Bessie Simms, Madeline Belt and Margaret Simms were some of the nation’s leading ladies in Black entertainment between 1910 and 1940. Though they spent most of their time on stages in Manhattan, the three women had strong ties to the Hill District and one of its most colorful characters: barber Frank Belt.
Belt had two significant connections to Pittsburgh and American history. First, he married Bessie Simms, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s earliest stage stars. The marriage made him part of a family that had a lasting impact on American entertainment history. Secondly, he opened Pittsburgh’s best-known barbershop and ran it for one of the city’s most colorful racketeers, William “Woogie” Harris.
Belt’s story is a distinctive Pittsburgh tale.
Born in 1881 in Frederick County, Maryland, Belt began his career as a barber after working as a bartender. Although not much is known about his life before moving to Pittsburgh in 1906, there are some clues that offer insight into his early years.
Both the Belt and Simms families had deep ties to Washington, D.C., and to Buckeystown, a rural farming community located between the nation’s capital and Frederick. The Belts worked in farming and craft trades, while Joseph Simms worked as a bricklayer and his wife Margaret was a domestic servant. The Simms were landowners and had a large family, including daughters Bessie and Katherine.
Bessie Simms was already an actress in Baltimore theaters during the early 1900s when she met and married Frank Belt. Their daughter Madeline was born there in 1904 on New Year’s Eve. If a divorce complaint Frank Belt filed in Pittsburgh in 1921 is accurate, the couple split up in October of 1904, two months before Madeline’s birth. (More about that later.)
By 1908, Bessie Simms had moved to Harlem and was in a relationship with rising ragtime composer and bandleader James Reese Europe. Historian Reid Badger believes that the couple met while touring nationally in the vaudeville show, “Red Moon.” Simms was a performer and Europe was the production’s musical director.
Though there are no records of their marriage, the couple lived as husband and wife. That’s how the 1910 U.S. Census recorded them in May and that’s how they were described when their daughter Mary was born six months later. At the time, Europe was working as a pianist in a restaurant and Simms was a theater actress.
Though Simms was an early vaudeville star in her own right, her relationship with Europe catapulted her to enduring fame.
Europe is credited with being one of ragtime’s earliest and brightest stars. His service as an officer in combat and as a bandleader during World War I only added to his popularity. Tragically, his life ended in 1919 shortly after he returned from war when a drummer fatally stabbed him in Boston.
He was 38 years old and his band had performed at Pittsburgh’s Syria Mosque just four days earlier.
The Simms-Europe relationship was complicated. Simms had never divorced Frank Belt. Though Europe had married widow Willie Angrom Starks in 1913, his relationship with Simms persisted until his death. In 1917, the couple had their second child, a son, James Reese Europe, Jr., whom Simms raised.
Badger, who wrote a 1998 biography of Europe, told me that James Reese Europe, Jr. had looked for and could never find a marriage certificate for his parents. Yet for 20 years, Bessie alternately used Simms, Belt and Europe as her last name.
While Bessie Simms remains an enigma in American entertainment history with tenuous ties to many places, Pittsburgh competed with Baltimore and Harlem to claim her daughter Madeline Belt as their own.
“We don’t want to fight with either New York or Pittsburgh who claim pretty Madeline as their favorite daughter, but Madeline is a native of Baltimore and we refuse to give her up,” wrote the Baltimore Afro-American in 1927.
As Simms was establishing herself in Harlem, Frank Belt was building a business in the Hill District. He met a divorced woman named Willa Mae and the couple moved in together and tried to start a family. Their baby girl was stillborn in 1908.
Belt worked in Hill District barber shops until he opened his own business, the Crystal Barber Shop, at 1405 Wylie Ave. For much of the time that he lived in the Hill, Belt rented an apartment above Crampton’s Drugstore at 1403 Wylie Ave., one door down from his barber shop.
In 1923, Belt sold the business to up-and-coming gambling entrepreneur William “Woogie” Harris. Over the next 16 years, Harris used the barber shop as a front for his lucrative numbers gambling racket while Belt shaved men’s faces and cut hair.
Belt was one of the Hill’s most popular barbers. At the height of his career, the Pittsburgh Courier estimated that he had cut 100,000 heads and shaved 1,000, faces. “Is that a record? Or, is that a RECORD,” the newspaper wrote on Oct. 20, 1934.
Despite Harris’s growing legend as a racketeer, Belt — the Crystal Barber Shop’s true tonsorial artist — boasted that he had never been arrested, “never been in a courtroom, except as a juror,” he told the Courier.
Had anyone looked closely at Belt’s marital status, that record might have quickly changed since his marriage status was unclear and multiple having concurrent marriages — bigamy — was just as illegal a century ago as it is today.
Though they lived together as a married couple for more than 30 years, there is no record that Frank Belt and Willa Mae Anderson ever married. After Frank died, Willa Mae moved to Philadelphia and died there in 1963.
Bessie Simms faded from public life and died in 1931 at age 41. She is buried in a rural Catholic church cemetery near Buckeystown. Her headstone reads “Bessie Simms Europe.”
Frank and Bessie’s daughter Madeline Belt had a more consequential career. By 1923, at age 17, Madeline was making headlines in Black and white newspapers for her role in the nationally touring show, “Plantation Days.”
“Born to the theater,” wrote a San Francisco Examiner reviewer, “she began to dance when she was two years old, and backstage, between [Bessie’s] acts, was given her music lessons.”
Madeline Belt starred in Broadway and Harlem shows. She became one of the most popular members of vaudeville troupes that toured stages in cities around the country, including Pittsburgh. She had some of her brightest runs at Harlem’s Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. Her stage credits include the “Dixie Crackerjacks” and the “Hot Chocolates.”
In the 1930s, Madeline Belt made the jump from the stage to the screen with a credited role in the 1939 film, “Paradise in Harlem.”
She had several high-profile flings and long-term relationships with other performers and was briefly married to trumpeter Joseph Smith and tap dancer Eddie Rector.
Madeline Belt’s career appears to have ended in the 1940s, which is when newspapers stopped covering her, and she died in 1977 in Flushing, New York.
The Simms entertainment dynasty didn’t end with Bessie or her daughter Madeline. Bessie’s niece Margaret Simms also became a New York stage star. Margaret’s stage career began in the 1920s, when she performed in Harlem and Washington, D.C. She toured with Cab Calloway’s band and other headliners before landing a gig with the Brownskin Beauties, Black Harlem’s counterpart to the Ziegfeld Follies.
Margaret married the troupe’s founder, pioneering producer Irvin C. Miller, and she ultimately became the company’s national manager after leaving the stage.
Margaret’s sister, Edith, had a brief dancing career performing in New York clubs and in Philadelphia’s Club Alabam.
Many writers have described the Hill District as Pittsburgh’s Harlem. But one family’s story shows how deep the ties went beyond such local luminaries as Billy Eckstine and Lena Horne.
Frank Belt’s imprint on the city and his star-studded extended family pushes back the Hill District’s entertainment history into a pre-jazz period that includes ragtime and vaudeville. It also begs the question: How many more Belts and Simmses are hiding in Pittsburgh’s past?