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00:23:18
00:28:17
00:23:18
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Transcription: [00:23:18]

{SPEAKER name="SPEAKER 1"}
I'd like to move from the discussion of minstrelsy and of carnivals onto another level of black entertainment. A level, which of course, is closely related as all of these are - that of the Vaudeville circuit.
[00:23:30]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Could you speak a little on the whole - the uh, tradition of black Vaudeville? Telling us a little bit about how, how large a circuit there was, and what the circuit was called? If you could maybe talk about TOBA a little?
[00:23:45]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
Yeah, well, uh. Our first black circuit was called T.B.A., TOBA. So now, that circuit would take you from Chicago all the way into Florida.
[00:24:00]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
You go up the east coast and come back to west coast. And that time, we had a lot of - of black theaters, was owned by a black.
[00:24:10]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}The theater loved the black theaters. It was owned by a black, because we had good shows and, and they was owned by a black.
[00:24:16]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
But later years, when they started having these big pictures, blacks couldn't get the pictures. So the white bought out the picture right. And later on, they bought out the - the whole picture show.
[00:24:30]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
They used to - years ago, all of them big theaters, 81 in Atlanta, all them things was owned by a black, years ago, but later years, they couldn't get picture rights - they couldn't get no good pictures.
[00:24:40]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
So, they sold the picture right out first, so they could get pictures. Then later, they had to sell the theater.
[00:24:46]

{SPEAKER name="SPEAKER 1"}
It's real important to make the links between the forms of theatre which we know and associate with folk, or traditional forms. The type of thing you would have seen on the carnival show.
[00:24:58]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
The type of thing you would have seen on the medicine show stage. With the stepping - the step-wise upwards movement, I should say - in the black entertainment industry.
[00:25:09]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
The traditions of the carnival and the medicine show were the same traditions, in slightly different form, that were found in the larger tent shows, and from the larger black tent shows, the Vaudeville style of tent shows,
[00:25:24]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
to the African-American owned and operated black minstrel shows.
[00:25:28]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
From the minstrel shows, you went one step further to the Vaudeville circuit. The performers who worked Vaudeville were often the same performers who either started off on the carnival or medicine show.
[00:25:41]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Or, as times change, moved from one circuit to the other.
[00:25:46]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
So, you've got an entire group of performers, performing within a set of traditions, and the set of traditions being found on the stages of the high-class theaters in Atlanta, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, or New York.
[00:26:02]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
And the small wooden medicine show stage at a cross-roads village or rail-road whistle stop out in the country.
{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
Uh huh.
[00:26:10]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
The very same traditions of one were found in the other. The way those traditions were passed down over time was, as I mentioned a lot earlier, from performer to performer.
[00:26:23]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
It wasn't father to son. It was a performer who was now working a medicine show who had once worked a minstrel show, and who was getting old, so in his later years was on the medicine show stage perhaps.
[00:26:34]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Working with a young performer who was coming up and using it as his first step - the medicine show stage. That younger performer, let's say a comic, would watch this older performer who's now in the twilight of his career.
[00:26:46]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Learning those very routines which the older performer had done twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years before on a larger stage.
[00:26:55]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
So you've got this transmission right here. In the case of comedy, Willie Jones, who was a dancer for the first what, forty years, thirty years of your life? -

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
Twenty-five years.

{SPEAKER name="SPEAKER 1"}
Twenty-five at least? [[laughter]]
[00:27:09]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
became a comedian, and is present with us this year as a comic.
[00:27:13]

{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Could you tell us how you came to be a comedian when you were working at that point as a dancer with the shows?
[00:27:19]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
Well, I don't know, a lot of people heard of uh, the Lindy Hop. Well I'm a professional Lindy Hopper. I'm one of the original, they was the Whiteys before the Lindy Hop was out in New York City.
[00:27:31]


{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
And, what they're doing today - we was throwing girls over our head, and cross our back, and cross the shoulder, through your legs, doing the thing called the me to you where you throw them up and somebody else catch em'.
[00:27:42]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
And you, they throw you around the same way, and uh a lot of you might have saw 'A Day at the Races' with the Marx brothers, Hellzapoppin with Olsen and Johnson, Merry Go Round with Martha Ray.
[00:27:55]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
If you saw in those pictures, you saw our group in there, and I was in those pictures, a long time ago.
[00:28:01]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
Now, if you saw those pictures, you saw how we threw each other around, and I was getting old, and I didn't wanna get out of show business.
[00:28:09]

{SPEAKER name="JONES"}
So, I was workin' with an old comic, and he made me do straights for him, and I learnt everything that he did, and when he died, he left me a living.
[00:28:18]