Dick Hyman, what's so important about Shuffle Along musically?

Dick Hyman: Shuffle Along described itself accurately as a musical mlange. It brought together so many diverse styles and influences. You hear operetta in a song like "Love Will Find a Way."

It is very important, and it was a very courageous decision for Sissle and Blake to have a beautiful ballad that could have come right out of a Jerome Kern show as part of their score. It also reflected the vaudeville acts of the four creators: Miller and Lyles, who were the book writers of Shuffle Along. Later, Miller became particularly well known for writing the Amos and Andy routines.

Miller and Lyles had these wonderful sketches that they did together, and it was their comic routines that provided the basis for the books that they wrote for Shuffle Along and other musicals of that period. And then you had Sissle and Blake's remarkable vaudeville act, which was really crucial. It was an extended fifteen or twenty minute sequence which would involve a diversity of materials.

And it was the ... more.

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