Title: Music, Musical Theater, and the Imagined South in Interwar Britain
Abstract: IN JULY 1923 JINGLE, THE THEATER CRITIC OF LONDON'S FASHIONABLE Bystander magazine, reviewed a new show at London Pavilion called Dover Street to Dixie. Produced by Britain's leading theatrical impresario C. B. Cochran, Dixie segment this two-part show featured an African American cast headed by singer-dancer-comedienne Florence Mills, who at time was widely regarded as the world's greatest colored entertainer, with musical support from Will Vodery's swinging Plantation Orchestra. As Jingle explained, this production was hardly time that British audiences had been exposed to southern-themed musical entertainment. We have come to look on Dixie as practically a suburb London, he wrote, describing how Mills opened southern portion show by singing first Tennessee, then Dixie, both which spots we have been taught to love. (1) Two years later, a critic at Manchester Guardian observed how southern themes had become commonplace successfully imported revues. Night Light, for example, left nothing out that a slick, well-oiled revue is supposed to have in. There are songs about Dixieland and Tennessee and Plantation Days. (2) In May 1928 Jerome Kem-Oscar Hammerstein II stage musical Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat (1926) began a run 350 performances that took story entertainers aboard a Mississippi River paddle steamer from Theatre Royal Drury Lane London across entire country. (3) A year later, an all-black stage version Porgy, based on DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel about African American life Catfish Row neighborhood Charleston, South Carolina, debuted London and won plaudits for its mix southern spirituals and orgiastic folk-song from a reviewer who conceded that, interwar Britain, any play whose scene is laid Charleston must be irresistibly attractive to our dancing generations. (4) By 1936, when latest a series Black Birds revues crossed Atlantic--this incarnation featuring a slew southern-themed lyrics by Georgia songwriter Johnny Mercer--the British vogue for putatively southern music, dance, and theater showed little sign waning. (5) As war clouds gathered over Europe, a 1938 cavalcade organized to celebrate municipal centenary northwest cotton manufacturing town Bolton offered a far more comforting scene, set in cotton plantations Southern States, complete with Negro minstrels happily singing of Swanee and Dixieland. (6) Most southern-themed revues and musicals that captivated British audiences between World War I and World War II featured African American performers, occasionally supplemented by nonwhite artists from Britain and its empire or, far more rare, by whites blackface. Yet, with a few exceptions, such as Down South (1923), directed by Iowa-born, London-based African American singer-musician Will Garland, they were largely penned, produced, and financed by whites. (7) The Black Birds revues, for example, were devised by New York-based Russian emigre Lew Leslie. (8) Consequently, one aim this article is to probe British preoccupations with and, therefore, worth various forms popular culture that claimed to capture essence African American experience but that usually bore unmistakable stamp white mediation. But this article also suggests that debates over racial authenticity these entertainments frequently fused with transatlantic anxieties about regional authenticity music, dance, and other performance practices that purported to depict life U.S. South. Focusing on real and imagined, claimed and imputed, southern coordinates various musical entertainments popular Britain between wars, argument here is that there was a kind Dixiephilia at work: a marked British interest things southern that intersected both with a more general fascination with American popular culture and with a Negrophilia that has traditionally been used to explain interwar vogue for African American culture among some whites on both sides Atlantic. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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