September was “Karnival” month in Topeka, Kansas and the 1897 “Karnival Krewe” was staging a “monster” festival. To ensure everyone could join in the theme song, a local paper published the lyrics of “A Hot Time in the Old Town, Tonight.” “If you don't know the tune, go out on the street and you will hear it; you won't hear anything but the tune, for nearly everyone is whistling it.”Footnote 1
The writer was hardly exaggerating. Between 1896 and 1903, “A Hot Time in the Old Town” was head and shoulders America's favorite song. From the rat-a-tat-tat of the snare drum's opening to the refrain's infectious hook, the ragtime march grabbed the popular imagination and refused to let go – it became the official and unofficial anthem for just about everything. People knew it as a sassy “coon” shout, a minstrel march, a victory anthem, a battle song, and a patriotic air. It proclaimed the optimism of a proud, ascendant nation; the muscular factionalism of machine politics; and rites of red-blooded masculinity. The melody heralded triumph over Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, and glory in the Battle of San Juan Hill. For black Americans, “A Hot Time” shouted the birth of Booker T. Washington's New Negro and murmured white cultural theft. For white supremacists, the refrain cackled the expectation of racial deference and the gruesome pageantry of lynching carnivals. In the newly acquired territories, troops whistled the tune as they crushed an independence rebellion and penciled in a global color line. Filipinos preferred to play the song in funeral marches, to accompany the migration of the soul from one world to another.
For historians, “A Hot Time in the Old Town” affirms Stuart Hall's theory of cultural repurposing: a single tune with a constant refrain invested with shifting meanings that circulated in a double movement of containment and resistance.Footnote 2 For anthropologists, “A Hot Time” functions as a cultural artifact that reflects, creates, and even defines the zeitgeist, revealing stories about collective experience, emotions, relationships, and ideas.Footnote 3 For scholars charting commodity supply chains, “A Hot Time” serves as a cultural product that flows through local knowledge systems, and economic and political networks to uncover otherwise masked connections.
At once rooted in a specific musical tradition and yet rootless and portable, “A Hot Time” wafted through the air, indifferent to social, geopolitical, and legal divisions. Yet listeners received it as a fixed entity endowed with a set of ideas that promoted group identification, even action. In short, “A Hot Time” was their anthem – that special category of song that validates systems of belief and mediates people's relations “to one another, to space, to our histories and historical moment,” as musicologist Shana Redmond has listed in her study of civil rights anthems.Footnote 4
Chronicles of popular songs name “A Hot Time” as a work of “historical significance,” a melody “indelibly linked” to the Progressive Era.Footnote 5 Despite these credentials, this anthem does not qualify as a popular song that “unit[ed] and shap[ed] a nation,” as determined by historians Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw.Footnote 6 For as much as “A Hot Time” united, so it divided; as much as it affirmed American exceptionalism, so it unsettled it. If anthems can “make” a nation, movement, or generation, then “A Hot Time in the Old Town” “made” a paradox, or at least revealed the paradoxical norms, codes of behavior, and ways of being that shaped the Progressive Era.
Since the 1970s, scholars have grappled with the paradox of American exceptionalism as an animating force in the nation's story. Large-scale studies have tracked the phenomenon across decades, even centuries, to explain a uniquely American experience of race, capitalism, and global influence.Footnote 7 This microhistorical investigation into the ritual and representational power of “A Hot Time” follows the creation of a paradox across a narrow slice of time to uncover how different groups of Americans navigated slippages, ambiguities, and absurdities to articulate a distinctive national identity.
The enormous appeal of “A Hot Time in the Old Town” was not hard to understand – although its origins were harder to discern. The propulsive beat was “hot,” just as the title said, infused with the displaced rhythms of ragtime. It was striking enough to intrigue white listeners without straying too far from a familiar march in four-four time. The lyrics, enunciated in a “black” “southern” dialect, were fanciful, following a swag of townsfolk parading through the streets in their finery, heading for the church, anticipating the moment of spiritual deliverance:
A seamless mix of the sacred, secular, and sexual, the song captured the mood of fin de siècle America – upbeat, optimistic, and more than a little preoccupied with masculinity. “You must be my man, or I'll have no man and all,” Miss Johannah Beasley advised her sweetheart in a later verse, the only time the lyrics slipped from the second person to the first.
Musicologist Donald Johns has suggested that the song's elusive alchemy lay in its exaggerated emphasis on the tonic chords that dominated the first twelve bars of the chorus. The shift to the dominant chord on the hook line relieved the tension, rousing the gathered not just to sing, but to holler: “There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight.”Footnote 9 The rhythmic force behind the word “hot” called for a short sharp exhalation that reached beyond the singer's belly into the bloodstream of what Ronald Radano has called the “dialectics of racial ideology in an emerging modern era.”Footnote 10 For white America's embrace of the “hot” black beat in the 1890s – a mix of ragtime, “coon” songs, and cakewalks – coincided with the rise of an economic juggernaut and the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation. “Negro themes,” for instance, brightened John Phillip Sousa's stirring tributes to liberty and flag, as Tin Pan Alley songs centered on razor-wielding “coons” lusting after white privilege.Footnote 11 The “hot” in “A Hot Time” was, at once, undeniably modern, quintessentially American, and unspeakably black – a schism papered over by the “all join in” lyrics and an origin story about a white minstrel song.Footnote 12
The popular press repeated endlessly the fable of the song's conception. One day, Theodore Metz, the German-born bandleader with the McIntyre and Heath Minstrels, was traveling through a black section of New Orleans known as “Old Town.”Footnote 13 From the train window, he witnessed the drama of a house fire. When a fellow minstrel hooted, “They'll be a hot time in the old town tonight!”, Metz sensed the makings of a fine song, which he published in 1886. Ten years later, he commissioned composer Joe Hayden to add lyrics.Footnote 14 A Chicago publisher protested, claiming to represent a white composer with “an exact transcript” but “different words,” although once he and Metz's New York publisher nutted out an arrangement, no one else challenged Metz's credit as composer.Footnote 15 A vaudeville star then launched it on the New York stage, aided, as Metz later admitted, by “fifty colored boys” planted in the crowd to chime along to the chorus.Footnote 16
The song met instant success. In 1896, “A Hot Time” opened almost every minstrel show in New York while black dance orchestras and marching bands took up the song with gusto.Footnote 17 Audiences everywhere loved “A Hot Time” but the cheers rang loudest in the segregated gallery.Footnote 18 The white press never asked why black audiences claimed the song as their own and the black press never cared to explain.
That year, all three candidates in New York's mayoral election turned to the tune. Each rewrote the lyrics to denounce their opponents, glorify themselves, and reflect on the nature of falsehood and corruption, often in a caricatured black voice.Footnote 19 “Tired of politics that's manufactured by machine … gwine to make a dispensation that they know is clean,” ran the campaign song of Henry George's Jefferson Democracy Party. Republican candidate General Charles Tracey espoused the virtues of solidarity and clean living: “We will vote in a body for our party candidate / And every true Republican will cast his ballot straight.”Footnote 20 Tammany Hall Democrat Robert van Wyk lambasted the “sham reform” of the Raines Law, the liquor tax that closed saloons on Sundays: “Hayseed rule must quickly pass away / No dictation from any country Jay.”Footnote 21
Henry George did not get the “landslide in the new town that night,” dying of a heart attack days before the election.Footnote 22 Instead, the “Tammany Tiger” roared, sweeping to victory up and down the ticket. Across New York City, tumultuous crowds took to the streets chanting “A Hot Time,” capping the verse with a delirious “Oh Tammany!”Footnote 23 As one reporter observed, “There was a hot time in the old town last night and no mistake. Tammany had won and Tammany celebrated. Nothing like it has been seen here. From City Hall to Harlem, there was a howling, shrieking mob. In the Bowery and on the East Side, joy reigned supreme.”Footnote 24 One disgusted reformer predicted a “hot time” in the City Hall assembly rooms over the next four years.Footnote 25 Another anticipated that the song title would be a “password” to the 35,000 appointive offices to be handed out by the mayor – or the man behind the mayor, Tammany Hall's president, “Boss” Richard Croker.Footnote 26 For the defeated, “A Hot Time” signaled a lack of moral restraint, the abuse of power, and the corruption of democracy. But mostly, New York's spontaneous “jag of joy” established “A Hot Time” as the people's victory anthem. They had vanquished the political forces that sought to regulate their leisure time and social pleasures.Footnote 27 The “old town” would be “wide open” again.Footnote 28
By 1897, the bright optimism of “A Hot Time” rang on stages, streets, and sports fields across the country, celebrating everything from Emancipation Day to corn harvests and football touchdowns.Footnote 29 One band promised to play it “247 times,” another every fifteen minutes.Footnote 30 As one reveler declared, the song captured the spirit of “a jostling, yelling, horn-blowing mass of good-natured, happy humanity.”Footnote 31 People adapted the lyrics to fit all occasions: sixty-five Omaha real-estate men howled it to spruik their “Dream city.”Footnote 32 A Salvation Army version fired up the soul.Footnote 33 A rude take had “Old Aunt Sally sneak[ing] out into the shed” for a roll in the straw.Footnote 34 The list went on. The song belonged to the people – inclusive, elastic, uplifting – a quintessentially American way of expressing the collective pursuit of happiness.
And, all too often, it was the rowdy and immoderate pursuit of happiness. Just as the exuberant spirit of Topeka's monster Karnival spilled over into “bedlam,” so the phrase a “hot time” signaled the passions of excess. Granted, the term “hot time” had been in circulation as early as the 1850s but, as digital data visualization graphs confirm, usage soared after the song burst into public consciousness as tens of thousands of newspaper headlines invoked the catch-cry.Footnote 35 A poker game shootout in the Klondike; a cranium cracking row in Nansemond County, Virginia; swaggering street toughs in Bonneville Illinois all fell under the banner of “hot time.Footnote 36 A widely published story in 1898 about a pipe organ wheezing out “A Hot Time” and soon after combusting into flames roused few suspicions.Footnote 37 A poetic truth, if not a literal one, made it possible.
The tune was a fixture of political pageantry at every level of government.Footnote 38 No other song captured the blood sport that was American political life – especially when rivalry within a party exceeded the animus between parties. Typical was the proceedings of the 1897 Union Republican State Convention in Wilmington, Delaware:
Of course, the delegates hollered along to the chorus. Or let out a “general laugh,” as they did at a Democratic State convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, knowing that a “battle royal” was to come.Footnote 40 And several hours later, when “pandemonium” and “absolute disorder” erupted on the conference floor, the band played “A Hot Time” again. “Chairman Doherty pounded the desk until he splintered his gavel and the walls reverberated with howls, curses, [and] catcalls,” wrote one delighted reporter.Footnote 41
Similar tales unfolded in conference halls across the nation.Footnote 42 Bandmasters pumped out “A Hot Time” as delegates stormed the stage, or punched their rivals, or accused each other of voter fraud.Footnote 43 The melody announced the arrival of a preferred nominee, or underscored a firebrand's speech, or bade farewell to the bolters as they departed the assembly room.Footnote 44 “Hot times” raged between “silverites” and “goldites,” saloonists and prohibitionists, the patrician “swallowtails” and the proletariat “overalls.”Footnote 45 Or registered a barefaced struggle for power, the clubhouse “gangs” fixed on snaring victory by means foul and fair.Footnote 46
“The general prophecy concerning today's battle is in the words of a current song ‘They'll Be a Hot Time In the Old Town, Tonight,’ which seems to have been invented expressly to fit the present state of political affairs in the county seat of Westchester,” noted a New York newspaper on election day.Footnote 47 The song conjured the grit of a winner-takes-all clash. This was a game where the victor savored, even abused, the triumphant pleasures of trouncing their opponent. Magnanimous, it was not. As such, “A Hot Time” conjured both unity and division, the oneness of “us” versus the otherness of “them.”
The explosion that sank the US battleship Maine in Havana harbor in February 1898 catapulted “A Hot Time” into new territory. Hundreds of sailors perished in the tragedy and, in the search for answers, media baron William Randolph Hearst famously (and falsely) fingered a Spanish torpedo. “Remember the Maine,” ran his tabloid's war cry. As Congress deliberated on the evidence – or dragged their heels, as Hearst newspapers insisted – vaudeville performers enlisted “A Hot Time” into a medley of national airs to kindle jingoism and stoke anti-Spanish sentiment.Footnote 48 “The old patriotic anthem of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ has, at last, received a mate,” cheered one Chicago newsman.Footnote 49 The sing-along refrain smoothed over the complexities of a US military intervention in an existing war between Cuban rebels and imperial Spain. Instead, the song's associations with youthful exuberance and triumphant victory advanced an easy-to-digest narrative. America had been dishonored. Only a duel-like “hot time” could crush the enemy and restore the nation's standing.
By early April, the stirring strains of “A Hot Time” set “the confident stride of an invading army.” “Practically every band” played it, declared one memoir.Footnote 50 A New Yorker recalled “vast throngs” roaring the refrain “at the top of their voices” as hometown regiments quickstepped through the streets.Footnote 51 An Ohioan told of eight thousand soldiers whistling the tune as they marched out of camp.Footnote 52 At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, six hundred marines howled a verse on news they were about to sail for Cuba.Footnote 53 Regimental bands could be heard “banging out ragtime music” as a naval flotilla left the Long Island Sound. “It has been a most happy-go-lucky expedition, run with real American optimism,” enthused one embedded reporter.Footnote 54
“A Hot Time” sounded a royal flush of American victories on the battlefield.Footnote 55 “The song by which we conquered the Spanish,” read one soldier's letter.Footnote 56 In the Pacific theatre of war, US sailors sang about making “the Spaniards cuss and damn” once they “hit that good old town of Guam.”Footnote 57 Infantrymen heard the tune throughout the Battle of Manila: as they bundled into transport boats, marched along the shoreline, faced the “hail of lead,” and raised the Stars and Stripes over Manila.Footnote 58 “A Hot Time” “sent a thrill to everyone,” recalled a bandleader.Footnote 59 “There was something prophetic in it, and the air struck home.”Footnote 60 In Cuba, Shafter's army struck up a “mighty chorus” as they landed at Daiquiri.Footnote 61 It rang on warship bridges as naval forces seized Santiago harbor.Footnote 62 On news of Spain's surrender in early July, soldiers wailed it “from one end of the line to the other.”Footnote 63 “The boys in the trenches wouldn't cheer for any other tune.”Footnote 64 “A Hot Time” was “defiant, full of hope, prophetic, American in its flippant, reckless, slangy dash,” an officer told the press.Footnote 65
The battle song was an inextricable part of many foot soldier's “crowded hour,” presiding over countless expressions of unity, of people “getting happy” in the church of the American nation. But nowhere did the “ding ling ling” of triumph ring louder than on San Juan Hill when Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, in a burst of derring-do, led his Rough Riders and members of four black regiments in a deadly frontal assault on Spanish entrenchments. As Roosevelt told the press, black and white troops were so “absolutely intermingled” it was impossible to know “who came forward with greater freedom to offer up their lives for their country.”Footnote 66 With little regard to race, war correspondents conjured “hardy” American soldiers charging up El Caney, spurred on by the ever-distant strains of “A Hot Time.”Footnote 67 In the euphoria that followed, survivors bellowed out the song over and again. Both the Rough Riders and Tenth (colored) Cavalry adopted it as their anthem.Footnote 68
More than a military victory, the Battle of San Juan Hill reified the transformative power of a different type of battle.Footnote 69 The 1890s was a period of political defeat for African Americans: southern states had begun disenfranchising black voters and racial segregation had been sanctioned by the highest court in the land. Military service in Cuba offered black men an opportunity to undermine the tenets of white supremacy and advance civil rights.Footnote 70 At political rallies in support of the invasion, black orators had linked Spanish colonialism to American slavery and Presidents McKinley to Lincoln.Footnote 71 The Cuban rebel army was a multiracial alliance, emphasized the black press, led by two high-profile black generals, Antonio Maceo and Quentin Bandera.Footnote 72 Within this narrative, black American fighters would join with their Cuban brothers and wring “liberty from tyranny.”Footnote 73
Despite the high death toll among black soldiers, victory on San Juan Hill appeared to exceed even these expectations.Footnote 74 Their courage and sacrifice prompted hard-bitten Rough Riders to revisit their assumptions of white superiority.Footnote 75 “Those Tenth cavalrymen … didn't seem to know what fear was,” vouched one Rough Rider:
When you're lying in a trench with the smell of powder in your nose and the crack of rifles almost deafening you … And then you see a body of men go up that hill as if it was in drill … and those men are yelling “They'll Be A Hot Time in the Old Town, Tonight,” singing as if they liked their work, why there's an appropriateness in the tune that kind of makes your blood creep and your nerves to thrill and you want to get up and go ahead, even if you lose a limb in the attempt.Footnote 76
Another Rough Rider named “A Hot Time” as the “new Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a symbol of sectional and racial reconciliation, as well as American distinctiveness. He recalled the sons of Union and Confederate veterans, enslavers and enslaved, frontier men and “full-blood” Indians marching to the same song, “under the same flag.” On San Juan Hill, the Rough Rider made a vow that “henceforth and forever all Americans should look alike to me.” His play on Ernest Hogan's 1896 ragtime hit “All Coons Look Alike to Me” was deliberate.Footnote 77 American exceptionalism was transmitted via the ragtime idiom.
The glow of victory prompted black leaders to revisit their distaste for the slogan, embracing it as a metaphor for racial advancement.Footnote 78 An upcoming generation has “been making a ‘Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’” without “discounting his manhood and God-given powers,” lectured Dr. Charles Spencer Smith of the AME Sunday School Union.Footnote 79 The Great Educator, Booker T. Washington, contended that the blood sacrifice had minted a “New Negro for a New Century,” as he titled his history of black progress. He imagined the Tenth Cavalry singing “A Hot Time” in the “mad charge” that “mowed down their enemy” and proved them to be “American, all and true” in this “grand and not always just Republic.”Footnote 80
Washington's ambivalent final note spoke to the speed by which black hopes of white redemption had evaporated. A year after the battle, Roosevelt penned a new account that impugned the heroism of black servicemen, positing the victory a day of redemption for the Anglo-Saxon race and, of course, himself.Footnote 81 Finally, he had tasted battle and washed away the sins of his war-shirking father.Footnote 82 This was an age when institutionalized white supremacy vied with eugenic anxieties of white racial decline. As historians Frederick Jackson Turner, John Fiske, and Roosevelt himself had urged, a dose of frontier primitivism and territorial expansion would revitalize the foppish, neurasthenic, Nordic male.Footnote 83 The Battle of San Juan Hill crystallized this social Darwinian brand of racial regeneration – and “A Hot Time” was its tune. As such, the song stamped Roosevelt's political ascendancy and followed him around for the rest of his political life.Footnote 84
Popular depictions mirrored Roosevelt's narrative, diminishing the role of black troops and elevating the white ones. At Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Rough Riders, with sabers drawn, led the charge up a papier mâché hill, supported by a black choir harmonizing “A Hot Time” – although they were dispensable.Footnote 85 The song, however, remained an essential part of the white tableaux.
More disturbing was the “epidemic of Negro phobia” in the wake of the Spanish American War.Footnote 86 Lynchings surged.Footnote 87 Even the heroes of the Tenth Cavalry, after their redeployment to Alabama, were “shot down in cold blood like dogs by organized mobs of Negro haters.”Footnote 88 The scale of white violence prompted historian Joel Williamson to label the period a “hot time” in American race relations.Footnote 89 But the meaning went beyond scholarly periodization: the phrase and melody announced the murderous ambitions of the mob. The Atlanta Constitution warned of a “hot time” if a Massachusetts Congressman tabled his antilynching bill, and again if a “populists and Negroes” fusion ticket secured electoral victory.Footnote 90
Few newspaper editors were so vulgar as to describe a lynching carnival as a “hot time,” although one or two did. “There was a hot time in the old town of Corinth last Sunday,” read one Mississippi paper's summation of a man being burned alive while thousands cheered.Footnote 91 Usually, the expression was confined to private letters. “I tell you old boy there has been a ‘hot-time’ in this town!” wrote a white Charlottesville woman. She described how “the whole town,” black and white, “rushed” to see John Henry James's bullet-ridden body swinging from a locust tree:
We expected to have a fight but the whites were in a perfect frenzy – and I believe if it had commenced – there would have been a battle equal to what is going on in Cuba – but the black devils soon slunk out of sight when they smelt the “brimstone in the air.”Footnote 92
The many political associations of the catch-cry left room for ambiguity. Both anti-saloon leagues and dispensers of extralegal punishment used terms like “vigilance committee” and “hot time,” prompting one black Kansan to seek clarity.Footnote 93 “Public notice is served on the joints that there will be a hot time for them personally if they do not get out, and get out in a hurry.” He queried whether this was the “same kind of action … taken by the citizens of Leavenworth when the negro Fred Alexander was lynched.”Footnote 94
Black folk matched white supremacist rhetoric. An army chaplain promised white locals “a hot time in Tuskegee” if “you dirty cowards come to my quarters” intent on a lynching.Footnote 95 So too a defense committee in Wichita, Kansas warned that a “hot time” awaited “white ruffians” who interfered with the course of justice.Footnote 96 From the front line to the color line, “A Hot Time” was a battle song in overt and covert wars where constructs of masculinity vied with ideas of nation and the administration of power. “A Hot Time” sounded a zero-sum game where compromise was not an option.
“A Hot Time” was not to everyone's taste. The cliché dialect and sexual allusions unsettled black people who prided respectability. White citizens “stood horrified” at the sight of “Uncle Sam's fighting men keeping step to such an air.”Footnote 97 The University of Chicago banned the tune, claiming that “its ethical influence points the wrong way.”Footnote 98 A widely syndicated article grappled to explain “the elevation of a Negro melody to the dignity of a battle hymn.”Footnote 99 Was it because the hostilities were “too brief and sharp for the evolution of a real battle song”? And why this word “hot”? they puzzled.
Hostility to the tune stemmed from rumors that “A Hot Time” had stronger links to the black “vice” district than suggested by Theodore Metz's origin story. An unnamed “musical authority” heard it “on the levee in Chicago” a year before it appeared in sheet-music form.Footnote 100 A Broadway impresario knew it from “the late-night hideaways on Sixth Avenue.”Footnote 101 A Colorado policeman recalled “a Denver Negress,” Mandy Green, singing it in the saloons and brothels of Cripple Creek in the early 1890s. He clearly remembered her, knee-deep in the snow, shouting out, “You've got to be my man, or I'll have no man at all.”Footnote 102
The unspoken origins of “A Hot Time” echoed the silence at the heart of American popular culture. At the turn of the twentieth century, no investigative reporter followed these leads. But if they had, they could have easily traced the song to the Castle Club, a “disorderly house” in St. Louis's Chestnut Valley, an urban interzone at the juncture of the Black Belt and Tenderloin. There, black bohemia, enterprise, and performance culture intersected with the white “sporting crowd” – a category of Progressive Era manhood that transcended the color line and bonded folk, if momentarily, according to their fondness for pleasure, ostentation, chance, whimsy, and entertainment.Footnote 103
Itinerant black musicians knew this corner of St. Louis as “the gay capital of the sporting world,” the cradle of a “hot” city beat soon known as ragtime, and a plaintive lament eventually known as the blues.Footnote 104 The specter of racial violence also hung in the air.Footnote 105 White political “gangs” openly threatened to pull black saloonkeepers “chock up against limb.”Footnote 106 Authorities allowed the bodies of lynch victims to hang in public for hours.Footnote 107 Historian Walter Johnson has called St. Louis the “crucible of American history,” ascribing to the city several qualities long associated with “A Hot Time”: conquest, prosperity, and a propensity for violence.Footnote 108
The sporting men who were privy to the true origins of “A Hot Time” described a different type of excess. They recalled a lavishly appointed brothel run by a formidable madame named Sarah “Babe” Connor who draped herself in diamonds and flouted the color line, keeping a white lover and white coachman. To entertain her guests, Babe Connor employed “Mama Lou,” a portly, middle-aged, dark-skinned entertainer who dressed in an “Aunt Jemimah” costume and sang salty songs, while “a dozen beauties” danced around her in “little more than stockings.”Footnote 109
“Mama Lou” was Letitia Lula Agatha Fontaine, a Santo Domingo woman of whom little is known beyond her extraordinary musical powers, sharp wit, and refined British accent. “She ferociously ‘insulted’ the customers and girls, pausing occasionally to bellow obscene songs,” reported St. Louis historian John Aaron Wright.Footnote 110 One tune, “The Bully Song,” described policemen unleashing their nightsticks on the black hobos along the Mississippi levee. Another, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” made little sense but invited rhythmic, hip-thrusting gestures.Footnote 111 Another still dwelled on the complicated sex lives of Miss Johannah Beasley and her friends. One verse, according to an uncredited but richly detailed description in a 1956 black newspaper, told a woman peeking through the blinds to find “her baby” and “another man in the folding bed.” Her riffs on the same-sex encounter landed on a refrain taken up by the sporting crowd: “There'll be a hot time in the old town, tonight!”Footnote 112 As loyal patrons recalled, Mama Lou – and the entire place – “transfigured” every time she belted out the tune. “Everybody” identified it with her.Footnote 113
What was to become a symbol of American conquest and masculine virility was, at first, an expression of transgressive desire: the challenge to “be my man” rooted in the gaze of a mature woman demanding sexual gratification on her terms. In sanitizing the lyrics, Metz and Hayden purged the homosexual overtones and reassigned the gaze to a younger person, while still suggesting that the fires of spiritual ecstasy and sexual desire (and by extension potency and fertility) were one: a blasphemy almost washed clean in the temple of nation.
The son of a white St. Louis newspaper editor later recalled that “everybody” “sooner or later” wound their way to the Castle Club to savor the “hair-raising emotion” of Fontaine's vocal delivery. Among them was a stream of white composers and showmen. Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski was one, spending the evening beside a blind pianist, attempting to discern what was to him a highly “original” keyboard style.Footnote 114 Impresario Henry Sayers was another – although his interest was more than academic. In 1891, Sayers walked away from the Castle Club with a transcription of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.”Footnote 115 When an English music hall vocalist gave it a leg-kicking Cockney makeover, the song became a runaway best seller. Henry Sayers reaped the royalties, eventually conceding that the melody was “of Negro extraction.” He vaguely explained that he had “caught the air” of an “unwritten” song “so far as any evidence is yet afforded.”Footnote 116
Henry Sayers also copied Theodore Metz's secret of songwriting success. By his own admission, Metz had visited the Castle Club, possibly in December 1885 when the McIntyre and Heath Minstrels played St. Louis's Olympic Theater.Footnote 117 The following year, Metz published an instrumental version of Letitia Fontaine's “unwritten” tune, later commissioning a colleague to clean up the lyrics, but retain the infectious hook. In short, Metz stole the tune and made a substantial fortune – $30,000 by 1900, according to one trade publication – his only hit.Footnote 118 A Tin Pan Alley music writer later reported that “to his dying day,” Metz “insisted” he “invented the tune,” claiming that Fontaine added her “unprintable obscenities” to his song.Footnote 119 Oddly, Metz publicly challenged Henry Sayer's authorship of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” testifying in a 1932 copyright suit that the song had “originated in Babe Connors place.”Footnote 120
Babe Connors died in August 1899 and, according to the 1957 profile, had parted ways with Letitia Fontaine several years earlier when the singer set up her own resort.Footnote 121 On the fringes of respectability and the law, neither was positioned to challenge Metz's copyright claims. (They were barely able to secure police protection when a deranged vigilante held them at gunpoint).Footnote 122 Black showbusiness figures, of course, knew the secret of the song's true origins – some by hearsay; others had borne witness. Ragtime masters like Tom Turpin and Scott Joplin had both played piano at Babe Connors.Footnote 123 In the 1950s, composer and bandleader W. C. Handy openly denied Metz authorship, describing “A Hot Town” as a “sporting house” song.Footnote 124 At the same time, he railed the “malignant falsehoods” that denied “the Negro creator” credit for all they “contributed to American music.”Footnote 125 In 1900, however, neither he nor any other black figure challenged Metz's claims.
The politics of respectability informed Handy's reluctance. The son of a “hardback” preacher, his family embraced what Imani Perry has called “black American exceptionalism,” a pathway of social and racial advancement founded on impeccable, virtuous behavior.Footnote 126 As such, Handy was sensitive to reflexes that linked vernacular black music to the sex industry, the ease by which critics condemned the “hot” rhythms of ragtime as an inherently immoral idiom. He carefully distanced himself from black ragtime operas such as Hot Time in Coon Town, A Hot Time in Darktown, and A Hot Old Time in Dixie, each conjuring a garish sporting world powered by “vice” and populated by brazen women and men in flashy checkered suits.Footnote 127 Instead, he sought to raise the status of black music and weave it into the very fiber of American national identity. So the tale of “A Hot Time” originating in a bawdy sporting house did not fit the racial-uplift narrative of thrift, industry, and self-restraint. Or, for that matter, of courage, redemption, and national reconciliation on San Juan Hill.
Still, W. C. Handy's band made “A Hot Time” their own, even within the galling constraints of minstrelsy.Footnote 128 In 1899 and 1900, he led the brass band in the Mahara's Minstrels, one of the leading all-black troupes. Each day, he kicked off the noonday parade with “A Hot Time” and played it again during the preshow concert and show. Indeed, the troupe's publicity hinged on the promise of “a hot time.”Footnote 129 As Handy recalled, the band often brought their own “interpretation” to the tune, playing it any way “we would want” – an exercise in improvised experimentation they called “faking.” The style incorporated “peculiar” local variations they had picked up from black folk musicians on their travels.Footnote 130 By playing “A Hot Time” in a way no white band had yet imagined, Handy pushed the boundaries of black commercial music, confident it would one day reconfigure modern American music. Far from a white pastiche, as the Metz story suggested, W. C. Handy's brass band stamped their authority on the heat in “A Hot Time.”
The people of the Philippines knew nothing of the song's unspoken past. To their mind, “A Hot Time” arrived with the United States Army, the tune sounding an invasion that began in the name of liberation and ended in service of imperialism.
Back in April 1898, when the US government first declared war on Spain, a Nebraska volunteer bound for the Philippines adapted the lyrics of “A Hot Time” to reflect the mission's purpose. His rhymes coupled “set the Cubans free” with “Manila also have liberty” and matched “good old town” with “most of them are brown,” a reference to the complexion of the “girls” who would welcome them as heroes. “The boys in blue don't care about the color of the face / They'll give them all the glad hand for their hearts in the right place.”Footnote 131
But even before US troops marched into Manila bellowing “A Hot Time,” Filipino rebel leader General Emilio Aguinaldo began to doubt whether “liberty” was America's primary objective.Footnote 132 The terms of surrender negotiated by American and Spanish military leaders required Filipino soldiers to vacate the city, diminishing the crucial role the rebel forces had played in defeating the Spanish. As the victory celebrations unfolded, Aguinaldo was denied a place in the parade and the new administration.Footnote 133
As the US military shifted from a liberating army to an occupying force, “A Hot Time” continued to ring through the city.Footnote 134 Americans recalled that, within weeks, a raggedy crew of newsboys were whistling the tune, and “every Manila resident was humming it.”Footnote 135 Most hamlets on the island of Luzon had a hometown band, even if the trombone was a modified tin can, and, without the aid of sheet music, local orchestras captured the melody with startling accuracy.Footnote 136 Bands blared out “A Hot Time” “with the full force of its lungs” while escorting newly arrived American administrators.Footnote 137 And not only in Manila; one traveler reached the island of Mindanao to be welcomed by the tune.Footnote 138
Some things, however, were lost in translation. US troops interpreted local enthusiasm for “A Hot Time” as a sign that they “like American rule,” while Filipinos assumed that the melody held a hallowed place in the US patriotic canon.Footnote 139 When asked to play the US national anthem at an official ceremony, a “crack Filipino band” struck up “A Hot Time,” much to the alarm of American officials.Footnote 140 It baffled governor-general Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur why he heard it every time he appeared in public. When an aide explained the melody's place in the popular imagination, MacArthur conceded that “A Hot Time” captured something of “the American spirit,” although he urged Filipinos to “fall in line and march to ‘Yankee Doodle’.”Footnote 141
The governor-general offered the advice amid mounting tensions between US authorities and Aguinaldo's independence movement.Footnote 142 By February 1899, the two groups were at war, bringing a new set of meanings to Letitia Fontaine's song. US troops peppered allusions to a “hot time in the jungle” with predictions of “a hard fight,” a “long drawn out campaign,” and a grim death toll.Footnote 143 “A pretty hot time of it for the last four days … Lost six men and about twenty wounded,” read one infantryman's letter.Footnote 144 “Hot time in Batangas. Desperate hand to hand encounter,” reported an adjutant general.Footnote 145 A regiment band who played “A Hot Time” “out on the firing line” at every opportunity, tolled up one death and three wounded in the course of combat duties.Footnote 146
American invocations of “a hot time” cleaved along racial lines. In July 1899, the US Army deployed the first black troops to the Philippines. Their letters characterized campaigning as “hard,” heroic, honorable, even dutiful, but never “hot.”Footnote 147 The conflict did not meet the benchmark. They did not seek to vanquish a clearly defined enemy but elevate their standing in the United States and, in some cases, advance the cause of Filipino independence. One drew on the term “Greek against Greek” to describe combat with “men of our own hue and color.”Footnote 148 Another noted that American efforts to crush the rebellion were “unpopular among our people.”Footnote 149 Back in the States, black newspaper editors used words like “criminal” and “calamity” to express their opposition.Footnote 150 W. E. B. Du Bois argued that annexation had caused “millions of brown and black people” to fall under the yoke of Jim Crow.Footnote 151 The winner, in this calculus, did not take all.
In recent years, scholars have pondered Du Bois's astute observation that American imperial expansion had constructed a “color line” that “belts the world.”Footnote 152 At the time, however, Du Bois was an Atlanta academic, unknown to most black troops in the Philippines. In contrast, they could hardly miss “A Hot Time” – and its ambiguous, shifting meanings. They noted, too, how white supremacy connected Mississippi to Manila. “The future of the Filipino, I fear, is that of the Negro of the South … He is kicked and cuffed at will and he dare not remonstrate,” read one infantryman's letter.Footnote 153 “The whites have begun their diabolical race hatred in all its home rancor,” read another.Footnote 154 A white infantryman agreed: if officers turned “the boys loose, there wouldn't be a nigger left in Manila twelve hours after.”Footnote 155
“A Hot Time,” in this context, was the battle song of a struggle between “the triumph of civilization” and the “black chaos of savagery and barbarism,” as President Theodore Roosevelt described it.Footnote 156 By chanting the refrain, white troops sang the global color line into existence. Aguinaldo “will get it hot and fast” and his supporters would be “exterminate[d] without mercy,” wrote the US consul. “Our soldiers are vigilant and brave … whistling and singing ‘Hot Time in Old Town.’ I urge them to keep cool, aim well, and let each bullet claim a victim.”Footnote 157 The song repeated like a mantra: an aid to endurance, a curse to punish a racial group with a “childlike idea of liberty and freedom,” unable to “appreciate the benefits of a good government,” as Harper's Magazine explained.Footnote 158 “‘Freedom’ has a vague meaning to these natives,” affirmed a Nebraska volunteer.Footnote 159
For white observers, nothing better illustrated the incomprehensible “alien” mind of the Filipino “native” than their embrace of “A Hot Time.” One American, visiting a sugar plantation district in the grip of a cholera epidemic, came upon a street procession honoring San Roque, patron saint of the plague. The faithful held aloft his battered image while the band played “A Hot Time.” “A tune perhaps more appropriate at the deadly hour than was realized by the Filipino musicians,” hazarded the writer.Footnote 160 Another heard “A Hot Time” during the crucifixion scene of a passion play.Footnote 161 Another still encountered an elaborate funeral parade – a hearse drawn by six horses, flanked by liveried footmen – led by a band playing “A Hot Time.” The writer could not decide the greater absurdity: the “natives” attempting to imitate European pomp and pageantry, or the “strangely inappropriate” use of the song.Footnote 162 Others described feeling “shock” and “surprise” or struggled to “keep straight faces” when the funeral band launched into the tune.Footnote 163 Granted, none of the “giddy” lyrics accompanied the melody but, to white Americans, vivacious ragtime at a funeral smacked of insensitivity and disrespect.Footnote 164 Just as the Filipino people did not understand “freedom” and “good government,” so they did not understand “A Hot Time.”Footnote 165
What Americans read as tasteless or nonsensical, Filipinos saw as reason. When a person died, their soul left this world of sorrow for one of unending happiness. “Therefore, we are glad and our music is joyous,” one person explained.Footnote 166 Americans, bewildered by Filipino rituals, never considered that just as they misunderstood Aguinaldo's independence struggle, so they misinterpreted Letitia Fontaine's song.Footnote 167 Celebrating military conquest and national pride by shouting a racy song about flirting did not make a whole lot of sense either.
The irony ran deeper. As historian Resil B. Mojares has pointed out, the Filipino cultural response to US territorialism cannot be “adequately captured by a simple bipolarity of resistance and submission.”Footnote 168 Instead of symbolizing the “Americanization” of the Philippines, “A Hot Time” also embodied the “Filipinization” of American popular culture. Thousands of miles from the continental USA, an abiding national trait endured: “A Hot Time” continued to sound the American paradox.
By 1910, “A Hot Time” had lost some of its American fizz, although none of its ambiguity. Smart-aleck street toughs no longer swaggered to its beat, but few anthems matched it when Jack Johnson and Jim Jefferies met to contest the heavyweight championship. On 4 July, “A Hot Time” rang from Reno Nevada to South Side Chicago, first to announce the coming of the Great White Hope, then to celebrate the black titleholder's triumphant victory.Footnote 169
White-supremacist violence continued to inflect the song. It surfaced in the Scottsboro Boys case, first in 1931, when a white mob outside the Alabama courthouse played the song to celebrate the system of “southern justice” that condemned nine young black men to death.Footnote 170 The following year, the US Supreme Court granted a new trial for seven of the Scottsboro Boys, swayed, in part, by the defense attorney's argument that “A Hot Time” contributed to “an atmosphere of hostility” that denied the young men a fair trial.Footnote 171
Mostly, the tune remained a favorite of political convention floors – and subsequent literary and cinematic depictions of Gilded Age politics.Footnote 172 It was an association President Theodore Roosevelt came to resent.Footnote 173 In 1908, he directed the Library of Congress to omit “A Hot Time” from a volume of great American battle songs, reasoning that “ragtime” was “not music.”Footnote 174 Still, every significant anniversary of the Spanish American War, newspapers reprised the memory of “A Hot Time,” elevating the tune's distinctive American character while diminishing its African Americanness. Theodore Metz's origin story was recited over and again, long after anecdotes about Babe Connor's “cabaret” began circulating.Footnote 175
The conspiracy of silence around Letitia Fontaine cracked in the late 1920s when a spate of memoirs by white showbusiness luminaries recounted joyous evenings at the Castle Club.Footnote 176 However, as late as 1948, the popular “Tune Detective” Sigmund Spaeth flipped between two stories, naming Metz as composer and “Mama Lou” as “originator.”Footnote 177 Not until the 1990s did historian John Aaron Wright identify Letitia Fontaine by name.Footnote 178 In 1924, Tin Pan Alley publisher Edward B. Marks paid Metz a substantial sum to secure the rights.Footnote 179 Three years later, a recording by Bessie Smith and the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra embroidered “A Hot Time” with the drawl of the Tennessee blues and slur of a New Orleans trumpet.Footnote 180 Smith's interpretation marked something of a return to the spiritual homelands of Letitia Fontaine and today is the best-known version.
For an anthem remembered as “one of the defining songs of the Gay Nineties,” “A Hot Time” spoke in riddles.Footnote 181 It promised certainty but delivered doublespeak; professed a desire to win the game, even if it meant changing the rules. The ditty that Letitia Fontaine wrote to celebrate transgressive sexuality in a segregated corner of St. Louis affirmed heterosexual masculinity on Main Street, USA. A tune whose racial origins and sexual overtones roused discomfort in polite society became the heroic victory anthem of politicians, warriors, and athletes. A composition founded on obfuscation and silences articulated distinctive cultural identity. A melody drenched in black American artistry set the beat of white supremacy. A battle song championing US imperial power transformed into a metaphysical ode to joy.
Letitia Fontaine endowed “A Hot Time” with single-pointed purpose, the rhythm and refrain generating energy and heat. Yet the passions sparked by “A Hot Time” served myriad needs ranging from joy to desire, excess, pleasure, triumph, chaos, virility, rage, revenge, cruelty, conquest, patriotism, and prayer. The extraordinary popularity of “A Hot Time in the Old Town, Tonight” elevated it above all other songs in the Progressive Era. Yet layers of public and private, even secret, meanings created the most mercurial of anthems that simultaneously exposed and shrouded the fault lines of a less heroic, but no less enduring, characteristic of American exceptionalism: the paradox.
