Snow was giving me the right steer. The Shuffle Along producers still classed me as a Fifth Avenue honky-tonk performer. Unlike downtown, where Fifth Avenue is considered elegant and very brownstone, in Harlem it was the street of about-to-be-forgotten entertainers. This baffled me because so many great Negro acts continued to come to Edmond's to see me, people like Earl Dancer and Cora Green, who were playing the white time; Butterbeans and Susie, already a solid standard act; Radcliff and Radcliff; Buck and Bubbles, who were about my age but already sensational with the Keith people; Billy King, who was then handling Gertrude Saunders, the comedienne slated for a big part in Shuffle Along; Ada Brown, the Kansas City pianist, and Amanda Randorf. << less