Join us as we return from our summer break to continue with the biographies – this time – the extraordinary Black British composer and performer, Madeline Rossiter.
A contralto singer, performer, male impersonator, tap dancer, dance teacher, choreographer, multi-instrumentalist, theatre director and comedian, as well as a composer and lyricist.
Rossiter toured extensively across the UK, Australasia and South Asia, known professionally as Madeline Rossiter. also performed in UK productions of musicals like the touring production of Rose Marie as Wanda the Mountain Vamp, leading the dance work of the company.
Despite this extensive presence, Rossiter isn’t included in An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre and we were told about her by a reader – we’ve noted several times that we are aware of the vaster history we are gesturing towards. What’s particularly exciting about Rossiter is that some of her music has survived – and there is potentially more in private circulation. In celebration of 135th anniversary of her birth, we’ve researched into her remarkable career and brought together some new information from digitised news sources from the UK and the US.
Very unusually for retracing Black practitioners in the early 1900s-1910s, there is one clear and full biography of Madeline Rossiter’s work written while she was still alive. The November 1954 edition of B.M.G. (Banjo Manadolin Guitar) “The Oldest Established and Most Widely-read Fretted Instrument Magazine in the World” – provides a detailed overview of her career, updating their readers that she was still directing amateur musical theatre productions in Cornwall. Though some details are very unclear, using digitised databases allows us to find a little more about Rossiter, who was by any definition, an extraordinary polymath.
Cornelia Estelle Johnson (b. 29 April 1875, New York – d. 1970, London )
Connie Smith was born in the US in 1875, and lived the majority of her life in the UK after her arrival in 1894. With her partner Augustus ‘Gus’ Smith (who became her husband), she performed touring British theatre as a singer and performer as Smith and Johnson. In later life she worked extensively as a television and film actor.
Stephen Bourne has retraced much of Connie Smith’s extraordinarily expansive career (and an entry for her exists in the Oxford National Biography database). Like many of the performers covered here, the advent of digitised resources allows us to know much more about the breath-taking array of work Smith was involved in from variety theatre, radio, plays, film and television, across sixty years.
When Smith first arrived in Liverpool in July 1894, on the SS Southwark (on the Philadelphia to Liverpool route) her occupation was listed as a ‘minstrel’ performer on the shipping paperwork (which saw her travel with James Johnson – also listed as a minstrel, and could possibly have been her brother, but it is unclear exactly who he was to her).
Tracing her work before 1900 is quite challenging, but as Smith and Johnson they performed extremely widely across the UK. She appears in a bill at the Glasgow Britannia variety theatre in June 1895, which still exists today. They went on to tour towns and cities like Portsmouth, Bristol, Leicester, Woolwich, Liverpool, Nottingham, Brighton, and Manchester. They were primarily advertised as vocalists but occasionally as comedians and even vocal comedians.
One 1897 account of their performance at the London music hall, Foresters notes that they were singing ‘Goodnight Goodbye’, ‘Dora Dean’ and ‘Sailor Boy’. In 1900 they performed alongside Cassie Walmer in the Theatre Royal Stratford production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Bourne notes in his biography of Smith, they were much praised for their singing and cake walk work by 1901.
The Era, July 1906
They clearly had a longstanding attachment to Liverpool, Connie was baptised as a Catholic in May 1902, presumably in order to be married there to Augustus [Gus] Smith shortly thereafter. Together they performed consistently in variety theatre, and increasingly in cinevariety (there are hundreds of accounts and references to their performances in The Era alone), until Gus Smith’s death in 1927.
The report of Gus Smith’s death came in The Stage in January 1927.
In 1927 Smith performed with the Southern Syncopated Singers as part of an act that ran alongside the premiere of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin movie at the London Pavilion. This company included John Payne and Mabel Mercer, and Noble Sissle clearly also had parallel performances at the Pavilion (perhaps in the nightclub) at the same period.
She was part of the London Show Boat company that featured Paul Robeson and Alberta Hunter (and we write about her in reference to that production in An Inconvenient Black History of British MT).
In the early 1930s she was singing at Romano’s Nightclub (as Pep Graham also did) as a quartet with Alexander Lofton, Edward Wallace, and Phil Hanlon, with songs like ‘River Stay Away From My Door’. She performed alongside Elisabeth Welch on the radio in the 1930s. She sometimes wrote updates to African American newspapers to inform readers at home about the successes of Black performers in the UK.
Curiously there are references to Connie Smith in the New York 1935 Cotton Club Parade, which starred Lena Horne and Nina Mae McKinney. There are no references to her that year that appear in the British Newspaper Archive, so it is possible that she went to New York to appear in the show – but there is no way to confirm at the moment. It was not unusual for settled performers to travel back for individual performances, so it is certainly possible. By 1939 she was living alone at 100 Brook Drive, Lambeth, and her occupation was listed as ‘variety and film artiste’.
In 1955, Edward Scobie wrote about her work in the UK for The Chicago Defender under the headline, ‘Septuagenarians Still Active in Foreign Theatres’. In that article he suggested that she had never returned in all the time she had been in the UK. It is difficult to establish whether he was write, given that Connie Smith is a common enough name to make finding her on immigration records exceptionally difficult.
In the UK, Smith was a founding member of the English Stage Company in 1956, where she performed in multiple plays including The Crucible. From this period on she was frequently on television, and her performances were reviewed in US Variety. There is a full film listing for her at the BFI.
Smith died aged 95, and like William Garland, another great figure in the history of Black performers in the UK, she was buried in the Streatham Cemetery area for variety theatre performers.
Announced in The Stage, as a detail when her husband died. The show toured widely across the UK, including small towns like Walsall. The show featured the ‘Franco Boston Syncopators’.
1927
The Lucky Bag
Revue
toured extensively, across smaller theatres like Cannock Hippodrome. Featured the same band as Good Times Coming playing ‘a fanfare of jazz’ so it is presumably related.
1929
The Fun Fayre
Revue
touring company
1930
The P—–y Revels
Revue
Touring variety show production (Essentially a full touring revue)
Unlike many of the practitioners in the book, Dove is thankfully more widely known, and much more has been written about her. So this post will act more as a starting point for research into her extraordinary life and work as a Black British performer. Her performance in the 1948 musical Calypso is featured in An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre 1900-1950 along with a more general overview of her activities.
Dove performed extensively in the UK, right across the country, and there are likely to be theatre programmes that feature her in various local archives. She also performed in Ireland. In 1958, she performed in the Langston Hughes musical Simply Heavenly which opened at the Adelphi theatre in the West End.
The BBC’s Programme Index (previously Genome, which digitised and archived the Radio Times) has extensive coverage of Dove’s many television and radio images. She performed alongside Elizabeth Welch and the celebrated pianist Winifred Atwell. She was also part of the Serenade in Sepia series with Edric Connor.
Zaidee is fairly well known and left behind a substantial recording profile. But her work in the UK is often not so explored – so we’ve uncovered this in more detail here.
About Zaidee’s work in the UK
In 1928 she performed at the Piccadilly Hotel, apparently recommended by a Lord Lathom, the review notes she ‘has charm and versatility, and is especially good in spirituals’ (Daily Mirror 06/06/1928, 11). She was reported as having arrived via Cannes. She broadcast regularly on the radio from London’s radio station from September 1928, often programs of spirituals though she was also described as a ‘[Black] syncopated song artist’. In October 1928 she performed spirituals before a play, Deadlock, though this appears to have been ill received by audiences at the time.
In September 1929 she performed in an all-Black cast variety radio show with Leslie Hutchinson, Williams and Taylor and Jackson and Blake. The radio work seems to have paused as Jackson then went into variety theatre (the Argyle, Birkenhead, Blackpool Palace). In 1930 she then performed in variety across the UK, first in Manchester Hippodrome, and then singing as a vocalist in support of Sir Henry Wood’s concerts at the London Coliseum (January 1930). By March 1930 she was appearing with the tagline ‘the singer from the Southland’, and was singing ‘My Fate is in Your Hands’ in variety. She must have been living or based at John C Payne’s house, as she gave his address for communications. She began broadcasting again in July 1930, though must have departed for Paris at some point fairly soon after this.
Jackson returned to the UK in 1933, now billed as a blues singer in Ballyhoo at the Comedy Theatre (London’s West End). She began broadcasting shortly afterwards. By December 1934 she was performing in Monte Carlo, and appears not to have returned to the UK.
Actor and singer, later film actor, Astwood was born in Florida before he moved to New York as a young man. He was in the UK for a two year period as part of T. Elder Hearn’s production of Blackbirds 1928-9 (the company included Johnny Nit, Anita Edwards, Olive Mendez and Bert Russell). Astwood sang solos and duets with Edwards, who was a white Welsh opera singer.
He briefly went into another Elder Hearn vehicle around Eddie Hunter, Good Gracious, but returned in 1930 after the tour. Before his arrival in the UK, Astwood had been a part of several US all Black cast revues including the Chicago production of Shuffle Along (1924), in Eddie Hunter’s Struttin’ Time (1924, co written with Alex Rogers) Darktown Scandals (1927). When he returned to the US in 1930, Astwood performed in various Harlem theatres, including the Alhambra, the Apollo and at the Cotton Club alongside Duke Ellington. He later appeared in three films Paradise in Harlem(1939), Sunday Sinners (1940), and Murder on Lenox Avenue (1941). He died in Florida in 1994.
The poster for Paradise in Harlem, from Rotten Tomatoes
Sources
British Newspaper Archive, Afro American, Billboard.
Further Reading
Astwood is mentioned in numerous accounts of Black film in the 1940s and in connection with Duke Ellington (e.g. Vail, Ken. Duke’s Diary. Scarecrow Press, 2002) but there is no substantial further material yet written.
Black History of British Musical Theatre 