Sherman H. Dudley

Sherman Houston Dudley
Born	1870-3
Died	March 1, 1940
Other names	Lone Star Comedian
Occupation	Vaudeville

Sherman Houston Dudley (1872 – March 1, 1940) was an African-American vaudeville performer and theatre entrepreneur. He gained notability in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as an individual performer, a composer of ragtime songs, and as a member and later owner of various minstrel shows including the Smart Set. Dudley is also notable as one of the first African Americans to combine business with theater, by starting a black theater circuit, in which theaters were owned or operated by African Americans and provided entertainment by and for African Americans.

Reportedly, Dudley was born in 1872 in Dallas, Texas (some sources list his year of birth as 1870 or 1873), "of humble parentage". A jockey early in his youth, he turned to theater and gained a reputation by singing in a medicine show on a Dallas street corner, singing "Dese Bones G'wine Rise Again". By 1897 he had his own show, the "S. H. Dudley's Georgia Minstrels", who were performing in Galveston; later that same year he was on tour with P. T. Wright's Nashville Students Company. He gained a reputation for writing popular coon songs (including a hit song called "Mr. Coon, You'se Too Black For Me"), and performed with a number of minstrel comedians in shows in the same vein, including A Holiday in Coonville (his own production) and Coontown Golf Club (a production by Tom Brown and Sam Cousins). When he toured with Tom Brown and Billy Kersands in 1902, it was clear that he was a popular, well-known artist in the South, and was billed as "the Lone-Star comedian". In 1903 he married Alberta Ormes, with whom he'd been performing since at least 1901, and was on tour the following year with Richard and Pringle's Georgia Minstrels. By this time, he received star billing. In the summer of 1904, however, he left that company and moved to Chicago to take over the leading role in Gus Hill's Smart Set after the death of Tom McIntosh, performing in the show A Southern Enchantment.

Dudley performed with the Smart Set for years with great success, though one critic, Sylvester Russell (a writer for the Indianapolis Freeman), was hard on him from the beginning, presumably because he felt that Dudley's minstrel show background made him unworthy; in 1906, Russell referred to him as "this loathsome comedian who hails from the Lone Star State." It seems that Dudley took all this in stride until 1911, when Russell made a comment about Dudley's son, after which Dudley beat him up "$5,000 worth", according to Russell; Dudley was arrested and fined $1 and court costs, after which Russell sued him for $5,000. Other critics were less hesitant to praise Dudley's performance, and he is now credited with having brought "the street to the stage": "Dudley revitalized the Smart Set and made it into an enduring classic of the American popular stage." In the next Smart Set show, The Black Politician (1906), Dudley got to use his jockey skills riding a horse on stage, and when in October 1906 a donkey named Shamus O'Brien was added (though another source lists the donkey's name as "Patrick"), the donkey and Dudley received high praise from critics, even from Russell.

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