Sheffield Gramophone Shops

Sucker for old gramophone record sleeves, advertising the shops they were bought in. I found these examples in a Peckham charity shop, both of them from Sheffield I'm guessing in the 1920s. Cann the Radio Man sold musical instruments and record players as well as records, while Goddard's Pianos in the same city clearly also sold instruments too. If you want to know more about these places check out the exhaustive Sheffield Music Archive.

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Music & Dance at Kelvingrove Art Gallery

Some musical/dance images from Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, which I visited this weekend:

'Melody' by Kellock Brown (1894)

'Music' designed by David Gauld, made by Hugh McCulloch & Co., Glasgown (c.1891)



Angel musician, detail from 'The Coronation of the Blessed Virgin' by Harry Clarke (1923) - a stained glass window originally designed for a convent in Dowanhill, Glasgow

as above

The Dance of Spring by E.A. Hornel (1864-1933)

 

'Summer Nights' by Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

The sounds

Of the Harlem night

Drop one by one into stillness.

The last player-piano is closed.

The last victrola ceases with the

“Jazz Boy Blues.”

The last crying baby sleeps

And the night becomes

Still as a whispering heartbeat.

I toss

Without rest in the darkness,

Weary as the tired night,

My soul

Empty as the silence,

Empty with a vague,

Aching emptiness,

Desiring,

Needing someone,

Something.

I toss without rest

In the darkness

Until the new dawn,

Wan and pale,

Descends like a white mist

Into the court-yard.

First published 1925.

See also: Dream Variations

Hobsbawm on Jazz, Dance and Class

The historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) died yesterday at the age of 95.  There's plenty to criticise in his political judgement  as he aligned himself with  the various phases of the Communist Party of Great Britain from its outright Stalinism to its proto-New Labour 'Marxism Today' period - even if it's not hard to understand why somebody who spent some of his teenage years in Berlin during the rise of Hitler joined the KPD. But his history writing on class and culture was often very nuanced and non-dogmatic. He also wrote extensively on jazz.

One of my favourite short essays of his looks at the early days of jazz in Europe, reflecting on how its popularity related to changing class cultural practices. 'On the Reception of Jazz in Europe'  was originally published in 1994 and then republished as 'Jazz Comes to Europe' in the excellent collection 'Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz' (1998). Here's a few extracts:

'The speed of transatlantic transport was such that ideas, notes and people could already cross the ocean very rapidly indeed. Will Marion Cook's Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk - Cook was later to bring Sidney Bechet to Britain - was performed in 1898 in both New York and London. The foxtrot, the basic dance routine associated with jazz, first appeared in Britain in the summer of 1914. a few months after its first appearance in the USA , and in Belgium in 1915. Jazz had hardly been baptized in the USA when groups under that name already toured Europe. They were there from the middle of 1917.

  ...the interesting thing about this diffusion is what was being diffused. It was one of several kinds of novel cultural and artistic creation that emerged, in the late nineteenth century, from the plebeian, mainly urban, milieu of Western industrial society, most probably in the specialized lumpenproletarian environments of the entertainment quarter in the big cities, with their specific subcultures, male and female stereotypes, costumes - and music. The Buenos Aires tango which secured for Latin American music a permanent but minor place on the international dance floor at the same time as jazz did, is one example. Cuban music is another...jazz was both novel and, in origin, an art belonging to an autonomous subculture...

  ...Jazz made its way and triumphed , not as a music for intellectuals but as a music for dancing, and specifically for a transformed, revolutionized social dance of the British middle and upper classes, but also. and almost Simultaneously, the British working-class dance. During the 1900s the upper-crust dance was transformed in two ways. (An expert contemporary witness dates the major change precisely to the season 1910-11.) First urban dancing had already ceased t be a seasonal occupation linked to special occasions. and was being practised all the year round as a regular social and leisure activity. To some extent it was practised privately, but special dancing clubs developed - there were three in Edwardian Hampstead alone - and it occurred in hotels and what were not yet called 'nightclubs' . The tea-dance and the restaurant-dance appeared on a modest scale. Second, the dance lost its formality and ordered succession. At the same time it became simpler, more easily learned and less demanding and exhausting. The crucial change here was that from the turning dance (for example. the waltz) to the walking dance, such as the Boston. a sort of rectilinear waltz, in the early 1900s. It seems clear that these developments reflected a substantial loosening of aristocratic and middle-class conventions, and they are a striking and neglected symptom of the notable emancipation of women in these classes before 1914. The link between the dance revolution, even specifically between the new primacy of rhythm in social dancing, and the emancipation of women, did not pass unperceived. It is noted in the most intelligent or the early jazz books, Paul Bernhard's Jazz: Eine musikalische Zeitfrage (1927)...  

...British jazz had a broad popular base, because its uniquely large working class had developed a, for Europe, uniquely recognizable, urbanized, non-traditional lifestyle. Even before 1914 huge popular dance halls had already been built for the holiday demand of specifically proletarian seaside resorts like Blackpool, Morecambe, Margate and Douglas on the Isle of Man. The post-war mania for dancing was immediately met by the new institution of the so-called Palais de Danse, of which the Hammersmith Palais. the first . immediately became a jazz venue by booking the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. No doubt the music to which the plebs danced would not always be considered jazz today. Indeed, the central tradition of British mass dancing moved away from jazz towards a curious phenomenon called 'strict tempo' dancing, which was to become a competitive sport on British television. Nevertheless, jazz made its mark as a name, an idea, a novel and demotic sound.

The massive dance mania produced an unusually large body of dance-band musicians, mainly of proletarian origin, or at least raised in the environment of the brass-band movement, much appreciated in the industrial areas. These formed the original core of the jazz public... Socially speaking. dance-band musicians, who did  rather better in the 1920s than in the depressed 1930s, were on the borders between the skilled workers and the lower-middle classes. It was in the higherparts of this zone that the bulk of British jazz evangelists were to be found before 1945. They were typically self-made intellectuals. In London we find 'Rhythm Clubs' (ninety-eight of which sprang up in Britain between 1933 and 1935) not in middle-class quarters like
Chelsea, Kensington or even Hampstead, but in the outlying districts like Croydon, Forest Gate, Barking or Edmonton...

We can leave aside the reaction of high society and its associated intellectuals. In Britain this was of no great importance though doubtless it pleased Duke Ellington to have the future King Edward VII sit in on drums at a party for his band in London. Much more important, as has been suggested, was the democratic and populist character of the music, which made the Melody Maker state approvingly: [It appeals not only to the fauteuils but to the gallery also. It considers no class distinction.'

...[what Britain] did develop, however, probably in close association with American New Deal radicalism ,was a powerful bonding of jazz, blues, folk and the extreme left, mainly communist but also, marginally, anarchist. For such people jazz and blues were essentially 'people's music' in three senses: a music with folk roots and capable of appealing to the masses, a do-it-yourself music which could be practised by ordinary people, as distinct from those with technical training, and lastly a music for protest, demonstration and collective celebration. Revivalist or Dixieland jazz lent itself unusually well to all these purposes. So much so that at its peak in the 1950s it came closer to turning jazz from the art of a coterie into a mass music than has been achieved anywhere else, except perhaps, for a moment, during the swing boom of the later 1930s in the USA. It is no accident that a typical anthem of the 'trad' jazz fans also became the typical song of the football fans on the terraces : 'When the Saints Go Marching In'. However, it should be noticed that, while revivalist jazz became de facto the music of an age-group in which students, and particularly art students, became prominent for the first time. it was neither consciously nor militantly a youth music... The 'trad' boom prepared the triumph of rock, but only rock turned itself into a conscious manifesto of immaturity'.

Battleship Potemkin

Well you can now watch the whole of Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film Battleship Potemkin for free on youtube. If you don't know the story - the disgusting soup is the final straw prompting a mutiny by sailors on a battleship in the 1905 Russian revolution; the death of a sailor prompts an outpouring of support for the revolt in nearby Odessa; soldiers massacre demonstrators on the Odessa steps; rebellious sailors respond by shelling the opera house; the fleet is sent in to attack the Potemkin, but the sailors on the other ships join the revolt. THE END. All this plus the great scene where the man who shouts 'Kill the Jews' gets attacked by angry sailors and an early positive portrayal of disability as a man with no legs leaps down the stairs during the massacre.

The Art of Parties

This article 'Retort Goes to a Party' by Holley Cantine was originally published in the Autumn 1951 issue of Retort, a journal of anarchism, poetry, literature and essays edited by Cantine, with contributors including Paul Mattick, Kenneth Rexroth and Paul Goodman. It was reprinted in the Portland-based journal Communicating Vessels (Fall/Winter 2008-9). There are more Retort articles here - it was published in New York in the 1940s and 50s.

A 1950s report of a 1920s retro party might seem obscure even for this site, but there are some interesting reflections on the art of parties.

'On last March 24th, in Greenwich Village, a party, was thrown for the ostensible purpose of commemorating the 1920s. The editors of Retort, being at the time on one of their occasional visits to New York, attended. It was a fairly large party — upward of 100 people, most of them costumed in the styles of the period — either authentic or reasonably faithful representations. There was a competent Dixieland jazz band and an adequate amount of drink, the price of admission being a bottle. The party was held in a commodious sculptor's studio on the top floor of a loft building in a non-residential section of the Village, so there was both plenty of room and sufficient isolation to permit complete freedom from the usual urban inhibitions about noise.

Yet, in spite of all these manifest advantages, the party, as a party, and especially as an attempt to recapture the spirit of the '20s, didn't really come off. There was a good deal of boisterousness, some fairly wild dancing, and a determined effort on the part of the sponsors to keep things moving, but the atmosphere was not at all that of the period that was supposed to be commemorated, and the level of intensity that a really good party attains was never observable. The present writer, who has a very warm feeling for the '20s, perhaps because he was just a little too young to take part in the revels of that era, but old enough to have witnessed some of them, stayed on to the bitter end, hoping that  something might turn up, but unfortunately the evening just wilted away, and when at 3 or 4 in the morning the last remaining revelers began looking for their coats, it was as if nothing had happened.

To the connoisseur of parties — and in the '20s, the party was an art form with many zealous devotees, not a few of whom gave their lives as a result of their single-minded dedication to art — a party is not really successful unless something happens other than the usual banalities of passings out, corner seductions, et al. Exactly what is supposed to happen is impossible to foresee (this is the chief charm of the party as an art form). At some point in the evening, usually well after midnight, when the more inhibited guests have gone home and the rest are sufficiently liquored up to be ready for anything, a sort of spirit of the party begins to take over, fusing the participants into a spontaneous organic whole which is capable of very curious and memorable acts.

At the party in question, the focal point of the evening was the so-called Charleston Contest, and had the party been sufficiently alive, this could have been the spark that started things moving. As it turned out it was merely an exhibition of rather extreme dancing (none of it the Charleston) with most of the people reduced to spectators while a dwindling number of couples competed. I can recall parties in the '20s when an event of this nature suddenly evolved into a mock revival meeting or voodoo ceremony, with everyone taking part, or at least experiencing the excitement — a sort of pseudo-religious ecstasy that could be quite breathtaking.

Of course, such a performance is only possible in an entirely spontaneous andabandoned atmosphere, and the heavy aura of self-consciousness that hung over this party was a serious detriment to even bogus spirituality. Perhaps we who have endured the terrible '40s are unable to recapture the fine, free and essentially naive gusto for wickedness that characterized the lighter side of the '20s. The '20s, despite the fond belief of its Flaming Youth, was — at least in perspective — a very innocent period. There was something ingenuous and good-natured about its revolt against Victorianism. The bottomless pit that the First World War had opened up before the Lost Generation was a shallow ditch compared to that which our generation has witnessed, and the consequent cynicism was childlike and lighthearted, in comparison to the numb apathy that is characteristic of the more advanced youth of today.

The "wild" party was the perfect vehicle for expressing this spirit, especially since, as the result of Prohibition — that last desperate stand of the forces of Puritanism — the simple act of taking a drink was transformed into a wicked and excitingly illegal event. (Today, the youth must resort to the more deadening narcotics to achieve a similar thrill). A party in the '20s that commemorated the '90s was a lively, good-natured spoofing of the previous generation's foibles; we of the '50s, with our prevailing atmosphere of doom and disintegration, are hardly in the proper mood to give the same sort of treatment to the youthful follies of our parental generation'.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin works on two levels -above ground the 'Field of Stelae' conveys a sense of scale, like a vast expanse of anonymous tombs.


In the exhibition below ground the focus is on named individuals. A small sample of life stories from the Shoah puts it on a human scale - real people shown going about their lives before they were cut short - musicians whose music was silenced, murdered dancers, lovers, mothers, sisters.

Alice Dreifuss (born 1910) in a Fasching (carnival costume) in Altdorf in 1927; she was murdered in January 1943 in Auschwitz-Birkenau

'Belgrade, 1924: members of the Demajo, Arueti and Elkalay families at a picnic. A friend of the Demajo family hid the photos in a box dug in the ground in Belgrade. Rafael Pijada saved the rest of the photos under Bulgarian occupation in Macedonia'. Chaim Demajo, the accordionist on the left, was shot in October 1941 near Belgrade.

Langston Hughes - Dream Variations (1926)

Langston Hughes was born on this day (1 February) in 1902. Here's his great poem Dream Variations (1926):

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Dancing at the country club - F.Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story The Popular Girl is centred around the figure of Yanci Bowman and her desire for more than the life on offer to her in her mid-Western city. It starts in the ballroom of a country club on a Saturday night, where Yanci encounters her lover Scott Kimberley for the first time:

"'Ballroom', for want of a better word. It was that room, filled by day with wicker furniture, which was always connotated in the phrase 'Let's go in and dance'. It was referred to as 'inside' or 'downstairs'. It was that nameless chamber wherein occur the principal transactions of all the country clubs in America...

The orchestra trickled a light overflow of music into the pleasant green-latticed room and the two score couples who for the evening comprised the local younger set moved placidly into time with its beat. Only a few apathetic stags gathered one by one in the doorways, and to a close observer it was apparent that the scene did not attain the gayety which was its aspiration. These girls and men had known each other from childhood; and though there were marriages incipient upon the floor tonight, they were marriages of environment, of resignation, or even of boredom...
When his eyes found Yanci Bowman among the dancers he felt much younger. She was the incarnation of all in which the dance failed - graceful youth, arrogant, languid freshness and beauty that was sad and perishable as a memory in a dream. Her partner, a young man with one of those fresh red complexions ribbed with white streaks, as though he had been slapped on a cold day, did not appear to be holding her interest, and her glance fell here and there upon a group, a face, a garment, with a far away and oblivious melancholy...

Mr Kimberly suggested to Miss Bowman that they dance, to which proposal Miss Bowman dispassionately acquiesced. They mingled their arms in the gesture prevalent and stepped into time with the beat of the drum. Simultaneously it seemed to Scott that the room and the couples who danced up and down upon it converted themselves into a background behind her. The commonplace lamps, the rhythm of the music playing some paraphrase of a paraphrase, the faces of many girls, pretty, undistinguished or absurd, assumed a certain solidity as though they had grouped themselves in a retinue for Yanci's languid eyes and dancing feet.

'I've been watching you,' said Scott simply. 'You look rather bored this evening'.

'Do I?' Her dark-blue eyes exposed a borderland of fragile iris as they opened in a delicate burlesque of interest. 'How perfectly kill-ing!' she added."


(story first published in Saturday Evening Post, February 1922; reprinted in F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (pictured), Bits of Paradise, London: Penguin, 1973)

Her first ball

'Her first ball! She was only at the beginning of everything. It seemed to her that she had never known what the night was like before. Up until now it had been dark, silent, beautiful very often - oh yes - but mournful somehow. Solemn. And now it would never be like that again - it had opened dazzling bright... in one minute, in one turn, her feet glided, glided. The lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel' (Katherine Mansfield, Her First Ball, 1922).

(Photo of early 20th century ballroom dancers Irene & Vernon Castle sourced from Sharon Davis - Swing Dancer)

Torture without Trace: Tibetan singer jailed

Tibetan singer Tashi Dhondup is reportedly serving 15 months hard labour after being arrested by the Chinese authorities for his 'subversive' songs. According to Free Tibet: 'The 30-year-old had been hiding in Xining, Qinghai province, after the authorities had banned his music. Tashi Dhondup had also been arrested in 2008 after the release of his previous CD, and was released in February 2009.... The 30-year-old was reportedly arrested at gunpoint by four police officers in a restaurant in Xining as his wife held onto a police officer's leg in an attempt to prevent the arrest. Like many Tibetans in detention, there are fears for his welfare. Tashi Dhondup was born into a nomadic family in Sarlang, a town in Yungan county, Malho prefecture in Qinghai province. He had also been detained between September 2008, accused of releasing songs containing 'counter-revolutionary content'. His song 'The Year of 1959' was singled out as an example of this. He was beaten by police over a seven day period'.

Here's his track Torture without Trace:

"Torture Without Trace" by Tashi Dhondup from HPeaks on Vimeo.

She refused to be bored - Zelda Fitzgerald

'the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn't need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends - it needs only crowds...'

Zelda Fitzgerald (pictured), Eulogy on the Flapper, 1922.

The above quote was the partial inspiration for my favourite song - Being Boring by The Pet Shop Boys. The lines of the opening verse are: 'I came across a cache of old photos, and invitations to teenage parties.“Dress in white,” one said with quotations, from someone’s wife, a famous writer in the nineteen-twenties'. Apparently singer Neil Tennant actually did recall an invitation to a party from his own teenage years featuring the above quote, with Zelda Fitzgerald both 'someone's wife' (though she was more than that) and one source of the 'we were never being boring' chorus.

Dangerous Desires, 1922

'Danger in Familiarities' - the American Social Hygiene Association advises on 'The Correct Dancing Position' from 1922: 'Conventions are the fences society has built to protect you and the race. Familiarities arouse dangerous desires. They waste your power for the finest human companionship and love. Physical attraction alone will never wholly satisfy. Complete and lasting love is of the mind as well as the body' (click image to enlarge).

Thanks to John at Alsatia for sending this.

Jazz Babies

THE VOICE: ...You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you danced the old ones.

BEAUTY (in a whisper) : Will I be paid?
THE VOICE: Yes, as usual - in love.
BEAUTY (With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips): And will I like being called a jazz-baby?
THE VOICE (soberly) : You will love it .

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned, 1922; sheet music above from 1920, below from 1919).

Racist Violence in The Jazz Age: Tulsa 1921

An acccount from the excellent Keep Cool - The Black Activists Who Built the Jazz Age by Ted Vincent (Pluto Press, 1995):

'The musical achievements of the 1920s must be seen in the light of the hard living conditions that Black people endured. Lynching claimed over 100 victims a year between 1910 and 1919, and these official annual figures document only the reported terrorist murders. But by 1920 reported atrocities were down to sixty-five and had been further reduced to eighteen by 1927.
Before the Jazz Age it was dangerous in most Southern towns for a Black to be seen walking fast, or talking loudly, let alone trying to make a reasonable contract for a musical performance. These dangers were a prime reason that musicians of this period poured into those oases of opportunity, New Orleans and Memphis. The decline in lynchings, beatings, cross-burnings and the like helped facilitate the Jazz Age by improving working conditions for musicians, especially in the South.

Harrowing accounts of the life of a Black musician travelling the South in the decades before the Jazz Age are plentifully provided in W. C. Handy's autobiography. On one occasion in Alabama, Handy and his touring band were ordered to accompany a menacing fellow to a murder trial. Handy's uniformed band was marched into the courtroom. They were told that they should play 'Dixie' as soon as the judge announced the acquittal of the threatening fellow's brother. The trial proceeded. The judge indeed ruled for the defence. And Handy and the band immediately obliged by filling the courtroom with the sounds of 'Dixie'.

In another incident, Handy and his band were kidnapped in Mississippi, put in a waggon, and taken to what they were told would be a murder. Their captors' plan was for them to commence playing as soon as the deed had been committed. The intended victim was a White store owner who had 'insulted' some of Handy's captors' Black workers. Handy and his musicians were stationed outside the store while the prospective murderer and his friends confronted the store owner, calling him names and trying to provoke a fight. But the store owner refused to fight or to take the gun that was thrust in his hand so that he could be shot 'in self-defence'. Handy and his group were finally let go after being forced to play at a dance for the would-be murderer and his crowd. The women, it turned out, were not in a very festive mood and the dancefloor was largely empty. The men remained in the angry mood they had attained in getting pumped up to kill somebody. The next night three local Blacks were lynched.

This uncertainty for African-American music continued into the early Jazz Age. For instance, a Chicago Defender item of 4 February 1922 reported that six members of a Black orchestra 'beaten by a mob of fifteen men, at Miami, Florida, are back home' in Columbus, Ohio. The Defender went on to describe the incident in Miami as a case of 'professional jealousy'. Thomas Howard, manager of the group, explained to the Defender, 'Down there the white union musicians do not recognize the colored union.' Howard emphasised that all the members of the Columbus, Ohio group and all other groups that he managed were union men.

A race riot where Whites invaded a Black neighbourhood was one type of trauma Black musicians experienced in both the North and the South. In June of 1921, the Broadway star Cleo Mitchell and her touring Jazz Repertory Company had the bad luck to hit Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a week's engagement at Mrs Williams's Dreamland Theatre just in time to get caught up in one of the more gruesome of these White invasions.

Tensions had been mounting in fast-growing Tulsa. The mile-square Black neighbourhood was located on prime real estate near downtown. Pressure was being brought upon Black residents and businesses to sell. Among the outstanding buildings was Mrs Williams's 'beautiful theatre'. On the one hand, this well-to-do Black businesswoman had the only theatre in Tulsa for l3lack patrons (one of the mere nine theatre/movie houses in the whole state of Oklahoma that then catered to a Black clientele - according to a survey by Billboard's Black reporter James A. Jackson). While Williams's Dreamland was an important asset to the black community, it was also serving to bridge the gap between the races by drawing White customers, who came to see the high-quality acts WilIiams booked for her stage.

Then came the bloody and fiery Tulsa riot, the last of the nearly three dozen White mob invasions of Black communities which occurred between 1917 and 1921. These riots typically began on such pretexts as a White person being jostled in a streetcar, Or a black appearing in the 'wrong part' of a public beach. In this regard the Tulsa riot began routinely enough: a Black was arrested for allegedly bothering a White woman in an elevator. A White mob headed for the jail in the hope of lynching the alleged culprit.

But this last of the White mob invasions had a new twist. The community had prepared in advance. A group of armed Blacks surrounded the gaol before the White mob arrived. The Tulsa branch of the revolutionary African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) had announced earlier in the week that any attempt at lynching in Tulsa would be stopped, by whatever means necessary. At the gaol, one White man tried to take a Black man's gun from him. In the ensuing scuffle the White man was shot, and the riot was on.

Cleo Mitchell and the performers of her jazz Repertory Company sought refuge in the large Dreamland Theatre, hoping to wait out the riot. For better than two days the White raiders were kept out of the Black community. ABB militants and other armed Blacks had effectively barricaded the streets leading into the Black community, and Marcus Garvey's Black Cross nurses mobilised and volunteered aid. Over the next two days many Whites died trying to get past the defensive positions. 'Casualty list favorable despite handicap,' headlined a Washington DC Black newspaper in its report from Tulsa.

Frustrated by the barricades, the enraged Whites hired aeroplanes and loaded the planes with dynamite and petrol bombs, which were dropped into the Black community from the air. Fires raged. The Black defenders fell back to try and save their homes from fire. The White mobs breached the barricades and headed for a Black church, which they torched. When Blacks inside ran out they were gunned down. The Dreamland Theatre went up in flames. Mitchell's jazz Repertory Company fled for their lives, leaving behind their costumes and wardrobe and all their personal possessions except what they were wearing on their backs. The theatre was then burned to the ground. According to the Chicago Whip, Williams's Dreamland was located 'close to a white theatre ... [and] it was said to be picked as one of the first targets because it materially reduced the white theatre's patronage'.

A truce was arranged whereby the Oklahoma National Guard entered the Black neighbourhood and disarmed most of the Blacks. Mitchell and her troupe were ordered at gunpoint to accompany the National Guard to the stockade. White mobs were then allowed back into what was left of Black Tulsa, which was then burned to the ground. In the end, the cost in lives had been estimated at 150 Blacks and fifty Whites. Garvey's Negro World noted that the loss of the Dreamland was a painful blow in that 'it was the pride of the Negroes of the city'.

Mitchell and her company left Tulsa as soon as possible, heading for Texas, where 'the company was relieved by the kind efforts of Mrs. Chintz Moore, wife of a Dallas theatre owner, who took them into her home and relieved their immediate needs', noted reporter jackson in Billboard, adding that two Black vaudeville troupes then playing Dallas gave benefit performances for their distraught comrades from Tulsa. A Black journalist in lndianapolis, Indiana, offered to co-ordinate benefits from around the country to help 'in placing the unfortunate on their feet again'.
Living up to 'the show must go on' tradition, by 20 june, a matter of days after the riot, Mitchell and her jazz Repertory Company were suf­ficiently recovered to open an engagement at the Lyric Theatre in New Orleans.

The riot at Tulsa had important, and double-edged, repercussions for the growth of the jazz Age. It took place at a time when many Black communities were under stress. Around the nation moves were afoot to strip Blacks of power in the theatre business. The summer 1921 riot that saw a lynch-minded mob burn the Dreamland Theatre in Tulsa occurred around the same time that mobsters of the Chicago gangland variety brought pressure to bear in Chicago's South Side to end Black control of the jazz cabarets, including a memorable cabaret that also carried the name Dreamland.

The barbaric riot that removed Tulsa's Dreamland did, however, have one salutary effect. Invading White mobs had lost many lives, and coming on the heels of costly White mob invasions of other Black cities, the Tulsa experience proved to be the convincing example that ended raids into Black urban centres by old-fashioned types of mobs in white sheets (the Chicago-style 'mob' was another story). The White invaders in Tulsa expected to have an urban version of the old rural 'lynching bee'. But the brave and organised defence of Tulsa raised the ante beyond what potential future mobs were willing to match.

Within a few years, following the crude version of 'urban renewal' which was the riot that had cleared the former Black community, Tulsa had a new Dreamland Theatre in the neighbourhood that became the new Tulsa Black ghetto. Part of the rebuilding of Tulsa involved re-estab­lishing trust between the races. Inter-racial commissions were formed. Choirs from Black churches visited White churches, and vice-versa, with visiting jazz troupes.'

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti (1896-1942) is best known as photographer, but her's was one of those lives that joined the dots between different radical and cultural scenes in the first half of the twentieth century. She was born in Udine, Italy, where her father was a militant worker and member of a banned socialist group. Tina had to drop out of school and earn a living as a silk worker in a sweatshop where 'the silk reelers were sometimes allowed to sing as they toiled. At first pianissimo and barely audible over the whirring of machinery, the juvenile voices would soar into the popular 'They call me Mimi' from La Boheme or 'ves doi voi che son dos stelis', a Friulian love song they had all been humming since childhood'.


In 1913, aged 16, she moved to San Francisco where she became an actress. She had a starring role in a Hollywood silent movie, The Tiger's Coat (1920), playing a Mexican servant who ended up heading a dance troupe.

After a period in Los Angeles bohemian circles she ended up in Mexico City in the aftermath of the revolution, living with the photographer Edward Weston, befriending Diego Riviera (who she modelled for while he worked on some of his murals), Frida Kahlo and B.Traven, and throwing herself into radical politics, including the unsuccessful campaign against the execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in the USA in 1927. Another of her lovers, the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antionio Mella was shot dead as the two of them walked together. In this period she was increasingly developing her practice as a photographer, with her work appearing in international radical publications such as El Machete, Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), and New Masses.

She joined the Communist Party, and like many radicals of her generation was compromised by her links to Stalinist terror, particularly during the Spanish Revolution/Civil War where she worked alongside her lover Vittorio Vidali, a notorious henchman implicated in the death of many Poumistas, trotskyists and anarchists (including Alberto Besouchet, the first Brazilian to join the International Brigades, who disappeared after being denounced for Trotskyist sympathies - the evidence against him including an association with the Brazilian singer Elsie Houston, ex-wife of the surrealist Benjamin Peret who we have mentioned here before).

Leaving aside this terrible episode (in which the extent of her complicity is a bone of contention), I think we can still appreciate her photography and wonder what it would have been like to have gone to one of her legendary parties. Just after the First World War she lived with her lover Ricardo Gomez Robelo in LA:

'The most enduring memories of 313 South Lake Street are of boisterous parties in the studio, mobilizing Los Angeles's small bohemia, a provincial avant-garde striving for effect. "Intense, dreamy and vibrant", in Robelo's recollection, evenings throbbed "with the magic of art and congenial, exquisite friends and Saki!" Photographer Edward Weston noted of his fellow revelers: They were "well-read, worldly wise, clever in conversation,-could garnish with a smattering of French: they were parlor radicals. could sing IWW songs, quote Emma Goldman on freelove: they drank. smoked, had affairs .... "

The screen door slapping open and shut, Tina greeted her guests wearing something flowing and distinctive, her tie-dyed tunic perhaps, over a long skirt. She adored silk stockings and stacked jangling bracelets on her arm. Her eyes were rimmed in black, mouth painted into a ripe cherry, hands smoothed with her favorite honey-and-almond cream... As the evening heated up, the gregarious, streetwise Wobbly Roy Rosen might set the room on a roar with tales of the scoundrels he confronted as a "tough, tough baby" bill collector. Rosen hailed from New York, but many guests were refugees from San Francisco art circles: the painter Clarence Hinkle and his wife, Mabel, and the curly-haired Mexican Francisco Cornejo, who had created costumes and decor for Xochiquetzal, the "Toltec ballet" staged by the Denishawn modern dance troupe. An unruly sexual charge swept around the room, sending tall, tousled ex-barmaid Dorothea Childs reeling into somebody's arms as the lecherous and amusing old satyr Sadakichi Hartmann pranced from one woman to another. Jazz or Japanese music spinning on the Victrola, the studio dis:olved into a smoky, incense-fragrant maelstrom dotted with pools of colored lights from Tina's homemade Japanese lanterns. The crowd wrangled oveer aesthetics, got drunk on bootleg sake, and sucked on cigarette holders as they quoted Nietzsche and Wilde. Eyelids drooping, Robelo recited Swinburne while couples drifted out to the porch in a fever of kissing and groping.

Among the Richeys' guests was Ramiel McGehee, a baby-faced man with one glass eye and a pinched, disapproving mouth. Once a dancer who had toured Asia and was obsessed with Eastern mysticism, Ramiel metamorphosed into an undulating contortionist at the first sound of a sitar or daibyoshi'.

Living in Mexico City with Edward Weston, Modetti was once again at the centre of bohemian social life:

'New Year's Eve found the kitchen at 12 Lucerna in an uproar as Lupe Marin whipped up a spread of firecracker Mexican dishes, for which she had shopped, thus enabling a couple unable to scrape up January rent to throw a lavish party. Guests fox-trotted their way into 1924, pausing to quaff rum punch and smack their lips over the delicacies. So successful was the tertulia that Tina and Edward made it a weekly event, to be underwritten by passing the hat. "Because of grave conditions resulting from the revolution," the pair chortled, they kindled up the fabled Saturday nights, turning the Modotti-Weston household into the most dazzling light on the vanguard social circuit.

Virtually every well-known writer and artist in Mexico participated. Mexican-born, Texas-educated journalist Anita Brenner described how 'workers in paints drank tea and played the phonograph with union and non-union technical labour-scribes, musicians, architects, doctors, archaeologists, cabinet-ministers, generals, stenographers, deputies, and occasional sombreroed peasants."

....Invariably hungry, they dug into Tina's spaghetti with butter and cheese Anita's version of chongo, a traditional syrupy curd, which she served with cinnamon toast and tea, and a delicious curry and sweet rice prepared by an Indian revolutionist named Gupta. After dinner, the men heaped Colts on a table as tangos and the wicked Cuban rumba scratched their way our of the phonograph. On one memorable occasion, a guest stumbled upon her lover entwined with another woman and holloed him from room to room, popping at his feet with a small pistol. On another, Tina and Edward exchanged clothes, mimicking each other so convincingly that revelers were perplexed until Edward kicked up his pink-gartered legs and vamped outrageously. Edward loved to prance, but Tina, clumsy and uncomfortable on the dance floor, caught her breath on the parties' less frenetic edges, where talk gravitated to revolutionary art and politics'.

Quotes from Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow – The Life of Tina Modotti, Clarkson Potter, 1999. See also this post at Museworthy.

'Men of the Nancy Type': London 1927

"In 1927 the charge of keeping a disorderly house at 25, Fitzroy Square, near Euston Station, was brought after a long period of surveillance by the police . The actual charge was that in the house there were: 'divers, immoral, lewd and evil disposed persons tippling, whoring, using obscene language, indecently exposing their private parts and behaving in a lewd, obscene and disorderly and riotous manner to the manifest corruption of the morals of His Majesty's Liege subjects, the evil example of others in the like case offending and against the Peace of Our Lord the King, His Crown and Dignity'.

Let's take a look at some of these heinous offences as related by police observers. Police Sergeant number 42 reported on January 3rd: "At 11.35. p.m. three men entered the basement door. The door was opened by a man wearing pyjamas... I saw them dance around him in the hall. At 12.20 four men were admitted by the man wearing pyjamas, who kissed one of the men as they entered. At this time the gramophone was playing in the front room, people were jumping and dancing making a very rowdy noise. I could hear the men in the front room singing and talking in effeminate voices. At 3.30. a.m. two men came out of the door. They were very drunk, vomited in the area, struggled up the steps and left."

On another occasion: "I saw a man standing at the door in a dressing gown. He kissed one of the men as they entered, laughed and shut the door. At 12.30. a.m. I saw four men walking in couples approach the house, they were cuddling.. one another as they walked and speaking in low effeminate voices ... They were men of the nancy type. "

….Several of the guests were followed after they left the house, with officers noting that the men cuddled each other whilst waiting for a bus. They were described as being 'powdered and painted'. The policeman who followed them said that they smelt strongly of perfume and guessed that, by their appearance, they were 'West-End poofs or male opportuners.'

Police photograph in the aftermath of the 1927 raid,

showing Robert Britt (second from left)

Because of what they had heard and seen the police considered it their duty to raid the house on the 17th January, 1927. They surprised six people in one of the rooms. Robert Britt, a twenty-six-year­old dancer, was wearing a thin black transparent skirt with gold trimming and a red sash tied around his loins. The ladies shoes he was wearing caused him to appear taller than the other guests. He was naked from the waist up. Other people in the room were either in pyjamas or partly dressed. It seems difficult today to understand what offence they might have committed and even in the twenties a legal dispute ensued as to what exactly a disorderly house was. Several of the defendants were found not guilty but Britt was sentenced to eighteen months hard labour and others up to six months without hard labour".

Source: In Darkest London: antisocial behaviour 1900-1939 - Steve Jones (Wicked Publications, 1994).

Benjamin Péret: songs of the eternal rebels

Benjamin Péret (1899-1959) was active in the Surrealist movement from its formation until his death. Among other things he edited at one stage the journal 'La Révolution surréaliste'.

His most substantial prose work is the surrealist novel 'Mort aux Vaches et au champ d'honneur' - literally 'Death to the Cows and to the Field of Honour' but sometimes translated as Death to the Pigs (since Vaches was used as slang for cops).

To give one example of its striking imagery, it features a section where the sobs of cinema goers form a sea of tears that floods the world:

'Suddenly the sun yawned like a dog waking up, and breath reeking of garlic polluted the atmosphere. A kazoo came and fell in to the heap of barbed wire the broom-seller was tangled in. He grabbed it and blew into it. A long whine and several tears emerged, which burst and expelled lumps of foam all around, which floated on the sea of tears. Delighted, the broom­seller continued to blow into the kazoo, continuing to to produce teary fireworks which burst into foam and settled all about him... When the sea of tears was covered over with a thick rug of foam, circumstances changed rapidly for the broom-seller, who had the unfortunate notion of lying down on it. Barely had he stretched out when the kazoo's whimpering became extraordinarily loud. They were no longer whimpers but veritable roars which destroyed his eardrums and slowly dug a tunnel through his head'

Like other Surrealists, Péret used automatic writing as a technique to discover the marvelous in everyday life: 'The marvelous, I say again, is all around, at every time and in every age. It is, or should be, life itself, as long as that life is not made deliberately sordid as this society does so cleverly with its schools, religion, law courts, wars, occupations and liberations, concentration camps and horrible material and mental poverty'.

His experiences in the French army in the First World War made him a pronounced anti-militarist, as well as being vehemently anti-clerical - Mortes Aux Vaches includes images of 'A general trampled by reindeer' and dogs sniffing dead priests. The photograph here was originally published in La Révolution surréaliste (1926) with the caption 'Our colleague Benjamin Péret in the act of insulting a priest'.

Péret was one of the first of the Surrealists to break with Stalinism. In the early 1930s, living in Brazil (with his wife, the singer Elsie Houston) he joined the trotskyist Communist League. In the Spanish Civil War, he worked first with the independent socialist POUM and then an anarchist militia fighting on the Aragon front. Later he was part of a group called the Union Ouvriere Internationale which broke with the trotskyist movement over the latter's defence of the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers state (see this biography of Ngo Van Xuhat for more about this)

In a 1949 poem, A Lifetime, Péret looked back on his long association with Andre Breton and wrote of:

'the songs in raised fists of the eternal rebels thirsting for ever new wind
for whom freedom lives as an avalanche ravaging the vipers' nests of heaven and earth
the ones who shout their lungs out as they bury Pompeiis
Drop everything'.

Main source: Benjamin Péret, Death to the Pigs and Other Writings, translated by Rachel Stella and others (London: Atlas Press, 1988). The best source online is L'Association des amis de Benjamin Péret (in French)

Queer Albert Hall

'Queer urban culture was the site of diverse intersecting modes of queerness and "normality," coalescing around their desires for homosex, sociability, and intimacy. These antagonisms crystallized in two prominent annual events: the Chelsea Arts Ball and Lady Malcolm's Servants' Ball -both held at the Royal Albert Hall.

1926 Chelsea Arts Ball (from Getty Images)

The former, in particular, was a centerpiece in the metropolitan social calendar, a New Year's Eve costume ball that attracted massive media attention and crowds of up to 7,000 socialites, artists, and ordinary Londoners in elaborate fancy dress. These "true pageants" were, observed Kenneth Hare in 1926, notable for their "variety, inventiveness, vivacity and colour." For many men, becoming part of this carnival gener­ated a palpable sense of release. Hundreds of working-class queans flocked to both balls, discarding the masks they wore in everyday life, wearing drag, dressing outrageously, and socializing unashamedly while never appearing to be anything out of the ordinary. In so doing, they were further protected by the Albert Hall's unique legal status: it was outside the Met's operational sphere. For once, temporarily and locally, men could fully escape police sur­veillance.

A 50-feet high mermaid designed by Ronald Searle for the 1954 Chelsea Arts Ball
(from Perpetua - Ronald Searle tribute blog)

The results were spectacular. In 1934, one observer described "groups of men dressed in coloured silk blouses and tight-hipped trousers ... lips ... rouged and faces painted. By their attitude and general behaviour they were obviously male prostitutes."...

1947 Chelsea Arts Ball, taken by Tony Linck, sourced from the Life Archive

From the early 1930s the organizers of both events were increasingly exercised by these "disgraceful scenes," and a nagging sense that men's behavior was somehow out of control. In 1936, Lady Malcolm herself wrote cryptically - apparently in some desperation-to the Times: 'Each year I notice at the ball a growing number of people, who, to be frank, are not of the class for whom the ball is designed. It is what it is called- a servants' ball, and I am jealous that it shall go on deserving that name."Both balls employed private stewards to maintain "order" and exclude "undesirables." From 1933, having failed to secure a police presence, Malcolm employed two ex-CID officers to remove any identifiable "sexual perverts." From 1935 tickets were sold with the proviso that "NO MAN IMPERSONATING A WOMAN AND NO PERSON UNSUITABLY ATTIRED WILL BE ADMITTED". On entry, men's costumes had to be approved by a "Board of Scrutineers." Whatever they tried, however, the organizers could neither keep the "Degenerate Boys" out nor adequately contain their visibility; indeed, they often struggled even to identify them amidst the fancy dressed crowds. In 1938, an observer thus described the "extraordinary number of undesirable men at this Ball who were unmis­takably of the Homo-Sexual and male prostitute types." Well into the 1950s, the balls remained, in Stephen's words, "a great Mecca for the gay world."

Working-class men reappropriated two high-profile public events, creat­ing a space at the center of metropolitan culture in which they could be together and socialize free of the constraints that braced everyday queer lives.'

1947 Chelsea Arts Ball, taken by Tony Linck, sourced from the Life Archive

Quote: Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 - Matt Houlbrook (University of Chicago Press, 2005) - I couldn't find any specifically drag photos, but these images certainly show that this was some party.

Anita Berber: Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy

Anita Berber (1899-1928) was a dancer in pre-Nazi Germany, famous/notorious for a life of bisexuality, drugs and semi-naked performance.

With her sometime husband and dancing parter Sebastian Droste she published in 1923 a book of poetry, photographs, and drawings called Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy), based on their performance of the same name.

In Berlin, "Berber was known to dance in the Eldorado, a homosexual and transvestite bar, where Rudi Anhang, dancer and jazz banjoist, accompanied her. Berber's speciality was a depraved dance number entitled 'Cocaine', performed to the music of Camille Saint-Saens. She also did a piece called 'Morphium'" (Kater).

Another dance, first performed in 1919, was Heliogabal where she played a sun-worshipping priest ‘Exquisite, entirely attired in gold, her metallic body lured the sun’ (Elegante Welt, 1919, cited in Toepfer).

In 1925 she was the subject of an expressionist portrait, entitled The Dancer Anita Berber, by the painter Otto Dix. 

Death in Vegas dedicated a song to Anita on their 2004 album Satan's Circus.

Berber's reputation still manages to wind up present-day Nazi sympathisers. While researching this I came across one such scum-site praising Hitler's cleansing of 'decadent' Weimar Berlin, and stating that Berber 'Typified the Jewish mindset. Her stage acts revolved around masturbation, cocaine, and lesbian love' (yes the fascists are still out there, though apparently there's now one less to worry about in Austria)

Sources: Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the culture of Nazi Germany; Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935.