YOUR DAILY DOSE OF EUBIE!!!!
Following Europe’s death, Pat Casey—the agent who had booked Europe’s band on vaudeville—asked Noble Sissle to continue touring with the Europe band as its leader:
[Casey] wanted me to go on vaudeville and probably take 12 or 15 of the band. I said, “No, no, this band’s too great. We ain’t going to bring nothing with that name on it. Let it die like it is. But I says, “Eubie Blake—he’s the fellow I’ve been writing music with– and I, we’ll go on vaudeville.”
Casey recognized Sissle’s talent as a vocalist and saw the potential in the duo’s act. And, in an unusual move, he also supported their desire to appear in white vaudeville without blackface makeup or adapting demeaning characterizations. However, Casey wisely did not book them in the South. Judging from newspaper notices and advertisements, the duo was primarily booked in the Northeast, including a few weeks in Canada; the furthest South they seem to have appeared is Eubie’s hometown of Baltimore and nearby Washington, D.C.
The act took the name “The Dixie Duo,” despite the fact that neither had direct Southern roots. This generic name could have equally been applied to a white act of the day, although some may have picked up the hint that their “Dixie” identity referred to their skin color.
After signing Sissle and Blake to his agency, vaudeville promoter Pat Casey had some initial trouble convincing managers to take on the duo as a “serious act.” Blake said that when Casey approached Newark’s Palace Theater to book the act, the managers suggested that they appear in blackface, dressed in overalls, and speaking in typical stuttering “darkie” dialect. They suggested that the piano be placed on stage and the two would enter, approach it gingerly, and then Sissle would say: “Hey, hey, hey Eubie, wh-wha-wha-what is that over there?” Blake was to respond, “I don’t know, I ain’t never seen one of them things,” and then approach the instrument carefully before touching its keys. You can imagine the rolling of the eyes, exaggerated expressions of fear and humility, and general clownishness that would have been expected as they carried out this dialogue. Casey, however, would not accept this request. As Eubie later recalled, Casey yelled at the Palace’s operators:
“Do you know these fellows? Do you know who there are? They were with Jim Europe’s band … The big Negro band. They worked for all the millionaires in the world. You can’t put no overalls on them, you might can, but I’m not going to put them on them. They’re going to work in tuxedos, like they always work, and play the piano and sing. And if you don’t want ‘em, just say you don’t want them.”
As Eubie frequently said, Sissle and Blake were not a “black” act in the sense that their repertory, presentation, and dialogue were all geared to appeal to a white audience. It is true that Blake sometimes spoke in dialect—much to the annoyance of Sissle—but he recognized that this was necessary to appeal to the audience. However, their dress and demeanor were equivalent to the white vaudevillians of the day, like the very popular Van and Schenck. In later interviews, Blake insisted that they shouldn’t be categorized as a “black act”:
They’d say “We drew Negroes.” We didn’t draw Negroes, because we didn’t have a Negro act. I’m the only one did light comedy, Negro comedy. I said, “Is you a fool? What you think I is?” That’s all, once or twice. Sissle didn’t like that, but it got laughs. [When he protested] I said, “Got a laugh didn’t it? I know how to talk different.” But he never liked that.
Blake accepted the expediency of using comic dialect to please the audience; the college-educated Sissle didn’t like it, and always pitched the duo as a “class act.” And Eubie took pride in the fact that he knew how to speak like a proper gentleman, so the only people being fooled were the customers in the audience.
