Blues Book of the Year -Living Blues With this volume, Lynn Abbott
and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the
development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades
of research, the authors bring to life the performers,
entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most
crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville
theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues
is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the
nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as
America's favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation
necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville
theaters. When these venues first gained popularity ragtime coon
songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters
provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation
and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were
formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction
between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The
first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler "String Beans" May,
a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre,
senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the "blues
master piano player of the world." His musical legacy, elusive and
previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of
country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording
era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of
blackface comedian, female "coon shouters" acquired a more
dignified aura in the emergent persona of the "blues queen." Ma
Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through
this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora
Criswell and her protege Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the
blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black
vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater
Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the
emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring
companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time
the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an
exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became
something it had never been before-a gateway to big-time white
vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan
cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative
period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more
creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early
development of the original blues on the African American
vaudeville stage.
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