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[0:14] Robert W. Schneider: Hi, I'm Robert W. Schneider, and welcome to Fifty Key Stage Musicals, the podcast, a companion piece to the Routledge Press publication, Fifty Key Stage Musicals, which is available for purchase by going to Routledge.com or clicking the link below in today's show description.

[0:28] Robert W. Schneider: Today's episode focuses on chapter four, the 1921 production of SHUFFLE ALONG.

[0:34] Robert W. Schneider: And with us today is the author of that chapter, Professor Jerrell L. Henderson of Chicago State University, Southside, Chicago.

[0:43] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Henderson is a director and puppeteer. His shadow play Three American Myths: A Riff in Shadow and Light in Three Rhythmic Movements was a finalist for the 2019 Jim Henson Foundation grant.

[0:56] Robert W. Schneider: As a director, he has been nominated for the Jeff Award and the Barrymore Award. And as an assistant director, Professor Henderson has worked with the Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, and Lookingglass Theatre.

[1:06] Robert W. Schneider: He received an MFA in directing from Northwestern University, is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab in 2012, an artistic associate of Black Lives, Black Words, and a Henson Foundation sponsored participant at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center National Puppetry Conference in 2020.

[1:27] Jerrell L. Henderson: Thank you so much, Rob. It's really, really great to be here.

[1:37] Robert W. Schneider: Why is SHUFFLE ALONG a key musical? Why is this included in this book?

[1:44] Jerrell L. Henderson: Because SHUFFLE Along helped rewrite the formula for what American musical theater would become. You know, musical theater for those of us who have studied it, we know that musical theater is an amalgamation of various forms of pop culture that came from what I would refer to personally as the old world. You have opera, you have elements of burlesque. However, you also have elements of that great American popular form of entertainment called minstrelsy. And so when you look at the musicals that came, the Broadway-level musicals that came before SHUFFLE ALONG, and you know, there's the argument of, well, they technically weren't on Broadway, but we know that for all intents and purposes, Williams and Walker, you know, Cole and Johnson, shows were Broadway level.

When you look at those shows, the makeup of those shows, it's very clear that those musicals are still more connected to the era of minstrelsy that came before it than the era of the jazz musical that would follow it.

[3:11] Jerrell L. Henderson: And I think that's the difference between the generation of Williams and Walker and the generation that Williams and Walker inspired, which is Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle and their folks, you know, in the 1920s. It's that element of jazz that moves it just beyond, you know, the blackface routine that Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller were performing. And it puts it in line for the revues that you're gonna see in the 1920s and 1930s. You got the Lew Leslie revues coming out, you know, and the Chocolate Dandies and all those kinds of shows. From those shows, you would begin to get music that's developed by Andy Razaf and Fats Waller and folks like that. And their music, as we know now in the early 21st century, actually pushes us to the end of the 20th century, as does the music of Eubie Blake, because you start to see those revue shows coming out in the 1970s that are actually a callback to the 1930s. But you understand that that callback, I mean, you're only able to have that callback because you have the original. And the further you get from minstrelsy, the less overtly minstrel it becomes. But that element, that jazz flavor never really goes away.

[4:35] Jerrell L. Henderson: And so the fact that SHUFFLE ALONG is the first jazz musical, that it popularized the form, that it wasn't just a Broadway show, it was also a pop culture phenomenon that would spur songs that would influence presidential elections and popular television towards the end of the 20th century. You know what I mean? The Warner Brothers cartoons and the Muppet Show. I forgot that they sing "I'm Just Wild About Harry" on the Muppet Show in the 1960s. And that's amazing. So that's one of the reasons why. When you think about the groundbreaking musicals that have changed American culture, right? And that's the hard call to make. When you think of Show Boat, I'm not a huge fan of Show Boat, but you can't deny after Show Boat, musical theater was different than before it.

I'm not a huge fan of Hair, but you can't deny bringing rock to that level on stage. Rock had been played around with before, but Hair took it to another level. It wasn't Bye Bye Birdie. It wasn't cute. It wasn't supposed to be about family. It was dangerous. And it was talking about things that people did not want to talk about. A Chorus Line, The Wiz, these are all shows that have changed the culture. And when you think about the fact that SHUFFLE ALONG, I know this is a long answer. You think about the fact that SHUFFLE ALONG came out in 1921, and there was a revue version of its history performed in 2016. That tells you everything you need to know about how influential that show is and deserves to be.

[6:36] Jerrell L. Henderson: One of the questions that we ask our authors, and I was so excited when we approached you with this title, which is, you know, why did you want to codify the history of SHUFFLE ALONG? You could have picked any show, but this is the one that you found the most interesting. Why did you choose this chapter to write about?

[6:58] Jerrell L. Henderson: Because I am always in search of the voices of my ancestors and those who came before me. It's really that simple. It's a very selfish reason. I wanted to know more about the show, and I knew a fair amount. As you know, I started collecting Black African American and African diaspora musical theater vinyl albums. And so one of those albums was the SHUFFLE ALONG soundtrack. And of course, they didn't put out a Broadway soundtrack, but those artists did record those songs around the time they put the show out. And those recordings were compiled into what we would now call a soundtrack. And so when you listen to, you know, when I'm trying to figure out which direction I'm gonna go in, or when I want to meditate, because I use the music, it helps me think and it helps me kind of figure out what direction to go in.

The more I know about the journey of the artists personally, the journey of the artists who went through this artistic process before, you know, they had to figure out how to produce a musical without money and without people lining up to back them. And this was a hundred years before now, literally a hundred years before now. You know, when I'm thinking about how to move forward, you know, their voices and their stories call to me and feed me in a way that helps me understand what way I want to go. And I kind of figured that if I felt that way, I couldn't be the only one who felt that way. And or it could be a way to show someone else a way to connect deeper with themselves.

[8:40] Robert W. Schneider: Here's something you never knew about American musical theater that is fundamentally important to know if you love American musical theater. Jerrell, when you were doing your research, what was one thing that you came upon that shocked even you? That you said, "Oh my god, I had no idea about this."

[9:01] Jerrell L. Henderson: My favorite story is the fact that, and it's another part of the history of how great the show is. The fact that Langston Hughes, who was a college student, the great poet known for his poems that came out during the Harlem Renaissance, when he was figuring out what college he was gonna go to, he went to Columbia University in New York. And he said that that was because he wanted to go see SHUFFLE ALONG whenever he wanted to go see it. That show is one of the reasons why he moved to New York and he became a very huge cultural figure in the city of New York. He's there because he's soaking up those beautiful Black and African American and African diasporic influences. And when you look at the career trajectory, the theater trajectory of Langston Hughes, because a lot of folks only know him as a poet, as a short story writer and a novel writer, but he was a librettist and had a few of his plays or his works ended up on Broadway in various shows.

When you look at his trajectory of the kind of theater that he would create, which was centered in African American traditions, as was SHUFFLE ALONG. So SHUFFLE Along inspires Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes begins writing plays and musicals that would then inspire the next generation. When you look at Jericho Jim Crow, which is a Langston Hughes play that was in the 1960s, it was co-directed by Alvin Ailey and William Harrison, starred Mickey Grant, the recently late great Mickey Grant, Joseph Adonis, who was a callback performer from the 1930s. When you look at the fact that Jericho Jim Crow, this play about the 1960s that has Mickey Grant in it, you know, Langston Hughes connecting back to the 20s connects to Mickey Grant.

Mickey Grant goes out, connects with Vinnette Carroll. And then the 1970s, you start to see musicals like Your Arms Too Short to Box with God. You start to see musicals like Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope. You start to hear music in musicals like Working that talk about what it's like to be a cleaning woman and what it's like to be a mechanic, and what it's like to live in these what you might call traditional African American spaces or experiences, and that extends to someone like me who then wants to take that into the 21st century. I mean, the joy that that show produced and the interest that it generates to make those of us who have that hunger dive deeper into that history as a connection to ourselves to make the world a better place.

[11:41] Robert W. Schneider: Oh, Langston Hughes, right there. That is so incredible. And when reading your chapter, I read that, and I just I had such a huge smile on my face to know that a musical is what helped keep one of America's greatest poets in New York City.

[11:47] Robert W. Schneider: In New York City, and I love that so much. Now, a question for you, because you know, our book doesn't cover things like Indo Homey or Abyssinium, which is you know the Williams and Walker thing. Can you tell me a little bit if when they were creating SHUFFLE ALONG, was there a clear decision made not to embrace some of the minstrel show type elements that Williams and Walkers had at the early part of the 20th century?

[12:26] Jerrell L. Henderson: Or was that not even something to be considered when they were crafting SHUFFLE ALONG? Because it seems like there's a pretty thick dividing line between the work of Williams and Walker and something like SHUFFLE ALONG.

[12:39] Jerrell L. Henderson: Thank you for asking that question. I would argue, and this is historical perspective, you know, that you have to remember that Williams and Walker, Colin Johnson, Jay Roseman Johnson and James Weldon Johnson, the Ernest Hogan, Ada Overton Walker, George Walker's wife, they were the direct influences, they were direct influences on Eubie Blake. And Eubie Blake would often, and all of them, but I mean Aubrey Lyles, Eubie Blake, because he just lived the longest, would often credit them and their musicals when people would say that SHUFFLE ALONG was the first Black musical. Eubie Blake would correct them and say no, so I don't know if there was that kind of awareness when they were developing SHUFFLE ALONG.

[13:30] Jerrell L. Henderson: I think that once SHUFFLE ALONG hit, and once some of the other shows that would come after hit, once you start getting about ten plus years after SHUFFLE ALONG, the culture really does begin to change, especially within the African-American community in terms of what we're willing to accept and what we're not willing to accept. It was still easier to accept that in 1920, 1921. And that was Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles' bread and butter, because you have to remember that that was the way that if you were making it on major circuits, to some extent, you were doing blackface, period. So I don't know if there was that particular divide, one, because of the time period that they existed in and how acceptable blackface still was.

[14:15] Jerrell L. Henderson: The jazz singer film with Al Jolson is around that era. I think it might be a little bit later. I forget the exact date of that film. It's 1927 or 28. Yeah, it's somewhere around there. And he's still wearing blackface and being celebrated in that. And also you have to remember that they were big influences. Burt Williams was a huge, I mean, it's just like asking, you know, Josh Henry if you know was, you know, I'm trying to think, you know, it was Andre DeShields or Ken Page or Gregory Hines, you know, someone who's not like Paul Robeson, who's so old that you would respect and revere, but someone from a few generations or two before them. You know what I mean? Would you still be influenced by them? It's like, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. To a large extent, at least in my case, that's what I listened to to discover musical theater. So it's in the water, you can't escape from it.

[15:17] Jerrell L. Henderson: Why do you think something like SHUFFLE ALONG is still with us today in terms of musical theater? But something like Indo Homey or Abyssinia has sort of fallen under a footnote in a lot of musical theater history books. SHUFFLE ALONG to a large extent has been blessed by the fact that enough people have remembered it who have sway in American musical theater popular culture, that it has never completely died away to the same extent that the Williams and Walker works have within the African American musical theater community and within the musical theater community at large. For those of us who are really into it, we know about Abyssinia, we know about Sons of Ham. But to a large extent, if you're, let's say, I don't want to say a casual listener because that sounds arrogant, but if you're someone who I guess isn't as deep into the history of it, but you like it, you're seeing it, you might miss that.

But SHUFFLE Along would be hard to miss because if you follow the curve, you know, if I don't know, I guess I think the fact that you had, you know, SHUFFLE ALONG came back in the 1950s, like it didn't work, but it came back in the 1950s. SHUFFLE ALONG in and of itself didn't come back in the 1970s, but Eubie did, and by celebrating Eubie, you were celebrating SHUFFLE ALONG.

[16:47] Jerrell L. Henderson: Yeah. And the fact that George C. Wolfe, who, you know, is now one of the godfathers of American theater, period, but definitely African-American musical theater. The fact that he came along in the early 21st century and was like, I'm gonna tell you a story that you are not gonna that you have never heard, you're not gonna believe. And there were enough contemporary people who hadn't heard about it, and enough contemporary folks who were like, Oh my god, yes, you can build off of it. And again, the music lends itself to joy and creative expression.

[17:22] Jerrell L. Henderson: I saw the show in 2016 on Broadway, okay. And wouldn't it be nice if there was a cast recording for those of us that were unable to see it?

[17:36] Robert W. Schneider: Why are you asking me this? Why are you trying to get me into trouble, Rob?

[17:39] Jerrell L. Henderson: I'm not, I'm not. I'm just asking me this question. It would just be nice. It is one of my deep, deep annoyances that push me to some extent to be as vocal as I am about valuing African American performers and African American bodies. Because to me, it was a great insult to produce that play. But when you know, when everything didn't line up the way that one person wanted it to line up, it was like everybody just go home. Here's a check, go home.

[18:19] Robert W. Schneider: Yeah, I'll take my toys and go away now.

[18:21] Jerrell L. Henderson: Yeah, so that I saw the show, so that'll live forever in my head. But those cast albums, that's how things live. That's how things move from generation to generation. I discovered SHUFFLE ALONG because I could hear the music that they were allowed to record. And the same thing with Eubie, and the same thing with all of these other African American shows that I'm collecting right now. So when you put something into the water, when you either deny it, it's just a lesser death. That's all that happened. It wasn't we're not gonna produce it, which is like the biggest form of disrespect. It's not worthy of being seen, but the fact that it's worthy of being received, but it isn't worthy of being catalogued. And there's no record, so it lives in the world of oral tradition.

[19:20] Jerrell L. Henderson: Somebody has to tell you about Savion Glover's tap dance because you can't hear it. Somebody has to tell you about how amazing it was to watch Audra McDonald be eight and a half to nine months pregnant singing amazingly and doing high kicks and Josh Henry and Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter, you know, these human beings who are literally living the dream and the reality that the folks that they're playing were trying to create a hundred years ago, and we don't have anything besides our memories and some photos to look back on. And to me, for the amount of money that lives in the American theater production industry for there to be no catalog of that brilliance, that's a crime.

[20:11] Robert W. Schneider: A taste of money is worse than none at all.

[20:14] Jerrell L. Henderson: It's history, I agree with you. You're playing with history, a hundred and ten percent. You're playing with American history. It's an absolute shame. I'm gonna be honest with you. When they announced the production, I assumed I said, Oh, this will be great because they'll capture it on film, so that way there'll be a record of it. And to go from that idea of what I think is gonna happen all the way to like you were saying, it's offensive that they didn't even, you know, there's no where you don't have money for this.

[20:43] Robert W. Schneider: No, no, there's no money out of all the—

[20:43] Jerrell L. Henderson: Excuse me. Out of all the money that we spend on things and nobody can find money for this, okay.

[20:53] Robert W. Schneider: That's right, to record that music.

[20:55] Jerrell L. Henderson: And it's one of the great sadnesses that I, if I have anything to do about it, it will never happen again. Great. I have a lot of power, a lot of say, but that's one of the things I'm gonna work towards. Because if we don't, there's so much of African American musical, there's so much of African American history that gets lost. So with at least in the realm of American musical theater, man, that's politics, that's social mores, that's generational expectations, that's seeing the evolution of African American male misogyny and homophobia, you know, to go from Guys and Dolls in the 1970s to A Strange Loop in the early 21st century, and how narratives about love and who's worthy of love get to be told.

[21:54] Jerrell L. Henderson: It moves out of the realm of putting African American narratives on top of white narratives to creating narratives of our own based on what we go through. It's not that we can't get anything from Guys and Dolls, of course we can. Guys and Dolls have something from everyone, but it doesn't hit the same way that, you know, the bubbly brown girl sheds her chameleon skin. You know what I mean?

[22:23] Robert W. Schneider: And you know, you said something so interesting, which I'd like to ask you about, which is you said, you know, the idea of who gets to fall in love and how those love stories are told. Can we talk a little bit about Love Will Find a Way?

[22:34] Jerrell L. Henderson: Yes. Would you be so kind as to tell our listeners exactly what is Love Will Find a Way and why it's significant?

[22:35] Jerrell L. Henderson: Love Will Find a Way. Such a good song. Sounds so good. Yeah, it's such a good song. Oh, okay. I'll get distracted by my own storytelling. So Love Will Find a Way is the major love song between the two young lovers, characters in SHUFFLE ALONG, Harry being the gentleman who's running for mayor, he's one of the three main stories of the musical. And so again, it was often believed that there had never been a showing of African-American love on stage that wasn't comedic.

[23:25] Jerrell L. Henderson: And that's not a hundred percent true. Like they, you know, during the Williams and Walker era, specifically between George Walker and his wife Ada Overton Walker, there were love narratives. It was always, these musicals were comedies, but none of us were there. So the idea to say that they were just based in comedy, I was like, I don't know if that's necessarily true. And to me, the images of George Walker holding his wife's hand while they dance on stage, to me, even if that's being done in a comedic context, that's still showing genuine love between a Black man and a Black woman. However, when you read the Eubie Blake autobiography or Reminiscing with Sissle Blake, which is where a lot of the information about this show comes from, thank God Eubie Blake lived so long, and Noble Sissle, because Noble Sissle lived a while as well.

From the stories that they tell about, you know, the previews of Love Will Find a Way, you definitely get the idea that it wasn't a given that this, you know, love ballad from a Black man to a Black woman was gonna fly.

[24:38] Jerrell L. Henderson: And basically, it was the idea of, you know, a lot of there was a lot of money to be made and a lot of social and political capital to be gained by the idea that African Americans were not full human beings.

[24:51] Jerrell L. Henderson: I mean, all you have to do is look at minstrel shows and how popular that was for as long as it was popular. So when you look at that, you understand that there was a lot to be gained from dehumanizing black people. And one of the ways that you dehumanize people is by saying that they're not capable of love. It was one of the arguments that were made for separating families during slavery. They don't feel love the way that we feel love, so it's okay to take their children away from them because it won't affect them the same way.

[25:28] Jerrell L. Henderson: And so when you push against those really strong national narratives, you know what I mean, and oftentimes unspoken narratives, you might be in for some real pushback, you know, racist America doesn't like it when you prove it wrong. And racist America doesn't like it when you try to change that narrative, especially if you're one of the people of color that's being oppressed.

[26:02] Jerrell L. Henderson: So you have the story of, you know, things like Noble Sissle and Aubrey Lyles with their feet in the stage door because they were afraid that when that song played, there was gonna be a riot. That was a real worry. And you got to remember there were still race riots going on. And just because they were in New York, there were race riots in New York. So it was possible for a love song to trigger massive violence and death. And if the cops showed up, they weren't arresting the white people who were tearing up shit, they were arresting the black performers.

[26:38] Jerrell L. Henderson: So you have this story of them with their feet in the stage door, like, all right, like if this pops off, we out. What about Yubi? He's gonna have to fend for himself. It's like literally never gonna like we out. And Yubi Blake is in the orchestra pit, like playing, like trying to be cool, beginning to play this song. Like, what is gonna happen?

[27:01] Jerrell L. Henderson: And so when the song becomes a hit, when reviewers start to write about it, the beauty of the melody, and it is a beautiful melody. You know, the beauty of the word, the poetry, the poetic language that's being used, and it is poetic language. Everybody takes a collective sigh of relief. In the 1920s, African Americans, America has decided that it is okay if African Americans have substantial love stories on stage.

[27:34] Jerrell L. Henderson: Okay. Like it's now a thing that we have written that white America will accept that. And so they really did push the envelope, even though they may not have been the first to do it. They definitely took it to another level. And "Love Will Find a Way" became the second most famous song after "I'm Just Wild About Harry."

[28:01] Jerrell L. Henderson: And you know, if you listen to it today, it's a beautiful song, and it's reminiscent of the time period in which it was written. Which is great because people don't write music that way anymore, and that's not an argument to say that they should, but isn't it really great to hear where you know, when you listen to the great love songs today, the first song that came to mind was "Play the Music for Me" from "Jelly's Last Jam."

[28:26] Jerrell L. Henderson: You know what I mean? Yeah. When you listen to songs that have come out in the last, let's say 30 or so years, the DNA of those songs lives inside of "Love Will Find a Way." You know, with just the last chance blues from the end of "Jelly," you know, these two characters in love singing about their love for each other, but their inability to show it. The DNA for that song definitely comes out of "Love Will Find a Way," and it's just cool to be able to track that again.

[28:56] Jerrell L. Henderson: That's the beauty of having an original Broadway soundtrack. You can see where you've been and imagine where you might go. Wow. And you know, because so many musical theater history books for so long were focused written by white men through that white lens, so many names from the African American musical theater community have just sort of disappeared.

[29:21] Jerrell L. Henderson: And one of the things that I really love about your chapter is it brings these names back into the narrative again. Yeah, and there were some names full disclosure. When I read it, I said I've never heard of this individual before, but it was fascinating. Can you tell me a little bit about James Reese Europe?

[29:38] Jerrell L. Henderson: Yes, I can. James Reese Europe was a band leader in the early 20th century. He was an African-American band leader, he was a physical bear of a man, he was a you know, big, large, barrel-chested man with these really serious like steel glasses from that era, and he was known for being fair. He was known for being decent.

[29:45] Jerrell L. Henderson: And he was known for what you would call he was a raceman. So his goal in life was to elevate the culture. And that's what we were going to do. And everything we were going to do was going to elevate black culture. And he was a big proponent of, you know, I'm not trying to write like John Philip Sousa. I'm not trying to write like Irving Berlin. That's not what I do.

[30:28] Jerrell L. Henderson: And why, and I don't understand, and he would say, you know, I don't understand why black people, we shouldn't try to write like white people. We should try to write like ourselves because nobody can do it the way that we can do it. So he had mad pride in himself and his culture and in where he came from.

[30:46] Jerrell L. Henderson: You know, he knew the genius that he had inside of him. And he looked at those around him and saw that same genius in them. And it was James Reese Europe who planted the idea of having an all-Negro musical on Broadway because you have to remember the love affair with the African American folks in America is fluid. It comes and goes.

[31:10] Jerrell L. Henderson: And so there are decades in which the so-called Negro is in vogue. And then there are decades where it's just like, yeah. You look at like "Hallelujah, Baby," "Dreamgirls," and it's like black artists are awesome. Then, like, there's "Tap Dance Kid" in the 80s, but after "Tap Dance Kid," it's kind of until like "Once on This Island" in the early 90s that you start seeing African American themed musicals again.

[31:47] Jerrell L. Henderson: So it comes and goes. And so James Reese Europe, you know, when they were talking about it, it was in the law. You had had the era of Williams and Walker and Ernest Hogan and those folks in the late 1800s going into the early 1900s, but that era had kind of petered out. And the era of "SHUFFLE ALONG" in the early 1920s hadn't fully popped off yet.

[32:08] Jerrell L. Henderson: There's still black musical theater happening, but it's not happening at that level. And so Jim Europe, who fought in World War I with Noble Sissle, they were friends, they were army brothers, they were musical brothers, you know, Europe was their mentor.

[32:28] Jerrell L. Henderson: Europe was, you know, the only way I can liken it now is if like the way that I kind of see Billy Porter. You know, Billy Porter was fortunate enough to live past all that ish that his younger generation had to deal with coming up in the late 80s, early 90s, and like AIDS and you know, Reagan and the first Bush and all that craziness.

[32:52] Jerrell L. Henderson: So he was there to see a lot of that, he can now be a mentor to those of the younger generation while he also lives his best life now. And so that's kind of how I like it's not exactly the same, but it's kind of how I see Jim Reese Europe in terms of he was the one that was like living and paying attention, so that when these other cats came along, he's like, Why are you over there? Come on over here, we're gonna create some shit together.

[33:20] Jerrell L. Henderson: And he is killed. Sorry, just want to quickly, he was killed by a band member, May of 1919, if I'm not mistaken. And it was an argument that got out of control, and the guy got a good cut. He cut him on his neck, and it was like the right cut, and it didn't seem that bad. And the next morning he was gone.

[33:41] Jerrell L. Henderson: And honestly, the musical would have been created anyway, but it's interesting that "SHUFFLE ALONG" wouldn't have been "SHUFFLE ALONG" if he had lived. "SHUFFLE ALONG" became "SHUFFLE ALONG" because Jim Europe died, and then Sissle and Blake were like, We gotta do something about this, and then it became their energy, and it was their musical energy, which was rooted in jazz, plus the energy of Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller that was rooted in like hardcore vaudeville comedy.

[34:12] Jerrell L. Henderson: That four-linked chain that created the musical. And had he lived, how do you think "SHUFFLE ALONG" would have sounded?

[34:20] Jerrell L. Henderson: Um, that's an interesting point because he and I mean Blake was influenced by him, so I think it would have been it still would have been a jazz musical, it just would have been different jazz because these were the Harlem Hellfighters, these were the folks who were playing their version of music all over Europe while they were there, and when they came back to Harlem with like a ticker tape parade marching, strutting, you know, playing their music.

[34:20] Jerrell L. Henderson: So I think it would have been it would have still been similar, it just wouldn't have been exactly the same. And you know, you had mentioned this before we went on the air, and one of the things I think that one of the people that we remember so much from "SHUFFLE ALONG" is Yubi Blake, just simply because he had such a long life, whether he was a hundred or ninety-five, we're still trying to figure that out.

[35:07] Jerrell L. Henderson: But because he was around for so long, he sort of became the person that we identified the most with the show, but there are all these other individuals that helped shape this show to be a key musical that either died young or just sort of disappeared from the history books.

[35:24] Jerrell L. Henderson: And one of the great things about your chapter, like I said, is you bring these people back. And one person I was so interested by was Florence Mills. Can you tell me a little bit about her and what she contributed to this event?

[35:41] Jerrell L. Henderson: Songbird. She was she was a replacement performer. Sutton Foster is the white version of Mills. She was a replacement performer, and she so defined the role that it became hers. That's who she was. She became an international sensation by redefining a role that had been introduced by another performer.

[36:12] Jerrell L. Henderson: Celebrated. They were both celebrated performances. So, you know, so that's who she was. She was an international influence, and one of the reasons why her memory is so mythic is because she died so young. She was sick. I forget the exact elements that took her out, but yeah, she was performing in London.

[36:39] Jerrell L. Henderson: In some ways, it's like a Marilyn Monroe type thing, which is because they left the world so young, there's this mythical idea about them.

[36:47] Robert W. Schneider: Is that correct?

[36:48] Jerrell L. Henderson: Ellington wrote a song about her.

[36:50] Robert W. Schneider: Wow.

[36:51] Jerrell L. Henderson: You know, and there's no known copy of her singing.

[36:57] Robert W. Schneider: I was just gonna ask.

[36:58] Jerrell L. Henderson: So we so whatever there was special about her, it's gonna be in the people's memories that got to see her. It lives in the hurts of that Duke Ellington song. It lives in the words of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle who spoke about her, you know. I mean, and the various other performers who were performing at the same time and who are her contemporaries, so they were influenced by her. You're talking Ethel Waters, you know what I mean? You're talking Avon Long. You're talking about people who would have seen her perform and would have remembered that, uh, uh, uh, Elizabeth Welch. Oh wow, who's another performer who would go to London, you know, and live her best life. So you hear it. It's what I was just listening.

I have a couple Elizabeth Welch albums, um, both in shows and, you know, solo, solo and to listen to her, you know that you're hearing the way that music was communicated at the beginning of the 20th century. Because it lives through whatever, you know, Florence Mills might be doing, we might be seeing elements or hearing elements.

[38:02] Robert W. Schneider: That's absolutely correct.

[38:11] Jerrell L. Henderson: She would have known they would have been aware of each other. Wow. So we can listen to Elizabeth Welch, we can listen to Ethel Waters and get some sort of idea of it. Get some sort of idea of how she would have performed knowing that, or Josephine Baker. Ah, okay. Listen to Josephine Baker because they would have known each other. You know what I mean? You know, um, they would have been aware, and so she, of course, would have put her own spin on it, but that's the idea of how musical theater was sung at that time, you know.

[38:44] Robert W. Schneider: Now you had mentioned that there was a revival of SHUFFLE ALONG in the 1950s that was not very successful. Is there a reason why it did not click with audiences in the 1950s?

[39:00] Jerrell L. Henderson: It seems from what I've been able to read for all the obvious reasons. Um, the script of SHUFFLE ALONG was never was not a script in terms of how we think of script today. But the actors knew what they were doing with what they had because it was their creation. So it's kind of like I imagine it when I read the script that the published script that's left, when I read it, it's like it kind of reads to me like it's like when you if you're writing a recipe, but you write a recipe for somebody who already knows the recipe, a lot that you leave out because the person knows it. So if you pick that up and try to make something of it, and you're not from that culture, because this was the, um, I forget the exact year, I think it was '56, but don't quote me on that.

Um, but Pearl Bailey was invited to be the lead, and Pearl was like, SHUFFLE ALONG, yeah, sure, I'd love to be in the revival of SHUFFLE ALONG. And the producers who are predominantly white move, you know, push Sissle and Blake further and further out and further and further away. Uh, and it becomes less their thing. And you know, these white producers, I think they make it into like the story of a guy at in at in World War II or something, or coming home from the war or something like that. And the script is a mess. So I think that that's one of the things if you're gonna do SHUFFLE ALONG, you got if you're gonna produce SHUFFLE ALONG, you gotta be the kind of producer that understands that if you don't know what you're doing, you really need to bring in the people who do and stay the fuck out of the way.

It's similar to how I see The Wiz, because The Wiz is also a very, it's, you know, a very, when I read the script to The Wiz, it reads like an insider recipe, and there's a lot of people who don't get that script because the slang throws them off. And I'm like, you know that if they just wrote this because that was the way that people were speaking today. So if you want to produce The Wiz, just have them speak the way that people are speaking today, you know, like it's not you don't need to have Evelyn calling somebody a job, you know, like come on, like they it wasn't written to be like held on like that. It was written to breathe and to let the actors make of it what they will, because that's what Black performers had to do for so long.

It's one of the things that you hear when you read Alice Childress's Trouble in Mind, the play that's about to come back on Broadway with the great LaShans, and at the beginning of it, she's telling the young Black person, you know, Trouble in Mind takes place in the late 1950s, and we see the generational divide of actors who worked during the 1920s and young actors coming up who are learning the method in the 1950s and how to be rooted in yourself and psychological things, and, um, you know, the lead actress is like I don't put that much thought into this because I know what they want, I know what they know what they're looking for, so I'm just gonna give them that, and I don't think about it.

[42:09] Robert W. Schneider: Um, so yeah, yeah.

[42:14] Jerrell L. Henderson: What got it, got it?

[42:16] Robert W. Schneider: Yeah.

[42:17] Jerrell L. Henderson: And the last, the last team I want to ask you about is Miller and Lyles, who don't get mentioned as much as Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. What information did you discover about these two individuals, Miller and Lyles?

[42:32] Jerrell L. Henderson: Yeah, there's a great book called Footlights that came out, or that I discovered, um, just as I was actually wrapping up this chapter. And it was like, no, well. Always the way. I was like, golly, what a great book. Because um, the literature that I was using did primarily focus on Sissle and Blake. But Footlights spends time with Miller and Lyles in a way that none of the other books or references I was able to find really did. And so to understand that they met at Fisk University, they were college friends. So think about all of the great musical theater that we have seen that have come from people who just connected in college. I think of Urinetown. I think of course Hamilton and In the Heights and those folks.

You know what I mean? Um, so they were buddies, they met at Fisk and they wanted to perform. And you know, especially at the time when they were young men, we're talking again, late 1800s going into early 1900s. You know, it was all about how you bring respectability to your race. And so theater was not seen as a respectable living. However, they created a piece in college that was so successful it started paying for shit around campus. They started bringing in money. And once they started bringing in money, theater didn't seem so bad. Yeah, exactly. To the folks who were, you know, running things. They go on the road, you know, and Footlights does a really great job. Oh, this book. I wish I remembered the author right now, but his name escapes their name escapes me.

We'll put a link to the book in that. Oh, great, great, great. Yeah, yeah. Um, the book is really clear about telling you how dangerous it was for them to pursue their dream. Like in the 21st century, you know, it's 2021. It's like, oh, yeah, these two kids met in college and they were writing shows, and then they went on the road. But they were living in the early 1900s, and they were two Black young men on the road. Think of the Scottsboro Boys. Think of all of the Black people who have died because white people have lied or had their feelings hurt a little. And the only thing that would make them feel better in that moment is for that Black person who made them feel uncomfortable for a second to be murdered in the most extreme way.

Like, so the book points that out, and that was something that they were aware of. They really had to watch their backs, and they had to watch each other's backs because anything could pop off at any time. So I really appreciated the book for that. Them going to Chicago, them kind of finding the theater culture and society culture in Chicago and finding people who are willing to invest in them. And when you're looking for that message, you know, uh, there's no way that, you know, forget about me. I'm already old with a career, but someone else coming up today, someone else coming up today trying to figure out what SHUFFLE ALONG and these, you know, men and women who lived so long ago has to offer them.

One of the great lessons that travels through time is the fact of like finding your community, finding the community that works for you, finding people who are gonna support you. All of these folks, whether it was the society in Chicago or Jim Reese Europe or somebody else, found a group of people who were willing to bet on them and help develop them. And that's where they stayed and lived until they were they had enough to do their own. Or you even look at Josephine Baker, who was not cast the first time she showed up. She showed up when she was 14 years old in DC. And I interestingly enough, or horribly enough, the reason why she wasn't cast, you know, Sissle looked at her, he was a colorist, you know.

So Sissle looks at her and goes, too young, too dark. Next, he sees her a year later, she performs incredibly, or a couple of years later, she performs incredibly. And his response, she goes, he goes, Do you know why I didn't hire you? And she looks at him and goes, Yeah, you said I was too young and too dark. And he's like, No, no, no, you want to experience and she's like, Yeah, whatever, am I in the show? You know, because that so and so in Josephine Baker's situation, it was an atmosphere that didn't immediately welcome her, but she knew what she wanted. She knew what she wanted in this world, and they were the keys to getting that. And no matter how long it took, no matter what it took, she was gonna be in that show.

When she got in that show, she did everything she could to her co-performer's chagrin to get attention and to push herself into the spotlight because she knew what she wanted. And once the men at the top realized what she had to offer once she was in the show, they started marketing that.

[47:45] Robert W. Schneider: I mean, once again, you know, uh, the chapter that you wrote is absolutely fantastic. Um, we will put a link to all of the things that Professor Henderson has talked about today in our show description, including his Instagram. Would you the name of the Instagram one more time, please?

[48:01] Jerrell L. Henderson: Black Theater Vinyl Archive, which is such a wonderful resource.

[48:06] Robert W. Schneider: Professor Henderson, thank you so much for joining us today. We could go on forever and ever. Uh, folks, please make sure to purchase a copy of Fifty Key Stage Musicals by visiting Routledge.com or by clicking in today's show description. If you want to learn more about SHUFFLE ALONG, please also review the links in the below description. I'm Robert W. Schneider, and thank you so much for listening to Fifty Key Stage Musicals.