Until my present study, African American entertainer Lorenzo Tucker had not been extensively discussed in histories of United States theater and film. Yet during a span of 60 years, from 1926 to 1986, he acted in 20 films and performed hundreds of times on stage as a dancer, vaudeville straight man, singer, on a part of U.S. entertainment history about which, so far, there has been insufficient scholarship.
I gathered much of the background material for my study of Tucker’s life through research in special collections of the New York and Los Angeles public libraries, including microfilmed correspondence, photographs, programs, and newspapers. Also examined—as primary source material for an analysis of Tucker’s acting technique—were the ten still available films in a group of personal, in-depth interviews I conducted with Tucker himself in 1985 and 1986.
There are both advantages and disadvantages in undertaking a biographical study of a living person. The greatest advantage is that the contemporary biographer has access to that person’s oral testimony. Yet this testimony must be approached with caution, since each person recounting his or her version of events for the historical record the duty of the biographer, therefore, to verify as much of the oral narrative as possible.
Information from Tucker has undergone careful scrutiny and has been placed up against the known facts for verification, and for the most part, information that could not be verified was not included in this study. But Tucker’s recollections of his personal life could not always be independently verified, of course, since most therefore, will weave together oral and other evidence to create the career biography of Lorenzo Tucker.
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