I've kicked my research into high gear in preparation for my shake dancing lecture at BurlyCon 2019! I've been spending many hours at the Library of Congress, sending a shit ton of emails to African-American museums all over the world, and basically doing whatever the f I can to "discover" more black burlesque and shake dancing history. It's been a lot of fun!
Even with all that brainy movin' and shakin' with different historical organizations, my main go to is good-old search engines. I'm not gonna give away all of my stripper librarian search strategies until BurlyCon, but basically I've been playing around with different keywords and lesser-known search engine sites that don't automate your top page results based on ads and profit (here's looking at you, Google).
I wanted to share a tiny bit of what I've found so far -- it's all very exciting. This is a lengthy snippet of a black burlesque show (or, at the very least, all women of color) from 1949. I've seen one snippet on YouTube, but the rest are all new to me. It's such a beauty of a video!
Enjoy:
Until next time,
Bebe Bardot
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