Photo Gallery - At The Devil's Ball by Irving Berlin
- At The Devil's Ball by Irving Berlin -
The Real History Hiding Behind One Delightfully Devilish Piece of Sheet Music
Sometimes an old piece of sheet music is just an old piece of sheet music.
And sometimes it is a 113-year-old time machine wearing horns and a cape.
(IMAGE TO RIGHT NOTE: ORIGINAL - UNREPAIRED - 1912 - AT THE DEVILS BALL by IRVING BERLIN with photo insert of performers Sampsel & Reilly - Guy J. Sampsell & Edith Reilly)
That is what makes Irving Berlin’s At the Devil’s Ball so fascinating. At first glance, the 1913 cover is wonderfully theatrical: a red devil pulls back a curtain while elegantly dressed little demons dance behind him. But look closer at surviving copies and something curious happens.
The devil stays.
The dancers stay.
The title stays.
But the people in the little circular photograph change.
One copy features the comedy team Watson & Cohn. Another features singer Marie Fenton. Other surviving editions promoted still other performers.
Why?
Because in 1913, sheet music was not merely something you bought after hearing a hit.
The sheet music itself was part of the machinery that made the song a hit.
And that little circle on the cover was essentially a 1913 celebrity endorsement.
Welcome to the Devil’s Ball. The orchestra is warming up.
FIRST, THE SONG
Listen to At the Devil’s Ball
At the Devil’s Ball was written by Irving Berlin, words and music, and published in 1913 by Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co., whose New York offices were at 112 West 38th Street. Surviving copies are preserved in major sheet-music collections, including Johns Hopkins University's Levy Collection and Mississippi State University's Charles H. Templeton Collection.
Berlin's premise was gloriously strange.
The narrator dreams that he has attended a formal party in Hell.
Not eternal torment.
Not fire and brimstone.
A dance.
The Devil is apparently throwing a social event.
The song's opening establishes that the whole infernal adventure is a dream, and the chorus launches into the Devil's Ball itself. Copyright records actually trace versions of the song back into late 1912 before its 1913 publication and recordings.
It was exactly the sort of novelty number that could flourish in the ragtime era: catchy, theatrical, slightly naughty and visually irresistible.
And then somebody had to package all of that into a cover.
Enter Edward H. Pfeiffer.
THE MAN WHO DRESSED THE DEVIL
The cover artist credited on this version of At the Devil's Ball is Edward H. Pfeiffer, identified in archival records both as “Pfeiffer, Edward H.” and “E. Pfeiffer N.Y.”
And the artwork is doing considerably more than decorating a song.
Look at the composition.
The Devil does not simply stand there looking sinister. He pulls open a theatrical curtain, literally inviting us into the performance.
Behind it, little devilish couples dance.
The gigantic title hangs overhead.
Red dominates the supernatural figure while cooler curtain colors create an almost stage-lit environment.
It is simultaneously a song cover, theater poster and advertisement.
Most importantly, Pfeiffer left a perfect piece of marketing real estate in the upper-right portion of the design:
that circular portrait space.
And that is where this story becomes particularly interesting.
THE LITTLE CIRCLE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
Today, if a singer helps make a song famous, we might see their face on Spotify, YouTube or social media.
In 1913, you could put their photograph right on the sheet music.
Publishers produced promotional variants associating songs with performers who introduced or popularized them. The underlying cover could remain substantially the same while the photographic insert changed.
The Mississippi State collection, for example, specifically catalogs an At the Devil's Ball cover with a photograph of Brown & Small, and its database identifies numerous alternate print versions.
Period performer listings associated with the song include Brown & Small, Marie Fenton and several other acts.
So the portrait wasn't random decoration.
It was essentially saying:
“You know these people from the stage? They sing THIS song.”
That relationship between publishers and performers was enormously important during the Tin Pan Alley era. Before radio became America's great musical loudspeaker, live performers could place a new song directly in front of hundreds or thousands of potential sheet-music customers.
Hear it tonight.
Hum it on the way home.
Buy it tomorrow.
Play it on the family piano tomorrow night.
Congratulations. You've just gone viral, 1913-style.
No Wi-Fi required.
Just a piano and somebody willing to terrorize the neighbors with the chorus.
🎶 SAMPSEL & REILLY: THE “FASHION PLATE” ENTERTAINERS
And that brings us to Guy J. Sampsel and Edith Reilly, generally billed as Sampsel & Reilly.
They were musical entertainers working the vaudeville circuits during precisely this period.
They weren't simply anonymous singers standing beside a piano.
Presentation was part of the product.
Their appearance, clothes, vocal performance and stage personalities were packaged together into a recognizable theatrical act.
Period trade reporting confirms that Sampsel and Reilly were appearing in New York vaudeville in 1914. Billboard's March 28 issue included them in its fascinatingly titled feature:
“Songs Heard In New York Vaudeville Last Week.”
Even that column title tells us something enormously important.
Publishers were paying attention to which songs were being performed onstage.
Because the stage could sell the sheet music.
But Sampsel & Reilly become even more interesting when we look at how they presented themselves.
WHEN VAUDEVILLE PLAYED WITH GENDER
One reported feature of Sampsel & Reilly's act is particularly fascinating when viewed from the 21st century.
The audience initially thought it was watching two women.
The act reportedly used Sampsel's appearance and presentation as a theatrical illusion. He appeared alongside Edith Reilly in such a way that spectators could initially assume both performers were women.
Then, as the routine progressed, the audience discovered that one of the two apparent women was actually Guy Sampsel.
The reveal became part of the entertainment.
It was clever.
It was theatrical.
And, whether its performers would ever have used our modern vocabulary or not, it was undeniably playing with the audience's assumptions about gender presentation.
That deserves a closer look.
ENTER WATSON & COHN
Another surviving performer insert brings us to the comedy team Watson & Cohn.
And that takes us directly into the extraordinary world of American vaudeville and burlesque.
Watson & Cohn were a comedy team working in the era's popular tradition of Jewish or “Hebrew dialect” comedy, a genre built around exaggerated dialect, comic misunderstandings, character types, songs, rapid exchanges and physical comedy.
The terminology and ethnic caricatures of this material can be uncomfortable to modern audiences, but they were a significant part of American popular entertainment in this period. Understanding the performers historically means acknowledging both their considerable theatrical skill and the stereotyped conventions in which that skill was packaged.
The better-documented member of the team was Joseph K. Watson.
Watson was a burlesque comic who went on to work in vaudeville and musical comedy. When he died in Hollywood in 1942 at age 56, Billboard remembered him specifically as a member of the comedy team Watson and Cohn.
Their sort of act depended heavily on something that barely survives in photographs:
timing.
Rapid conversation. Interruptions. Puns. Arguments. Songs. Physical reactions. One performer setting up the other. A routine accelerating until the audience was laughing faster than the performers could supposedly think.
It was live comedy with a hair trigger.
LIFE ON THE VAUDEVILLE AND BURLESQUE CIRCUITS
Performers like Watson & Cohn inhabited an entertainment industry built around circuits.
A successful act did not necessarily remain in one theater for months. Performers traveled from city to city, carrying costumes, routines, jokes and music with them.
The Columbia Amusement Company, popularly associated with the Columbia burlesque “wheel,” operated a large circuit of theaters and became particularly associated with comparatively “clean” burlesque before the form changed considerably in later decades.
The great vaudeville circuits operated on a similar principle.
A performer might finish one engagement, pack the trunks, board a train and do it all again in another city.
Then another.
Then another.
No streaming.
No television.
No viral clips.
Just trains, trunks, theater bills and an audience waiting on the other side of the curtain.
Which makes that photograph on At the Devil's Ball much more interesting.
Watson & Cohn weren't merely posing for a souvenir.
They were part of the song-distribution system.
AND THEN THERE WAS MARIE FENTON
Now look at another cover.
Same Devil.
Same curtain.
Same demonic dance party.
Completely different celebrity.
Inside the circle is Marie Fenton, a musical-comedy and vaudeville singer who was billed with the marvelously evocative nickname:
“The Blonde in Black.”
Period publicity described Fenton as a striking singer known both for her appearance and for her selection of popular songs. She had connections with important New York musical comedies before touring vaudeville with songs she had helped popularize on Broadway.
And her branding was beautifully simple.
Blonde woman.
Black wardrobe.
Instant recognition.
A 1910 Billboard report was already referring to her as “the blonde in black.”
This was personal branding decades before anyone used the phrase “personal branding.”
FROM BROADWAY TO VAUDEVILLE
Fenton represents another important piece of the Tin Pan Alley machine.
Songs moved.
A number might begin in a New York production, get picked up by a prominent performer, travel through vaudeville and eventually reach parlors across America as sheet music.
Fenton's career moved between musical comedy and vaudeville, and surviving records place her at significant venues on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1911 she appeared at London's Palace Theatre, where contemporary publicity even remarked on the speed of her costume changes.
And we know she was associated with At the Devil's Ball: performer listings for Berlin's song specifically include Marie Fenton.
So putting her face on the cover made perfect commercial sense.
A shopper sees Marie Fenton.
A shopper remembers hearing Marie Fenton.
A shopper recognizes the song Marie Fenton sang.
The cash register rings.
Tin Pan Alley understood influencer marketing before influencers had ring lights.
THE DEVIL WHO NEVER CHANGED
And this is our favorite part of these covers.
Put them side by side.
Watson & Cohn change.
Marie Fenton changes.
Other performers change.
But Pfeiffer's Devil remains standing there, holding the curtain open.
That makes the cover almost a reusable theatrical stage.
The illustration supplies the fantasy world.
The circular photograph supplies the current star.
The publisher could therefore connect the same song to different performers, audiences and engagements without throwing away the visual identity of the song.
It is clever graphic design.
It is clever marketing.
And 113 years later, it accidentally created something even better:
a collectible historical puzzle.
BEFORE SPOTIFY, THERE WAS SHEET MUSIC
This is perhaps the easiest thing to forget when looking at an object like this today.
Sheet music wasn't merely musical notation.
It was mass media.
The cover had to catch your eye.
The title had to stick in your head.
The performer had to lend recognition.
The illustration had to sell a mood.
And the song itself had to be catchy enough that somebody hearing it in a theater would want to take it home.
The surviving At the Devil's Ball covers preserve that entire ecosystem in one wonderfully bizarre image:
Irving Berlin, writing the song.
Waterson, Berlin & Snyder, publishing and selling it.
Edward H. Pfeiffer, giving the song its devilish visual identity.
Watson & Cohn, carrying popular entertainment onto the comedy stage.
Marie Fenton, bringing Broadway polish and vaudeville glamour.
And audiences buying the sheet music so they could recreate a little piece of the performance at home.
ONE COVER, AN ENTIRE LOST ENTERTAINMENT WORLD
That is why At the Devil's Ball is so much more interesting than its wonderfully strange title suggests.
It captures a moment when popular music, vaudeville, burlesque, Broadway, illustration, celebrity photography and advertising were all tangled together.
The little photograph that might initially look like an afterthought turns out to be one of the most revealing parts of the artifact.
Change the photograph and suddenly we can follow another performer.
Follow the performer and we find another theater.
Follow the theater and we discover another circuit.
Follow the circuit and an entire vanished entertainment industry starts flickering back to life.
And through every version, that magnificently overdressed Devil is still standing there, patiently holding open the curtain.
More than a century later, we're finally walking, dancing and wheeling through it.
THANK YOU - HAPPY HALLOWEEN
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