Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870–1929

Abstract

As Eddie Cantor worked his way from neighborhood theatricals to vaudeville stardom, he learned that his career would rise or fall on waves of applause. The audience was always right, he concluded, and he used that insight to forge a career that carried him from vaudeville to radio, film, and early television. Vaudeville Melodies ably explores the origins and significance of this insight to understand the relationship between artists and audiences that shaped not only vaudeville but also popular music and popular culture, in ways that endure into our own time. Nicholas Gebhardt explores vaudeville as a product of the period from the 1880s to the 1920s, when the “corporate reconstruction of American culture” introduced “a new version of the good life in which consumption, desire, novelty, and pecuniary reward were principal values” (pp. 1, 127). Within vaudeville, Gebhardt emphasizes the complex relationships among booking offices that organized performers' touring routes, the interactions between performers and audiences at the heart of the vaudeville experience, and the popular music—especially popular songs—that animated vaudeville shows.

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