The "Baby Dolls"

by Kim Marie Vaz

  10. Legend has it that the song “Funky Butt” originated with Buddy Bolden, who encountered a foul smell in one of the dance halls when the ventilation failed and the hall became overheated.

  11. Peter Tamony, “Funky,” American Speech 55 (1980): 210–21.

  12. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan Co., 1968), 21.

  13. Daniel Hardie, Exploring Early Jazz: The Origins and Evolution of the New Orleans Style (San Jose, Calif.: Writers Club Press, 2002), 41.

  14. Oscar Monte Samuels, “New Orleans Makes a Claim,” Variety, July 1, 1911, qtd. in Gushee, “The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” 170.

  15. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 21.

  16. Barker, A Life in Jazz, 77.

  17. Since 2004, critical perspectives on women in jazz have been produced, including Kristin McGee’s Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928–1959 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2009).

  18. Sherrie Tucker, “A Feminist Perspective on New Orleans Jazz Women,” research report, New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, 2004, 2.

  19. Ibid., 11.

  20. Ibid., 17.

  21. Debra Mouton, personal communication, January 7, 2011.

  22. The alarming rate of alcohol and drug abuse among musicians is discussed from a psychological perspective by Charles Winick. Winick listed numerous social and personal elements that led to frequent drug use by jazz musicians: many bands had several users, and there was pressure to use in order to belong; many nightclubs were hospitable to the sale of drugs; and musicians played for audiences that were in various stages of intoxication themselves and were there to have a good time. The arduous travel schedule and conditions made the musicians irritable, and they relied on drugs to “lift” them. In addition, they were able to afford drugs and had the leisure time to use them. The pleasure derived from using drugs was a frequent theme of jazz lyrics, and the lyrics also promoted a lighthearted attitude toward drug use. See Charles Winick, “How High the Moon: Jazz and Drugs,” Antioch Review 21 (1961): 53–68. See Robert McKinney’s interviews with “Baby Doll” and Beatrice Hill for his assessment of the toll drug use took on their lives.

  23. Saxon et al., Gumbo Ya-Ya, 15

  24. Sam Bonart was born in New Orleans on December 25, 1869, to immigrant parents, Hertz Bonart, from Krakow, Austria, and Bertha Cohan, from Scherwerin, Germany. S. B. Goodkind, Eminent Jews of America: A collection of biographical sketches of Jews who have distinguished themselves in commercial, professional and religious endeavors (Toledo, Ohio: American Hebrew Biographical Co., 1918), 46.

  25. Arthé A. Anthony, “‘Lost Boundaries’: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans,” Louisiana History 36 (1995): 291–312.

  26. Ibid., 298.

  27. Barker, A Life in Jazz, 69–70.

  28. Daniel L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

  29. LaKisha Michelle Simmons, “Black Girls Coming of Age: Sexuality and Segregation in New Orleans, 1930–1954,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2009. Also see Christina Simmons, “African Americans and Sexual Victorianism in the Social Hygiene Movement, 1910–1940,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1993): 51–75.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Recent work includes Lee Sartain, Invisible Activists: Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). See also Doris Dorcas Carter, “Refusing to Relinquish the Struggle: The Social Role of the Black Woman in Louisiana History,” in Louisiana’s Black Heritage, ed. R. Macdonald, J. Kemp, and E. Haas (New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1979), 163–89; Arthé A. Anthony, The Negro Creole Community in New Orleans, 1880–1920: An Oral History (Berkeley: University of California, 1978); and Simmons, “Black Girls Coming of Age.” Each author describes and analyzes Black women’s lives in segregated New Orleans.

  32. The double standard that values male productivity and maleness per se is captured by LaKisha Simmons. Simmons notes that Charles Guerand, the White patrolman who killed fourteen-year-old Hattie McCray because she would not allow him to rape her and who was convicted and sentenced to death, ultimately was able to avoid the death penalty by first claiming he was insane, then crossing over to sanity to stand for another trail and ultimately gain his freedom. Simmons writes that the ease with which Guerand, as a White man, was “able to cross the boundaries of insanity and sanity speaks to the way in which white men were easily brought back into the framework of New Orleans citizenship” (“Black Girls Coming of Age,” 490).

  33. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the “politics of respectability” was central to Black life and political thinking. According to LaKisha Simmons, those who embraced this view challenged racist views and policies, especially regarding how Black women were perceived and treated in White America. Blacks emphasized self-respect and their rights as citizens. But even Black women who adhered to the dictates of respectability could be raped with impunity by White men. Through the politics of respectability, Black women challenged their characterization as immoral, childlike, and unworthy of respect or protection (“Black Girls Coming of Age,” 485).

  34. Lewis A. Erenberg, “Everybody’s Doin’ It: The Pre–World War I Dance Craze, the Castles, and the Modern American Girl,” Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 155–70; Julie Malnig, “Athena Meets Venus: Visions of Women in Social Dance in the Teens and Early 1920s,” Dance Research Journal 31 (1999): 34–62.

  35. Barbara S. Glass, African American Dance: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2007), 96.

  36. Rachel Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2004), 88.

  37. Frederic Ramsey, qtd. in Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 140.

  38. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 18.

  39. S. Smith, “Muntu Troupe: A Jazzy, Riotous Extravaganza,” Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1998, articles.chicagotribune.com/1998–04–11/news/9804110120_1_mardi-gras-dances-fat (accessed June 12, 2011).

  40. Some Negro Customs, Folder 33, Federal Writers’ Project, Cammie G. Henry Research Center, Watson Library, Northwestern State University of Louisiana.

  41. Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1988), 48.

  42. Ibid., 49.

  43. Andrew Justin, “The Wild Tremé Mardi Gras Indians.” http://wildtreme.com/The_History.html (accessed August 25, 2012).

  44. Interview with Andrew Justin, January 31, 2012.

  45. Joseph Lee, “Play as an Antidote to Civilization,” Playground 5 (1911): 125.

  46. People in New Orleans are masters of the moniker. Danny Barker explained to his interviewer that older people would give a baby a nickname based on an essential but humorous characteristic of that child, and it would stick.

  47. Erenberg, “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” 165.

  3. “OH YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL”

  1. “Williams’s song ‘You’re Some Pretty Doll’ (1917) had already been performed by the Ziegfeld Follies, sold to Shapiro and Bernstein for publication, and recorded for Columbia by Samuel Ashe,” according to Anne Key Simpson in “Those Everlasting Blues: The Best of Clarence Williams,” Louisiana History 40 (Spring 1999): 186.

  2. Jelly Roll Morton, A Fragment of an Autobiography, 1944, www.doctorjazz.co.uk/fragment.html (accessed July 18, 2010).

  3. Philip W. Scher, “Copyright Heritage: Preservation, Carnival, and the State in Trinidad,” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (2002): 453–84.

  4. Jamette refers to a working-class woman who masked at Carnival and eschewed proper Victorian decorum. These women dressed in provocative costumes, confronted White and Black men, demanded mone
y, fought, sang, and drank as far back as the nineteenth century in Trinidad’s carnivals. Dylan Kerrigan, “Creatures of the Mas,” Caribbean Beat 71 (January– February 2005): www.meppublishers.com/online/caribbean-beat/archive/index.php?id=cb711-38&print=1 (accessed September 24, 2011).

  5. Samantha A. Noel, “De Jamette in We: Redefining Performance in Contemporary Trinidad Carnival,” Small Axe 14 (2010): 60–78.

  6. Qtd. in Kerrigan, “Creatures of the Mas.”

  7. Ragan Wicker, “Nineteenth-Century New Orleans and a Carnival of Women,” M.A. thesis, University of Florida, 2006.

  8. Robin Roberts, “New Orleans Mardi Gras and Gender in Three Krewes: Rex, The Truck Parades, and Muses,” Western Folklore 65 (2006): 303–28.

  9. Tableau designates the theme of a float or a theme or several themes of the ball.

  10. Roberts, “New Orleans Mardi Gras and Gender in Three Krewes.”

  11. Robert McKinney, “Queen Catherine Riley Talks, at Last!” FWP Folder (n.d.): 582. Leopold LeBlanc was king.

  12. The official location of City Hall.

  13. Robert McKinney and Hazel Breaux Odette Delillie (Negro), FWP Folder 56 (February 13, 1939). Allen James was king.

  14. Robert Tallant, “Negroes in the Carnival,” FWP Folder 434 (n.d.). Emanuel Bernard was king. Odette offered that the king was respectful to her and never approached her in an untoward manner. This is in distinction to Catherine Riley and Ceola Carter, through their admission, and the rumor mill seemed to indicate an intimate connection to the Zulu club officials.

  15. Belinda Edmondson, “Public Spectacles: Caribbean Women and the Politics of Public Performance,” Small Axe 7 (2003): 1–16.

  16. Sarah Carpenter, “Women and Carnival Masking,” Records of Early English Drama Newsletter 21 (1996): 9–16.

  17. Ken Plummer, “The Sexual Spectacle: Making a Public Culture of Sexual Problems,” in Handbook of Social Problems: A Comparative International Perspective, ed. George Ritzer (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2004), 521–41. The public education function of Carnival is not lost on Shalini Puri, who writes that “it is further possible that carnival trains the public in a politics of irony in which radical knowledge may be yoked to conservative action” (“Beyond Resistance: Notes toward a New Caribbean Cultural Studies,” Small Axe 7 [2003]: 27).

  18. Plummer, “The Sexual Spectacle,” 530.

  19. Pamela R. Franco, “‘Dressing Up and Looking Good’: Afro-Creole Female Maskers in Trinidad Carnival,” African Arts 31 (1998): 62–67, 91, 95–96.

  20. Edmondson, “Public Spectacles,” 5.

  21. Pamela R. Franco, “The ‘Unruly Woman’ in Nineteenth-Century Trinidad Carnival,” Small Axe 7 (2000): 60–77.

  22. Franco, “‘Dressing Up and Looking Good,’” 76.

  23. Noel, “De Jamette in We,” 63.

  24. Ibid., 61.

  25. Edmondson, “Public Spectacles,” 3.

  26. Carpenter, “Women and Carnival Masking.”

  27. Franco, “‘Dressing Up and Looking Good,’” 63.

  28. Trinna S. Frever, “‘Oh! You Beautiful Doll!’: Icon, Image, and Culture in Works by Alvarez, Cisneros, and Morrison,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 28 (2009): 122.

  29. Ibid., 123.

  30. Ibid., 124.

  31. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (1950; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 49.

  32. Sidney Bechet (May 14, 1897–May 14, 1959) was born in the early years of Storyville and lived through the heyday of the Mardi Gras Baby Dolls. Sidney Bechet and Rudi Blesh, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 82.

  33. Gerilyn G. Tandberg, “Sinning for Silk: Dress-for-Success Fashions of the New Orleans Storyville Prostitute,” Women’s Studies International Forum 13 (1990): 229–48. “An example of it may be seen in the Figure 6 illustration of an 1898 advertisement for a Mardi Gras ball found in the Blue Book (1898). Figure 7 records Ernest Bellocq’s photograph of a prostitute wearing one.”

  34. Ibid., 237.

  35. Ibid., 242.

  36. Ibid., 240.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Long, The Great Southern Babylon.

  39. Robert McKinney, “A Real Baby Doll Speaks Her Mind,” FWP Folder 423 (February 9, 1940).

  40. Interview with Mary Davis at the Suzy Q Barroom at South Rampart and Thalia streets, December 23, 1938.

  41. McKinney, “A Real Baby Doll Speaks Her Mind.”

  42. See Monique Guillory, “Under One Roof: Sins and Sanctity of the New Quadroon Balls,” in Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 65–92.

  43. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18.

  44. One example is Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974).

  45. Personal communication, April 14, 2011.

  46. Ibid., March 26, 2011.

  47. U.S. Census 1920, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, New Orleans, 3rd Ward, SD1 ED34, Sheet 14B, line 72, at 539 Franklin Street.

  48. U.S. Census 1910, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, New Orleans, 3rd Ward, SD1 ED31, Sheet 22B, line 57, at 524 Franklin Street.

  49. U.S. Census 1930, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, New Orleans, 3rd Ward, SD11 ED36–42, Sheet 14B, line 66, at 539 Loyola Avenue (was Franklin in the 1920 census).

  50. U.S. Census 1930, Louisiana, Orleans Parish, New Orleans, 3rd Ward, SD11 ED36–42, Sheet 11A, line 1, at 454 S. Liberty Street.

  51. Barker, interview.

  52. Barbara Smith Corrales, “Prurience, Prostitution, and Progressive Improvements: The Crowley Connection, 1909–1918,” Louisiana History 45 (2004): 37–70.

  53. “Landau, Emily. (2011, May 8). Storyville.” Retrieved May 8, 2011, from KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana: www.www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=739

  54. L’Hote v. City of New Orleans, 177 U.S. 587 (1900).

  55. City of New Orleans v. Willie V. Piazza v., No. 22,624, 1917. See also Long, The Great Southern Babylon.

  56. Shirley J. Carlson, “Black Ideals of Womanhood in the Late Victorian Era,” Journal of Negro History 77 (1992): 61–73.

  57. Elizabeth J. Stigler makes the case for gender outlaws or transwomen who participated in roller derby in “Trans on the Track: Policing of Gender in the All-Women Space of Flat Track Roller Derby” (presentation, Florida Consortium for Women’s and Gender Studies, Boca Raton, April 1–2, 2011).

  58. Ibid.

  59. Jeff Nall, “Reproduction of the Patriarchal Feminine Ideal (Emphasized Femininity) in Cultural Representations of Childbirth” (presentation, Florida Consortium for Women’s and Gender Studies, Boca Raton, April 1–2, 2011).

  60. Barker, interview.

  61. Sterling Brown, “Negro Folk Expression: Spirituals, Seculars, Ballads, and Work Songs,” Phylon 14 (1953): 45–61.

  62. Berry, “African Cultural Memory in New Orleans Music,” 8.

  63. VanSpanckeren, “The Mardi Gras Indian Song Cycle,” 41–48.

  64. Berry, The Spirit of Black Hawk, 8.

  65. The middle passage was the longest part of the trip made by slave ships, the part of the Atlantic Ocean between the west coast of Africa and the West Indies. Irene Diggs, “Singing and Dancing in Afro Cuba,” The Crisis 58 (Dec. 1951): 663.

  66. Paula J. Gidding, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Harper, 2001).

  67. Diggs, “Singing and Dancing in Afro Cuba,” 161.

  68. Leonard V. Huber, Mardi Gras: A Pictorial History of Carnival in New Orleans (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1976), 69.

  69. Ronnie W. Clayton, “The Federal Writers’ Project for Blacks in Louisiana,” Louisiana History 19 (1978): 327–35.

  70. Ibid., 330. “
Blacks, in general, were more expressive to the Dillard writers than they were to the white writers of the Louisiana Writers’ Project,” a conclusion Clayton derived from his interview with Caroline Durieux, January 27, 1974.

  71. Robert McKinney, “Captain Jackson Keeps the Baby Dolls from Strutting their Stuff: Indians Come Out,” FWP Folder 423 (March 19, 1940): 3.

  72. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), xii.

  73. Ibid., xxi.

  74. Ibid., xxii.

  75. McKinney, FWP Folder 423.

  76. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1978), 300.

  77. Beatrice Hill, told to Robert McKinney, March 11, 12, 14, 1940.

  78. The song “When the Saints Go Marching In” is critiqued by Ralph Slovenko as being misrepresented when characterized as religious only. Slovenko’s experience as a native New Orleanian led him to conclude that the song, when sung in the brothels, pokes fun at the “upstanding, business, and family men who frequented the District’s brothels” (“When the Saints Go Marching In,” Journal of Psychiatry and Law 28 [2000]: 553–64).

  79. Count Basie arranged and performed a version of “Momma Don’t Wear No Drawers.” The Million Dollar Baby Dolls added much profanity to the lyrics.

  80. Kim Marie Vaz, “Teacher Helps Students Get a Head Start,” New Orleans Times Picayune, July 13, 1989, www.canerivercolony.com/CreoleHistory/CreoleHistory.htm#martinez (accessed October 15, 2011).

  81. Martinez has produced other films exploring the African American experience in New Orleans: Too White to Be Black and Too Black to Be White: The New Orleans Creoles and Wings of Wood: The Art of Creole Wood Carvers of New Orleans.

  82. Martinez could not recall the spelling of this last name.

  83. Johnny Heckman’s shoe store near the St. Bernard market on the corner going toward LaHarpe Street sold a lot of Carnival materials, including trim and satin, but they were known for shoes, the black patent-leather ones with the strap across.