Two Other Vaudeville Books

The post I started working on for today turned out to be a real bear, so I decided to kick the can down the road on that one ’til next year. As a stop-gap, today I share a post I had intended to publish prior to the holidays (for gift buying purposes) but it fell through the cracks. There’s still two days ’til Epiphany, though!

These two vaudeville books caught my eye, and I like the way each of them fills a niche. I say “other” of course because the premiere contemporary vaudeville book happens to be my own. After you’ve dutifully bought that one, though, consider these!

T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners Booking Association in Jazz-Age America (University of Illinois Press, 2023), by Michelle R. Scott. The pop culture history world has long needed an in-depth scholarly portrait of the black vaudeville scene. Michelle R. Scott is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, so I imagine this to be just what we’re looking for.

“Vaudeville Indians” On Global Circuits 1880s-1930s (Yale University Press, 2022) by Christine Bold. Ditto this one! While the actual pool of Native American vaudeville performers (and people pretending to be such, hence the quotes in her title) is much smaller than even the black vaudeville community, it’s also true that there’s been far less written about it. As with black vaudevillians, I’ve written about the Native American ones I have come across on this blog, but my sense is there is a big untapped well of additional information, so Bold’s book also sounds highly useful! It’s part of the The Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity. Bold is a professor at the University of Guelph (Canada) and has been a Fulbright Canada Visiting Research Scholar and Smithsonian Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, DC, and the National Museum of American History 2021-22.