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Stetson’s Big Double Uncle Tom’s Cabin Co. Or Life Among the Lowly. Our Colored Corps in Songs and Dances And Champion Cake Walkers of the World.
[Ca. 1895.]. Illustrated lobby card, 11” x 14”, image size, 5.5” x 9.5”. A lobby-card for a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, showing eight smartly dressed African-American performers dancing the cakewalk. Managed by George Stetson and Leon U. Washburn, Stetson’s Big Uncle Tom’s Cabin Co. appears to have been active from at least the 1880s into the 1900s. A Stetson recruitment placard seeking a “full cast of No. 1 ‘Tom’ people” is illustrated in Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895. It specifies that performers “must be good dressers on and off the stage,” as certainly seems to have been the case with those pictured here. The ad further specifies that the company needs “A No. 1 leader for band and orchestra, white and colored musicians, colored quartet, those playing brass preferred. White and colored drum majors. No mashers, kickers or drunkards wanted.” Music historian Thomas L. Riis notes that “A Stetson production of 1899 included songs composed just the year before: ‘Mid the Green Fields of Virginia,’ a typical nostalgia piece; ‘Just as the Sun Went Down,’ which sentimentalizes the death of two soldiers; and Kerry Mills’s great hit, ‘At a Georgia Camp Meeting.’ The fad for syncopation had firmly taken hold in stage music by the end of the 1890s, and cakewalks and ragtime songs were duly included by that time in Uncle Tom's Cabin.” REFERENCES: Abbott, Lynn and Doug Seroff. Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 54, 236; Riis, Thomas L. “The Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” American Music, Vol. 4, No. 3 (University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 268-286. CONDITION: Good, repaired separations along two vertical folds, minor soiling.
Item #5493
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