Blackbirds

More on the Nicholas Brothers. The recently released DVD of Hallelujah contains the short "Pie, Pie Blackbird" featuring the Nicholas Brothers and Nina Mae McKinney. McKinney was the Halle Berry of her day. According to the linked website (which is wonderful and well worth exploring) she was known as the Black Garbo. Donald Bogle in Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams notes she was also referred to as a "dusky Clara Bow."

Both McKinney and Eubie Blake, whose band appears in the short, have "Blackbird" antecedents. Blake, together with Noble Sissle, created the show "Shuffle Along" which opened on Broadway in 1921. This was a pioneering all-black Broadway show. According to the linked website:

Shuffle Along was so original and successful that it inspired the creation of countless other African-American musicals to showcase African-American dancing. In 1923, Miller and Lyle starred in Runnin' Wild, which introduced the Charleston to the stage and turned it into a national and international fad. In Sissle and Blake's 1924 production of The Chocolate Dandies, which made a star of Josephine Baker, the chorus line performed tap and danced closely together with a swinging rhythm.

Gerald Bordman praises Blake's "foot-stomping score" and says the show's "rhythms provoked an orgy of giddy dancing that had audiences shouting for more tap routines, soft shoes, buck and wing, and precision numbers."

The score included such hits as "I'm Just Wild About Harry", "Love Will Find a Way" and "Bandana Days". It also launched several great black performers on their stage careers - including Josephine Baker and Florence Mills. Nonetheless as this site notes, the show had its limitations:

Judged by contemporary standards, much of Shuffle Along would seem offensive. The African American actors darkened their skin with blackface make-up, and most of the comedy relied on old minstrel show stereotypes. Each of the leading male characters was out to swindle the other, and the show closed with one character explaining that the lighter the skin, the more desirable a Negro woman was.

The show also inspired the promoter Lew Leslie to launch a series of revues at the Plantation Club which featured performers including Mills, Baker and Paul Robeson. Eventually Leslie launched a series of "Blackbird" revues on Broadway which reached their pinnacle in "Blackbirds of 1928" which opened on May 9, 1928.

"Blackbirds" followed another black show onto the 1928 Broadway stage - "Keep Shufflin'". Time's review of Keep Shufflin is redolent of the pervasive racism of the age:

Keep Shufflin' is for those who like capering, singing, cuckoo coons.

There are also more strenuous Bedlamites from Harlem who break into loud melodious ululations; there is a skilful and frantically energetic black and blues orchestra and marty lively tappers and prancers of whom one, name unspecified, brandishes her mahogany limbs with incredibly vicious abandon.

By the way, Eubie Blake was no longer with the franchise. He had been replaced by Fats Waller. I'll just note that Blake and Waller are now lionized as among our greatest composers and musicians. The guy who wrote that Time review has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Blackbirds was, unlike "Keep Shufflin'", an "all-white creation for an all-black cast" as Gerald Bordman put it. The music and lyrics were by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields (who did the lyrics for several numbers in Roberta and other Astaire films). The show's numbers included "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", "Diga, Diga Do" and the crowd favorite - "Doin' the New Low Down". This last was performed by Bill Robinson in his Broadway debut.

According to Jim Haskins in his book Mr. Bojangles

the first-act finale [of Blackbirds], a tribute to the DuBose Heyward novel Porgy, featured a huge black screen on which were reflected the magnified shadows of the performers. The first production of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess several years later featured a similar stage effect, though it is not known whether director Rouben Mamoulian consciously copied the Blackbirds segment.

But the best was yet to come, as the second act featured Bill Robinson who, according to Haskins, "from the moment he came on the stage seemed to electrify it." That was certainly the view of Time which rhapsodized:

the finest tap dancer in the world is Bill Robinson, long a spot of interest on Keith's tours. His feet are as quick as a snare drummer's hands; in Blackbirds he has a double flight of five stairs which, when he trots up and down it, produces a rapid tuneless and delicious music. Bill Robinson makes the show; if he were on the stage more of the time he would make the show a lot better.

Keith, by the way, was a vaudeville touring circuit founded by Benjamin Franklin Keith. It later became the "K" in RKO.

The New Yorker appeared to agree with Time that Robinson's dancing was the best thing in the show - albeit in a less enthusiastic way. Of "Blackbirds", they said: "Darky revue. For tap-dancing fans only."

Well, in fairness, Blackbirds did have solid competition in the 1928 theater season. Also showing was "Funny Face" with Fred and Adele Astaire, "Showboat" with Paul Robeson and others, "A Connecticut Yankee" with words and music by Rodgers and Hart, "Rosalie" - a Ziegfeld production - and the aforementioned "Keep Shufflin'".

Apparently King Vidor attended "Blackbirds" and spotted Nina Mae McKinney in the chorus line. That led to her casting in Hallelujah. And eight years after "Blackbirds of 1928", the Nicholas Brothers would star with Bill Robinson in "Big Broadcast of 1936" and then travel to London to star in a Lew Leslie production entitled "Blackbirds of 1936." And so, we're back to "Pie, Pie Blackbird".