On September 6, 1924, the Cleveland Gazette announced the arrival of the celebrated black musical comedy Seven-Eleven with a lengthy article that described the veracity of its character portrayals: “The authors of Seven-Eleven have striven to depict the southern ‘Negro’ in the true character, and the cast has been selected with the same point in view.”1 Appearing in the city's daily black newspaper, this story attempted to reassure readers that Seven-Eleven was different from earlier black musicals that had been mired in damaging African American stereotypes. This show, according to the Gazette, was more realistic and honest. Similar claims of realism followed Seven-Eleven throughout its four years on the road as it toured black and later white theatrical circuits. When headlining as the first all-black show on the Columbia Burlesque Wheel, a national theater circuit catering primarily to white audiences, stories attesting to its truthful rendering of African American life became a main selling point on par with its acclaimed music and dancing. By relying on general promises of authenticity to promote the show across racial lines, Seven-Eleven effectively tapped into emerging desires within the largely segregated entertainment industry for up-to-date black cultural products like music, dance, and fashion.Seven-Eleven was among the most popular black musicals of the early 1920s, yet it has largely been forgotten and its significance overlooked in favor of shows like Shuffle Along that dominated the New York City market.2 Although it originated in New York, Seven-Eleven earned its acclaim not on Broadway, but rather through its headlining of national theatrical circuits. While crisscrossing the country, the show made regular stops in what were then important destinations of the Great Migration, communities that in the early 1920s were rapidly undergoing profound cultural changes. The expansion of black populations across the industrial North led not only to the implementation of racist policies but also to a growing curiosity in black culture among white residents—especially youth. It likewise dynamically restructured black communities in many cities, prompting internal debates over racial uplift and issues of identity. Seven-Eleven was responsive to these markets beyond Broadway by building in character types, plot scenarios, and specialty numbers that reflected the new hopes and anxieties of theatergoers it encountered in places like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Its ability to adapt and successfully engage these distinct markets is what kept the show afloat for years.True to its claims, Seven-Eleven incorporated elements drawn from contemporary black life in subtle yet meaningful ways. A tale of migration from a small Mississippi town to the bustling port city of New Orleans sets the story in motion, paralleling the Great Migration narrative that many African Americans in the North had experienced. At its core, Seven-Eleven presents a variant of the “greenhorn” dramatic convention in which a newcomer struggles to make sense of their new surroundings in humorous yet relatable situations.3 Working- and middle-class characters likewise populate the story, reflecting the expanding black middle class in the United States during the 1920s; there is even one character who is newly among the wealthy class after symbolically selling his cotton plantation. As much as these elements distanced the show from the damaging legacy of blackface minstrelsy, Seven-Eleven still presented the nouveau riche character in a burnt cork mask, relied on racist humor, and featured settings and dialect that betray a blackface lineage. Yet for many, these elements conformed to the generic expectations of the time, with many white theatergoers viewing them as signs of authentic black entertainment. As contemporary reviews demonstrate, these audiences missed the narratives of migration and economic uplift and instead latched onto (and praised) the show's minstrel show conventions. By expanding and layering new meaning upon familiar formats and character types, Seven-Eleven was able to captivate racially distinct audiences that—viewing the show through lenses based on individual preconceptions and lived experiences—saw different qualities in this singular production.This complex and potentially dangerous mixing of hackneyed tropes in contemporary dressing complicates the show's claims of offering “true character” portrayals. Yet rather than wading into the uncertain terrain of parsing fact from fiction, this article instead seeks to understand what impulses these claims of authenticity tapped into. In the following pages, I first detail the production history of Seven-Eleven before examining its marketing tactics and reception as it traveled black theatrical networks and later as it crossed over to mainstream white ones. In doing so, I situate the show's narrative themes, musical numbers, and publicity strategies within the growing body of scholarship on race and spectatorship in the entertainment industry. Relying on archival scripts and scores, photographic evidence, advertisements, and press reviews, I demonstrate how crossover black musicals engaged racialized markets by adjusting show formats and advertising campaigns. In the case of Seven-Eleven, the show offered sendups of topics familiar to black theatergoers across the upper Midwest: acclimating to new surroundings, economic hardships, middle-class aspirations, and debates over colorism. Yet when navigating white theatrical circuits, the show fed into the growing white fascination with African American music and dance by promising an “authentic negro comedy” while following the model of earlier black musicals—such as those by Bert Williams and George Walker or Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson—which had succeeded with white audiences through a reliance on minstrel stereotypes.4 This investigation ultimately reveals how Seven-Eleven deftly navigated the crossroads of divergent worlds: between profitable models reliant on racist caricatures and the black consciousness of the emerging Harlem Renaissance; between attempts at entertaining black audiences with relatable material and not alienating potential white theatergoers with content too unfamiliar; and between competing visions of black identity in a moment of cultural transformation.Seven-Eleven followed on the heels of the immensely popular Shuffle Along, which in 1921 took New York City by storm with a 504-performance run. Observing this success, entertainment industry veterans Barrington Carter and Garland Howard joined forces with vaudeville comedy duo Sam Cook and Andrew “Speedy” Smith (Figure 1) to create a show that would entice this same growing market that was hungry for original, black-created entertainment. Knowing that it was destined for the road, Carter and Howard sketched out a simple plot that incorporated some of the new social realities facing northern black communities, particularly in its diverse array of characters and its central concern over money. After cobbling together a dozen or so musical numbers and a cast of talented singers and dancers, the Seven-Eleven troupe held rehearsals in New York just weeks before hitting the road. The show premiered on October 21, 1922, at the Dunbar Theater in Philadelphia—the city's principal black performing venue—to largely positive reviews. As the entertainment critic for Billboard wrote, “It is a pleasing entertainment, with a reasonable plot, full of fun and with good music, well rendered.”5The “reasonable plot” that audiences first encountered at the Dunbar remained mostly unchanged throughout the show's four seasons touring North America from 1922 to 1926. The surviving book for Seven-Eleven, which Howard and Carter submitted for copyright protection in 1923, contains only dialogue and limited stage direction.6 Producers and actors animated this skeletal outline with musical numbers and comedic routines that would periodically change to suit a given audience. The lack of a definitive version is typical of musicals from this era—reflecting what Bruce Kirle has called “unfinished show business”—but by combining the script with the many descriptions found in newspaper reviews, we get a fuller picture of the production and its evolution.7Seven-Eleven comprised two acts and six scenes (though some reviews list up to twelve scenes) that the authors packed with a variety musical numbers and dance styles, including the Charleston, the buck-and-wing, military- and Spanish-style dances, hoedowns, the hoochie-coochie, and a number involving roller skates.8 Although the budget was tight, the production offered four stage settings—two elaborate drapes and two complete sets.9 The show's music, which I treat in greater detail below, largely followed the contemporary practice among musical comedies of repurposing existing compositions. Depending on the engagement or current talent in the lead roles, Seven-Eleven featured between fifteen and twenty-one musical numbers, including vocal solos, duets, and quartets along with ensemble choruses and instrumental features.Although the show's title alludes to a dice game of the same name, the plot actually centers on the foolish, yet lucky, Jack Stovall (Smith), who loses a large sum of money only to win it all back in the end betting on a racehorse named Seven-Eleven.10 Act 1 opens along the levees of New Orleans with the two lead characters disembarking from a steam ship. On their voyage, Hotstuff Jackson (Howard), a dandy-type proprietor of the struggling Needmore Hotel, meets Stovall, a man from Vicksburg, Mississippi, who recently earned a fortune selling his large cotton plantation. With this information, Hotstuff preys upon Stovall's superstitions with the aid of sham Hindu fakir Gunga Din (Carter), convincing him to purchase the hotel and supply back pay to its employees.11 A host of other characters populate the opening act, including a comedic Chinese laundryman named Go Kum (Cook), whose struggle with the English language perpetuates racist stereotypes; Elder Berry (Andrew Fairchild), an old preacher with a gambling problem; and lesser characters such as bellhops, a police officer, and a racetrack bookie named Diamond Joe (Alex Lovejoy).12 Much of Act 2 is a dream sequence in which Gunga Din's crystal ball transports Hotstuff and Stovall to a mythical country called “Zigabooland,” famed for its beautiful women and ferocious cannibals (Figure 2).13 Seconds before their impending demise at the hands of the cannibal king, the two wake from their trance state to the news that Seven-Eleven, the racehorse on which everyone had bet money, won its race. The remaining two scenes, abbreviated in the original typescript, depict the characters boarding a train to Chinatown to celebrate their good fortune and performing an ensemble finale to close out the production (Figure 3).Seven-Eleven reprised many potent and detrimental tropes from blackface minstrelsy that circulated among early black musical comedies. The two leads of the show, Hotstuff and Stovall, are clear descendants of the two most popular blackface minstrel characters: the well-dressed dandy Zip Coon and the simple-minded Jim Crow—the striking presentation of Stovall in blackface and as a drunkard who speaks in the so-called “negro dialect” makes this connection explicit (Figure 4). Hotstuff's dancing additionally recalls the internationally renowned black minstrel Master Juba, who was famous for his energetic dance moves; a critic writing for Variety underscores this connection by describing Hotstuff as “a smooth worker who can dance like a barefooted boy on a steel deck in July.”14 As in the late nineteenth-century minstrel tradition, actors impersonated other races for the sake of humor, including the Hindu fortune-teller and the Chinese laundryman, who, in stereotypical fashion, is unable to pronounce the letter “r.” Aside from character types, Seven-Eleven projected images common to minstrelsy, including the crude primitivism of the cannibal sequence and the depiction of a romanticized South, with mention of cotton plantations and the iconic Steamboat Natchez dominating the stage in the opening scene. Song choice also bears evidence of this legacy through the inclusion of numbers that deride other cultures, such as “Chinky, Chinky Chinaman,” a song based on the racist children's rhyme, and the reprisal of Stephen Foster's minstrel standard “Old Black Joe” (1853).In addition to minstrel holdovers, Seven-Eleven inherited plot elements, character types, and its dramatic structure from earlier black musical productions. In Dahomey (1903), for example, similarly featured a blackface lead, a comic duo modeled on Jim Crow and Zip Coon (Williams and Walker), the inclusion of a comical Chinese character, and the appearance of cannibals from “darkest Africa.”15Darktown Follies (1913) likewise contained themes of urban migration and featured a variety of African American dance forms, ranging from ring shouts to the contemporary “ballin’ the jack” craze.16 Yet it was the success of Shuffle Along that had the greatest impact on the look and form of Seven-Eleven. As many scholars have noted, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along reinstated black-created musicals on Broadway after nearly a decade's absence and went on to inspire dozens of subsequent black productions throughout the 1920s.17 The show similarly featured blackface characters, “Oriental girls,” and even a hotel proprietor as a central character. For the press, the connections were obvious: “[Seven-Eleven is] the logical successor of the No. 1 Shuffle Along Co.”18Much like its contemporaries, Seven-Eleven featured a host of musical styles, from the vocal quartet harmonizing as the curtain rose to the final ensemble number that closed the show.19 Musicals in this era were constantly evolving as they test ran and updated material, and Seven-Eleven was no exception.20 Most of the show's songs were either interpolations from earlier musicals or were popular Tin Pan Alley tunes of the day, yet the production featured a few original numbers that were specific to the narrative. A complete record of the show's music does not appear to survive; however, news reports indicate that several songs originated from cast member Evon Robinson, whose recently deceased husband J. Leubrie Hill had produced and composed for such hit musicals as My Friend from Kentucky (1913) and Darktown Follies.21 The show adopted at least three songs from the latter, including “Lou My Lou,” “Good-by Ragtime,” and “Sure Cure for the Blues.”22 Other interpolated songs include “All Aboard for Chinatown” (1915) by Frank Davis and Win Brookhouse, “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” (1922) by African American songwriting duo Henry Creamer and Turner Layton, and two songs credited to Jelly Roll Morton: “The Animal Ball” (1906) and “Jelly Roll Blues” (1915). Finally, composers wrote at least three songs expressly for the show, including “Zigabooland Glide,” “Zigaboo Lady,” and “High Yellow and a Seal Skin Brown.”23 Songs appearing later in its four-year run include Stephen Foster's “Old Black Joe,” Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's “Ain't-Cha Coming Back, Mary Ann, To Maryland” (1919), and a song by African American composer Marion Dickerson titled “Vampin’ Liza Jane” (1921), which had previously appeared in Irvin C. Miller's 1921 black musical comedy Put and Take.24The show toured with its own instrumental ensemble, about which little is known during the first two years. According to early accounts of the touring personnel, pioneering female orchestra director Marie Lucas headed the ensemble.25 For the show's final two years, Stanley Bennet took charge of the band, which the press occasionally referred to as the “Original Jazz Hounds.”26 Critics across the country applauded Bennet's touring ensemble, which offered “everything from old fashioned clog to modern jazz.”27 The band comprised five members during the 1924–25 season and would play alongside local house orchestras.28 As Seven-Eleven began headlining the Columbia Burlesque Wheel the next season, its band increased in size to twelve: two cornets, four saxophones (three doubling on clarinet and one on violin), bass saxophone or tuba, trombone, banjo, bass, trap set, and piano (Figure 5).29 The show featured other ensembles including the Pan-American Four male vocal quartet, a separate mixed-voice quartet, and the highly lauded “snappy chorus,” numbering between fourteen and twenty-five members.30Despite becoming one of the more popular shows of the 1920s, Seven-Eleven barely survived its initial 1922–23 season. Due to financial setbacks, managerial failings, and intermittent hiatuses, one Billboard critic lamented that Seven-Eleven was “a corking good show without prospects.”31 By April 1923, theatrical producer Robert Levy picked up the show to headline his newly formed Syndicate Attractions Circuit.32 Syndicate Attractions exclusively featured black vaudeville acts and, in its inaugural season, comprised roughly twenty black venues from Boston to Kansas City, Missouri.33 Under Levy's management, Seven-Eleven embarked on a tour of the Midwest, hitting Columbus, Toledo, Cleveland, and finally the famed Grand Theater on Chicago's South Side.34 A rift between the show's creators and Levy spelled the end of the first season, after which the company took up a stock practice at New York's Lincoln Theater to test out new material.35 The next big break came in May 1924, when theatrical firm Hurtig and Seamon signed on as producers and expanded the show's market to include white theaters.36 “Those early days were lean ones,” choreographer Billy Pierce recalled, “it was up to the boys to convince Hurtig and Seamon that they had a real show.”37 Hurtig and Seamon successfully negotiated for Seven-Eleven to star as the first all-black show to headline the Columbia Burlesque Wheel—a partnership that commenced February 1, 1925, and ran through May 1926.38 Throughout its time on the road, Seven-Eleven delighted two distinct markets with what was essentially the same show, yet it engaged somewhat different desires among those audiences.Throughout its first two years touring the North, Seven-Eleven played to enthusiastic black theatergoers in cities marked by Great Migration, such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, and New York City. Audiences in these cities comprised many southern migrants who attended the theater as a respite from work and for a bit of levity amid the difficulties of life in transition. In creating Seven-Eleven, Garland Howard and Barrington Carter reflected back to audiences the changes taking place in these communities, though often in comedic ways that played into both white stereotypes of African Americans and urban black stereotypes of rural migrants. It spoke an insider discourse that borrowed tropes from minstrelsy not to mock but conversely to respond to the real concerns of a new generation of African Americans living in the North. To demonstrate how Seven-Eleven contributed to contemporary dialogues in the black community, this section specifically examines the symbolic importance of the main country rube character, the show's range of class representation, and its themes of racial beauty and colorism that are imbedded in the musical numbers. By contrasting these narrative and lyrical themes with the show's critical reception in the black press, we see how Seven-Eleven connected with black audiences by echoing the familiar struggles of city life for those living through the adjustment of the Great Migration as well as for those just on the other side of it.In many ways, Seven-Eleven is a story of urban migration and the misfortunes of the greenhorn newcomer. As one of the two main characters of the show, Jack Stovall embodies the country rube archetype: he is superstitious, unintelligent, and easily swindled. To underscore his backwardness, Stovall appears in blackface and his manner of speech gives way to comedic misunderstanding and occasional clever word play. Comedic repartee based on the twisting of words’ meanings is a holdover from minstrelsy—traditionally carried out by the “end-men”—and by the turn of the century it had become a staple of the vaudeville stage. Throughout the script, Stovall's humor relies on linguistical confusion; for instance, when he is paying employees of the Needmore Hotel, his misinterpretations and malapropisms drive the comedic banter (Figure 6).A similar situation occurs later, as Stovall finds himself in Zigabooland and confronted by cannibals (which he pronounces “cannon balls”). When they ask how he got there, Stovall responds by holding up his feet and, as he points to them, answers, “And they gwine take me ’way from here too.”40 The dialect and burnt cork mask come from minstrelsy, but urban black audiences could have read past the stereotype, or even within it, to see a rural caricature.In addition to his blackface makeup and exaggerated speech, Stovall also appears as a drunkard. As is typical of this comedic character type, Stovall's imbibing serves as a source of humor, particularly as he tries to seduce one of the Zigabooland maidens. The young woman can only speak in “yips” until Stovall is drunk enough to understand her: Stovall: Oh Honey, you drive me to drink. (Takes bottle out of pocket.) Do you know what dis is? Dis is gin, home made gin, made dat dis morning. Now if I want to make red liquor out of dat, all I got to do is to put a little iodine in it. Now I'm goin to say you a little toast, would you like to hear it?Girl: Yip.Stovall: Yip, Liquor, O liquor, I knows you of old,You've robbed my pockets of silver and gold,You've throwed me down and busted my shin,Bot dog gone your time, I'm goin to try you again. (Drinks)41To augment this drunken display, Speedy Smith added an “inebriated dance” for his character late in the show's second season.42Stovall's exaggerated appearance and speech register just how different he is among his New Orleans counterparts. In this way, he effectively embodies the greenhorn archetype common to immigrant theater, a character whose blunders generate a knowing laughter from audiences who once stumbled themselves while adapting to their new surroundings. The power of the greenhorn derives from its ability to act as a mirror through which audiences can at once identify and distance themselves. Although the show is set in New Orleans, Stovall's status as an outsider ultimately symbolizes the new social realities that many African Americans encountered during the Great Migration—the new fashions, slang, and cultural landscape.43 Not only did the Great Migration pose challenges for those undergoing the journey, but it also dynamically restructured northern black communities, leading to debates within black intellectual circles over issues related to black uplift and identity. Civic leaders discussed openly in the press how to manage such an influx, going into such seemingly trivial detail as physical appearance. A 1917 Cleveland Gazette editorial, for example, urged local officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to “go to the various plants in the city and talk to the newcomers from the south and tell them how to conduct themselves in public places so as to help and not hurt our people of this community.”44 On its surface, then, Stovall's grotesque makeup and dialect connect him to the Jim Crow minstrel character who is routinely mocked for his backwardness, yet when considering that the original audience comprised many southern migrants, the narrative device of the greenhorn offers an alternative reading of these exaggerations and points to the real tensions that were then growing in communities where the show appeared.The otherness of Stovall's physical appearance as well as his dimwittedness not only served as a main source of humor in the show, but, by way of contrast, also helped to legitimize the other black characters as more realistic portrayals of working-class African Americans who were accustomed to fast-paced city life. Additionally, by choosing to represent characters drawn primarily from the service industry—boat stewards, chauffeurs, waitresses, messengers, bellhops, and chambermaids—Seven-Eleven reflected real and important sources of black employment in the early twentieth century. The workers of the Needmore Hotel in particular point to the significant role of the hotel industry as a source of black employment in the 1920s, and due to laws governing segregation, hotels were among the earliest black-owned businesses, which Hotstuff Jackson reflects.45 The authors of the book refrained from making these working-class characters into jokes themselves, but rather depicted them as hardworking, fashionable, and clever. Even bits of dialogue separate these city dwellers from Stovall. Cleo Zell, for instance, whom the script describes as a “jazz baby doll,” uses contemporary slang like “grease my mit” when soliciting money from Stovall.46 As these characters entertained with jokes, singing, and dancing, they represented a range of possible black identities—the greenhorn, the hardworking urban class, the slick business owner—with which audiences across the North might identify.Yet as Seven-Eleven was breaking from the constrictive depictions of African Americans often found in mainstream song and stage, it was also guilty of perpetuating such one-dimensional stereotypes of other races. Sam Cook's high-pitched Chinese character Go Kum and Leigh Whipper's Middle Eastern Gunga Din gained particular attention in the press, despite their clichéd appearance and dialogue: “Sam Cook, the well known Chink impersonator [exhibited] some of the cleverest character work seen here for many a season.”47 And while they were gross ethnic renderings akin to blackface, they lent additional credibility to the other African American characters by serving as exaggerated foils. Like Stovall, Go Kum drew laughter from the audience as a result of his inability to understand or speak English effectively. In fact, the show reserved most of the comedic moments for Stovall and Go Kum, who fumbled their way through dialogue (Figure 7). J. A. Jackson noted this in his review for the Baltimore Afro-American: “Cook and Smith in a Chinese and Negro argument about laundry before a special setting in one was ludicrous.”48 Go Kum's struggle to understand English in effect heightened the humor of Stovall's malapropisms outlined above. By introducing such racist exaggerations as these, Seven-Eleven conveyed a level of normalcy to the rest of the cast. In doing so, the grotesque caricatures diverted the expected racial punchlines away from the working-class characters, allowing audiences to take them seriously and marvel at their sophistication.Because linguistical hijinks played such a prominent role in the renderings of Go Kum, Gunga Din, Stovall, and even the Cannibal King of Zigabooland, the rest of the cast stood out by comparison for their eloquence. Several critics in both the black press and mainstream trade publications made specific mention of the actors’ well-articulated speech. A reviewer for the Chicago Defender, for example, singled out Garland Howard as having “a fluent command of good English.”49 The same author went on to describe the entire company as a collection of “wise actors and actresses who can read lines distinctly and work in scenes like thoroughly seasoned actors.”50 Alfred Nelson, theater critic for Billboard, likewise called out Howard as “a clear-dictioned, classy-attired straight man of light-comedy type.”51 This somewhat unusual commendation of proper pronunciation suggests that the actors of Seven-Eleven possessed a freshness in their portrayals by avoiding the tired “negro dialect” of earlier theatrical tradition. Yet the fact that critics deemed their speech noteworthy taps into deeply rooted racist expectations of African Americans and language. As H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman detail in Articulate While Black, language is inextricably linked to social and racial hierarchies in the United States; when one speaks outside of their expected category, they are either met with shock or ridicule.52 These linguistical strata are what led audiences to laugh at Zip Coon's sophisticated speech in the nineteenth century and are the same principals guiding Stovall's comedic dimwittedness—they both attempt to speak outside of their expected class with fanciful (but incorrect) vocabulary. The actors of Seven-Eleven who received this praise stand at the opposite end of the spectrum and represent an educated urban class that exemplified the tenets of black uplift ideology of the 1920s.53In addition to its depiction of urban migration and class diversity, Seven-Eleven engaged contemporary debates within the black community over colorism and its connection to beliefs of beauty and worth. For Seven-Eleven, the topics of image and status are most evident in what the press frequently described as the show's best specialty number: Speedy Smith's performance of “High Yellow and a Seal Skin Brown.”54 The song debates what type of women are the most beautiful and vacillates between “high yellow” and “seal skin brown,” which are terms that emerged in the nineteenth century to describe black people with light- and medium-brown complexions, respectively. According to the sociologist JeffriAnne Wilder, the contentious term “high yellow” “represents an internal bias within the African American community that places value on individuals with lighter skin.”55 The stratification of color with correlative value extends back to the antebellum period, at a time when enslaved peoples with lighter skin tended to receive domestic servant work indoors, while those with darker skin labored