Specialty Acts: Stage Musicians and the Gilded Age Job Market

Since the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988), historians have been content to answer questions about culture and capitalism in the nineteenth-century US by citing a split between sacralized art and popular amusement. Yet this was never the most salient division for performers, who crossed genres out of necessity and readily critiqued the exploitative practices of an industry that looked like art but functioned like Standard Oil.
This paper offers a new approach that centers the operations of the first talent agencies as a way to re-evaluate the rise and consequences of Gilded Age entertainment monopolies. Scholars have long viewed the theatrical syndicates and vaudeville trusts of the 1890s as the result of inevitable progress rather than theatrical capital’s effort to consolidate ownership and control. Thus far ignored by historians, agencies were a crucial step in constructing an industry beholden not to audiences or players but to investors and managers. The earliest agencies were founded in the 1860s to route thousands of female vocalists and dancers through transnational variety circuits. Within two decades, however, even orchestra players and tragedians used agencies, which altered how players without the leverage of celebrity pitched themselves to employers and made claims for the value of their effort.
Drawing on more than 800 letters written to New York City agent James Milliken from players across the US and the UK, I analyze the strategies of musicians and other players navigating an employment system that institutionalized their interchangeability. Regardless of genre, stage performers were expected to develop a “specialty act” that was unique and memorable even as they worked within a structure that rendered them fungible. Defined at the peak of the live performance monopolies and relevant again in the era of LiveNation, the specialty continues to shape how we understand the work of commercial musicians.