Rabbit's Foot Company

The Rabbit's Foot Company, also known as the Rabbit('s) Foot Minstrels and colloquially as "The Foots", was a long-running minstrel and variety troupe that toured as a tent show in the American South between 1900 and the late 1950s. It was established by the African-American entrepreneur Pat Chappelle and taken over after his death in 1911 by Fred Swift Wolcott. It provided a basis for the careers of many leading African-American musicians and entertainers, including Arthur "Happy" Howe, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, Butterbeans and Susie, Tim Moore, Big Joe Williams, Louis Jordan, Brownie McGhee, and Rufus Thomas.

The company was founded, organised, originally owned and managed by Pat Chappelle (1869–1911), an African-American former string band guitar player and entrepreneur originally from Jacksonville, Florida, who established a small chain of theatres in the late 1890s. In 1898, Chappelle organised his first traveling show, the Imperial Colored Minstrels (or Famous Imperial Minstrels), which featured the comedian Arthur "Happy" Howe and toured successfully around the South. Chappelle also opened the Excelsior Hall in Jacksonville, the first black-owned theater in the South, which reportedly seated 500 people. In 1899, he closed the theater and moved to Tampa, where he and the African-American entrepreneur R. S. Donaldson opened a new vaudeville house, the Buckingham, in the Fort Brooke neighborhood, soon followed by a second theatre, the Mascotte.

The success of their shows at the Buckingham and Mascotte theatres led Chappelle and Donaldson to announce their intention, in early 1900, to establish a traveling vaudeville show. Chappelle commissioned Frank Dumont (1848–1919), of the Eleventh Street Theater in Philadelphia, to write a show for the new company. Dumont was an experienced writer for minstrel shows, who "wrote perhaps hundreds of skits and plays".A Rabbit's Foot had little plot; a newspaper at the time said that it "is an excellent vehicle for the presentation of an abundant amount of rag-time, sweet Southern melodies, witty dialogue, buck dancing, cake walks, and numerous novelties".

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