Search Results

This chapter and the next examine novelty songs that use both opera and ragtime to express tensions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, racializing them as tensions between white and black America. Chapter 6 is an in-depth treatment of a single song, Ted Snyder and Irving Berlin's “That Opera Rag” (1910). Through a close reading of the music and lyrics, an examination of the song's use in a stage comedy, Getting a Polish, and a consideration of the stage persona of May Irwin, the actress who interpolated the song in that comedy, the chapter demonstrates how contemporary audiences could perceive multiple levels of meaning that interact in a complex piece of social and musical commentary.

The author, through anecdote and personal history as a professional performer, reveals how she discovered May Irwin. Although Irwin was a major star in vaudeville and musical farce from 1890-1920, she has been largely forgotten today. Irwin’s personal and public successes exceeded those of contemporaries such as Trixie Friganza, Eva Tanguay, Marie Dressler, and Sophie Tucker, yet this is the first full length study of her life and work. She may have been forgotten because of: her status as a female comic star in vaudeville; her failure to make the leap into film; the difficulty in researching her life and work; and her association with the birth of the ragtime “coon” song. This study examines her strategies for success.

This chapter considers the role of seen and unseen infrastructures in the material transmission and circulation of May Irwin’s (1862–1938) famous “Frog Song.” Just as ontologies of music shift in our digital era, the chapter peels back the hazy ontological histories of this song—as material commodity, technology, and memory—to consider its ramifications as a musical object replete with racial and social meanings. The argument developed here brings together aspects of the “hard” infrastructures of song sheet publishing, paper, and lithography, on the one hand, and the “soft” infrastructures of race, body, and memory, on the other. More specifically, the material resources of the song’s production—in printed page, body, and recorded sound—illuminate the shadowy histories of this song and emphasize how these materials reconfigure shifting notions of gender and race across cultural and historical boundaries into the twenty-first century.