Terry Gross: This is "Fresh Air." I'm Terry Gross.

[music up and under]

Terry Gross: The song is "Memories of You," one of the best known melodies composed by Eubie Blake. At the piano is Dick Hyman, who is joining us today with singer Vernel Bagneris. They're going to revive some of Eubie Blake's wonderful, but largely forgotten, songs. Some of the songs we're going to hear come from Blake's 1921 musical, Shuffle Along. That show not only left us with great music. It changed Broadway. Shuffle Along was created by, and starred, African Americans. It brought new syncopated rhythms and dances to Broadway, and even helped launch the Harlem Renaissance. Here to tell us about the impact of Eubie Blake's work and the obstacles Blake faced as an African American composer is theater historian Robert Kimball. He helped rediscover Blake in the late 60s and co-authored the book, Reminiscing with Sissle and Blake. Kimball is also the co-author of The Gershwins and editor of the complete lyrics of Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter.

Let me tell you more about our performers. Singer Vernel Bagneris is currently appearing on Broadway in the musical, The Life. He also co-created and starred in the Jelly Roll Morton review and the New Orleans music review, One Mo' Time. Dick Hyman is an expert in the piano styles of the teens, twenties, and thirties. You may know him as the composer and music director for several Woody Allen movies.

Eubie Blake not only wrote for musicals, he wrote for vaudeville. Let's start with one of his vaudeville songs written with lyricist Noble Sissle.

[music: I Wonder Where My Sweetie Can Be]

Terry Gross: Great. Wow. Now, we're all here because we love Eubie Blake's songs, but let's just go around the room and ask everybody why they love the songs. Vernel, let's start with you.

Vernel Bagneris: Well, for me the melody lines are pretty much where I like music to be. It's melodious. And the lyrics are great, and a lot of fun. And I love vaudeville, period.

Terry Gross: Yeah, I know, and you're great at it. There aren't that many people now who can sing that material. Dick Hyman, what do you love about Eubie Blake's songs?

Dick Hyman: Well, I guess that he's really a stride piano player at his core, and that his songs seem to come out of that kind of piano playing, which I'm very fond of.

Terry Gross: And which you're very good at. Dick Hyman, you rediscovered Eubie Blake in the late 60s. What do you love about his songs?

Dick Hyman: I think Eubie really bridged the gap between the European song tradition and the American in the sense that he loved operetta. He loved Lehar. He loved composers like Tchaikovsky. His idol was Leslie Stuart, and he felt that it should be possible for an African American to write any kind of song. And he did it. And I think his range is extraordinary, and his ability to use accent in songs, which he could do as a conductor. He learned how to do all of those things. It makes his songs very, very exciting for us.

Terry Gross: Tell us a little about him biographically. Where was he from?

Dick Hyman: Eubie Blake was born in Baltimore on February 7, 1883. He was the son of slaves. In fact, his father had 21 children by two wives. Eubie was the only one of the 21 children to live to adulthood.

Terry Gross: Not only did he live to adulthood, how old was he when he died?

Dick Hyman: One hundred years and five days.

Terry Gross: Amazing. [chuckles] Some of the songs we'll be hearing today are from Shuffle Along, Eubie Blake's 1921 musical written with Noble Sissle It is really a landmark musical in the history of the Broadway stage. Dick Hyman, what's so important about Shuffle Along musically?

Dick Hyman: Shuffle Along described itself accurately as a musical mélange. It brought together so many diverse styles and influences. You hear operetta in a song like "Love Will Find a Way." It is very important, and it was a very courageous decision for Sissle and Blake to have a beautiful ballad that could have come right out of a Jerome Kern show as part of their score. It also reflected the vaudeville acts of the four creators: Miller and Lyles, who were the book writers of Shuffle Along. Later, Miller became particularly well known for writing the Amos and Andy routines. Miller and Lyles had these wonderful sketches that they did together, and it was their comic routines that provided the basis for the books that they wrote for Shuffle Along and other musicals of that period. And then you had Sissle and Blake's remarkable vaudeville act, which was really crucial. It was an extended fifteen or twenty minute sequence which would involve a diversity of materials. And it was the coming together of all these different influences that made Shuffle Along special. Another part about Shuffle Along that has always struck me very forcefully is that, because there were no other black musicals on Broadway, when they gathered the talent together to bring Shuffle Along to Broadway, they were able to obtain the very best talent in the black community.

Terry Gross: Who were some of the people who come out of Shuffle Along?

Dick Hyman: One person who you don't think of is Paul Robeson. He was a member of the cast of Shuffle Along. The most beloved of the black artists of the twenties, Florence Mills, was from Shuffle Along. In many ways the most famous of the performers from that period, who later went on to achieve great renown in Europe, was Josephine Baker. She was from Shuffle Along. Two great figures in music played in Eubie's orchestra: Hall Johnson, whose choir was world renowned, and the extraordinary composer, William Grant Still, played the oboe in the Shuffle Along orchestra. These are just some of the great people who were part of that show.

Terry Gross: Vernel and Dick, I'm going to ask you to do a song from Shuffle Along. This is called "I'm Craving for That Kind of Love." It was the showstopper of the musical. Want to do it for us?

[music: "I'm Craving for That Kind of Love"]

Terry Gross: That's a really fun song. Now, when that song was sung in Shuffle Along 1921 it was done by someone named Gertrude Saunders. What an unusual style she had of singing! I thought maybe we'd listen to a little bit of that 1921 recording and hear how it sounded back then in her voice. Why don't we give that a spin? This is from 1921, Gertrude Saunders.

[music]

Terry Gross: That's an amazing style of singing. I mean, it's this really odd combination of operatic style and syncopation. Is it something brand new happening with this kind of singing?

Dick Hyman: It's also got an element like a blues shout, too.

Terry Gross: Yeah

Dick Hyman: Yes, it's the beginning, of course, of recording. I believe Bessie Smith had just started to record at that time, and you're having this great infusion of artists of that tradition as well. Again, very classically trained, and it's the bringing together of these incredible styles, plus some extraordinary vocal embellishment, the portamento and other things we just don't hear anymore.

Dick Hyman: Also, this was a time when you could still sing pop songs in a real soprano. After that, pop songs have almost always been sung in a much lower range by women. That sounds funny to us. But, that, as you say, came out of opera and operetta and was just the kind of voice that women were expected to sing with.

Terry Gross: Vernel, you must go back and listen to early recordings because you sing a lot of songs from that period. How much do you try to get from that period and how much do you try to keep it contemporary-sounding when you do songs of the past?

Vernel Bagneris: I try to stay pure to the intentions, what I think to be the intentions. But, I definitely know that I'm performing to ears of the 90s. And, as a male, you go somewhere very different with it.

Terry Gross: We're here today reviving some of the great songs of Eubie Blake and talking about the different musical periods that he wrote in during his long life. In the studio with me is theater historian Dick Hyman, singer Vernel Bagneris, and pianist Dick Hyman. What influence did Shuffle Along have on other Broadway musicals? As we were saying, it brings this kind of mix of a light opera sound and ragtime and syncopation.

Dick Hyman: Probably its most dramatic influence was in the area of jazz dancing. The producers of the Broadway reviews, men like George White and Ziegfeld, immediately hired the dancers from Shuffle Along to teach white girls how to dance that way so that they could incorporate those elements into the reviews and the Broadway musical comedies of that period. That was probably the most dramatic effect. I would think, musically, and knowing what I've heard from Irving Berlin and others--Mr. Berlin said that the impact of Shuffle Along was extraordinary-- that there's no question that the kind of syncopated songs that he wrote after, like Everybody Step and Pack Up Your Sins, and Go to the Devil, which were for the Music Box reviews, were influenced by songs like The Baltimore Buzz and Craving for That Kind of Love, which he heard in Shuffle Along. It's hard to imagine Gershwin's "Fascinating Rhythm" without hearing what Sissle and Blake were doing before.

Terry Gross: And you know for a fact that Gershwin and Berlin heard Shuffle Along and they knew the music?

Dick Hyman: Yes. Mr. Berlin said he went back several times just to see it.

Terry Gross: But, you know, one the things I find so interesting about this period of Eubie Blake's music is that you have this constant cross influence of black and white. You have Gershwin and Berlin picking up on what Blake is doing. But you also have Eubie Blake being very inspired by operatic, light opera composers, like Leslie Stuart, who is British, and Victor Herbert. So, there's this constant cross influence. The influences don't just go one way.

Dick Hyman: Eubie felt that this was the way it should be, and he said it was very difficult for black artists to write in styles that are associated with the white culture, the high culture. So, originally, "I'm Just Wild About Harry," the most famous song from Shuffle Along, was a waltz. And, Lottie Gee, the leading lady of Shuffle Along, said, "Eubie, you can't have a waltz in a colored show. You have to make it a one-step." So, he made the change. He said he didn't want to make the change, but "of course, she was right," he said, given what happened with the song. But, it was his wish to be able to write any kind of music he wanted. And it was very hard for him to be able to do that because of these expectations. I think that, with "Love Will Find a Way," the ballad, they were all terrified.

Terry Gross: You mentioned that "I'm Just Wild About Harry" was originally done as a waltz and that wasn't considered a black form, so he changed it to a one-step. Can you play it for us both ways, Dick?

Dick Hyman: Sure. The way we generally play it is: [plays a few bars in 2]. If you play it as a waltz it would be :[plays a few bars of waltz].

Terry Gross: During the period that Eubie Blake starts writing, a lot of African American performers are still performing in black face. And when Sissle and Blake were starting off with their vaudeville act, did they ever perform in black face? Were they expected to do that?

Dick Hyman: They wouldn't do it. They didn't do it. The reason they were able to achieve that was because they had both worked very closely with James Reese Europe. They were part of his musical aggregate. Eubie was a pianist and leader for some of the Europe bands that performed, and Sissle was a vocalist. They performed a great deal in the homes of millionaires, and they were always expected to dress properly, respectfully, and, at times, formally. They felt that, for their audience, they must dress the same way when they performed on the vaudeville stage.

Terry Gross: So, they would just say "no" if people expected them?

Dick Hyman: They said no.

Terry Gross: There's a song I'm going to ask you to do, Vernel and Dick, from Shuffle Along, called "If You've Never Been Vamped by a Brown Skin (You've Never Been Vamped At All)." When we were thinking of including this song in our show today, a couple of people said, "Well, maybe you don't want to sing that song, because, you know, the lyrics might sound stereotyped or offensive to contemporary ears." Vernel, what's your take on that?

Vernel Bagneris: I think that Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake were extremely careful themselves about how they would represent themselves to their audience. So, I don't have a problem with that. Other musical material from the period, when you say "darkies beat their feet on the Mississippi," then I change it to "people beat their feet on the Mississippi" and I do the number. A lot of African American audiences won't even touch the material once they see a lyric. I prefer to see if the lyric can be doctored in some way and then present this wonderful song and not lose the material.

Terry Gross: Well, why don't we hear the song. This is from Shuffle Along, the 1921 musical by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. We have Dick Hyman at the piano and Vernel Bagneris singing.

[music: "If You've Never Been Vamped by a Brown Skin (You've Never Been Vamped At All)"]

Terry Gross: [chuckles] That's great. Vernel, I know you actually met Eubie Blake.

Vernel Bagneris: Yeah, when I was doing One Mo' Time.

Terry Gross; Your New Orleans musical. Did he share any good stories with you?

Vernel Bagneris: Well, not so much stories as much as help me to face what later on I would get nationally with the press.

Terry Gross: What do you mean?

Vernel Bagneris: He had come down to New Orleans to see the show when we were actually in our original workshop period with it before we opened in New York. I asked him about the black face because I knew that he had personally refused to appear in black face. He was saying that when you're doing an authentic piece about the T.O.B.A. circuit . . .

Terry Gross: That was like the black minstrel and vaudeville circuit?

Vernel Bagneris: --Yes, the theater owners' association's circuit of colored vaudeville--that, the truth is that the majority, 99%, of the performers would have to have that moment. And so, "tell the truth" was his thing. You know, if you're going to do a historic piece you want to paint it as clearly and as purely as you can. So, that was a big help for me to have a man who, to me, was such a legend-96 years old at the time-watching the show and saying "This feels good. This feels like this is the truth and it feels like you haven't painted or bleached it out of commission."

Terry Gross: I think it's such an interesting area to deal in, the past, because people want to be politically correct sometimes when approaching the past instead of approaching the past and looking as it really was and trying to understand the past.

Vernel Bagneris: Well, I think the only way to fully understand the past is to look at it without political correctness, to look at it in its own environment, and figure out why people were doing what they were doing at that time and, really, how heroic they were and breaking walls down at that time.

Terry Gross: Another interesting thing about Eubie Blake and the period that he starts performing in, it's a period when African American composers are starting to organize. James Reese Europe was probably the most famous African American conductor of his time and he died, I think, in 1919. He organized something called the Clef Club, which I guess was the first black musicians' union. Dick Hyman, do you want to say just a little bit about the kind of organizing that's happening in the African American music world in New York at about the time of Shuffle Along?

Dick Hyman: Well, you had the theatrical organization called The Frogs, which included virtually all of the writers who were writing for the musical stage, both lyricists and composers. That was a kind of fraternal organization. So, these groups were organizing, and I think probably the crucial factor, in addition to all of that, that changed the feelings at the time, was World War I. World War I broke down some of the old racial lines because black soldiers were fighting, and Jim Europe formed this tremendous band which achieved renown in Europe. He brought it back to the United States, and it was really a triumphant expression of unity and a sort of oneness with the American experience.

Terry Gross: One of the many interesting things about Shuffle Along is that it relates to the Harlem Renaissance. In fact, Langston Hughes says that the reason why he came to New York and went to Columbia University was because he really wanted to see Shuffle Along. In fact, let me quote something that Langston Hughes wrote about Shuffle Along and its importance to the Harlem Renaissance, which we think of as being largely a literary renaissance. Langston Hughes wrote: "Certainly it was the musical review Shuffle Along that gave a scintillating send off to that Negro vogue in Manhattan. Everybody was in the audience, including me. It gave just the proper push, a pre-Charleston kick, to that Negro vogue of the 20s that spread to books, African sculpture, music, and dancing."

You know, after reading that I wanted to hear more about the Harlem Renaissance and its connection to Shuffle Along, so we actually invited an expert on the Harlem Renaissance, David Levering Lewis, to talk about it. He wrote the book When Harlem Was In Vogue, about the renaissance, and he won a Pulitzer for his biography of W.E.B. DuBois. He holds the Martin Luther King chair in history at Rutgers University. He told me that another music event that helped launch the Harlem Renaissance was a victory parade in 1919, after World War I, in which the most famous African American conductor of the day, James Reese Europe, led his 369th U.S. Infantry Hellfighters Band through Manhattan. Noble Sissle had helped him organize this band and had been the drum major overseas. Eubie Blake was a close friend of Europe's. So I asked Lewis about the importance of this victory parade.

Lewis: The march that James Reese Europe led from Washington Square, straight up the spine of Manhattan into Harlem, was the victory parade of the returning 369th Infantry regiment, perhaps the most highly decorated American infantry regiment participating in the hostilities of World War I. The symbolism of that march--with all of New York turned out, white and black, troops covered with confetti; by the time they reached 125th street each soldier had a damsel on his arm-the symbolism of that march was that jazz was marching into the American scene, with a vengeance.