Abstract
Shuffle Along was the most popular musical of the Harlem Renaissance. It was a Broadway hit and enthusiastically received by both black and white audiences. Opening on 23 May 1921 at the 63rd Street Theatre, it ran for 504 performances, providing considerable profit for its creators and producers. In 1922, it had a successful yearlong tour. Revivals would appear in New York in 1930, and as late as 1952 another updated adaptation appeared, although neither earned the accolades of the original. Described in the program as a “musical melange,” Shuffle Along ,according to theatre historian Allen Woll, “legitimized the black musical,” spawning “a series of imitators” that turned African American musical theatre into a “Broadway staple.”3 Included among these musicals were popular productions such as Put and Take (1921), Strut Miss Lizzie, Plantation Revue, Oh Joy, Liza (1923), Runnin’ Wild (1923; it introduced the Charleston to the stage), The Chocolate Dandled, Dixie to Broadway (1924), Lucky Sambo (1925), Blackbirds of 1926 and 1928 ,and Africana (1927).
De black folks gits off down in de bottom and shouts and sings and prays. Dey gits in da ring dance. It am jes’ a kind of shuffle, den it git faster and faster and dey gits warmed up and moans and shouts and claps and dances.
— Rawick, American Slave1
Negroes could always make it with the deplorable darky stereotype, but whites found it difficult to swallow the concept that there was a real Negro somewhere who could do anything the white man could do.
— Al Rose (1979)2
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Notes
Rawick, American Slave, 4:142, pt. 3; quoted in Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 266.
Al Rose, Euble Blake (New York: Schirmer Books, 1979), 72.
Allen Woll, Black Musical Theatre: From Coontown to Dreamgirls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989
Bernard L. Peterson, Jr., Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816–1960 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 184.
Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 161.
Gerald Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 350.
For details, see Wesley C. Mitchell’s “Review” in Recent Economic Changes in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929)
Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 149.
See also William M. Tuttle, Jr., “Views of a Negro During ‘The Red Summer’ of 1919,” Journal of Negro History 51.3 (July 1966), 209.
James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (1933; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1990), 341.
Walter F White, “The Eruption of Tulsa,” The Nation 112.2921 (29 June 1921), 909.
Robert Kimball and William Bolcom, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 88.
Interview of Blake, quoted in Marshall and Jean Sterns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 136.
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 223
See David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1979, 1997), 96.
Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 289
Susan Gubar, Race Changes: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 118.
Theophilus Lewis, “Survey of the Negro [in Theatre]: No. II,” The Messenger 8.9 (September 1926), 278.
Bernard L. Peterson, Jr., A Century of Musicals in Black and White (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 312.
See C Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford, 1974), 85.
Helen Armstead-Johnson, “Shuffle Along: Keynote of the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Theatre of Black Americans, ed. Errol Hill (New York: Applause, 1980, 1987), 133.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W W Norton, 1978), 254.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 4.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” (1895), quoted in African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. John R. Sherman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 402.
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Noonday Press, 1995), 378.
See, for example, Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 345.
Booker T. Washington, quoted in “Genius Defeated by Race,” Literary Digest 72.12 (25 March 1922), 29.
Victoria W Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 13.
Fannie Barrier Williams, “Social Bonds in the ‘Black Belt’ of Chicago,” Charities 15 (March 1906), 40.
Tom Fletcher, 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business (1954; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1984), 7.
William Barlow, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 120.
Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 369.
James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930; New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 200.
Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 449–450.
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© 2002 David Krasner
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Krasner, D. (2002). Shuffle Along and the Quest for Nostalgia: Black Musicals of the 1920s. In: A Beautiful Pageant. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06625-1_11
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