Paris Noir

After the Great War, Paris became a magnet for African American writers, poets, and musicians as La Ville Lumière was far more tolerant and welcoming than the United States at the time. Trumpeter Bill Coleman said, “It was a thrilling, wide-open town. Paris had everything that New York had and then some. The cafes or bars stayed open 24 hours a day. The people were friendly and a jazz musician was considered a human being.”

By the mid-1920s, a new kind of music began to waft through the neon-lit streets of Paris’ Montmartre district. It was dynamic and audacious and unlike anything heard before in Europe. It was the music of Black Americans, and for that brief period of time known as Les Années Folles (“the crazy years”), Montmartre became an outpost of the Harlem Renaissance: Harlem-on-the-Seine.

Montmartre at night

Among those migrating to Paris at the time was Florence Emery Jones. An early scene in The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince has our brash American torch singer, Bizzy Holt, run afoul of Miss Jones in a smoky Paris jazz club called Chez Florence. While Bizzy is fictional, Florence and the club named in her honor were quite real.

Florence Jones was an African American singer who ruled the Paris jazz world in the late Twenties, enchanting audiences first at Eugene Bullard’s Le Grand Duc and later at Louis Mitchell’s nightclub in Rue Pigalle. Poet Langston Hughes was working as a cook at Le Grand Duc during Florence’s run and explained her allure as “a professional snobbishness which she deliberately cultivated.” Jones’ aloofness toward the clientele eventually led to her dismissal, after which she relocated to Louis Mitchell’s club. Mitchell was so riveted by Florence’s beauty and talent he renamed his club Chez Florence, which increased her fanbase and drew high-profile patrons to the club.

Florence Jones' passport photo

Writer Ralph Nevill described Chez Florence thusly: “Florence’s in the Rue Blanche, a late-night resort which occupies the site of an old and charming garden, is crowded from midnight to dawn with revelers who have begun the night at other places. This is headquarters of the Charleston… participation in the dance is one of the rules laid down by Florence, the half-caste who gives her name to the place. Such compulsory dancing, of course, produces ludicrous effects, the sight of an old gentleman in spectacles or a fat old South American lady covered with jewelry executing the Charleston, sending everyone into fits of laughter, the sound of which even the strident notes of the jazz band are powerless to drown.”

Meanwhile, back at Le Grand Duc, Eugene Bullard replaced Florence with an African American jazz singer and vaudevillian named [deep breath] Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, better known simply as “Bricktop.”

Ada "Bricktop" Smith

Bricktop would go on to become a “saloonkeeper” herself, owning Paris’ famous Chez Bricktop (where our unruly gang of expatriates find refuge after being invited to exit Chez Florence in The Purple Menace) where her protégés included Duke Ellington, Mabel Mercer, and Josephine Baker, the latter or whom would later have a relationship with the inspiration for Bizzy Holt herself, Miss Libby Holman.

Josephine Baker

You, too, can disappear into the smoky neon haze of Chez Florence when The Purple Menace and the Tobacco Prince comes out on March 1.

See you in Paris.

-WEB3