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Blackface Behind Barbed Wire
Blackface Behind Barbed Wire Gender and Racial Triangulation in the Japanese American Internment Camps Emily Roxworthy THE CONFUSER: Come on, you can impersonate a Negro better than Al Jolson, just like you can impersonate a Jap better than Marlon Brando. [...] Half-Japanese and half-colored! Rare, extraordinary object! Like a Gauguin! — Velina Hasu Houston, Waiting for Tadashi ([2000] 2011:9) “Fifteen nights a year Cinderella steps into a pumpkin coach and becomes queen of Holiday Inn,” says Marjorie Reynolds as she applies burnt cork to her face [in the 1942 filmHoliday Inn]. The cinders transform her into royalty. — Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise (1996:183) During World War II, young Japanese American women performed in blackface behind barbed wire. The oppressive and insular conditions of incarceration and a political climate that was attacking the performers’ own racial status rendered these blackface performances somehow exceptional and even resistant. 2012 marked the 70th anniversary of the US government’s deci- sion to evacuate and intern nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The mass incarceration of Issei and Nisei in 1942 was justified by a US mindset that conflated every eth- nic Japanese face, regardless of citizenship status or national allegiance, with the “face of the TDR: The Drama Review 57:2 (T218) Summer 2013. ©2013 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 123 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00264 by guest on 01 October 2021 enemy.”1 While this racist reading of the Japanese (American) face has been widely condemned in the intervening 70 years, the precarious semiotics of Japanese ethnicity are remarkably pres- ent for contemporary observers attempting to apprehend the relationship between a Japanese (American) face and blackface. -
Aida Overton Walker Performs a Black Feminist Resistance
Restructuring Respectability, Gender, and Power: Aida Overton Walker Performs a Black Feminist Resistance VERONICA JACKSON From the beginning of her onstage career in 1897—just thirty-two years after the end of slavery—to her premature death in 1914, Aida Overton Walker was a vaudeville performer engaged in a campaign to restructure and re-present how African Americans, particularly black women in popular theater, were perceived by both black and white society.1 A de facto third principal of the famous minstrel and vaudeville team known as Williams and Walker (the partnership of Bert Williams and George Walker), Overton Walker was vital to the theatrical performance company’s success. Not only was she married to George; she was the company’s leading lady, principal choreographer, and creative director. Moreover and most importantly, Overton Walker fervently articulated her brand of racial uplift while simultaneously executing the right to choose the theater as a profession at a time when black women were expected to embody “respectable” positions inside the home as housewives and mothers or, if outside the home, only as dressmakers, stenographers, or domestics (see Figure 1).2 Overton Walker answered a call from within to pursue a more lucrative and “broadminded” avocation—one completely outside the realms of servitude or domesticity. She urged other black women to follow their “artistic yearnings” and choose the stage as a profession.3 Her actions as quests for gender equality and racial respectability—or as they are referred to in this article, feminism and racial uplift—are understudied, and are presented here as forms of transnational black resistance to the status quo. -
African American Performers on Early Sound Recordings, 1892-1916
African American Performers on Early Sound Recordings, 1892-1916 Finding music by African Americans on early phonograph records is more difficult than one might surmise. African American artists rarely performed on early recordings. Racial prejudice may only be a contributing factor. Although African American singers and musicians were well known, in its early years, the recording industry was not looking for known artists. At its inception, beginning in the 1890s, it was the song that sold a record, and not (with some exceptions), the artist. Talent scouts from the record companies were on the lookout to recruit anybody with a good clear voice, and good diction. Recruits were trained to utilize the various techniques of making a successful recording--such as backing away from the recording horn at loud passages to avoid "blasting." There was no need to seek out famous stage artists. The Berliner, Edison, and Columbia companies of the 1890s had established a cadre of professional white "recorders" able to render both up to the minute hits as well as old favorites--and for a lower fee than a famous performer required. These white recorders could also reproduce the works of African-American performers with "authentic" language usage. So why hire Ernest Hogan, Cole and Johnson, Williams and Walker, and others when the in-house talent could do the job? Besides, many artists famous for their strong stage voices did not record as clearly as the professional record makers. Earliest African American Recording Artists http://memory.loc.gov/cgi‐bin/query/r?ammem/dukesm:@field(DOCID+@lit(ncdhasm.b0814))In 1890 George W. -
Florenz Ziegfeld Jr
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE ZIEGFELD GIRLS BEAUTY VERSUS TALENT A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts in Theatre Arts By Cassandra Ristaino May 2012 The thesis of Cassandra Ristaino is approved: ______________________________________ __________________ Leigh Kennicott, Ph.D. Date ______________________________________ __________________ Christine A. Menzies, B.Ed., MFA Date ______________________________________ __________________ Ah-jeong Kim, Ph.D., Chair Date California State University, Northridge ii Dedication This thesis is dedicated to Jeremiah Ahern and my mother, Mary Hanlon for their endless support and encouragement. iii Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis chair and graduate advisor Dr. Ah-Jeong Kim. Her patience, kindness, support and encouragement guided me to completing my degree and thesis with an improved understanding of who I am and what I can accomplish. This thesis would not have been possible without Professor Christine Menzies and Dr. Leigh Kennicott who guided me within the graduate program and served on my thesis committee with enthusiasm and care. Professor Menzies, I would like to thank for her genuine interest in my topic and her insight. Dr. Kennicott, I would like to thank for her expertise in my area of study and for her vigilant revisions. I am indebted to Oakwood Secondary School, particularly Dr. James Astman and Susan Schechtman. Without their support, encouragement and faith I would not have been able to accomplish this degree while maintaining and benefiting from my employment at Oakwood. I would like to thank my family for their continued support in all of my goals. -
Politics and the 1920S Writings of Dashiell Hammett 77
Politics and the 1920s Writings of Dashiell Hammett 77 Politics and the 1920s Writings of Dashiell Hammett J. A. Zumoff At first glance, Dashiell Hammett appears a common figure in American letters. He is celebrated as a left-wing writer sympathetic to the American Communist Party (CP) in the 1930s amid the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. Memories of Hammett are often associated with labor and social struggles in the U.S. and Communist “front groups” in the post-war period. During the period of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communism, Hammett, notably, refused to collaborate with the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) investigations and was briefly jailed and hounded by the government until his death in 1961. Histories of the “literary left” in the twentieth century, however, ignore Hammett.1 At first glance this seems strange, given both Hammett’s literary fame and his politics. More accurately, this points to the difficulty of turning Hammett into a member of the “literary left” based on his literary work, as opposed to his later political activity. At the same time, some writers have attempted to place Hammett’s writing within the context of the 1930s, some even going so far as to posit that his work had underlying left-wing politics. Michael Denning, for example, argues that Hammett’s “stories and characters . in a large part established the hard-boiled aesthetic of the Popular Front” in the 1930s.2 This perspective highlights the danger of seeing Hammett as a writer in the 1930s, instead of the 1920s. -
Cohen, Michael. “The Ku Klux Government”: Vigilantism, Lynching
JSR_v01i:JSR 12/20/06 8:14 AM Page 31 “The Ku Klux Government”: Vigilantism, Lynching, and the Repression of the IWW ■ Michael Cohen, University of California, Berkeley It is almost always the case that a “spontaneous” movement of the subaltern classes is accompanied by a reactionary movement of the right-wing of the dom- inant class, for concomitant reasons. An economic crisis, for instance, engenders on the one hand discontent among the subaltern classes and spontaneous mass movements, and on the other conspiracies among the reactionary groups, who take advantage of the objective weakening of the government in order to attempt coup d’Etat. —Antonio Gramsci 1 When the true history of this decade shall be written in other and less troubled times; when facts not hidden come to light in details now rendered vague and obscure; truth will show that on some recent date, in a secluded office on Wall Street or luxurious parlor of some wealthy club on lower Manhattan, some score of America’s kings of industry, captains of commerce and Kaisers of finance met in secret conclave and plotted the enslavement of millions of workers. Today details are obscured. The paper on which these lines are penciled is criss-crossed by the shadow of prison bars; my ears are be-set by the clang of steel doors, the jangle of fetters and the curses of jail guards. Truth, before it can speak, is stran- gled by power. Yet the big fact looms up, like a mountain above the morning mists; organ- ized wealth has conspired to enslave Labor, and—in enforcing its will—it stops at nothing, not even midnight murders and wholesale slaughter. -
America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW
H-HOAC Review: Shapiro on Strang, Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW Discussion published by John Haynes on Monday, August 9, 2021 Dean A. Strang. Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. 344 pp. $36.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-32330-1. Reviewed by Shelby Shapiro (Independent Scholar)Published on H-Socialisms (August, 2021) Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56024 Destroying the IWW Interest in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, seems to come in waves: the 1950s saw Fred Thompson’s The I.W.W.: Its First Fifty Years (1955) while the 1960s brought Joyce Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (1964), Robert Tyler’s Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest (1967), Patrick Renshaw’s The Wobblies: The Story of the IWW and Syndicalism in the United States (1967), Ian Turner’s Sydneys’s Burning (1967), and Melvyn Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All (1969), to cite but a few. Entries for the twenty-first century include Lucien van der Walt’s PhD dissertation, “Anarchism and Syndicalism in South Africa, 1904-1921: Rethinking the History of Labour and the Left” (2007); Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, edited by Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer (2017), and Peter Cole’sBen Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly(2021). -
C464c4 1920.Pdf
l11111111111111111111llllllllllllllllllnllnlliilllullululllullllllllulllllllllllllllllllilllilllllllllllllllllllullllllllllllllllulllulull~lllllulllllllluulll~lnlulllnlllulllllllllullilllill~lllllulllllllu~nU 6 e a aongue of JFlam q The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of flame; every prison a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house en- lightens the world; every suppres- sed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side. The minds of men are at last aroused; reason looks out and justifies her own, and malice finds all her work is ruin. It is the whipper who is whipped and the tyrant who is undone.-Emerson. 8 . I1III~llUlll~ll~IIllUllllUlll~lllUUUl~llllUllllUlllllUllllllllllllllUllllllllillll~lllllllliIIUIIIIIIIIIIIIIHIIIlllllll!lllllllllllilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll~ MURDER OR SELF-DEFENSE? HIS BOOKLET is not an apology for murder. It is an honest effort to unravel the tangled mesh of circumstances that led up to the Armistice Day tragedy in Centralia, Washington. The writer is one of those who believe that the tak- ing of human life is justifiable .only in self-defense. Even then the act is a horrible reversion to the brute-to the low plane of savagery. Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting. The nation was shocked on November 11, 1919, to read of the killing of four American Legion men by members of the In- dustrial Workers of the World in Centralia. The capitalist news- papers announced to the world that these unoffending paraders were killed in cold blood-that they were murdered from ambush without’provocation of any kind. If the author were convinced that there was even a slight possibility of this being true, he would not raise ‘his voice to defend the perpetrators of such a coward1 y crime. -
Broadway 1 a (1893-1927) BROADWAY and the AMERICAN DREAM
EPISODE ONE Give My Regards to Broadway 1 A (1893-1927) BROADWAY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM In the 1890s, immigrants from all over the world came to the great ports of America like New York City to seek their fortune and freedom. As they developed their own neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves, some of the new arrivals took advantage of the stage to offer ethnic comedy, dance and song to their fellow group members as a much-needed escape from the hardships of daily life. Gradually, the immigrants adopted the characteristics and values of their new country instead, and their performances reflected this assimilation. “Irving Berlin has no place in American music — he is American music.” —composer Jerome Kern My New York (excerpt) Every nation, it seems, Sailed across with their dreams To my New York. Every color and race Found a comfortable place In my New York. The Dutchmen bought Manhattan R Island for a flask of booze, E V L U C Then sold controlling interest to Irving Berlin was born Israel Baline in a small Russian village in the Irish and the Jews – 1888; in 1893 he emigrated to this country and settled in the Lower East Side of And what chance has a Jones New York City. He began his career as a street singer and later turned to With the Cohens and Malones songwriting. In 1912, he wrote the words and music to “Alexander’s Ragtime In my New York? Band,” the biggest hit of its day. Among other hits, he wrote “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” “What’ll I Do?,” “There’s No Business Like —Irving Berlin, 1927 Show Business,” “Easter Parade,” and the patriotic “God Bless America,” in addition to shows like Annie Get Your Gun. -
Liner Notes, Visit Our Web Site
BLACK MANHATTAN, VOLUME 2 THE PARAGON RAGTIME ORCHESTRA RICK BENJAMIN, DIRECTOR 80731-2 1. Shuffle Along Overture (1921) (Eubie Blake–Will H. Vodery) 6:30 Introducing “Opening Chorus,” “Love Will Find a Way,” “Honeysuckle Time,” “If You’ve Never Been Vamped by a Brown-Skin,” “Gypsy Blues,” “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” “I’m Craving for That Kind of Love,” and “Bandanna Days” 2. Nobody (1905) (Bert A. Williams) 4:54 Edward Pleasant, baritone 3. That’s Got ’Em—Rag (1919) (Wilbur C. Sweatman) 2:26 4. Honey Lamb (ballad, 1914) (Al. Johns) 3:26 Anita Johnson, soprano 5. Brazilian Dreams (tango-intermezzo, 1914) (Will H. Dixon) 3:59 6. Down in Honky Tonky Town (one-step, 1916) (Chris Smith) 2:04 7. Returned: A Negro Ballad (1902) (Will Marion Cook) 6:23 Anita Johnson, soprano; Rick Benjamin, piano 8. The Bell Hop Rag (1914) (Frederick M. Bryan) 3:28 9. Black Patti Waltzes (1896) (Will Accooe) 6:16 10. Goodnight Angeline (1919) (James Reese Europe) 3:08 Robert Mack, tenor 11. The Castle Walk (one-step, 1914) (James Reese Europe–Ford T. Dabney) 2:46 12. Aunt Hagar’s Children Blues (1921) (W.C. Handy) 2:39 Linda Thompson Williams, blues singer 13. Valse Angelique (1913) (J. Tim Brymn) 3:56 14. At the Ball, That’s All (1913) (J. Leubrie Hill) 2:37 Edward Pleasant, baritone 15. When the Moon Shines (from the 1904 revival of In Dahomey) (James J. Vaughan) 3:53 Anita Johnson, soprano 16. Oh! You Devil (rag, 1909) (Ford T. Dabney) 3:35 17. -
VOICE, RACE, and NATION in US MUSIC, 1890-1924 by Scott A
VOX AMERICANA: VOICE, RACE, AND NATION IN U.S. MUSIC, 1890-1924 by Scott A. Carter A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Music) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2014 Date of final oral examination: 05/15/2014 This dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee Ronald M. Radano, Professor, School of Music Jerome Camal, Assistant Professor, Anthropology Susan C. Cook, Professor, School of Music R. Anderson Sutton, Professor, School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa Amanda Weidman, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College i For Katie ii The more I hear, the less I know. — "Music is a Better Noise," Essential Logic iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements v List of Figures ix A Note on Transcriptions and Direct Quotations x Chapter One 1 Introduction Chapter Two 28 Anthropology, Vocal Science, and the Ordering of World Song Chapter Three 73 Forging a Sound Citizenry: Voice Culture and the Embodiment of the Nation Chapter Four 122 Bert Williams's Vocal Challenge Chapter Five 167 The Vocal Economy of Vernon Dalhart Epilogue 205 Bibliography 211 iv v Acknowledgements Like any major project, my dissertation has benefitted from the insights, critiques, and generous advice of friends and colleagues. I want to begin my acknowledgements by thanking the community of scholars in the School of Music at UW-Madison for creating programs that challenge students to produce scholarship of the highest caliber while allowing them the freedom to pursue avenues of innovative musical inquiry. I am particularly grateful for the interdisciplinary approach to scholarship afforded by the department, which allowed me to seek out and work with scholars in anthropology, history, communication arts, and Afro-American studies. -
Congressional Record-Sen Ate
- ., .. 6262 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD-SENATE. A U GUST 23 law. The touchstone for such juuicial power is the Constitu . utilize Its every man and its every energy to dPfc::;{j ifs libp.r+y tion and nothing else. It remains to be determined, whether the and to defeat tbe migration to its soil of mi~hty nations M Constitution has conferred authority on Conoo-ress to enact this ferocious warrior , whose barbarous inlmmanitv for tll r e law. Clause 11 of Article I, section 8, of the Constitution em years has surpasse-d all others sin~ tbe death of Atinn. tile powers Congress ' to raise and support armies.' This power scourge of God. The 1'\-Tits are deniet1.'~ is plenary. It is not restricted in any manner. Congress may .AnTICLE BY OTTO H. KAHN. summon to its army thus authorized every citizen of the United States. Since tt may summon all, it may summon any. Said Mr. SUTHERLAND. I a..~ unanimous C'nm;;cnt to ha \e printetl the Supreme Court in the case of The United St..·1tes v. Tarble as a public document an article by Otto II. Knlni on AJnpr jea us (13 Wallace, 408): 'Among the powers assigned to the National of German origin and the war. I believe it wilT be \ery llelpf:1l Government is the power to raise and support armies: * * * to the German-Americans of tllis country, aml I belie ~ it wi ll IK' Its control over the subject is plenary and exclu ive. It can well to have it widely distributed. determine without question from any State authority how the · The PRESIDEJ\'T pro tempore.