Robert Allen Cole Jr. was an American composer, actor, and playwright who produced and directed stage shows. In collaboration with Billy Johnson, he wrote and produced A Trip to Coontown (1898), the first musical entirely created and owned by black showmen. The popular song La Hoola Boola (1898) was a result of their collaboration. Cole later partnered with brothers J. Rosamond Johnson, a pianist and singer, and James Weldon Johnson, a pianist, guitarist and lawyer, creating more than 200 songs.
Florence Mills, billed as the "Queen of Happiness", was an American cabaret singer, dancer, and comedian.
William Mercer Cook, better known as Will Marion Cook, was an African-American composer, pianist, orchestrator, lyricist, violinist, and choral director. Cook was a student of Antonín Dvořák. In 1919 he took his New York Syncopated Orchestra to England for a command performance for King George V of the United Kingdom, and tour. Cook is probably best known for his popular songs and landmark Broadway musicals, featuring African-American creators, producers, and casts, such as Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk (1898) and In Dahomey (1903). The latter toured for four years, including in the United Kingdom and United States.
In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy is a landmark 1903 American musical comedy described by theatre historian Gerald Bordman as "the first full-length musical written and played by blacks to be performed at a major Broadway house." It features music by Will Marion Cook, book by Jesse A. Shipp, and lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. It was written by Jesse A. Shipp as a satire on the American Colonization Society's back-to-Africa movement of the earlier nineteenth century.
Lew Leslie was a Jewish American writer and producer of Broadway shows. Leslie got his start in show business in vaudeville in his early twenties. Although white, he was the first major impresario to present African American artists on the Broadway stage. He had two well-known wives, torch singer Belle Baker and Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Irene Wales.
Shuffle Along is a musical composed by Eubie Blake, with lyrics by Noble Sissle and a book written by the comedy duo Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. One of the most notable all-Black hit Broadway shows, it was a landmark in African-American musical theater, credited with inspiring the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s.
Tim Moore was an American vaudevillian and comic actor of the first half of the 20th century. He gained his greatest recognition in the starring role of George "Kingfish" Stevens in the CBS TV's The Amos 'n' Andy Show. He proudly stated, "I've made it a point never to tell a joke on the stage that I couldn't tell in front of my mother."
Coon songs were a genre of music that presented a stereotype of Black people. They were popular in the United States and Australia from around 1880 to 1920, though the earliest such songs date from minstrel shows as far back as 1848, when they were not yet identified with "coon" epithet. The genre became extremely popular, with White and Black men giving performances in blackface and making recordings. Women known as coon shouters also gained popularity in the genre.
Blackbirds of 1928 was a hit Broadway musical revue that starred Adelaide Hall, Bill Bojangles Robinson, Tim Moore and Aida Ward, with music by Jimmy McHugh and lyrics by Dorothy Fields. It contained the hit songs "Diga Diga Do", the duo's first hit, "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", "Bandanna Babies" and "I Must Have That Man" all sung by Hall.
Flournoy Eakin Miller, sometimes credited as F. E. Miller, was an American entertainer, actor, lyricist, producer and playwright. Between about 1905 and 1932 he formed a popular comic duo, Miller and Lyles, with Aubrey Lyles. Described as "an innovator who advanced black comedy and entertainment significantly," and as "one of the seminal figures in the development of African American musical theater on Broadway", he wrote many successful vaudeville and Broadway shows, including the influential Shuffle Along (1921), as well as working on several all-black movies between the 1930s and 1950s.
George Walker was an American vaudevillian, actor, and producer. In 1893, in San Francisco, Walker at the age of 20 met Bert Williams, who was a year younger. The two young men became performing partners. Walker and Williams appeared in The Gold Bug (1895), Clorindy (1898), The Policy Player (1899), Sons of Ham (1900), In Dahomey (1903), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandanna Land (1907). Walker married dancer Ada Overton, who later also was a choreographer.
Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk is a one-act musical by composer Will Marion Cook and librettist Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Jesse Allison Shipp, Sr. was an American actor, playwright, and theatrical director, who is best remembered as a pioneer African-American writer of musical theater in the United States, and as the author of the book upon which the landmark play In Dahomey was based. Shipp played an influential role in expanding black theater beyond its minstrel show origins and is recalled as perhaps the first African-American director of a Broadway performance.
George Walker and Bert Williams were two of the most renowned figures of the minstrel era. However the two did not start their careers together. Walker was born in 1873 in Lawrence, Kansas. His onstage career began at an early age as he toured in black minstrel shows as a child. George Walker became a better known stage performer as he toured the country with a traveling group of minstrels. George Walker was a "dandy", a performer notorious for performing without makeup due to his dark skin. Most vaudeville actors were white at this time and often wore blackface. As Walker and his group traveled the country, Bert Williams was touring with his group, named Martin and Selig's Mastodon Minstrels. While performing with the Minstrels, African American song-and-dance man George Walker and Bert Williams met in San Francisco in 1893. George Walker married Ada Overton in 1899. Ada Overton Walker was known as one of the first professional African American choreographers. Prior to starring in performances with Walker and Williams, Overton wowed audiences across the country for her 1900 musical performance in the show Son of Ham. After falling ill during the tour of Bandana Land in 1909, George Walker returned to Lawrence, Kansas where he died on January 8, 1911. He was 38.
A Trip to Coontown is an American musical comedy. It was performed, directed, and produced by African-Americans. It was written and performed in by Bob Cole and Billy Johnson. and debuted it New Jersey in 1897 before touring in the U.S. and internationally. Its New York City debut was at the Third Avenue Theatre on April 4, 1898.
The Darktown Follies were a series of musical revues staged in Harlem at the Lafayette Theatre from 1913 through 1916. All of the revue's creators were black, and it was one of the earliest musical revues to feature an all-black cast. Most of the music and lyrics written for the various reviews were created by J. Leubrie Hill and Will Vodery. Hill was also a major contributor to the musical books written for the revues, along with the writer Alex C. Rogers. Part of the age leading up to the Harlem Renaissance, the revue attracted diverse audiences from all over the city of New York. The theatre impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. attended performances, and purchased some of the content of the Darktown Follies for use in his Broadway musical revue, Ziegfeld Follies.
Willis J. Accooe was an American performing musician and composer, mainly of musicals. He was "an important songwriter during the birth of the black musical" according to the Library of Congress website.
African American comedy has had a substantial role in American culture from minstrel shows, vaudeville, blackface, and coon songs to some of the world's most popular comedians, shows and filmmakers.
Andrew Tribble (1879–1935) was an American actor, comedian and female impersonator of the early 20th century who played a variety of female characters at Chicago's Pekin Theatre, on Broadway and in touring companies throughout the United States. He is best known for his characters Lily White, a washerwoman, and Ophelia Snow, from Cole and Johnson's production The Red Moon. He has been described as "a real genius" and "one of the greatest female impersonators".
Blackbirds of 1926, also known as Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1926 was a musical revue with an all African American cast created and produced by impresario Lew Leslie that starred Florence Mills, Edith Wilson, and Johnny Hudgins, with music by George W. Meyer and Arthur Johnston, and lyrics by Grant Clarke and Roy Turk. The Blackbirds were a continuation of Leslie’s Plantation Revue, and the 1926 show was the first and original of a series of revues that would continue for more than a decade. The show ran for two years, and was succeeded by a new show called Blackbirds of 1928, a Broadway hit. Leslie mounted a series of Blackbirds revues, which ran in 1926, 1928, 1930, 1933 and 1939. The series were named after Mills' theme song, "I'm a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird," a thinly veiled protest against racial injustice, which she first sung in 1924.
