That's Got 'Em!: The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman

7. THE ORIGINAL AND MUCH-IMITATED RAGTIME CLARINETIST

- 66 Chapter 7 ThE orIGInAl And muCh-ImITATEd rAGTImE ClArInETIsT By the autumn of 1911, Sweatman, having spent three years accompanying traveling vaudeville acts and stock companies at the Grand and Monogram theaters, probably felt that the time was right to look for new opportunities and challenges. Throughout his professional career to date, he had been almost continually on the move; first with N. Clark Smith’s Pickaninny band, then with the Lowery and Mahara circus bands, then roaming around Minnesota and Wisconsin. His tenure in Chicago had been the longest period he had stayed in one place and, although he put down roots in the form of his marriage to Nettie, one suspects that the urge to move on was, once again, starting to develop. His years of experience of stage and touring show work had taught him much of what audiences enjoyed and expected, and how to present it to them. Seeing the wide array of acts that passed across the stages of the Grand and the Monogram, some good, some bad, some indifferent, made him realize that it could be him on the stage rather than in the orchestra pit. Vaudevillian and entertainer Tom Fletcher recalled seeing Sweatman while at the Monogram and recognizing the potential he had as a vaudeville act: While laying off there in Chicago for a week I would meet “Sweat” after he had finished for the night and we would sit around and talk. . . . Ragtime was all the rage and still going strong. I said to Sweat: “Fellow, I have travelled around a long time and I have never heard anybody play the original and much-imitated ragtime clarinetist 67 a clarinet the way you play one. Man, you have a novelty. Why don’t you get an act just playing the clarinet?” When he revealed to me that he could play two, and even three clarinets at the same time I declared, “What are you waiting for?”1 Sweatman heeded Fletcher’s advice and handed in his notice at the Monogram. His replacement as leader was pianist Billy Dorsey, directing a band that, by 1913, included Erskine Tate, violin, Harry Johnson, cornet, and George Smith, drums.2 Dorsey left the position in 1914 and was replaced as leader by Sweatman’s nemesis, the ubiquitous Horace George, who was evidently not held in the same esteem by the theater’s management as had been Sweatman. A report in the Indianapolis Freeman noted: “The retirement of Horace George from the Monogram orchestra recalls the fact that Wilbur Sweatman not only brought trade to the house, but was the first leader who raised a musician’s salary on State Street to anywhere near the size of the price paid to a white musician. Mr. George did not get so much money as Sweatman, and rather than have his salary cut, resigned from his position.”3 Sweatman’s first theatrical agent was Jo Paige Smith, who with Gene Hughes formed the Hughes and Smith management agency in 1909. Josephine “Jo” Paige Smith was a rarity in the white, male-dominated entertainment business of the day: a female talent scout and theatrical agent, highly respected by her peers for her ability to sound out and develop new acts. Other artists on the Hughes and Smith roster included a young song and dance act, Fred and Adele Astaire, and later the celebrated operatic soprano Rosa Ponselle.4 Under Jo Paige Smith’s management, in September 1911 Sweatman made his first vaudeville appearances, a sphere of activity that kept him in the public eye for over twenty years and took him from coast to coast and all points between. His first recorded vaudeville appearance was at the New Ruby Theater, Louisville, Kentucky, opening on Monday, September 18, 1911, to laudatory reviews. The normally prickly Sylvester Russell, in his column in the Indianapolis Freeman, wrote of his appearance: “Wilbur C. Sweatman, the expert clarinet player of the Monogram Theater, made his debut as a vaudeville artist at the New Ruby Theater, Louisville, KY., Monday, September 18. As a master of variety, Prof. Sweatman has no equal among all players of his race upon that instrument .”5 It appears that he split his first week in vaudeville between theaters, as the Indianapolis Freeman of the same date carried a report of Sweatman at the Lyre Theater, also in Louisville: the original and much-imitated ragtime clarinetist 68 W...