Recorded by May Irwin on 20th May 1907, the song originated from the Broadway show "The Widow Jones" produced at the Bijou Theatre on 16th September 1895.
In 1896 the Edison Company purchased the rights to a motion picture projector that had been invented by C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. The projector was renamed the "Vitascope" and had its commercial debut on April 23, 1896. During its first year the most popular film shown using the "Edison" vitascope was the "May Irwin Kiss".
May Irwin and John Rice were the two principal actors appearing in the New York stage hit "The Widow Jones". At the request of the New York World newspaper, the two staged their kiss from the last act of that comedy for Edison's camera.
May Irwin (18621938) was a Canadian actor, comedienne and singer. Her first starring role on Broadway came in 1895 in a musical comedy created for her by J.J. McNally, called "The Widow Jones". In one key scene at the end of the play, Irwin and her costar, John C. Rice, kiss each other with something of a flourish. Many were scandalized when they recreated their stage kiss for Edison's camera the following year, and one clergy member denounced the film as "a lyric of the stockyards". Critic Herbert Stone complained, " . . . neither participant is physically attractive and the spectacle of their prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was hard to beat when only life size. Magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over is absolutely disgusting!" Despite, or perhaps because of these derisive reviews, the "May Irwin Kiss" became the most popular film produced that year by Thomas Edison's film company.
May Irwin (June 27, 1862 October 22, 1938), was an actress, singer and star of vaudeville.
Born Ada May Campbell, her father died when she was 13 years old and her stage-minded mother, in need of money, encouraged May and her younger sister Flora to perform. Creating a singing act, the sisters debuted in nearby Buffalo, New York in December 1874. By the fall of 1877, their career had progressed, and they were booked to appear at New York's Metropolitan Theater then at the Tony Pastor Theatre, a popular New York City music hall.
The Irwin sisters proved popular enough to earn regular spots for the ensuing six years after which a 21-year-old May Irwin set out on her own. She joined Augustin Daly's stock company where she made her first appearance on the theatrical stage. An immediate success she went on to make her London stage debut at Toole's Theatre in August 1884. In 1886 her husband of eight years, Frederick W. Keller, died unexpectedly.
By the early 1890s, May Irwin had married a second time and developed her career into that of a leading vaudeville performer with an act known at the time as "Coon Shouting" in which she performed African American influenced songs. In the 1895 Broadway show The Widow Jones, she introduced "The Bully Song" which became her signature number. In Vaudeville, coon songs flourished and a rather odd performance convention emerged; white females became the favored deliverers and were called "coon shouters". Foremost among the coon shouters was May Irwin. Her performance of the Charles Trevathan hit The Bully Song (1896) was influential in establishing the stereotype of the razor toting, jealously belligerent black male. Even black songwriters produced songs as fully demeaning of their own race as those by white composers. The worst of these was Ernest Hogan's All Coons Look Alike To Me.
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