Eubie Blake and the Legitimization of the Black Musical

His father called him Bully.

His mother called him Wally.

Neighbors called him Mouse.

Relatives called him Eubie.

And Eubie was the one that stuck for James Herbert Blake. 

Happy Black History Month, Brooklyn fans! Today we're going to spend time with the American pianist, lyricist, and composer of ragtime, jazz, and popular music, Eubie Blake. Not orginally from Brooklyn, but a resident, Eubie Blake was born February 7, 1887 in Baltimore Maryland, the child of a previously enslaved couple and the only one of theirs to survive past infancy. 

Music found Eubie early, when he was just four or five and his parents purchased a $75 pump organ. While his mother did her best to keep Eubie playing church music, as he grew and music became like a second language to him, the influences of nearby pool halls, introduced him to ragtime. At 15 he started playing at Aggie Shelton's bordello and there earned several hundred dollars for his piano playing. 

According to an interview with American Heritage in 1976, Eubie agreed that he made good money:

Did you make good money?

Yeah. Eighteen dollars a night, that’s if you had a good night. That’s all side money, now. I got three dollars a night from Aggie Shelton—but she ain’t paid me the first quarter yet. But Shelton’s is where I made the most money.

Later on I played at Annie Gilly’s. It was a dollar and a half a night, and she paid me, too, every night, Monday to Sunday, no union. You worked till you dropped dead, and when you dropped dead then you were off.

Annie Gilly’s was only a dollar house. Bing, hing, hing, hing! “Come on in, boys!” They’d sit in the windows with wrappers on, those girls.

He was 16 when he wrote his first ragtime composition, The Charleston Rag. The year was 1899 - the same year Scott Joplin wrote Maple Leaf Rag, one of the most famous ragtime songs ever.

In 1915 he came to New York to play for Jim Europe, as a member of the Clef Club, a booking agency for Black musicians. And it was working with Jim Europe that Eubie Blake teamed up with Noble Sissle to start writing and composing music together. After the war Sissle and Blake went into vaudeville and would, along with Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles produce Shuffle Along, the first all-Black Broadway show to play for full Broadway prices. 

Shuffle Along premiered at the 63rd Street Music Hall in 1921 running for 504 performances, an incredibly successful run at the time. Shuffle Along was the first major production to be written, produced and performed entirely by Black people, and in doing so it legitimized the Black musical proving to producers and managers that audiences would pay to see Black talent on Broadway, according to Harlem chronicler James Weldon Johnson.  Shuffle Along also launched the careers of Josephine Baker, Adelaide Hall, Florence Mills, Fredi Washington, and Paul Robeson. Though some have described the plot as paper thin, it was the music, created by Eubie Blake that kept the show running.

Songs such as I'm Just Wild About Harry - which Harry S. Truman picked for his presidential run - Love Will Find A Way, and Banana Days were written specifically for the production while the rest were songs that Blake and Sissle tried unsuccessfully to sell to Tin Pan Alley.

I'm Just Wild About Harry was an extremely important song as it broke the taboo of showing Black characters falling in love according to Phillip Furia, author of America's Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. 

Shuffle Along had such an impact on Black performances that Langston Hughes credited it with kickstarting the Harlem Rennaissance. And Eubie went on to have a long career. During his lifetime he was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson as well as Merv Griffin. He was awarded honorary degrees by Rutgers, The New England Conservatory, The University of Maryland, Morgan State University, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College and Dartmouth. In 1981 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Regan. Eubie! a revue of his music opened in 1978 and ran for nearly 500 performances. He retired at the age of 63 and studied the Schillinger method of composition at NYU in order to be able to transcribe all the music he knew by heart. Then at 86, with the release of The 86 Years of Eubie Blake he erupted out of retirement and started performing again, running on and off stage and detailing his life to the audience with colorful anecdotes and bubbling vitality.

Eubie moved into 284A Stuyvesant Avenue in 1946 in what is the Bedford-Stuyvesant Historic District of Brooklyn. He lived there until he died at home on February 12, 1983.

His obituary claims it was five days after his 100th birthday but it was actually his 96th. Blake claimed to be born in 1883 but the US Census, Military and Social Security Records all state his birth year to be 1887. But when he was interred in Cypress Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn, the African Atlantic Genealogical Society commissioned a bronze sculpture of Blake´s face and the musical notation of "I'm Just Wild About Harry" his birthdate was listed as 1883, just like Eubie said it was! 

Eubie Blake's legacy cannot be overstated and the impact that he had on musical theater and Black performance is undeniable. According to Broadway, The American Musical written by Laurence Maslon and Michael Kantor, Blake was quoted as saying, "The proudest day of my life was when Shuffle Along opened. At the intermission, all these white people kept saying, 'I would like to touch him, the man who wrote this music.' At last, I'm a human being."