This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:07] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process.

[0:22] David Armstrong: I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode 100 Years of SHUFFLE ALONG, Part 1.

[1:07] David Armstrong: This year marks the 100th anniversary of SHUFFLE ALONG, the groundbreaking musical that kicked off a decade of vibrant black musical theater on Broadway, which included more than a dozen shows created by black songwriters, black book writers, black producers, black directors, and choreographers, and that brought hundreds of black actors, singers, dancers, and musicians to Broadway.

[1:30] David Armstrong: This landmark event is being celebrated this year with the release of two wonderful new books, including the first full biography of SHUFFLE ALONG's composer, which is titled Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race by Richard Carlin and Ken Bloom, and Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way by Caseen Gaines.

[1:50] David Armstrong: I have had the great pleasure of interviewing the authors of both of these books, and you will have the opportunity to meet all three of them in a series of upcoming episodes.

[2:03] David Armstrong: Today it is my honor to introduce you to Caseen Gaines, whose extraordinary new book, Footnotes, tells the story of how four young black artists, Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, Flournoy Miller, and Aubrey Lyles overcame poverty, racism, violence, and the legacy of slavery to produce a runaway Broadway hit that ushered in both the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age on Broadway.

[2:57] David Armstrong: As that title suggests, this was not a revival or revisal of the original show, but instead it attempted to tell the behind-the-scenes story of the making of SHUFFLE ALONG.

[3:07] David Armstrong: You may also remember that that show closed rather abruptly and unexpectedly, less than three months after it opened.

[3:13] David Armstrong: There was, however, at least one positive outcome from the early demise of that musical, and that's where Caseen and I begin our conversation.

[3:22] David Armstrong: I saw the 2016 George C. Wolfe SHUFFLE Along, or the making of the musical sensation 1921 and all that followed on the day before it closed, actually.

[3:33] David Armstrong: And I was fortunate enough to be an audience member during a talkback. And I was so struck by it because the actors seemed certainly proud of the work that they had done, but also seemed disappointed, frustrated that the show was closing.

[3:53] David Armstrong: So this was the 98th performance. I saw it on a matinee, and they had ultimately just a hundred regular performances of this show before it closed.

[4:02] David Armstrong: And I had obviously been to many a Broadway show. And this was the only time where I left the theater feeling really unhappy, actually. It felt funereal and like the shared contribution of Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, Flournoy Miller, and Aubrey Lyles was being buried yet again.

[4:24] David Armstrong: There was no original Broadway cast recording. There was no publicly available video recording. The libretto was never published. And the libretto was quite amorphous, actually; it changed almost nightly. And so when I got home, my curiosity just led me to Googling around a little bit.

[4:42] David Armstrong: And I stumbled on some anecdotes that really interest me. One of them being that Langston Hughes chose to attend Columbia University because he wanted to see Florence Mills in SHUFFLE ALONG. And he single-handedly credited this show with kick-starting the Harlem Renaissance. And I thought that was fantastic.

[5:02] David Armstrong: And then also Josephine Baker getting her start in this show professionally, ending up becoming the highest paid chorus girl in the United States and it directly catapulting her into her international stardom in Paris, whether it was those things or I'm Just Wild About Harry, which is a song that I've heard probably countless times in my life and never associated with this show, let alone black musicians.

[5:30] David Armstrong: I just felt like there was much more story to tell than I experienced even in that two and a half hours at the Music Box Theater. And I wanted to try and do my part as a writer to preserve this history.

[5:43] David Armstrong: How much did you know about SHUFFLE ALONG or any of the artists involved in its creation prior to seeing the show that day?

[5:50] Caseen Gaines: I was familiar with Eubie Blake, I think, just as an older gentleman, as someone who was on television quite a lot in the 70s and 80s, and he was the name that I had known. Memories of You was just a song that I had known. Obviously, I'm Just Wild About Harry, of course. But I didn't really know anything about SHUFFLE ALONG, and I didn't really know anything about Noble Sissle, Flournoy Miller, or Aubrey Lyles.

[6:15] Caseen Gaines: And I should add as well that I was in pretty good company because Audra McDonald had never heard of SHUFFLE ALONG before 2015 when she was asked to be in this show. And so I was sort of flummoxed by this, frankly, as someone who lives 12 miles outside of Manhattan. I go into the theater quite often for this to have somehow evaded me for this long.

[6:42] Caseen Gaines: At first I felt sort of embarrassed that I did not know about it, but then I felt actually like it was a great injustice that was not of my doing that I didn't know about it. And I was curious as to how Audra McDonald in particular, who has more Tony Awards for performing than any other person to have ever lived, how she did not know about this show and what was at the heart of that.

[7:04] Caseen Gaines: And it's not like it was some insignificant flop musical from the early 1920s. Help us understand just how big a hit SHUFFLE ALONG was back in its day.

[7:14] Caseen Gaines: So the 2016 SHUFFLE ALONG ran for 100 performances. The 1921 SHUFFLE ALONG ran for 504 regular performances in Manhattan. There were three touring companies. One of those touring companies even went into the Deep South. The main touring company went to Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, pretty much every major city from the middle of the United States to the East Coast and up to Canada as well. They were summoned to play in London.

[7:44] Caseen Gaines: And it was really significant because it led to an explosion of all black musicals throughout the 1920s. You know, a lot of people regard the 2016 Broadway season, which was the season that gave us George C. Wolfe's SHUFFLE ALONG, but also Hamilton, On Your Feet, Eclipse, Allegiance, the Color Purple Revival, just this beautiful, beautiful season. And people celebrate that as the most diverse season in Broadway history. But there were more black folks working on Broadway in 1924 than there are today. I mean, that's just an astonishing fact. An indictment, frankly, in a sense.

[8:56] Caseen Gaines: How would you describe the show overall and what were some of the elements about it that made it so remarkable?

[9:03] Caseen Gaines: I mean, in terms of the structure of the shows themselves, SHUFFLE ALONG was a book musical. The book was relatively thin, but well written, I should say. It introduced jazz and syncopation to Broadway. It introduced a woman's dancing chorus; prior to SHUFFLE ALONG, women were mostly ornamental on stage. It glorified black women not as objects, but as talents for their voices, for their dancing abilities.

[9:31] Caseen Gaines: It was so significant, in fact, that the traffic patterns on 63rd Street where the show played actually had to change. It became a one-way street just about four weeks after SHUFFLE ALONG's opening because the traffic was so bad. They had to add a midnight matinee performance because so many other stars of the stage wanted to see this show and otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to. So it was incredibly significant.

[9:58] Caseen Gaines: I was especially interested in that section about the midnight matinees because one of the things that fascinates me, and in fact, one of the themes of this podcast is the level of admiration and camaraderie and interaction that took place between so many of the early inventors of the Broadway musical, in this particular case, between the black songwriters and performers and the white songwriters and performers, which we don't often hear about.

[10:23] Caseen Gaines: The white artists went crazy for this show. And you know, Al Jolson is an example of someone who not only came to SHUFFLE ALONG quite often, but would actually also buy 50 tickets and just give them away to friends and say, "You have to go see this show."

[10:42] Caseen Gaines: It's interesting because I think sometimes a little bit too much is made. There's almost a suggestion that, well, white people went to see SHUFFLE ALONG for the purpose of pillaging and co-opting and taking elements from it for their own shows. There obviously was an element of that that happened, but I genuinely don't believe that that was the intention, and certainly not early on.

[11:10] Caseen Gaines: I think in the same way that you would have Cynthia Erivo wanting to go see Hamilton if she had a night off from doing Color Purple. This was a novel production. This was a genuine sensation that was changing the sound of Broadway, the look of Broadway, the feel of Broadway. It was an attraction. So certainly entertainers who appreciated art wanted to see this artistry on stage, and more often than not, some of it deliberately, some of it just subconsciously, elements of what made SHUFFLE ALONG so special started to seep into some of these other productions.

[12:09] Caseen Gaines: And Blake also remembers that Fiorello LaGuardia came three times in one week to see the show this way. They said that white people spread the word, and then Negroes came to see the celebrities. There's an interesting story that I don't think I included in Footnotes, but Eubie Blake believes that Irving Berlin actually was inspired quite deliberately—and I'm using inspired sort of loosely—by some of the riffing that the orchestra would do during SHUFFLE ALONG.

[12:45] Caseen Gaines: And in fact, I should probably mention while SHUFFLE ALONG had a book and had a program, there were moments in the show that were unscripted. There was a band called The Harmony Kings that was able to go and spend 15 minutes just kind of doing a musical interlude. And once the actual plot of the show had concluded, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle would get up on stage and they would kind of do some of their vaudeville act and they would do different bits. It wouldn't be the same every night, which is also great for ticket sales, right? You know, if you're getting a different performance every show.

[13:15] Caseen Gaines: But Irving Berlin definitely did go and would talk with Eubie and give his compliments, but also Eubie took notice that it sounded like that syncopation started to find its way into Berlin's music in very short time. But of course, that kind of cross-pollination goes both ways. Eubie Blake's favorite composer was Victor Herbert, who he admired, emulated, and indeed imitated. Yeah, and in fact, Eubie Blake would describe his approach to writing music as like Victor Herbert meets Scott Joplin.

[13:46] Caseen Gaines: And I think you hear it when you know that that's where he's being influenced. You know, we've been talking a lot about SHUFFLE ALONG having a jazz score, but if you listen to a song like "Love Will Find a Way," that's more Victor Herbert than it is Scott Joplin. And it's a real beautiful musical theater ballad that wouldn't have been out of place in The Follies.

[14:39] Caseen Gaines: And so I think it's actually a great testament to the versatility of Eubie Blake that he was able to write so many different musical styles. It's similar again to something like Hamilton, which is often referred to as having a rap score or a rap and R&B score, but there was a lot more going on musically in that show than just one genre. And of course, that's the very nature and essence of musical theater, to be able to take all of these various elements and blend them together into a unified whole.

[15:36] Caseen Gaines: You mentioned a few minutes ago that SHUFFLE ALONG was a book musical, even though in many places you'll often see it referred to as a revue. And the writers of the book were Miller and Lyles, who were big vaudeville stars, just as Sissle and Blake had been. And it was in their vaudeville act that they had originally dreamed up the two leading characters that they played in SHUFFLE ALONG and the small southern city called Gymtown where the story took place. Those early sketches were expanded into the book for SHUFFLE ALONG, but it didn't stop there. Those characters and Gymtown had an incredibly long theatrical life.

[16:08] Caseen Gaines: How many musicals were built around those characters? I think it's five. I'm doing this off the top of my head. I could be wrong, but it's four or five. Yes, five. SHUFFLE ALONG, Run and Wild, Rang Tang, Keep Shuffling, and Sugar Hill. Look at me. I get nervous when I get my facts wrong. Then I get lots of tweets at me. But that was good. What's interesting is they didn't even write all of those shows. You know, those characters were able to survive. So those characters are Steve Jenkins and Sam Peck, who kind of similarly to Laurel and Hardy, I would say. If you think of something like March of the Wooden Soldiers, they're still Laurel and Hardy, but they are playing other characters, you know.

[16:50] Caseen Gaines: Those two characters would sometimes have a store. Sometimes they were war veterans, sometimes they worked at a fabric company. So they were always these unscrupulous characters who were generally distrusting of each other, but they were also friends and did not want the other person to know that they were distrusting of each other. You know, the book of SHUFFLE ALONG is interesting to me because it does traffic in racial stereotypes quite a bit. But I also think there is something really clever about Miller's writing. Perhaps that sounds odd to hear, but I guess what I'm saying is there's really bad vaudeville and bad minstrelsy, and what Miller, what you really see in the book of SHUFFLE ALONG is just how clever and witty he was.

[17:49] Caseen Gaines: And it's a shame that that cleverness and that wit, because of the time period, had to be used for that sort of humor. But there isn't a doubt in my mind that Flournoy Miller, especially, could have written any sort of show. But in fact, he did write several dramas later in his career. His big goal was to create the first black-owned Broadway house, and they would produce works that were germane to the black experience. You know, white actors would certainly be allowed, but they would serve stories about the black experience.

[18:27] Caseen Gaines: And he was working on this earnestly through 1932 when his partner Aubrey Lyles, who he was working on this with, died quite quickly and unexpectedly. It's a tragedy because obviously there still is no black-owned Broadway house today. You know, that dream went unfulfilled. Yes, I was very taken with that section of the book where you quote that sort of manifesto that he writes. It's almost a black national theater that he's proposing. It's an inspiring vision, and as you say, it's a bit tragic to note because it has never been realized, much less by him back in the day.

[19:03] Caseen Gaines: I feel like there are so many moments in Footnotes and in their history, their story, where SHUFFLE ALONG was a moment that they just happened to catch, and there were so many other moments that they tried to catch, and it evaded them. But this one they were able to grab.

[19:25] Caseen Gaines: Don't go away. Broadway Nation will be back right after this short break.

[19:33] Caseen Gaines: One of the major challenges of writing a book like this is that you have to do a group biography. It's also one of the joys of reading it because it's not just about these four main characters, the two teams that come together to make SHUFFLE ALONG happen. It's also about all of these other characters that intersect with them. And what I loved about it is that I could pull ten names out of the book, people we should know much more about, but that have been somewhat lost to history. Any one of them could be the subject of their own book or documentary or the next Netflix miniseries.

[20:05] Caseen Gaines: James Reese Europe is a great example of this. And that chapter where you focus on him was a revelation for me. I knew his name, I knew a bit about the Cleft Club and the Harlem Hellfighters, but you were able to go into some detail that I'd never heard before.

[20:19] Caseen Gaines: Yeah, and I often say with Footnotes, I really wanted people to take from this that SHUFFLE ALONG is an example of black artistry and excellence, not the example. And that sort of as you are suggesting, you could take any of those chapters and use it as the first chapter to some other book and start writing that because I agree. I think that Jim Europe, you know, this is not the first book that I've written, and I've written others as well. And there's always this moment where I fall in love with some character who is not my main one. And Jim Europe was that for me. He is like the fifth main character of this book, even though his time in this text is limited. But he hangs over the whole story to me.

[21:08] Caseen Gaines: And your description of that concert in France and his influence on the music scene of the day was so illuminating for me. I feel compelled at this moment to give thanks to my editor because the book came in a wee bit over word count, I will say. And to my editor's amazing credit, she understood what I felt compelled to do as I was writing this because there were people, Josephine Baker is an easy one, Paul Robeson has some time. Then there are people that people may be less acquainted with: Lottie Gee, Florence Mills, Adelaide Hall, Valleta Snow, Freddie Washington. They're just all of these great people whose lives intersected with these four men.

[21:55] Caseen Gaines: I should probably also mention Lawrence Dees, who is the actual director of SHUFFLE ALONG, who ends up getting removed from the project when it moves to New York because they felt like it would be better to have Walter Brooks, who's a white director, to have his name on the project, even though Walter Brooks did not really direct the show at all. And so I felt like if my thesis, I guess you can say, for this project was that these artists should be better remembered, then I would almost be dishonest if I did not try to find space for these other stories to be told.

[22:35] Caseen Gaines: I really was glad that I was able to take a moment and pay homage to some of the women of the chorus because they were written about as a unit. They were written about in so many of the reviews of the show. Almost every review of the show commented on the chorus, but never by name, never individually, who these women were were largely forgotten. And so in Footnotes, there are at least four or five that really have some equitable time to have readers learn more about them.

[23:10] Caseen Gaines: The dancing in SHUFFLE ALONG was one of the most revolutionary aspects of the show, and it received tremendous attention from the press. As Footnotes tells us, a writer for Billboard remarked that, quote, many of our more legitimate chorus sisters could get lessons in ginger by attending a performance of SHUFFLE ALONG and watching the sprightliness of its Creole Bells. And the New York American noted that the dancing was something new for Broadway. At times it seemed as though nothing would stop the chorus from singing and dancing except bringing down the curtain. They reveled in their work, they simply pulsed with it, and there was no let up. And gradually, any tired feeling you might have been nursing vanished in the sun of their good humor, and you didn't mind how they shuffled along. You even felt like shuffling a bit with them. All of which I admit isn't usual in dear old 42nd Street.

[23:59] David Armstrong: Caseen, was Lawrence Dees the choreographer of SHUFFLE ALONG, as well as the show's original director?

[24:05] Caseen Gaines: It was. So back during that time, they just sort of referred to the show being staged, staged by, not even directed. And so Lawrence Dees would direct the show and choreograph the show, but credit where it's due, the women also contributed to the choreography. And I think this is something that doesn't get enough credit, that doesn't get acknowledged enough. The way that this would sort of work is Dees would sort of have choreography rehearsal and he would do his moves and you know suggest his moves. He was a vaudeville performer, and he would encourage the women to maybe try it a little bit differently. How does this look for you? Maybe you can move in a way that I can't. And together, he provided the skeleton, but they collaborated on really building the piece.

[24:50] Caseen Gaines: There were actually women of the chorus. Elida Webb is one that's coming to mind, who went on to choreograph and stage other shows. So when you think about representation on Broadway, you're talking in 1923, there were women, black women who were the top creative team of shows playing on Broadway, because they came out of the chorus of SHUFFLE ALONG. And I should also mention before the show opened, the editor of Variety saw the four writers, Sissle, Blake, Miller, and Lyles, and said, you know, this show is dead in the water because people, particularly white women, will never pay Broadway prices to see black women on stage. That makes the success of this show all the sweeter. Very few people have ever been proven to be so entirely wrong. SHUFFLE ALONG became one of the longest-running Broadway musicals of the 1920s, and it led to a giant wave of black musicals that followed in its wake.

[25:46] David Armstrong: We'll pick up that story as Caseen and I continue our discussion in the next episode of this four-part miniseries.

[26:10] ♪ Musical number: "I'm Just Wild About Harry" — performed by Caseen Gaines ♪