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The recent
Vaudeville Nation exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts displayed a program for a revue called" The Bourbons Got the Blues" in which Duke Ellington participated. This was a revue staged by the Negro Cultural Committee as a benefit for the National Negro Congress on May 8, 1938. The National Negro Congress - according to the
Schomburg Center - was created in 1935:
In May 1935 a conference on the economic status of the Negro was held at Howard University in Washington, D.C., out of which emerged a major civil rights coalition that was active in the late 1930s and 1940s. The National Negro Congress—whose sponsors included Ralph J. Bunche and Alain Locke of Howard University, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, James Ford of the Communist Party, John P. Davis of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, Lester Granger and Elmer Carter of the Urban League, and Charles Houston of the NAACP—was truly significant in two respects.
It represented one of the first sincere efforts of the 20th century to bring together under one umbrella black secular leaders, preachers, labor organizers, workers, businessmen, radicals, and professional politicians, with the assumption that the common denominator of race was enough to weld together such divergent segments of black society. It also signalled the Communist Party’s movement into the mainstream of black protest activity. In particular, the evolution of the National Negro Congress dramatized the growing convergence of outlook between Communists and activist black intellectuals that had taken shape in the protests of the early Depression years and reached full fruition during the years of the Popular Front.
According to
Harvey Klehr, the goals of the Congress were "not very radical." They included support for higher wages, unemployment compensation, aid to Ethiopia and assistance to black sharecroppers. The Congress also supported anti-lynching legislation.
The performance took place at the Mecca Auditorium -now City Center. The first half of the program featured sections titled "Uncle Tom is Dead" and "From the Life of
Denmark Vesey". The revue was written and staged by Carlton Moss. It also included a reading of Frederick Douglass's address of July 4, 1852. This is the address that concludes:
"What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all otherdays of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty towhich he is the constant victim. To him yourcelebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholylicense; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock."
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Ellington wrote a composition for the revue -"There'll Come a Day". It was performed by Ellington on the piano with the
Juanita Hall choir. I have not been able to find any record that Ellington recorded this piece.
The second half of the revue was a ballet titled"Filibuster - a Satiric Ballet". The music was composed by Paul Denniker with choreography by
Anna Sokolow. I have to confess I was unfamiliar with both these names. Sokolow was a radical choreographer who was responsible for a number of political dance pieces including
Anti-War Trilogy. She also did choregraphy for the
Federal Theater Project's
Sing for Your Supper and Bernstein's
Candide.
The ballet also featured readings of speeches by Senators Ellender and Bilbo who filibustered anti-lynching legislation in the US Senate in January 1938.
Theodore Bilbo was a particularly vicious racist who served as governor and later senator from Mississippi. He introduced legislation to deport black Americans to Liberia and authored a book entitled "Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization."
Other notable black actors including
Rex Ingram and Canada Lee also took part in the "Bourbons" revue. Ingram got his start in a Tarzan movie made in 1918. He later appeared in "Cabin in the Sky" both on Broadway and on film. However, his reputation was tarnished by his conviction in the late 1940s for a violation of the Mann Act.
Canada Lee was a fascinating figure who was at various times in his career a jockey, a prizefighter, an actor and a civil rights pioneer. In her
biography of Lee, Mona Smith writes that "Bourbons" was the "actor's first brush with overt political activism." As Smith notes
The show's mix of monologues, music, and dance proved, according to the New Masses that "Uncle Tom is dead, that the Negro remembers his heroes, working-class heroes, that the Negro is organizing for his freedom."I had not thought of Ellington as a particularly political person. But in his
biography of Ellington, A.H. Lawrence writes that the FBI began surveillance of Ellington in 1938 and regarded him as a Communist sympathizer. I imagine
Bourbons Got the Blues played a role in that. What a trip it must have been to see that revue!!
