Irving Jones

Irving Jones (1873 – March 9, 1932) was an American comedian and songwriter who specialized in a ragtime musical genre known as coon songs during their heyday in the late 19th and early 20th century. He sold close to 50 songs, many of which became enormously popular. A successful comic throughout his career, he has been hailed as a pioneer of ragtime music and both praised and criticized for his ability to take advantage of the popularity of the coon song genre, which often used stereotypical portrayals of African-Americans.

Life and career

19th Century

Jones was born in New York City in 1873 and began his stage career as a child. While still a teenager, he began working with Sam T. Jack's Creole Show during their first tour in 1890. That same year he married his wife Sadie, who also performed with the Creole Show.

The Creole Show broke with the old plantation show format and introduced new urban elements. In the show, Jones composed and sung his own songs and performed comic monologues. His song and dance numbers like Postman reflected the new cosmopolitan sensibility of African-American vaudeville performance . In his early years, he was known mostly as a comic and was described as "a charming hustler" who expertly took charge of the craps games on the Creole Show's railroad sleeping car.

Shortly after Jones began his show business career, "coon songs" exploded in popularity. These songs, the first to be labeled ragtime, were written in 2/4 time, with a four bar intro, two bar vamp, followed by two or three verses and a sixteen bar chorus. Written and performed by both Black and White performers, often in Blackface, they used the derogatory term "coon" in their lyrics to refer to Black people. They relied on earlier Minstrel stereotypes of Black people as gaudy and ignorant, but added new stereotypes of violence and licentiousness. Watermelon, chicken, and razors were often mentioned.

These songs were initially hugely popular among younger white audiences in Northern cities, though less so with older Southern whites. They also found favor with some African-Americans who appreciated their pointed humor and boisterous anger, compared to earlier, more sentimental minstrel songs. Black songwriters used the genre to add irony as well as political and social commentary, and black audiences understood some of the double meanings in the songs in a way that most whites didn't.

Jones "wrote coon songs exclusively" and "rode the fad until its demise." "Take Your Clothes and Go" and the answer song, "Let Me Bring My Clothes Back Home", published in 1898, became hugely popular as they were picked up by other performers, black and white, on the minstrel show circuit. He also started his own Vaudeville Act, "Irving Jones and Charley Johnson, Two Cut-Ups" later adding his wife Sadie in "Jones, Grant and Jones." Jones sang "Home Ain't Nothing Like This" in New York in 1902. The song became another hit and was sung again by Ernest Hogan.

Jones stayed active as a comedian until his death on March 9, 1932, in New York City. He made fun of Ernest Hogan's popular but often disparaged "All Coons Look Alike to Me", with "All Birds Look Like Chickens to Me."

Paul Oliver in Songsters and Saints claimed Jones was probably the most popular of the ragtime songsters, adding "few other composers of such importance within a genre have been so neglected by historians of popular music."

Despite the success of his songs, Jones never actually became "the ragtime millionaire" that he wrote about. In 1922, the Kalamazoo Gazette published an interview with Jones that said that at that time the sale of one song with its royalties and recordings could set an entertainer up for life. But in Jones' day, songs sold for $50–100 each. Had he been born later, Jones would have made a lot more money, the article said, concluding: "Jones said there is just so much melody in a person's soul, and his supply is exhausted, and he sold his songs for a song. He is too good-natured to grouch over what might have been, even though he has a perfect right to be."