Uncovering Noël Coward’s surprising role in ‘An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre 1900-1950’
GUEST POST: Sean Mayes and Sarah K. Whitfield
Who wouldn’t have wanted a late night call from Noël, inviting us to rush over and hear him play and perform his newly completed score for Words and Music?
In July 1932, British newspapers reported the summoning of West End impresario and producer C.B. Cochran and African American choreographer Buddy Bradley. Since Cochran was a consummate media relations expert, the incident was clearly widely circulated.
Newspaper reports clearly announced Coward’s genius and permission to do such shocking things. The Northern Whig (a Belfast newspaper) recounted that ‘Time for changing scenes, costumes, even applause, was allowed, and I was told that the performance given by Mr Coward was simply amazing’.
Coward’s late night impromptu recitals are perhaps not particularly surprising. What might be slightly more so, is Coward’s long standing collaborations and celebrations of a number of key Black composers and practitioners during the 1920s and 1930s, practitioners like Buddy Bradley. The popularity of jazz music is clearly a part of this, but Coward’s stage performances featured and celebrated Black experience right through this period. Because these performances themselves have been rarely remembered, this aspect of Coward’s working life is only now being fully uncovered. Buddy Bradley for example reinvigorated British musical theatre, creating not only an important dance school, but choreographing dozens of major musicals in the West End as well as nightclubs, ballets and revues.
News of lyricist and performer Noble Sissle and composer Eubie Blake’s work in Shuffle Along, the groundbreaking 1921 musical co-written with Aubrey Lyles and Flornoy Miller, had quickly reached the UK. In 1923, London’s Calling at the Duke of York featured Coward and Joyce Barbour singing the Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake duet ‘You Were Meant for Me’. The program notes the dance was choreographed by one Fred Astaire. Some of the songs from this revue, including the Sissle and Blake duet, went into the Broadway production of the André Charlot Revue of 1924.
In 1931, Cavalcade featured two Black performers onstage in creating the world of a jazz nightclub, Jack London and Leslie Thompson. London, born in what is now Guyana, had competed for Britain at the 1928 Olympics, and was Britain’s first Black Olympian. He won a Silver and a Bronze medal at the games. He was also a pianist and band leader, and performed as a pianist in Coward’s musical. Leslie Thompson was a Jamaican jazz trumpeter and trombonist,
Coward also crops up because many Black performers reperformed his songs. Blues and jazz singer Alberta Hunter recorded his ‘I Travel Alone’ in 1934, a haunting rendition, made all the more poignant when one considers the challenges of her life being a lesbian and Black woman travelling across the US and Europe performing. Coward was reported as being a fan of Hunter’s, and it’s not hard to see why, not only did she have an extraordinary voice and style, she was a composer herself.
Coward’s work collaborating with women musicians - not least Elsie April - is becoming much more widely known. As this important aspect of his career emerges there’s still much more to discover.
You can preorder An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre 1900-1950 now, available at Methuen Drama (Bloomsbury), Amazon and many independent bookshops.
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