Eva Tanguay, 'the first rock star'

So claimed Jody Rosen back in April in his EMP presentation on her, which is now published as an article via Slate. A snippet:

To call Tanguay a "rock star" is anachronistic but appropriate. She was not just the pre-eminent song-and-dance woman of the vaudeville era. (One of her many nicknames was "The Girl Who Made Vaudeville Famous.") She was the first American popular musician to achieve mass-media celebrity, with a cadre of publicists trumpeting her on- and offstage successes and outrages, and an oeuvre best summed up by the slogan that appeared frequently on theatrical marquees: "Eva Tanguay, performing songs about herself." She was the first singer to mount nationwide solo headlining tours, drawing record-breaking crowds and shattering box-office tallies from Broadway to Butte. Newspaper accounts describe scenes of fan frenzy that foreshadowed Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theatre and Beatlemania. At the height of her stardom, Tanguay commanded an unheard of salary, $3,500 per week, out-earning the likes of Al Jolson, Harry Houdini, and Enrico Caruso.

Meantime, he just posted a followup about how none other than Britney has covered her signature song way back a bit:

Britney's brassy, big band-style "I Don't Care" is clearly less indebted to Tanguay herself than to Judy Garland's rendition in the 1949 MGM musical In the Good Old Summertime. Still, it's pleasant to contemplate the cosmic symmetry of our own millennial "I Don't Care Girl" blasting out Eva's proto-feminist anthem from 1904. And by the way, Britney sounds in better voice here than she has at anytime since.

Too bad no one is around to present fifteen minutes of apocrypha on some chanteuse living
during World War I, or better still, just prior or after the Civil War. Hell, with a little luck you could mine that one all the way back to the War of 1812, maybe earlier, I bet.

"Mrs. Pless, an australopithecus living in Tanzania had a pleasant hooting style some anthropologists say was perhaps so captivating it resulted in cave-painting of her, proto-Velvet Elvis decoration from 4 million years ago ..."

This is great stuff. She only did one recording! The perils of not foreseeing technological shifts, even as she played the cultural shifts to a tee.

That's one more than Buddy Bolden.

Great article. She passed the peak of her popularity a little too early for film, recording, and radio. The 1934 note to Henry Ford is poignant: " ... I could sing on radio if the programme was without the audience viewing the entertainer ... "

Yves Tanguy, the first rock star:

http://www.surrealists.co.uk/images/Yves_Tanguy_2.jpg