The 'Baby Dolls': Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition

3. “Oh You Beautiful Doll”: The Baby Doll as a National Sex Symbol in the Progressive Era

3 “Oh You Beautiful Doll” The Baby Doll as a National Sex Symbol in the Progressive Era S ongs celebrating women as “dolls” and “babies” flourished in the early years of the twentieth century. “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” written by A. Seymour Brown (1911), and “Pretty Baby,” created by musician and New Orleans native Tony Jackson (1912 or earlier), and other similarly titled numbers were part of the new and popular ragtime music. “When the Grown Up Ladies Act like Babies (I’ve Got to Love ’Em That’s All)” (1914), by Maurice Abrahams, Joe Young, and Edgar Leslie, is a further indication of what was titillating male desire at the time. The actress Florence Mills wore a baby doll costume and performed with composer Tony Jackson as a “Pretty Baby” with her Panama Trio around 1918. On the flip side, Bessie Smith’s “Baby Doll” (1926) expressed women’s desire to be someone special to a special someone: “I want to be somebody’s baby doll so I can get my loving all the time. I want to be somebody’s baby doll to ease my mind.” “Baby Dollism” was in the air. It was a part of the national sensual ethos. In New Orleans, one clever group of African American women seized on the emerging icon and turned it into a marketing strategy and an expressive art. Jackson’s “Pretty Baby” rag was specially written to accompany erotic dancing that characterized entertainment in the District after midnight. His lyrics described how a person in love with an adult is just like a person loving a baby: Won’t you come and let me rock you in my cradle of love And we’ll cuddle all the time. Oh, I want a lovin’ baby, and it might as well be you, Pretty baby of mine. Tony Jackson accompanying the Panama Trio, formed by Florence Mills with Carolyn Williams and Cora Green, about 1918. Photograph by Duncan P. Schiedt, used with permission . 48 • the “baby dolls” It is thought that Jackson wrote this for his male lover and the words were more explicit in the original. Another jazz musician, Clarence Williams, who was well acquainted with the sporting scene of Black New Orleans, wrote the popular “You’re Some Pretty Doll” (1917). His lyrics go to the heart of male fantasy of sexual play: Now listen Dolly, come over here There’s something I must whisper in your ear You’ve got me hanging ’round you like a child It seems as if you’re goin’ to drive me wild. Williams’s song captures many of the features of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls. The “Doll” not only makes him nervous, i.e., “sets my heart jumping,” but will make him “fall.” Those charming little curls and dimples too They make me know that it is you, just you I wonder if your dear heart is mine If so, it is a joy divine, Oh! won’t you tell me and put my heart at ease Oh! for a loving squeeze.1 The song ends with a declaration that he has “millions” that he will spend on his pretty doll. In his “Fragment of an Autobiography,” Ferdinand “Jelly Roll Morton” LaMothe recalled that, in the District, prostitutes stood “in their cribs with their chippies on.” He noted that a chippie was a dress that “women wore, knee length, very easy to disrobe.”2 Morton’s signature sentence, “The chippies in their little-girl dresses were standing in the crib doors singing the blues,” captured the fantasy that some men were willing to pay for and a group of women used as one economic option under the restricted employment opportunities available to them. Historian Samuel Kinser views the Baby Doll tradition as being borrowed from a similar practice in Trinidad. While the direct line cannot be proven, and the available evidence does not support this assertion, he rightly concludes that male libido was aroused by the image. the baby doll as a national sex symbol in the progressive era • 49 “mind yuh baby”: baby dolls and trinidad’s carnival From the inception of their participation in Carnival, Afro-Caribbeans would critique their conditions of bondage and oppression. As newly freed Africans in the Caribbean began to participate in Trinidad’s Carnival around 1832, the colonial authorities as well as the White and Black elite were alarmed and scandalized. The...