Lost Witch Song from the Wizard of Oz

Image of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, and Dorothy from the 1902 production of "The Wizard of Oz."

     While searching through the Levy Collection at in the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries Special Collection for witch images, I came across ​"The Witch Behind the Moon," and it was so complex that I thought it deserved it's own post.

​Note: the cover image is racist. This post deals with Black-Face Minstrelsy, a tradition that made caricatures and stereotypes out of Black Americans in American popular music. I can't go into all those historical and cultural implications in this post, but you can read more here or here or here....

     The sheet music advertises that “The Witch Behind the Moon” was sung with great success by Helen Byron in “The Wizard of Oz.” Shortly after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz became a sensation, the children's book was transformed into a stage musical in 1902. But the connection between the Minstrel lyrics of the tune and Byron’s character Cynthia, a new character described as a “lady lunatic,” isn't clear. And was it performed in dialect the way the sheet music is written?
     Searching for these answers led me down a path of the relationship of Minstrelsy and the Wizard of Oz. 

     Cynthia is accused of being a witch in the play by the munchkins, but sings the song only after an encounter with the Wizard, and with a chorus of witches flying around on brooms. In Oz Before the Rainbow: L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939, Mark Evan Thomas writes, "The Wicked Witch of the West may be a negative portrayal of a black woman. Baum, describing her death, refers to her as 'melting away like brown sugar,' and Denslow [the illustrator] depicts her as having pickaninny braids." But, the Wicked Witch of the West was eliminated from the 1902 stage version, and the song seems totally wrong in the plot, since the Witch isn't a threat to Dorothy or the other characters. 

W.W. Denslow's original illustration of the Wicked Witch

      I wish I knew more about the original selection of pieces for the 1902 production. If this piece was written for The Wizard of Oz, it seems out of place. The lyrics are too much like a Minstrel show to be appropriate for the overall Vaudeville feel of the production. Thomas writes, "It was to comic opera that Baum and [Paul] Tietjens turned for inspiration in preparing their musical. This popular form of entertainment had a comic plot and songs that, at least in the purer examples of the form, were linked thematically to the plot." However, the lines between comic opera, vaudeville, burlesque, and the Minstrel show are nuanced. The Minstrel show was the precursor to Vaudeville, and many of the performers crossed between the two. 
     The actors who played the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman did just that. Fred Stone and Dave Montgomery, a Black-face Minstrel and Vaudeville duo, were annotated in Monarchs of Minstrelsy:

"Montgomery and Stone, who achieved fame as the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow in "The Wizard of Oz" as well as "The Red Mill" respectively, and subsequently "The Old Town," made their first joint appearance with Haverly's Minstrels at New Orleans, February 16, 1895. Later they did a great song and dance act for several seasons, appearing in black-face as real gallus coons. 
About ten years before they formed a partnership, Mr. Stone played Topsy in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; he was the best Topsy in the show."
​ - Monarchs of Minstrelsy, 1911. 

      According to Oz Before the Rainbow, Stone and Montgomery were a huge comedic success. A 1903 review for the musical wrote, "The burlesque parody of the cockney coon song never satisfies the audience until the two comedians have sung and danced themselves completely out of breath." Stone brought a Minstrel-style performance to the “brainless” Scarecrow, complete with the clownish garb of the Minstrel show: tattered and patched shirt and pants with over-sized white gloves. Apparently Baum enjoyed the portrayal so much that it influenced his later descriptions of the character. 
     Was this their way to perform as minstrels without black-face? Black-face as a comedy routine went on well into the 1950s, but in this case, the performance was not not being presented as a Minstrel show, but had similar tropes and gags to make the audience laugh. This means that some of those classic things we see the Scarecrow do in the 1939 movie (wobbly legs, tripping over himself) have a racist, Minstrel origin, and puts a new perspective on Michael Jackson's role in The Wiz.​​​ Minstrelsy seems to permeate every part of American culture, whether we know it or not. 

A European-centric depiction of a witch in Hallo'ween in America, 1919.

      Since the song doesn't fit the plot, it's hard to know why it was in the play other than that it provided an entertaining number. In the song, a grandmother is telling children a story, warning that a witch is hiding behind the moon, ready to swoop down on her broom and get them. The most interesting thing about the lyrics is a line in the chorus that says the witch hums a "Hoodoo tune." Hoodoo is a real practice that enslaved Africans brought to the New World, lives on today, and is a really complex subject. The West African religion of Vodou changed and adapted in North America into the system of religious beliefs that was Hoodoo. Part of that change was the incorporation of European folk religion, with cross-cultural ideas like: "Witches posses the powers of invisibility, mind control and transmogrification and may punish enemies by draining them spiritually and physically," according to Megan Lane in  "Hoodoo Heritage: A Brief History of American Folk Religion." The idea of a witch flying on a broomstick goes back to the 15th century in France, but the concept of "root conjure" or using medicine and herbs to do good or bad was strongly associated with enslaved African Americans in the United States. 

     While I couldn't find a direct link between Hoodoo beliefs or practices and a witch-moon relationship, I was struck by something that Lane wrote in "Hoodoo Heritage," that brought me back to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the Vodou religion, there is the twin deity Mawu-Lisa. The children of Nana-Buluku, Mawu is the female half, who has dominion over the night and the moon, and resides in the west, while Lisa is the male half, has dominion over the day and the sun, and resides in the east.  Just like in the 1939 film version, L. Frank Baum's story has the Wicked Witch of the East and the Wicked Witch of the West. I'm not familiar enough with Baum to know if he was influenced by or even aware of the Vodou religion when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but it's fascinating to think about deities, witches, religion, and folk beliefs, and how they can come together and influence popular culture and our views on the world.