Carita Day, 1900's Vaudeville Star

I've done a little online research into Carita Day, stage name for Carrie Washington, who's the original singer of "I Can't Keep My Eyes Off Of You" that we perform in many of our shows. She has two Broadway appearances, both in musicals by Ernest Hogan; apparently she was his wife, we say apparently because keeping track of Hogan's wives seems to be a bit difficult, one Hogan bio puts the number at possibly four. Nonetheless, before hand, she was doing pretty well on the vaudeville circuit. Much was made of her very light complexion in a lot of the articles you see about her.

A lot of how we find out about her is through newspaper snippets written by Lester Walton, who had a music-sort-of-gossip column back in the day. Walton (1882-1965) is from St. Louis and graduated from Sumner High School. Walton met up with Hogan in St. Louis and they partnered on a few projects, the last of which would have been The Oyster Man, the play where the song comes from.

Walton also reviewed the play even though he was involved in it, and while he wrote the lyrics to "I Can't Keep My Eyes Off Of You." he was critical of Day's performance of it, saying she was too showy, he said that Hogan's performance was the only thing that held the play together, and even he could use a little help in the acting department, and the play in some parts relied too much on racial stereotypes. Not everyone agreed, necessarily; Hogan was quite the celebrity back at the time. In his later reviews, he was much more complimentary of Day, so either he came around, or she got better, but she had a good career in what was mostly a male-dominated industry, most of the reviews of her performance urge patrons to go see her.

Oyster Man didn't have a long run because Hogan was ill with TB and he passed away in '09, and after that Day continued her vaudeville career, touring the states and even doing a stint in Havana, where they noted how she brought some American-style dancing to Cuba. She settled in Chicago where she remarried (again we know this thanks to a Lester Walton gossip article) and another newspaper article says she set up an upscale dress & lingerie shop on State Street in Chicago. She still performed regularly and one of her short sets still included "I Can't Keep My Eyes Off Of You."

I can't find any info for what she did later on or how long she lived; Walton went on to become ambassador to Liberia for a time. The Oyster Man, for all it's faults, enters history as the first play where an African-American both produced and starred in the show. Hogan made sure to include a love story in the play, in an effort to break stereotypes, and thanks to that, we've got this cool song from back in the day.

Here's an instrumental version of the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr6S6FFWjwE