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The Vaudeville Age: Vaudeville Acts and Songwriters
Crest
In America, a decade or two after the Civil War, music hall entertainment became established in North America in the form of vaudeville. It eventually superceded American minstrelsy.
Great composers and entertainers of the music hall/vaudeville age include: Gilbert and Sullivan, Noel Gay, Harry Lauder, Vera Lynn, Victor Herbert, George Formby, Noel Coward, George M. Cohan, Albert and Harry von Tilzer, James Reese Europe, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Bert Williams, and Rudy Vallee.
Mainstream Genre
At the turn of the 20th Century, vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in North America, as was music hall culture in England.
All major cities and towns in Europe and North America had music halls to accommodate “light” entertainment variety shows.
In America, other ways of presenting variety entertainment, especially radio and film, began to displace vaudeville in the 1920s. However, the music hall genre lived on in Europe for several more decades.
The Broadway style musical replaced the vaudeville show as stage entertainment.
Eventually all of the elements of vaudeville and music hall had migrated to other media or were no longer referred to by their original names (e.g., musical revues, movie musicals, and television variety and talk shows).
The Beatles recorded a landmark album in the British music hall tradition: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).