Vaudeville was the premier entertainment form in America for many decades, from the late 1800s through the 1920s. Vaudeville was a series of differing, short acts combined into one performance. Today if you watch a show like “America’s Got Talent” you’ll get an idea of what a vaudeville variety show was like. Vaudeville covered the country, and Dalton, not to be left out, got a taste of vaudeville from time to time as well.
The name vaudeville comes from the French, but there are a couple of sources attributed to the name. One is “voix de ville,” meaning “voice of the city.” Others believe it came from “Vau de Vire,” the name of the Vire River Valley where a certain type of French singing entertainment developed centuries back. Either way, in America it became vaudeville and was sometimes called variety entertainment because it was literally “anything goes.”
From a mix of differing entertainments in the U.S. in the early and mid-1800s, including plays, monologues, magicians, minstrels, song and dance, and acrobats, mixed in with circuses, museums, side-show freaks and local fairs, vaudeville emerged as a fairly fixed form of entertainment with a set number of acts in a certain order and the top billing going to a star headline act.
Eventually, producers made vaudeville theater chains so they could book top acts for long runs, guaranteeing them consistent pay and booking as they traveled from city to city and theater to theater. There was the big time and the small time, with the big time getting into bigger cities, bigger pay and longer runs. Showbiz is about as crazy as mining for gold, so anything that standardizes the madness helps. The vaudevillians would travel 42 weeks or more of the year with a steamer trunk, perhaps crates of specialty magicians gear or trained animals, with the hope they would get paid after each stand.
Below the small time
Researching old Dalton newspapers from about 1912 to 1925, the heyday of vaudeville, it would seem we were a little below the small time. We had some performing spaces like the Dalton Opera House, which unfortunately burned down just about the time it would have played vaudeville, and Trevitt Hall, as well as several movie theaters like the Shadowland and, later, The Crescent, which sometimes hosted live shows or performers as part of a mixed presentation with the movies they regularly showed. There was no ongoing vaudeville theater in town that I’ve come across.
And many of the shows that came to town with vaudeville acts included other types of entertainment in addition to the vaudevillians. The traveling shows that came here would bring large tents (like a circus tent) to stage their shows in and had entertainment such as live bands, plays and singing groups in addition to the vaudeville acts. Proper vaudeville was fairly standardized, and the Dalton shows didn’t really follow those standards, with the vaudeville acts here acting as between act entertainment.
Open to anyone
I recently read a memoir by vaudevillian George Burns and in his book he covers the vaudeville scene accurately, seeing as he was part of it. Big-time vaudeville consisted of eight acts and small time four or five acts and a movie. The place you had in the eight-act showed how big you were, the higher or later in the show the better, with the seventh place being for the headliner. The eighth act might be a film or an act that wasn’t as good and acted as a “chaser” to chase the audience out of the theater so it would be empty for the next audience and show.
According to Burns, the first act was always a “dumb” act, meaning an act where there was no talking. The first act would start after an overture of current popular tunes by the live musicians, so the thought may have been for the music and then the silent act, to give patrons time to find their seats without interrupting an act that sang or talked.
Dumb acts that opened might include acrobats, jugglers or cowboy lariat spinners. The second spot was usually a singing or dancing act. The singer might be an opera singer, a lady “nightingale” or a comedy singer. Dancers might include everything from buck dancers to tap dancers to a brother and sister dance act like Fred Astaire and his sister Adele doing elegant ballroom dancing. Vaudeville was open to anyone with an entertaining act, so there were even one-legged dancers!
The third act would be a sketch or one-act play. This might be a famous international actor doing a bit from Shakespeare or a comedy sketch a la The Marx Brothers. Headliners, of which a good vaudeville bill would include two or three, were in the fourth and fifth spots. Another headliner might be the emcee of the show, a comedian with good ad-lib abilities to keep the show going smoothly.
Regarding headliners, you didn’t have to be good to be a headliner, you just had to be a draw and sell tickets. Some acts, like the legendary Cherry Sisters singers, were so bad people came to see them to see just how bad they were. Other headliners were just celebrities with no act, such as heavyweight boxing champs or even lady murderers who had gotten out of prison. Helen Keller worked vaudeville as a celebrity headliner.
There could be an intermission after the fifth act and when things got rolling again it would be a “flash” act, which was something like a big animal act (lions or trained seals, for example) or a musical number with a dozen beautiful showgirls parading around.
The seventh spot was for the star of the show. This might be a famous singer of the day, or a comedian like George Jessel or Eddie Cantor (who also sang hit songs). Jessel did a famous bit where he pretended to talk to his mother on the phone and the audience only heard his side of the conversation. “Ma, how’d you like that exotic bird I sent you for your birthday? What? You cooked it and ate it? Ma, that was an expensive bird from South America and it could speak five languages! Well, yes, I guess you’re right. I guess it should have spoken up and said something.”
The last act in a show was also a dumb act or maybe a silent film. This was to let the people know the headliners and star were done and it was time for them to leave. The eighth act played to “the haircuts,” the back of the heads of the people leaving the theater.
Unfortunately, in the Dalton paper ads I can’t find the names of the actual vaudeville performers that came with the shows here. The focus was on the play and the music, not the vaudevillians. The ads would even say things like “all new scenery and all new costumes,” those novelty items being a draw as big as the performers. When most people dressed quite simply around here, a lavish, stylish, just-over-from-Paris outfit was worth the price of admission alone. and that admission went from 10 cents for kids to 20 cents for adults, to other shows that charged 15 cents and 30 cents. The tents they brought could seat 2,000, so you can do the math. Monday nights must have been slow even in an entertainment-starved place like Dalton, because more than one of the traveling shows advertised that women would get in free on Mondays if accompanied by a guest with a paid ticket.
A great equalizer
Vaudeville was a great equalizer, where women performers could get a much bigger paycheck than men performers, where African American performers could work, including all-Black vaudeville theaters as well as the mainstream, and immigrants could get work if they had a knack for entertainment. There were even specialty vaudeville theaters like all Yiddish language theaters.
In Dalton one of the shows that advertised vaudeville performers was a Buffalo Bill Wild West Show that had all the regular components of a Western show but included vaudevillians. and during fairs and festivals in nearby towns like Rome or Atlanta ads promoting the event included “Vaudeville Performers” as part of the draw, as well as award-winning cows, horses, pigs and chickens. Many times the railroad would run special excursion trains to these fairs, where a few dollars would get you a round-trip ticket on the train from Dalton to the site of the festivities.
The greatest theater in vaudeville was The Palace in New York City. If you played The Palace you had made it to the top.
When did vaudeville end? Well, like “America’s Got Talent,” late night talk shows and some of the shows in Las Vegas, vaudeville-type acts are still around. But for the ongoing touring vaudeville like the old days, some point out 1932, when The Palace dropped variety acts altogether and showed only movies. George Burns said although movies cut into vaudeville, it was really radio that did it in. Now folks could sit at home and listen to entertainment for free at their kitchen table.
The Town Crier, on the other hand, urges you not to sit at your kitchen table or in front of the TV, but to go out and find some live entertainment, whether a play, a concert or a circus. There are performers out there that need your applause. Don’t let them down!