Irvin C. Miller

Irvin Colloden Miller, born February 19, 1884, in Columbia, Tennessee, was an American actor, playwright, composer, and producer whose career spanned Broadway and vaudeville from the early twentieth century through the mid-1940s. His father edited the Nashville Globe, a Black weekly newspaper. His younger brothers, Flournoy Eakin Miller (1885–1971) and Quintard Gailor Miller (1895–1979), also pursued careers as theatrical performers and producers. Miller attended Fisk University in Nashville, graduating in 1904.

He began his performing career in 1905 with the Pekin Stock Company in Chicago, where he appeared in Colored Aristocrats, a production written by his brother Flournoy and Flournoy's stage partner Aubrey Lyles. Miller subsequently joined Scott's Black American Troubadours in New Orleans, for whom he wrote a musical play titled Happy Sam from Bam. In 1913 he began touring in vaudeville alongside singer Esther Bigeou, whom he later married; the two divorced in 1918. The following year he married chorus girl Blanche Thompson. After returning to Chicago, Miller performed with Kid Brown's company and wrote a musical comedy called Mr. Ragtime, in which he also appeared.

Miller first staged Broadway Rastus in Philadelphia in 1915, and the show's success brought him widespread recognition. Productions continued on a regular basis until the late 1920s, with the show eventually featuring performers including Leigh Whipper and Lottie Grady and incorporating music by W. C. Handy. A subsequent production, Put and Take (1920), with music by Spencer Williams, did not succeed, and Miller returned to vaudeville, this time performing with Emmett Anthony while simultaneously writing Liza. That show opened on Broadway in 1922 and was credited as the first Black musical comedy owned and produced on Broadway entirely by Black capital. Miller's Broadway credits also include Harlem Cavalcade, and his work as a Broadway performer and composer extended from 1922 to 1942.

In 1923, Miller wrote and produced Dinah, a stage show that introduced the Black Bottom dance to audiences. Within months, the dance had spread to society balls across New York. Four years later he produced Desires of 1927, which starred Adelaide Hall. During the 1927–28 season alone, Miller mounted ten different productions for the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), demonstrating the volume and pace at which he operated.

Beginning in 1925, Miller launched an annual touring revue called Brown Skin Models, inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies but built exclusively around Black performers, with a particular focus on Black women. The show toured the country for approximately forty weeks each year and, during World War II, performed at army camps as part of the United Service Organizations (USO). The models in the revue were not required to sing or dance but instead appeared in costume, crossed the stage, and posed. The Chicago Defender described the show as a departure from stereotyped plantation song-and-dance productions. Miller continued staging versions of Brown Skin Models, with his wife Blanche Thompson serving as one of its leading models, until he retired around 1955, giving the revue a run of roughly thirty years.

Beyond his producing work, Miller contributed to the broader infrastructure of Black theatrical life. He helped establish the Official Theatrical World, a directory of African-American performers, and in 1929 became President of the Florence Mills Theatrical Society. In 1930 he appeared in the all-Black film Dark-Town Scandals Revue, produced by Oscar Micheaux, and that same year staged his brother Flournoy's successful production Shuffle Along. Miller settled in Benton Harbor, Michigan, during the 1940s. He died on February 27, 1975, in nearby St. Joseph at the age of 91. Blanche Thompson survived him and died in 1987.