Eubie Blake: A Lifetime of Activism Through Music

Breaking Into the Performance Industry

James Hubert “Eubie” Blake was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1887. His parents, Emily Johnstone and John Sumner Blake, were born into enslavement in Virginia, and his father served in the Union Army during the Civil War.

A master storyteller, in his old age Blake often enjoyed relaying the story of how his parents first purchased a pump organ at the price of 75 dollars, making payments of 25 cents every week, with which young Eubie spent hours honing his musical talent as a boy.1 Blake’s first big break came in 1907. He was hired to play the piano at Gans’ Goldfield Hotel, the first club in Baltimore that catered exclusively to Black clientele.2 In 1912, legendary composer James Reese Europe invited Blake to join his orchestra’s vaudeville performance as a pianist playing ragtime, a popular musical style of the time with roots in America’s Black communities.3

Shuffle Along Brings Black Artists to Mainstream New York

Following World War I, Blake and fellow composer Noble Sissle began working on a musical revue called Shuffle Along in New York City. When it premiered in 1921, Shuffle Along was the first hit musical on Broadway about African Americans and that was written, composed, and performed by an all-Black team.4 The show included popular songs that are still familiar to audiences today, such as “I’m Just Wild About Harry" and “Love Will Find a Way”.

Shuffle Along was lauded by comtemporary activists and critics alike for the fact that it “did not bother to make concessions to white taste or to theater cliches."5 Others were not so enthralled. Rudolf Fisher, a prominent doctor and author, lamented that Shuffle Along brought flocks of white audiences to his favorite Black establishments in Harlem. Nevertheless, the show was a huge success and ran for a total of 504 performances.

In fact, Blake’s Shuffle Along was so monumental that some historians place the show’s introduction to Broadway as the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance movement (Black Music 1). The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, artistic, and activist movement of the 1920s that placed an emphasis on Black heritage in the form of music, literature, fashion, dance, art, politics, and scholarship. With its epicenter in New York City’s Harlem, this movement consisted of a network of speakeasies, theaters, cabarets, cocktail lounges, and literary societies frequented by New York’s Black community. Moreover, Black leaders in New York aimed to leverage this cultural revival to secure economic and social equality with white Americans.6 With the production of Shuffle Along, Blake undoubtedly left his thumbprint on America’s Black musical theater, and his community’s broader struggle for full citizenship.

Ragtime Revival Complicates Blake's Legacy

Blake’s success during the era of the Harlem Renaissance is tempered by the fact that later generations of activists often expressed frustration with his earlier work. Younger generations in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s voiced that Blake’s 1920s musicals capitalized on harmful stereotypes of Black stage humor. Blake himself reflected that, once the critical acclaim of Shuffle Along brought his work to a wider, and whiter, audience, as an entertainer he felt pressure to cater to white audiences.7

However, when ragtime experienced a revival in the 1970s, Blake and his compositions returned to the limelight. In 1969, he released The 86 Years of Eubie Blake album and opened Eubie!, a revue featuring a history of his music over the decades, on Broadway in 1978, which went on to receive three Tony nominations.8

Blake’s relationship with activism and New York’s Black communities was at times complex. Some of his contemporaries voiced frustrations that Blake’s fame brought white audiences into Black nightclubs and theaters, one of the few public spaces in New York where Black communities were not excluded at the time. Conversely, in his later years, Blake felt pressure from his own community to act as an ambassador on behalf of Black musicians. With the revival of the ragtime musical style in the 1970s, many activists looked to Blake as a statesman of Black music who could stand in as a representative for Black composers. This was particularly true of Black composers in New York, where Blake helped develop a specifc "New York style" of ragtime with its own set of unique characteristics.9 This is in tension with the fact that Blake personally preferred classical music over Black-inspire genres like ragtime and jazz.10

Blake continued to perform publicly until his death on February 12, 1983 in Brooklyn.11 His headstone was commissioned by the African Atlantic Genealogical Society and is engraved with the musical notation of “I’m Just Wild About Harry”.

Citations and Further Readings

1 Ken Bloom and Richard Carlin, Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm, and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 11.

2 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, 35.

3 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, 67.

4 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, vii.

5 Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., “Music in the Harlem Renaissance: An Overview,” in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays, ed. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 10.

6 Floyd, Jr., “Music in the Harlem Renaissance," 2-3.

7 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, 362-3.

8 Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 392.

9 Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 49.

10 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, 364.

11 Brooks, Lost Sounds, 393.