The black-owned tent show “Silas Green from New Orleans” toured for fifty years with singers, dancers, comedians, and musicians playing one-night stands across the South. Lead actress Ada Lockhart Booker, who began her theatrical career with Sissieretta Jones, The Black Patti, wrote “letters” to the Chicago Defender from the road, sharing tour news, touting acts, and gassing up the show’s owner Charles Collier.

In May 1924, Ada Booker wrote from Wilson. After briefly mentioning her hospital stay in Cordele, Georgia, Booker introduces readers to the show’s personnel. “We are in the strawberry section now,” she noted in closing, though this was not, strictly speaking, true. North Carolina’s historic strawberry-growing region was further southeast.

Chicago Defender, 31 May 1924.

A week later, Silas Green was 75 miles down the road in New Bern. Booker noted that “the boys on parade [had] paid a very fitting tribute” to the memory of Warren “Stiffy” Thorne, a Wilson native who had passed the previous November and “was quite well thought of in his home town.” “Dear Old Pal of Mine” was a popular World War I tune and, sung on circle with Bill Jones surrounded by choristers, must have been a moving experience.

Chicago Defender, 7 June 1924.

Four years later, Silas Green show advertised for new troupe members, including clarinetists, a novelty act, and “neat, attractive chorus girls of good character.” Wilson was listed among the show’s eastern North Carolina stops over the next few weeks.

Chicago Defender, 19 May 1928.

The era of black minstrel shows is fascinating, but poorly remembered and little-studied. If you want to know more, start with Alex Albright’s essay — chock-full of oral interviews and photographs — “Noon Parade and Midnight Ramble: Black Traveling Tent Shows in North Carolina,” in Good Country People: An Irregular Journal of The Cultures of Eastern North Carolina (1995). You can buy it for ten bucks at rafountain.com.

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• Warren Thorne

In the 1900 census of Wilson, Wilson County: Hattie Grissom, 25; son Herman, 8; sister Anie, 23, and brother Warren [Thorne], 15, day laborer.

In the 1920 census of Wilson, Wilson County: on Vick Street, Herman Grisson, 30, barber at Tate & Hines; wife Lydia, 26; children Dorothy, 5, Vivian, 3, and Ruth, 7 months; mother Hattie, 46; and uncle Warren Thorn, 35, musician.

Warren Thorne died 6 November 1923 in Wilson. Per his death certificate, he was born 15 October 1886 in Wilson County to Preston Thorne of Edgecombe County, N.C., and Edna Adams of Greene County, N.C.; lived at 203 Vick Street; worked as a musician; and was buried in Wilson [probably, Vick Cemetery.] Hattie Grissom [his sister] was informant.

[Sidenote: Warren Thorne was not the only musician in his family. His brother Isaiah Prophet Thorne joined Sherwood Orphans’ School brass band, traveled to London, and spent decades touring Europe before washing up in Istanbul in 1942 and writing the Daily Times for help reconnecting with family.]