In “Shuffle Along,” two black people fell in love onstage, and Walton wanted to see how a white audience would handle this. There was, however, an area in which the show genuinely pushed things forward: romance. A strange story, but this is a strange country. It was allowed, for actual black people to perform this way, starting around the 1840s - in a very few cases at first, and then increasingly - and there developed the genre, as it were, of blacks-in-blackface. By mocking themselves, their own race, they were giving it up. They could hide their blackness behind a darker blackness, a false one, a safe one. Blacks, too, could exist in this space that was neither-nor.
CAKEWALK INSTRUMENT DEFINITION FILES WILLIAMS CRACK
And this created a space, a crack in the wall, through which blacks could enter, because blacks, too, could paint their faces. That was an old custom of the stage, going back at least to “Othello.” They could live with that. But what those audiences would allow, would sit for - not easily at first, not without controversy and disdain, but gradually, and soon overwhelmingly - was the appearance of white men who had painted their faces to look black. To be sitting below a black man or woman, looking up - that made many whites uncomfortable.
In front of the cabin, in the nursery, in a tavern, yes, white people might enjoy hearing them sing and seeing them dance, but the stage had power in it, and someone who appeared there couldn’t help partaking of that power, if only ever so slightly, momentarily. There were anomalous instances, but as a rule, it didn’t happen. The sight wasn’t tolerated by white audiences. They could not, that is, appear as themselves. But it emerged from a single crude reality: African-American people were not allowed to perform onstage for much of the 19th century. The blacks-in-blackface tradition, which lasted more than a century in this country, strikes most people, on first hearing of its existence, as deeply bizarre, and it was. In one picture of Hogan, from the 1890s, he looks more like a sock puppet, wearing a clownish pointed cap. He was a black entertainer who painted his face - with burned cork or greasepaint (or in emergencies, lampblack, or in real emergencies, anything black mixed with oil) - to make it appear darker. Hogan was not so much unbleached as the opposite of bleached.
Walton and Hogan wrote songs together, and it was Hogan who first brought Walton to New York, as a kind of business manager. the Unbleached American, an early black minstrel and vaudeville comedian who (by some historians’ reckoning) was the first African-American performer to play before a white audience on Broadway. Louis, a city he left behind 15 years before - and where he got his start as America’s first black reporter for a local daily, writing about golf - he had somehow come to know and collaborate with the legendary Ernest Hogan, a.k.a. Les Walton, the journalist in the audience that night, was also a theater man. Among themselves, they referred to the show as “Scuffle Along.” The production was forced to rip out seats in the front three rows to make room. It needed space for the band, which happened to include a 25-year-old musician known as Bill Still, later to become the famous composer William Grant Still, but in 1921 a mostly unheard-of young man from Arkansas, switching among the six or seven instruments he taught himself to play. A problem: The music hall had no orchestra pit, and this show needed an orchestra. It had philosophical lectures, amateur violin recitals and religious meetings, and during the day it showed silent movies: “ ‘Pudd’n Head Wilson,’ with Theodore Roberts, tomorrow.” But on this evening - and for many months to come, as it turned out - the stage belonged to an all-black show called “Shuffle Along,” a comedy with lots of singing and dancing. A kind of multipurpose performance space, not very big, not very nice, “sandwiched in between garages,” Walton wrote, and “little known to the average Broadway theatergoer.” You could rent the place for the night. Or the Sixty-Third Street Music Hall, as it was more properly called. Ninety-five years ago in New York, a journalist named Lester Walton bought a ticket to see a much-buzzed-about new show, a “musical novelty” that had opened about a week before at the Sixty-Third Street Theater.