The Hedges Brothers and Jacobson were a vocal/instrumental trio whose brilliant but discontinuous career lasted from 1910 until 1926. They performed in cabaret, vaudeville, music halls, and musical comedy in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and South Africa and recorded fourteen released sides for English Columbia in 1912–13 and English Zonophone in 1920.Footnote 1 They are better known in England than in the United States because their career in the former spanned 1911–14 and 1919–26, whereas in the latter they performed only in 1910–11 and 1913–14, and the recordings that helped spread their fame were probably never released on the western shore of the Atlantic.
The trio brought a distinctively Californian style of entertaining to the East Coast of North America and a distinctively American style to Britain, France, and South Africa. Hammerstein's Victoria Theatre, their first New York City venue, billed them as “those entertaining Frisco boys,”Footnote 2 and Variety's reviewer noted that the unfamiliarity of their West Coast repertoire “may be one of the reasons the boys did so well” in their New York debut.Footnote 3 J. B. Priestley, the English novelist, who heard them in Leeds in about 1913 during their first English residency, fairly raved about them in a 1962 memoir:
It was as if we had been still living in the nineteenth century and then suddenly found the twentieth glaring and screaming at us. We were yanked [a pun?] into our own age, fascinating, jungle-haunted, monstrous. We were used to being sung at in music-halls in a robust and zestful fashion, but the syncopated frenzy of these three young Americans was something quite different; shining with sweat, they almost hung over the footlights, defying us to resist the rhythm, gradually hypnotising us, chanting and drumming us into another kind of life in which anything might happen.Footnote 4
The Hedges Brothers and Jacobson were in the forefront of an exciting influx of performers that created a British craze for American ragtime in 1911–12, a craze that lasted through the years of the Great War and prepared the British public for the jazz craze that followed the war. In virtue of their position in the ragtime vanguard, they can now be seen as key agents in the international diffusion of jazz. In 1919 they accepted the biggest music-hall contract ever offered. Now they are forgotten or at best misremembered; only two of their remarkable recordings are available on CD reissues.Footnote 5 Here is the bare outline of their story.
By 1910, when the trio converged, each of the musicians had already earned acclaim on his own as part of San Francisco's ebullient entertainment scene. The city was rebuilding itself after a 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire that had destroyed about a third of its structures, so money abounded at all levels of society, facilitating what was called The Life Joyous in dance halls, cabarets (then called cafes), and theaters. Future legends such as Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson appeared on the vaudeville stage; such astonishingly talented pianists as Mike Bernard and Jay Roberts played ragtime in saloons; and the rapidly ascending Blossom Seeley had just left for Los Angeles after establishing herself as one of Frisco's leading musical-comedy stars. Comedian Lou Holtz, who was just starting in show business at the time, looked back from 1939 and saw in the San Francisco of that era the birth of a style of entertainment that came to dominate U.S. night clubs right through the 1920s and 30s.Footnote 6
The Hedges brothers, Charles Frederick (Freddie) and Elven Everett, came to San Francisco from Iowa with their parents, John Alonzo (called Lon; 1861–1937) and Flora (1866–1947). Lon was probably a farmer when the boys were born, first Freddie (in Colfax, Iowa, 23 June 1886), then Elven (in Sprague, Washington Territory, 25 October 1889).Footnote 7 But in the 1900 census, back in Colfax, Iowa, he gave his occupation as “showman.”Footnote 8 The show was a wagon-borne family circus that Elven and Freddie talked about to a Newcastle, England, reporter in 1912. In an early version of the spectacle, Freddie walked the tightrope, Elven danced barefoot (on “cutglass,” according to the report), and “they both sold song books, red lemonade and other things.” In a later, improved version, the family traveled with a large tent in case they couldn't find an indoor performance venue in the town where they had landed, and “the boys did blackface acts and monologues” in addition to singing, dancing, and working with trained animals: a fox, a bear, a raccoon, and pigeons “painted to make them appear strange birds.”Footnote 9 What Lon and Flora did in the show was not reported in Newcastle, but Lon, who played bagpipes and violin, and Flora, who played mandolin, doubtless joined in making music. Flora, who may have had both European and Native American ancestry, would braid her long hair and dress in “American Indian” garb. The show's name (perhaps it was the Bonanza ShowsFootnote 10) and itinerary are lost, but family tradition preserves the story of a stand in Indianapolis, Indiana, probably in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Frieda Hedges, a younger first cousin, taught Freddie and Elven their first chords on the piano. Tent shows were usually summer phenomena, but a December 1902 newspaper story from Davenport, Iowa, suggests that the Hedges family was in winter show business as well, as teenaged Freddie and Elven fought to a draw in a preliminary bout at a boxing tournament in that city.Footnote 11 By the time of the 1906 San Francisco disaster, the Hedges family was living in the unlucky city and extending help to other victims.Footnote 12
A remarkable source for details of San Francisco entertainers’ lives in 1907–17 is a pair of sporting-life magazines called The Referee and The Announcer, merged in 1914 into The Referee and Announcer. These journals were principally concerned with boxing, horse racing, baseball, and the like, but the “sports” who read them were steady patrons of the city's cafes and theaters, so the pages were bordered with ads for drinking establishments, and over the years a growing amount of space was devoted to show business reportage and gossip.Footnote 13 As early as September 1908, the Referee noted that Elven Hedges and Jesse Jacobson, along with two others, were appearing at The Cave, a basement dive in the Barbary Coast, San Francisco's celebrated red-light district, which was rapidly reawakening after near-total devastation in the earthquake and fire. Jesse was also one of the establishment's managers. The advertisement didn't indicate whether they worked together or how they entertained, for example by singing, playing piano, telling jokes, or dancing barefoot on broken glass.Footnote 14 Sophie Tucker said that, “San Franciscans boasted [that The Cave] was the toughest place in the world.”Footnote 15 At 611 Jackson Street, it was just across the way from a capacious whorehouse playfully dubbed the Municipal Brothel or Municipal Crib because of participation in its ownership by several city officials.
Freddie first appeared in a Referee advertisement a few months later, teamed with Elven at a gambling roadhouse called A-Mon-Chateau in Colma, a suburb just southwest of San Francisco.Footnote 16 A month after that, the duo of “comedy entertainers”Footnote 17 entertained at The Cave, though not yet musically united with Jesse.Footnote 18 And in May, they were back at A-Mon-Chateau, teamed with tenor Curly Monroe and pianist Eddie Jewell, two of San Francisco's best-known cafe entertainers.Footnote 19
Alas for gambling, it was illegal in California, and in September 1909 the proprietors of A-Mon-Chateau closed the roadhouse without notice, leaving the musical staff suddenly unemployed.Footnote 20 But they landed on their feet. San Francisco's city government had recently decided to turn a blind eye to the establishment of a new red-light district in the burned-out footprint of the old “uptown tenderloin.” The “Cafe District,” as it was called, was intended to supplement and compete with the Barbary Coast, but also to be higher-priced and better policed than the Coast, in order to attract not only clients with more disposable income, but also crowds of “respectable” ladies and gents who wanted to drink, dance, and be amused for an hour or two in the numerous cafes that quickly blossomed. The quartet from A-Mon-Chateau, augmented by baritone Charles Cohn, opened at Stack's Cafe, one of the District's sparkling new showcases, in October, but the quintet quickly dwindled to a trio and disappeared by December.Footnote 21
Nevertheless, the brothers’ reputation remained strong. In December 1909, The Referee named Elven as one of three candidates for “the best ragtime pianist on the [Pacific] coast” aside from the universally acknowledged champion, Mike Bernard.Footnote 22 Freddie and Elven were out of work for only ten weeks during 1909, according to the 1910 census, whereas Lon, now a “theatrical stage hand,” had missed thirty-six weeks (probably owing in part to the reconstruction of the city's theaters, slowed by strict new fire-code requirements).Footnote 23
As 1910 dawned, a Referee piece, “San Francisco's Leading Entertainers,” yielded a morsel of information about the Hedges boys’ act: Freddie, “the skinny one,” sang, and Elven played piano, guitar, and saxophone. The brothers were then performing as a duo at another Cafe District resort just around the corner from Stack's, the Mirror Cafe.Footnote 24 By April, a prospering Freddie was “wearing a diamond ring that would make a head light on a Santa Fe engine look like a pin head.”Footnote 25
It was probably in April or May 1910 that Jesse Jacobson and the Hedges boys formed their act.Footnote 26 Jacobson (b. 13 December 1881 or 1882) was slightly older and, given his experience managing “the toughest place in the world,” probably more worldly than his new partners.Footnote 27 His father, Herman, had emigrated to the United States at age nineteen from the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (later to become part of Germany) in 1868,Footnote 28 well before the first great wave of Jewish immigration to the United States, and by 1880 was a saloon keeper in Mexico, Missouri, midway between Kansas City and St. Louis.Footnote 29 Jesse, the fourth child, grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. In 1900, his mother, Rachel, and sisters, Fannie and May, opened an ice cream parlor in the city,Footnote 30 and the following year his older brother Fred went into the hotel business in Santiago de Cuba.Footnote 31 By 1910, all but Fred had moved to San Francisco, where Herman kept the books for a liquor store.Footnote 32 A February 1910 Referee item suggests that Jesse was at that time better known as a saloon keeper than as a singer when it reported that “the genial proprietor of the Cave . . . put on a song at the Grotto [a cafe in nearby Oakland]” and that “Buck Reilly [the manager] immediately tried to sign him up as an entertainer.”Footnote 33
Jesse, Elven, and Freddie inaugurated their act at Dunn's Cafe, a block away from the Mirror, and enjoyed rapid and enormous success in the city's highly competitive entertainment market. Lou Holtz recalled their act decades later: “One kid played a boogie beat on the piano with one hand and a hot saxophone with the other. All three were handsome and sang terrific harmony. They were so great.”Footnote 34 They left Dunn's without notice to take up an offer from Freddy Train's Cafe in Chicago, and by the end of May they were entertaining there, on the glamorous edge of the Levee, the Windy City's equivalent of the Barbary Coast and Cafe District.Footnote 35
The Orpheum vaudeville circuit, one of the era's two principal U.S. variety theater chains, quickly snatched the trio from Train's and by the end of June had sent them on the road through the Midwest.Footnote 36 The move into vaudeville, then the best-paid branch of North American show business, meant a chance at long-term employment by a circuit of theaters instead of a constant struggle for the next cafe date. It also offered a chance of much wider fame than could be garnered in the red-light districts even of large cities such as San Francisco and Chicago.
The move paid off. Just a few weeks into their tour, they earned the praise of Ashton Stevens, the influential critic of the Chicago Examiner (and a former San Franciscan). In his review of their Chicago debut, he pronounced Freddie ragtime's “fair July savior,” whose singing of “Some of These Days” was the high point of that week's whole vaudeville program at the Majestic Theatre: “it takes an entirely new sort of youth to sing ‘Dad-ad’ as C. F. [Freddie] does. A youth with the boy yet left in him, an enthusiast without being an egotist, a chap that can get beneath the cuticle of his ditty and project it with human pictures almost visible to the nude eye. Such a youth is C. F.” Stevens also rhapsodized about Elven's piano playing: “His rambling, cascading, somersaulting right hand is always just the right beat behind his straightmarching left. Mr. E. E. Hedges at the piano is certainly a wonder.” Stevens then jokingly compared Elven to Onaip, a “Hindu illusionist” who appeared to play a piano while suspended (along with the piano) upside down by “hypnotic influence.”Footnote 37 “Any working clairvoyant can explain the dipping, diving, climbing, circling Onaip . . ., but E. E.'s accompaniment to his little brother's ‘Dad-ad-ad-ad-ad-ad’ is ragpicking that defies detection. . .. It takes an ear with a twist in it to play that accompaniment, and fingers as spry as banjo strings.”Footnote 38 (Figure 2 is a photo of the trio from the cover of the sheet music of “Some of These Days.”)
Figure 1. Charles Frederick (Freddie) Hedges, his brother Elven Everett Hedges, and Jesse Jacobson ca. 1912. From the author's collection.
Figure 2. Freddie, Jesse, and Elven ca. 1910. From the author's collection.
In late September 1910 they hit New York City and received their first reviews in nationally distributed show business periodicals, both the old-line New York Clipper and its brash new competitor, Variety. Favorable notices in these two weeklies were vital to the careers of vaudevillians, because they were written from a business point of view (in Variety even more so than in the Clipper) and because among their readers would be theater managers all over the United States and Canada, who would make hiring decisions based in part on the reviewers’ opinions. Newspaper reviews, no matter how effusive (or caustic), did not have the same weight. The reviews of the act in both Variety and the Clipper were enthusiastic, and, more importantly for the historical record, both gave details of the trio's stage routine.
The Clipper called their opening “the most pronounced and emphatic hit scored by a musical act in many seasons” at Hammerstein's Victoria, and Variety judged that the trio had “cleaned up.” The act opened with Elven at an upright piano with Freddie and Jesse seated on top and all three singing “a catchy coon song.” They continued with vocal solos, duos, and trios, all accompanied by Elven. Freddie was praised for his “character” singing (that is, directly impersonating the imagined African American, Italian, Jew, or chorus girl—for example—who “spoke” in the lyrics) and Jesse for his ballads.Footnote 39 Their singing “caused the entire audience to break into their songs with ringing applause even before the songs were completed.” Elven did a piano solo called “Frisco Rag”Footnote 40 “with the speed clutch thrown back to the last notch” and “a wonderful amount of finger movements,” though Variety's reviewer sneered that “the backstanders at Hammerstein's who placed him on a par with Mike Bernard were stretching it a bit.” For their final number, Freddie and Jesse sang and did “a little ‘raggy’ dance” while Elven played the saxophone. (The Clipper's characterization of Elven's saxophone playing as “his ‘rag’” suggests that he played a syncopated ragtime obbligato rather than straight melody; Lou Holtz, in the 1939 piece cited earlier, claimed that Elven “was the first man to play . . . a ‘hot sax.’”Footnote 41) The closer “caught the house like wildfire,” and “won them five or six bows and kept the gallery applauding after the intermission sign was out.”Footnote 42 A newspaper reviewer two nights later added some detail in describing the finale as
unquestionably the greatest finish ever seen on a New York stage, introducing the song, “Play That Rag,” and it is in this number that Young Hedges plays rag time on the saxophone, in a manner never before shown, while the other two sing with him, doing the real Frisco Bear Dance, the first part by Hedges and Jacobson and the second part by the Hedges Brothers; the savophone [sic] player never stops playing while dancing.Footnote 43
They scored similarly as they toured other eastern cities.Footnote 44
It is an indication of the success of the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson that, although the circuit's bookers could have sent them anywhere in the United States and southern Canada, the trio spent at least half the period from October 1910 to early February 1911 in New York City theaters, leaving an imprint on the East Coast to match the ones they had made on San Francisco and Chicago. But they didn't tour widely enough to create the kind of national reputation that figures such as Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson were to enjoy. Instead of carrying their new style of entertaining to the endless “sticks” of North America, they took a transatlantic chance on one of England's storied music halls. The Clipper announced that the trio, “‘Those ‘’Frisco Boys,’ who do a piano and singing act which has been a riot in vaudeville, sail for London, Eng., Feb. 8, to open at the Palace, Feb. 20 for six weeks. This will be the first American piano act over there, and their opening will be watched on this side with great interest.”Footnote 45
The Clipper's “London Letter” followed up a few weeks later with a brief report of the Palace debut noting that the trio's songs and the saxophone finale “were greatly admired.”Footnote 46 But the admiration didn't carry them beyond a single week of the promised six. They told a reporter two years later that “their manager [Martin Sampter, an American agent and producer who accompanied them to England] compelled them to give their act in the American style, doing seven numbers in twelve minutes. The audience could not grasp what they were doing.” The manager of the Palace “told them that the English people did not care for ragtime,” and they moved on to short engagements in Manchester and Glasgow. “No more contracts came along, and the boys went to book their passage back to America, when they met an American lady whom they knew, and through her influence secured an engagement at the Metropolitan Music Hall, London.Footnote 47 Since that time they have never looked back . . . .” The key to their ultimate success, according to their unnamed spokesman, was that they slowed the act down, from the former seven numbers in twelve minutes (“the real, unadulterated, overproof ragtime that is furnished in America”) to six numbers in eighteen minutes.Footnote 48 Reporting on the Metropolitan opening, the Clipper's “London Letter” correspondent, reserved as always, said that they “made an effective beginning” and “certainly got in all right here.”Footnote 49 Within the writer's narrow register of expression, this amounted to explosive enthusiasm.
Finally launched in London, the Frisco Boys sailed on to success after success. Circuit bookers in England, no less than those in the United States, could send performers wherever they thought best, and the norm was to send them on extended tours of theaters all over the British Isles. Such was the case with the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson until they had an opportunity to settle down for a couple of months in one place. Starting on Boxing Day 1911, they were featured in one of England's best-loved theatrical formats, the Christmas pantomime, this one entitled Humpty Dumpty, at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle. Jesse distinguished himself in the role of the Chief Fakir of the City of Benares, and the trio's turn was judged to be “one of the undoubted triumphs” of the vast and lavish production. So comfortable had the boys become in England that they told reporters that they intended to settle there, and during the pantomime's long run, Lon and Flora crossed the Atlantic and announced that they too were there to stay.Footnote 50
“The Stage” Year Book 1913, an annual publication of The Stage, an English equivalent of Variety and the Clipper, singled out the trio in its review of the English theater scene of 1912:
Another “craze” to be mentioned is that of Ragtime. Syncopated melody, introduced from America, caught the London Public in its grip about half-way through the year, and ragtime troupes of varying degrees of excellence made their appearances all over the country. One of the first among the best of these companies was that of Hedges Brothers and Jacobson.Footnote 51
The trio's publicist bought a full-page ad in the same publication, billing them as “The Pioneers of Rag-time Shows in England” and attributing to them the following:
We do not want to throw bouquets at ourselves, but who will deny that the present boom in Rag-time is due to the success achieved by us? Since our first appearance at the Palace we have consistently featured REAL Rag-time at all our performances throughout the Kingdom. We have trained British audiences to appreciate Rag-time. For the result See our date-book, and count the Rag-timers who have followed us.Footnote 52
The advertisement went on to note that the group was “Booked at all the Principal Halls until 1917.” (See Figure 3.) The projected six weeks at the London Palace burgeoned into two years and nine months away from North America, during which the Frisco Boys entertained not only in the British Isles, but also in Paris (March 1913) and South Africa (August–October 1913).Footnote 53 They also made their first records in late 1912 and early 1913, at least one of which (“Trail of the Lonesome Pine”) was reportedly used as the soundtrack disc for a Hepworth Talking Picture.Footnote 54 (See “Appendix: The Recordings” below.)
Figure 3. Elven, Jesse, and Freddie ca. 1912. From the author's collection.
According to Variety, the trio ignored their English contracts in order to play Paris (at Ciro's, a restaurant for the wealthy), because their English wages were stuck at an amount “agreed upon when the act was first here” which, by 1913, were “very much under the present ragtime salary.”Footnote 55 It is not known if the walkout enabled them to negotiate higher pay when they returned to Britain.
Although the trio made a splash wherever they appeared, rumors of internal strife reached California. In April 1912, The Referee reported that Elven had quit the group, and in September of the same year, it claimed that all three had returned to New York, where they were working separately.Footnote 56 Both stories were false, but they foreshadowed what was to happen a couple of years down the line.
In October 1913, the Clipper reported that the act, at that point engaged in South Africa, had cancelled its future European engagements in order to return to the United States to appear in a Lew Fields musical comedy called Fancy Free, which was to open in Chicago on November 18.Footnote 57 A month earlier, another source had said that they were about to leave for Australia, where they had been booked for a year on the Rickard circuit.Footnote 58
Whether bound for Chicago or Australia or neither, the Frisco Boys arrived in New York on 1 November 1913 and dived back into American show business. (The fact that they left Lon and Flora behind suggests that from the outset they intended to return to England. Perhaps part of the motivation for the trip—like that for their Paris jaunt—was to boost their stock.) By November 17 their act was featured, along with, but not in, a one-act play called Fancy Free at Lew Fields's Forty-fourth Street Music Hall. In their finale, Elven still played the saxophone as Jesse and Freddie danced.Footnote 59 The following week, at a Friars Club gathering, they were given “a rousing welcome” by a large crowd that included show business luminaries such as Sophie Tucker and Irving Berlin.Footnote 60 In December, the trio began a series of vaudeville engagements that lasted through most of January 1914, then returned to their cabaret roots at the Folies Marigny, atop the Forty-fourth Street Music Hall.Footnote 61
Their next move was from vaudeville and cabaret to the musical-comedy stage, in a farce called Bringing Up Father (based on the popular comic strip), for which Elven had written much of the music.Footnote 62 This move should probably be seen as a gamble. Theater, whether musical or not, was in general remunerated more poorly (except in prestige) than vaudeville, but an actor or composer who managed to establish a strong reputation in the field could end up based in New York (or a smaller metropolis), working in a series of shows and making a handsome living without the necessity of constant touring, as had such contemporary figures as George M. Cohan, Lew Fields, and Fred Stone. But the gamble was a long shot.
A large cover photo of the trio, with Elven at the piano, adorns the published songs from Bringing Up Father. The show opened 9 February 1914 in Middletown, New York, and, after several weeks of brief stands in small cities, moved to the Broadway Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, on March 28 for a longer run.Footnote 63 Besides doing their usual stage routine in the last act, the three had speaking and singing roles in the play. Jesse was Tom Hamilton, the romantic lead who wins the heart and hand of Jiggs and Maggie Mahoney's daughter Elinor; Elven was Oswald, the Mahoneys’ butler; and Freddie was Billy McGee, the elder Mahoneys’ son-in-law. A Clipper review of a March performance in Brooklyn praised the work of all three: Freddie, with “a splendid tenor voice,” “proved himself a clever light comedian”; Elven “got much fun out of the role of a ‘cissy’ butler, keeping the part entirely free from vulgarity”; and Jesse “scored heavily, especially with his singing.” In their last-act specialty, a version of their vaudeville routine, the trio was “a real genuine ‘knockout.’”Footnote 64 The play seems to have done very well, culminating the season with five weeks in April and May at the Globe Theatre in Boston.Footnote 65
Bringing Up Father then disappeared from Clipper itineraries, possibly for the summer hiatus that was customary in the days before theaters were air-conditioned. Although the tryout season had been successful enough that three touring companies were sent out in the fall, the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson were no longer part of the cast.Footnote 66 About ten days after the Boston closing, the trio had returned to vaudeville, but their first stand, at the New Brighton Theatre in Brooklyn,Footnote 67 was cut short after three days, when “a motorcycle with basket attachment” in which the brothers were zipping along Ocean Parkway “became unmanageable and crashed into a tree.” Elven's nose was broken, Freddie was knocked out, and both men were badly cut and bruised. The remainder of the Brooklyn engagement was canceled.Footnote 68 As far as I can determine, that was their final engagement in the United States, not just for 1914, but forever.Footnote 69
They returned to England in July 1914 and resumed their music-hall career, but the renewal was brief. In December the New York Dramatic Mirror reported that the trio had dissolved, with Freddie already back in the States and Jesse remaining in England.Footnote 70 The article didn't mention Elven's whereabouts, and the evidence is equivocal as to whether he stayed in England or returned to America with Freddie. In either case, he seems to have been (back?) in England in March 1915.Footnote 71
Freddie soon joined a new turn called “Those Four Boys” that debuted at the Colonial Theatre, New York, in February 1915, “did very big” at the Monday matinée, and then, reportedly at their manager's suggestion, failed to show up for the evening performance. The other three Boys were pianist Mike Bernard, whom Freddie must have known from San Francisco, Eddie Goodrich, and “Happy” Naulty. Bernard quickly ditched the act, and the remaining three, instead of replacing him to take an already scheduled engagement in Atlanta, decided to throw in the towel. Variety reported that Freddie “expects to make San Francisco.”Footnote 72
By May 1915, perhaps with stops in San Francisco and Salt Lake City,Footnote 73 Freddie had moved west to Reno, Nevada, where he sang in a cafe. He was brought to the attention of the Reno Evening Gazette by an arrest on the “charge of being drunk at city hall,” followed by a night in jail.Footnote 74 His move to Reno may have been motivated by Lezette Hoskins, a Nevada native whose stage career had started as early as 1893, when she was a five-year-old performing on autoharp, piano, and alto horn in San Francisco.Footnote 75 She was born of the union of two western show-business families, and by 1904, at age fifteen or sixteen, she was traveling with her maternal uncle's troupe, the Bob and Eva McGinley Comedy Company, through the Pacific Northwest, singing songs illustrated with projected slides and performing as a “novelty trick pianist.”Footnote 76 She may have retired from show business for a time, as the 1910 United States census lists her as a “teacher of instrumental music.”Footnote 77
Freddie had met Lezette in London, just after she had “completed a tour of the old world,” and a romance ensued. Six weeks after Freddie's night in jail, still in Reno, they married.Footnote 78 The Evening Gazette reported that “the couple will go to San Francisco soon, and probably again enter vaudeville.”Footnote 79 It isn't known whether the newlyweds went to San Francisco, but they did form a duo, Hedges and Hedges, at the Sagebrush Cafe in Reno, debuting on December 18.Footnote 80 (Figure 4 shows them a year or two later.) With the help of Freddie's old associate Eddie Jewell, the new act landed some long cafe engagements in San Diego and Venice, California,Footnote 81 and from October to early January they toured the East Coast, Canada, and the Midwest in a musical comedy called Bringing Up Father in Politics, a sequel to the show Freddie had been with in 1914. Most of the itinerary consisted of one-night stands, but there were weeklong runs in Chicago and St. Louis.Footnote 82 Freddie reprised his Billy McGee role and Lezette played Peggy, one of the Mahoney daughters. Their singing, according to one review, included a number of “foreign songs” and “helped relieve the situation when the comedy seemed to drag.”Footnote 83
Figure 4. Lezette and Freddie Hedges, ca. 1917. Photograph courtesy of the DeHoff-Cartwright family.
Meanwhile, Elven and Jesse were following separate paths on the opposite shore. In February 1915, the Variety Controlling Company, a booking office, won a judgment of $1500 against the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson for breach of contract. The following month, Elven declared bankruptcy, and the court appointed a receiver in July.Footnote 84 Perhaps Jesse shared in taking the hit. Elven must have worked to rebuild his position, but I have no information about his itinerary until his appearance in the cast of a “musical comedy mélange” called Step This Way in January 1916.Footnote 85 In December he “joined forces” with Nella Webb, a slightly older fellow expatriate who had made a place for herself in English show business, and the duo appeared together until at least May 1917. But as of July, he was again working single.Footnote 86 Meanwhile, in March 1917 he married Blanche Courty (or Decourty), a French citizen who had lived in England since the beginning of the Great War.Footnote 87 For the balance of 1917–19, he seems to have worked mostly as a solo turn.
Jesse (now using “Jess” as a first name) stayed in the music halls as a single for a short time but soon formed a new trio, Two Rascals and Jacobson, with fellow Americans Charles O'Donnell (b. 30 March 1888) and Edward Greenfield (“Eddie Fields” on stage; b. 5 August 1894). Jesse had met his new partners in the United States in 1910, probably on the Frisco Boys’ eastern vaudeville tour.Footnote 88 The fact that the two arrived in Liverpool from the States together in February 1915 suggests that Jesse had sent for them.Footnote 89 O'Donnell had been one of the Three Rascals, a trio similar to the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson that toured Britain and South Africa in 1912–14 and recorded for Fonotipia, Ltd.'s Jumbo label.Footnote 90 The Two Rascals and Jacobson quickly occupied the variety niche left vacant by the Frisco Boys, and they recorded nine released titles for Regal in 1915 and 1916. In May 1917, just after the United States entered the war in Europe and the new trio returned from a South African tour, Jacobson, O'Donnell, and Fields went to France as Red Cross volunteers for five or six months.Footnote 91 After some sort of rift developed, Jesse defected from the act just as it was about to leave England for a second South African tour. Lawsuits were brought against him by the African Theatres Trust, Ltd., and by a booking agency. In April 1918, he lost both suits.Footnote 92 The Two Rascals continued as a duoFootnote 93 and Jesse as a single.
We left Freddie and Lezette in St. Louis in January 1917. Evidently they spent part of that year honing their two-act in smaller towns, and by early August they were entertaining on the Keith vaudeville circuit.Footnote 94 Later in the month they made their New York vaudeville debut at the Harlem Opera House. The Clipper, noting that the audience had greeted the new turn with unusual warmth, reviewed Hedges and Hedges briefly in “New Acts,” with mixed emotions:
The pair can successfully put over any popular song, for they inject an abundance of ginger into their work and harmonize excellently. The man in the act, however, has paid little or no attention to his wardrobe and owes it to the audience to appear in something classier than ordinary street attire.Footnote 95
A couple of weeks later, Lezette's wardrobe also came under fire, when a Variety columnist snarled that Lezette's attire “may have seen better days” and that she “is below even the average small time act—in her dressing. . .. [S]ome good dressing will help this act immensely.”Footnote 96
Despite this lukewarm reception in Manhattan, the pair was booked into Keith and Orpheum houses through September, although they mostly played “split weeks” (three-day stands) and never achieved the topliner status or the degree of acclaim Freddie had enjoyed with the old trio. At the end of the month, they canceled an engagement because of “illness”Footnote 97 and disappeared from Variety and Clipper rosters until November, when they were given a split week at Proctor's in Troy, New York.Footnote 98 Perhaps something untoward happened there, for the next time they appeared on a published roster, almost a month later, they had been exiled to Texas and Iowa, far from the East Coast metropolises where big reputations could be built, and booked by the much less prestigious Western Vaudeville Managers’ Association.Footnote 99
Soon after returning to the Keith and Orpheum circuits in January 1918,Footnote 100 Hedges and Hedges ran into further trouble. In March, the Clipper printed two short notes about the act, one stating that they had been “removed from the bill” at a theater for being “indisposed when the time for their appearance came” and another that Orpheum management had canceled all their future bookings. The latter item pointed out the significance of the incident: “The act was at the Royal [in the Bronx] for its first real showing and was to have established a salary and spot for the balance of its vaudeville time.”Footnote 101 In a letter to the weekly's editor, Hedges and Hedges said that it was they, not the Orpheum circuit, who had canceled the bookings. But they didn't deny the part about being indisposed.Footnote 102 The particulars of their indisposition went unreported, but perhaps Freddie was drinking again.
The blow to Freddie and Lezette's reputation had broad repercussions. In 1906, the Orpheum and Keith circuits had come to dominate all but a small share of big-time vaudeville bookings via the formation of the “Combine,” a partnership according to which they agreed not to open theaters in each other's territory and to cooperate in the management of the vaudeville business. Although the two circuits maintained separate booking operations, from 1913 both were housed in the same building in New York, ensuring even closer and quicker cooperation. In general, a bad relationship with one circuit would result in a bad relationship with the other. Freddie and Lezette's contretemps with the Orpheum circuit would have effectively excluded them from prestigious venues, comfortable working conditions, and decent pay.
In fact, only a single notice for the act surfaced in the trade press from March until August,Footnote 103 and none after that. It appears that their stage career had reached its end. When Freddie registered for the draft on 6 September 1918, he reported that he was working in Philadelphia and gave a New York address for Lezette.Footnote 104 Then suddenly in November Lezette was gone, one of the twenty to forty million victims of the worldwide influenza epidemic. She died the morning of 4 November 1918 in her room at the New Victoria Hotel in New York, just off Times Square.Footnote 105 Death from the 1918 strain of influenza was a gruesome affair, a result of the lungs filling with blood and ceasing to function. We can conjecture that, whether Freddie was present or not, the death of his young and beautiful wife, his lover and professional partner for the previous three years, was an emotional catastrophe. Her remains were sent to Reno for burial.Footnote 106
In March of 1919, Freddie, living in New York, applied for a passport to go to France and Great Britain under the auspices of the YMCA to entertain American soldiers awaiting their return to the United States.Footnote 107 The passport was issued but remained in the organization's hands. Crusading prohibitionists that the YMCAers were, perhaps they were put off by Freddie's affection for alcohol. Although his impending April departure on the Noordam was announced in the press, he was not on the boat when it sailed.Footnote 108
A few weeks later, on 7 May, Freddie received a momentous cablegram from his brother in London: “FIXING OLD ACT HEDGES BROTHERS JACOBSON OPENING STOLL JUNE TWENTYTHIRD CABLE SAILING DATE TO EUGATNOM LONDON/HEDGES.”Footnote 109 The following week, Freddie filed a new passport application and was soon back in England with Elven and Jesse. Variety reported that the contract was for six years in variety for £30,000.Footnote 110 (Other sources give a different figure, but they all stress that it was an unprecedented sum for a music hall turn.) The reconstituted act began touring,Footnote 111 but despite the lavish contract and renewed acclaim from audiences who remembered them from five years earlier, Freddie continued to drink too much, to his brother's distress. A 1931 source says that Freddie “signed the pledge [to abstain from alcohol].”Footnote 112 But he went on drinking heavily,Footnote 113 and in February 1920, after a stand in Southsea, near Portsmouth, he stayed behind as his partners continued to tour. Three weeks later, alone in his room, he killed himself by inhaling gas.Footnote 114 The Variety article reporting the coroner's “verdict of unsound mind” observed that Freddie had “changed utterly after his wife's death.”Footnote 115
Although Freddie was gone, the contract prevailed, and by June he had been replaced by Forest (sometimes spelled “Forrest”) Tell (b. 22 June 1888), a U.S. entertainer residing in London (and nephew of Eugene Stratton, an U.S.-born music hall topliner of an earlier generation).Footnote 116 The new trio made six released sides for Zonophone in November 1920. (See “Appendix: The Recordings.”)
The three men seem to have gotten along well with one another. It was probably in the spring of 1921 that the new Hedges Brothers and Jacobson (or so it is alleged in two apparently independent sources) spent an off week golfing their way across the countryside between Castle Bromwich (Birmingham) and Hull, a distance given in one source as 152 miles and in the other as 175. The golfers were forbidden to shave or to change their clothing or boots during the competition, which lasted six days and seven- and-a-half hours and offered as a prize a week's salary from each of the defeated partners. The only clubs allowed were a driver and a mashie. Tell (referred to in the reports as Forest Hedges or F. T. Hedges) dropped out a third of the way on, but Jesse and Elven slogged on through five snowstorms, with Jesse the winner by sixty-seven strokes. At the end of the round, their feet were so badly swollen that they had to cut off their boots.Footnote 117
In 1923 they likely toured France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.Footnote 118 A 1925 review notes that in their act, even at that late date, “Elven Hedges presides at the piano, harmonizing occasionally with the other two . . . Elven seems to be able to play anything from a tin whistle to a saxophone, and plays exceedingly well. On one curious instrument, his imitation of the bagpipe is very realistic.”Footnote 119 They continued to perform until at least February–March 1926, when they headlined a traveling revue called Hey Hey.Footnote 120 By the mid-1920s, the British craze for American ragtime had long been supplanted by a craze for American jazz. In the absence of recordings, we can only wonder how the Frisco Boys adapted to the new epoch.
By September 1926, the trio seems to have dissolved, and Elven was performing alone.Footnote 121 He soon joined with former Rascal Eddie Fields to form a duo called Hedges and Fields,Footnote 122 which continued on stage until at least June 1928, and in 1927–28 recorded a number of sides released on the Edison Bell Electron label.Footnote 123 Elven's face was familiar enough to the English public that, in May 1928, he was featured in a British Pathé newsreel segment called “Eve Takes Up Baseball,” in which he demonstrated baseball batting technique to a group of actresses from the London shows Yellow Mask and So This Is Love.Footnote 124
Elven quit the stage in 1928 or 1929 and opened a members-only nightspot, the Elven Hedges Club, in London. Unfortunately, in the eyes of the authorities “the premises were . . . disqualified from being used as a club,” that is, unlicensed. A plainclothes policeman got the doorman to waive the membership requirement, and once inside he bought drinks for himself and a too affable Elven. The place was raided and closed on 7 December 1929, and Elven was fined £140 plus court costs.Footnote 125 According to another source, he was then deported to France (perhaps because of his wife's nationality). In 1931, Elven was “found wandering lonely and deserted, through the streets of Paris” and put “in the care of a French mental hospital . . . in a room with eighteen other patients.” Jesse traveled to Paris to help his old partner, but Elven remained in the hospital,Footnote 126 probably the Hôpital Bicêtre, just south of Paris, where he died on 2 May 1931.Footnote 127
Lon and Flora didn't learn of Elven's death for more than a year. They had quit show business and moved back to Iowa to live in an isolated house in the countryside near Colfax. In 1930, Elven had sent them gifts and money and promised to visit them the following year, but that was the last they heard from him. Puzzled, then worried, they sent an inquiry to the U.S. consulate in London, whose staff responded with the distressing news.Footnote 128 Elven's much younger cousin, Edward DeHoff (a son of Frieda Hedges DeHoff), visited Lon and Flora a few years later and remembers the parents’ near-reverence for their extraordinary sons and Lon's saying that the brothers had “lived a lifetime in just a few years.”Footnote 129
Jesse seems to have been a minor celebrity in London entertainment circles through the 1930s and the Second World War. In a rambling chapter about “the lesser lights” of the music halls, London journalist S. Theodore Felstead spoke of “handsome Jesse Jacobsen [sic], a tenor whose voice, I am sorry to say, succumbed all too soon to overwork. He became too popular; there was hardly a cabaret show in the West End considered complete without Jesse Jacobsen.”Footnote 130 In 1933, Jesse got into the Times by getting into a scrape as manager of the Water Rats Social Club, a Soho retreat for members of the Grand Order of Water Rats, an association of variety artists. An undercover policeman found gambling and, after a jury trial, Jesse was fined £10 and costs for “keeping and conducting . . . a betting house.”Footnote 131 In 1945, just after the catastrophic war in Europe ended, he applied for a new U.S. passport and in May 1947 returned to San Francisco.Footnote 132 When the 1953 and 1954 numbers of Polk's San Francisco Directory were compiled, he was living with his wife Adele (or Adelaide) in a modest neighborhood just a few blocks from San Francisco Bay. But they separated shortly after, she remaining in Frisco and he settling in Stockton, California, a shabby agricultural port on the San Joaquin River about 70 miles to the east. On Independence Day 1959, at San Joaquin General Hospital, he died of pneumonia brought on by chronic emphysema, and his remains were cremated three days later.Footnote 133
In their prime (1910–14), the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson were recognized as among the best performers on the American and British variety stages. “One of the first among the best”Footnote 134 of the acts that brought a ragtime craze to England in 1911–12, they should be given a share of the credit for an important development in British popular music: a turning away from homegrown music hall songs and toward the syncopated American style that paved the way to an affection for and understanding of jazz, the arrival of which after the Great War constituted, according to jazz scholar Chris Goddard, a “profound upheaval, an overturning of [musical] tradition of almost volcanic proportions.”Footnote 135
A second historical distinction, much more difficult to document, would be Elven Hedges's status as “the first . . . to play a ‘hot sax,’” as claimed by his contemporary Lou Holtz.Footnote 136 If Elven was, or was among, the first, he was well situated to influence other players. Musicologist Lawrence A. Gushee reportedly conjectures in unpublished research that “a vogue for saxophones in cabaret bands seems to have begun in the San Francisco Bay region around 1910 and to have spread to Los Angeles and Chicago by 1914.”Footnote 137 If some of these saxophones were “hot,” their heat may have been indebted to Elven's playing, according to the following line of thought, suggested by Rudy Wiedoeft scholar Douglas Caldwell.Footnote 138 One of the apparent consequences of the vogue for saxophones in San Francisco was what is often (if hyperbolically) said to be the first addition of a saxophone team to a dance band (Art Hickman's Orchestra) in the late 1910s.Footnote 139 Hickman was an habitué of the Cafe District and a staff writer for The Referee, so likely would have known of Elven's saxophone playing and remembered it when he added hot saxophonist Bert Ralton to the band in 1918.Footnote 140 Lines of influence in the poorly documented popular music world before 1915 are virtually impossible to discern. I offer this speculation only to suggest the importance that Elven's saxophone playing may have had.
As outstanding entertainers, as key agents in the preparatory stage of jazz's international diffusion, and possibly as a showcase for the father of the hot saxophone, the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson deserve a place in the history of popular music. We are fortunate to have their recordings to study and enjoy.
Appendix: The Recordings
Discography of Hedges Brothers and Jacobson
The main sources for this discography are Brian A. Rust, British Music Hall on Record (Harrow, England: General Gramophone Publications, 1979), 116; an unpublished discography of the group (and related groups) compiled and kindly provided by Mark Berresford; and a personal communication from Alan Kelly regarding the Gramophone Company's “Weekly Returns” or recording sheets. Although Berresford conjectures that the pianist on the recordings is Jesse Jacobson, all documentary sources identify Elven Hedges as the pianist in stage performances, so I have credited the accompaniment to Elven in most cases. Identification of the singers is based on close listening to these recordings and to other recordings where, for example, Jesse or Elven is present but not the other.
In each entry, the first element is the recording location and approximate recording date. (Rust usually based his conjectures about Columbia recording dates on known release times and the normal interval between recording and release.) Next the personnel is given, followed by the matrix number, title, composers, and release number of each side. When only one or two singers are heard on a side, their initials, preceded by “v,” are given in parentheses after the title, thus: (v EH, FH). Columbia and Zonophone issues are on the English, not the U.S., labels so named.
London, ca. December 1912
Elven and Freddie Hedges, Jesse Jacobson, vocal, accompanied by orchestra
28357 “Let Me Live and Stay in Dixieland” (Elizabeth Brice and Charles King) Columbia 2108
28359 “The Ragtime Violin” (Irving Berlin) Columbia 2086
Elven and Freddie Hedges, Jesse Jacobson, vocal, accompanied by Elven Hedges, piano
28361 “Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy” (Eli Dawson and Albert Von Tilzer) Columbia 2086
28362 “When We Are M-A-Double R-I-E-D” (v EH, FH, possibly accompanied by JJ) (George M. Cohan) Columbia 2108
London, ca. April 1913
Elven and Freddie Hedges, Jesse Jacobson, vocal, accompanied by Elven Hedges, piano
28529-1 “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” (Harry Carroll and Ballard MacDonald) Columbia 2172, reissued on EMI MRSSP513 (After the Ball: History of Pop)
28530-1 “The Land of Cotton” (v FH, JJ) (Eddie Leonard) Columbia 2172, reissued on Timeless CBC 1–085 (From Ragtime to Jazz, vol. 4)
28535-2 “On San Francisco Bay” (Gertrude Hoffman and Vincent Bryan) Columbia 2191, reissued on WHRA-6003, disc 2 (That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History, vol. 1)
28539 “Put a Bet Down for Me” (George M. Cohan) Columbia 2191
Hayes, Middlesex, November 1920
Elven Hedges, Jesse Jacobson, Forest Tell, vocal, accompanied by Elven Hedges, piano
22190-2e “Oh! I Wish I Was Tarzan” (Cecil Law) Zonophone 2101
22191-2e “Oh, You Little Thief” (Billy Howard and Elven Hedges) Zonophone 2101
22192-2e “If I Had the Lamp of Aladdin” (Billy Howard and Elven Hedges) Zonophone 2088
22193-2e “Dear Old Songs” (Billy Howard and Elven Hedges) Zonophone 2120
22194-e “I Want a Boy” (Billy Howard and Elven Hedges) Zonophone 2088
22195-e “Old Fashioned Mammy of Mine” (Billy Howard and Elven Hedges) Zonophone 2120
The Performances
The eight recordings that the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson made for Columbia in 1912–13 give us a fairly rich aural portrait of the original trio's work that includes a vocal duet by the brothers, vocal solos by Freddie and Jesse, and vocal trios, both a cappella and accompanied. Although there is no extended piano solo of the sort that reviewers lauded, there are short piano introductions and interludes, along with some very engaging accompaniments. Unfortunately, Elven's saxophone playing was not recorded.
Their three voices covered a range wide enough to allow for varied textures. Jesse's strong baritone carries the melody on most of the selections, with the harmonies stacked above. Elven's mid-range tenor confines itself to harmonizing, except for “When We Are M-A-Double R-I-E-D.” Freddie's high and wide-ranged tenor allows him to vary the trio's harmonies to structural effect. For example, at the end of the final chorus of “Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy,” Freddie sings a higher harmony than he does on the first chorus, to create a more exciting and so climactic sound; he does the same toward the end of “The Ragtime Violin,” “When We Are M-A-Double R-I-E-D,” “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine,” and “On San Francisco Bay.”
The most salient feature of their singing to twenty-first-century ears—the feature that I conjecture contributed centrally to their aural impression on their audiences—was the rhythm. Aside from the built-in syncopation of the songs they sing, the two devices that mainly constitute this feature are what I will call “staggered attacks” and polyphony. Staggered attacks consist in the three voices occasionally attacking a syllable at slightly different times, a stylistic trait that creates a sense of urgency and excitement.Footnote 141 The staggered attacks sometimes become more frequent as the performance builds to a climax, for example on the second (final) statement of the chorus on both “Let Me Live and Stay in Dixieland” and “The Ragtime Violin.” Both sides create a theatrical sense of almost frenzied climax by employing final choruses where the accompaniment switches from none to an orchestra, the frequency of staggered attacks increases noticeably, and Freddie's part “goes high.”
“On San Francisco Bay” has three mildly polyphonic passages, where the separation of voices seems to grow out of the lesser anarchy of staggered attacks. All three instances start with a growling glissando by Jesse, followed the first time by laughter and the other two times by his syncopated obbligato around the written melody. In the second chorus, Freddie briefly interjects a line with its own rhythm. All three choruses, with their playful departures from coordinated ensemble singing, end with the trio's perfectly straight, slower, emphatic, and rubato repetition of the clause, “on the golden strand, I won her hand,” almost a parody of mainstream popular choral singing,Footnote 142 followed by the title phrase. Besides being comic in itself, the contrast, functioning as a kind of caesura, intensifies the effect of a chain of tempo increases and changes in the piano accompaniment. The second chorus is faster than the first, the third faster than the second, and the piano accompaniment underscores the increases in tempo with changes in rhythm, from two strong pulses per bar in the first to eight even pulses per bar in most of the second and third, while in the third Elven's right hand covers a wider range. This arrangement, judging from other popular vocal recordings of the period, puts the Hedges Brothers and Jacobson in the vanguard of ensemble singing. Nothing comparable can be heard from contemporary American groups in England such as the Two Bobs, the American Ragtime Octette, and the Three Rascals.Footnote 143
Because of Freddie's contribution, the singing on “The Land of Cotton” is just as exceptional. The verse, divided between Freddie and Jesse, hints at a parody of old-fashioned minstrel style, beginning and ending with broad rubato, but with a sudden change to a fast and steady tempo in the middle. Freddie begins to sing the chorus by himself, again at a fast tempo, with great agitation and enigmatic alterations of the song's published lyrics, only to be interrupted by rubato passages from other songs, sung sometimes by Jesse, sometimes by both men. The performance ends without ever arriving at the end of the original song, whose content (yearning for the Old South) is subverted by the performance. The abrupt alternation of styles, the mocking of minstrel conventions, and the general air of non sequitur bring to mind the Marx Brothers.
Gaps in the series of matrix numbers for the 1912–13 sessions suggest strongly that the trio attempted additional selections, but recording ledgers for Columbia are not known to have survived, so likely we will never know. Perhaps somewhere there is a test pressing of Freddie singing “Some of These Days” and Elven playing “hot sax.”
The six 1920 recordings, with Forest Tell replacing Freddie, don't present the variety of approaches that the 1912–13 recordings do. Jesse is the dominant personality on all of them, leading the ensemble and taking short solos that range from a phrase or two to almost the whole of “If I Had the Lamp of Aladdin.” Forest Tell is an adequate replacement for Freddie in the ensemble singing, as his voice has similar strength and range, but it lacks Freddie's tinge of madness. Elven's voice is heard only in the ensemble, and his piano playing stands out only a couple of times. The staggered attacks so characteristic of the trio's style in 1912–13 may still be heard, but not as often as before.
Although the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had started a vogue for jazz with its visit to England in 1919–20, there is no obvious trace of jazz in these performances. The performance emphasis is much more on the songs themselves than on the manner of presentation, as if to promote the sales of Elven's portfolio. The innovation and excitement of the 1912–13 recordings are gone, replaced by the kind of polished professionalism necessary to last out a six-year contract.
Except for brief introductions and transitional passages on the recordings, Elven's piano playing during the life of the trio is heard only in accompaniments. He made no solo recordings. His most impressive backings occur on “Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy” (first half of the second chorus), “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” (third quarter of both choruses), “The Land of Cotton” (almost throughout), “On San Francisco Bay” (second and third choruses), “Put a Bet Down for Me” (second chorus), and “Oh, I Wish I Was Tarzan” (measures 5–10 of the second chorus). Elven was clearly an outstanding pianist for his time and performance nicheFootnote 144 (that is, vaudeville rather than the concert stage), but what can be heard doesn't furnish a basis for comparing his playing with that of Mike Bernard, for deciding whether reviewers who mentioned them in the same breath were right or not. Bernard's formidable technique is documented (if faintly) on a CD reissue of all but one of his records.Footnote 145 He plays fast, cleanly, and accurately, with plenty of brio. Eleven of Bernard's recorded ragtime performances date from the same 1912–13 period as Elven's first recordings, the most apposite being “That Peculiar Rag,” “Everybody Two-Step,” “1915 Rag,” and “Tantalizing Tingles.”
