Dixie

1936 · rif. BK0062 — Rigby Idaho 1936. Illustrated handbill single sheet printed on both sides with three photographic group illustrations on recto and descriptive text verso. 7 ¼ x 5 ¼ inches. Local overprint for a Friday evening performance at the Rigby Stake Tabernacle sponsored by the Rigby Lions Club for the benefit of the drum and bugle corps. Admission fifteen and twenty-five cents. Light toning and scattered spotting with old folds and minor handling wear; very good. An illustrated handbill advertising an appearance by the African American Dixie Jubilee Quartet at the Rigby Stake Tabernacle in Rigby Idaho. The local overprint announces a concert sponsored by the Rigby Lions Club for the benefit of the drum and bugle corps with the quartet appearing at 8 p.m. on Friday November 13 1936. A notice in the Rigby Star of November 5 1936 confirms the engagement at the L.D.S. tabernacle and names the four performers. The reverse identifies James Collins first tenor and soloist; Napoleon Simpson second tenor and soloist; Aramis Fouche baritone and soloist; and Arnett Williams bass and reader. Arthur D. Lawrence is listed as manager with an address on South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. Fouché's later obituary records his work as a singer and manager of the Dixie Jubilee Quartet and notes the group's western touring activity. Under the heading "An Evening of American Folk Lore And The Old Favorites" the advertising describes a program built around plantation songs popular selections comedy and literary recitation while explicitly using the performers' racial identity as part of the appeal: "The peculiar charm of the plaintive Southern Melodies is imperishable. There is nothing so full of genuine sweetness as these old negro songs with all their simplicity and it takes the real negro to sing them as they should be sung. As rendered by the Dixie Jubilee Quartet these old plantation melodies take on new and more interesting charms." The program also included "humorous readings usually taken from Paul Laurence Dunbar's dialect works" with Arnett Williams specifically identified as the group's reader. The front promotes the quartet as "Humorous-Novel-Artistic" "Kings of Harmony" and "The Sweetest Music in All the World" while the reverse closes with the appeal: "What Would You Rather Hear Than A Real Good Harmonizing Colored Male Quartet" Overall a relatively uncommon piece of Western performance ephemera documenting a Black touring quartet in eastern Idaho and preserving the language through which such groups were marketed to white civic and church-hall audiences during the 1930s. . unknown