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The circus performer has from the earliest days of the genre been a person of many talents. Any and all of them were riders, tumblers and leapers. Some, of course, were better than others at some tasks, and so specialized at those turns. A circus roster was a pool of talent from which the best at each specialty was given that spot on the program as the need arose.
Every performer was expected to appear in the “ground and lofty tumbling,” as an example. The least talented would drop away as the feats became more difficult, but everyone could at least appear in the cartwheel and somersault portion of such an act.
We read of several instances where a performer left a show for one reason or another, and someone else was substituted. This doesn’t mean that the fit was perfect. Hugh Lindsay admitted that he was a failure when he first substituted for an absent clown on John Miller’s circus in the 1820s. Pete Conklin was dragooned into a similar position when Tony Pastor left the Mabie show in 1859. These examples are listed to illustrate that the absence, through injury or other cause, of a featured performer didn’t mean that the circus did without that specialty.
Nor do we mean to say that everyone’s talents were completely used by the managers. There were those who could adequately perform at what we’ll call stage or hall show turns, such as singing, dancing and comedy that ordinarily was not considered a part of a circus performance. Circuses playing small towns in the 1830s and thereafter usually gave but one performance, and that in the afternoon. Rural audiences were earlyrisers and did not, as a rule, attend night performances. Because of this, the performers were unoccupied after four or five o’clock until time to leave for the next town in the morning. It was not unusual for a group to band together and present a hall show in the village at night splitting the proceeds between them. As the practice became prevalent, it came to the attention of managers that here were talents they could make use of in their show.
There was a precedent for this in the common appearance of some performers in both the side show and the main tent. Side show minstrels were often clowns in the circus. Two of the better known men to appear in blackface in the side show and do the circus’ clowning in the ring were Dan Rice and Tony Pastor.
Side shows were not necessarily available as second venues to circus performers as time went on, for privilege men increasingly ran the side shows, and they hired their own features. Thus, the concert or aftershow became a way of exposing the non-ring talents of people on the circus payroll. It also provided a means for the managers to extract a few more dimes and quarters from people already seated in the arena. In time outside performers, that is, persons who appeared only in the concert, came to be hired.
We cannot, with accuracy, point out the first concert. This is because the references are vague. For example, a minstrel troupe might be announced by the show, but the advertisements would not specify if they appeared in the regular performance, a side show, or the concert. The reason for this seems clear; there was no sense in announcing that the public would have to pay extra to see the act.
Silas Robinson, son of Yankee Robinson, wrote in the April 23, 1892 New York Clipper that the after-concert was not known in 1857, but his report can hardly be classified as a contemporary reference. Gilbert Robinson in his book Old Wagon Show Days (Cincinnati, 1925) provides rosters of the John Robinson Circus in the appendix. Presumably, he used old programs for his source. He first lists the concert performers in 1857.
There is a contemporary source for an 1857 concert, an advertisement for the Hiram Orton show in the Fayetteville Observer (North Carolina) for June 25, of that year. The notice says that a minstrel troupe, Lewis and Lindsey’s Sable Harmonists, will perform after the circus in the same tent for an additional charge of twenty-five cents. This announcement was repeated throughout that season’s advertising and in 1860 as well.
William S. Davis, in a series of letters to the New York Clipper in 1892, in which he gave the history of the first cookhouse on a circus, also mentioned Mabie’s first concert. He wrote: “As to the concert, all I may say is that we (Mabie’s Menagerie and Circus) went south again in the fall. In December, 1858, I put the concert under the big tent, and charged ten cents extra and found it a good thing. I kept it there when Mr. Mabie came on and met us at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He came right from New York, where he spent most of his time, and where there were headquarters of all the showmen at that time. He had never heard of such a thing being done, and was very much surprised to think I dared to do it. He wanted me to stop it, saying we would be ‘torn all to pieces,’ but I did not stop it. The next season we heard of Orton & Older and others doing it.”
We also find James Esler in the February 13, 1892 Clipper speaking of 1857 on the Mabie show: “All of the concert performances were outside of the tent (he is referring to side-shows here). I left the company in August, 1857, and joined Nixon & Kemp’s Circus, when I there first heard an inside concert for money.”
In the same series of letters in 1892, George S. Cole wrote that “Orton & Older gave concerts in the circus tent in 1858.”
All this would seem to date the introduction of the concert in 1857, on Orton & Older, and on Nixon & Kemp. Those who specified 1858 may not have been aware of what was happening on other circuses, and most of these commentators were speaking thirty-five years after the events, thus their dating may have been in error.
One of the earliest contemporary references we have found to the existence of after-shows is in a review of Dan Castello’s Great Show in the August 11, 1866 Clipper. Correspondent “Chip” wrote from Savannah, Georgia, that “The minstrel band, under the direction of Tim Woodruff, is decidedly the best I ever saw with a circus. They perform immediately after the circus performance, under the same pavilion.”
To illustrate the popularity of this addition to the traditional circus form, we turn to Hugh Coyle’s memoir of what he mistakenly identified as the first concert ever given. His description in the April 28, 1906 Billboard tells of the Gardner & Hemmings Circus of 1862, in which he was a musician. At Oil City, Pennsylvania, Gardner agreed to hire a stranded minstrel company. For some unstated reason, the minstrels couldn’t appear in the side show (perhaps the side show was owned by a privilege man), so it was decided to have them appear in the main tent after the circus performance. But what to call them? Coyle says over fifty suggestions were made and rejected until Lew Simmons, leader of the minstrels, came up with “concert.” A most revealing statement in Coyle’s article is that the charge for the concert was set at twenty-five cents, and that over two-thirds of the original circus audience stayed to see it.
In a search for the content of concerts, we found that minstrel shows were the overwhelming choice in the earliest offerings, but gradually the variety show (also known as olios, and later as vaudeville) came to the fore. Jig dancers, singers of comic songs, instrumentalists and comedians were some of the acts. We would guess that the dependence on “freaks” (fat people, thin people, tattooed people, etc.) in the side show rose as vaudeville-types moved into the concert.
For reasons unknown to us, it wasn’t until 1869 that the New York Clipper began to list the concert privilege men in the rosters they printed. It may have had something to do with the system by which the names of attaches were gathered. Even then, they very seldom disclosed the names of the concert performers. We can understand this last omission if we realize that the privilege men were known at the beginning of the season, but the performers may not have been contracted that early.
Also, if the circus contracted the concert to a third party, the managers might not know whom the privilege men intended to hire. As to the names of the privilege men, finding them in the Clipper is of no particular assistance in determining their careers, as few of them repeated the exercise, or so it seems to the researcher. A few wellknown names do appear. Batcheller & Doris had the concert on “Pogey” O’Brien’s circus in 1871 and 1872. J. M. Chandler had the privilege with P. A. Older in 1871. He was later the show’s press agent, and in 1873 Older’s partner in the ill-fated Barnum lease. James A, Bailey and his partner, George Middleton, had both a side show and the concert with James Cooper’s 1872 company.
As time passed, more and more concert managers also had other positions with the circus. The rider James DeMott did this with several O’Brien shows. John Robinson was a great one to grant the privilege to one or another of his managers. It must have been used as a way to attract certain persons to the roster.
Tickets for the concert were originally sold by candy butchers; our earliest reference to this practice is dated 1874. Eventually the task was given to the ushers. This had to be large-show practice, as the usher corps needed to be sizable to get the job done. A certain number of customers would decide at the last minute to stay for the after-show and so pay cash instead of buying a ticket. The ushers were allowed to keep this money; they referred to it as “lunch money” in the 1930s.
In 1879 James T. Powers, later a well-known actor, was a member of the Van Amburgh four person concert, a song and dance team. In his memoir, Twinkle Little Star (New York 1939), he tells us that they were paid ten dollars per week each and 10% of concert sales. They sold the concert tickets, as well as ten cent songsters themselves. An interesting aside is that he says that the sideshow and concert people had their own cook tent.
Another revealing glimpse of concert management is in the Pawnee Bill route book of 1898. Edmund G. Smith, an old trouper who started with the Sands & Quick circus in 1853, visited the show and some of his remarks were noted. He was with Dan Rice when Rice first attempted an after-show. He said that clearing the tent in order to present the concert always gave trouble, and invariably resulted in a few controversies. It was a couple of years before it became customary.
Concerts were variety shows until they were replaced by wild west shows in the twentieth century. However, wild west shows came on the scene much earlier, beginning with the Buffalo Bill Wild West and Rough Riders of 1883. Surprisingly, the first wild west presentation in a circus was presented in that same year. On March 24, in Madison Square Garden, Barnum & Bailey began their program with a cowboy act, a rodeo- like scene.
In the next season, 1884, Adam Forepaugh started his program with a large wild west contingent very similar to Buffalo Bill’s program, with cowboys, Indians, stagecoach robberies, and so forth. Buffalo Bill himself starred in what appears to have been the first wild west concert, on Sells-Floto in 1914 and 1915. In 1916 the Floto show featured boxer Jess Willard and wrestler Frank Gotch in their aftershow.
The Ringling brothers added cowboy presentations in the 1920s, but they were part of the regular circus program. In 1924 they moved these features to the concert. Similarly, Hagenbeck & Wallace had their wild west as part of the regular program in 1929, moving it into the concert position for 1930 and 1931.
When the new Cole Bros.-Clyde Beatty Circus opened in Chicago in 1935 it presented a musical review-vaudeville show with a chorus line of girl dancers as the concert. This did not go over. When the circus went on the road the after-show became “The Colossal Frontier Day Exhibition, 30 Minutes in the Golden West,” headed by long-time circus cowboy Jimmy Foster.
Begun, as we said, with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in the 1880s the enormous popularity of motion pictures with cowboy themes in the 1920s revived the after-show use of western themes. Such movie stars as Tom Mix, Ken Maynard, Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson and Tim McCoy, and the like were hired as concert features throughout the period. Silent movie cowboy Jack Hoxie appeared as a concert feature with more circuses than any other Hollywood star.
The movie cowboys rode into the big top during several concert announcements during the performance. It was also noted that all those holding concert tickets could move to the center grandstand chairs to view the presentation. This allowed the bleacher boards and star-backed seats to start being removed after the night show, while the concert continued.
In most cases the movie cowboys appeared with other wild west people hired by the circus. This was not the case when Ringling-Barnum hired Col. Tim McCoy in 1935. McCoy hired his own people and was paid for the complete presentation. In 1937 his after-show consisted of eleven or twelve cowboys and girls, ten Indians and seven Cossack riders. McCoy’s after-show was so successful it convinced him that the country was again ready for a full-blown wild west show a la Buffalo Bill. He was wrong; his 1938 show lasted only a few weeks.
Some western stars, Mix, Maynard, Hoxie and Jones for example, headed their own circuses. Television decreased the novelty of the variety show type of concert. Cowboy movies went into a decline, as well, possibly another victim of the tube. By contrast, as late as the 1950s William Boyd’s “Hopalong Cassidy” character, revived on television, was featured in circus after-shows. But he was one of several exceptions. Generally, the concert faded, as had the side show and the minstrels and the street parade, and as will the menagerie in all likelihood. Only the ring performance survives, the original and the basic circus.
CHS webmaster J. Griffin, last modified December 2005.