SALOME JACKSON
Subtitle
A Colored Satyre
Type
Song
Composer
Benjamin Hapgood Burt
Lyricist
Benjamin Hapgood Burt
Publisher
Jerome H. Remick & Co.
Cover Artist
deTakacs
Notes
The cover shows a none-too-fat black woman in beaded bra and gauze skirt holding a watermelon in her outstretched arms.

This is a "politically incorrect" satire of an overweight black woman starting a career as a Salome dancer. Cf. "Egyptian Ella" as another version of an obese dancer. A hack is a [black] carriage/ taxi.

Eva Tanguay and Gertrude Hoffman both performed their versions of the Dance of the Seven Veils in the wake of the American premiere of Strauss' opera "Salome."
Lyrics

When Lucy Jackson went to see the great Salome dance,
She said, "If this is what they want, I think I'll take a chance;
I'm going to do, Salome, too; I'll have a costume made,
And give them a sensation at the porters masquerade."
Now Lucy she, was forty three and very fat and black,
To see her from the back, you'd swear it was a hack:
So when she made, the masquerade, and glided o'er the floor,
Instead of one Salome, Lucy looked like three or four.
The coons all flocked around her, she held them in a spell;
And when she started in to dance, they all began to yell:

CHORUS:
"Oh, you Salome Jackson! You're the queen of the colored ball
Oh you, Salome Jackson! Why you've got it on them all;
For you've put it all over Tanguay, and Gertrude Hoffman too;
They haven't got a chance, in a barefoot dance, Miss Jackson, with you."

When Lucy reached her home that night, said she: "It's plain to see;
I'm full of talent, this here town ain't no good place for me;
Instead of taking washing in, I might be all the rage;
If I should try Salome on the reg'lar actin' stage."
She got a chance, to do her dance, with a burlesquing show,
And Lucy made it go; she did Salome so:
She didn't dance it like the rest, around her lover's head,
But danced around a watermelon she had there instead.
The coons up in the gallery were nearly falling out;
For when they saw that melon there, they all began to shout: