At the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, there’s a wall-size panoramic photo of Wild West Show performers, and in it there's a group of Black musicians.
Siriana Lundgren studies the musical history of the American West as a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University. There wasn't much known about Ferris's Satisfied Musical Entertainers, who toured with the Wild West Show for two seasons in the early 1900s – until Siriana interned at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West last summer.
Lundgren recently published an article on the group for the Center of the West’s magazine and shared her findings with Wyoming Public Radio's Olivia Weitz.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Olivia Weitz: Tell us about Ferris’s Satisfied Musical Entertainers. Who were they, and what kind of music did they play?
Siriana Lundgren: They were a band! They were a ragtime band. They were 18 players strong, and they played a variety of early American music, which included not only marches that we might associate with folks like John Philip Sousa, but also they played more complicated genres of music, things like blackface minstrelsy, which was oftentimes the only kind of music that white audiences wanted to see Black musicians play. But they were also able to showcase some really wonderful music by Black composers, including early ragtime.
OW: So if you and your friends would have, at the time, gone to Buffalo Bill's Wild West, I'm just wondering how you would have experienced Ferris’s Satisfied Musical Entertainers. At what point in the program would you have been able to hear their music?
SL: The sideshow band, in almost every other type of show, whether it be circus or Wild West, would never get a chance to perform under the big top. But Ferris’s Satisfied Musical Entertainers were fighting the color line in Wild West shows, and they performed a 45-minute long concert in the big top arena after the performance of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was done as folks were leaving the arena.
And we know this because a network of Black cultural critics decided to report on it in Black newspapers, particularly a man named Sylvester Russell. And this was earliest researched by some folks named Doug Seroff and Lynn Abbott in their book, “Ragged but Right.” And they describe the way Sylvester Russell, who was a Black critic for the Indianapolis Freeman, a Black newspaper, would follow Ferris’s Musical Entertainers to write reviews of their concerts under the big top of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
So you would see the musical performance of Ferris’s Satisfied Musical Entertainers either in the sideshow tent before Buffalo Bill’s big show took place or after the show was over as we're getting ready to leave the stand. They would come out and perform a 45-minute long concert just by themselves.
OW: When you were looking at the payroll records during your research, you found that there was some disparity between Ferris’s group and the Cowboy Band. And the Cowboy Band was a group of all-white musicians. They played the “Star Spangled Banner” at the beginning of the show. They also played music during the acts. I'm wondering what you found out about the pay disparity between the two groups.
SL: The Cowboy Band, which had about the same instrumentation as Ferris’s Musical Entertainers – so we're still looking at trombones, trumpets, clarinets – they were paid as individuals $12 to $18 a week, depending on what chair or what position they had in the orchestra, how good of a player they were. So, if I'm some random trumpeter in the Cowboy Band, maybe I'm making $14 a week. Here’s the rub. If I play for Ferris’s Satisfied Entertainers, first of all, the entire group is getting paid monthly. The entire group is getting paid one monthly salary. And when you work that out to be per week, it comes out to $19 a week for the entire ensemble, which again has 18 members and one conductor. So that would in total, if everything is split evenly, be $1 a week per person.
I'm not a complete expert on the way side shows were paid. They were contractors with the Wild West show as opposed to employees of the Wild West show. But it doesn't escape my notice that this is a drastic pay disparity between an all-white band and an all-Black band.
OW: What do you think that tells us about the show itself and also the wider culture at the time?
SL: There were some interesting pay equities in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, like the fact that Buffalo Bill's Wild West had far more gender pay equity than many other Wild West shows at the time. That's fascinating. But when you look at the way Buffalo Bill's Wild West show treated its Black performers, you see that maybe the show wasn't as progressive when it came to dealing with race as it was when it came to dealing with gender. And that's certainly something that we need to think about as scholars of the American West and as people who love Western history in general.
OW: In the article that you wrote for the museum's magazine, you write that even though Ferris’s group only performed for two seasons with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, they left a lasting impression on the show's musical landscape. I'm wondering if you can talk about the impact that Ferris’s Satisfied Musical Entertainers made on the show's music?
SL: William Sweeney was the director of the all-white Cowboy Band, and about a year after Ferris’s Satisfied Entertainers ended up leaving Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, William Sweeney would come out with a piece called “The Two Bills’ March [and Two-Step],” which was heavily influenced by the ragtime style of composition. Now, I don't have any direct proof for this, but ragtime during the 1910’s and the early 20th century was the center of a culture war in America. And it was really considered a music that was, by a lot of upper class, upper middle class and middle class white society, disreputable.
The fact that William Sweeney would come out with a heavily ragtime-influenced composition, I think, directly reflects the musical relationship between Ferris’s Satisfied Entertainers and the Cowboy Band. William Sweeney almost certainly heard Ferris’s Satisfied Entertainers playing their 45-minute-long concert at the end of the show every night. There were over 100 stops on the 1910-1911 season tour, of which Ferris’s Satisfied Entertainers were a part of the entire 1910 and 1911 seasons.
So William Sweeney likely heard their take on ragtime music again and again and again. So I think his composition the “Two Bills’ March [and Two-Step],” which was written to honor Pawnee Bill and Buffalo Bill, was certainly influenced musically by the presence of Ferris’s Satisfied Entertainers.
