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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2015
Double-voiced singing was a popular form of variety show entertainment from the 1860s through to the 1920s. Double-voiced performers were able, through intonation and tone, to sound as though they had at least two separate and distinct “voices,” generally one soprano and one baritone. But as Claire Rochester, a double-voiced singer of the early twentieth century made clear, their act was more than just a matter of a woman singing low notes or a man singing high ones; it was all about a performer adopting the “voice” of the other sex. The unusual practice of these singers was to sing duets (and sometimes as much as quartets) to themselves and by themselves, flipping back and forth between their male to female “voices.” I place this strange form of entertainment in the context of changing attitudes to gender and sexuality and suggests that conventional interpretations of “freak” performances as “transgressive” fail to account for these vocal wonders. Double-voiced singers shunned the “transgressive” billing, especially when their own sexual identity was called into question. In making this argument, I suggest that we need to widen our understanding of “freakery,” imposture and the meaning of “nature” and “truth,” as they were revealed both on stage and off.
1 New York Evening Express, November 26, 1860.
2 “Freak” is used here, with no intent to disparage, in order to refer to performers who were on stage because they were physically unusual. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers commonly applied the term to a particular kind of performer. Although some used the term to describe entertainers whose unusual bodies were produced by training or manipulation (such as body-builders or tattooed people), it is here employed to refer to those whose unusual bodies were, or were attributed to, biology.
3 For a discussion of the unusual body as an object of “exploitation” used to “map” the normal, see Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie, “Introduction: From Wonder to Error—A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York, 1996), 1–22Google Scholar; Craton, Lillian, The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Difference in 19th-Century Fiction (Amherst, NY, 2009)Google Scholar sees the freak show as a sign of the fetishization of difference within normative culture. Adams, Rachel is more concerned with restoring agency to the freak performer in Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago, 2001)Google Scholar; Bogdan, Richard integrated both perspectives in Freak Show (Chicago, 1988)Google Scholar; Chemers, Michael, Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show (New York, 2008)Google Scholar suggests freak performers made transgressive statements about difference. The quotes are from Adams, Sideshow USA, 6 and Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks” in Freakery, 35.
4 On deceitful performers, see Cook, James W., Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA, 2001)Google Scholar; Reiss, Benjamin, The Showman and the Slave: Death and Memory in Barnum's America (Cambridge, MA, 2001)Google Scholar; and Warren, Louis, Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York, 2005).Google Scholar
5 These auricular wonders were described in: Christian Diadem and Family Keepsake, I, ed. Hatch, Z. Paten (New York, 1851)Google Scholar, 308; Putnam's Monthly III:12 (February 1854), 151; Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2000)Google Scholar, chapter 4.
6 New York Public Library (NYPL), Double-Voiced Clipping File, undated clipping: New York Dramatic Mirror (November 1884?).
7 The New York Times, November 26, 1860; www.immigrantships.net/v9/1800v9/jason18590905_01; New York Clipper, May 1, 1860; Boston Daily Advertiser, July 3, 1862; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 385 (February 14, 1863); Daily National Intelligencer [Washington], January 7, February 29, and March 17, 1863; Hill, Errol, The Jamaican Stage (Boston, 1992)Google Scholar, 196; Evening Courier and Republic [Buffalo] December 19, 1863; The New York Times, July 3, 1864; New York Clipper, November 19, 1877; Washington Post, April 8, 1878; Odell, George, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 12 (New York, 1970)Google Scholar, 187; Fort Wayne Sentinel, December 20, 1872; Arkansas Daily Gazette, July 3, 1873; New York Clipper, May 31, 1884 and February 6, 1886.
8 Based on author survey of The Clipper, Variety, Billboard, and the New York Dramatic Mirror.
9 New York Dramatic Mirror, September 9, 1915.
10 Werner, Morris Robert, Barnum (New York, 1926)Google Scholar, 229. Although semioticians recognize that sound and vision are different types of codes, many hold that our minds impose congruence upon them. Saussure compared language to a piece of paper with words as cut-out shapes. Each shape is on one side an image and on the other a sound, so they have complete identity. As Robert Bresson explains: “images and sounds [are] like strangers, who make acquaintance on a journey and afterwards cannot separate.” de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Bally, Charles and Sechehaye, Albert (New York, 1959), 112–13Google Scholar; Bresson, cited in Walter Murch, introduction to Chion, Michel, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York, 1994)Google Scholar, xvii.
11 The New York Times, November 26, 1860; New York Evening Express, November 26, 1860; New York Herald, November 9,1863; Daily National Intelligencer, February 29, 1864; New York Tribune, December 13,1860; Sacramento Daily Union, September 29, 1864; New York Herald, November 9, 1863; Daily National Intelligencer, May 24, 1869.
12 Bob Albright said his range was 3.5 octaves (January 12, 1910); Flora Batson, the African American double-voiced singer, claimed hers to be 3 octaves (The Sunday Oregonian,July 3, 1898); Dorothy Toye said her range was 4 (NYPL, Robinson Locke Collection, Dollie Toye, envelope 2376, undated clipping: “Dorothy Toye to write a Treatise on Tone Placing”); Claire Rochester in the interview from which the quote is drawn claimed a modest 2.5 (NYPL, Robinson Locke Collection, Claire Rochester, Envelope 1934, undated clipping “Temple Theatre”); in male double-voiced singers, a falsetto was regarded as a cheap imitation of a true soprano (Variety, March 12, 1910).
13 New York Herald, November 9, 1863.
14 Mora highlighted the masculine timbre of “her extraordinary low voice” by sometimes fronting a quartet of male singers. In addition to singing, she delivered recitations and in1898 she performed both the closet scene from Hamlet and Mark Antony's address from Julius Caesar. These roles provided spectators with the opportunity to ogle Mora's “slim figure of youth” and “straight and slender” limbs because she acted in trousers. Metropolitan Magazine 3:5 (April 1897); Rochester Democrat Chronicle, March 2, 1902; New York Dramatic Mirror, January 1 and October 29, 1898; Mora was 42 when she died, Brooklyn Daily Standard, July 21, 1903.
15 The Clipper [New York], August 14, 1869; Byron, Henry, Lucretia Borgia, M.D., of La Grande Doctresse (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, 1868).Google Scholar
16 On the “serious” female impersonator: Bean, Annemarie, “Transgressing the Gender Divide: The Female Impersonator in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, eds. Bean, A., Hatch, J. V., and McNamara, B.. (Hanover, 1996), 245–56Google Scholar and Bean, “Black Femininity and Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Blackface Minstrelsy,” Performance Research 1:3 (Autumn, 1996), 32–44Google Scholar; for gender impersonation outside of minstrelsy: Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, “Afterward” to Twain, Mark, Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts (Berkeley, 2003), 192–93Google Scholar; Kibler, M. Alison, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill, 1999), 70 71Google Scholar; Kasson, John, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York, 2001), 92–98.Google Scholar
17 New York Dramatic Mirror, June 24, 1909; The Clipper [New York], March 6, 1904; The Freeman, February 18, 1899 and March 17, 1900; Athens Daily Messenger, May 27, 1912.
18 Ryan, Mary, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; and Lystra, Karen, Searching the Heart: Men, Women and Romantic Love in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1989)Google Scholar. On men, see eds. Chapman, Mary and Hendler, Glenn, Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar. On male relationships: Godbeer, Richard, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore, 2009)Google Scholar. On women, see: Blauvelt, Martha Tomhave, The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830 (Charlottesville, 2007)Google Scholar; also see Hendler, Glenn, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill, 2001).Google Scholar
19 Harris, Neil, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago, 1973)Google Scholar, esp. chapter three; Lindberg, Gary, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle- Class Culture in America, I830–1870 (New Haven, 1983)Google Scholar; Cook, The Arts of Deception. For a history that explores the social implications of the culture of deceit on the frontier: Rothman, Joshua, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of the South and America in the Age of Jackson (Athens, GA, 2012).Google Scholar
20 This interpretation of cultural work is derived from Tompkins, Jane landmark study: Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar. Reiss, Benjamin, “Tricking the Eye and Exposing the Body: The Dialectics of Mass Deception,” Reviews in American History 30:1 (March 2002), 81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brooklyn Eagle, September 11, 1850; Warren, Buffalo Bill's America, 67–68; Argersinger, Peter, Structure, Process and Party, Essays in American Political History (New York, 1992)Google Scholar, 103.
21 Melville, Herman, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (London, 1857)Google Scholar, 43.
22 Wilson, Elizabeth, “Is Transgression Transgressive?” in Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Politics, eds. Bristow, J. and Wilson, A. R. (London, 1993)Google Scholar, 109. This is not how theatrical transgression is usually seen. According to Marjorie Garber, transgressive performance practices are those that challenge “easy notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female.’” According to Laurence Senelick, actors who “convey a plausible impression of sexes to which they did not belong … by “mixing and matching,' let alone switching, the signs [their] culture uses” were “revolutionaries.” Senelick, Laurence, “Boys and Girls Together: Subcultural Origins of Glamor Drag and Male Impersonation on the Nineteenth Century Stage” in Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, ed. Ferris, Lesley (London, 1998)Google Scholar, 84; For this approach see Wilson, Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London, 1992)Google Scholar, 10; See also Grosz, Elizabeth, “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Thomson, Rosemarie (New York, 1996), 55–68.Google Scholar
23 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Experience” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, eds. Slater, J., Riggs, A., and Carr, J. F. eds. (Cambridge, MA, 1983)Google Scholar, 35. On American idealism: Albanese, Catherine, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 3; for a study that roots antebellum reform in the confidence generated by idealism: Garvey, Gregory, Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America (Athens, GA, 2006)Google Scholar; for a summary discussion of confidence that nature supported morality if one simply looked hard enough, see Walker, Daniel, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America (New York, 2007)Google Scholar, chapter 12.
24 Saturday Evening Post 6:57 (September 1, 1877).
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26 Hathaway, Jay, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ordover, Nancy, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis, 2003), esp. 70–83.Google Scholar
27 Duggan, Lisa, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity (Durham, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Terry, Jennifer, An American Obsession, Science, Medicine and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chapter 3; Boag, Peter, “Sex & Politics in Progressive-Era Portland and Eugene: The Local Response to the 1912 Same-Sex Vice Scandal.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 100:2 (Summer 1999): 158–81Google Scholar; Boag, Peter, Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar, chapter. 4; on the growth of a subculture and the creation of the “fairy” as a type: Chauncey, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; for an interesting study of the way in which new ideas of sexual identity changed political discourse: Murphy, Kevin, Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chapter 1. Ellis, Havelock, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion (New York, 1990), 580–81Google Scholar. On the creation of congenital homosexuality: Hathaway, Jay, The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American Homophobia (Gordonsvillle, VA, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 Variety, April 9, 1910.
29 Variety, March 12 and April 9, 1910; Robinson Locke Collection, Claire Rochester, envelope 1236, clipping: “Man with Two Voices” and clipping: “Sings in Two Voices,” August 31, 1910. Lucca managed to secure real critical success when he moved on to Hammerstein's roof garden where he was a regular until disappearing from the stage in 1915 being “well liked by the patrons there.” New York Clipper, August 6, 1911.
30 Variety, April 30, 1910; NYPL, clipping file for Albright, Robert, clipping: “Oklahoma Bob Albright,” May 14, 1916.
31 NYPL, Robinson Locke Collection, Dollie Toye, envelope 2376, undated clipping, “Mirror Reflected Voice.”
32 NYPL, Robinson Locke Collection, Series 2, Emma Carus scrapbooks, vol. 1, untitled clipping dated May 1, 1904; Locke Collection, Claire Rochester, envelope 1934, undated clippings: “Sings Entire Quartet” and “Orpheum.”
33 NYPL, Robinson Locke Collection, Dorothy Toye, envelope 2376, undated clippings: “Delights Hundreds with Double Voice,” “Dorothy Toye,” “Namara-Toye,” “Girl with Two Voices” (dated February 26, 1910); “Dorothy Toye in Paris,” Los Angeles Herald, September 6, 1908.
34 Robinson Locke Collection, Claire Rochester, envelope 1934, undated clippings: “Sings Entire Quartet”; “Palace Theatre”; “Orpheum.”
35 Savannah Tribune, February 8, 1902; The Clipper [New York], August 6, 1911; Robinson Locke Collection, Claire Rochester, envelope 1934, undated clipping: “Claire Rochester a Hit in Buffalo” and Dorothy Toye, envelope 2376, undated clipping; “Little Stories.”
36 NYPL, Robinson Locke Collection, Dorothy Toye, envelope 2376, undated clipping: “Toye” and “Dorothy Toye to Write a Treatise on Tone Production.”
37 Variety, March 13, 1914 and September 16, 1917; The Billboard, July 25, 1914; NYPL, Robinson Locke Collection, Claire Robinson, envelope 1934, undated clippings: “Sings Entire Quartet” and “At Orpheum.”
38 Lucca achieved his most noteworthy success in the somewhat liminal space of Hammerstein's Roof Garden, which was an all-night supper and drinking club, the American equivalent of the European cabaret; The Clipper [New York], August 6, 1911. On Rochester's enthusiasm for the Boston Braves, New York Dramatic Mirror, October 21, 1914; on automobiles and World War I: Robinson Locke Collection, Claire Rochester, envelope 1934, undated clippings: “Actress Motors Coast to Coast” and “Claire Rochester Urging Men to Join the Navy”; the quote is from the undated clipping: “Two Voiced Star Looks Better than Jewels.”
39 Robinson Locke Collection, Series 2, Emma Carus Scrapbooks, vol.1, clipping dated: Sept 10, 1914; on Mora see Oswego Palladium, December 18, 888; New York Dramatic Mirror, March 3, 1900; Emma Carus Scrapbooks, vol. 3, clipping: “Singing Soubrette.”
40 New York Dramatic Mirror, July 22, 1914 and July 15, 1901; New York Dramatic Mirror, July 22, 1914; Carus is most famous today as the singer who premiered Irving Berlin's “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” For more on the song, Hamm, Charles, “Alexander and His Band,” American Music 14:1 (Spring 1996): 65–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
41 Carus made her transgressive personality into the core of her star image. Where Rochester implicitly connected her masculine element to sports, fast cars, and fun, Carus associated hers with a promiscuous and predatory sexuality. Her first lover, James Burrows, a theater manager, shot himself in Nashville when his mother refused him permission to marry her. Carus declared that she would have joined her lover in death had her father not been ill at the time. Her next fiancée, a wealthy Washingtonian, Charles Green, also died, this time of typhoid fever and the next proposal came from a married man. While he waited for his divorce, she married a college student and son of the consul general in India. They divorced within five months and she soon remarried. There were, in sum, five engagements and two marriages between 1898 and 1903. Washington Post, August 18, 1900; Boston Globe, August 29, 1903; for the horse-whip incident: New York Herald, January 24, 1902; for the Comer exchange: Chicago Daily Tribune, November 12, 1916.
42 Ned Buntline tried to interview “Wild Bill” Hickok before writing novels about him Rosa, James, They Called him Wild Bill: The Life and Adventures of James Butler Hickok (Norman, OK, 1964), 242–43Google Scholar; similarly Edward Ellis, who authored several hundred dime novels, claimed to have based his fiction on real stories and his sensational Life of Pontiac was even advertised as “a piece of sober historical scholarship.” Pfitzer, Gregory, Popular History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920 (Amherst, 2008)Google Scholar esp. chapter 5, the quote is from 236.
43 Vaudeville's anarchistic nature is described in Jenkins, Henry, What Made Pistachio Nuts ?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; it is also a prominent theme in Kibler's Rank Ladies.
