Cravenomena

Run, man, run.

Though your lungs are splayed across your ribs like the tatters of a burst balloon, and your feet are hard lead cakes that send rivulets of white-hot thermite squirting through your nervous system every time they piston against the Times Square cobblestones below — run! Run like your life depends upon it.

Because it surely does.

There are more than a hundred men hot on your heels, shouting epithets, their teeth bared like dogs and glinting in the pale glow of the arc lamp streetlights. They are, all of them, strangers, but they shout your name and scream their awful intentions as they bear down hard behind you.

Run, man, run!

As you race pell mell south down Broadway, the dirty puddles through which you splash shoot spatter across the pressed creases of your brand-new Brook Brothers suit — but you give it not a thought. There’s been no time to think since you first set hapless foot outside the exit of the Cherry Blossom Theatre a few minutes ago. Moments earlier, you had taken your bows in the Cherry Blossom’s rooftop garden, luxuriating in the wash of warm applause that followed your latest triumphant performance in the new hit play, JES’ LAK WHITE FO’KS. After getting out of costume, you sallied forth to walk home, as you do every night.

Like most New Yorkers, you were aware of the ugly tension currently electrifying the city. Three days earlier, just a few blocks from the Cherry Blossom, two men had begun to bicker. One was white; the other black. What piqued their acrimony is unknown, forever lost, like the works of Ozymandias, to the lone and level sands of time. Perhaps it was a racist comment from the white man, off-duty police officer Robert Thorpe. Maybe, as had already happened several times in the past few years, the fight was provoked when Thorpe whistled the well-known melody of that monstrous hit from four years earlier, “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” Whatever the impetus, angry words soon rang out. Suddenly, the white man whacked the black man with a cudgel. Whereupon the other whipped out a shiv, thrust it into his attacker’s gut and absconded into the gathering crowd. Over the next two days, Thorpe dallied at death’s door, while outraged whites paraded the streets of Manhattan. Yesterday, when he succumbed to his wounds, the fury on the streets was palpable.

Still, there was no way you could know that just as you left the theatre this night of August 15, 1900, a huge mob of white men, brandishing knives, blackjacks and nailed planks, would be turning the corner onto Broadway, hollering, “Get Williams! Get Walker! Get Hogan!” Anyone overhearing the hullabaloo knew in an instant they meant Bert Williams, George Walker and Ernest Hogan, the three most successful African-American performers of the era. As luck would have it, the first two named, Williams and his partner-in-comedy Walker, aren’t even in the city at this time, instead rehearsing their next production, THE SONS OF HAM, in upstate New York.

But luck is luck, as apt to be bad as good, and it was very bad luck indeed that you, Ernest Hogan, now found yourself facing a crowd seized by a racist bloodlust, out to avenge the murder of one of theirs by beating lifeless a black man who had the vexing temerity to become rich and famous. Now they chase after you, so close you can practically feel their hot breath warming the nape of your neck.

Run, man! Run!

In a way, this race for survival is all too familiar. After all, you’ve been ducking and dodging most of your life, ever since you were born as Reuben Crowders in postbellum Bowling Green, Kentucky. At an early age, you hit the road with a succession of small-time minstrel acts and tent shows. While traveling through Kansas City in 1895, you published your first song, “La Pas Ma La,” based on the Creole ballroom dance. But it was when you moved to New York the following year and Isidore Witmark published your next song that your fortune was truly made. Witmark so loved your number that he signed a royalty agreement, a practically unprecedented development in those nascent days of Tin Pan Alley.

Your new song was an immediate hit. In August, 1896, it became a show-stopper for vaudeville songstress May Irwin (who scandalized early film audiences that same year by engaging in an extended lip-lock with actor John Rice in Thomas Edison’s 47-second short, “The Kiss”). In November, prolific recording artist Len Spencer recorded your composition for the first time on the eight-year-old Columbia label. Spencer’s wax cylinder was soon followed with covers by banjoist Vess Ossman, singer Arthur Collins and many others. The song seemed to strike a nerve with the American public and soon could be heard everywhere. A year later, the sheet music for the song was still selling nearly 40,000 copies a month! (Thanks to that royalty agreement with Witmark, the song will eventually net you the almost unimaginable sum of $26,000.)

And yet, in the past couple years, you have begun to tell your friends that you regret ever having written this particular ditty. Although the lyrics are innocuous — sung from the point-of-view of a young woman of color trying to decide between two suitors — the song’s title, in the few years since its inception, has become imbued with a sinister meaning you never intended. Your music and comedy was meant to bring people together, but this song — and the musical fad it has launched — are pulling folks apart.

Because it was you, Ernest Hogan, who wrote “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” the song that has become the informal theme song for racist white America. The very song that may have set Robert Thorpe against his unknown antagonist three days ago… the song that has incited a thousand other fights… the song that, a year after your passing, will be played in Reno, Nevada to taunt Jack Johnson, the world’s first black champion heavyweight boxer, in his legendary bout against James J. Jeffries… this is your most famous work. Your legacy.

As you approach the corner of 36th Street and Broadway, you spy a uniformed beat officer standing in the brightly lit entrance to the Marlborough Hotel. You sprint past him as he pulls out his revolver. From the hotel’s lobby, you can hear the policeman yelling at the crowd, “Stop! Stop!” He fires a warning shot into the air while you dash past startled bellhops and guests toward the back of the hotel.

Thanks to this anonymous cop, you will escape the mob tonight. But sadly, your desperate race has just begun. You’ll live another nine years past this harrowing night, but the rest of your life will be spent trying to escape the consequences of your having written the original “coon song.”

Run, man, run — but you will never outpace the hateful heritage that will forever be conjured by the name of Ernest Hogan… an immensely talented, charismatic performer and songwriter who sold out… played Judas… took the money…

…and ran.

This post was reprinted from the Notes Blog and Podcast.