Days, pp. 306–7.

44 Tucker, Sophie, ‘How Negroes Influenced my Career’, in Thompson, Era Bell and Nipson, Herbert, eds., White on Black: The Views of Twenty-Two White Americans on the Negro (Chicago: Johnson Pub., 1963), pp. 153–70, here p. 168Google Scholar.

45 Kimball, Robert and Bolkom, William, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (New York: Viking Press, 1973), pp. 15–17Google Scholar.

46 Cited in Harrison, Daphne, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 209Google Scholar.

47 Ibid.

48 Ida Forsyne, interview by Marshall Stearns, 29 July 1964, artist file, Institute for Jazz Studies, Dana Library, Rutgers University.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid.

51 Tucker, Some of These Days, pp. 84–5.

52 Tucker, ‘How Negroes Influenced my Career’, p. 155. Tucker, Some of These Days, pp. 78–80.

53 Tucker, Some of These Days, p. 129.

54 Ibid., p. 76.

55 Ibid., pp. 78–80.

56 On 28 August 1909 the New York Clipper reported, ‘Sophie Tucker on Morris Time. Sophie Tucker, “that singer,” recently prominent in the “Follies of 1909,” is entering vaudeville on the Morris time, opening this week at the American Music Hall, Rockaway Beach, N.Y.’ New York Clipper, 28 August 1909, p. 735.

57 Script Series, Lulu's Husbands Script # 2229, Shubert Archives. On Sophie Tucker's salary for Lulu's Husbands see Early General Correspondence (1908–10) Series, Box 44/Jaa-Jac: JW. Jacobs, Shubert Archives.

58 Sophie Tucker Autobiographical Writings, Manuscripts and Archives Division, the New York Public Library.

59 Tucker, Some of These Days, p. 114.

60 Ibid.

61 Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress, p. 40.

62 Tucker, ‘How Negroes Influenced my Career’, p. 166.

63 Ibid.

64 Harrison-Kahan, The White Negress, p. 24; Casey, The Prettiest Girl on Stage Is a Man, p. 112.