The Shuffle Along Baseball Team

Here’s a unique item from Eubie’s scrapbooks: A photo of the Shuffle Along ball team at a game they played against a team led by white vaudevillians Van and Schenck. Life on the road was often boring and there were few opportunities for fun. Touring companies often formed ball teams as both a means of recreation and as a way to promote a forthcoming performance. Musician Bill Monroe famously would roll into town challenging the best local players to a game in the late afternoon before giving a tent show at night.

Van and Schenck were in many ways Sissle and Blake’s greatest competition on the vaudeville circuit. The fact that this white duo was paid more per week than the equally popular Sissle-Blake duo was galling to them. Sissle noted that—despite being a top draw and working their way up to a featured spot on the program—their pay remained at the bottom of the pay scale. He stated that they could “stop the show” and even out-draw popular white acts: “Nobody could follow you on the goddamn stage. The next act might be a white act headliner and [the audience would] run ‘em off the stage because they want what they want. And we were the only colored persons on the bill. … Now the unfair part about it was … they put us on the old #2–and the #2 salary, about $250. Now then, the third act couldn’t get on, so they wouldn’t follow us, so they pushed us down to the fifth act, [and] pretty soon we’d be down to act next to closing. Now, there was no complaining from that act, because they were the animals, the dog acts, something like that. But they didn’t change our salary; #4 should be $450-500 if you could hold that spot.” According to Sissle, though, their salary was not adjusted to reflect the act’s popularity with the audience.

Decades later, Blake continued to complain that—at their height after the success of Shuffle Along—Sissle and Blake made only $3000 a week in vaudeville, while the white Van and Schenck got $5000 for essentially the same amount of work. Of course, $3000 a week was considerably more than other black acts earned at that time, but still it irked Blake that the duo was not paid as much as their white counterparts.