Readers, before you begin, I encourage you to put on Beyoncé’s song “Ya Ya,” and read this piece with its percussion, syncopation, and roaring vocals playing loudly in the background. It is the only song on her 2024 Act II: Cowboy Carter — a terrain-shifting album that garnered her Grammy Awards for Best Country Music Album and Album of the Year — that name-checks the title of Beyoncé’s latest global performance, the “Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour,” which kicked off last week at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium.
There is some powerful signposting embedded in this name. The “Chitlin’ Circuit” began in the 1920s as popular shorthand for segregated routes of Black American touring performances. The circuit catered to Black audiences across the South, East Coast, and Midwestern states at notable venues including Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre, D.C.’s Howard Theatre, and the Frolic Theatre in Birmingham, Alabama.
Against the backdrop of both Jim Crow and the progressive Harlem Renaissance, Black artists worked the “Chitlin’ Circuit” with the intention of carving their own images and visions into the American imaginary. They created and performed across a wide range of genres, from minstrelsy, comedy, and circus acts to song, instrumental music, and dance routines. These performances aimed to counter the negative and stereotypical presentations of Black life that dominated American popular culture and to awaken Black-produced pleasure. Ya-ya.
But, what about those chitlins?
Any understanding of the “Chitlin’ Circuit” must begin with the food, which pre-dates the performances by hundreds of years. Stated plainly, chitlins or chitterlings are pig intestines that have been laboriously cleaned, seasoned, and cooked. Enslaved Black people developed this meal of sustenance to feed themselves and their families with the unwanted food scraps of plantation owners. Many 19th-century physicians, influenced by Charles Darwin and others who advanced theories of biological Black inferiority and difference, believed that pigs were effective nutritional catalysts for producing healthy Black workforces. As a result, plantation owners distributed the least desirable parts of the animal to their slaves.
Chitlins, then, dually symbolize an engineered hindrance to Black progress that was literally force-fed to Black populations and Black ingenuity.
Chitlins were (and continue to be) cultivated by Black hands into delicacies using practices passed down from generation to generation. But for many Black Americans, they trigger various responses: proclaiming one’s cultural ties to the food, enjoying them behind closed doors, or scorning the very idea of them. The chitlin’ places the ironies, stereotypes, and complexities of Black trauma and resilience onto and into the African American dinner plates of the present. And that chitlin’ grease, per se, has seeped onto and into many fields of Black performance and Black artistry across the 20th and 21st centuries. Enter “Chitlin’ Circuit” theater.
“Chitlin’ Circuit” musicals — also referred to as urban theater or the urban circuit by its practitioners — stem from the vaudeville of the early circuit. In the 1920s, Sherman (S. H.) Dudley, a Black producer, created the Dudley Theatrical Enterprise to compete against the white-owned Theater Booking Association (TOBA). His stages flourished, likely featuring artists such as Flournoy E. Miller, Florence Mills, and Ethel Waters, respectively known for their signature vocal and comedic abilities. In an era of segregation, Dudley created communal Black spaces for artists and audiences alike. The dynamics of which were markedly different when these same entertainers performed before white audiences who viewed them solely as objects of entertainment and stereotype, rather than treasured members of their communities. Shortly before the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, TOBA used its financial might to overtake Dudley. Although his circuit enterprise was short-lived, Dudley’s legacy provides an important foundational fragment in the early-20th-century history of African American entertainment.
Beyoncé’s ‘Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit’ will hold these histories, these vexed plates, these cultural ironies, these modes of survival.
As the Civil Rights Movement strengthened, Langston Hughes became the architect of the Black circuit musical audiences know today. Hughes wrote three musicals that were produced on and off-Broadway from 1957 to 1963. With each production, Hughes presented new modes of musical storytelling and introduced movement and codified worshipping practices from Black churches — like outstretched arms raised overhead while praying and the unique tones and verbal dexterity of sermons — into the performance lexicon of American theater. Black Nativity, which premiered in 1961, received widespread fanfare from critics across race, from the New York Times to the Harlem-centered Amsterdam News. They praised Hughes’ retelling of the birth story of Jesus Christ for its successful integration of gospel music and the ways in which the production brought the communal environment, revelry, and theological gravitas of Harlem’s churches to the stage.
Today, the theatrical “Chitlin’ Circuit” lives on in the contemporary gospel musicals of David Talbert, Je’Caryous Johnson, Gary Guidry, and Tyler Perry. They carry with them the legacies, trials, and burdens of those who came before them. Their plays, which tour across the country for several months at a time, infuse religion, comedy, gospel, jazz, and R&B into narratives about everyday Black American life set in fictional inner-city environments. Many productions feature renowned Black entertainers, such as Billy Dee Williams, Richard Roundtree, and Vivica A. Fox, performing their celebrity identities within the context of the play.
Live “Chitlin’ Circuit” performances create a Black public sphere wherein spectators engage, sometimes audibly and physically, with the unfolding dramas in ways that relate to their individual experiences and, at times, overlapping cultural perspectives as Black Americans. “Chitlin’ Circuit” theater remains the most popular form of contemporary Black theater outside of Broadway since the 1980s.
Beyoncé’s “Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit” will hold these histories, these vexed plates, these cultural ironies, these modes of survival. With nods to the past and an awareness of the exclusionary, white-male centered history of American country music, Beyoncé’s circuit is slated to travel to Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, Houston, Paris, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and Las Vegas. Notably, the vestiges of historically Black-oriented performance cities in the United States are granted equal weight alongside London and Paris. These international cities have assembled throngs of enthusiastic fans during past Beyoncé tours and possess their own long and complicated relationship with Black performers that goes back across centuries.
Acknowledging past hurts and celebrating the resilience of those who choose to embrace her, those who came before her, and the numerous Black country music singers who walk alongside her (including those who are still waiting for their moment in the light), Beyoncé is remodeling the Black performance circuit in her image. Carving her routes. Rewarding her audience. Dictating hersound. Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya.
Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon is a professor and the incoming chair of English and affiliated faculty of African American studies and theater at Wesleyan University, and the author of The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship in Black Popular Theatre.
Want more? Sign up to get Stocktonia delivered to your inbox three days a week.