A fourteen-piece ragtime orchestra made up of Black musicians performed with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show for two seasons in the early 1900s.
Siriana Lundgren, a Harvard Ph. D. candidate and former intern for the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, says while Ferris’s Satisfied Musical Entertainers weren’t with the show for long, their musical style may have influenced the conductor of the show’s all-white cowboy band.
“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,” she said.
Lundgren adds that there were over 100 stops during the 1910 and 1911 season, which means Sweeney would have listened to their music regularly. She says the group’s musical style can be heard in Sweeney’s “The Two Bills’ March,” a piece that was written to honor Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill.
To learn more about the band and the impact the group made on the show, listen to WPM’s interview with Lundgren here.
