Tuning
Up Autumn 2023
Queen of the Castle
Looking
for Mama Lou, the legendary singer whose work helped inspire American ragtime
By Eric McHenry | September 5,
2023
https://theamericanscholar.org/queen-of-the-castle/
The American Scholar magazine published by Phi Beta Kappa/Autumn 2023 issue
……………………………
One
evening in the early 1890s, after giving a concert in St. Louis, the Polish
pianist Ignacy Paderewski asked his friend George Johns whether the city had
“anything novel, anything out of the ordinary, a trifle bizarre” by way of
nightlife. Johns hustled him over to the Castle Club, an opulent bordello run
by Babe Connor. There, a dozen beauties danced “in little more than stockings”
while a blind pianist played and a Black woman named Mammy Lou belted out bawdy
songs. Paderewski was especially taken by one number, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.”
“He went to the piano and asked her to sing it again and again,” Johns’s son
wrote in a memoir. “In a season or two the song, like many others that
originated with Mammy Lou, got into vaudeville by way of some manager who
visited Babe’s, and became a sensation.”
Johns’s
timeline may be slightly off—“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” had already debuted on the
vaudeville stage by the time Paderewski first visited St. Louis. But there’s no
question that Mama Lou (as she is more commonly remembered) had been performing
the song for years by then. Henry Sayers, who published “Ta-ra-ra” under his
own name in 1891, talked openly of having first heard it at Babe’s.
If
the history of American popular music were itself a song, the theft of Black
melodies by white opportunists would be the refrain. But there may never have
been an artist more serially or consequentially stolen from than Mama Lou. Many
experts believe that she was the source not only of “Ta-ra-ra” but also of “A
Hot Time in the Old Town,” a song so popular during the Spanish-American War
that Europeans mistook it for the U.S. national anthem, as well as May Irwin’s
“Bully Song” and several other ragtime-era smashes. And yet, Mama Lou remains a
half-mythical figure—unrecorded, unphotographed, and only barely present in the
documentary record. Until now, even those most invested in her story didn’t
know that her real name was Louise Rogers.
……………….
Eric McHenry is a poet and critic whose work has
appeared in The Yale Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Book
Review, and The Threepenny Review. He teaches creative writing at
Washburn University and is a former poet laureate of Kansas.
