CLEVELAND, Ohio – While Adele and Beyonce were hogging the spotlight at the Grammys in Los Angeles Sunday night (yes, Queen B should have taken home album of the year), Bill Rudman, artistic director of The Musical Theater Project, was popping a cork right here in CLE.
Harbinger Records, the label Rudman formed with musical theater historian Ken Bloom in 1983 to showcase musical theater and cabaret, won the Grammy Award for best liner notes for the 2016 release “Sissle and Blake Sing Shuffle Along.”
(Harbinger, which has released more than 60 albums, became a division of The Musical Theater Project, a Cleveland-area nonprofit dedicated to supporting and promoting Broadway and Hollywood musicals, two years ago.)
The actual hardware, presented before the televised portion of the event held at the Staples Center Feb. 12, will go to the co-authors of the liner notes: Harbinger co-founder Bloom, a New York-based playwright, director, record producer and author; and Richard Carlin, an editor and the author of several books on folk, country and traditional music living in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
“TMTP is thrilled with this award because it affirms the importance of what the label and the organization are here to do: provide an educational perspective on important musical theater,” said Rudman.
“The CD itself — ‘Sissle and Blake Sing Shuffle Along’ — preserves original recordings by two great African American songwriters: Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. Their hit 1921 musical ‘Shuffle Along’ was a groundbreaker in black theater.”
That it was. The original Broadway production, based on F.E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles’ vaudeville sketch known as both “The Mayor of Jimtown” and “The Mayor of Dixie,” opened at the 63rd Street Music Hall and played some 500 performances, launching the future standards “I’m Just Wild About Harry” and “Love Will Find a Way.” (In addition to Sissle and Blake, the Harbinger/Musical Theater Project recording features members of the original 1921 cast.)
Even more significantly, “Shuffle Along” and “its embodiment of all things jazz . . .began dismantling racial segregation of Broadway theaters,” writes Doug Reside, curator of the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
“Although handfuls of whites had ventured up to black performances at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre as early as 1912, the opening night of ‘Shuffle Along’ — at which Variety reported that black patrons sat as far forward as the fifth row from the stage — marked an important stride toward integrating orchestra-level seating in theaters south of 125th Street. White patrons had traditionally . . . enjoyed the orchestra level to themselves, and relegated African Americans to the theater’s uppermost balcony. The box office of the 63rd Street Music Hall however, was willing to sell seats in the rear one-third of the orchestra to African-American ticket-buyers, a modest yet revolutionary departure from the segregated audience model.
“The musical’s continued ability to draw in white theatergoers,” Reside continued, “demonstrated an unprecedented willingness on their behalf to pay to see black talent on Broadway . . .”
(Another irresistible fact: Josephine Baker, hired as a dresser for the national tour, reportedly joined the ensemble when a chorus girl took sick at Boston’s Selwyn Theater and continued dancing in the chorus from the summer of 1922 through the fall of 1923.)
In 2016, playwright and director George C. Wolfe mounted “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.” The meta-revival brought the show back to glorious life and the told the story of the hard-won creation of the smash (few black artists of the era ever made it to the Great White Way, let alone enjoyed successful runs) with Tony Award-winning stars Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter.
Bloom and Carlin’s liner notes, excerpted here, reveal the show’s poignant history.
After everything that Sissle, Blake, Miller, Lyles and the rest of the company went through to get to Broadway, the show was triumphant. It validated their belief that black artists could be treated as equals to whites, judged by the quality of their work, not the color of their skin. Blake later recalled, “The proudest day of my life was when ‘Shuffle Along’ opened. At the intermission of the show, all those white people kept saying: ‘I would like to touch him, the man who wrote the music.’… It made me feel like, well, at last, I’m a human being.”
The two beat an impressive field of nominees, including Mikal Gilmore for “The Complete Monument & Columbia Albums Collection,” performed by Kris Kristofferson. (Gilmore is the author of “Shot in the Heart,” his unforgettable 1995 memoir about his dysfunctional family that included brother and convicted killer Gary Gilmore.)
To buy a CD of “Sissle and Blake Sing Shuffle Along,” go to MusicalTheaterProject.org.
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