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INTRO:

Every now and then, while researching an episode for the Closing Night podcast, I stumble into a story that's much bigger than the one I originally set out to tell. That was certainly the case when it came to the 1940 musical Cabin in the Sky. What began as an exploration of a short-lived Broadway production, quickly became a much broader story of the artists who transformed Broadway decades before Cabin in the Sky ever opened. I came across all these composers, playwrights, performers, and dancers who reshaped American theater while fighting for opportunities that were largely controlled by white producers and creators.

Discussing such events from a century ago means having to comb through newspaper archives and hopefully finding some preserved audio and video clips as well. But I also came across a contemporary voice who is able to put this theater history into perspective. Whether discussing language, music, race, or American culture, John McWhorter has a remarkable way of explaining not just what happened, but why it matters. I've admired his work for years, so having the opportunity to sit down with him and examine these topics was something I genuinely enjoyed and learned from.

He and I went well beyond Cabin in the Sky and talked about the origins of Black musical theater itself, with a focus on the revolutionary impact of artists like Will Marion Cook, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Eubie Blake, and Langston Hughes. There’s also the complicated legacy of shows like Porgy and Bess, and why American theater of the early 20th century looks so different from the Broadway of today. The story of Cabin in the Sky is only one slice of a much larger history, and this full conversation offers a deeper dive into this era—where John and I consider the often overlooked contributions of Black artists who reshaped Broadway and why so many of those achievements have gone unrecognized.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Well, welcome, John McWhorter. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Nowadays, you write about language, race, culture, politics, and yet you describe yourself as a student of musical theater history. Where did this interest begin?

John McWhorter:

I became interested in musicals only very late in college, and it was really only because a friend of mine dragged me to something called A Little Night Music. It was a community theater production. I didn't know what that was. I was thinking, is it Mozart? Is it a story set to in a Klein and Nachmusic or something? But there was less to do before the Internet. This is 1985. And so I went and saw this Night Music thing. Ten minutes in, I was just hooked. I had never been so stunned by a theatrical or musical experience.

John McWhorter:

And so because I'm obsessive, then I thought, what else did this Sondheim person do? And luckily, it wasn't as much then as it is now. There was less to suck up. But I got all of the LPS at the time. And then with Sondheim, often he's referring to older musical theater, especially with Follies. And so I would read, well, that's supposed to sound like Gershwin's. That's supposed to sound like De Silva Brown and Henderson. And so then I was thinking, well, what did they do? And so I started collecting LPs and cassettes of basically every musical theater there was a recording of at the time. And then I started realizing, I want to know the history, and there was less to do.

John McWhorter:

So I read three or four musical theater histories and getting a sense of all this, and somehow it just never left me. And the truth is, the straddling the 20th and the 21st century has been a great time to be interested in musical theater history, because there's been this spate of recordings of these shows in how they originally sounded. There's been an academicization of the subject. So there's so many more things to read, so many people who are interested in digging this stuff up. And so I have been present at the creation of this field these days, such that there would be a podcast like this. And so, yeah, it just grabs me. A lot of it is really great music. It's an interesting intersection with American history in general.

John McWhorter:

And, yeah, the beginnings of black musicals and what are essentially minstrel shows. And then gradually, after a while, you have something like Jelly's Last Jam. It's just. It's interesting stuff.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Was there a particular artist or show? Like, once you started digging into the history of it, was there one that really opened your Eyes to, oh, why don't more people know about this, this kind of forgotten history of Broadway?

John McWhorter:

You know, to tell you the truth, it's now known more than it was. But I was very interested in the fact that blackness had so much to do with creating what we think of as the Broadway sound that you're at, say, Sweet Charity or something and you're enjoying that music. And the truth is that if it hadn't been for African slaves dragged here and having to, you know, build a life, then there wouldn't be music like that. Basically, American musical theater would sound like Les Miserables. And I know a lot of people deeply love Les Miserables, but frankly it's, it's Europop and there's no, there's nothing African about it. And that's all we would have, we would just, we would just be French. And so just to imagine that really Broadway musicals, such as a little night music, I'm sitting there enjoying it and it's a very broad white thing, but gradually realizing that musical theater in America in general is a black white story that really interested me from, from the beginning. Although, to tell you the truth, my favorite musicals are not into Homie and Shuffle along.

John McWhorter:

But nevertheless, the story does start there and I always found that interesting.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And you are largely a self taught pianist and so as you write about musical scores, being able to play them as well, does that give you a different insight than just researching and reading and wr about it?

John McWhorter:

Yes, because, for example, there was and is a big Gershwin collection that really just takes him from the beginning to the end. It's the, it's the Blue Book. And I played through that whole book and noticed that, you know, anything that he wrote before 1924, with the exception of maybe two or three songs, they're kind of boring, you know, and they're not recorded. And partly because they were kind of boring. And so it helped to be able to play, to realize, wait a minute, these songs from La La Lucill really don't sound anything like Lady Be Good. And that in itself is just a factoid. But that was part of my realizing, wait, his music gets good after Shuffle along and a Couple of its Children are hits on Broadway. And that couldn't be an accident or playing through a Vincent Newman's book and noticing that his songs change at that same time and thinking, no, no, Nanette is great, but most of what he did before that wasn't.

John McWhorter:

And so it allowed you to think about that kind of history and just

Patrick Oliver Jones:

looking at the sheet music did the physical Sheet music itself change, like just the construction of the. The notes and the progressions, the melodies before and after.

John McWhorter:

I wouldn't necessarily say that in itself. I mean, there were printing conventions in the 1890s and the aughts and the teens that can make the sheets from that time a little harder for me to read. There's something that happens in. In the twenties that everything starts looking normal. Broadway sheets are better arranged starting in the 20s. If you're playing something from the teens or the aughts or the 1890s. Often I fill stuff in. I feel like this is a skeleton of what this song is.

John McWhorter:

But I'm going to add this note, I'm going to add this chord, because I know that's what he meant. Yeah. There is something that happens, particularly when they start writing at The Harms Publishing Company, where it's clear that arrangers like Dr. Alfred Sirmai, he's one of the ones that we actually know of, had an arranging style that makes the songs more pleasant on the page than, frankly, the hacks who were doing it before him.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And you've spent years recently helping reconstruct a show by Fats Waller called Early to Bed that had essentially disappeared. What was it that drew you to this musical and needing to be preserved?

John McWhorter:

Because it's Fats Waller and it's barely known, and so how bad could it be? And also, you want to know what he did, because everything else he did was so much fun. You know, he's so richly recorded that you notice that almost any, you know, three minutes he did, he got something out of. And that the music he wrote, he never wrote a bad tune. And so there's this lost show. And it was one of those things the Broadway people had no reason to care about early to Bed because it was a passing hit. And there. There are a few sheets and. Well, there were many passing hits in the 1940s.

John McWhorter:

And early to Bed did not extend the parameters of the form at all. That's not what Fatswilder was doing. So they don't care. The jazz people don't care because, well, there are barely any recordings. And it wasn't about him improvising and playing the piano. It's this Broadway show. If you're interested in jazz in the early 40s, Bebop is happening. Who cares about this show that was playing down the street from Oklahoma? And so nobody was going to do it.

John McWhorter:

And I realized, I like jazz, I'm black, I like Broadway. Only one person is going to do this. And so I Thought it's going to be me or this stuff is going to get even more lost than it already is. And so, yeah, I think I have a. I might have a production company lined up to make a CD of the score with as much of it as can be found and orchestrated to sound like then. And with that, my job would be done. So, yeah, that's. That's the Early To Bed story.

John McWhorter:

I wish to God that the overture would turn up. We'll never know. But I would love to know how that four minute medley sounded, but that I'm going to have to make up.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Right, right. And so, I mean, part of it is that you're correcting the historical record, so to speak, but it sounds like these stories are also teaching something about Broadway in particular, but maybe American history in general.

John McWhorter:

Early to Bed, for example, was written by a white man, produced by a white man. The lyricist was white. There were a few black characters in the show, but they were subsidiary. And yet the composer was Fats Waller. So early to Bed is weird because a Broadway show, a mainstream Broadway show in 1943, where the person who's writing the music is not white. That's really unusual. And it shows what a major celebrity and what a major phenomenon Fats Waller was. But it's an.

John McWhorter:

It's an interesting thing that he's there writing the music. He's going to the lyricist's apartment and writing music with the lyricist. I met the lyricist daughter and she told me the Fats Waller would come by and they would write these songs in the living room. That's a weird little black white intersection in 1943. And the thing is, Waller died right after it. He had a hit. He would have kept writing Broadway musicals and who knows what those would have been like. And if he had lived until, say, 1970, it would mean that he probably would have had another hit musical in, say, 1950, when there were cast albums.

John McWhorter:

Imagine there's a cast album of Fats Waller's Broadway music sung by people like Mary Martin, etc. But that never got to happen.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Another show that came after Cabin in the sky, St. Louis woman was the same kind of thing about a black and white creative team creating a musical together. Yeah. And it also played at the Martin Beck.

John McWhorter:

It did, didn't it?

Patrick Oliver Jones:

That's right. And that was really Pearl Bailey's breakout role.

John McWhorter:

Yes. And then she did Arms and the Girl. Yeah, that was. That was when people came to know who she was. And yeah, it's one of the best Broadway scores ever written. And unfortunately, the book was stupid, and so the show just fell apart. But splendid, splendid.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

So I wanted to kind of start back with Clarindi because that's considered the first musical, first Broadway musical with an all black cast. And this year marks the 160th anniversary of the Black Crook, the first Broadway musical considered.

John McWhorter:

Yes, that's true. Yeah, that's right.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

But it was 30 years later. That's when Clarendi came out. And so besides it being being the first Broadway musical featuring an all black cast, what else is significant about this particular musical?

John McWhorter:

Clarindy was important because Will Marion Cook, the composer, had an idea that black popular music, and American popular music in general, could take a step forward by being put in a theatrical context that was not a minstrel show. And also, what we can't appreciate about Clarindi because of just the nature of recording technology is also that it was connected to what at the time was considered dynamic dancing and so cakewalking and things like that. And so Clarindi was the idea that you could kind of make black pop music a lady, so to speak, by putting it on stage and giving it, you know, giving it a national audience. And as a result, it would look quaint to us today, but to see these black performers singing in beautiful harmonies, this syncopated, lightly syncopated by our Sanders, but syncopated music with a kind of rhythm that was considered devilishly catchy at the time. So you'd say Abraham Lincoln never jammed. He didn't know what we think of as music being catchy. There's no such thing. He was a 13 person.

John McWhorter:

Here's this music that gives you a foot tap, and it was on a rooftop. And there was a certain drama to that. It was really about there not being air conditioning, but it must have been a really exciting thing. And they moved well. So that's what Clarindi was, and that's why Clarindy is the first black Broadway musical. And of course, you know, it's a fine line, but it'll do.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And so is it really just that distinction between rhythm on 1 and 3 versus 2 and 4, or is there more to it?

John McWhorter:

Well, for syncopation, it really is that instead of having March time, where it's a matter of da da da da da da da da. The melody plays against that bottom. And so you have the bottom going 1, 2, 3, 4. And the melody has lots of beats that are in between, say, 1 and 2 or 3 and 4. And so it dances around that four square bottom rather than Sitting on top of it. And to us, that catchiness is quite ordinary. But one of the hardest things that we would find if we went back in time to, say, 1856, there are all sorts of things would throw us, but one of them would be we would find the music dull, because there is no such thing as that kind of syncopation in Western music. African music had it, and that's where Western music gets it.

John McWhorter:

But that was a really exciting thing to people listening to American pop in the 1890s. It was that new feel.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And was this particularly black in its origin, this kind of syncopation?

John McWhorter:

Very much. And so it was what happened when African slaves came to the United States and took up Western musical form, such as the march? There was no such thing as a march or a waltz in Senegal. And so you combine those two things. You give a march a catchy beat, you give a jig a catchy beat. And so Abraham Lincoln would have known. He would have thought of that as pretty hot stuff. But if you go, that's Africa. And next thing you know, you have something that feels more normal to us today.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Yeah. Which seems like such a part of music today. You know, there'll be the beat, and then the singer will come in on the end. Exactly, yeah. And so is this what makes Cook so important as an artist in American musical theater? This introduction of it?

John McWhorter:

Yeah, he was a pioneer in bringing that feel into a theatrical context outside of white men, or sometimes black men in makeup pretending to be black and telling stupid jokes. This was taking this kind of music. Music. And putting it in a more artistically sophisticated setting and concentrating it all more. So, yeah, Cook was the one who did it first. Now, the truth is, Cook kind of withdrew from doing this faster than one might think. And so in the next decade, he helps to write a few more Broadway scores of this kind. But usually writing music that wasn't especially syncopated.

John McWhorter:

What really happened is that other people took the baton from him and kept it going.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And it was mostly white composers, right?

John McWhorter:

Well, actually, it started out with black composers doing the same thing, but white composers picked up on this very quickly. And so Irving Berlin, for example, was a genius, not to say that he stole anything. But Irving Berlin very quickly understood that writing tunes that are catchy in this way is something that America wants to hear. He was particularly good at it. And then there were other people who are unheard of now who were kind of mining the same vein. And so Broadway is all about. They often called it jazz. We hear it as ragtime that happens on white Broadway.

John McWhorter:

By the mid teens, that kind of music becomes ordinary. So this was just. It was instantly a national fad.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

What exactly was the difference between the original ragtime music and then progressing into jazz? What is that transition?

John McWhorter:

It's subtle and if you ask people at the time, nobody really could have told you. But you start with ragtime. And so, for example, not just say Scott Joplin's Rags, which are hard for most people to play and were usually not heard on the piano, but songs that were written with a ragtime feel, such as Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band. When ragtime takes on the quality of the blues as well. When ragtime has blue notes and when the emphasis is on improvisation rather than playing it straight, ragtime gradually evolves into jazz. Now Louis Armstrong is there helping it do that. He just thought of himself as playing music. He didn't think of himself as doing ragtime or jazz.

John McWhorter:

He wouldn't have been bothered with the difference. But ragtime starts as what to us is, you know, crisp, pretty, but often a little bit quaint. It's kind of, you know, doing, doing the same little groove again and again. Next thing you know, you have blue notes and so which has a kind of a plangency. Once again, that's an African inheritance. And then also the idea that you improvise as well as just play the tune straight. And that's when you have jazz. So by the 20s, you, you know, it's interesting.

John McWhorter:

The original Dixieland Jazz Band is calling themselves a jazz band in 1917. And we can hear them now and they barely improvise and they're not much for blue notes. They sound like a ragtime band to us. But they thought they were doing something different. They were in a kind of an archaeopteryx phase. By about 1922 or 1923, we hear something that we know is jazz and that makes ragtime sound kind of old fashioned.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

So Cook and Dunbar, then they have their follow up into Homie. How did that differ from Clarindi or was it kind of an extension of the same?

John McWhorter:

Ndahomy is different from Clarindi in that Clarindi was one act and barely had a story. It was more like a review. N. Dahomey actually was a narrative story musical. And Ndahomey had probably more interesting performances from Burt Williams and George Walker. They headed into Homey and then they headed two more musicals after that in the Aughts and so into Homey takes what Clarindi began and hooks it to narrative. It has a much longer and more elaborate score. And so N.

John McWhorter:

Dahomey becomes the first Broadway musical in that it played downstairs. It actually played in a theater rather than a rooftop. That difference would have been trivial to people at the time they were on the roof because there was no air conditioning. But Into Homey technically is the first black Broadway musical for that reason.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Right, because it was actually on the stage.

John McWhorter:

Right, exactly.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And so it was more of a musical expansion of what Clarendi was. But music style wise, it was very similar.

John McWhorter:

Exactly the same. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Clorinde starts a style. And that is what black Broadway music sounds like for the next 10 years. Yeah.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

So with Cook, he studied under the Czech composer Anton Dvorak. He mentored Duke Ellington, UB Blake. So he had quite a resume and was contributing to Broadway's musical language. Yet he is very unknown to many people, myself included, until I started digging into this. Why do you think that is? Is it just the racial barrier or is it something more that's kept him undiscovered?

John McWhorter:

That's an interesting question, because he is always undercovered. He worked a long, long time ago. And so part of it is that the kind of work he did was such that it could only be recorded in very primitive form. And so when we hear what he did, it's cylinder recordings and it sounds like it's, you know, 20,000ft underground. So that's part of it. A lot of Will Marion Cook's work was heading up really spectacular all black bands which traveled around the country. And that was great work and it would have been very immediate to somebody living at the time. But it doesn't preserve you don't.

John McWhorter:

You can't. You don't keep celebrating that. He wrote a lot of songs, but the truth is he could do a syncopated tune. He thought of that as interesting, but it wasn't his main meal. He wrote I'm Coming Virginia the. The tune for that, which is a really nice song. But a lot of his work was really kind of post Victorian. He was interested in doing what white people did as well as they did.

John McWhorter:

And, you know, God bless him for that. But that means that a lot of his work, and I say this with great admiration today, is of less interest than the work of the black Broadway men and women who came after him. He also was extremely difficult later in his life. He became this kind of dad figure to younger men. But when he was a younger man himself, it's obvious from all the stories about him that he was a manic Depressive and he could be extremely difficult. Called. He married a 13 year old, you know, they had a physically violent relationship. And so that didn't help.

John McWhorter:

People did not seek him out as much as maybe they would have. There was something off there.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Just because he was hard to work

John McWhorter:

with, very hard to work with, very imperious. It had to be his way. And you know, people like that sometimes get lost because nobody wants them around. He mellowed as he got older, as most people do, but the Clarindi guy, the indahomey guy, he was a tough one. And so what's the story about him? He, he, he had written the score to a musical and he had expected that he would conduct it. And instead this was a white house and they said, no, we, we're not going to have a black man conducting. We're going to use our house conductor who's white. His response to this, and you can think of it as heroic, is that he took the parts off of the stands and tore them up and just, you know, didn't have his show done because he found that insulting.

John McWhorter:

However, you know, if he had had, if he had just knuckled under and let the white man conduct, suppose it had been a hit show with his songs, you know, instead that didn't happen. That's the sort of person that he was. And so we completely understand how insulting it must have been to be told you can't conduct. Other people would have knuckled under because after a while the publicity of the show would have been worth that initial humiliation. He wasn't one to think of it that way, so it's probably that.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

But that's also something that his contemporaries like George M. Cohen or Berlin or Jerome Kern, they didn't have to think about that.

John McWhorter:

Never. That would never have happened to them all. It's funny. Well, no, we don't need to go too far aside. Kern was a extremely difficult too, but for different reasons. So.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Yeah, right, right. But again, that's kind of where race can come into it. You know, you accept one from one. Whereas, you know, if he's difficult, then maybe he's playing into that stereotype of a dick black man.

John McWhorter:

Yeah, and it's. Yeah, that's another thing when you act like that. Whites in particular, you know, even black composers got tired of them. But whites, you know, are not going to bend at all with, to. To a black man who acts like that then. And so that didn't help his case either.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

So I was looking at what was considered black musicals in kind of this early 1900 to 1910s, there was basically none. Then we get into the 1920s, there's this boom, about 23 or so, and then it kind of falls off. In the 30s, there was. Where there was about. So in the 1910s, why was there this emptiness of black musicals?

John McWhorter:

You know, the truth really is it was a bizarre accident. A lot of people died. And so George Walker, who was really the star between Williams and Walker, he got syphilis, and he died around 1910. So that meant no more Williams and Walker. If he had lived, they would have kept on doing musicals. And I highly suspect they would have evolved into more narratively sophisticated and maybe even more musically interesting musicals. But he died. Ernest Hogan, who actually was the black musical comedy star of the time, he died.

John McWhorter:

Various other people just, you know, came to a bad end. Cole, Bob Cole and the Johnson Brothers had done a string of musicals just as interesting as the In Dahomey ones. And they certainly. They would have kept going until the end the 40s, I'm sure. But Bob Cole had something. Nobody's quite sure what it is, but he ended up killing himself. And so it really was that the leading lights by the opening of the Teens just weren't there. And that really is the reason why suddenly in the Teens, nothing was happening.

John McWhorter:

And it's easy to think that it must have been that there was some kind of resistance or something, but it actually just was a chance thing. Scott Joplin had written a musical. He dies of syphilis in 1917. Who knows what he would have done if he hadn't gotten sick? And so it means that there's this fallow period until 1921. And I know where we're going, so go ahead.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Yeah. So that's when Euie Blake and Noble Sissel come up with Shuffle Along. And what exactly was it about this musical that was captivating people that. That made it such a seismic event in American theater at the time.

John McWhorter:

Because the music that they were doing had a jazz flavor, for one thing. There's a bluesiness to some of the songs. There is an extremely catchy kind of syncopation to the songs. The songs are very frisky in many ways, in a way that nothing in Dahomey was. And so it's ragtime kind of on steroids. It's almost what we think of as jazz. And Shuffle along is tough because as much as we like to talk about it, you know that now there's a whole. There are two books about it, etc.

John McWhorter:

To listen to the actual Material, you've got to put your history glasses on. Because what came after it was, to us, snappier and larger than what they were doing back then. But to an audience then to hear something like, I'm just wild about Harry and he's just wild about me. And then, of course, it certainly in performance, it would have been, he's just wild about. Is a child about something, aisle about. He's just wild about me. That's really catchy stuff for 1921. Also, the dancing was apparently astonishing.

John McWhorter:

We can't really know what it was, but. But it was good. And Shuffle along was funny. And not in a way that is very polite for us today. But you had these two lead comedians and their black men in blackface doing these. These tacky routines that nevertheless, you know, some of those routines were funny. You can see them doing one in the movie Stormy Weather. It's somebody who was one of the leads in Shuffle along.

John McWhorter:

And then a guy who's doing basically an uncanny imitation of the other one. It's. It's supposed to be. To be Miller and Lyles. And what they're doing is. Is Horry stuff by our standards. But it was funny. And so they would have done that in front of the curtain.

John McWhorter:

But the music is really. I never thought about this until right now. The music is late ragtime more than early jazz. We're talking about the very early 20s. But then it gets to the point where the. The difference is semantics. And one of the songs is called I'm Simply Full of Jazz. So that's what they thought it was.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And it's interesting, I was thinking musically that doing that one three. Because it's on the downbeat, that one. If the music is going along with what we feel is the downbeat, then we kind of don't need to tap to it. But once it goes off that. Then we almost have to tap to kind. Kind of feel the other rhythm that it's countering. And so is. Is that a bit of where toe tapping comes from?

John McWhorter:

Yeah. And so, like Bandana Days, once it leaves the beat, there's a bit of you that goes, oh, there. You know, that's boring. But then that syncopation. And it's fun to dance to, and it's fun to watch somebody dance to. So, yeah, that's the feel of this.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

If someone listened to Broadway scores, then before and after Shuffalong, what would that difference be that they would hear?

John McWhorter:

The truth is, and it really is. It's a pretty clean case before Shuffle Along, Broadway music Can be very pleasant, but it's very polite. It only lets loose to a certain extent. It's the sort of thing that somebody might tap dance to. The best of it was written in terms of who has lasted since. Jerome Kern was very good at it, especially in his Princess Theater shows in the mid and late teens. After 1921, people jump on the bandwagon of this new jazz feel. This kind of naughty, captivating, fast paced feel.

John McWhorter:

And that becomes gradually the Broadway default. And it's interesting very often it used to be said people are getting over this now, but it used to be said that, well, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin created jazz on Broadway with Lady be good in 1924. And you think of these two guys and they come up with this jazz feel. And almost nothing Gershwin wrote before that sounded anything like his music in 1924. To get really nerdy about it, that feeling starts creeping in in their show Sweet Little Devil, which they composed in 1923, but that nobody had heard until about 15 years ago. But they were creating a new sound and Lady Be Good is what made it really famous. But the thing is, their music hadn't sounded anything like that before. And it's inescapable that he and also Vincent Humans, who does no no Net around the same time were imitating this new feel from Shuffle Along.

John McWhorter:

And Shuffle along, you know, was quite famous. It's not that nobody paid any attention, but it also rewrote what a Broadway musical sounded like. And so Shuffle along is one of the first musicals that we can listen to and almost hear a Broadway musical. And it's Humans and Gershwin who most famously really set it in stone with no, no, no and Lady Be Good. Although Lady Be Good is a little, little ragtimey if you listen to the whole thing. But certainly after Lady Be Good they're writing something that Broadway had never heard before.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And so this absorbing and almost imitating of this black musical sound, was this just an artistic thing like, oh, this is interesting. I'm going to extrapolate on this. Or was it financial? Because they saw the success of Shuffle Along. So now I want to hop in on that was a little bit of both, maybe.

John McWhorter:

I'll tell you. Humans and George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin were people who really were interested in taking musical theater forward. And so I think a lot of what they were doing was they were finding these new kinds of show tunes interesting and catchy and they wanted to do it too. And after a while it just became the fashion. And so Cole Porter jumps right in writing that kind of tune. I don't think he was not especially ambitious in terms of trying to move musical theater form forward, but that was how people were writing songs. And these guys kind of competed with each other. And after a while, there was just one way to do it.

John McWhorter:

I'm not aware of Richard Rogers thinking, I want to write jazz tunes. He just knew what kind of tunes sold, and it just became his native language. So a musical language emerged. And so it'd be easy to say, well, Gershwin and humans ripped Eubie Blake off, but it was more just that they thought, this is better than what was going on before and we're going to do this. And I. I'm not sure either one of them thought of themselves as writing black music. They thought of themselves as writing the new kind of Broadway music. It was just very much in the air.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

So within this time, I think it. It can be hard for some of us to put ourselves back there because certainly we know about the Jim Crow south and the lynchings and what was happening in the South, The. The segregation, the deep racism there. But when we think about the north, we don't tend to associate that with it. But the same kind of segregation and you're not welcome here, was still going on in the north and especially in the theater world.

John McWhorter:

Yeah, there were all sorts of barbaric things going on in terms of, you know, who could sit where, who could be in which theater, in terms of, you know, who got to play parts. You know, all of it was quite. There was. It was a highly segregated and highly racist environment. Now, the truth is that there was a certain kind of white Broadway guy who nevertheless hung around with black musicians because they were really fascinated. Gershwin was one of them. He would just sit at the feet of the top late ragtime, early jazz, novelty pianists, or people like Fats Waller. He.

John McWhorter:

And he was just genuinely fascinated by this kind of music and was aware of it on a certain level as black in its more advanced forms. He knew he was writing, quote, unquote, black music with, say, poor D and best. But yeah, it's an environment where Broadway happens, and it is most certainly the great white way. And so Shuffle along had many children. You know, frankly, the same show was written over and over again in the 20s, and, you know, some of them are better than others. And then that plays out because the Depression makes it hard to get money up for a show. And so there were just fewer Broadway shows in general. And big surprise, that problem was even worse for getting money for a black production.

John McWhorter:

And so after A while. You have another one of these lulls in the 1930s when you've got so much wonderful Broadway music happening to the extent that people can get up the money to do a show, but you're kind of almost waiting for there to be a Blake and Sissel or something like that, and that's just not happening. It took a while for anything like that to start happening again.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Well, yeah, in 1935, that happened to be a milestone year. That's when Langston Hughes Mulatto came out. And that was a dramatic work.

John McWhorter:

Exactly.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Bringing kind of interracial elements into it. And more dramatic work than the musical stuff. And then Parking Bess that you mentioned. And how did each of these not just provide an opening for black stories to be taken more seriously, but also for black artists to be seen as more than just musical comedy performers?

John McWhorter:

It was a long. It took a long time for black performers to be seen as serious. Except occasionally, you know, there was room for a Paul Robeson, for example, but, you know, many, many fewer women. And the truth is, with, say, Mulatto, which runs what, 11, 11 months, and it's by Langston Hughes, it was interesting, but it was also kind of a pot boiler. What made that run was the shocking goings on on stage, including the sexual violation, etc. But gradually there was a place, and frankly, George Gershwin had a lot to do with it in creating Porgy and Bessel, The play Porgy, which had been its original source and that plays, I believe, in 1927. And Porgy is very melodramatic in its original elements, but it was directed beautifully. What really put Porgy over was Reuben Mamoulian's stage pictures.

John McWhorter:

But still, it's black people taking themselves seriously on stage, which is something that would not have been a Broadway hit in 1919. And so, yes, there's a change on that in the 30s. And Porgy and Bess would be one of the main examples. But real change of this kind, where black people doing things on stage other than tap dancing and telling silly jokes, that. That starts at the beginning of the forties.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Both Porgy and Bess and predecessor Porgy, they were created, written by white authors. And so what was the impetus or fascination maybe of these white creators looking at black stories to bring to the stage?

John McWhorter:

This was an era. Well, nothing's really changed on this. There was a certain kind of white artist who saw blackness as authentic, as spiritually compelling in a way that whiteness wasn't. There was a fascination with, as they would have put it, Back then, the Negro and his vitality, et cetera. And I think a lot of this was artistically sincere. The idea was that there was something truly American about blackness. And then it was also that blackness was considered exotic. And that had been around.

John McWhorter:

I mean, frankly, that's Dvorak, in a way, saying that American classical music needs to be based on Native American and Afro American sources. But there were always artists who had that notion. Dubose Hayward, for example, who created the play Porgy, he had lived. He lived in Charleston and was very familiar with the local Gullah Geechee culture. And wanted to present it respectably to the rest of America. But, yeah, he was. He was sincere in this. And it was just easier for a white person to get the funding to put something on stage.

John McWhorter:

So Zora Neale Hurston is doing various theater works at this time. Very busy with the theater. More interested in the theater often than in writing. But she can only get herself out there so much. Whereas a dubose Hayward or George Gershwin could do things and get national attention.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Now, Langston Hughes in 1940 came out with an autobiography. And one of those chapters was called when the Negro Was in Vogue. And so for him, he saw it more as a commercial fad rather than anything artistic. Do you see his point of it as well?

John McWhorter:

Well, I don't know that I would say that it's interesting point because he's talking about the 20s. And so all of a sudden everything's all about quote, unquote, than Negro. And then less so in the 30s, during the depression. Sure. Yeah, I can go for that. That there was an attention paid to blackness, especially in New York. There's a. The history is written as if New York was the only place.

John McWhorter:

But in New York, white people downtown were interested in black people uptown. Some white people were more interested than they had been in, for example, financing black people's work. And so Langston Hughes had a kind of a sugar mama. And that same woman gave money to Zora Neale Hurston, too, just to support them in their work. Because this woman, she thought of blackness as authentic and needing expression. But her sense was that blackness of interest was kind of rough, kind of exotic, kind of passionate. She wasn't interested in the more anti. Macassar we can do white things to way of looking at things.

John McWhorter:

So for her it was, you know, blackness. And she was a little condescending. Very much a person of her time. But she also gave Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and some other artists an awful lot of money.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And you certainly wrote contemporarily about, especially since 2020, about the performative nature of whites kind of kowtowing to black or being, being silent, giving them space, all these kind of things. Was there something like that back in the 20s and 30s and 40s? This a performative nature of like, look what good I'm doing.

John McWhorter:

No, in the 20s it was more condescending than that. It was more. Look at these animalistic, vital, sexy people doing things that we kind of wonder bred whites don't. It was less. Except among some educated people perhaps. It was much less. An idea of. It makes us good people to pay these people some attention.

John McWhorter:

So the thing that I have written about in this century is quite different from what was going on then. And to be honest, I mean, I'd rather have it be the way it is in this century than the way it was then because basically black people were thought of as rather animalistic. But I would say it's different. Definitely different.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Yeah. Because even Langston Hughes, he referred to it as them kind of watching animals at the zoo kind of thing.

John McWhorter:

Exactly, yeah. Yeah, very much.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Now you talk about how these white composers were absorbing the black music of the time and their musical styles shifted. Did black composers also shift through the decades or were. I mean, obviously ragtime and blues and jazz were shifting music in general. But did the black composers also have this before and after that? The white composers had.

John McWhorter:

You know, Patrick, the truth is that no black composer was able to have long enough a career that you could chart that. That's an interesting question. Duke Ellington's Beggar's Holiday is one thing. It's these little tunes. Duke Ellington's puss cafe in 1966, the music sounds more like the music he had come to start making in the 40s and had perfected by the 60s, kind of with elaborate chords and a little more serious then when he does what he called an opera, Queenie pie in the 80s, I only saw it then. There's no recording and I only remember one song, so I can't say. But with Blake and Sissel, the truth is, and you don't want to knock them, they were kind of like Louis Armstrong. They never changed.

John McWhorter:

And so the story of them after Shuffle along is they kept on doing variations on Shuffle Along. They kept on writing songs just like Shuffle along. And Pretty soon it's 1952 and they're doing the same stuff and hoping to make lightning strike twice. They just. They did what they did very well and they just kind of sat there. It would have been interesting if they had kind of pushed the envelope. But not all artists do whatever color they are. But, no, I can't think of a black Broadway career where you see a progression, a change in style, because most of them were only there for so long, and Sissel and Blake kept trying, but they were too conservative in a way.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

But was it also getting back to that Negro vogue of just like, well, this is the hot composer now. Now we're moving on to this one. Now. Here's the hot show. And it just. That flash in the. Kept changing.

John McWhorter:

Yeah, for a long time. The idea, especially they were overt about it in the 20s and 30s, is that black people are supposed to do shows about tap dancing and watermelon and smiling and hijinks and things that white people don't do as well. If anybody tried to do anything else, then they'd say, well, this isn't black enough. That was often a problem. That certainly would have discouraged black composers from trying to write for Broadway. A lot of black composers did other things, such as being jazz men or jazz women, because why put together something on Broadway when what they want is, you know, fried chicken and, you know, hijinks. I wouldn't have wanted to write, you know, anything for Broadway then, knowing that that's what the critics were gonna say. And so probably partly that, yeah.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And so, as we Progress Forward to 1940, what kind of Broadway environment now was Cabin in the sky entering into as far as, like, racially, but also musically?

John McWhorter:

When Cabin in the sky comes in in 1940, the depression is over, and Broadway musicals have flowered in many ways. And so showboat happened in 1927, and nothing really came in Showboat's wake. But Broadway music by the end of the 30s has become a sophisticated art form in many ways, often involving extended ballets with interesting music within the show. And there are various artists who are working at the top of their form by then. However, it is. The racial consciousness is minor. And so, for example, Babes in Arms by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart is 1936 has a whole string of hit songs. The one we don't hear today is the one that the Nicholas brothers who were in the show dance to.

John McWhorter:

And it was called All Black People Is Light on they Feet. That's the name of the song. So that's Rogers and, you know, Hart, and they weren't unsophisticated men, but that was considered a normal thing. And so the idea is, what kind of black musical can we create that is about more than incredibly talented Black tap dancers tapping their feet or a black woman coming out and doing the same thing. And that's where Cabin in the sky comes in.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And so with these. I mean, it had a great creative team. It was Russian born composer Vernon Duke. What can you say about him?

John McWhorter:

Vernon Duke is someone who never quite caught a break in terms of his Broadway output. The break that he caught was Cabin in the Sky. But Cabin in the sky as a stage piece was only a minor hit. And he was Russian born and he wanted to advance the form of the Broadway tune. He was kind of a friend with and competitor with George Gershwin. His music is delightfully complex. I. I like playing it myself, just from the sheets.

John McWhorter:

I have a friend who is dedicatedly collecting his sheets because they aren't all in one place. But Duke had one flop after another, always with these quirky, wonderful songs in it. And it's just. It was the luck of the draw. He never had a real hit. But he was somebody who was interested in moving this form forward and he was somebody who saw this music from the outside in such a way that it was going to be interesting how he wrote music for a show about unlettered, disadvantaged black people.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And when it comes to the cast, obviously leading actress Ethel Waters was the star of the show. Her presence in this musical, what did that mean?

John McWhorter:

Well, Ethel Waters was the exception in that she is a black woman who has a Broadway career appearing in top flight work written by the mainstream guys. And she had a really unique presence. And luckily she's well recorded. And so you can watch her, for example, in the movie of Cabin in the Sky or as she gets older, you can see her doing interviews on TV shows and you know, it's the Wonder Bread 50s and she's giving really deep answers to what are supposed to be kind of softball questions. So she was really captivating on stage. There was a kind of a plangent element to her. She's getting through, but she's clearly truly hurt about life, about being black. And she carried that with her in any role that she played.

John McWhorter:

And so she must have been really interesting to see in the stage show, which is a grittier thing than the movie. You know, if MGM does Cabin in the Sky, you know, it's going to end up being this big happy time. Whereas in the show she's really dealing with a certain amount of pain and everything is not a jolly good time and Lena Horne is not in the bathtub and things like that. So, yeah, it must have been a very interesting thing to see.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And Katherine Dunham, she was co choreographer, but she was also a dancer in the show. And from what I was reading, that her style was really a kind of a wake up call to white audiences, seeing black performers move this way and do these kind of things, these moves,

John McWhorter:

actually racially authentic moves. She had them doing kind of black art dance rather than just the frenetic tap dancing and the sort of thing that say, Bilbo Jangles Robinson did very, very well. He was one of the best tap dancers ever. But this, and we're more familiar with it now, but this modern dance adapted to the Broadway stage. Katherine Dunham really was doing something new and she for a long time was a presence in the Broadway environment. She did various shows showing how black people could dance other than in a frenetic, grinning kind of way.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And I hear that there was some tension between Waters and Dunham because of, you know, Waters more traditional, more Christian upbringing. Dunham's maybe more visceral, sexy, you know, that there was some tension there, friction between the two.

John McWhorter:

Yeah, Ethel Waters was not an easy person, never was. And as time went by, it got worse. And yes, she had a. There was a prim quality and. Or I think it's fair to say sometimes she would get especially jealous of younger and perhaps more conventionally pretty women. And that was always a problem. But also she was star and she wanted to be her show. And many stars, especially in that era, could be chillingly hierarchical.

John McWhorter:

Hierarchical about things like that. And so the idea that there would be another woman, another black woman who's being written about and getting as much attention as she is, she's feeling like this is supposed to be about me nowadays. I think there's less of that on Broadway. There's a certain kind of coded cordiality in American theater culture that had not happened yet in 1940.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And Todd Duncan was also. He's an operatic baritone who was part of the original Porgy and Bess and is now in Cabin in the Sky. Does that credential then carry Cabin in the Sky? Like, oh, the Porgy and Bess guy is now in this. Does that carry some weight back then as well?

John McWhorter:

Quite honestly, I don't think it would have because Porgy and Bess only lasted for a short time and so only so many people saw it. That's 1935. Porgy and Bess really becomes a thing in 1942 when a shortened version with spoken lines rather than recitative starts touring the United States. And that's when it really enters the national consciousness. And 1940 is before that. And so Todd Duncan, I think, would have come off as just, you know, black man with a great voice. Some people would know he had been the original Porgy. But Porgy and Bess didn't become a staple part of American musical culture until a few years after 1940, it's my guess.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

And with the. The chorus that was part of it, that was directed and arranged by J. Rosamond Johnson. What was his contribution to this as far as the. The choral feel and sound of it?

John McWhorter:

The problem is that. But those arrangements don't survive. And so we have to go on what we know of his output in general. You can hear things on the radio. He had been part of the team, Bob Cole, Jay Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson, who had written a string of black Broadway musicals in the aughts. And so he knew where he was coming from. James Weldon Johnson went on to become one of the heads of the naacp. And Jay Rosamond did.

John McWhorter:

Did all sorts of things in a very low key way, including that he was in the original Porgy and Bess as the. The lawyer character. But his arrangements would have been stirring and they would have sounded probably a lot like the Swing along arrangement by Will Marion Cook. Will Marion Cook wrote Swing along for In Dahomey. It's the catchiest thing from our modern perspective from it. And you can actually hear there's a recording that was made in 1914 and you can hear the black choir doing it, you know, the rich black spiritual harmonies. I'm almost positive that that is the sound that Rosamond Johnson would have had. The songs in.

John McWhorter:

In the original Cabin in the sky and Encores revival of it. I remember they. They had to create those for today because the arrangements didn't still exist. But he would have written in a style that we would recognize as spiritual jubilee singers, Black essence.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Looking back now, what do you think Cabin in the sky represents in the larger history of black musical theater?

John McWhorter:

Cabin in the sky took a rather simple story and through the acting and the stage pictures and the directing and the stylized dancing made it into something larger than it was. And for that to happen with a black production, and now it's musical theater rather than just a drama the way Porgy had been in 1927. That was. It was a weird thing. And the truth is Cabin in the sky didn't have any followers. So once you see black musical theater in the 40s continuing, you're getting interesting experiments like the black Mikado and, you know, a black version of the Midsummer of a Midsummer Night's Dream. And these are very interesting things. Duke Ellington does Beggar's Holiday, which is a very interesting piece, but none of these pieces are ambitiously weird.

John McWhorter:

The way Cabin in the sky was, Cabin in the sky was odd. Vernon Duke's music is often okay. And so it's an interesting experiment. It would be interesting to go back in time and actually see a production, which is not true of all Broadway musicals from back then. If you had to actually sit through what Boys From Syracuse was like with people shouting unamplified over an orchestra, and a lot of them couldn't really sing, dancing was kind of clunky. I wouldn't want to see the original Boys From Syracuse. But with Cabin in the sky, it would be great to be there just to see, you know, what it even looked like as well as sounded like.

Patrick Oliver Jones:

Well, thank you so much for your time and for doing this. It's been a joy to talk to you.

John McWhorter:

This is not something people ask me about much, and so my pleasure.