VAUDEVILLE: Home Is the Hoofer

Since Oldtime Songwriter Hughie Cannon wrote the lyrics in 1902, singers have been pleading in every form of jazz from ragtime to bop: “Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey, won’t you come home? Bill

Bailey, won’t you please come home?” These days, any enterprising traveler in the Far East can hear the answer—a firm no—from Bill Bailey himself.

Well, almost himself. Billy Bailey is 73 and runs Singapore’s Coconut Grove, an obscure and homey bar (no unescorted women allowed) next door to a Buddhist nunnery on Singapore’s Cuppage Road. A guitar keeps the air moving. The drinks are on the level, and the talk is good, since Iowa-born, ex-Vaudevillian Bailey does most of it.

Circus Minimus. Bill’s clients, mainly young English, Australian and American couples, listen while he reminisces about how he introduced the late Sultan of Johore to the sweet mysteries of bourbon whisky, nod politely when Bill pontificates about modern pop music. Rock ‘n’ roll and all that jazz, he says, are “just a rehash of the old stuff, what used to be the Texas Tommy, the Bunny Hug and the Grizzly Bear.”

Bill Bailey ought to know. Born in 1886, the son of a patent-medicine hawker, he learned song-and-dance routines to help sell the family product: Bailey’s Gypsy Liniment. At 120-proof, the stuff worked like magic. Later, in vaudeville, Bill hoofed up with a singer named Dave Hodges, who changed his name to Barnum so the pair could work their way around the country as Bailey & Barnum. They were a sort of circus minimus until a Manhattan impresario gave them a five-minute spot in Fred and Adele Astaire’s Lady, Be Good. The playbill did not mention their act, Bailey says airily, but “it stopped the show. I remember the pit musicians claiming overtime.”

From the circuits and the speakeasies, Bailey & Barnum began picking up about $900 a week. But as Bill tells it now, in 1929 he saw the stock-market crash coming at him one way and talkies the other, so he broke up the old act and left the country. With his wife, he drifted east via South Africa and Australia, did routines in Peking, Tsingtao, Manila, Java and Shanghai. Then he put in two weeks at Singapore’s famed Raffles Hotel, looked over the city and decided: “This is the place for me.”

The Baileys lost all their money in 1939 producing a show that used Hollywood cheesecake to whet the Eastern appetite, quickly suffered an Occidental death. Interned by the Japanese during World War II, Bill, then in his mid-50s, put the years of imprisonment to good use: he learned to read and write, something he had never found time to accomplish before.

Like Old Black Joe. When the British liberated Singapore in 1945, the Baileys wandered out of prison and into town, found a house marked ENEMY PROPERTY. Bill added a note of his own—”Occupied by Bill Bailey”—and moved in. The couple liked the place, settled down, soon turned it into the Coconut Grove. Old Trouper Bailey had come home at last.

Since his wife’s death in 1956, he has kept on rasping out songs and memories for the patrons of the bar, happier than he would be anywhere else. “I’ve never claimed to be the original Bill.” he says. “There never was an original Bill. It’s just like Old Black Joe or Uncle Tom.” Still the customers ask: “Bill Bailey, why don’t you want to go home?” The invariable answer: “Why the hell should I? I like it here.”