We all want to travel to see new things and learn about new people and sometimes, just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, all we must do is to look in our own backyard.  With the recent dedication of a new Kentucky Historical Society roadside marker honoring Bowling Green native, Ernest Hogan, we realize that Bowling Green/Warren  County has been the birthplace of many contributors to the Arts.

At the dedication ceremony, many attendees readily confessed to not knowing about Hogan but were pleased to learn about him and his short but very successful life.

Comedian, singer, songwriter, actor, producer, playwright, pianist, Reuben Ernest Crowders (Crowdus) was born on April 17, 1865 in Bowling Green. His mother  in 1910 was living next door to where the marker now stands. By the 1890s, he was using the stage name of Ernest Hogan to capitalize on the popularity of Irish minstrel men, and gaining national attention. The details of his early life are sparse. His parents were Reuben and Louise Crowder, a bricklayer and cook, and he was one of five children. Self-educated, as a juvenile, he began  to travel with the tent and minstrelsy shows that toured the South, performing first as a pickaninnny in a low rent version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Hogan believed that his salvation and that of his race was in the Arts and worked toward breaking down the ever present barriers that he met. By 1900, Ernest Hogan was earning over $300.00 per week, the highest pay for any black vaudeville entertainer of his time, and calling himself, “The Unbleached American.”  He would be the first African American star on Broadway in Will Marion Cook’s Clorindy (1898), and the first black star to reside in Harlem.  He also produced and starred in such shows as Rufus Rastus and The Oyster Man, with these shows and others providing many record breaking performances. Hogan’s talent is overshadowed by Bert Williams, and Hogan’s legacy is dominated by the effects of his best selling song, All Coons Look Alike to Me. However, He would publish over thirty-five songs in his career but none would be a popular or as hated as this one. This song was the “first use of “rag” on a song sheet and Hogan is also credited with “staging the first syncopated-music” concert in history in 1905. Hence, Hogan is sometimes called the “Father of Ragtime.”  It should be noted that “Hogan came to regret having been responsible for bringing this ‘coon’ song before the public, a song he actually did not originate, but had appropriated from a Chicago saloon pianist.”  His influence, however, along with other nameless African American composers, led to the development of Jazz and other innovative music styles.

Hogan, sick with tuberculosis, ruined his health with the strains of producing and staging The Oyster Man, and he was forced to give up performing. Though he needed no financial assistance himself, he was also a founding member of the Colored Actors Beneficial Association in 1905. He was married twice, first to Louise Hogan, and a then to a co-star, Mattie Wilkes. He died on May 20, 1909 and is buried in Mt. Moriah Cemetery in Bowling Green, Kentucky.