From the Streets of Cairo to St. Louis, Louis: Musical Print Culture and the Intermedial Travels of the Danse du Ventre

Abstract

This essay discusses the danse du ventre—a Middle Eastern dance that proved controversial at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago—to explore how the social effects of a repertoire of corporeal motions, repeated across a range of venues and through a variety of media, can be amplified by remediation. First, I read contemporaneous accounts of the dance and efforts by Anthony Comstock and other “anti-vice” crusaders to censor its performances, showing how attempts to suppress the dance increased the audience for it and occasionally derailed the regulatory bodies that were mustered to stifle it. Then I track the dance’s treatment in popular songs and piano pieces of the era, including “The Streets of Cairo” and “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” examining sheet music as a print-culture medium distinctly capable of evading censors’ authority at the turn of the twentieth century. In light of scholars’ recent assertions that literature can invite reading practices that resemble listening, I argue that attending to sheet music—where character-building, scene-setting, and narrative are approached not just through language and its sonically charged dimensions but also through musical elements and interactions between music and the written word—can enable us to be more precise about what we mean when we talk about aural reading practices.

In the mid-1890s, a multiyear moral panic played out in the US over a style of Middle Eastern dance known as the danse du ventre.¹ Performers from Cairo, Algiers, and Turkey had introduced varieties of this dance—what today is usually called belly dancing—to US audiences at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and after that fair closed, many of the dancers and their imitators brought these movements to stages across the country. As they performed at venues including regional fairs and vaudeville theaters, a counter-ensemble of antivice crusaders, police officers, and local and state governments endeavored, with varying degrees of success, to hinder the dance’s travels through the US. Performances were banned in Boston and bowdlerized in San Francisco, and dancers themselves were arrested and jailed in New York on several high-profile occasions.²

Two years after the Chicago world’s fair made history, a new comic song about the danse du ventre became a hit. “The Streets of Cairo, or The Poor Little Country Maid” tells the story of an innocent girl who travels to a city and winds up posing “in abbreviated clothes”; the song simultaneously invokes and disavows a link between the girl’s corruption and the abdominal undulations that were by this time a staple of Cairo-themed fair exhibitions across the nation. “She never saw the streets of Cairo,” the chorus proclaims, proceeding to cite the danse du ventre by one of the names it had acquired in the US: “She never saw the kutchy, kutchy/Poor little country maid” (Thornton 1895). Popular songs pitying young women for their tragic lives constituted a blockbuster genre in the 1890s, but this song pointedly left open the possibility that the real tragedy of the country maid’s life was her failure to witness one of the peak cultural phenomena of her era.

While the danse du ventre’s performers, both within and beyond the midway exhibitions that were typically called some variation of “A Street in Cairo,” battled opprobrium and suppression for years, the song “The Streets of Cairo” circulated much more easily in multiple venues and media, including some freshly emergent forms: a rising Tin Pan Alley publisher in New York printed the sheet music, a leading tenor recorded it for the still-new technology of the wax cylinder and the 78-rpm phonograph record, bands played the song at state political functions, a group of high school students wrote a parody version of it, and circuit-touring vaudevilleans and nightclub habitués performed it for audiences throughout the country.³

This all took place at a historical moment marked by fierce contestations over acceptable public representations of women’s bodies and performances. At the turn of the twentieth century, the censor Anthony Comstock, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and similar advocates sought to ban or restrict performances, books, music, photographs, and other cultural forms they deemed immoral or obscene, confiscating such materials and prosecuting those responsible for distributing or presenting them.⁴ In the same fin-de-siècle moment, the US was on the rise as a colonial power, which stoked intense curiosity about cultures from other parts of the world—the many ethnological exhibitions at world’s fairs attest powerfully to this—as well as intense anxiety about the prospects of increased immigration from the regions where the US was becoming more involved.⁵

In light of these conflicting factors, it’s no surprise that the ostensibly sensuous Middle Eastern and North African dancers and their American imitators attracted both keen interest and concerted opposition in the wake of the Chicago world’s fair. Perhaps more surprising, at least at first glance, is the contrast between the dance’s difficult dispersion and the relative ease with which the song “The Streets of Cairo” traveled from coast to coast. Attending to how “The Streets of Cairo,” and the dancing it evoked, responded to and navigated the era’s contradictions regarding cultural alterity and gendered performance, this article proposes that the danse du ventre set into motion social effects that were considerably amplified through its multiple remediations. In particular, the dance’s treatment in “The Streets of Cairo” and other popular songs, and the travels of these songs in print as well as in performance and recording, illuminate sheet music’s status as a print-culture medium distinctly capable of evading censors’ authority at the turn of the twentieth century and amplifying the effects of other cultural performances.

Published sheet music was a thriving print-culture medium at the turn of the twentieth century—“Never in modern history have so many songs been printed as at the present time,” the Philadelphia Inquirer marveled in 1900—and its ascent was influenced by many of the same developments in printing methods, copyright law, and media consolidation that shaped the contemporaneous rise in periodicals and printed novels (“Some Popular Songs”).⁶ The medium’s reach was expansive; even for several decades after the invention of the phonograph, sheet music continued to be the primary way popular songs were bought and sold. Today, the vast array of surviving scores, many of them readily accessible online, offer a rich archive for scholars of both print culture and popular music.

Paying close attention to sheet music can add a valuable dimension to scholarly discussions of popular print culture, and it can also enrich sonically attuned studies of literature. Sound is the vibrational corona of writing, its archaic ancestor and the stuff of its potential performance, and literary scholars are increasingly attending to the sonic dimensions of literary forms and practices. Poetry’s originary connection to song, and that sonic genealogy’s persistence, has long driven conversations about poetics, including recent sonically attuned studies by Matthew Kilbane, Maureen McLane, and Lytle Shaw, among others.⁷ Henry Louis Gates’s seminal 1988 book The Signifying Monkey, as well as work by Bruce Barnhart, Brent Hayes Edwards, Carter Mathes, and Anthony Reed, discuss defining linkages between African American literary and musical traditions.⁸ Other literary scholars highlight the influence of popular musical genres and media on literature: Florence Dore’s Novel Sounds (2018) turns up musical aspects of mid-twentieth-century Southern US fiction, T. Austin Graham’s The Great American Songbooks (2013) traces musical dimensions of early-twentieth-century modernist prose, and Jessica E. Teague’s Sound Recording Technology and American Literature (2021) argues that technologies of sound reproduction and circulation influenced writers’ literary techniques. Many scholars doing defining work in the syncretic field of popular music studies employ methods drawn from literary studies, among other methodologies, to produce illuminating scholarship focused on popular music, its formal affordances, its performers and audiences, its multiple media and circulation networks, the cultural work it enables, and its traces and influences in literary texts.⁹

Yet for all this rich intellectual engagement, scholars working to bring out a musical strain in literary studies have rarely focused at length on sheet music, in particular, as a key medium where music and writing overlap overtly, and where character-building, scene-setting, and narrative are approached not just through language and its sonically charged dimensions but also through musical elements, and through interactions between music and the written word. In light of recent assertions that twentieth-century writers wrote literature that was meant to be heard as well as read or that they invited reading practices that entailed a sort of listening, attending to sheet music, which literally requires hearing (at minimum audiation, or inner hearing) as a part of the reading process, can enable us to be more precise about what we mean when we talk about certain reading practices as aural.¹⁰

The cultural practices that anchor this article’s study of musical print culture—the danse du ventre, its reception by mainly white American audiences, and its reinscription through sheet music as well as other media contexts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—may for some readers evoke more recent reinscriptions of belly dancing by some late-twentieth-century white feminists who embraced the form as an empowering route to sensual self-expression and body positivity grounded in a supposedly ancient goddess-worship ritual. Such an embrace has been decisively discredited by trenchant critiques of the dance’s culturally imperialist appropriation.¹¹ In risking such an association, the present article takes heart from a recent invitation by Jennifer Nash and Samantha Pinto (2023) to study feminism’s “bad objects,” those superseded objects and framing concepts that feminism periodically disavows in an attempt to create a more perfect movement.¹² Heeding this call gives us a chance to tell a fuller story of the danse du ventre and its reception in the US.

From the danse du ventre’s first performances in the US, it served as an occupation for working dancers from the Middle East trying to make a living here.¹³ In addition, although the dance at the turn of the twentieth century did not reach the overwhelming popularity of what Shane Vogel has termed the later “black fad performances” of ragtime or calypso, its spread through the US following the Chicago fair nevertheless shares some characteristics with those fads. Its popularity, like that of calypso, registered “cultural imperialism” while also furnishing opportunities for performers to “expand diasporic culture within and against such imperial claims of knowing”; its diverse performers agilely maneuvered through the space between ostensibly authentic cultural traditions and their commodified incarnations in mass culture; and, in its performers’ insistence that the dance they were presenting in avowedly Americanized format nevertheless constituted a “national dance” and “race characteristic,” the danse du ventre “destabilized authentic/inauthentic binaries and unsettled the epistemological grounds of colonialism” that framed the dancers’ very presence in the US (Vogel 3–4, “Baya Will Dance”).

The story of the danse du ventre’s travels through US culture after the Chicago fair has been mainly told as a story about dance history, world’s fairs, and colonialism.¹⁴ It’s certainly crucial to recognize how Western imperialism and Orientalist attitudes made it possible for Middle Eastern and North African women to transgress norms of gendered performance in ways that would have been off limits to all but the most dishonored domestic performers, and later enabled the appropriation of many of these same performances. Yet this story also presents a valuable opportunity to trace how developments in musical print culture, along with other turn-of-century changes in the conditions of mass media and print culture, helped dancers from the region, as well as American performers, counter attempts to suppress the dance in the US.

The migrations of the danse du ventre from world’s fairs to other venues, including the midways of regional fairs, burlesque and vaudeville stages, and command performances in courtrooms and other halls of power, were mediated and remediated through multiple media, including souvenir photographic portfolios that promised to preserve otherwise evanescent memories of the fairs, newspaper accounts that detailed dancers’ performances and legal proceedings, and popular music’s many forms, including gramophone recordings, parody versions, and sheet music editions, in addition to vocal and instrumental performances. This array attests to how such remediation can expand the reach of corporeal actions, multiplying the encounters they stage across differences of gender, nationality, and desire. According to a canonical account of performativity, identity, and repetition, identity-based social norms are perpetuated at least in part through a compulsory set of corporeal styles and actions that gain power and credibility through continual repetition, even as variations and differences inevitably accrue over the course of such repetitions.¹⁵ The remediations of the danse du ventre suggest how a repertoire of dance moves, repeated across a range of venues and through a variety of media, might connect to social effects beyond the literal stages where those moves are formally performed for audiences.

How, though, do the mediations and remediations to which these motions are subjected and through which they circulate shape their potential effects in the world? In instances of remediation, especially at times when available media technologies are rapidly changing, a “double logic” often emerges wherein the proliferation of available media coexists with a tendency to “erase” the appearance of these media, such that immediacy—or the illusion or experience thereof—“depends on hypermediacy” (Bolter and Grusin 5–6). In the case of the danse du ventre, the multiple media and networks through which circulated not just the dance itself, but also ideas and stories about the dance and the people who might engage in it, paradoxically produced an immediacy effect, attenuating the ethnographic frame that had served, at the world’s fairs, to maintain a carefully delineated distance between the kinds of people who might move their bodies in such a manner and the kinds of people who would observe those performances. Each wave of the danse du ventre’s intermedial circulation helped create conditions that enabled its further travels. The dance and its musical mediations thus present a valuable case study for understanding the dynamic interactions among changes in media, performance, and social norms—interactions that, for all that they are substantially shaped by capitalist, colonialist, and repressive state and para-state interests, can nevertheless harbor possibilities for exceeding and even unarranging these systems of power in unexpected and dramatic ways.

1. The World’s Columbian Exposition and “A Street in Cairo”

The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago took place in 1893, one in a series of world’s fairs through which organizers and audiences in the US and Western Europe sought to make systematized sense of the overwhelming amount of information about human communal life and productive activity that advancements in transportation and communicative media were making available.¹⁶ In the elaborate temporary buildings of the Chicago fair’s White City, fairgoers visited exhibits on topics such as agriculture and transportation, admired the products of individual states of the US, and surveyed official offerings from countries including Brazil, Sweden, and Haiti. Nearby lay the Midway Plaisance, a broad mile-long promenade stretching eastward toward Lake Michigan. The fair’s more commercial and entertainment-oriented attractions were located here, including the world’s first Ferris Wheel, along with many ethnological exhibitions that claimed to offer a look at everyday life in other parts of the world: Algiers and Ireland, Lapland and Dahomey, Japan and Tunis.¹⁷

The exhibition formally named “A Street in Cairo” was by many reports the most successful concession on the Midway. Contemporaneous accounts, including those in the souvenir photographic portfolio The Dream City, attest that the big draw of this Cairene byway was the availability of camel rides, although its central location near the world’s first Ferris Wheel may also have played a role.¹⁸ One of the fair’s most controversial attractions was housed there as well: the theater where could be seen, all day and into the night, women performing the famed danse du ventre. The Turkish and Algerian villages also presented women dancing in a similar style, and once the considerable appeal of these dances became clear, the Persian Palace engaged Parisian dancers to deck themselves out in Eastern-inflected outfits and present a pastiche of “pseudo-Oriental dance” (Carlton 23). Yet it was the Street in Cairo that became fixed in the US imagination as the danse du ventre’s home at the Chicago fair.

Most American observers who went on the record about their experience witnessing the danse du ventre in Chicago described it as a grotesque, unappealing performance accompanied by monotonous music. A reporter from the Chicago Inter Ocean meticulously described the proceedings:

Fatima, the girl in blue, doesn’t prance up and down the stage, or go into mad gyrations, or try to kick a hole in the ceiling. She keeps time in timid little steps, and occasionally sidles about the stage in slow, gliding circles. It seems to be her pet ambition to disjoint herself at the hips, though a man in yesterday’s audience thought she was suffering from an overdose of green apples. At any rate, her anatomy below [sic] the waist and the knees performs a series of violent tremors, spasms and contortions. She literally humps herself in this wild agony, and occasionally turns her back to the audience to give ocular proof. Tiny cymbals fastened to the dancer’s fingers like castanets keep up a clanging accompaniment. It is long after the audience is weary of the monotonous performance before Fatima shows signs of exhaustion. The cymbals stop to take breath, the eye-lids drop, a languorous tremor sweeps thro’ the swaying body and the dancer is about to drop asleep. Unfortunately, the tambo player wakes up at this inopportune time and starts a new bar of music. That banishes sleep, and the poor girl has to do it all over again (“Poetry” 13).

The Dream City asserted that “No ordinary Western woman looked on these performances with anything but horror,” thus establishing aesthetic response to the danse du ventre as a mode of distinguishing between Western and non-Western, between ordinary and abnormal, and between “woman” and spectators who would not qualify for the term (The Dream City, “A Dance in the Street of Cairo Theatre”). The Inter Ocean reported a similar combination of gendered repugnance and national taste, writing: “Many ladies seem to get their money’s worth before it is half over, for they leave the theater. The dans du ventre [sic] is quite a strain on American sensibilities, but many want to see it as one of the oriental curiosities of The Fair” (“Poetry”). The repeated report that it was ordinary Western, or American, women or ladies who found the dance the most unpleasant suggests that the dance did possess a greater appeal for some other audience members. Such appeal may explain the repeated attempts to defuse and contain that appeal through derisive descriptions like the one above, or by appeals to human evolution. The Dream City, for instance, was careful to locate the dance in a schema of human progress that revealed Western culture to be more advanced than others:

The Western eye was but a moment in determining, at the World’s Fair, that time has wrought as great a change in the dance as in the alphabet . . . Whereas, men began by reading from right to left, they now mostly read from left to right; and whereas, dancing began by movements of the body rather than the lower limbs, it has now developed into the Western performance (The Dream City, “A Performer of the Danse du Ventre”).

The Dream City attributed American fairgoers’ distaste not only to the movement but also to the sound track: “Though thousands went to see it, they did not go often, for the music was too irritating,” the portfolio says, describing the music as being “of a most monotonous character, the drums, particularly, hurting the ordinary ear with their increasing sharp beats” (The Dream City, “A Performer of the Danse du Ventre,” “A Dance in the Street of Cairo Theatre”).

Some observers considered the dance to be not just grating but obscenely sexual, yet their protests proved ineffectual at first. Comstock visited the fair and returned to New York to denounce the dance as “an assault on the pure dignity of womanhood,” but the reporters covering his fulminations were more captivated by the imitation Comstock attempted to offer.

Here Mr Comstock stepped out on the floor and gave an imitation of the danse du ventre. He is a pretty stout man and the performance was very interesting, but not at all libidinous. He wreathed his shirt-sleeved arms over his head and made his ginger-colored side-whiskers shiver in the air. “Of course I can’t do it exactly as they did,” he apologized, “but I am not as little as they are. It is not dancing as we understand it. The legs are hardly moved. They bend away back.” Mr Comstock attempted this and came near falling on the big leather-covered lounge in his room.

   “But its [sic] got to stop,” exclaimed Mr Comstock, reseating himself at his desk and opening letters containing cigarette pictures of young women with long skirts (“It’s Got to Stop”).

When the fair’s own Board of Lady Managers decried the dance, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mocked the ladies’ response as a “hysterical attack” that “brings out the innate cussedness of human nature” (untitled news brief). Far from dampening interest in the dance, the outcry was apparently good for business. According to the Saint Paul Globe, which ran a compendium of newspaper quotations about the Midway controversy, the Chicago Dispatch wrote that Comstock was “giving first-class satisfaction as the advertising agent of Midway plaisance” and suggested that “If Anthony Comstock and the board of lady managers can be induced to continue their spectacular antics during the next three months the Midway Plaisance may safely be relied upon to pull the exposition out of its present financial difficulties” (“Anthony Comstock”).

Despite Cairo Street’s supposed strain on American sensibilities and the allegedly irritating character of its music, the exhibition and its danse du ventre remained a touchstone in US culture and music for many years. A new industry of traveling carnivals and amusement parks arose in the wake of the Chicago fair, and a version of Cairo Street, complete with the danse du ventre, was a common component of these attractions. At the larger-scale fairs that followed Chicago’s—including 1894’s Midwinter International Exposition in San Francisco, the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis—Cairo-themed exhibitions with the dance were de rigueur.¹⁹

As the dance’s popularity spread, so too did efforts to restrict and regulate it. In New York, a month after the Chicago fair ended, three women from Algiers were arrested and fined $50 apiece for recapitulating the dance at the “World’s Fair Prize Winners’ Exposition,” presented at the Grand Central Palace. The following month, the Arizona Republican reported that the “kouta kouta” had been declared “immoral” and banned from Boston in a unanimous vote by that city’s aldermen, following a visit by two of them to a performance at the city’s once-venerated Howard Athenaeum.²⁰ Stories about the Boston ban made the news in cities as far away as Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, an indication that the spread of the dance and efforts to rein it in continued to be a national story.²¹ The opposition persisted through 1895, when the Georgia House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly for a bill that would have made it a misdemeanor to participate in “a muscle dance, ventre dances, and other vulgar, obscene and immoral dances” (“Against the Dance”). Yet Georgia’s State Senate concluded its legislative session that year without bringing the bill to the full chamber for discussion: the muscle dance ban had died a quiet death in committee.

The efforts to crack down on the dance inadvertently increased the venues within which it could be seen and discussed. While many sources produced during and immediately after the Chicago Fair had downplayed the dance and its supposedly scandalous qualities, the later series of arrests and court appearances provided it with a new stream of publicity and opened up new venues, such as daily newspapers, vice-suppression society offices, and municipal courtrooms, not just to discussions or descriptions of the danse du ventre but often to the dance itself.

In San Francisco, for instance, dancers who were in town for the Midwinter International Exposition were obliged to give multiple additional performances for the Pacific Society for the Suppression of Vice after members of that group initially shut down their public performances. Numerous news articles in the San Francisco Examiner suggest the anti-vice reformers became well versed in the differences between supposedly Turkish dance moves and what they called “the obnoxious Egyptian dance,” and they demanded several rounds of specific changes to the routines in the name of morality (“They May Dance”). Local journalists reported on these private audiences with undisguised relish for the scenes’ absurdity.

“You want to understand,” said Secretary [Frank] Kane addressing the girls through an interpreter, “that you must dance the whole dance. Don’t leave any steps or anything else out. Wear the same costumes you wear in public. Let us see the worst of it, and then you can show us what the modified form is like. Is that correct, gentlemen?”

  “We can judge better the morality or immorality of the dance by seeing it all, I think,” said Director Morris.

  “By all means dance it at its worst first,” added Director Sullivan […]

  Catherina came forward to give the Egyptian dance. She wore a short embroidered skirt, a red sash was fastened about her waist, and a beaded coronet was on her head. The music seemed to gradually suggest the dance […]

  The Directors leaned forward and watched the excited dancer with scrupulous interest (“For the Sake”).

Repression also brought the danse du ventre into courtrooms, where it frequently upstaged the legal proceedings and occasionally drafted new bodies into its undulating shapes and motions. Performers’ trials were well attended by members of the public eager for an offstage glimpse of the dancers, and the performances they found there were not always what they had expected. At the New York hearing for the three dancers arrested at Grand Central Palace, a “somewhat large and burly” city detective found himself obliged to perform the dance after defense attorney Abe Hummel objected to his repeated use of the word “indecent” in describing it: “Finally, in despair, McMahon stood up and gave an imitation of the dance” (“No More,” “Dancing Girls”). The Evening World reported that the dance’s appearance in the middle of the legal proceedings reshaped both the court and the detective: “The court-room was convulsed, and Manager Delacroix of the dancers looked wistfully at the ruddy-faced officer, as if he wouldn’t mind adding McMahon to his staff of ‘ventre dancers’” (“Dancing Girls”). The judge declined to allow one of the arrested dancers to demonstrate the dance herself, a decision that disappointed many spectators, some of whom “left the place disgustedly” (“Dancing Girls”).

In a California courthouse the following year, when dancer Belle Baya offered to give a demonstration, the judge asked the jury if they would like to see it. One juror blurted out, “I think so,” and a journalist reported that the mere prospect of the dance, combined with the juror’s excited anticipation, temporarily overwhelmed the regulatory apparatus meant to govern it:

And then the gravity of the court gave way. A prolonged roar of laughter shook the room, and the excitement even seemed to reach Judge Conlan himself, who cried: “On with the dance,” and then, remembering his judicial dignity, rapped for order and cried: “Bailiff, keep order in the court!”

During the performance itself, “pandemonium reigned in the court.” The jury proceeded to acquit the dancers after deliberating for five minutes (“Baya Will Dance”).

All the suppression and censorship imposed on the danse du ventre, all the surveillance and efforts at control that were aimed at it, thus helped to increase the audience for it, proliferate the spaces within which it could be seen and discussed, demonstrate its compelling qualities, and dishevel the very legal and regulatory bodies that were mustered to suppress it, shattering the dignity of official proceedings and remaking even the sworn enemies of vice as prospective ventre dancers. Not incidentally, the dance’s proliferation by way of attempts to suppress it also helped make the dance famous—famous enough, in fact, to warrant having a hit popular song written about it. This song, in turn, spread the allure of the dance even more widely.

2. Conveying the Comedy of Sentiment in “The Streets of Cairo” (1895)

“The Streets of Cairo,” a song written in 1895 by James Thornton and popularized by his wife, the vaudeville singer-comedienne Bonnie Thornton, demonstrates how humor, ambiguity, and the multiply mediated ways popular music circulated in the late 1890s all helped bring the music and the idea of the danse du ventre into venues where the dance itself would likely have had difficulty traveling.

The lyrics of “The Streets of Cairo” tell, in elliptical form, the story of a “poor little country maid” who goes to a city, poses nightly “in abbreviated clothes,” and makes men “sorry” to have met her. The lyrics leave enough unstated that the story can be read as describing either a hapless innocent who becomes somehow corrupted—which would be a familiar fallen-maiden story—or else, and more intriguingly, a young woman who misrepresents herself as innocent in order to make a string of men regret their involvement with her.

Records from the US Copyright Office demonstrate that “The Streets of Cairo” was copyrighted between July and December 1895, and the sheet music was published that year by Frank Harding of New York. Harding was a successful publisher who frequently printed songs that became popular at New York’s clean vaudeville houses such as Tony Pastor’s, where Bonnie Thornton often performed. The sheet-music industry was changing in these years. No longer the purview of small-scale music publishers in Cincinnati or Philadelphia, the business was growing and consolidating as a veritable machinery of popular song centered in Manhattan’s Tin Pan Alley, where songwriters, vaudeville stars, and song “pluggers” worked in tandem to manufacture and promote hit after hit.²² The turn of the twentieth century is especially key in the industry’s development: changes in copyright law, the increasing concentration of music publishing in New York, and the role of the Chicago world’s fair in disseminating cultural trends to a truly mass audience all helped drastically increase the potential reach of popular songs. Charles K. Harris’s sentimental story-song “After the Ball” was published in 1892, became the unchallenged hit of the Chicago fair the following year, and by 1895 was reported to have sold more than one million copies, an unprecedented number.

“The Streets of Cairo” traveled quickly around the country in the second half of 1895, just as the Cairo Street exhibition at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta was sparking opposition and the Georgia state legislature was weighing a ban on “vulgar, obscene and immoral dances.” The song reached the west coast as early as August, when reporter Alice Rix heard it sung in an interracial nightclub in San Francisco. It “proved a glittering success while it lasted,” Rix wrote, “and I could not help regretting that there were no more verses. They sang one verse six or seven times. The men beat the floor with their heels and the girls patted their hands together in time with the music. Oh, it was so lively!” (Rix) By September, an article in the popular men’s magazine National Police Gazette referred to “Jimmy Thornton’s famous song, ‘The Streets of Cairo,’” but then went on to quote the whole first verse, suggesting that it was not quite so famous that readers could be expected to fill in the lines for themselves (“Masks”). The following month, the Evening Journal of Wilmington, Delaware, included the title at the top of a list of “well known songs” by Thornton, and by November, the song was popular enough that Dan Quinn, one of the most prolific and successful recording artists of the early phonograph era, recorded it for the Berliner label (“Amusements,” Discography). In early 1896, when Bonnie Thornton performed for a standing-room-only crowd of 2,675 servicemen at the Fourth Regiment Armory in Jersey City, the song was so well known that the audience requested it as Bonnie’s opening number. They proceeded to roar along with the song’s chorus at top volume, making it unnecessary for Bonnie to sing at all (“The Stag Was a Bird”).

The cover of the sheet music for “The Streets of Cairo” establishes it as something between a sentimental song and a parody of one, while also helping frame the score’s connection to live performance: the score, like all scores of popular vaudeville songs in this era, simultaneously promotes the song’s live performances and rides their coattails, while also reproducing those performances, in however attenuated a form, and spurring further remediations of it in the form of amateur performances.

On the cover of “The Streets of Cairo” (fig. 1), the elaborate hand lettering, the pen-and-ink curlicue ornamentation around the words and image, the photograph of the song’s signature performer, and especially the visually prominent subtitle, “The Poor Little Country Maid,” distinctly imply that this is a sentimental song, perhaps even a tearjerker, about something terrible happening to a vulnerable girl—a reliable formula for a hit song in the mid-1890s. Meanwhile, other elements of the cover hint at a comic take on this framing. Chief among the countervailing factors is the photo of Bonnie Thornton that takes up a large portion of the cover. The full-body photo—already a telling departure from the head shot that more commonly adorned popular sheet music in the 1890s—displays Thornton clad in a frilly, long-sleeved white dress that lacks a defined waistline but is gathered at the neckline and the ribbon-trimmed wrists. Beneath this virginal frock, we can see loose striped pants whose hem hits just below her knees. She is bunching up one side of her dress at the waist in a conspicuously failed attempt to be seductive, and her gaze darts nervously off to the side of the frame. Below a comical triangular hat of white lace that seems to float atop her head, a riot of curly hair spreads out to her shoulders in another triangle shape. This would be an unusual photo to put on the cover of a straightforwardly sentimental song, and despite (or because of) Thornton’s ostentatiously childish outfit, her pose comes off as more a sendup of youthful innocence than a straightforward invocation of it.

Thornton’s photo also contrasts interestingly with the cover images of two other pieces of sheet music from the era that reference the Street in Cairo exhibition or its characteristic dance. “Cairo Street Waltz,” an 1893 piano piece both composed and published by one Signor Guglielmo Ricci, operating with a downtown Chicago address, was sold at the Chicago fair’s Cairo exhibit for 50 cents per copy. The sheet music features on its cover an intricately hand-drawn panorama of the Chicago exhibition itself (fig. 2). Over a dozen dark-skinned men fill the street’s main plaza, clad in flowing robes and a range of head coverings, while a Victorian couple gaze on the scene with distanced curiosity from their spot at the far left of the picture. Three camels are visible, and their riders include a fair-skinned lady sitting side-saddle and balancing a white parasol on her left shoulder. The whole scene looks positively sedate, except for a circular inset at top left, which shows a drawing of a dancing girl incompletely contained on the head of a tambourine. The deep V-neck of her gown, and her bare ankles visible beneath its hem, mark her as scandalously undressed. A fringed sash is looped loosely around her hips, accentuating them; at the end of each of her gracefully outflung arms she holds a set of finger cymbals, and her left hand extends beyond the border of the tambourine, as if to embody the danger that her dance might exceed the carefully constructed frame of ethnographic display to disturb the orderly scene depicted below. Yet once consumers turned the page, they would find the music itself to be a stately G-major waltz that bears the tempo marking Moderato (video 1). If the eighth-note-triplet flourishes that show up in the piece’s third section and the interlude that immediately precedes it, bearing dynamic markings that accentuate the ornaments (crescendos in the interlude, forte markings in the third section), are intended as musical approximations of a ventre dancer’s finger cymbals or flowing garments, they do so rather subtly, and without ever disrupting the left hand’s steady quarter-note waltz rhythm (video 2). A bit of chromatic movement in the piece’s coda drives a brief trip through other harmonies (E-major to A-minor to D7), but the final nine measures resolutely reassert the piece’s G-major framework through no fewer than ten restatements of the tonic chord (video 3). The cover may picture a colonial order of examination and demure entertainment that the dance threatens to unarrange, but in the music, the Western status quo is never in any real danger.

The cover of “Kutchy Kutchy, or, Midway Dance,” an 1895 piano piece by Henry Berti, takes a different approach. Its sheet music names three publishers in three different cities—Alberto Himan in New York, Lyon & Healy in Chicago, and W.W. Peffers in Cleveland—reflecting an interim stage in the transition of popular music publishing from a regional affair to an industry concentrated in New York. The cover art (fig. 3) eschews any direct representation of a human body, instead subtly suggesting the dancing through the thick curlicues of the capital Ks that twine around each other, and most prominently through an abstracted line drawing at top right whose two curling prominences could suggest a woman’s two arms raised lithely over her head. The curved outcropping at the right-hand side of this sigil might aim at approximating the way a sash or gown could rise up on air currents as the dancer wearing it spins around, or it could be a purely decorative flourish added to reassert the abstraction of the shape and cast the human referent into doubt.

Unlike the music of “Cairo Street Waltz,” which reasserts Western order in the face of an Orientalized threat, the music of “Kutchy Kutchy” makes that threat the main attraction. The piece’s melody reproduces the song said to have accompanied the danse du ventre in Chicago, and the liberal use of grace notes, chromaticisms, and visually intricate sixteenth-note figures with detailed fingering indications would have made at least the song’s exoticism visually apparent to a reader with basic musical training and passing acquaintance with Orientalist motifs (video 4). It’s worth noting, too, that the sixteenth-note figures are much easier to play than they look at first glance, especially thanks to the fingerings provided: the apparently exotic, in other words, proves remarkably accessible. The melody (video 5) derives from “Kradoudja,” an Algerian folktune, according to several mid-nineteenth-century French musical scores that include versions of it (Locke 116). From the Chicago fair onward, the tune was widely associated in the US with the danse du ventre, an association so durable that even today it is linked with a stereotyped idea of the Middle East, and US schoolchildren for generations have learned it on playgrounds as a ditty that begins either “There’s a place in France” or “There’s a place on Mars” (“Hootchy-Kootchy”). “Kutchy Kutchy” uses abstraction and musical quotation as tactics for sonically evoking the scandalous dance of its title, and even inviting amateurs to participate, without running afoul of more literal-minded censors—although, as we shall see later, at least one censor was not so easily put off the scent.

The “Kradoudja” melody may have arrived in Chicago through the mediating efforts of Sol Bloom, the fast-rising impresario and sheet music publisher who contracted to bring the Algerian Village exhibition he had enjoyed at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris to the Chicago fair, and who was eventually put in charge of all the Midway Plaisance concessions in Chicago. Bloom later claimed to have composed the melody himself, off the cuff, at a press preview for the exhibition:

Only a pianist was available to provide our music, and to give him an idea of the rhythm I hummed a tune, then sat down at the piano myself and picked it out with one finger. From this improvisation a score was later arranged, and the music became far better known than the dance itself (Bloom 135).

The Algerian tune’s presence in earlier French scores clearly contradicts Bloom’s claim to authorship, and his close connection with the Algerian dancers makes it nearly inevitable that he would have heard the song at performances and rehearsals before the press preview, whether or not he consciously recollected these hearings when he reproduced the melody for the pianist on duty. So Bloom’s assertion is of limited value as a factual account of the tune’s genesis. Still, it is interesting that while Bloom—who was a long-serving US Congressman from Manhattan by the time he published his recollections of the fair in his 1948 autobiography—took care to disavow any personal connection with the era’s most famous and controversial danse du ventre performer, an elusive figure known as Little Egypt, he saw no reason to disclaim responsibility for the music that would have accompanied some of her dances, even asserting that he should have gotten authorship rights: “I believe that my failure to copyright it cost me at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars in royalties” (Bloom 135).

Through the cover images for these three pieces of sheet music, we can witness a process in which the figure of the Middle Eastern dancer is initially portrayed as a physical presence in, and a potential disruptor of, an ordered exhibition of Cairene culture for white American audiences, and is then either abstracted altogether, as on the cover of “Kutchy Kutchy,” or replaced with a comic white proxy, as on the cover of “The Streets of Cairo.” Thus, in addition to making light of the virtuous-young-girl-in-moral-danger theme, the photo of Bonnie Thornton on the sheet music cover also doubles the way the “poor little country maid” of the song displaces the Middle Eastern dancers themselves.

Other elements of “The Streets of Cairo” and its sheet music offer additional context for its appearance and circulation in the era’s print culture. The song’s title and subtitle, along with James Thornton’s name, are all rendered in the thick, vibrant hand-lettering common to popular sheet music of the era, but much of the other text bears signs of a rushed job. The words “Bonnie Thornton’s Latest ‘Hit,’” which run across the top of the cover, are handwritten in thin, light capital letters that are unevenly spaced out. The quotation marks at the end of the song title are drawn the wrong way, appearing as upside-down apostrophes rather than the right-side-up apostrophes that properly serve as closing quotation marks. Beneath James Thornton’s name, there is a list of several of his other well-known songs, but the title of the first one listed, the popular 1892 ballad “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,” seems to have been written incorrectly at first and then fixed only halfway: The second word is written as “Sweethearts,” without the apostrophe, and the final s of that word is wedged awkwardly between “Sweetheart” and “the,” so as to leave almost no space between the two words, strongly suggesting that whoever wrote this part of the cover had initially forgotten the s altogether and quickly squeezed it in rather than redoing the line.

Why would this cover have been put together with such poor attention to detail? The song was being performed widely in the autumn of 1895, in many cities and by many different performers. By October, the Topeka  Daily Capital could complain: “‘She Never Saw the Streets of Cairo’ is running ‘One Girl in the World’ a close race for popularity in the shows that visit Topeka this year. The people are getting tired of both of them” (“A Word in Passing”). A music publisher hoping to profit from the song’s considerable vogue in live performance before audiences moved on might well have rushed it into print. It’s also possible that Thornton and Harding were keen to secure the copyright before anybody else, since the song’s verses used the same Kradoudja-cum–danse du ventre melody that had been widespread in the US for at least two years. Thornton and Harding’s chief competition, the team that copyrighted “Kutchy Kutchy” and brought it to print in the same year as “The Streets of Cairo,” was no stranger to the complexities of musical intellectual property: in 1888, “Kutchy Kutchy” publisher Alberto Himan had been spotted at New York’s Casino Theatre taking notes on the songs performed onstage. He claimed to be acting on the instructions of music publisher Richard Saulfield, who intended to publish the songs himself, and Himan confessed to having already transcribed “eight of the most taking airs” over the course of six visits to the theater (“Tried to Steal Music”). It turns out that even with such experienced competition, Thornton and Harding had no need to worry, since, according to the US Copyright Office’s Virtual Card Catalog, “Kutchy Kutchy” and “The Streets of Cairo” both managed to receive copyrights between July and December of 1895.

The “Streets of Cairo” cover also indicates the song’s commercial ambitions. It promises that the song is “for sale at all music stores”—likely an exaggeration, but one that attests to an aspiration for retail ubiquity. It names, presumably as publishers, both “Frank Hardings Music House” (again with a missing apostrophe) in New York and B. Feldman in London, a prominent British music publisher. The cover also provides the unusual stipulation that the copyright was “entered at Stationers Hall London England”—this is in addition to the US copyright that was secured for the song—which further suggests that Thornton and Harding were particularly eager to lock down authorship rights, on both sides of the Atlantic, to a phenomenally popular melody that demonstrably predated them by several centuries.

If the cover of “The Streets of Cairo” combines elements of sentimental song, comic parody, ambition, and compression or even haste, the song’s lyrics offer a similar mix. It sketches out a story of a girl gone wrong, while leaving out so many details that the song can be read as either a cautionary tale or a boisterous celebration of naughtiness, an ambiguity that the song’s melody and musical accompaniment further complicate. The lyrics begin with a straightforward introduction:

An attractive, morally upstanding girl from the countryside has recently arrived in a city, and, perhaps predictably, something will go wrong for her: oh what a pity. Yet the chorus immediately proclaims, in a jaunty dotted rhythm and an insistent major-key melody, that the girl has made excellent decisions, wisely abstaining from frequenting the location that the song treats as the absolute embodiment, the nerve center, of urban vice.

Thornton’s audiences would have had little difficulty identifying the song’s titular locale as referring not to the actual streets of the Egyptian capital but rather to Cairo-themed fair exhibitions. And the “kutchy, kutchy” would have been immediately understood as a reference to the danse du ventre: throughout 1894 and 1895, the dance was most commonly referred to in the US as the “coochee coochee,” a variant on the earlier “kouta-kouta,” with the spelling highly variable.²³

Other elements of the song undermine the chorus’s blanket denials regarding the main character’s entertainment habits. Although the second verse suggests that the girl falls from virtue, the song offers no specific scene of corruption to account for her fall. If it is truly not the streets of Cairo that bring her down, there’s no clear sense of what does.²⁴ The iconic hootchy-kootchy melody, combined with the similarly Orientalist piano accompaniment, makes the main character’s relationship to the danse du ventre even more ambiguous. In keeping with mid-1890s attitudes toward the dance, “The Streets of Cairo” presents the idea of the dancer while coyly withholding the explicit appearance of an avowed one, preserving the modesty of its audience while tapping into the dance’s allure and, crucially, allowing an invocation of the dance to enter spaces where the dance itself might not have been welcome.

“The Streets of Cairo” plays with the clichés of sentimental songs about good girls brought low by corrupting city life. Such songs were then at the height of their popularity—Paul Dresser’s “Just Tell Them that You Saw Me,” a classic of the genre, was one of the top-selling songs of 1895—but “The Streets of Cairo” at once mobilizes and makes light of the idea that the female protagonist is a ruined object of pity. The song never directly explains what makes this girl “poor,” but the final verse gestures toward what made the maid such a regrettable acquaintance: “She was engaged as a picture for to pose/To appear each night, in abbreviated clothes.” Despite the centrality of the hootchy-kootchy to this song, the lyrics do more to suggest that the girl appeared in one of the tableaux vivants that were both popular and controversial entertainment of the time, or that she worked as a figure model.²⁵ The song’s music and lyrics, taken together, conflate the three activities in a mélange of scandalous behavior, possibly mocking the era’s censors who lacked the aesthetic refinement to distinguish among a diverse range of departures from a singular norm of womanly purity.

After this last verse, the final chorus arrives, with different words from the previous choruses. This chorus also introduces a literary intertext:

Trilby is the eponymous protagonist of George du Maurier’s phenomenally popular novel about bohemian artists in Europe. First serialized in Harper’s New Monthly throughout much of 1894 and then published as a book that fall, Trilby was a massive best seller in both England and the US that inspired theatrical works, fashionable hats, and a boom in sheet-music publishing for “Ben Bolt,” a ballad that figures prominently in the novel and that was published in numerous Trilby-branded sheet music editions.²⁶ The novel’s protagonist, Trilby O’Ferrall, is a good-hearted, free-spirited figure model, beloved by all her male friends. She gives up posing nude once she learns that it isn’t respectable behavior, but her decision comes too late; for this misstep, she is barred from marrying the sensitive young painter who loves her. She subsequently marries the sinister Jewish musician-hypnotist Svengali, under whose mesmeric influence she becomes a talented singer. When Svengali is incapacitated, though, the trance is broken, Trilby’s singing voice becomes hideous again, and she tragically weakens and dies.

The music of “The Streets of Cairo”’s verses hints at a similar mesmeric process: Whether the country maid ever sees the kutchy kutchy or not, the dance’s hypnotic influence extends to her through sound, a process that is audible in the hootchy-kootchy melody and grace-note-studded basslines. Attending to the song’s score in detail will enable a richer understanding of how its music fills out, and pushes against, the narrative that is only sketched in the lyrics.

From the beginning of the song until the first chorus, the song’s musical language is defined by the hootchy-kootchy melody. First a brief piano introduction condenses the verse’s full melody into a tight four measures, with multiple grace notes in the left hand anticipating similar notes that will dominate the accompaniment to the chorus (video 6). Then comes the solidly E-minor verse, in which the story of the little maid is told to that characteristic melody, the latter invoking the dance through sound and undermining the chorus’s lyrical disavowal of any direct encounter with those taboo moves (video 7). The piano’s right hand doubles the verse melody for the first two lines, then switches to choppier eighth-note chords alternating with eighth rests for the next line, and ends with an ominous-sounding perfect authentic cadence (i6-V7-i) of quarter-note chords, all of which mirrors the melody’s alternation between relatively slow, sinuous rhythms and quicker passages.

When the chorus arrives, the song switches into the relative major key of G, and the melody’s rhythm grows statelier, broadening out from the verse’s eighth notes to a chorus melody based primarily on quarter notes. Dotted rhythms on the lines “saw the streets of Cairo” and “saw the kutchy, kutchy” ensure that these stand out as the energetic focus of the chorus (video 8).

The repetitiveness of the piano accompaniment, combined with the repeated percussive accents of the grace notes, align with contemporaneous accounts of the music that accompanied the danse du ventre at Cairo Street exhibits: the danse du ventre’s music had been described as being “of a most monotonous character,” and a newspaper wrote that “Tiny cymbals fastened to the dancer’s fingers like castanets keep up a clanging accompaniment” (The Dream City, “A Dance in the Street of Cairo Theatre”; “Poetry of Motion”). The piano accompaniment to the chorus mainly repeats a single figure: in the left hand, a G played on its own alternates with a G-major chord, and the right hand plays a mostly unchanging oscillation between the D next to middle C and the D one octave higher, with the higher D being consistently introduced by a twinkling grace note of C sharp. This pattern is only broken on the line “she had never strayed,” the musical “straying” offering another clue that skepticism about the maid’s protestations of innocence may be warranted.

Put all together, the song comes into focus as being only superficially a lament for a girl who becomes a fallen woman despite her virtuous viewing habits. This song transposes the Trilby story from European bohemia to the cultural buffet of US world’s fairs, playing with du Maurier’s central narrative of a girl whose deep goodness leaves her vulnerable to moral missteps. By fusing the appealing heroine Trilby with the rural US girl-turned–figure model/tableau vivant participant/hootchy-kootchy dancer, by ironically juxtaposing the maid’s disavowals with the relentless sonic presence of the very thing she’s disavowing, and above all by breaking a cardinal rule of sentimental narratives by not showing the girl so much as suffering, let alone dying as Trilby does, “The Streets of Cairo” turns the story of the corruption of white femininity from a tragedy into a comedy.

The song first emerged as a vaudeville hit, but it soon spread out from those stages, traveling to places the dance would not likely have been welcome at the time. Newspaper accounts indicate that the song showed up as a singalong number at a Delaware bicycle Club’s first anniversary party; a ditty to be rewritten by students in Worcester, Massachusetts, cheering on their classmates at a sports competition; and a tune played by the band at the inauguration ceremony of the governor of New Jersey.

The song’s vogue was short-lived: within two years, it was no longer in heavy rotation at theaters, clubs, schools, or official events. Yet the poor little country maid was not entirely gone from public life. Rather, she morphed into a figure who had been pitied because she “never saw the streets of Cairo” but who would now, fortunately, have an opportunity to do so. A representative example appeared in the Nashville Tennesseean:

The little country maid who is the source of so much commiseration in the song, because she never saw the Streets of Cairo or gazed on the sights and heard the sounds of ‘Midway,’ can now have her second chance and by attending the Tennessee Centennial Exposition can stray along another midway, just as gay (“Solace”).

The song also provided a way to refer to people who were sheltered and old-fashioned, as in the news item from Niles, Michigan, reporting dryly that some local coin-in-slot machines, “which caused numerous complaints from people who ‘never saw the streets of Cairo,’” had been removed from service (untitled news brief). Whether these coin-operated machines offered popular audio entertainment or the visual thrills of the kinetoscope is not specified; either way, it is interesting that the song was capable of eluding some censorship attempts and making fun of more successful acts of suppression.

Through its cannily ambiguous lyrics, musical evocation of the danse du ventre, and parodic take on the sentimental ballad genre, and aided by the media developments that allowed it to travel widely, “The Streets of Cairo” facilitated the danse du ventre’s movements around the US. Even on the rare occasions when people tried to ban the melody, they failed, due to a presumption of innocence enjoyed by music as such. The Chicago Inter Ocean ran a report from a New York paper about several instances of attempted censorship, including an attack on the melody of “The Streets of Cairo.” The article scoffed lightly at a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, librarian’s decision to bar Trilby from its shelves, but it reserved its sharpest ridicule for another censor’s unsuccessful effort to ban hand-organ musicians from playing the danse du ventre melody. The tune “suggest[ed] to him the wicked motions of the Cairo dance,” which the journalist found patently absurd. “This opens a new subject for professors of ethical philosophy to investigate,” the article commented sardonically. “Can music become, per se, immoral? And which are the notes, semi-breves, or demi-semi-quavers that inspire naughty thoughts? Perhaps Mr. Anthony Comstock can write an essay on these novel inquiries” (“Can Music Become”). Although people might disagree with a decision to ban a book, the very notion of banning a set of musical notes was a nonstarter.

“The Streets of Cairo” had used the presumed goodness of music itself, sonic-narrative affordances of popular song, the resources of musical print culture, and the emerging media and infrastructures of popular performance to mock and undermine moralizing opposition to, and putatively aesthetic revulsion from, the danse du ventre. A few years later, another popular song would complete the dance’s transformation from moral threat into good, clean fun.

3. Mass Seduction in “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” (1904)

Nine years after “The Streets of Cairo” became a hit, an even more popular song about encountering Middle Eastern dance at a world’s fair emerged. Written to coincide with the opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” served as the fair’s unofficial theme song and became an enormously popular song in its own right. In its goofy refrain—“We will dance the Hoochee Koochee, I will be your tootsie wootsie”—it treats the danse du ventre as the chief selling point of the new fair, rather than an attraction that would need to be explicitly disavowed and only subtly reintroduced as it had been in “The Streets of Cairo.” The dance appears in the song’s chorus as a collective, participatory activity that, far from threatening morality or undermining the heteronormative couple form, instead has the power to reinvigorate languishing marriage bonds with a new spirit of playfulness and freedom:

The opening verse and chorus present, first, the point of view of the husband who comes home and has his domestic ritual derailed by the absence of his wife; and then, in the verse’s ending into the chorus, the perspective of the bored housewife who hits the road in search of greater excitement. This is not straightforward abandonment, though. The chorus immediately invites a repair of the marriage bond that has been momentarily severed by the pull of the fair: Flossie is not just telling Louis where she has gone but is also imploring him to meet up with her there. If he can join her in this new embrace of a performance once tarred as immoral, then there can be a reunion that remakes the wifey as the tootsie wootsie and relocates the couple from a domestic space of slowness to a zone of shining lights.

Flossie’s rebellion is repeated throughout the song’s seven verses: The abdication of domestic or professional duties in favor of the fair’s bright lights, and the invitation to others to do the same, is reenacted by a bank teller, a gold-digging dame, a racehorse named Lew Woods who bolts from the track in the middle of a race, and finally, a snoozing churchgoer who heckles the pastor, states heretically that “the Beautiful Shore is a joke,” and invites “the whole darn congregation” to come with him to St. Louis. The mass seduction here—away from the domestic, the religious, the running-around-in-a-circle of workaday life—exceeds the scale of the one-to-one invitation and turns into wholesale recruitment. And the dance that was until recently seen as a scandalous, Orientalized, destructive cultural force is now promoted not despite but because of its ability to scramble the existing order.

This power to unarrange is made light of through the form of the popular song—the comic waltz, in this case—and through the song’s central comic engine of reproduction. From “Louis, Louis” (pronounced “Louie” both times, thus rendering the city’s political body cute and diminutive while giving it a louche French élan) to “Hoochee Koochee” and “tootsie wootsie,” what makes the song especially catchy is the repetitions, which either repeat a word with a slight difference, or repeat what should be two different words but pronounce them the same way. This repetition proliferates and collapses difference, while making both operations adorable. As an advertisement for a world’s fair that in many ways reproduces previous fairs—and was a remediation of the Louisiana Purchase itself, a historical referent that both echoes world’s fairs’ cultural imperialism and lends additional context to the Frenchified pronunciation of “Louis,” suggesting a reabsorption of a defeated foreign other—“Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” combines repetition with humor to generate a sensation of lightness and novelty.

The cover of the sheet music for “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” (fig. 4) echoes this emphasis on repetition while suggesting just how far musical print culture had come in the nine years since “The Streets of Cairo.” The block letters of the title are pristinely drawn, with the doubled “Louis Louis” reproduced precisely, the repetition within the title mirroring the advanced processes of print reproduction that enabled the song’s wide reach. Below the repeated “Louis” appears a list, in tidy typeface, of performers by whom the song was “Also Sung With Great Success.” There are eighteen solo or duo acts on this list, which adds to the sense of the song’s limitless replicability. There is only one publisher listed here, and F. A. Mills’s address at 48 West 29^th Street in New York announces that the song emanates from the very nerve center of Tin Pan Alley, which was concentrated on West 28^th Street but included locations on West 29^th as well: the consolidation of the popular music industry in New York was now complete. The formal head shot of performer Gus Williams, centered within a staid picture frame at top left, lends an air of sobriety to the composition that balances and thus renders less threatening the upheaval described in the song.

The strangest part of the cover is the drawing at the center, which depicts an androgynous, disembodied head looking down and to the left. The face features thick eyebrows, and full lips curved in a mysterious half-smile; three red flowers bloom around the person’s head, long dark hair is parted over the forehead, and five red ribbon-like loops of varying lengths dangle down around the head. The face’s full lips and dark eyebrows and hair suggest that it is intended to be understood as ethnically other, and the loops may be understood in light of a late-1880s incident in which Comstock tried to persuade a judge that a series of fringed loops in a photograph were meant to represent a woman’s “private parts” (qtd. in Werbel 155). This whole complex is couched as a design element, surrounded by evergreen fronds twining around a red stripe that runs horizontally across the cover. The figure of the hootchy-kootchy dancer, which had threatened the ethnological scene on the cover of “Cairo Street Waltz,” been abstracted on the cover of “Kutchy Kutchy,” and been replaced with a white comedienne on the cover of “The Streets of Cairo,” is here invoked in deconstructed form, with a disembodied head and loosely suggestive loops serving to invoke, and remake as purely decorative, the Orientalized danger once posed by the danse du ventre. This treatment reproduces the dance’s lighthearted treatment within the song’s lyrics.

Turning another culture’s art form into a laughing matter that anybody can do for fun and profit fits neatly enough within the operations of colonialist capitalism, which has rarely been above repackaging elements of other cultures in the name of entertainment, innovation, novelty, and lucre. Yet the very operations of relocating, repackaging, and remediating that underlie the selling of such cultural elements also introduce important variations and reach expanded audiences, audiences whose engagements with the content always risk outstripping state and para-state bodies’ ability to regulate them.

The danse du ventre allows us to recognize a paradox in the workings of colonialist power, and indeed of power in general. Many of the dance’s original performances in the US functioned as part of a colonial will to amass and organize ever more detailed knowledge of colonized subjects so as to enable more effective, better-informed mechanisms of social control. The degree to which Comstock and his fellow censors became skilled taxonomists of Middle Eastern and North African dance in their quest to suppress specific moves and styles is a perfect case in point. Yet at the same time, the dance’s many proliferations and mediations, including those performed at the behest of would-be regulators, vastly exceeded what those in power were equipped to suppress. The remediated repetitions with a difference managed to make comical what had been attacked as deadly serious, and to make intimately available and appealing what had been rigorously defined as outlandish and strange.

When is a dance not just a dance? The sheet music editions of “Cairo Street Waltz,” “Kutchy Kutchy,” “The Streets of Cairo,” and “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis” all give form to an understanding of the danse du ventre’s sounds and motions as possessing the capacity to seduce people into actively participating in a dance that had been denounced as a threat to Western women’s morals. As the dance’s remediations variously proliferated, migrated, and concealed the mediating operations that framed and presented the dance to US audiences, the dance could increasingly skirt regulation’s repressive feints, eventually becoming a cultural touchstone celebrated for the very powers of subversion for which it had been attacked. This circulation took place within conditions defined by colonial power relations, but it did more than merely reinscribe these relations. The danse du ventre demonstrates the capacity of corporeal actions to evade regulatory efforts and exceed suppression, especially through remediation. Multiplying and spreading further through each subsequent mediation, these performances harbor the possibility of unarranging the existing order of things.

Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Marcus is the author of Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (2023), which received honorable mention for the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize and was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award in literary criticism, and of the punk-feminist history Girls to the Front (2010).

Data availability

No new data were generated or analyzed in support of this research.

Footnotes

Works Cited