First of the Red Hot Mamas: "Coon Shouting" and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl

Jewish women vaudevillians at the turn of the century popularized what is now a little-discussed and misunderstood performance venue, known as "coon shouting." These once well-known, now obscure popular entertainers were crossing and breaking racial and gender boundaries, enacting narratives of immigration and Americanization on the Jewish female body. Coon shouting, the last descendent of the nineteenth-century minstrel show, represented not only popular theatre's transition from blackface minstrelsy to American vaudeville, but found currency in and capitalized on the suppressed identities of these Jewish performers. Provocative ambiguity fueled the racial uncertainty, meaningful messages and theatrical success of a popular fad lasting nearly 40 years, from 1880 to 1920. ¹ This study, part of a larger project on Jewish minstrelsy, reflects an interdisciplinary move to merge performance studies with Jewish and cultural studies in order to understand the deeper meanings of performance in historical context. ²

"Last of the Red Hot Mamas"

In an often-cited passage of Sophie Tucker's autobiography, Some of These Days, the comedienne recounts her first theatrical triumph in 1906. She claims to have begrudgingly donned blackface at the insistence of a Harlem manager who thought Tucker could not get a sexy song across. He jeered, "This one's so big and ugly the crowd out front will razz her. Better get some cork and black her up." ³ Rebelling onstage, Tucker reportedly lifted a smidgen of glove to reveal plump, pink skin bulging underneath. Tucker, like many popular entertainers who preceded her, outwardly performed blackness while attempting to efface its influence personally. ⁴ In her autobiography, she made sure to self-consciously foreclose any doubts about her coloration: "[I'd] wave to the crowd to show I was a white girl," she writes. ⁵

For an extra "kick," Russian-born Sonya Abuza eventually interpolated shund or common Yiddish into her repertoire. ⁶ The unique mix of racial disguise and dialect humor performed by a female comedienne- three "low other" associations in comic collusion-shocked and dismayed audiences into side-ripping gasps and howls. Like the exposed wrist, injected schmaltz was discordant with Tucker's swarthy sound and spectacle. Yet the combination endeared Tucker to audiences weaned on minstrel mirth and Hebrew impersonation. Furthermore her novel infractions of the blackface form did more than confirm Tucker's "bona-fide" whiteness; they laid bare her white Jewishness at a crucial time in American Jewish history when Jews-still tallied as "black" and "Oriental" by the US Census-were casting themselves increasingly as ethnic variations of the Caucasian race to describe their contributions to American society as distinct from that of African Americans. ⁷ Tucker's performance reflects these aspirations, but it also captures the conscious transition.

From 1906 to 1912, Tucker was billed on the minor vaudeville circuit as the "world-renowned Coon Shouter," a singer of "coon" songs. Coon songs emerged from the ashes of the Civil War when minstrel shows supposedly fell from comedic grace. ⁸ Otherwise known as Negro dialect songs, they were first introduced in the late 1870s in "primadonna" acts, when minstrel men known as female impersonators wore "high yellow" makeup and portrayed romantic leading octoroons and comic wenches. Though lynching was on the rise and the unspeakable crimes of rape and miscegenation gripped the white imagination, as Eric Lott has shown, theatre audiences were fascinated by doomed portrayals of interracial love featuring cross-dressed men playing mulatto women-the object of both white and black male desire. Female audiences, especially, were bewitched by the up-to-date fashions primadonnas sported as white minstrels preached conservative sexual, racial and social mores. ⁹ When women began playing a greater role on the popular stage in the Gay Nineties, primadonna acts soon diminished but its song lyrics, fashionable agenda and stereotypes fed right into vaudeville as it garnered a more respectable middle-class female...