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Welcome Episode Four of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black artists invented the Broadway Musical, and how they changed America in the process.

I'm David Armstrong and I call this episode "Eubie Blake and the Black artists who invented Broadway.”

In our last episode, I outlined the vibrant, but almost entirely forgotten, series of African American musicals that thrived on Broadway during the first decade of the 20th century and strongly influenced the creation of the Broadway musical just at that moment it was becoming its own separate and distinctive art form.

That productive era, however, was followed by nearly ten years in which Black musicals were entirely absent from Broadway.

But during that decade, the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North combined with the dynamic social changes that emerged after the First World War, would transform Harlem into a vibrant breeding ground for modern Black culture and lead to a new and even more significant series of Black musicals.

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The first, most successful, and most influential musical of that era was Shuffle Along.

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With music by Eubie Blake, lyrics by Noble Sissle, and book by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, the show opened in the Spring of 1921 and almost immediately caused a sensation and it jumpstarted this new era of Black musicals on Broadway.

Its plot revolved around an election for mayor in an all-Black town in the South. The characters did not stray very far from the old minstrel show stereotypes, but even so, Shuffle Along is considered by many to be one of the instigators of the Harlem Renaissance.

Just what was the Harlem Renaissance?

In his book, Harlem: The Crucible of Modern African American Culture, author Lionel Bascom says the Harlem Renaissance was a sudden blossoming of Black visual, performing, and literary art in New York.

And he explains how these “seismic cultural changes created an unprecedented opportunity to use art to recast the Negro as a deserving worthwhile American no longer to be seen as just the downtrodden descendants of slaves.”

And Langston Hughes said more than once that Shuffle Along was the instigator of this incredible period.

He added that for nearly two years the show was always packed. Shuffle Along, he said, gave a scintillating send-off and a pre-Charleston kick to the Negro Vogue in Manhattan that soon spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing.

The creators of Shuffle Along were all talented Vaudeville performers who began writing their own material.

The book writers were the comedy team of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. Miller and Lyles were both born in Tennessee in the mid-1880s, and they met while attending Fisk University.

Their Vaudeville act consisted of songs, jokes, and physical humor and included a sketch called “The Mayor of Dixie,” which they thought could be expanded into a full musical comedy book.

Shuffle Along’s songs were the creation of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. Sissle was born in Indianapolis in 1889 and he began singing in his high school Glee Club. He dropped out of college to join James Reese Europe Society Orchestra and later played in Europe's regimental band with the 369th Infantry Regiment known as the Harlem Hell Fighters during the First World War.

James Hubert Blake was born in Baltimore in 1883. Both of his parents were former slaves. Eubie started exhibiting extraordinary piano skills at the age of six, and by the age of 12, he had already composed the Charleston Rag and other Ragtime tunes to the great disapproval of his mother who did not want to have the devil's music in her house.

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His professional career began in Atlantic City where he worked with James P. Johnson and other veterans of the first wave of Black musicals on Broadway and he briefly took over leadership of the Society Orchestra after James Reese Europe's death.

Eventually, Sissle and Blake also teamed up to form a hit Vaudeville act called the Dixie Duo.

It was during this time that Miller and Lyles approached them about joining them and creating a musical comedy for Broadway.

After much struggle, they persuaded the white producer John Court to give the show a trial run and, following a severely underfinanced tour, the show opened at a rundown, seldom used theater on 63rd Street, more than 10 blocks away from most other Broadway shows.

Featuring all four of its authors in leading roles, Shuffle Along opened on May 22, 1921, and soon became a smash hit.

Eubie Blake's score for Shuffle Along helped usher in the jazz age, although it doesn't sound all that jazzy to us today, and his music would inspire every Broadway songwriter of the decade.

The song "I'm Just Wild About Harry" became an enormous hit.

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The story goes that Blake loved the music of Victor Herbert, and he wrote a waltz for the show "In Victor Herbert's Style."

I'm just wild about Harry, not with those words, of course.

Later, when it was decided that a waltz wasn't such a good fit for the show, Blake kept the melody, but changed the 3/4 time to a lively 4/4.

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Harry would become a timeless standard, and even be used as Harry Truman's campaign song during his successful run for president in 1948.

Shuffle Along's large cast introduced many African American stars, including Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, and Paul Robeson, and it attracted a large mixed-race audience with unsegregated seating.

The white cast members of other Broadway shows were so eager to see Shuffle Along that special midnight performances were added on Wednesdays to accommodate them.

Overall, the show would run an incredible 500 performances, and as I said, the show was tremendously influential.

Irving Berlin went to see it many times, and there's no doubt that George Gershwin and almost all of the other songwriters of the day were affected by it.

The show's choreography and wild dancing also had a tremendous impact on Broadway. Ziegfeld and other producers hired the dancers and the creators of Shuffle Along to teach their dancers how to move like that.

Perhaps most importantly, Shuffle Along's immense success demonstrated that both white and Black audiences were once again eager to see talented Black performers on stage and in Black authored shows.

As a result of the incredible success of Shuffle Along, over the following decade, more than 20 musicals written by and starring African Americans would open on Broadway.

Several of these shows were virtual sequels to Shuffle Along. They were set in the same town called Jimtown and featured some of the same characters.

For example, the 1923 musical Runnin’ Wild would run 288 performances and introduce the dance, the Charleston, along with the song of that same name by James P. Johnson and Cecil Mack.

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It would become the signature dance of the 1920s and it's a tune that still defines the decade.

The creators of these shows included a mix of returning veterans from the earlier era of Black musicals as well as new emerging talents.

Toward the end of the decade came a show called Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1928 and it was even more popular and successful than Shuffle Along.

The producer was a Russian Jewish immigrant originally named Lewis Lyzinsky. He was totally captivated by African American performers and spent most of his career producing shows with all-Black casts.

Inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies and other revues of the era, Blackbirds of 1928 was a lavish, star-studded musical revue with a cast of 100.

It was first performed at a theater in Harlem, then traveled to Paris and London before returning for a 515 performance run on Broadway.

The show produced four immensely popular songs, including the still much performed "I Can't Give You Anything But Love."

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All of the songs were written by lyricist Dorothy Fields and Irish American composer Jimmy McHugh.

Dorothy Fields was the daughter of Lew Fields of Weber and Fields and the sister of Bookwriter Herbert Fields. We will hear much more about both of them in future episodes.

Following Ziegfeld’s example, Lew Leslie would stage multiple editions of the show, including Blackbirds of 1930, 1934, 1936, and 1939.

And along the way featuring such stars as Adelaide Hall, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, Ethel Waters, and Lena Horn.

The success of Blackbirds inspired the 1929 revue, Hot Chocolates, and would introduce Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s classic songs "Black and Blue" and "Aunt Misbehaving," sung and played in the show by Louis Armstrong in his Broadway debut.

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In 1930, a show called Brown Buddies opened starring Bill Robinson and Adelaide Hall and with a score by African American songwriters Joe Jordan and Millard Thomas.

Just as this flourishing of Black musicals was reaching its peak, the landmark musical Show Boat opened.

This 1927 Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II show, was based on the best-selling novel by Edna Furber, and it was groundbreaking in a number of ways that I'll discuss in depth in future episodes.

But for right now, we should note that its plot revolved around controversial themes such as racial inequality and interracial marriage.

It was the first musical to intertwine stories of both Black and White characters who shared equal importance in the book and the score. The show also had a large multi-racial cast with white and Black actors sharing the stage side by side.

Show Boat would run 572 performances. It would tour extensively and have a hit revival on Broadway just five years after its premiere. And in the process, it would offer significant employment to African American performers.

It is arguably the single most influential musical of all time.

Unfortunately, the onslaught of the Great Depression in 1929 would make the economics of producing any kind of show on Broadway extremely challenging.

By the mid-1930s, we have entered another bleak period for Black songwriters, directors, and choreographers, and unfortunately, they will not find significant opportunity on Broadway again until the 1970s.

As we have discussed, one of the most influential aspects of these Black musicals of the 1920s was their exuberant dancing and choreography.

We talked about the Charleston whose wild abandon captured the zeitgeist of the era and whose basic steps would soon evolve into the Lindy Hop and swing dancing.

However, without a doubt, the most significant dance style of the 1920s was tap dancing, and I want to conclude this episode by exploring the fascinating history of this unique African American and Irish American co-creation.

Between 1619 and 1866, an estimated 388,000 enslaved Africans were kidnapped and brought to the United States. They came from a wide variety of regions and cultures and carried with them many diverse art, music, and dance traditions.

During centuries of enslavement, those traditions blended and intermingled. And like all people throughout history, no matter how oppressed or persecuted, these enslaved people sang and danced for various reasons: as religious expression, to express joy and sorrow, to reinforce a sense of community, or just for fun and entertainment. Meanwhile, white Southerners were exposed to this singing and dancing on a regular basis.

For generations, white children spent more time with the enslaved people who nursed and cared for them than they did with their own parents.

And the children of both white Southerners and enslaved Blacks played together and grew up in close contact. As a result, music and dance were exchanged back and forth between them continuously over hundreds of years.

The music of enslaved Africans was originally centered around various kinds of drums and rhythmic beats. However, after an unsuccessful, but for the whites, very alarming, slave rebellion in 1739, during which it was believed that the slaves had used drums to send messages to one another to coordinate the uprising, laws were passed forbidding the use of drums by enslaved Blacks for any purpose.

So, as a way around this problem, the slaves transferred the rhythms of the drums to their feet and their hands. They also clacked bones together like castanets and put strings on a gourd called a bunja, and in the process invented the banjo, a musical instrument found nowhere else in the world.

Another consequence of the great Irish famine and the migration to America that we talked about in Episode 2 was that it brought thousands of members of an outcast itinerant group very similar in many ways to the Roma people. They were known as the ‘Irish travelers’ or pejoratively as “Tinkers” who traveled throughout the South and performed their jigs and reels and clog dances wherever they went.

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The Tinkers' foot rhythms intrigued the Black slaves who picked them up quickly. Eventually they transformed the Irish downbeat into a syncopated off-rhythm and instead of the stiff upper body and arms that the Irish were locked into, the Blacks used their arms and entire body in exuberant ways.

As Agnes DeMille states in her 1980 book America Dances: “the Blacks threw away all the restraints until the decorous hornpipe and the Irish clog became the exuberant American buck and wing, tap and jazz.”

Well, that's one version of the story. Another thread centers around dance competitions that were mounted in and around the infamous Five Points District of New York in the 1840s.

The competitors were an African-American man named William Henry Lane, also known as Master Juba and the Irish American dancer John Diamond.

The Five Points was New York's poorest and most dangerous neighborhood and where the most poverty-stricken Irish, Jewish, German, Chinese and African-Americans lived all packed together in tenement buildings.

If you've ever seen the movie The Gangs of New York, that is set in Five Points. When Charles Dickens visited the area and one of its dance halls in 1841, he was appalled by the poverty he found, but he was thrilled by the dancing of 16-year-old William Henry Loose.

Here is how Dickens described his dancing: “Single shuffle, double, shuffle, cut and crosscut, snapping fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels. Dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs, all sorts of legs and no legs. What's it to him? And in the walk of life or dance of life does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him when he finishes by leaping on the bar counter and calling for something to drink.”

Just as boxing promoters would later purposely pit Black prize fighters against white boxers, beginning in 1844, theatrical agents organized dance contest between Juba and what they called his greatest white contemporary, 20-year-old Jim Diamond, who was called, quote, "one of, if not the greatest jig dancer the world has ever known."

The contestants were each paid $500, which was an enormous sum in those days equivalent to about $17,000 today.

This must mean that these competitions drew large and lucrative crowds. We don't know who the winners of these contests were, but according to Tyler Anbinder, in his history Five Points, we do know that such contests as well as the friendly rivalries between native-born whites, Irish immigrants and African-Americans within the Five Points dance halls had a profound influence on the direction of American dance.

Each group incorporated favorite steps from their competitors' dance idioms into their own. In Juba's case, he adopted some of the high-stepping, foot-stomping style of the jig into his own footwork.

It was from this interaction between Irish-Americans dancing the shuffle and the Irish dancing the jig that tap dancing developed.

Juba and Diamond competed in a series of these competitions across the United States and continued to influence each other's dancing.

Diamond would become a star performer in minstrel shows and Juba became one of the first black performers to guest star in a white minstrel show.

Juba's fame took him to London where he performed before royalty and where he died in 1852 at the age of 27.

Which version of the birth of tap is true?

Probably both of them and many similar interactions that have not been recorded.

A dance historian in 1948 contended that the repertoire of any current tap dancer contains elements that were established theatrically by Juba.

One of those was certainly the breakout dancing star of the 1920s, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson.

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Bill Robinson was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1878. He was primarily raised by his grandmother who was a former slave.

As a young man he was given the nickname ‘Bojangles’ because of his prickly and cantankerous disposition.

At the age of 5, Robinson began dancing for a living, performing in local beer gardens, and by the age of 12, he was touring with a show called The South Before the War. In 1902, he teamed up with another dancer named George W. Cooper and they became a popular Vaudeville act on the Keith and Orpheum Circuits.

They did not wear black face makeup, even though it was still typically used by almost every black performer in mainstream Vaudeville at that time.

When they split up in 1914, Robinson launched a very successful solo career. He soon rose to the top in big time Vaudeville and became one of the few African Americans to headline at New York's prestigious Palace Theatre.

His signature routine was his stair dance which he introduced in 1918 and he would perform various versions of it throughout his career. This routine was remarkable for both its showmanship and its musicality. As he danced up and down the stairs, each stair step would emit a different pitch.

In 1928, he starred on Broadway in the immensely successful musical revue Black Birds of 1928, where he introduced the songs “Digga Digga Do” and “Doin’ The New Low Down.”

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Although already a star, Blackbirds was a huge breakthrough for Robinson. It was during this time that he became well known as ‘Bojangles,’ which for his white fans suggested a cheerful, happy go lucky demeanor but signaled nearly the polar opposite meaning for his Black audience.

He went on to star in 14 Hollywood movies, most of them musicals, and including multiple roles opposite the child superstar Shirley Temple. Despite his fame, Robinson was limited to a very narrow range of stereotypical roles, usually servants of some kind.

In 1939, at the age of 61, he returned to Broadway to star in The Hot Mikado, a jazz-inspired interpretation of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta. Robinson celebrated his 61st birthday publicly by dancing down 61 blocks of Broadway.

Despite earning millions during his lifetime, Robinson died poor in 1949 at the age of 71. This is not as sad as it sounds, however, because he had actually given away much of his wealth to various charities during the last years of his life.

According to newspaper reports of the time, his funeral was attended by 100,000 people, including many of the biggest stars of show business.

In 1989, a joint congressional resolution established National Tap Dance Day on May 25th, Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson's birthday.

Robinson would inspire the tap dancers of his day as well as all who came after him, including John Bubbles, Fred Astaire, Honey Coles, Eleanor Powell, the Nicholas brothers, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Gregory and Maurice Hines and Savian Glover to name only a few.

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During the 1940s, tap dancing would fall out of fashion on Broadway, and it would rarely be seen in musicals throughout the 1950s and 60s.

But then it made a gigantic comeback in 1971 when a hit revival of the 1925 show No No Nanette jump-starred the nostalgia craze of the 1970s.

Ever since then, tap dancing has retained a strong presence on Broadway, and indeed has come to symbolize the very essence of the classic Broadway musical comedy.

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Broadway Nation is produced and written by me, David Armstrong, special thanks to Sean Griffin for his voice acting contributions and to the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and New World Records. For more music from this era, check out their amazing Black Manhattan series of recordings.

I also want to thank everyone at KVSH 101.9 FM on Beautiful Vashon Island, Washington and at the Broadway podcast Network.

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