Who Was Alice Shaw?

Alice Shaw: A Nineteenth Century Professional Whistler

J.M. Schlitz ©

    Any story touching on the history of whistling inevitably produces the name Alice Shaw, considered by many^[1] to be the progenitor of "artistic whistling" and the greatest whistler of all time. Yet interestingly, nearly all mention of Alice Shaw stems from a single article written in 1982^[2], which mentions several historical women whistlers. Chief among them is Alice, whose whistling prowess is described in almost superhuman terms. Though it is an inspired and entertaining article, the author duly cautions that 1) information about Alice had been sketchy, that 2) the one surviving recording of Alice (known to him) fell short of spectacular, and that 3) most of his information was obtained from a single 1888 advertisement sent out by her promoter J.B. Pond. Add to this the fact that Pond was, next to P.T. Barnum, the most successful vaudeville impresario of his time, one then begins to understand why the 1982 article is not only sketchy, but also tinged with the exaggerations of nineteenth century vaudeville advertising.

    For this study several different materials were used, including three cylinder recordings of Alice's whistling I had recovered (the remaining two were not yet procurable). Alice is mentioned in very few books, but a search through late nineteenth century New York newspapers^[3] produced sufficient references to Alice to piece together a fairly clear picture of who this figure really was, when she lived and died, what contemporary accounts actually said about her, her repertoire, and the true extent of her whistling abilities.

I. Biographical

    Alice Shaw was born Alice J. Horton, some time around late 1853 in the town of Elmira, Chautauqua County, New York. She spent most of her childhood in Detroit, Michigan, where she probably married in or around 1874. She died on April 22nd, 1918 in New York City^[4]. She had a sister and two brothers, the eldest of which died at the age of 19 only a few blocks from their home (cause not mentioned). Her father was a merchant and stockbroker.

   Heretofore nearly all modern articles on whistling describe Alice as a widow who 'took up whistling to support her four children'. This is not the case, and Alice was certainly not a widow. Her husband's name was William H. Shaw. He was at least 15 years her senior, a businessman from Canada and possibly an associate of her father's when the family was living in Michigan. Alice and William had four daughters and two sons, though the latter were probably from a previous marriage of William's. The four daughters would gain some fame in their own right as Alice Shaw's four whistling daughters: I have ascertained that these were Minnie (b. 1875), Leila (b. May 1880), and Elsie and Ethel (twins, born in or around 1882). Minnie and Leila were born in Michigan; Elsie and Ethel were born in New York City, whence the family moved in May 1880.

    Alice and William separated around December 1886, the exact same month in which Alice first appears as a performing whistler, and in September 1888 they were formally divorced. This and other circumstances of the divorce are described in a rare, if biased, glimpse into Alice's personal life, from an interview with William himself:

    William never received custody, however; in fact there are no records to indicate that he ever appealed the court's decision.^[6]

    Alice meanwhile had probably been involved in an affair no later than April 1888^[7] with David Leigh Howell (c.1849-1907), the respected owner of a very successful dry goods store in Hamilton, Ohio. They eventually became engaged, but he died unexpectedly in 1907. By this time Alice's career was essentially over and she appears to have been in deep financial need. But because (for reasons unknown) they never married, Alice was unable to collect on a sum of $40,000 from Howell's estate^[8]. During the last years of her life Alice seems to have survived by teaching whistling to young women.^[9]

II. Career Catalysts

    Alice's career timeline can be fairly well reconstructed. The first mention of her is 18 December 1886, probably soon after her separation, when she is listed as the third of six individual performers at a benefit for the Teacher's Association^[10]. Throughout the next year she is found performing as part of similar groups in several other minor engagements.

    Meanwhile the women's suffrage movement in 1887 New York had become a hot issue in high society. Alice was unusual not only because she had left a wealthy husband, and with so many children, but also because of a minor superstition (still well-known amongst people born before c.1930) advising that women should not whistle^[11]. Alice was not the first performing woman whistler2, but she was the most active. She eventually gained the attention of several wealthy New York women, who helped her stage her first major performance on December 10th, 1887 when Alice is featured as the star of a "testimonial."^[12] Alice is mentioned as having whistled a polka, a duet with a soprano, and "several melodies by Delibes." The wealthiest of Alice's patronesses was the famed humanitarian Mrs. Frederick W. Vanderbilt (1844-1926, born Louise Holmes Anthony), who arranged to send Alice to England as a private guest of the Princess of Wales.

    Alice's entire career would be predicated on this brief visit. She was in England during the months of July and August, 1888 whistling impromptu in the homes of various elite^[13]. These informal engagements were arranged by her kind host and new patroness the Princess of Wales (later Queen Alexandra, 1844-1925). Alexandra however was half-deaf when she heard Alice, as she had been suffering from otosclerosis ever since the birth of her daughter Louise in 1867^[14]. Just before Alice left England, she was also invited to provide one of the 26 selections for the test-recording of Edison's "improved phonograph" (which used wax cylinders instead of tin foil), though Edison himself was not in England but in New Jersey at the time^[15].

III. Success in the United States

    In September 1888 Alice arrived back in New York at a time when vaudeville (variety shows consisting of acrobatic, theatrical, musical, dancing, and other novelty acts) was still new and very popular. At first she continued performing under the management of Marshall P. Wilder, the famous humpbacked comedian-entertainer, but soon signed on with the great vaudeville impresario J.B. Pond (1838-1903)-- second only to P.T. Barnum in fame and success. It was Pond's seasoned management and marketing which is truly responsible for making Alice's career possible. Taking full advantage of the two months she had spent in England (and her unusually full figure^[16]), he billed her as "the Belle Siffleuse who whistled for the Prince and Princess of Wales" to help book performances for a nation-wide tour, with Alice as the star attraction. Like many such "broadsheets" of nineteenth-century America, Pond's 1888 promotional flier contained many exaggerations and half-truths^[17], but it formed the basis of the aforementioned 1982 article, which in turn has become single-handedly responsible for the deification of Alice Shaw.^[18]

    Pond's 6-month tour booked appearances in many if not most existing U.S. states, each drawing huge audiences and income for Pond, Alice, and the vaudeville troupe’s 6 other performers. Although Alice whistled only 2 numbers in the routine, her performances were very well-received in some newspapers^[19]. But the harsh reviews outnumbered the kind ones:

    After the 6-month tour, Pond no longer managed Alice, and in his Eccentricities of Genius (1900)-- one hundred autobiographical portraits of the men and women he managed-- he does not mention Alice.

    But Alice was still in demand, and she went to Europe twice more. There the harsh reviews continued^[21], but she scored a great success in January 1891 when she performed for the Czar in Russia^[22], where she may have given performances for one year or longer.

IV. Decline

    After enormous success from 1888 to 1893 during which Alice performed abroad not once but thrice, her career heyday was already over. In August 1893 Alice returned from England as part of a vaudeville troupe recruited by Loïe Fuller, the celebrated choreographer/dancer who combined long flowing costumes with colored lighting, flourescent gases, and other visual effects far ahead of her time^[23]. Though everyone was handsomely paid, their performances were described as "disastrous."^[24]

    From 1893 there were more minor engagements; finally in 1896 she formed a trio with her whistling/dancing twin daughters Elsie and Ethel, appearing alongside other performers in several variety shows. Then, almost a year later in May 1904, it was suddenly announced that Alice would "hereafter fulfill all engagements alone. She has placed her twin daughters under the instruction of a vocal teacher."^[25] No details were mentioned.

    From August 1st, 1904 to January 1905, Alice made a tour of "the far Western states" and was further scheduled for Cuba and South America^[26], though there is no mention of this tour ever having taken place. This is the last mention of Alice having whistled on the stage.

    It is probably from 1907 until her death in 1918 that Alice taught whistling to young ladies while taking minor roles in the theatre. Her whistling students included at least Mary Scott Withers (1898-1950) and possibly briefly Margaret McKee^[27]. The cause of death is not mentioned; her obituary^[28] merely states that she long been suffering from an illness.

V. Posthumous Mention

    There is no direct mention of Alice Shaw after 1909, when she is mentioned as a "professional whistler and actress" in the aforementioned Howell legal dispute. Ironically, were it not for much later in the 1931 tremendously unpopular statement of Professor Charles Gray Shaw (1892-1974, no relation to Alice), which denounced all whistlers as "morons"^[29] and provoked hundreds of comments in newspapers nation-wide, Alice would probably be completely unknown today. In rebuttal to this statement, we gain two significant mentions (*bold portions are the words reproduced in the famous 1982 article mentioning Alice; note however which portions were left out!). The first is a passing remark about Alice by the well-known column writer and music collector Franklin Pierce Adams (1881-1960), noting:

that Alice was "too good," in that she got carried away with too many chirps and warbles.

    The other mention has been quoted far more often: "No jazz or cheap crooning stuff had a place in her repertoire and her performances were equally sensational in the drawing rooms of kings, czars, emperors, and maharajas." This statement about Alice Shaw is found in several sources, but an exhaustive search finally proved the October 31st, 1931 issue of Musical Courier to be where it first appeared. It was in fact not a "report" but a "letter to the editor" from a reader, who was responding to the Professor Shaw's hugely unpopular notion. The original, full letter reads:

    To Alice's credit, Grena Bennett (1884-1946) was an esteemed music critic. But Grena had probably never heard Alice formally perform, since prior to 1905 Grena had been living in San Francisco, not New York. Grena and Alice had likely met while (briefly) acting in theatre plays between 1905 and 1908.

    Grena either exaggerates, or else Alice may have exaggerated to Grena. In either case, Alice's career was not quite that international; secondly, as for Alice's "musical taste," all mention of her performances in newspapers include only light parlour music (songs from the stage shortened and arranged for amateur playing at home); and thirdly, we have little indication of Alice's intelligence, other than perhaps her oft-made and rather dubious claim that whistling was responsible for her unusually large breast size^[30] (if that were true I would surely stop whistling myself). But we must remember, after all, that Grena was trying to make a point.

    Grena's letter also thinly disguises her distaste for the newer forms of music which appeared after Alice's death. "Crooning," for example, was a very new style of smooth, soft and sentimental singing, and its main proponent was Bing Crosby, who was also famous for his whistling. The comparison is a poor one, however, since Alice could not have performed "crooning" nor even jazz, for neither form of music had yet existed during Alice's heyday. In short, Grena's oft-quoted letter, while drawing attention to Alice's former fame, was written primarily to refute someone else's statement and tells us nothing of Alice's actual musical ability.

VI. Recordings

    It is important to remember that well-known artists during this period had little motivation to make recordings, as only one cylinder at a time could be produced, and artists did not earn royalties. Alice nonetheless managed to produce five cylinders.

    Only one recording of the Shaw trio - Alice with twin whistling daughters - survives. It is unclear what could have prompted the trio to reunite for a recording, but in January 1907, the number "Springtime Revels," with the twins, was released^[31].

    On May 29th, 1907 Alice recorded three more numbers, without the twins, listed in the Victor Talking Machine Company's June catalogue. Two of these, "Manzanillo" and "La Gazelle," have not yet been procured. The other number "In Venice" survives, largely due to the fact that it was later transferred onto record.

    Also, in 1888 during her first visit to England and just after her impromptu performances for the Princess of Wales and other dignitaries, Alice is reported as having been one of two dozen or so individuals who made test recordings on Thomas Edison's first white wax cylinder phonograph (previously recordings had been made in impermanent tin foil). It was long thought that these recordings were lost, but they have very recently resurfaced. Unlike the other surviving recordings which were made only after Alice's stage career was effectively over, this recording gives us an important sense of what Alice sounded much earlier, only months after she had first begun whistling professionally.

    All of these recordings feature light parlour music ornamented with bird chirps, and there is nothing that suggests virtuosity either then or now. If anything, these songs only confirm the oft-made criticisms leveled against Alice's whistling.

VII. CONCLUSIONS

    Alice Shaw was not, after all, an artwhistler. There is no evidence to suggest that Alice was "capable of difficult instrumental solos,"^[32] Pond had merely advertised her as a virtuoso. Newspaper accounts and surviving recordings show that Alice was not even a particularly good whistler, even during her prime; and that her repertoire contained not even one piece of serious music. Instead, we see a repertoire of mostly ethnic tunes, bird-related songs, and parlour music ornamented with bird chirps. It was these performances, furthermore, which made a very poor first impression of staged whistling upon American fine arts communities, impressions which last until this today.

    Fortuitous circumstances led to Alice being enormously well-publicized; however she gained from music circles only a handful of very harsh reviews and mentions, whose criticism is well-reflected in these three surviving phonograph recordings. But what is fascinating is that despite her mediocre talent, powerful friends and circumstances of the time (esp. the women's suffrage movement) procured for Alice many high-profile engagements, especially during the years 1888-1892. It is also worth noting that Alice may not have even seen herself as a "whistling prima donna" or virtuoso at all. She never targeted (what we now call) classical audiences, but remained consistently on the vaudeville circuit throughout her career. We find her providing popular entertainment, whether through whistling, theater acting, and even together with her daughters as "the dancing twins." Alice is perhaps best described as a highly successful entertainer in the right place at the right time, whose hobby as a child and homemaker eventually afforded her a second life and a career more colourful and fascinating than any known professional whistler to date.

Note: Resneck's (1982) primary source for Alice was Pond's 1888 promotional broadsheet for her. Since Resneck's death, unfortunately, this broadsheet has been confirmed as lost. The following, therefore, are my own findings, independent of the Pond/Resneck broadsheet, except where mentioned.