For his thesis project, my husband is writing in part about the evil ex-lumberjack Jim Carr and the brothel he ran in Harrison, MI. He has learned that many of the girls there did a dancing and stripping act to music. Frankie Osborne was the most famous. This was all around the year 1884.
It’s kind of an interesting question, so I’ve been trying to help him out. Unfortunately, we’ve looked everywhere, and we can’t find out what kind of music they would have danced to. It’s a small detail, but important to get right.
Can anyone help? Are there any specialists in vintage popular or erotic music out there?
Wiki has 1884 in music for the traditional popular stuff. I think there were “folk blues” singers in that time so that might be a possibilty that wouldn’t have been mainstream or considered popular music.
He might do well to locate a Sears-Roebuck mail-order catalogue for that time. Sears was a tremendously important merchandising source for Americans in that era, especially those living far from major cities. Sears had a reputation for selling virtually everything that could possibly be mailed or transported, including entire pre-fab homes. It’s a safe bet they carried sheet music.
Your local strip-tease joint may have had a piano player and/or a clientele with a hunger for drinking songs, polkas, reels & jigs, or what have you that might have too off-color, low-class, difficult to translate or otherwise obscure to have been codified in sheet music and marketed by the likes of Sears… So another research resource would be area ethnic [formerly immigrants’] clubs, aid societies, historical societies, etc. Dunno much about Michigan, but I’m guessing your local German-American [plus Swedish, Norwegian, etc.] cultural orgs would be a good place to start.
What Scrivener said. Talking with some older brass musicians I’ve known, many of them got their start playing for burlesque shows. They would sort of make things up as they went along, like a jazz jam session, but sultry. The time frame you’re looking at is older, but possibly similar.
I did a story on Neil Woodward a few years ago when I was writing for a local newspaper.
He’s “Michigan’s Troubadour by proclamation of the Michigan Legislature,” which sounds pretty lame, but this guy knows a lot about folk music dating back hundreds of years. If anyone would know what kind of music 19th century strippers danced to, it would be this guy.