The "Baby Dolls"

by Kim Marie Vaz

  Jazz music observers of the time also noted this preference for a few favorite blues and tunes. Quoting a 1911 writer, Gushee highlighted the heart of jazz dance activity to be at Customhouse Street (now Iberville Street) and Franklin Street in the District. The musicians were Black and “often repeated the same selection, but never played it the same way twice.”14 The dances accompanying the music, the writer reported, were a “siege” of erotic ones: “the Grizzly Bear,” “Turkey Trot,” “Texas Tommy,” and “Todolo.”

  Even as New Orleans’s residents left the South to head for points north and west in search of better-paying jobs and to escape the stranglehold of Jim Crow segregation, they continued to make demands on the jazz musicians who entertained them in these new haunts. One type of song that was required was a slow tune to allow dancers to perform the slow drag. Coot Grant described this popular dance most famously: “couples hold on to each other and just grind back and forth in one spot all night.”15

  Danny Barker described a night he performed in Chicago at Warwick Hall, a place known as a gathering spot for Black people from New Orleans, including Louis Armstrong. There they would come together, bring the cuisine of their original region, mingle with the “fast-living” people, and shed work identities. In those new milieus, they could express their submerged identities. Barker felt compelled to play a steady rhythm of swing for the dancers at Warwick Hall, explaining, “People go to a club. If you play the tempo too fast, they gonna walk off the floor, because they didn’t come here for no marathon or no Olympics.”16

  By 1932, jazz was firmly established as dance music. The power of the dancers to determine the music can be seen in Barker’s recollection of New Orleans native King Oliver’s jazz band during their first performance at the Savoy in Harlem, the stronghold of Lindy-hoppers: “They didn’t know the tempos of the Savoy, which was the Lindy-hoppers place. They would dance. If you didn’t play their tempos, they just look at you. That’s where Chick Webb and King Oliver had this battle.… They had the truck go around, like I tell in my book. The truck used to go around playing the music, advertising the Savoy.… First set, King Oliver played. The second set, nobody danced. They looked. They didn’t say nothing. A little jive applause. Then Chick Webb come in, and announce Chick Webb. Big applause. Chick went on and went through that tempo.… Start that Lindyhop. That was them people’s rhythm.”

  “NEW ORLEANS JAZZ WOMEN”

  Sherrie Tucker has provided one of the most comprehensive assessments of women’s participation in New Orleans jazz. Tucker identified “New Orleans jazz women” as “women who contributed to New Orleans jazz history whether or not they lived in New Orleans.” They included musicians and others, “such as garden party entrepreneur Betsy Cole, religious figures such as Mother Catherine Seales, and jazz fans, jazz club members and revivalists such as Myra Menville.” She also included “educators, church musicians, musicians who worked with jazz musicians, or who were influenced by jazz.”

  By this time African American vernacular dance in New Orleans had consolidated into a distinguished style infused by centuries of African dance, religious dances, burlesque dances, second-line dances, jazz dances, and other social dances such as the cakewalk and animal dances. When District-related Baby Dolls paraded on Carnival, they would walk “raddy,” stopping periodically to “shake dance.”

  If female musicians were left out of the histories of jazz, women who contributed to the music by their dancing were likewise ignored by those writing the historical narrative.17 Tucker noted that “women participated on every instrument, in every genre, in every period of jazz history. We also know that they often participated differently, or in different areas, than ordinarily considered historically important, such as in family bands, all-woman bands, or as dancers or teachers, and that those areas typically became minimized in jazz histories.”18 Tucker offered a further explanation that “often times, as in other areas of social life, women did not have access to roles that historians are accustomed to using in the criterion for historical importance.” Tucker’s effort is to broaden the scope of jazz activity beyond its traditional bounds, to find “ways to re-frame jazz history so that gender and women are visible.”19 “The study of women in New Orleans jazz history makes it possible not only to locate women in New Orleans jazz as we know it, but to increase our knowledge of both women and men in entire areas of jazz history that have been historically devalued. These include church musicians, vocalists, music education, theatrical performance, dancers and ‘all-girl’ bands.”20

  One of the best-known jazz dancers was Neliska “Baby” Briscoe. Born in the Tremé, Briscoe started her career as a young child in a local gambling house and cabaret called the Alley on Claiborne and St. Bernard avenues. In 1925, when Neliska was eleven, she sang and entertained with a jazz band consisting of Maurice Dumond, “Big Eye” Louis Nelson, George Henderson, and Odette Davis. According to Debra Mouton, Neliska’s daughter, her mother did not seem to have any known connection to any of the Baby Doll groups.21 Yet Neliska performed regularly at the Entertainer, a club on Franklin Avenue near Customhouse/Iberville that was a frequent haunt of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls. She also performed with Kid Rena and His Hot Eight band for dances at the Astoria. Neliska acquired the nickname “Baby” from her time as a child entertainer, and not in relationship to the masking tradition; nevertheless, this dancer and the Million Dollar Baby Dolls inhabited the same landscape.

  “WALKING RADDY”

  Classically trained musicians who played established marches and cultured tunes disapproved of the changes to the music, calling this new vernacular “ratty” or “honky-tonk.” The slang word “ratty” (also spelled “raddy” in the scholarly literature on jazz and in tourist accounts) came to define a style of music, a kind of “strutting walk,” as well as the type of people who enjoyed it. Danny Barker noted that the distinction between “raddy” and “ratty” was a major one in that “ratty” referred to criminal and illegal behavior,22 whereas “raddy” referred to “not giving a damn” about what others thought about one’s behavior, art, and way of life.

  When they became the Million Dollar Baby Dolls, Beatrice Hill recalled that, at Carnival, “we went to the Sam Bonart playground on Poydras Street and bucked each other to see who had the most money.”23 Bonart attended public schools and would go on to establish a successful store at the corner of South Rampart and Poydras streets. Before they were Baby Dolls, Beatrice Hill led a revolt against another set of similarly placed women who were rivals because of their politics of turf and caste warfare. This revolt involved taking over one of the dances being sponsored by the rival group. Wearing sharp-looking clothes was part of the strategy. Beatrice recalled Sam Bonart wondering aloud why all those African Americans were coming in his store and buying up all the evening clothes. Sam avidly engaged in civic participation by serving as the president of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, as trustee of the Jewish Federation of Charities, treasurer of the Orthodox Congregation Beth Israel, and as a member of the Playground Commission. The latter contribution would bring him lasting recognition in New Orleans because he provided a space for play that Joseph Lee, founder of the playground movement, felt was critical for adults to rejuvenate themselves.24

  THE “NEW WOMAN” AND THE OLD POVERTY

  The vitality of such women as Beatrice Hill was constructed against a backdrop of severe race, gender, and class oppression, denying their recognition on a par with the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the Black Indians of New Orleans, and the Skull and Bones Gang. Understanding the sociopolitical world of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls is key to understanding them as the courageous and trailblazing women that they were. Black Creole women who were born between 1885 and 1905 would have to contend, for their entire lives, with the consequences of racial repression and legal segregation. It would affect every aspect of their lives. Their restricted access to education, healthcare, and employment would determine their level of literacy and long
evity as well as their ability to accumulate wealth. It was not unusual for Black girls to end their education in third grade in order to enter the workforce, formally or informally. Occupations open to Black women were limited to sewing, laundering, being a domestic servant in a White household, and to lesser degrees factory work and teaching. For example, according to Arthé Anthony, for the first quarter of the twentieth century White-owned and -operated cigar companies maintained “whites only” employment policies, or allowed unsatisfactory segregated working conditions for their African American employees.25 The circumstances surrounding Black people’s working conditions led Eugenia Lacarra, a Black Creole born at the turn of the century, to wonder: “I stop to think sometimes, and I wonder how the poor colored people got along. You couldn’t work in the department stores, the men couldn’t drive a bus, you couldn’t work for the telephone company, you couldn’t work for the Public Service, so if you didn’t do menial labor, or housework, or learn to be a cigar maker, or you weren’t lucky enough to get an education to teach, well, you were in very bad luck because then these people had nothing to do. You see, they didn’t give the poor colored people jobs.”26

  The depth of this poverty becomes poignantly alive through childhood recollections of Danny Barker. As a child, Barker visited his father in the District. His father lived with a woman, Celie, who owned a boardinghouse. The abysmal living conditions included a dump where defective and condemned imports were thrown away. The residents of Back o’ Town would search among the goods for what was salvageable.27

  Black women also were victimized by sexual abuse. This problem was pervasive in the South and was widely known but seldom discussed. Both Black men and women suffered sexual stigmatization, with women being defined as “sexually loose” while men were depicted as “rapists.” This was the period in which Ida Wells led her “crusade for justice,” exposing the practice of lynching Black people on false charges of sexual aggression. So widespread was the problem of Black women’s sexual victimization that recent research by historian Danielle McGuire places it squarely in the center of the civil rights movement,28 inciting the Montgomery Improvement Association’s famous bus boycott.

  White men’s sexual aggression across the color line was felt by Black women in New Orleans. For example, as a teenager, Amelda Betz, a black New Orleanian, worked as a nanny for a white family with two small children: the Kanton family. Her parents, however, did not want her to work for the Kantons because, as Betz explained in an interview, “at that time my daddy and momma knew about Mr. Kanton’s record.”29 When the interviewer asked what type of record, Betz replied, “Well, he used to love colored girls, you see. [His wife] didn’t know, but all the colored people knew.”30

  The Million Dollar Baby Dolls were proud of their independence and made no excuses for their life choices. They created an art form by drawing on the tools of their culture, united in entrepreneurial sisterhood, and turned the street into their platform. Nevertheless, minimization of New Orleans Black women’s expressive culture continues, both in mainstream society and in academia.31 If this is true for the most visible and “respectable” of Black women such as business owner Gertrude Geddis Willis, singer Mahalia Jackson, and educators Henriette Delille, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson, and Frances Joseph-Gaudet, just to name a few, the invisibility of the creative entrepreneurship, collectivist activities, and contribution to the history of Mardi Gras of Beatrice Hill, Leola Tate, and Althea Brown is virtually guaranteed. If the drug and alcohol abuse of Black male jazz musicians is considered a normalized condition of their work and creative environment and the study of all aspects of their creativity is vigorously undertaken,32 why is no such scholarly equity extended to women who engaged in a profession that was legal, even if scorned, and who took the nothing they were given and produced a legacy that was imitated by the “respectable” classes of Black women and men for decades to come?

  AFRICAN AMERICAN DANCE

  To be a woman who “danced the jazz” in the age of Jim Crow, as a Black woman in New Orleans, was to be part of a subversive underground. Jazz was considered outsider music, and the Million Dollar Baby Dolls were outsiders to middle-class Black “respectable”33 culture and to all of White society. The Baby Dolls embraced their outsider identities and combined them with the freedoms being assumed by the New Woman of the 1920s. The period between 1890 and 1920 saw a revolution in social and political norms governing women in the United States. Women had agitated and subsequently were successful in winning the vote. They were making forays into formerly male-dominated spaces from the professions to the saloons. Dance became a major tool by which women of all social classes defined and expressed their changing relationship to their autonomy and sexuality.34

  Early African American Dancing in New Orleans

  African and Afro-Caribbean dancing took place in Congo Square. The dancers were reported to attach animal skins to their clothing, which may be evidence that they performed African masquerade dancing. They performed the bamboula, a serious dance involving bowing, curtseying, and eventually involving all body parts as the tempo of the drum increased. Onlookers, especially women, would sing a chorus, clap, and chant. Other dances included the Afro-Caribbean calenda and the chica. African influences on the dancers were without question. Barbara Glass has noted that “improvisatory call and response singing, dance moves signaled by the drum, circle and line formations, the presence of the community to support and encourage the dancers, percussion provided by both the drums and by handclapping, and movement expressive of sexuality or fertility” were always present.35

  Jazz Age Dancing

  The Jazz Age was about dancing, and dance music ensured sales of records and sheet music. Composers and lyricists found themselves under pressure from music publishers to make sure their music was danceable. There were two popular tempos: fast and slow. The fast-tempo music was accompanied by steps like the stomp that emerged from the New Orleans brass-band marching tradition. Its use most famously was for jazz funerals. Brass bands played dirges and hymns on the way to the cemetery. On the way back from the cemetery, when the body had been “cut loose,” the mourners danced to up-tempo religious hymns and moved on to “hot,” raucous music. In the dance halls, New Orleanians were performing dances with names like “the shag,” “hop,” “jump,” “grind,” “twist,” “belly rub,” “strut,” “wiggle,” “Ball and the Jack,” the “Black Bottom” and many others that had no names. Mostly, these were called shake dances.

  Nude Dancing

  Two types of dances are of note for their popularity in the District’s brothels, dance halls, and saloons. One is the “naked dance,” and the other is the “ham-kick.” In the early days of the striptease, women were undressed by others. In a nod to Victorian standards, the woman in the act was “innocent” in that she did not engage brazenly in displaying herself. Her nudity was caused by others.36 The Million Dollar Baby Dolls would strip the clothes off one of the dancers, and she would be nude on stage. New Orleans native Tony Jackson, an accomplished composer and pianist, wrote a tune, “The Naked Dance,” that was played when women of the District disrobed. The ham-kick was a form of competition in which a proprietor would hang a ham from a rafter and women who wore no underwear would kick at it in a mock attempt to knock it down. The woman who kicked the highest won the ham. The Million Dollar Baby Dolls were known for their high kicks.

  Second-line Dancing

  Danny Barker credits Bou-Boul Fortune (pronounced For-tu-nay), a rival of jazz legend Buddy Bolden, as the first bandleader to label the band as the “first line” and the band’s supporters as the “second line.” The second line consists of community members who dance to the music the band plays as it marches or has a procession or parade down neighborhood streets. Frederic Ramsey described the relationship between dance and the Black brass band as being centrally focused on dance from its inception.

  From the beginning, the music of Negro Brass bands both in New Orleans and Al
abama seems to have been related to dancing. This alone would not distinguish them from the earliest white bands known in Alabama or elsewhere; but it is unlikely that white audiences indulged in the sort of loose-hipped dancing which accompanies both the New Orleans or Alabama bands’ music. One can see the sort of dancing flowing along in the Second Line that follows a funeral band in New Orleans today.… In New Orleans, the bands have played traditionally, for festive occasions, and for funerals.… The rhythm set up by these bands is not a tight, regular march step; it is more of a flowing, anticipatory emphasis and counteremphasis, ideally suited to [an improvised] style of dance.37

  The second line and its music are sometimes interpreted as an expression of resistance to oppression when poor people take over public streets in processions. The second line is also valued for the spiritual communion it engenders among family and friends. In 1959, Marshall and Jean Stearns witnessed a second-line parade in the heart of the city and described how the dance conveyed the spirit of the music: “It was not just the music—we heard the same or better on recordings—the dancing, a fascinating variety of walks, shuffles, grinds, struts, prances, and kicks, improvised, by the marchers—official and unofficial—as the residents rushed out of their houses to join the parade. The dancing gave the music a new dimension of joy and vitality.”38