(The setup for this scene: the boys have just arrived, via stagecoach, in an old Wild West town. They’re there with a purpose; before pursuing it, though, they turn to head into the saloon. And that’s where they encounter the Avalon Boys Quartet, arrayed on the wooden porch as though to formally welcome L&H to town.)
My fondness for Laurel and Hardy stems, no doubt, from memories of watching their films with my father. He would have been twelve or thirteen years old at the time Way Out West made its way to the little theater in Dad’s hometown — an age which has always been one of my own favorites. Their style of comedy — gentle slapstick, silly (albeit cleverly written) dialogue, preposterous situations — occupies no solid ground in our century’s cynical, noisily worrisome landscape; but if you can simply relax long enough to watch what’s onscreen without judging it from a steely 21st-century perspective, and listen to their soft-spoken banter and “arguments,” you may find that all the allegedly important stuff of life suddenly seems less so.
David Wagoner’s poem “For Laurel and Hardy on My Workroom Wall” is about a nearly identical scene in a different — later — film of theirs, The Flying Deuces. But it perfectly captures, for me, the soul of their comedy — of their art — as expressed in this scene: “Their arrival/Will mark a new beginning of meaningless/Hostilities with a slaphappy ending. In a moment,/They’ll hear music, and as if they’d known all along/This was what they’d come for, they’ll […] move their feet/With a calm, sure, delicate disregard/For all close-order drill and begin dancing.” The whole poem is here, and I reproduced it (with a clip of the scene) in a whiskey river Fridays post in 2011.
When I first thought of doing a post about this scene, my mind — not yet relaxed, you see — immediately leapt to a brief series I ran here in 2015, Those Happy-Go-Lucky Poor Folks. Laurel and Hardy, after all, are classics of the tramp-as-comic-figure type: the pants with holes in their knees, the shoes with holes in their soles, the dusty hats. Without damaging its joke, Norman Rockwell’s 1928 Post cover (at the right) could have featured one of them, rather than an anonymous bum.
But I had second thoughts about that — familiar second thoughts, explaining why I eventually stopped posting to a series which might have gone on for quite a while: who the heck was I to sneer at the pleasures which simple music might bring to folks with simple, “unsophisticated” lives?
So I relaxed. And enjoyed, a few times. (And shared with siblings, who I knew would also be reminded of Dad.)
But then I started thinking of the song itself, rather than of Laurel and Hardy…
At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, America still — a half-century after the events leading up to the US Civil War — had a lot of pent-up, unresolved anxiety about what is still often called “race relationships.” Everyone seemed tacitly to have decided it would simply be best if white folks lived here, and black folks lived there.You couldn’t call it a truce, even an uneasy one (although it had some of the characteristics of one). It was just a postponement — a forestalling of the inevitable. If there’s one thing you can say about people, after all, it’s that people in Place A simply can’t help yearning for the things of those in Place B.
Of course, in a place like New York City — even in the early 1900s — keeping one group of people apart from another never lasts very long. Specifically, in the short period of time between, say, 1910 and 1915, suddenly downtown Manhattanites woke up to miracles of music and dance taking place among their uptown Harlem counterparts.
Pinpointing “the” moment when it happened is impossible. But it closely tracked the emergence of a black impresario — and composer, conductor, actor, singer, and producer — named J. (for John) Leubrie Hill. In 1911, he and his partners staged My Friend from Dixie, a “musical comedy in 3 acts” (so described in the show’s registered copyright). After some time touring, and retooling, My Friend from Dixie re-emerged (after a run at a couple of downtown locations) at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem in 1913 as My Friend from Kentucky. (Its copyright entry, on the same page as My Friend from Dixie‘s, adds the detail that it was in five scenes as well as three acts, and the script’s page count had gone up as well. You can read a couple of contemporary, complimentary but admittedly wince-inducing reviews, here: the Indianapolis Freeman (November 1, 1913); The Theatre Magazine (Volume 19: 1914); and Neale’s Monthly (January, 1914).)
One source describes My Friend from Kentucky‘s finale like this:
…the whole company formed an endless chain that passed before the footlights and behind the scenss, round and round, singing and executing a movement from a dance called “ballin’ the jack.”
That number? “At the Ball, That’s All.” (More less full lyrics here, including an intro verse which doesn’t appear in the Avalon Boys’ performance.)
As you can see from the lyrics reproduced over the video above, the lyrics are a clever intertwining of sense and rhythm, naturally suited to multiple voices — like dancers — in complex synchrony. Also of interest the catalog of dance names and movements embedded 
therein… commence advancing, start a-prancing, right and left a-glancing, ragtime moochee dancing, slide and glide entrancing, tango jiggle and a Texas Tommy wiggle…
Reports of the show’s popularity made their way to the ears of Florenz Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld thereupon acquired the rights to include a few of Hill’s numbers in the 1914 edition of his Follies, including “At the Ball, That’s All.” Characteristically — not just for Ziegfeld, but for white cultural appropriators of black music generally — the Follies version was ridiculously “whited up” — and evidently not much of a hit at all. While we have no direct recordings of the song in its Harlem show, it’s not hard to imagine a rendition in the spirit of the Avalon Boys’ interpretation, subordinating the performers to the music. Ziegfeld’s version — also unavailable as a “live” recording — probably came pretty close to this number, by a (white, of course) tenor/bass duo named Harry Tally and Harry Mayo, as inscribed on a wax cylinder in 1915:
If you really want to read about the place of “At the Ball, That’s All” in Ziegfeld’s show, you can browse the numerous mentions of it here. But you know what I’m thinking, don’t you? Right — I’ll stick with the presumed J. Leubrie Hill original, the Avalon Boys’ follow-up, and — of course — with Laurel and Hardy.
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P.S. J. Leubrie Hill’s My Friend from Kentucky introduced yet another song to the popular music repertoire, the influence of whose title and spirit, if not its precise lyrics and tune, still speaks to songwriters: “Rock Me in the Cradle of Love.” For reference, I point you to Dee Dee Sharp (1965), Freda Payne (1971), Deborah Allen (1993), and — very recently — a performer identified as LX Skye (2018). And since I’m feeling generous, I’ll also direct you to a song from 1919… by Eubie Blake.
P.P.S. …and, to return for a moment to “At the Ball, That’s All,” here’s contemporary bluegrass master Tim O’Brien‘s sympathetic banjo rendering, joined in the vocals by Jan Fabricius:
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