May Irwin reigned as America's queen of comedy and song from the 1880s through the 1920s. A genuine pop culture phenomenon, Irwin conquered the legitimate stage, composed song lyrics, and parlayed her celebrity into success as a cookbook author, suffragette, and real estate mogul. Sharon Ammen's in-depth study traces Irwin's hurly-burly life. Irwin gained fame when, layering aspects of minstrelsy over ragtime, she popularized a racist "Negro song" genre. Ammen examines this forgotten music, the society it both reflected and entertained, and the ways white and black audiences received Irwin's performances. She also delves into Irwin's hands-on management of her image and career, revealing how Irwin carefully built a public persona as a nurturing housewife whose maternal skills and performing acumen reinforced one another. Irwin's act, soaked in racist song and humor, built a fortune she never relinquished. Yet her career's legacy led to a posthumous obscurity as the nation that once adored her evolved and changed.

"Papers taken from the ... second Visual Delights conference held at the University of Sheffield in 2002"--P. [4] of cover.

Vol. 1. A-F, Vol. 2. G-O, Vol. 3. P-Z modern period.

A disrobing acrobat, a female Hamlet, and a tuba-playing labor activist--all these women come to life in Rank Ladies. In this comprehensive study of women in vaudeville, Alison Kibler reveals how female performers, patrons, and workers shaped the rise and fall of the most popular live entertainment at the turn of the century. Kibler focuses on the role of gender in struggles over whether high or low culture would reign in vaudeville, examining women's performances and careers in vaudeville, their status in the expanding vaudeville audience, and their activity in the vaudevillians' labor union. Respectable women were a key to vaudeville's success, she says, as entrepreneurs drew women into audiences that had previously been dominated by working-class men and recruited female artists as performers. But although theater managers publicly celebrated the cultural uplift of vaudeville and its popularity among women, in reality their houses were often hostile both to female performers and to female patrons and home to women who challenged conventional understandings of respectable behavior. Once a sign of vaudeville's refinement, Kibler says, women became associated with the decay of vaudeville and were implicated in broader attacks on mass culture as well.

In this unprecedented, fascinating book which covers women in theatre from the 1910s to the 2010s, author Lynne Greeley notes that, for the purposes of this study, "feminism" is defined as the political impulse toward economic and social empowerment for females or the female-identified, a position perceived by many feminists as oppositional to ideas of femininity that they see as personally and politically constraining and that "femininity" comprises social behaviors and practices that mean as "many different things as there are women," some of which are empowering and others of which are not. This book illuminates how throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, playwrights and artists in American theatre both embodied and disrupted the feminine of their times. Through approaches as wide ranging as performing their own recipes, energizing silences, raging against war and rape, and inviting the public to inscribe their naked bodies, theatre artists have used performance as a site to insert themselves between the physicality of their female presence and the liminality of their disrupting the role of the feminine. Capturing that place of liminality, a neither-here-nor-there place that is often unsafe, where the established order is overturned by acts as banal as raising a plant, women have written and performed and disrupted their way through one hundred years of theatre history, even within the constraints of a variably rigid and usually unsympathetic social order. Creating a feminist femininity, they have reinscribed their place in the culture and provided models for their audiences to do the same. This comprehensive tome, part of the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts headed by John Clum (Duke University) is an essential addition for theater studies and women's studies.

DELUXE EDITION: STARS ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE Premiere Issue. December 2013 (200 Pages). AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE. In full colors, printed on glossy heavy stock paper. Published monthly by Times Square Press, New York. Editor-in-Chief: Maximillien de Lafayette. Website: http://timessquarepress.com/ On the Cover: Diva Dominique Hourani, and Alexandra Sokollof, Natasha Blasick, Patrice Cole, Patti Negri, Kristen Dalton. Also available in economy edition. The magazine of international superstars, artists, screen goddesses, filmmakers, actors/actresses, music, dance, theater, cinema, performing arts, fashion, authors, glamour, beauty, style and elegance. Contact Carla C. at [email protected]

STARS ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE Premiere Issue. December 2013 (200 Pages). Commercial/economy edition. AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE. Other edition: Deluxe Edition in full colors, printed on glossy heavy stock paper. Published monthly by Times Square Press, New York. Editor-in-Chief: Maximillien de Lafayette. Website: http: //timessquarepress.com/ On the Cover: Diva Dominique Hourani, and Alexandra Sokollof, Natasha Blasick, Patrice Cole, Patti Negri, Kristen Dalton. Also available in economy edition. The magazine of international superstars, artists, screen goddesses, filmmakers, actors/actresses, music, dance, theater, cinema, performing arts, fashion, authors, glamour, beauty, style and elegance. Contact Carla C. at [email protected]

STARS ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE Premiere Issue. International Commercial Edition. December 2013 (200 Pages). Economy edition. AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE. Other edition: Deluxe Edition in full colors, printed on glossy heavy stock paper. Published monthly by Times Square Press, New York. Editor-in-Chief: Maximillien de Lafayette. Website: http: //timessquarepress.com/ On the Cover: Superstar Natasha Blasick. The magazine of international superstars, artists, screen goddesses, filmmakers, actors/actresses, music, dance, theater, cinema, performing arts, fashion, authors, glamour, beauty, style and elegance. Contact Carla C. at [email protected]

This work, a companion to the author's Broadway Sheet Music: A Comprehensive Listing of Published Music from Broadway and Other Stage Shows, 1918 through 1993 (McFarland 1996), provides information about all sheet music published (1843-1918) from all Broadway productions--plus music from local shows, minstrel shows, night club acts, vaudeville acts, touring companies, and shows on the road that never made it to Broadway--and all the major musicals from Chicago.

A vibrant and varied look at African American songs and the history behind the lyrics Musicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the colorful life stories of blues performers. Equally important and, until now, inadequately studied are the lyrics. The international contributors to Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From explore this aspect of the blues and establish the significance of African American popular song as a neglected form of oral history. "High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood," by David Evans, is the definitive study of songs about one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of the United States. In "Death by Fire: African American Popular Music on the Natchez Rhythm Club Fire," Luigi Monge analyzes a continuum of songs about exclusively African American tragedy. "Lookin' for the Bully: An Enquiry into a Song and Its Story," by Paul Oliver traces the origins and the many ava