unicornmeat

Well.. what can I even eloquently say about this? This recording is from a Victor Vaudeville Comedy 12″. The flip side sketch is “Darktown Campmeetin’ Experiences.” “Darky Specialty.”
I’m sure most readers of my blog are familiar with this unsettling phase in pop-culture.
I like to believe that my 1917 equivalent wouldn’t be interested in such a record as this. But as we all know- on some level, this type of entertainment wasn’t the sole domain of “racists.” Acts similar to this recording took place between the jugglers and opera singers in vaudeville. The inappropriateness of this type of entertainment was hardly acknowledged until decades later. (Although the Irish were able to successfully raise a big stink about the mockery they were facing in vaudeville.)
I think the majority of consumers then as now were mindless sheep, never stopping to think about the perversion of ‘lightheartedly’ ridiculing a people and a culture while simultaneously oppressing it.
I sometimes roll my eyes at the constant pop-culture self-reflection that takes place in our society today (hello VH1). But when you think about it in light of things that slipped by in the past, maybe it’s a good thing to keep our consumption and entertainment under scrutiny. Maybe we can reflect on our questionable judgement within our own lifetime.

Victor Vaudeville Company
Court Scene in Carolina
Victor Talking Machine Co., 1917

Esmereldy and Her Novelty Band
Slap Her Down Again Paw
1948

As much as I tend to avoid encouraging negative stereotypes against hillbillies, hicks, yokels, etc., this song is a bizarre piece of “comedy” that must be heard to believe. This song is about the singer’s sister Bessie, a hussy who has been cavorting with a traveling salesman with “City slickin’ ways.” As for the rest, the title says it all.
Internet searching leads me to believe it’s from 1948. If you really love the song and want to share it, there’s a better quality version to be found here. Don’t ask me why I made my own mp3… I guess it just felt like stealing otherwise.

Click through the vaudeville items I’ve posted and you’re sure to notice the melting pot of ethnic caricatures. Some vaudevillians played up their actual heritage and some created a persona (or several) based on one of the many immigrant stereotypes flooding into the United States.
People from all walks of life attended vaudeville shows to laugh at themselves and each other.
The appropriate-ness of such humor is probably judged by most people in the context of social status, perceived or real.
In addition to immigration-inspired monologues like this, there was also the minstrel influence on vaudeville. Another one of my records, instead of “Norwegian dialect” declares that it’s a “Darky Specialty.”
I don’t suppose I need to go into the way that piece of vaudeville history is looked upon today.
But without that history and baggage, “for many, vaudeville was the first exposure to the cultures of people living right down the street.”
I don’t know where Ethel Olson was born or what she looked like. I can determine that her specialty was gleeful laughter and Norwegian Dialect. (Scroll down that last link to a transcript and brief commentary about the monologue that’s on the other side of the mp3 I’m posting.)

Ethel Olson
At The Movies
1923?