2 February 1922: The Publication of ‘Ulysses’
‘Irish Back Bottom Blues’: Race, Modernity and the City
By Elaine Sisson
James Joyce’s Ulysses was published on his 40th birthday, 2 February 1922. In the Circe episode, it captures Leopold Bloom’s spinning thoughts on the American blackface entertainer Eugene Stratton. Bloom’s crude racial characterisation of minstrels in ‘white duck suits’ and hands that ‘jingle the twingtwang wires’ is woven into his stroll through the modern city. Stratton also appears in The Wandering Rocks episode, when Father John Conmee glimpses a billboard advertising his appearance that evening at the Theatre Royal.
Although published in 1922 Ulysses was set in 1904, so Joyce’s rich details on the social and material culture of city life evoke the Edwardian, rather than the Irish Free State, era. Among other things, Ulysses offers a narrative of Irish urban life and puts the city at the heart of experience in a way that is unusual in Irish literary writing of the early twentieth century. For the most part within Irish literary discourses, narratives of the city, and particularly the urban middle classes, take second place to the importance of rural life. The dominance of the agrarian, posited as the most ‘authentic’ landscape, resulted in its representation (notably by Synge, Gregory and Yeats) in city theatres ‘showcasing the rural in the urban centre’.¹ The tendency in political discourse in presenting rural Ireland (particularly a bucolic version) as a synecdoche for the nation as whole persisted during the early years of the Free State.² As a reading of Ulysses shows, city spaces are complex, with poverty and wealth within a few streets of each other, and theatres, cinemas, parks and shops are open to all people. The importance of the city as a socio-political agent of change, of industry, technology and leisure means that analyses of urban experiences are crucial to understanding how different cultural representations are circulated, seen and understood.
The presence of Eugene Stratton in Ulysses demonstrates the types of popular entertainment available in Dublin in 1904, and by 1922 there was still a demand for American-style minstrel shows. The Irish Times of 16 September 1922 advertised a blackface double act, Chick Harlem and Joan Bronx, at the Tivoli theatre on Burgh Quay. Harlem & Bronx appeared with ‘Rastus and Banks, the coloured American Entertainers’. Chick Harlem became Bud Flanagan, singer of ‘Underneath the Arches’, with the duo Flanagan and Allen. All that summer, blackface acts performed on Dublin stages: G.H. Elliott, a British act described as ‘the chocolate coloured coon’, appeared at the Theatre Royal in June, while the ‘black and white’ comedian act, Dene & Dixon performed the following week.
From the late nineteenth century, American minstrel shows had been popular sources for cheap sheet music. The music was easily sight-read making it suitable for piano lessons, and its vocal range suited the amateur singer. Consequently, songs from the minstrel repertoire were widely known, creating a demand for music hall shows featuring touring American black musicians. As early as 1903 an American troupe, Uncle Sam’s Pickaninny Minstrels and Creole Singers, had played Waterford, Clonmel and Cork, and the renowned minstrel group Mohawk, Moore and Burgess played the Dublin circuit in 1916.³
The popularity of minstrel shows, and the shortage of black entertainers, meant that home-grown British blackface acts appeared on the bill in the larger theatres. For example, Stewart Morton, reviewed as the ‘present day Eugene Stratton’ (Stratton died in 1918), performed Stratton’s popular repertoire of ‘coon songs’ in The Tivoli, Dublin and The Palace, Cork in spring 1922. The show, ‘direct from the London Palladium’, was ‘a pleasing delineation of coon character studies’.⁴
Recording blackface events and song titles is painful, as the terms casually used to describe minstrels and other black entertainers are offensive to us now, but at the time they did not attract censure from lobby groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in the United States.⁵ The presentation of these shows, however, featuring songs about plantation life, skits about foolish farmhands, and extolling lazy afternoons, suggests that the experience of slavery was nothing more harsh than a boarding school. Moreover, the infantilising representation of blackness is evident in how blackness as costume is associated with children and entertainment at this time. In March 1922 young Donald Lewin won a fancy-dress competition dressed as a golliwog at a children’s hospital benefit. That summer, a troupe of children performed ‘a pickanniny dance’ at an Eye and Ear Hospital fundraiser, and the Leggett-Byrne School of Dancing staged a show at the Theatre Royal featuring ‘a coon dance’ alongside minuets and ‘other picturesque examples’.⁶
By the early 1920s the popularity of the pre-war minstrel songs and their sentimental delivery was waning in favour of syncopated dancing, ragtime and jazz orchestral music circulated through radio broadcasts from the London Palladium and the availability of gramophone records. Dances featuring syncopated orchestral music were advertised all over Ireland.⁷ Ragtime and jazz had been popular with select audiences since the late teens, but there was now a marked shift away from British minstrel acts towards authentic African American acts such as the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. In truth, this was more about the growing hegemony of American culture, but it also indicates the emergence of a distinctly modern sound, generated and performed by black bodies and voices. Blackface shows, plantation melodies and soft-shoe shuffles rendered black experience safe and harmless and as an object of comic regard, even fondness, by Irish audiences. By contrast, the syncopated rhythms, energetic vocals and complicated choreography of the new shows was undeniably contemporary. An October 1921 review of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra in Dublin, identifies this difference, noting the quality of the company compared with the usual ‘negro minstrelsy’ and its performers ‘flanked by bones and banjos’.⁸ This particular performance was exceptional, as shortly before, the SS Rowan—a passenger ship taking the troupe from Glasgow to Dublin—sank, drowning 36 people including nine members of the orchestra. British Pathé footage shows the remaining members landing in Dublin.⁹
Some of the difference in taste was generational; younger audiences were keen to learn American dance steps and styles such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Dance schools and exhibition dancers offered instruction on the latest dance crazes. The Black Bottom was ‘a combination of the hula-hula, the Charleston, and the shuffle’.¹⁰ Both dances suited the unrestricted, shorter skirt lengths favoured by women at the time; pleated skirts were perfect for ‘kicking up your heels’ and knee bumps. The Black Bottom dance originated in the Harlem show Dinah, but another version, ‘Irish Black Bottom Blues’, was performed and sung by Louis Armstrong. He sings: ‘all the ladies and the cooies/laid aside their Irish reels’ and laughs ‘now Ireland’s gone Black Bottom crazy/you ought to see them dance’. Harlem’s cultural renaissance, nightlife and popular culture was not unknown to Irish people and there are many connections to be drawn between the Irish cultural revival and the Harlem renaissance.¹¹ Indeed, in a 1922 anthology of negro poetry, James Weldon Johnson acknowledges that black music, dancing and performance are important cultural expressions, but what black literature needed was to find a vernacular: ‘to do…what Synge did for the Irish’.¹² Bridging the urban and rural divide, Synge’s idiomatic rural language resonates through urban theatres in Irish cities and, travelling across the Atlantic, is refracted back via Harlem within articulations of black experience.
British Pathé footage showing the survivors of the SS Rowan
Extracted from Ireland 1922 edited by Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry and published by the Royal Irish Academy with support from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media under the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme. Click here to view more articles in this series, or click the image below to visit the RIA website for more information.
