It’s a Saturday night in New York City, 1925; get excited, because we’re going out on the town. You weave your way through the tables at one of New York City’s most infamous hot spots, The Cotton Club. You order a Sidecar at the bar and take a seat at your favorite table, all anticipation, as you wait for the night’s entertainment to begin. And then it does: the curtain sweeps back, revealing a Black woman dressed to the nines. She’s not just wearing a beautifully fringed flapper dress; there’s also an ostrich feather headdress. Every finger is dripping in diamond rings. She looks like a queen up there, one hip cocked as she smile down at your table. And that’s before she starts to sing. The crowd goes silent, mesmerized by the power of that voice, and the emotion humming through it. This woman, proud and sultry, could lead armies, and bring whole countries to their knees.

Welcome to the last episode of Season 4! I can think of no better way to wrap up our time in the Roaring 20s than by spending time with some of its most fabulous women of entertainment. Grab your best fringed dress, a diamond-collared leopard, and that good old razzle dazzle. Let’s go traveling.

research sources

Books & Academic Journals

Alan Schroeder, Josephine Baker, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.
Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Donald Bogle, Brown Sugar: Over 100 Years of America’s Black Female Superstars, New York: Continuum, 2007.
Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.
Jackie Kay, Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend, New York: Vintage Books, 2021.
Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters, New York: HarperCollins, 2011.
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.
Ken Burns, “Jazz.” PBS Documentary, 2001.
Amy Absher, “Musicians and the Segregated City: Chicago in the Early 1900s-1930s,” in The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.
Philip S. Foner, and Ronald L. Lewis, “Black Women Workers” in The Black Worker: The Era of Post-War Prosperity and the Great Depression, 1920-1936, Temple University Press, 1981.
Adrienne Oehlers, “The Chorus Girl in Black and White: Performing Race, Gender, and Beauty,” The Ohio State University, Graduate Dissertation, 2023.
Gail Hilson Woldu, “Do These Sequins Make My Butt Look Fat? Wardrobe, Image and the Challenge of Identity in the Music of Black American Women,” The Musical Quarterly 96, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 101-136.

Online Sources

Sara McNeil, “The Great Migration,” Digital History, 2018, accessed November 17, 2023.
“Colorism During the New Negro Movement,” CUNY Academic Commons, accessed November 17, 2023.
“History of Lynching in America,” NAACP, accessed November 17, 2023.
DeNeen L. Brown, “Red Summer: When Racist Mobs Ruled,” PBS American Experience, February 4, 2021, accessed November 17, 2023.
“African-American Theater Circuits,” Hearing the Americas, accessed November 17, 2023.
Dorian Lynskey, “The Forgotten Story of America’s First Black Superstars,” BBC Culture, February 16, 2021, accessed November 17, 2023.
“The Women Behind the Music,” Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, accessed November 17, 2023.
Erin Blakemore, “How Race Records Turned Black Music Into Big Business,” History.com, May 5, 2023, accessed November 17, 2023.

“Ma Rainey and the Georgia Jazz Band,” *Rolling Stone*, 1924, accessed November 17, 2023.

episode transcript

please keep in mind that this was written for audio, so there are bound to be some typos, and it won’t match the audio exactly.

THE 1920S: separate but equal (?)

Before we can get into all that jazz and razzle dazzle, we’ve got to try to understand what life is like for Black Americans in the 1920s. When the Civil War ended in 1865, it emancipated African Americans. But that doesn’t mean it also made them equal. They had to start entirely new lives, with little money, support, or education. Many traded enslavement on Southern plantations for work and living conditions that weren’t a whole lot better. For Black men, voting was legal, but often difficult - in the South, it was next to impossible. Black women couldn’t vote at all. Black Americans were barred from certain neighborhoods, schools, and jobs. They were paid less, more likely to work as unskilled laborers, more likely to live in poverty, and to be barred from roles in public service.

In the years right after the Civil War, there was the Reformation: a time when federals troops occupied the South to try and make its citizens obey the law. But by the 1870s, all that was over, and most Southern States had instituted what were called Jim Crow laws. These laws were meant to keep Black and Whites separate that meant segregated schools, public transport, movie theaters, even water fountains. And while Black facilities were supposed to be equal in quality, they rarely were. In 1896, the Supreme Court heard a case called Plessy v. Ferguson. The underlying case was based on a Black man who boarded a whites-only train car in New Orleans and got arrested for his trouble. In a landslide 7-1 decision, the judges upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal,” legitimizing the righteousness of Jim Crow laws everywhere. And they were everywhere, including up North, but for African Americans, the South was a particularly grim place to be.

In 1910, three out of every four Black Americans lived on farms, and nine out of ten of them living in the South. But then they started flocking to the North’s largest cities in what would come to be called the Great Migration. During the 1910s and 20s, Chicago's black population grew by 148 percent; Cleveland's by 307 percent; Detroit's by 611 percent. The North offered more jobs and opportunity, but it wasn’t free of discrimination and exclusion. The Great War only unscored the frustrating disrespect they often endured. More than 350,000 African Americans served for the American Expeditionary Force (AEF); 40 to 50,000 served under French commanders. The 15th Regiment, dubbed the Harlem Hellfighters, spent more time in continuous combat than any other American unit of its size: 191 days in the trenches. They suffered more losses than any other American regiment and were awarded more French Legions of Honor for bravery, than any other. Imagine their feelings when they came home to a country where many not only didn’t appreciate their service but showed them open contempt.

Things escalated in the Red Summer of 1919. There were some 25 race riots in some 50 cities across the country. White mobs attacked black people and invaded their neighborhoods, burning black businesses and homes. That included 97 recorded lynchings. These brutal public executions, carried out without any due process by lawless mobs, continued throughout the 1920s. And while some white people were lynched - for what, you ask? Helping Black people or being anti-lynching - as well as some immigrants, 72 percent of the victims were Black. White people accused them of murder, rape, arson, robbery, and vagrancy, whether they had any proof of said event or not. Lynchings involved hanging victims from trees, as well as torture, mutilation, decapitation, and desecration. Large crowds often attended; photos of lynchings were sometimes even sold as souvenir postcards. These unlawful murders were continually used in the South to terrorize and control Black people. In 1920s America, the specter of race-based violence is everywhere we look.

We also can’t talk about the 1920s without mentioning the Ku Klux Klan. The white supremacist group we all love to hate first rose up out the ashes of the Civil War, but it saw a massive revival during the 1920s. Remember that 1915 blockbuster we talked about last episode, Birth of a Nation? That blockbuster silent film that romanticized the founding of the KKK? That didn’t help matters. By 1925, more than 50,000 hooded members of the KKK, both men and women, were marching through Washington. Imagine being a Black American - or any American who values justice - watching them walk proudly through the streets.

Many cities adopted residential segregation ordinances meant to keep blacks out of predominantly white neighborhoods. But look: when one neighborhood doesn’t want you, you turn your back and start your own. Black Americans created cities-within-cities during the 1920s; places where they could build and celebrate community. Harlem, in upper Manhattan, was the largest of them all. Some 200,000 African Americans live there in the 1920s, attracting black intellectuals and artists from far and wide. Artists like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston help ignite what’s called the Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of Black artistic and cultural expression that produced some of America’s most famous music, art, dance, and writing. But it also extended to cities like Chicago, creating links with African tradition, and cultivating a sense of Black identity, on a scale that America has never seen before.

MINSTRELSY, VAUDEVILLE, AND ALL THAT JAZZ

By the 1920s, white Americans are getting increasingly obsessed with Black art and culture. But it’s not really a new development. The trend goes back to the traveling minstrel shows of yore. In the mid-1800s, both Black and white actors called “minstrels” put on shows, often while painted up in black face, performing caricatures of slaves on plantations to make their audiences laugh. In fact, that’s where the term “Jim Crow” comes from: he was a popular minstrel character. Minstrel shows were almost like the first national television: minstrels troupes travelled around, which meant that everyone was seeing the same songs and skits and bits. It developed a national humour. Unfortunately, some of that humor was racist to its core. These shows often characterized blacks as lazy, ignorant, criminal, hypersexual, even sub-human. So why were many black performers playing any part in them? …because it was the only integrated entertainment work they could get.

By the end of the 1800s, minstrelsy was making way for vaudeville. And while it started turning its back on blackface, in theme it wasn’t a whole lot better. Vaudeville shows were variety shows, usually featuring around a dozen performers, loosely organized into musical and dance acts. They were more fun to be in than minstrel shows: chaotic, full of impromptu and spontaneous performances, as well as a new, hot, sexy form of music called ragtime, great for dancing, and taking the nation by storm. Still, vaudeville was usually all about black performers romanticizing the Southern past for their audiences. They featured plantation songs, demeaning jokes, and stereotypical and racist characters. Why do it, then? Because it’s a way for the enterprising and talented lady to make a name for herself, and to make more money than she might doing anything else.

It’s a hard economy for Black women in America. Those in the South are often reliant on sharecropping, succeeding, or failing ,on the tide of the harvest. As they flood into the North, the jobs waiting for them are likely in domestic service, which many find demeaning. Some strive for industrial or factory jobs in the garment or tobacco industries, as they tend to pay better, but though more than twice as many black women are in the labor force as native-born white women, and yet they often get paid a whole lot less. A study conducted in one American industry found that 50% of the 177 women interviewed received $10 a week or less: the minimum weekly wage is supposed to be $16.50. In one candy factory, a forelady told an undercover investigator, "The colored girls start at $8 a week; of course, they wouldn't pay a white girl that." So imagine being a sharecropper’s daughter who comes across this ad in a local paper: “Wanted– A Girl for Vaudeville. One that can sing. Experience unnecessary. Must be reliable. $20 a week.” Ethel Waters, who will go on to become one of the era’s most famous singers, started her working life clearing dishes at an automat for 75 cents and one hot meal a day. By contrast, singing got her $2 a day. So you can see why so many Black women take up jobs as chorus girls, cabaret dancers, jazz and blues singers, vaudeville entertainers, and musicians. Some of them even get famous doing it.

Make it stand out

“Mamie Smith advertisement in *The Richmond Item*,” *Friends of Music Hall*, April 17, 2021, accessed November 17, 2023.

But it isn’t easy for a Black entertainer to break out in vaudeville. White entertainment circuits book acts into their vast network of theaters all around the country, while Black troupes have a harder time breaking in to perform for white audiences. The most prominent black circuit of the time is the Theatre Owners Booking Association (nicknamed TOBA, or Tough on Black Asses). For 25 cents, patrons could watch a variety show that lasted 2 to 4 hours, full of dancing girls, comedians, blues singers, snake or magic acts, and even a jazz band. Many Black vaudeville acts perform in more rural areas of the South as part of itinerant tent shows. Touring companies will announce their arrival in town with brass bands, sporting matches, and smaller performances before the main event. They perform to both black and white audiences, though the two are forced to sit on opposite sides of the tent.

Black entertainers on the circuit also have to deal with bad or absent housing, cramped dressing areas, poor lighting, racist managers, and schedules that tended to change on a dime. In the South, they also deal with the strictures of segregation, and dangers that come with it. Having grown up in the North, Bessie Smith had to learn the ways of the South quickly. On trains, she learned that food had to be packed beforehand because most dining cars were off limits. Once she arrived in a town or city, she headed for a colored boarding house, which often didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. Sometimes, when a town had no Black boarding houses, they had to sleep in empty buildings. Entertainers on the TOBA are often greeted with signs in a town telling them what parts of town to avoid, and what stores and restaurants they won’t be welcome in. Even vaudeville’s most famous Black singers had to face perilous conditions. During a tent show in South Carolina, Bessie Smith was told that she should run, as six hooded KKK members were marching toward her performance. Instead, the songstress stormed out to meet them. “I’ll get the whole damn tent out here,” she said. “Just pick up them sheets and run.” And they did. Meanwhile, when Ethel Waters was in an automobile accident in Birmingham, Alabama, white passersby did nothing to help her. Finally, some Black bystanders took her to a hospital, where a white doctor made her walk on a torn tendon to the Negro quarters of the hospital, where she was ignored and had her money stolen before a white nurse finally took pity and helped her. And these women are some of the most respected in the biz.

Showbusiness is a man’s world, and it’s hard for a Black female entertainer to gain control over her earnings or her purse strings. But these traveling shows offer black performers opportunities to play for more money and wider audiences. It’s a place to cut their teeth, to make connections, and to work their way into the spotlight. Vaudeville gives them a place to really soar.

Bessie Smith in the late 1920s, looking thoughtful with some epic feathers.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

the music of the age

The 1920s ushers in what turns out to be rather a boon for all performers: Prohibition. Suddenly there are thousands of speakeasies that need good nightly entertainment. Musicians who were earning $1.50 a night in dance halls could make a whole lot more at upscale clubs and mansions. Turns out everyone wants to shimmy to the music that will come to define the 1920s: jazz. Jazz grows and matures in big cities like Chicago and New York City, but its roots grew out of the rich soil of New Orleans. It was shaped by the city’s Black population, influenced by African percussive beats, Caribbean rhythms, and the call and response of the Baptist church, brought in by the formerly enslaved people who flooded here from the Mississippi Delta. They also brought another revelatory kind of music: the blues. But more on that in a minute.Jazz’s biggest influence was probably ragtime, a uniquely American style of syncopated instrumental music, usually centered around the piano. But jazz introduced the sounds of a brass band, and it wasn’t afraid to get very sexy. In fact, most of the truly great jazz being played at the turn of the century was emanating out of Storyville’s bordellos. The name “jazz” is rumored to have come from the jasmine perfume the city’s sex workers wore. No surprise, then, that a lot of people were nervous about what would come to be called “the Devil’s music.” It’s true that one things people loved about jazz and ragtime were that they were excellent to dance to. They inspired racy dances like the Black Bottom, the Grizzly Bear, and the Charleston, which many thought were corrupting America’s youth. Two famous White dancers, Irene Castle and her husband, made such dances more palatable to the masses, and super popular. But they couldn’t have done it without their all-black jazz band. And while many of the most famous early jazz stars are men, there are plenty of women blazing a trail alongside them: Lizzie Miles, Edna Hicks, Olivia L’Ange Porter Shipp, Baby Briscoe, Daisy Lowe, Maeceil Peterson, Yvonne Busch, Ione Golden, Dixie Fasnacht, and Mickey Stevens. There are all-woman jazz bands traveling throughout New Orleans, like the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and the Harlem Playgirls. Louis Armstrong, one of the most important and iconic jazz musicians of the century, might not have made it as far as he did without his piano-playing wife, Lil Hardin. When he joined her band, she was a very talented musician in her own right, and pushed him to step out and into the spotlight. But some of the most famous Black women performers aren’t playing instruments. They are singing the blues.

Often built on just three chords, allowing for a lot of variation, blues music was truly forged in the hearts of Black Americans. Soulful, confessional, and personal, blues were about expressing heartache, and then finding ways of expelling it. And, in the early years and through the 1920s, it was effectively a female art form. As one 1926 study observed, "upwards of 75% of the songs are written from a woman's point of view. Among the blues singers who have gained more or less national recognition there is scarcely a man's name to be found." By the 1920s, blues and jazz had essentially fused, becoming a hugely popular and swiftly growing industry. To find out more about how women defined the blues in the ‘20s, let’s let some of the era’s biggest stars lead us on.

LADIES SING THE BLUES

Ma Rainey was born Gertrude Pridgett in Columbus, Georgia, in 1886. She would become famous for a myriad of talents: minstrelsy, traditional blues, country blues, popular song, comedy, dance, and acting. In 1904, she married dancer, singer, and comedian William "Pa" Rainey and together they become a leading song-and-dance duo on the black tent-show circuit. From 1906 to 1908, they were known as "Black Face Song and Dance Comedians, Jubilee Singers, [and] Cake Walkers." Wherever they went, they dazzled audiences. By 1917, the woman officially billed as "Madame Gertrude," had gained the affectionate nickname "Ma," and she was very much a minstrel star.

Ma Rainey had one goal: to move and please all who came to see her. She would saunter out in greasepaint and powder, decked out in sequins, beads, rhinestones, and ostrich feathers, defying the idea that black couldn’t be beautiful. At a time when most Black chorus girls were very light-skinned, and lighter skin was considered more fashionable, the very dark-skinned Ma Rainey dressed lavishly and garishly, which made her rather a trailblazer. As jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams would say later, “Ma was loaded with real diamonds -- in her ears, around her neck, in a tiara on her head. Both hands were full of rocks, too; her hair was wild and she had gold teeth. What a sight!”

Nobody puts Ma Rainey in a corner.

“Ma Rainey in 1917,” Accessed via The New York Times on February 28, 2024.

She dressed like a queen, but wasn’t afraid to talk dirty. She sang saucy lyrics like "I done showed y'all my black bottom," making her Black audiences feel that perhaps they could also be confident and glamorous. She sang about the things that affected many Black women: mistreatment, desertion, infidelity, revenge, sex, and alienation, allowing them to see themselves in her songs. That said, she was almost unheard of outside the South until she was picked up by Paramount Records in 1923. Of course, they make it seem like they somehow discovered her. But when they announced, “Discovered at Last: the Mother of the Blues,” Ma had been slaying shows for nearly 25 years. She made 92 records during the 5 years she worked for Paramount, accompanied by some of the era’s best musicians, and influencing every single Black singer who came after her. She always provided coaching to newcomers, including a young gal named Bessie Smith.

Bessie grew up poor in Tennessee, and learned quite early that music was the fastest way to help support her family. She started by singing on street corners, but soon started performing in minstrel shows. In the 1910s, she joined Ma Rainey’s Moses Stokes Travelling Show troupe, and toured with them on the TOBA. Bessie styled herself after Ma Rainey, and she would become just as much of a legend. She was hugely popular with Black audiences, and especially the poorest amongst them, expressing feelings they had trouble putting into words. She spoke for them, because she was them. But she dresses just as fancily as Ma Rainey ever could. She wore curve-hugging fashionable flapper dresses, trimmed in fringe, feathers, lace, or, preferably, all three. She presented by turns as both flirtatious and sophisticated, and her presence fills a room as soon as she enters it. As guitarist Danny Barker once said, “Bessie Smith was a fabulous deal to watch…She dominated a stage...She could bring about mass hypnotism. When she was performing, you could hear a pin drop.” Bessie is a heavy drinker, is jealous of any rivals, and is known to occasionally get violent. But there’s no denying that she is one of the most influential and fascinating stars of the era.

One of the reasons singers are able to become so widely famous in the 1920s is because of the popularity of music records. The first commercial jazz record was made in 1917, and it sold more records than any record ever had. But rather strangely, it was performed by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, which was full of white musicians. The main guy in the band would go on to say that it was white guys like him, not black people, who invented and popularised jazz (yikes, man). But jazz only really found its national groove when Black artists started recording discs. At first, record labels created what they called “race records” – music produced by black people and meant to be bought by black people. Some people thought they wouldn’t sell, because Black people wouldn’t go out and buy record players. They were, turns out, extremely wrong. They bought them in droves, and those who couldn’t still purchased records, playing them at community dances and barn bashes and rent parties. A 28-year-old singer named Mamie Smith – no relation of Bessie’s - was one of the first to prove just how successful such records could be. In February 1920, she walked into Okeh Records in New York City and made history by recording two songs: "That Thing Called Love" and "You Can't Keep a Good Man Down." It was the first recording by a black blues singer, but her biggest hit came later that year with “Crazy Blues.” Within a month, black audiences had purchased 75,000 copies. By the end of a year, it had sold a million.

This totally upended the music industry, revealing a huge appetite for records made by and for black people. Labels such as Okeh, Paramount, and Columbia rushed into the "race records" market, making recordings by dozens of talented Black singers. Unfortunately for them, white labels find it much easier to exploit and underpay black artists than white ones. Since many of these songs had never been published, labels make sure to grab recording rights along with the actual recordings. That means many of these women end up going under pseudonyms, or their names are left out entirely, and thus they aren’t able to turn these records into successful performing careers. Some are recorded without any contracts, and without receiving royalties. By the mid-1920s, these record labels have gone one step further, sending scouts armed with recording equipment to shows in the South, recording artists whose names we might never know.

In 1921, Black Swan Records was born: a novel company whose employees and artists were all black. Bessie Smith is rejected by Black Swan because they deem her voice too “rough,” i.e. too black. They also think her skin is too dark and her behavior far too wild. This isn’t a new frustration for Bessie: back in 1912, she was kicked out of a chorus line for being too dark-skinned. But Columbia is more than happy to have the woman many would come to call The Empress. Her first single, “Downhearted Blues,” sold 780,000 copies in the first six months: more than any other blues record. She becomes America’s first real musical superstar. Columbia is so pleased that they sign an 8-year contract with Bessie, and she goes on to record 160 songs. Even though Bessie Smith makes them millions of dollars, she is never paid any royalties.

But don’t worry. Bessie Smith still manages to earn more, and spend more, than anyone. By the 1920s, Bessie is so popular that she is commanding $2,500 a week, making her one of the highest-paid black performers of the era. She will also be one of the first black singers featured in a moving picture, singing her heart out in the 1929 talkie “St. Louis Blues.” In 1925, she purchases her own, custom painted, bright yellow railroad car. It had 7 staterooms and could accommodate up to 35 people, and had hot and cold running water, so the whole crew could live on the train. When the Empress arrives in your town, you best believe she’s going to do it in style.

Ethel Waters knew how to make audiences fall in love.

“Ethel Waters posing for On With the Show,” *Collectors Weekly,* 1929, accessed November 17, 2023.

Ethel Waters, by contrast, was chosen because her style is more in line with white singers of the day. Born at the turn of the century, she spent a hard childhood in poverty in Philadephia’s Red Light District, bouncing around between family members whom she felt didn’t understand her. Like many blues stars, she married early, around age 13, and ended up with an abusive husband. She left him and worked as a maid to support herself at Philadelphia hotel. On her 17th birthday, she went to a party at a nightclub, where she sang two songs and so enchanted her audience that someone offered her a job singing at Baltimore’s Lincoln Theatre, where she performed under the name Sweet Mama String Bean. As she said of her gyratory talents, “I sure knew how to roll and quiver”. After traveling the vaudeville circuit, she joined a musical revue, performing a number in blackface dressed in typical plantation-style gingham. It’s there she learned that, unlike country Southern audiences, New Yorkers want to hear her lyrics. So she worked on her diction and articulation, which makes her sound different – re: “whiter” - than the other songstresses around her. She almost single-handedly puts Black Swan on the map with “Down Home Blues”, selling something like 100,000 copies. She becomes a huge favorite with white audiences, introducing them to many blues classics, and goes on to become the first Black woman to integrate Broadway.

The blues provide these women with an unprecedented new arena for self-expression. The songs they sing call out the demons and frustrations that plague women, particularly Black women, and exorcise them….in public. Many speak to the difficulties of being a working-class Black woman in America. Washwoman’s Blues, for example, is a tribute to the ladies who spend their days cleaning houses and scrubbing floors. We see social protest (in Poor Man’s Blues, Bessie Smith sings “Mister rich man, rich man, open up your heart and mind/Give the poor man a chance, help stop these hard, hard times). But really, no subject is off limits. They sing about abusive relationships, which many of these singers experienced. They sing about marginality, alienation, and sex and sexuality. Many take aim at the men in their lives, mocking and deriding them. Many of these singers are bisexual or lesbians, and they sing about that openly too. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Gladys Bentley, and Ethel Waters all have female lovers. In 1928's Prove It on Me, Ma Rainey sang: "I went out last night with a crowd of my friends/It must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men/Wear my clothes just like a fan/ Talk to the gals just like any old man." Gloriously, Bessie will have to bail Ma Rainey out of jail, one time, when the cops arrive to bust up a lesbian orgy she was throwing. Good on you, Ma!

But one performer is living her best lesbian life even more loudly and proudly than her counterparts. That someone is a tuxedo wearing, tawdry song-belting show woman named Gladys Bentley. She first arrives in Harlem around 1925 after leaving her hometown of Philadelphia. She first started singing at rent parties, where the people who threw them would have a cover charge meant to help them pay the rent. At these aprties, she sang songs so raunchy that it would make even Ma Rainey blush a little. And when she moved on to singing in clubs, she pushed the envelope even further by dressing in a full white tuxedo. She is often promoted as a “male impersonator,” and has no problem whatsoever with flirting openly with female audience members. Instead of trying to water down her lifestyle, she leaned into it, shocking the media by telling one report that she not only married a woman, but that it was a white woman. And while there’s no evidence for such a marriage, it says something about how unapologetically open Gladys was, and how her audience loved her more because of it.

SHIMMY AND SHAKE: JOSEPHINE BAKER & THE CHORUS GIRL LIFE

But singing isn’t the only artform that Black women are dominating in the 1920s. The chorus girl is also shimmying her way into America’s hearts. Thanks to vaudeville, Black dancers have been growing increasingly popular. By 1913, Harlem had a show called the Darktown Follies, one of the earliest large-scale musical revues created and performed by an all-black cast. It shared some elements with vaudeville, but the plot focused on a romantic storyline between two black characters: this was a new thing. It also brought social dances like Ballin’ the Jack and the Texas Tommy into the spotlight. Ethel Williams, the show’s star, got so famous she went on to train the white Ziegfeld Follies girls in how to perform these black dances, which had become wildly popular with white audiences. Of course, Mr. Ziegfeld would make sure his show didn’t tip its hat to the Darktown Follies, and then would go on to eclipse it. He barred those very same black dancers from ever auditioning for him. It happens all the time in the 1910s and 20s: white producers flock to the big cities in search of new dances and sounds, steal them, and get white musicians to record them. Black dances are appropriated by dancing teams like Vernon and Irene Castle. White performers get famous with their acts on Broadway, while black dancers are relegated to segregated vaudeville circuits. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t Black women aren’t finding their way into the spotlight.

Who else could rock a banana skirt this hard? No one, probably.

Citation: “Josephine Baker in the Folies Bergère,” *The National WWII Museum,* 1927, accessed November 17, 2023.

Some people see Black chorus girls as little better than ladies of the evening. But by the later 1920s, many are celebrated as inspiring examples of black womanhood. Part of this shift in attitude has to do with the growth of black beauty companies (I’ll be talking about one of them and its incredible founder, Madam CJ Walker, in an upcoming bonus episode over on Patreon). Many chorus girls become models for their advertisements, making them more glamourous than ever. As one 1928 Pittsburgh Courier article wrote, “The chorus girl has forced recognition of the beauty and charm of the colored woman not only from the outside, but has awakened the Negro woman herself to her own possibilities, which feat may be considered the greater accomplishment.” But to find out more about the chorus girl life, we’re going to join one of the most iconic Black performers of the era: Josephine Baker.

Josephine was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a washerwoman and a drummer. After her dad split the scene, her mother remarried: really, she had to in order to pay the bills and look after her kids. Still, they had to move often, living in rat-infested shacks. For escape, Josephine would try to go to the black vaudeville house in her neighborhood. She left school to help earn money for her family, offering to clean houses, babysit, or even sift through the trash to find food. Eventually, she joined a family band performing in cafes or restaurants, where she proved to have a knack for comedy. As far she was concerned, there was nothing quite like making an audience laugh. When she finally left St. Louis, she remembers: “Closing my eyes, I dreamed of sunlit cities, magnificent theaters and me in the limelight.”

As we’ve already covered, traveling on the black vaudeville circuit could be tough, and eventually she goes to New York City, hoping for something a little more glamorous. In 1921, she auditions for an all-black Broadway musical called Shuffle Along, only to be told she’s too young to be a chorus girl. The musical is a hit, so when Josephine hears that a second Shuffle Along company is being formed for a road tour, she tries again. And she’s rejected again, for being too young and too skinny, but she takes a job helping out with their costumes. And when one of the regular chorus girls falls ill, you best believe Josephine elbows her way onto the stage to cover for her. She steals every scene she’s in.

But there were some uncomfortable confrontations. Nearly all of the chorus girls, both here and in the swankier city nightclubs, are light-skinned, which makes Josephine stand out. Some of the cast members take to calling her “the monkey” and play tricks like glueing her shoes to the floor.

None of this stops Josephine: she eventually moves on to a new musical called The Chocolate Dandies, then takes on a role as a chorus girl job at the elite Plantation Club.

“The Ebony Steppers at the Cotton Club,” *The New York Public Library Digital Collections*, 1929, accessed November 17, 2023.

Now, in the 1920s, most clubs are segregated. Some, especially those run by African-American entrepreneurs, are welcoming of all races. Integrated dance halls, known as “black and tans,” become popular in places like Harlem. Some oppose such wild racial mixing, saying they encourage women to drink to excess and express themselves with “coarse and vulgar dancing.” The dancing usually features flailing limbs and the ‘20s equivalent of twerking. But in many of the most popular clubs that cater exclusively to white patrons, the entertainment is almost exclusively Black. White revelers prefer to listen to jazz music or see Black dancers do the Cakewalk and the Charleston, because they think it’s more authentic. As one contemporary wrote, “In their dancing and song, the Negroes are the very embodiment of rhythm. They are natural born musicians; beautiful voices abound among them; they have a rare vein of melody; their talent for acting is remarkable.” There is, of course, rather a dark side to this voyeuristic fascination. Musical revues often cater to white audience’s tastes for plantation stereotypes. Famed dancers Edith Wilson and Florence Mills star in The Dixieland Plantation Room revue, put on in a Broadway theater, which includes scenes of a Mississippi steamboat landing in a cotton field and watermelons. Reviewers of these black revues often compliment dancers by calling their moves “savage, exotic, and primitive.” White revelers go to places like the Cotton Club and the Plantation Club, decorated with old South decor and featuring black “slave” dancers, as a type of exploitative tourism, to be entertained by white ideas about “blackness.” Josephine herself summed the bizarre situation up nicely. “The white imagination is sure something when it comes to Blacks.”

Opened in 1923, New York’s Cotton Club becomes one of the most popular in the city. Visitors from around the world come here to drink and enjoy music and dancing courtesy of the Cotton Club Girls. Also known as the “Copper-Colored Gals,” these chorus girls and singers are all light-skinned, and they have to meet pretty exacting criteria: they have to be at least five feet six, under twenty-one, thin, and light-skinned enough to pass the “brown paper bag” test: aka, their skin has to be lighter than a brown paper bag. Even some of the most famous, like Ma Rainey, would sometimes wear greasepaint to lighten her complexion. Why? Because many producers think that white audiences won’t find darker girls beautiful. One reviewer wrote, “I hate to say it, but both white and colored producers show this prejudice towards the dark girl. They want girls to look as nearly white as possible when they’re on the stage, although the extremely dark girl is nine times out of ten the better dancer…. But [the black girl] hasn’t a chance in the chorus of today.” Yikes.

So that’s what Josephine is dealing with. But hey, The Plantation Club features blues singer Ethel Waters, the waiters speak French, and the mobsters and millionaires who fill the audience think Josephine’s a real winner. It’s not just that she’s lovely to look at, either. Josephine is truly funny, too. “Beautiful?” she wrote later. “It's all a question of luck. I was born with good legs. As for the rest... beautiful, no. Amusing, yes.”

The chorus girl’s life could seem glamorous, but generally speaking, it is pretty exhausting. It requires constant motion and strain on your body. And because those bodies are often gyrating for a drunken audience, they sometimes find themselves in dangerous situations. They’re often grabbed or subjected to inappropriate advances by customers and staff members. Ethel Waters, when she was working at a club called Edmond’s, had a boss who slapped her posterior one time, to which she responded to by kicking him right on his. In some clubs, it’s an unspoken part of the job for chorus girls to make themselves “available” to certain customers after their shows. Josephine navigates it all, making audiences wild with her unique brand of dance and humor. In 1925, she is approached by a producer who wants her to star in a new black vaudeville show in Paris called La Revue Negre. Of course, this show is also filled with racial stereotypes. She dances the Charleston surrounded by mammies, but she does it so well that guards have to be hired to keep her adoring public from rushing the stage. And she loves Paris: she can go wherever she wants, and she is treated well, which makes a change from America. Josephine is only 19 years old when she first appears on the stage of Folies-Bergere in 1926. The show features a steamy jungle setting and Josephine wearing nothing but a skirt made of bananas. “I wasn't really naked,” she would write later. “I simply didn't have any clothes on.” Those swinging fruits, and the hips that made them shimmy, made her an instant, irrefutable star. By 1926, she’s received more than 1,000 marriage proposals by mail, is one of the most photographed women in the world, and owns a leopard named Chiquita, whom she walks down the streets of Paris wearing truly fabulous attire. Winning.

music credits (listed in the order they first appear in the episode)

Ma Rainey’s “Booze and Blues,” and “Shave ‘Em Dry Blues” (1925)
Bessie Smith’s “Hard Drivin’ Papa” (1926)
“Crazy Blues” – the original version, performed by the Dixieland Jass Band (1921)
Bessie Smith’s “Downhearted Blues” (1923)
Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds’ version of “Crazy Blues” (1920)
Ethel Waters’s “The New York Glide” (1921)
“St Louis Blues” by the Dixieland Jass Band (1921)

conclusion

These incredible, hardworking, fearless Black entertainers changed America. They filled the air with their beautiful, moving songs, speaking for the entire Black population. Their provocative acts enthralled and inspired. The proved that Black women could not just make it in America, but make that country bend around them. And while they had to face so many hurdles and race-based discrimination, they left a mark that couldn’t be erased. Until next time.

Ladies Sing the Blues: The Black Entertainers Who Dazzled the 1920s