YOUR DAILY DOSE OF EUBIE!!!!
Sometime during the late spring and summer of 1915, Noble Sissle travelled to Baltimore where he was hired as a vocalist by Joe Porter’s Serenaders to replace another singer, Frank Brown, as Eubie recalled: “[Brown] used to be with [the Broadway composing/acting duo] Cole and Johnson, and he had a very jealous wife. And they worked in cabarets. [They] work[ed] in white face. And when Frank would walk out on that floor, the white women would go, “Ooooohhh.” And the white men didn’t like it. … So [his wife] wouldn’t let her husband come to Baltimore. So Sissle came in his place.”
Porter’s group had a regular gig at Baltimore’s popular Riverview Park, which city dwellers could easily visit thanks to a regular streetcar line that served it. The trip took 20 minutes from downtown Baltimore. The 50-acre park did not charge an admission fee, advertising that the nickel street car fare was all that was required to attend. In 1915, the Park was totally refurbished, including the installation of a Ferris wheel that was 100 feet tall and featured 3500 electric lights. Other attractions included pony rides, novelty animal acts (including from time to time dancing bears), a miniature train that ran through the park, and nightly firework displays, along with opportunities for swimming, boating, and even bowling.
The park featured a band shell where military band concerts and singers performed; a separate “Vienna garden” featured a string quartet. Porter’s “popular group of Negro singers and musicians” performed both in the garden-restaurant area and in the band shell when the featured act, the “Royal Artillery Band, led by the world’s greatest Trombone Soloist, Sig. Salvatore Orriunno” took its breaks. Advertisements noted that “the man who sings with the [military] band,” Eddie Nelson, was a featured performer; as we will see, Nelson would play a key role in helping to author Blake’s first published song. The white singer Nelson lived in Baltimore and was “well known to the patrons of the dancing pavilions of many summer resorts” in Maryland.
Sissle and Blake worked together through the summer and early fall in Porter’s group. During this period, the duo wrote their first song, “It’s All Your Fault,” with some help from white singer Eddie Nelson on the lyrics. The trio collaborated on at least one other song published in 1916, “See America First.” The rarity of this sheet would indicate that it didn’t sell very many copies, even locally. The song’s title was borrowed from a movement sponsored by the railroads and the new automobile association to encourage American tourism; a “See America First” convention had been held in Baltimore in 1911. Neither Sissle nor Blake ever mentioned the song in later interviews as far as we have been able to determine.
