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Archival research for this article has been carried out at the Museum of the City of New York (Sophie Tucker Collection), Billy Rose and Manuscripts and Archives Divisions of the New York Public Library (Sophie Tucker Scrapbooks and Autobiographical Writings), and the Shubert Archives (General Correspondence and Script Series). A special thanks to Shubert archivist Sylvia Wang for her bright intuition, commitment and generosity.
Sophie Tucker: ‘the Jewish girl with a colored voice’
‘The Mary Garden of Ragtime’, ‘The Queen of Jazz’, ‘The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas’, ‘The Jewish Girl with a Colored Voice’: Sophie Tucker's monikers remain cultural touchstones decades after her death and continue to remind us of the range of musical forms and racial signifiers that she explored as a variety singer in the early twentieth-century United States.2 During her sixty-year-long career, Tucker proved herself a stylistic chameleon: changing her appearance and the tone of her act to mirror the fashion of the day, and regularly adapting her singing techniques to seamlessly fit into the musical genres that she helped to popularize. But perhaps most interestingly, Tucker's ‘refashionings’ encompassed an assortment of racial referents that coexisted onstage with a multiracial cast and – behind the scenes – with authors of diverse racial backgrounds.
Sophie Tucker got her start in vaudeville in 1906 with a blackface ‘Mammy’ character and stereotypical black southern dialect. The movement and tonal quality of her voice stood out for three typical features associated with black blues singing: the restriction and sudden expansion of the range, the switch from singing to speaking and back again, and a characteristic bass wavering note.3 Eventually, Tucker's growing popularity gave her the freedom to leave the constraining black make-up behind, but her record buyers kept mistaking her for an African American singer based on the sound of her voice and the many references to black life in her lyrics. During the course of her career, Tucker explored a variety of musical styles originating from African American cultural forms: ‘ragtime, jazz, blues, swing, the hep-cat, jitterbug, and zoot-suit’, according to her own catalogue.4 Lastly, her vaudeville acts became increasingly marked by their racial diversity in casting and contents. They included an all-Jewish jazz band, African American shimmy dancers, references...