Butterbeans and Susie

Butterbeans and Susie were a comedy duo made up of Jodie Edwards (1895-1967) and Susie Hawthorne (1896-1963). Edwards began his career in 1910 as a singer and dancer. Meanwhile, Hawthorne performed in African American theater. The two met in 1916 when Hawthorne was in the chorus of the Smart Set show. They married on stage the next year.

The two did not perform as a comic team until the early 1920s. They had been touring with the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA) with a black husband-and-wife comedy team known as Stringbeans and Sweetie May. Upon the death of Stringbeans (Butler May or Budd LeMay), a TOBA promoter asked Edwards to take the stage name "Butterbeans" and for him and his wife to take over Stringbeans and Sweetie May's act. "Butterbeans and Susie" appeared for the first time shortly thereafter.

Their act, a combination of marital quarrels, comic dances, and racy singing, proved very popular on the TOBA tour. They later moved to vaudeville and appeared for a time with the blackface minstrel troupe the Rabbit's Foot Company. Butterbeans and Susie published several recordings of blues songs interspersed with comic banter through Okeh Records. They later starred in a black-produced feature film.

Butterbeans and Susie used their fame and influence to help younger black comedians. After seeing Moms Mabley in Dallas, for example, they helped her gain acceptance at better venues. Even after leaving show business, they stayed friends with many black entertainers and put up down-on-their-luck comedians in their Chicago home. Stepin Fetchit stayed with them at some point in the 1950s or 1960s.

Comedy act

Butterbeans and Susie's act played up the differences between the two. Susie wore elegant dresses and presented an air of composure and sexiness. Butterbeans, on the other hand, played the fool, with his too-small pants and bowler hat, bow tie, tails, and floppy shoes. He was loudly belligerent: "I'd whip your head every time you breathe; rough treatment is exactly what you need."^[1] However, his pugnaciousness was belied by a happy demeanor and an inability to resist Susie's charms.

Whereas Stringbeans and Sweetie May stressed song and dance, Butterbeans and Susie emphasized comedy with content that was frowned on by moralist.^[2] The typical act featured a duet, a blues song by Susie, a cakewalk dance, and a comedy sketch. Short bouts of bickering peppered the act. The humor often centered on marriage or, more rarely, black life in general. One of their more popular numbers was "A Married Man's a Fool If He Thinks His Wife Don't Love Nobody but Him". The act could also be risqué at times. One of their more popular comic songs was Susie's saucy "I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll", full of racy double entendres:

I want a hot dog without bread you see.

'Cause I carry my bread with me.

. . .

I want it hot, I don't want it cold.

I want it so it fit my roll.^[3][2]

The song was accompanied by Susie's provocative dancing and Buttberbeans's call-and-response one-liners: "My dog's never cold!" "Here's a dog that's long and lean."^[3] "I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll" was one of the few songs that Okeh Records refused to release.

The act usually ended with a song by Susie that showed that the two really were happily married, then Butterbeans's trademark song-and-dance number, "the Heebie Jeebies" or "the Itch". During this dance, Butterbeans thrust his hands in his pockets and began to scratch himself in time with the music. As the tempo increased, he pulled the hands back out and scratched the rest of his body. According to Stearns, this was the moment when the audience "flipped".^[4]

Notes

1. ^ Watkins 389.
2. ^ ^{a b} Fox, Ted (1983). Showtime at the Apollo. Da Capo. pp. 92–93. ISBN 0-647-01612-2. 
3. ^ ^{a b} Quoted in Watkins 376.
4. ^ Stearns (1966). Southern Folklore Quarterly. Vol 30: 228-9. Quoted in Toll 377.

References

• Watkins, Mel (1994). On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor. New York: Simon & Schuster.