Miss Ida and The Darktown Scandals
"It was the most marvelous life a kid could ask for." In the 1930s, Earl Palmer was "The New Orleans Flash," the child tap-dancing star in a famous Black vaudeville troupe that crisscrossed America
“Miss Cox, an ebony edition of Sophie Tucker, whams with “My Handy Man,” topped by a shiver dance that rocks the house.” Variety review of Ida Cox’s Darktown Scandals, Roxy Theater, Salt Lake City, Utah, November 28, 1937
“Ida Cox combined the poise and artistry of vaudeville with the passion of the blues and with an armour plated cynicism all her own.”—Chris Hillman, Storyville Magazine (UK), October 1976
“I was beginning to feel that I was badder than bad”—Earl Palmer, twelve-year-old hoofer. “Word comes from Chicago that “Baby” Earl Palmer ‘broke up’ the Sunset Club Saturday”—Louisiana Weekly, April 25, 1936.
If “Miss Ida and The Darktown Scandals” is the last of the four Earl Palmer episodes that I’m posting, chronologically it’s the earliest. The events and adventures that Earl narrates here occurred almost a century ago, in a very different America from ours today. It was the Depression, so life was hard for millions, and it was also Jim Crow America, which made life doubly hard for the nation’s 12 million African-Americans. As the child tap-dancing star of a well-known vaudeville troupe, Earl was somewhat sheltered, but segregation found its way into every corner of 1930s America. This is the story of how a plucky kid not merely survived, but thrived, in very tough circumstances. It’s drawn, as are the other episodes, from Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story, the prize-winning oral autobiography, published in 2000 by Da Capo Press, that Earl and I spent most of the 1990s working on. After several introductory paragraphs, I’ll leave you with Earl’s inimitable vernacular. And remember, with a little luck, in a few years we’ll be watching Earl Palmer’s Story: The Movie.
In the early Thirties, Earl joined his mother and aunt in Ida Cox’s Darktown Scandals Revue, one of the more popular acts on the largely white-owned Black vaudeville circuit, the Theatre Owners Booking Association or T.O.B.A. (“Tough on Black Asses” to the performers .
“The Uncrowned Queen of the Blues,” Cox had ridden the crest of the Twenties blues craze, selling hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of records. By the Thirties, big bands reigned and blues singers were passé. Miss Ida had played the Apollo in 1929 and headlined at Chicago’s great Regal Theater in 1930. Within two or three years she was plying the back roads, bringing country folk a touch of big-city class. 1
Above: As vaudeville faded, Miss Ida took other work, including the occasional movie. She made a comeback in the late ‘30s, invited to perform at Carnegie Hall in the talent scout/record producer John Hammond’s epochal From Spirituals to Swing concerts in 1938 and 1939. At the December 24, 1939 show, Miss Ida, backed by some of the day’s best jazz musicians (James P. Johnson (piano), Lester Young (tenor saxophone) and Dicky Wells (trombone), sang the blues “Low Down Dirty Shame” and “‘Fore Day Creep” to the big, integrated audience’s delight.
Below: Miss Ida sings one of the biggest hits of her long career, songwriter Porter Grainger’s “(I’m a) One Hour Mama” (“I’m a one-hour mama/ So a one-minute papa/ Ain’t the kind of man for me”).
“It was the most marvelous life a kid could ask for,” says Earl of his show days. He thrived in a dying genre. Crippled by radio and talking pictures, vaudeville was finished off by the Depression. Black vaudeville suffered even more than its white counterpart; the audience had fewer discretionary dollars. Only a few troupes carried on: the Brownskin Models, Silas Green from New Orleans, the Whitman Sisters, Ida Cox’s Darktown Scandals and various organizations calling themselves the Georgia Minstrels. [Earl and his mother and Aunt Nita put in time with one of the Georgia Minstrels aggregations in 1936.] A show was lucky to break even. On May 9, 1937, the Louisiana Weekly, New Orleans’s black newspaper, reported that after a week at the city’s Palace Theater, “Ida Cox made no money here. Which isn’t bad for a road show these days.”
The life had a rough romance but no luxury; performers scraped hard against life’s unbuffered edge. The great jazz trumpeter/flugelhornist Clark Terry, who began his career in the Darktown Scandals’ orchestra, remembered the show’s bus. “That little rusty-ass bus, it’s a wonder we didn’t all catch pneumonia. We wrapped croker sacks around our feet and plugged the windows with paper.” On a hill outside Huntington, West Virginia, the bus shuddered to a halt. As Terry recalled, “Miss Ida said, ‘Alright, everybody get out and push’ and everybody got out and pushed, except a little midget named Prince. ‘But Miss Ida, I’m so small.’ ‘Get your ass out there, we got a little bitty place just for you.’ We came into town once and the engine burst into flame. Someone in the press wrote, ‘Ida Cox’s red-hot show rolled into town on fire.’”
Below the Mason-Dixon line, the everyday could instantly turn nightmarish. Clark Terry was almost lynched, twice. He and a bandmate were in a dime store in Jacksonville, Florida when Terry’s companion accidentally stumbled into an elderly white woman. “She started yelling,” said Terry, “and we were suddenly running from a mob.” They hid under a rubbish heap. “We were lucky they didn’t have dogs.” In Meridian, Mississippi, Terry made the mistake of answering a white railroad man’s question without adding “sir.” “He beat the hell out of me with a blackjack and left me lying in a puddle, crying and moaning.” Some show members found Terry “and carried me back to the show car. They told me later that this man came back with fifteen Caucasians with axes and shovels and bricks and bats, and they said, ‘Where’s that nigger?’ They were going to finish me off.”2
However grim the circumstances, world-class performers were no rarity on the T.O.B.A. In 1936, the Scandals’ Aurora Greeley was the toast of Harlem, headlining at the Ubangi Club. Drummer Kidd Lipps Hackett of the Brownskin Minstrels stopped shows by diving fifteen feet from the box seats to the stage while executing a perfect flip, landing at his drum kit to hit the song’s last beat. Although Hackett appears in none of the standard reference books, he was a presence in straight-ahead jazz as well, starring in Buck Clayton’s orchestra in the mid-‘30s.
Earl’s vaudeville years were vitally important to his drumming career. Tap dancing, as Earl and others liked to say, is drumming with your feet, and their early dancing expertise gave Earl, Buddy Rich (“Taps, the Drum Wonder,” as Rich was known in his childhood), Louis Bellson, Philly Joe Jones, Steve Gadd, Hal Blaine, and others a rhythmic facility that they drew on as drummers. Years spent sweating to make an audience applaud gave Earl an intuitive knowledge of how to achieve emotional effects, how to build tension to the point of climax and catharsis: how to sell a song, as the old-timers said. You can hear it in Earl’s drum fills on a big band album like The Explosive Side of Sarah Vaughan or a rock tune like Sam Cooke’s “Shake”—in the understated but expressive licks with which he graced thousands of recordings. As Earl’s recording engineer and old friend Cosimo Matassa said, “Some people didn’t do it, they were it. It’s in their bones. Earl is one of those people. Earl is an entertainer.” In Earl Palmer, ex-vaudevillian, ‘60s rock and roll benefited from a long vanished showbiz tradition.
A few words on Earl’s parentage, on both sides. His mother and aunt, Thelma and Nita, always kept their family surname: Theophile (TAY-oh-feel). “I never knew my father,” Earl said, “never saw a photograph of him, don’t know what he looked like, his age, nothing. This is all I was told: he was a cook on a whaling vessel and he sailed out of Newfoundland and had an accident and got killed on the ship.” His name, Thelma once told Earl, was Edward Palmer. Digging through numberless archives and talking to dozens of people, I found no trace of him. Edward Palmer may very well never have existed. The name of a popular New Orleans bandleader, Walter “Fats” Pichon (1906-1967), on the other hand, repeatedly came up. Harold Dejan, the first New Orleans bandleader to hire Earl, told me, “When I met Walter Pichon, he was living with Earl’s mama. Then Earl came along. So I’d say, yeah, that’s Earl’s daddy.” Walter Pichon, Jr., Pichon’s legitimate son, a career maître d' at New Orleans’s finest restaurants, told me, “I believe deep within my heart that Earl is my brother.” Earl’s second boss, the bandleader Dave Bartholomew, agreed: “We always did guess that Fats was actually Earl’s father. I’ve always felt that way.”
Whoever fathered Earl, it likely constituted one of Thelma Theophile’s only, or the only, sexual unions with a man. “By the time I was a growing young man,” Earl said, “it had become pretty much knowledge to me that my mother’d had some gay relationships. I’m telling you, a lot of these so-called aunts of mine! My Aunt Nita, my real aunt, was also involved in a few relationships. I had a lot of aunts, man. I was probably the only feminine thing my mother ever did!” Whatever Thelma and Nita’s sexual preferences, Earl never thought twice about them. As deeply—one might say aggressively—heterosexual as Earl Palmer was, queerness, even his mother’s, didn’t faze him a bit.
The Georgia Minstrels chorus line, 1936. Earl Palmer’s aunt, Nita Theophile, is at far left; Earl’s mother, Thelma Theophile, at far right.
I LOVED MISS IDA AND SHE called me her baby. “Earl! Come here, baby.” She’d grab me and hug me and put me on her lap. Many times I fell asleep on them boobs of hers. Like pillows! Actually, Miss Ida wore a corset most times. If she hadn’t, she’d have looked like a bale of cotton with the middle band busted. Miss Ida was a hell of a woman. She carried people when they needed to be carried, gave them plenty of opportunities when they messed up.
I traveled in vaudeville off and on for eleven years and a fair chunk of that was with Ida Cox’s Darktown Scandals. My mother took care of a lot of business for Miss Ida because Miss Ida drank a lot in those days. She always thought she was as good a blues singer as any and hadn’t been recognized. I remember a tune she did, something about he stokes her furnace, lights her fire, does everything that fulfills her desire because lawdy lawdy lawdy he’s her handyman. That was my favorite.3
I sat on Bessie Smith’s lap, too, in Montgomery or Mobile. She and Miss Ida and my mother were talking in Miss Ida’s dressing room and Miss Bessie picked me up and hugged me. I smelled booze all over her but I was used to it. I stayed and listened to her and Miss Ida, just two drunken women talking, a mutual admiration society and neither of them meant it worth a shit.
We did three or four shows a day, at least. My mother and my aunt Nita had a featured spot. It was a good act. They were good dancers, good singers—they were good entertainers. They worked out new stuff all the time: between shows, on the bus, in the dressing room. We had time. I’d suggest things, or my Aunt Mattie Jackson would suggest things. She was Nita’s girlfriend.
Before I got my own spot I was in my mama’s. I came in and did my little dance, to “Rose Room” or something like that. I had four, five minutes, then they’d announce me as Thelma’s son and I’d run off.
After I got my spot I did maybe six minutes. Reggie announced me [Reggie Grant, “a strict, straight-out tap dancer,” said Earl, “and a very good one,” who often held down emcee duties]: ”Earl Palmer the Kid Wonder!” or “The Tap Dancing Sensation” or “The New Orleans Flash!”—whatever nonsense came into his head. I wore a white tux onstage. Not just a plain tuxedo: tails. Tails was more or less de rigeur back then. I’d come out, bow, and open with something eye-catching, maybe ‘I Got Rhythm.’ Then I’d level off and do a chorus or two where the audience could hear me tapping, not just watch. Something that showed my prowess. “Rose Room” was especially good for that. It had built-in stop time—you didn’t have to cut out any of the melody, it had plenty sections where the music stopped cold. “Tea for Two” is more continuous, it stops only once. Then came your big, your closing chorus, where I’d do something like “Liza,” using what we called flash steps, fast and flashy.
Reggie gave me my first conk. I was smitten with it. Oh, it looked beautiful! I said, “Damn, all of a sudden I got good hair!” but my head burned like a sumbitch. For some reason Reggie always called me Mustard. I can hear him, clear as a bell: “Hey Mustard!”
There were about thirty of us in Miss Ida’s: eight or ten girls in the line, eight to twelve pieces in the band, and maybe another ten in the featured acts. We used one bus with a big sign on the side: “Ida Cox’s Darktown Scandals Revue.” Miss Ida took a double seat all to herself, right behind the driver. She put her feet up, leaned a big pillow against the window, and slept. Snored like crazy. Otherwise she’d be talking and drinking with the rest. Miss Ida wasn’t drunk all the time, just frequently.
When Mr. Jesse Crump was on the show, he took up a double seat, too, because he was a big fat man. Mr. Jesse played piano, led the band, and was Miss Ida’s accompanist. He was from Paris, Texas. He was Miss Ida’s old man at the time, though I don’t know if they were married. [They were, according the encyclopedic Blues Who’s Who.] They’d sit up front and have normal husband-wife conversations or talk about the music. Get in arguments all the time. Miss Ida was a volatile woman and Jesse Crump was no pussy of a man. He might say, “Ida, why you got to drink?”
“Don’t tell me what the fuck to do.”
“Goddamn right I’ll tell you what the fuck to do.” Exchanges along those lines.
I saw a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to. A little boy is a hell of a peeping Tom and I made it a point to peep at Aurora Greeley. I had a huge schoolboy crush on her. Aurora was very aloof from everybody on the show. She was in a team called Broomfield and Greeley, one of the most class acts the show ever had, Leroy Bloomfield and Aurora Greeley. They did a lot of ballroom routines. Boy, was that woman beautiful! Had a body on her I can never forget. I never did catch her completely undressed, but what I saw was enough.
If I was finished performing I might be gone, gone out in the streets. When you’re a kid dancer, everywhere you go somebody’s always bringing in the local favorite, the new fast gun. “Aw, we got a local kid better than that” They didn’t realize that what they saw you do onstage isn’t all you do. They don’t know that as a professional you can turn it on, pull out the hard stuff, and cut his head. We called it bucking each other.
This was mostly with black kids. I only remember one white kid coming backstage, in Boulder, Colorado. I wiped him out, outdanced him so bad he went home crying. That was standard until in Kansas City I ran into these two kids who took me down a peg. Two brothers, bitching dancers. They kicked my ass, boy. Taught me some humility, which I needed; I was beginning to think I was badder than bad. Here I was, thought I was big, and these local townskids, kids that wasn’t doing nothing, whipped my ass. I was burning with shame. Those little mothers, man, they cut my head!
But I was good. Had I kept going I’d have been very high echelon. Known. It has nothing to do with ego. It’s a matter of fact.
Sometimes I was on the posters. My mother and aunt often were: “Ida Cox’s ‘Darktown Scandals,’ Featuring the Theophile Sisters.” Sometimes we hired a big act. You may remember the Step Brothers. Oh, could they dance! Maceo Anderson and Al Williams and Prince Spencer. Whenever they were on, I watched. They did things like jump over each other sideways from a push-up position. The guy on the left leapfrogged over the guy in the middle, the guy on the right leapfrogged over him, all the while parallel to the floor. Then they’d get up and tap-dance their butts off. Prince Spencer was the best dancer I’d seen up to then. Who I recognize now as great, that I only saw once, much later on, was a drug addict named Baby Laurence. Ohhh! You know how scat singers put lyrics to famous jazz solos? Well, Baby Laurence tap-danced to solos. He hummed the melody once and tapped it, just so you knew what song it was. Then he tapped the solo. Try to imagine someone tap-dancing to Bird’s solo on “Donna Lee”! I saw Baby Laurence in a club in Chicago not long before he died. He was the best I ever saw.4
On Miss Ida’s, everybody paired off. I was getting older and it was natural for me to want my old lady, too. And wouldn’t you know it—I got close to a girl named Shirley Brooks in St. Louis and she gave me a dose of the clap. My mother sent me to Reggie Grant to find out what to do.
“Oh Lord, Mustard is a man now!” Reggie said, and died laughing. He said to buy Harlem Oil Capsules, they had some kind of something that fights infection. Damned if they didn’t clear it up. But those pills were horrible tasting, just like eating garlic.
Do you know, I think my best memories of the road come from right around the time I got that dose of clap. I sensed a turning point in my mother, I realized she considered me almost grown now. And though I stayed with the show a few more years, I was getting more and more anxious to be on my own. I stayed home and worked little jobs: cleaning bathrooms at the Whitney Bank, plucking chickens at the French Market. I told my grandma I had a job in Slidell and stowed away to Cuba. The captain wasn’t very pissed. I think this was something he was used to. Do you realize Havana, Cuba in 1941 was one of the wildest places on earth? Gambling and prostitution and dope all over, and music hipper than anything I’d heard to that day.
I never saw Miss Ida after I left the Scandals. I thought of her often, thought about how strong she was and how she seemed to recognize the worth of my mother. I remember her kindly for that. The years with Miss Ida were my schooling in life. That was an education, man. How many kids get to do that? Meeting diverse people in diverse cities, seeing ways of life you’d never see staying home. New Orleans is a very difficult city to get out of, man. After a while you don’t get out. I was lucky. I left.
WHEN EARL SAYS, “I WAS LUCKY. I LEFT,” he is really referring to two departures: spending the better part of a decade with the Darktown Scandals, and leaving New Orleans for good in 1957, bound for Los Angeles and its handsome recording-session pay. As I wrote in my initial Earl Palmer post of November 5, 2024, “After his departure, Earl was universally admired by the many top-notch New Orleans players who could not find it in themselves to forsake New Orleans’s leisurely, soulful stride for the dog-eat-dog competitiveness of the L.A. studio world.” “If there was a way to sell and bottle ignorance, you could get rich here,” Ellis Marsalis, the patriarch of a great New Orleans musical family, told me in 1997. “There really are no swift thinkers, no fast lanes, and people who have some get-up-and-go about them, they get up and leave. Earl did.”
.“I was born in Cedartown, Georgia,” Ida Cox told The New Yorker’s longtime jazz writer, Whitney Balliett, on April 29, 1961. Cox gives no birthdate; according to various sources, she could have been born anytime between 1888 and 1896. She died in 1967. “When I was fourteen,” she told Balliett, “I ran away and joined a minstrel show, the Black and Tans. I sang blues and ragtime songs, like ‘Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey’ and an old, old one I learned from my brother, ‘Hard, Oh Lord.’ Then I went to the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and the Florida Blossom Minstrels and into vaudeville. Jelly Roll Morton—he was a good-lookin’ light-skinned boy—played for me at the Eighty One Theatre, on Decatur Street in Atlanta, and one of his tunes, ‘Jelly Roll Blues,’ was my first big success. I worked at the Plantation in Chicago with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. Oliver was fat and plain, and almost as homely as I am. After that, I sang in every state in the Union. I had one of the most lovely colored shows on the road [Cox would no doubt be referring to the Darktown Scandals.] A beautiful chorus line! ” (As Earl explains, minstrel shows began long before vaudeville, and the two genres differed widely. I’m not going to go into the details here, but encourage the curious to read Earl’s authoritative account in Backbeat, pp. 27-29.
Clark Terry (1920-2015), a veteran of both the Basie and Ellington orchestras, also put in a ten-year stint on The Tonight Show Band. Terry was not only one of the finest jazz musicians of the later 20th century, but one of the most omnipresent, appearing on more than 900 recordings. To my knowledge, Terry never spoke to another writer about his vaudeville days. His and Earl’s tenures with the Darktown Scandals seem not to have overlapped, although the pair likely crossed paths decades later in one big-band job or another.
Earl is talking about James P. Johnson’s “blatantly risque” composition “My Handy Man.”
From Marshall and Jean Stearns’s deeply researched Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance, 1971 (Macmillan): “For sheer durability, diversity, and flexibility, the thirty-eight year and counting (in 1966) career of The Four Step Brothers takes the prize. They established themselves in the late 1920s as a trio, appearing with Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club. ‘Duke composed “The Mystery Dance” for us,’ says Al Williams, the leader of the act, and Duke Ellington concurs [in 1966], eyebrows raised in astonished recollection as he adds, ‘I wrote it in 1928!’ In addition to the two regulars, Al Williams and Maceo Anderson, several fine dancers passed through the ranks, [including] Prince Spencer, who [was] still with the act in 1966.”