Seventy years ago, on Aug. 20, 1938, The Times published an editorial mourning the death of Thomas K. Heath, one of vaudeville's biggest stars in what is now the largely vanished phenomenon of the minstrel show.
Today, the once sensationally popular minstrel shows, in which white actors (and sometimes blacks) mimicked the worst racial stereotypes, are largely viewed as ugly symbols of the past. Little survives in popular culture except for a few jarring clips from old movies, like one of the sketches in "Yankee Doodle Dandy."
One of the most popular such acts was Heath and his partner Jim McIntyre, who performed in blackface for many years after they teamed up in 1874. I'd never heard of them and I wondered who they were.
But while researching Heath and McIntyre, I ran across another team of entertainers who were far more obscure: Bert Williams and George Walker. Instead of two white comedians pretending to be black, Williams and Walker were African American. And, according to The Times, they were from Los Angeles. These fellows sounded fairly interesting and worth investigating.
Although minstrels today may seem like nothing more than embarrassing relics, in their time they shared the stage with actors whose legacies are well known.
McIntyre and Heath, for example, signed the autograph book of young vaudeville performer Buster Keaton and wished him well in his career. In January 1902, they appeared at the Orpheum in Los Angeles along with a young "eccentric juggler" named W.C. Fields.
And the team was a sensation.
The Times said in 1898: "Last night's audience laughed at these two until there was not a dry eye or a side without a pain in it upstairs or down; indeed, the audience did not simply laugh, it yelled and shrieked in its ecstasy of merriment and the curtain went down with the roar of its cachinations still echoing among the rafters."
Minstrel shows emerged before the Civil War in skits that claimed to depict plantation life in the South, blending "mirth and melody."
There was no scenery, merely a string of about 15 men in blackface arranged in a crescent across the stage. In the center was the middle man and at either end were two "end men," whose jokes kept the performances lively.
"First would come the overture," The Times said, "made up of popular airs." The middle man would address one of the end men, saying: " 'How is Brother Bones this evening?' Brother Bones would answer, 'Scrumptious,' or words to that effect."
