Co-editors Lyn Schenbeck and Lawrence Schenbeck open their introduction to this new volume of the Music of the United States (MUSA) critical edition series with a seeming justification: “Why Shuffle Along Matters.” In some eight years since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement, how much that verb to matter has itself come to “matter.” Ed Sarath may have been the first to take the related affirmation Black Music Matters (my emphasis) into print, and Spotify now likewise provides Black Music Matters playlists while Etsy sells t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan as well.Footnote ¹ Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake and the works they created, have always mattered, albeit in ways that we—a hegemonic white majority academe—have been both unable and frequently unwilling to acknowledge. As Thomas Riis noted more broadly in “Defying Boundaries and Escaping Stereotypes,” that same “we” has yet to grasp “how fully engaged and developed was genuine African American popular culture [in the late 19^th century] when whites were not much paying attention.”Footnote ² Certainly, by 1921, when Shuffle Along appeared, whites, both at home and abroad, as well as African Americans, were very much paying attention to Black musical theater. For the co-editors, Shuffle Along deserves our attention not just because by all measures it was a success in its own time but also because it set new standards for musical theatricals, it launched careers, it provided a reinvigorated public space for the Black dancing body, and, in ways both compelling and contradictory, it gave voice to the post-war New Negro Movement.

Lyn Schenbeck, with whom the critical edition originated, brings to the project a background in American musical theater research. She reached out to other scholars in theater, dance and U.S. music history to create a collaborative team, thereby modeling the process that gave rise to this “musical mélange,” as its creators called it, and which contributed to the show's unqualified success. Lawrence Schenbeck, best known for his Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878–1943, served as co-editor.Footnote ³ Theater historian David S. Thompson supplied cogent background, much of which, however, appeared in his 2012 essay “Shuffling Roles.”Footnote ⁴ Most importantly, Constance Valis Hill, author of the award-winning Tap Dancing America, offers critical insights on vernacular dance, central to Black popular theatrical entertainments, with their “aural and corporeal synergy of black rhythm” (xlvii), and so often ignored by musicologists.Footnote ⁵

Riis's own earlier MUSA contribution, The Music and Scripts of “In Dahomey” (1996), is a model for this edition, as the co-editors acknowledge, while In Dahomey (1903) itself is part of the much larger trajectory of Black popular theater which Shuffle Along reinvigorated. The two volumes, with their source material almost two decades apart, demonstrate further interrelationships among music and dance, actors and composers, stories and audience. What comes through so clearly in the Shuffle Along volume is the force not only of collaboration but also mentoring. Chief among the mentors the Schenbecks identify is composer and bandleader James Reese Europe, whose untimely and tragic death in 1919 predated the show's opening by almost two years. The co-editors give Europe high praise, stating that “much of what now seems distinctive about Shuffle Along stems from his influence” (xxvii). Sissle, in particular, learned directly from Europe, who gave him a job and then found one for Blake. By 1916, Sissle served as Europe's assistant business manager, affording him the opportunity to learn from one of the best about things both musical—how to fill a space with sound—and practical—how to negotiate the Jim Crow realities that had only worsened during the 1890s. Europe also well understood the fascination with the Black dancing body and as the music director for white social dancers Irene and Vernon Castle had provided them with access to changing Black dance practices. Given Europe's influence at the time, it comes as no surprise that every popular dance then currently in circulation shows up in the show. What waits to be explored further is what other work those dances—and their dancers—might have been doing to create their characters and advance plotlines.

Like his mentor Europe, Sissle volunteered for service in World War I, and together they served in the decorated 369^th Hell Fighters Infantry Regiment that both saw combat and performed as an ensemble, thereby experiencing firsthand the transatlantic market for Black music. Arranger and orchestrator Will Vodery likewise volunteered and played in another all-Black soldier ensemble. Blake, the editors note, was too old to enlist, which is at odds with the evidence that Vodery, two years Blake's senior, had joined up. Regardless, that wartime experience further cemented the relationship between mentor and mentee and encouraged the emergence of New Negro activism as well. Following the war, Sissle, as the primary vocalist in the Hell Fighters Band, recorded Europe's “All of No Man's Land is Ours.” I hear a compelling connection between Europe's sweet love song masquerading as a victory tune and “Love Will Find a Way,” one of the three new tunes written for Shuffle Along, with its disarming foxtrot into the no man's land of Black domesticity and “serious” love. Shuffle Along's plot, featuring elections and voting, remains prescient and poignant as well, even with the contradictions of the character Mrs. Peck, Suffragette and the other tropes from minstrelsy that remained in the show and in the blackface routines of Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller. However, claims to New Negro personhood can also be seen in the plot's focus on retaining ownership and claiming agency over one's intellectual property. As the co-editors stress, Sissle and Blake, along with arranger Will Vodery, held on to their materials, thereby providing the Schenbecks with a “small mountain” (473) of sources, including the texts necessary to justify a presence in the MUSA series.

In her December 2019 article “Choreographic Ghosts: Dance and the Revival of Shuffle Along,” dance scholar Joanna Dee Das reviewed George C. Wolfe's short-lived 2016 revival cum transformation, Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All that Followed. As she notes, Wolfe did not explore the choreographic process central to the 1921 Shuffle Along nor did he engage with the show's likely choreographer, Lawrence Deas, one of the “ghosts” of her title. The co-editors of the MUSA edition and their collaborator Valis Hill likewise only mention Deas in passing, noting that “We cannot even be certain about the roles of Lawrence Deas, a dancer who also portrayed Penrose the detective when the show opened, and Walter Brooks, a white Broadway veteran officially credited with the Staging” (xlix). Nevertheless, they go on to quote Blake: “We got all the Broadway touch we needed from Larry Deas. He did the choreography” (xlix). Dee Das provides evidence that Deas toured with Ernest Hogan and had his own theater in Asbury Park, NJ and cites a 1955 Chicago Defender article that identifies Deas as a member of the creative team.

I cite Dee Das and provide her evidence not as a criticism of either of the editors of this valuable and well-edited volume, or of their formidable collaborator Valis Hill, but rather, thinking back to Riis, as a reminder of just how difficult it is to restore the histories of these body-laden, dance-forward, racially marked shows produced by U.S. citizens still denied the rights of that citizenship. If we think our published sources and archival records for historical popular music are limited, popular dance history remains even more difficult to recover. Furthermore, this lack of evidence makes it all too easy to erase the creative and performative labor of dancers and choreographers in ways that reproduce racism and sexism through a focus on published texts and musical scores. Popular dancing becomes something done “naturally” by Black performers, frequently by women like the homogenously costumed chorines who appear in photographs included in this volume. However as Jayna Brown recounts in her ground-breaking Babylon Girls, theatricals like Shuffle Along relied on Black female dancing bodies that also articulated a New Negro modernity that requires intersectional analysis.Footnote ⁶

Even for works as successful as Shuffle Along, with its national tours, historic cast recordings, and its creative team of Sissle and Blake who lived long enough to provide oral histories and cogent perspectives on their contributions, there remains so much more to know about this work and its contexts. As with most scholarship dealing with racialized popular culture, this volume ultimately raises as many questions as it answers, not only about how we might perform its music now or whether we can ever restage it, but about what Black creators and performers did or attempted to do to be taken seriously, to matter in their own time and now to our histories.