Vaudeville-Era Traveling Midwestern Entertainers: Blackface Minstrelsy, Musical Acts, Comedy and Great Lakes Social Life, circa 1912–1918

Traveling Midwestern Entertainers Vaudeville

Photograph

Midwestern theatrical photograph album, circa 1912 to 1918, centered on a striking group of large photographs documenting professional popular entertainment during the height of American vaudeville and variety theater. The theatrical images encompass blackface minstrelsy, musical and comic performance, costumed spectacle, and patriotic staging, while the remainder of the album records the dances, music, Great Lakes excursions, and social life of the young Midwestern circle that assembled it. Additional material includes the Demon Dozen's 1912 Leap Year Dance, a portrait identified as Metropolitan Opera soprano Mabel Garrison, and contemporary theatrical ephemera.

Photo album containing 101 photographs, silver gelatin prints, including large full-page photographs and smaller photographs, ranging from approximately 4 by 2.5 to 7.5 by 5 inches, Midwestern United States and Great Lakes locations, circa 1912 to 1918. The large photographs form the album's most substantial theatrical component and appear to depict professional or organized stage performers. A particularly striking photograph shows a large blackface minstrel company, with rows of male performers in stage makeup, white shirts, and bow ties posed before a painted architectural backdrop, accompanied by musicians and a pianist. Other photographs show costumed performers in white sailor outfits carrying tambourines and parasols; a company posed with rifles around an American flag; musicians with mandolins; and performers arranged in exaggerated comic tableaux. Collectively, the photographs document several forms central to early twentieth-century American popular entertainment: minstrelsy, musical performance, patriotic spectacle, costume acts, and broad stage comedy.

The smaller photographs place this theatrical material within a broader world of Midwestern leisure. Young men and women appear aboard Great Lakes vessels, on beaches and rural outings, making music, posing for informal portraits, and gathering socially. Inscriptions identify individuals and groups including "Doc Merz," "Merz & Curtiss," "Tubby," "Judge," and successive "G.H.C." groups. One photograph is captioned "U.S.S. Essex," while another shows a company posed aboard a vessel. Also retained is substantial material from the Demon Dozen's 1912 Leap Year Dance at Odd Fellows Hall, including a printed dance program with partners handwritten beside waltzes, two-steps, schottisches, a rye waltz, and a Cubanola. Newspaper accounts describe the grand march, German, favors, decorations, and supper, providing unusually specific evidence of organized social dancing during the period.

The album's connection to contemporary professional entertainment is reinforced by an advertisement for Harry Lauder's farewell American tour and Irving Berlin's Stop! Look! Listen!, Berton Braley's anti-Kaiser poem "The Limit," and a portrait identified in manuscript as "Mabel Garrison opera singer." Also, a Great Lakes vessel photograph is identified as the Eastland, the Chicago excursion steamer whose 1915 capsizing killed more than 800 people. The album provides a visually rich record of popular entertainment and leisure in the prewar and wartime Midwest, with its large theatrical photographs providing its strongest documentary content and the surrounding images of dancing, music, excursions, and social life showing the cultural world in which such entertainment circulated. Album leaves and mounts show moderate handling and edge wear; some photographs cut and unbound. Clippings show chipping, and photographs show scattered fading, surface wear, and occasional creasing. Overall in good to near fine condition.

Item #23988

Price: $900.00