Chitlin Circuit
Chitlin Circuit, network of live entertainment venues in the United States that catered to African American audiences and booked Black performers during the period of Jim Crow segregation from the early 20th century through the 1960s. The clubs of the Chitlin Circuit put on a variety of acts that included music, dancing, and comedy and played a crucial role in popularizing blues, jazz, rhythm and blues (R&B), and rock and roll. After the heyday of the Chitlin Circuit, a contemporary network of Black clubs and theaters continued to operate and showcase both established and new talent.
Origins of the name
The name “Chitlin Circuit” derives from the word chitlins, which comes from chitterlings, the term for a Southern dish consisting of pigs’ intestines that are either fried or stewed with spices and aromatics. A staple of Black foodways since the era of slavery, chitlins have long been considered a delicacy by African Americans. Many performance venues on the Chitlin Circuit served chitlins and other soul food dishes, and performers were sometimes compensated with a meal in lieu of cash.
The name “Chitlin Circuit” may also be a playful variation of “Borscht Belt,” the term for the circuit of clubs and theaters in the Catskills region of upstate New York that was a popular vacation spot for Jewish families between the 1930s and the ’60s in which many famous Jewish comedians of the era began their careers. Some historians believe that the first time “chitlin’ circuit” appeared in print was in the 1960s, when the singer Lou Rawls used the term in interviews to describe the small blues clubs that he had graduated from performing in early in his career, though the term probably existed as a slang expression long before Rawls used it. Indeed, as early as 1916 the composer and bandleader W.C. Handy referred to “chitlin cafés” in the lyrics of “Beale Street Blues,” a song about the nightlife of the famous blues district in Memphis, Tennessee.
Development of the Chitlin Circuit
The Chitlin Circuit developed out of necessity as a response to the racial segregation that was practiced by performance venues and enforced by Jim Crow laws. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, vaudeville—a genre of theater that intermingled comedy, song, and dance—dominated American entertainment. Vaudeville developed partly out of minstrel shows, which often involved white entertainers performing in blackface. Yet, despite being the subject of many vaudeville performances in the form of these blackface caricatures, African Americans were excluded from attending many vaudeville venues. Seeing the need for organized entertainment and a safe environment for Black performers and audiences, a Black vaudevillian named Sherman Dudley created a touring company in 1911. Dudley also purchased several venues and formed a union for Black entertainers.
The early 1920s, however, saw the formation of the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), an organization that booked Black entertainers and gave theater managers and owners some amount of shareholder interest in their performance venues. TOBA’s governing board was interracial, and many of the organization’s agents and owners who booked theater and musical acts were Black. TOBA provided a steady means of employment for its entertainers, who included Josephine Baker, Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith. TOBA also fostered the growth of tap dance among African American artists and nurtured such performers as Leonard Reed and Willie Bryant, creators of the Shim Sham Shimmy (c. 1927; the “national anthem of tap”), and the Whitman Sisters. But some entertainers found working TOBA’s circuit of venues grueling and demeaning, and they referred to TOBA derisively as “Tough on Black Artists.” The association so dominated regions of the circuit that it forced Sherman Dudley to merge his circuit of venues into TOBA’s. By the early 1930s, TOBA had collapsed—a development hastened by the Great Depression and financial mismanagement by the organization’s principal owners.
TOBA’s dissolution created a vacuum in Black entertainment venues. But in the early 1930s two brothers from Indianapolis, Denver and Sea Ferguson, decided to sell their printing business and open a series of clubs along the city’s Indiana Avenue. Eventually, they founded the Ferguson Brothers’ Booking Agency, which grew to become a national network of venues and the largest Black-owned entertainment agency in the country. The Ferguson brothers regularly booked shows in Indianapolis, bringing such artists as Duke Ellington and J.J. Johnson to the city’s clubs. Just as successful as the hometown stands were the agency’s tours, which brought Black orchestras, comedians, and blues musicians to the South, forming a network of clubs and theaters that helped compose the Chitlin Circuit of the mid-20th century.
Venues and entertainers of the Chitlin Circuit
The Chitlin Circuit was an ever-rotating and ever-growing collection of clubs, and it is thus difficult to map out at any one point in its history. It generally stretched from Miami in the South to Boston in the North and at least as far west as Texas. The circuit’s venues ranged in size and style from ornate, palace-like theaters to tiny juke joints. Among the more famous Chitlin Circuit venues were the Apollo Theater in New York City’s Harlem district, the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, the Howard and Lincoln theaters in Washington, D.C., the Regal Theater in Chicago, and the Royal Peacock in Atlanta. Smaller communities had clapboard dance halls such as the 100 Men Hall in Bay Saint Louis or unassuming spaces such as Club Ebony in Indianola (both in Mississippi), which, along with entertainment, met a vital cultural need in rural Black communities.
A great number of Black musicians who went on to national success began their careers on the Chitlin Circuit, including Billie Holiday, Al Green, James Brown, Fats Domino, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Aretha Franklin, Ike and Tina Turner, and Otis Redding. The singer Patti LaBelle opined to an interviewer in 1984 that the venues she came up in were so hardscrabble that “it wasn’t even the chitlin circuit. It was sardine houses.” Yet these same venues gave many performers a platform that they might never have otherwise had under segregation. The Chitlin Circuit fostered new sounds, and in its clubs the popular music of the 20th century coalesced. A young still-unknown Jimi Hendrix spent many nights performing as the guitar player in the house band at Club del Morocco in Nashville. In an interview in 1967 Hendrix said of his early days on the circuit, “You really had to play, ’cause those people were really hard to please.…That’s where I learned to play, really, in Nashville.” The Chitlin Circuit was also a valuable network for Black comedians, supporting the stand-up comedy routines of future stars such as Redd Foxx, Flip Wilson, Moms Mabley, and Richard Pryor.
In the 1960s, as segregation laws changed, many original Chitlin Circuit venues began to close. Urban renewal plans in the ’60s and ’70s brought about the demolition of many Chitlin Circuit clubs. However, some venues continued to operate and nurture new talent, such as bluesman Bobby Rush, whose decades of touring in blues joints around the South earned him the nickname “King of the Chitlin Circuit.” Beginning in the 1970s a new generation of comedians came up in clubs on the circuit, including Rudy Ray Moore (better known as Dolemite), Mo’Nique, and Bernie Mac, who honed his act at the New Regal Theater (later the Avalon Regal Theater, a venue built to replace the earlier circuit’s Regal Theater, which had been demolished) in his hometown of Chicago before his television career ignited. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, several original Chitlin Circuit venues were restored to their former glory or designated as historic landmarks, while the contemporary circuit now includes venues in all parts of the country.