Staging Vaudeville for a Twenty-First-Century Audience
ing ... I take a purely animal , or fleshy , pleasure in getting my audience with me .” Others spoke of honesty , light-heartedness , and an ability to share the pleasure they took in performing as critical ingredients . Singer Adele Rowland told a reporter that a performer needed “ something ” to succeed with audiences . “ There are girls , you know , that have real talent�sing well , dance well , look well�who never seem to get anywhere . It must be lack of personality . Perhaps my something is alertness . I ’ m dreadfully alert , you know .” Appearing relaxed but remaining engaged on stage might sound simple , but many described it as hard work . May Robson , a musical-comedy star who tried performing in vaudeville in 1904 soon quit , declaring it much easier to play a part than to act like one wasn ’ t . 19
The vaudeville database is especially useful for tracing how vaudeville ’ s peculiar aesthetic infused different genres . To choose just one example , what we today recognize as American popular music developed in the last decade of the nineteenth century . Historians have offered a variety of explanations for why modern popular music emerged in this period . For those who describe popular music as a business , the precipitating cause was the growth of commercial song-writing and publishing , industries centered on 28 th Street in New York ( Tin Pan Alley ). For musicologists like Eric Wilder and Peter van der Merwe , the development of a style with African-American characteristics�a bluesy feel and syncopation�was critical . 20 Less well documented is the influence of performance on the character of popular music and , in particular , of vaudeville , as the medium through which mainstream music was disseminated . The discussion below will show that vaudeville was a venue whose performance culture strongly influenced the development of modern commercial music .
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