Josephine Baker Overview

A protege of dancers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissel, 15-year-old Josephine Baker began her career on the vaudeville circuits, touring with Bessie Smith as a chorus girl. After Broadway appearances in "Shuffle Along" (1921) -- which marked the advent of the... [more]

A protege of dancers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissel, 15-year-old Josephine Baker began her career on the vaudeville circuits, touring with Bessie Smith as a chorus girl. After Broadway appearances in "Shuffle Along" (1921) -- which marked the advent of the black theatrical renaissance, and "Chocolate Dandies," she traveled to Paris with La Revue Negre (1925) and took the city by storm as the incarnation of le jazz hot. Wearing nothing but a banana-bunch skirt over her birthday suit, her thrilling orgiastic shimmies and extravagant motions quickly brought all of Europe to her feet. Baker kept the flame of jazz music alive throughout the continent and introduced the "Black Bottom" and "Charleston." Besides her spectacular costumes and cabaret performances, Baker's spellbinding appeal to Europeans seemed to lie in what critic Andre Levinson declared a "carnal magnificence," a kind of expressive freedom that "comes close to pathos." He, like the rest of an awestruck white old world, found embodied in the delirious effect of her sensuality "a sinuous idol that enslaves and incites mankind." Baker's great European fame did not catch fire in America until 1951, in a sole appearance that, despite her advanced years, included her incendiary dancing. [show less]