Tony Pastor

For Tony Pastor the saxophonist and bandleader, see Tony Pastor (bandleader).

Antonio Pastor (May 28, 1837–August 26, 1908) was a variety performer and theatre owner who became one of the founding forces behind American vaudeville in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The strongest elements of his entertainments were an almost jingoistic brand of United States patriotism and a strong commitment to attracting a mixed-gender audience, the latter being something revolutionary in the male-oriented variety halls of the mid-century.

Tony Pastor was born in Brooklyn, New York and embarked on a show business career at a very young age, obtaining a job singing at P.T. Barnum's "Scudder's American Museum". During the next few years he worked in minstrel shows, the circus business, and as a comic singer in variety revues. He established himself as a popular songwriter during a four-year run in a saloon at 444 Broadway in the Bowery district. Pastor published "songsters", books of his lyrics which were sung to popular tunes. The music had no notation, as it was assumed that the audience had a collective knowledge of popular song. The subject matter of his music may be shocking to modern audiences, but was intended to be bawdy and humorous rather than revolutionary.

According to the humor of the time, Pastor wrote several songs that negatively portrayed ethnic stereotypes, such as The Contraband's Adventures, the story of a freed slave. After the slave is set free by Union soldiers, he attends an anti-slavery meeting where the abolitionists try to scrub off his dark pigment. The slave concludes by singing...

...De nigger will be nigger till de day of jubilee

For he never was intended for a white man.
Den just skedaddle home-leave de colored man alone;
For you're only making trouble for de nation;
You may fight and you may fuss
But you never will make tings right
Until you all agree for to let de nigger be

For you'll neber, neber, neber wash him white!

Though he separated some ethnic groups in his music, he also intended to unite the lower and middle classes. In songs like The Upper and Lower Ten Thousand, he defended the common man of the Bowery in lyrics like...

If an Upper-Ten fellow a swindler should be

And with thousands of dollars of others make free
Should he get into court, why, without any doubt,
The matter's hushed up and they'll let him step out.
If a Lower-Ten Thousand chap happens to steal,
For to keep him from starving, the price of a meal,
Why the law will declare it's a different thing-

For they call him a thief, and he's sent to Sing-Sing!

Though Pastor was popular in the Bowery saloons, he noticed that his audience was primarily male and that his ticket sales would double if he attracted a female audience. Eventually Pastor began to produce variety shows, presenting an evening of clean fun that was a distinct alternative to the bawdy shows of the time and more appropriate for middle class families. In 1865 Pastor opened Tony Pastor's Opera House in Manhattan in partnership with minstrel show performer, Sam Sharpley, whom he later bought out. The same year he organized traveling minstrel troupes who toured the country between April and October of each year. With shows that appealed to women and children as well as the traditional male audience, his theater and touring companies quickly became popular with the middle classes and were soon being imitated.

In 1881, Pastor leased the Germania Theatre on 14th Street in New York City that became widely known as Tony Pastor's Theater. He alternated his theater's presentations between operettas and family-oriented variety shows, creating what became known as vaudeville. His theater featured performers such as Ben Harney presenting a new style called "ragtime" as well as other up-and-coming talents such as Lillian Russell, May Irwin and George M. Cohan.

Tony Pastor died in Elmhurst, New York on August 26, 1908 and was interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens, in Brooklyn. He was 71, and though greatly mourned at his death as one of the last gentlemen of the early vaudeville halls, the medium had passed him by with the advent of the vaudeville circuit in the 1880s. Pastor had remained a local showman in an epoch that increasingly came to be dominated by regional and national chains. Fighting against the monopolies for the rights of individual local showmen was an undertaking that marked the last years of his life, earning him the nickname of "Little Man Tony".

References

Snyder, Robert W. (1989). The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505285-4.