Irving Jones

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Jones was born in New York City in 1873 and began his stage career as a child.^[1] While still a teenager, he began working with Sam T. Jack's Creole Show during their first tour in 1890. That same year he married his wife Sadie, who also performed with the Creole Show.^[2]

The Creole Show broke with the old plantation show format and introduced new urban elements. In the show, Jones composed and sung his own songs and performed comic monologues. His song and dance numbers like Postman reflected the new cosmopolitan sensibility of African-American vaudeville performance .^[3] In his early years, he was known mostly as a comic and was described as "a charming hustler" who expertly took charge of the craps games on the Creole Show's railroad sleeping car.^[2]

Shortly after Jones began his show business career, "coon songs" exploded in popularity. These songs, the first to be labeled ragtime, were written in 2/4 time, with a four bar intro, two bar vamp, followed by two or three verses and a sixteen bar chorus. Written and performed by both Black and White performers, often in Blackface, they used the derogatory term "coon" in their lyrics to refer to Black people. They relied on earlier Minstrel stereotypes of Black people as gaudy and ignorant, but added new stereotypes of violence and licentiousness. Watermelon, chicken, and razors were often mentioned.^[5][6] For Black performers, said one historian, it was "the classic situation of blacks donning the white-defined mask of blackness, using the racial conventions of mainstream entertainment to gain public recognition."^[7]

These songs were initially hugely popular among younger white audiences in Northern cities, though less so with older Southern whites. They also found favor with some African-Americans who appreciated their pointed humor and boisterous anger, compared to earlier, more sentimental minstrel songs.^[8] Black songwriters used the genre to add irony as well as political and social commentary, and black audiences understood some of the double meanings in the songs in a way that most whites didn't.^[8][6][7] Other Black critics and composers, however, lamented and lambasted the rise of the coon song genre and its use of derogatory language and negative stereotypes.^[9][10]

Jones "wrote coon songs exclusively" and "rode the fad until its demise."^[2] He got his songwriting start in 1894, when he wrote and performed a parody of a popular ballroom dance, which he called The Possumala Dance. He performed the song during his comedy routine with the Creole Show. This was the first song he sold. The song was picked up by fellow performer Ernest Hogan and rewritten as Pa Ma La, which became wildly successful.^[5][2]

With the introduction of published sheet music in the 1890s, the syncopated ragtime rhythms created by African-Americans went mainstream, and Jones' songs and lyrics were printed by Tin Pan Alley publishers and sold in multiple copies.^[11] "Take Your Clothes and Go" and the answer song, "Let Me Bring My Clothes Back Home", published in 1898, became hugely popular as they were picked up by other performers, black and white, on the minstrel show circuit.^[9] "Take Your Clothes and Go" sold 100,000 copies of sheet music in two years.^[5]

In 1895-1897 Jones joined Isham's Octaroons company.^[2] Coon songs were reaching the zenith of their popularity in the late 90s; Jones rode the wave,^[2] selling his songs for $50 to $100 each to different publishers.^[12] Despite the popularity of his songs, Jones could not read or write music and "probably lost more songs than he sold" to white song publishers who frequented the clubs where Black songwriters were performing and stole their songs.^[5]

In 1898, Jones was invited to perform for Gussie Davis's Darkest America, where he introduced another hit song, "Get Your Money's Worth". By 1899, he had sold about 20 songs to more than a dozen publishers, including "Give me back my clothes," "If They Fought the War with Razors", and "I'm Living Easy."^[2]

In 1900, Jones signed on with the traveling Black Patti Troubadours and released "My Money Never Gives Out". He followed that up with another sale, "I'm a Ragtime Millionaire", which had one of the first lyric references to "having the blues" in any song.^[2] Also in 1900, he played the leading role in a short-lived operetta called "Jus Lak White Fo'ks" by Will Marion Cook and Paul Laurence Dunbar.^[13] He also started his own Vaudeville Act, "Irving Jones and Charley Johnson, Two Cut-Ups" later adding his wife Sadie in "Jones, Grant and Jones." Jones sang "Home Ain't Nothing Like This" in New York in 1902. The song became another hit and was sung again by Ernest Hogan.^[2]

Jones wrote his last song, called "I've Lost My Appetite for Chicken", in 1904. In 1908, a song he had written earlier, "Under the Chicken Tree", was his last publication.^[5] By the early 20th century, both black and white audiences were beginning to reject the term "coon songs, but Jones' comedy and songs continued to be popular into the 1920s. One critic said that white performers hated having to compete with him on the same bill.^[9] He had a "chesty boisterous" onstage persona, but was described as shy with self-deprecating humor in person. He lived to see some of his songs not only get reproduced but become some of the most popular on the Race Records of the 1920s.^[2] Unfortunately, since he had sold his songs piecemeal, he never received any royalties for the recordings.^[12]

Jones stayed active as a comedian until his death on March 9, 1932, in New York City.^[1]