The southern theater circuit in the 1900s featured an act that was well known in the Black community.
Butler “String Beans” and Sweetie Matthews May “were major stars, widely imitated and familiar to African American theatergoers throughout the country,” wrote Elijah Wald, a folk blues guitarist, journalist and a music historian. “They never recorded. As a result, they have tended to be left out of blues histories.”
String Beans was born in Montgomery, AL in 1894. Sweetie was probably born a year earlier in New Orleans. It’s difficult to say for sure, because there are no records of her birth or death.
According to Jax Psycho Geo, the two met in 1910 when String Beans was 15 and Sweetie was 16. “They connect as a comedy team like there’s been no beforetime, just always was, a togetherness like that,” the website states. String Beans “is built like his nickname.” Sweetie “flirts from head to toe.”
The book, “The Original Blues,” states String Beans was the first major blues star. He also was a vaudeville performer, pianist and comedian, who headlined at New Orleans’ Iroquois Theater.
In a description of a 1914 performance, musician and Spelman professor Willis Laurence James wrote that String Beans attacked the piano. His “head starts to nod, his shoulders shake and his body begins to quiver. Slowly, he sinks to the floor of the stage … shouting the blues and, as he hits the deck still playing the piano, performing a horizontal grind which would make today’s rock and roll dancers seem like staid citizens.”
Sweetie’s hit song was “Fishing.”
In 1915, the couple debuted at Harlem’s Lafayette Theater. They performed together off and on until the end of the year.
String Beans died in 1917 after his neck was broken during a Freemasonry lodge initiation.
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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