Dominic Vautier 1/7/2011
Essentially, vaudeville is a variety show featuring different acts. There were jugglers, acrobats, animal acts, skits, burlesque, singers, strong men, magicians, slapstick, and even audience participation, usually in the form of “plants”[1] who did everything from singing to throwing tomatoes. The format, unlike the more structured minstrel show, was loose and unrestrained. Many actors and songwriters preferred vaudeville because of the open and generally unrestricted format.
This open-ended continuous stage presentation was a career springboard for actors and singers who needed an opportunity to refine their skills before entering areas of more serious entertainment. This included many notable people such as Irving Berlin, Jack Benny, George Burns, Eddie Canter, W.C. Fields, and Al Jolson. But as Vaudeville gradually moved to Hollywood after 1915, so did the talent.
The first Vaudeville may have appeared in the 1880’s around New York. Some suggest that it started because saloon and dance-hall owners began losing business to other forms of entertainment. However, vaudeville probably began sooner than that, perhaps as early as 1865, and for a variety of other reasons that are discussed in chapter seven. Saloon owners did however organize a type of loose-formatted casual theater. They obviously relied on less artistic forms of entertainment that were more appealing to their clientele and indulged heavily in satire, sleaze, and social comment.
In a word vaudeville was a bottom-dweller, a garbage collector, the vacuum cleaner of early entertainment. It sucked up everything left over by other more respectable forms of music. It was truly low comedy at its highest.
Even though vaudeville was long considered “lowbrow” entertainment because of its crude humor and raucous performances, by 1910 it had been forced to acquire a degree of respectability. By that time, the market was drying up and vaudeville needed to forsake its erstwhile ways and offer more family-oriented entertainment to increase audience attendance.
Vaudeville played a very important part in the development of mainstream music. It was in a unique position to attract, collect, and use song material that catered to the lowest common denominator, and for this reason it often had very wide public appeal. It gave its customers what no other type of entertainment at that time was able to give. Often this entertainment took on the form of cheap girlie acts and sexy songs that could not be performed in more respectable venues, such of Broadway and off-Broadway.
During these early years from 1892 until 1915, there was no single larger source for mainstream popular music than vaudeville. Many writers preferred to try their music out on the vaudeville stage because audiences gave them the direct feedback they needed. Moreover the format was somewhat free of censorship and writers could be much more creative. All this variety generated an uninterrupted source of rich material for the popular-music machine. The relationship between early popular music and vaudeville remained very strong, and the point where one left off and the other started is often hard to distinguish.
[1] Plants were actors who were purposely placed in the audience to perform some prearranged act.
Here are some other links in this article:
Origins of Early Popular Music
Minstrelsy
Broadway
Other sources