Mayme Gehrue

Gehrue was born in Louisville, Kentucky.[4] The date 1883 is often given for her birth,[5] but is questionable, considering that she was touring in shows by the mid-1890s. She was in a touring dance act as a teen, with her sister Daisy Gehrue,[1] before Daisy married.[6][7]

Sheet music from a song dedicated to Mayme Gehrue, from the New York Public Library collection.

Gehrue appeared on Broadway in Little Red Riding Hood (1900), The Casino Girl (1900),[8] Nell-Go-In (1900), The Giddy Throng (1901), The King's Carnival (1901), Hoity Toity (1901-1902), Lovers and Lunatics (1906),[9] The Deacon and the Lady (1910),[10] and The Opera Ball (1912). She also toured with The Ford Dancers,[11] [12] as "the Yama-Yama Girl" in Three Twins (1910-1911),[13][14] and in Topsy and Eva (1923), a musical comedy based on Uncle Tom's Cabin.[15] She was frequently on the vaudeville stage,[16] well into the late 1920s,[17][18] in the United States and abroad, including a tour in Australia; "to-day she is recognized as one of America's foremost dancing comediennes," noted a 1909 report.[19]

Gehrue appeared in two silent films, The Fable of the Galloping Pilgrim Who Kept on Galloping (1915, short)[20] and Above the Abyss (1915). She wrote the lyrics to several World War I-era songs, including "I'm Leaving France for my Old Kentucky Home",[21] "I Wish to Wed a Sammy",[22] "Military Band",[23] "The Man of the Hour", "Dear Little Jessamine",[24] "Over in Spain", and "Back Down South",[25] all with music by Victor Hammond.

Gehrue recommended buttermilk, meat, and no corsets for a healthy physique.[26] She married[27] and divorced her vaudeville dance partner[28] Johnny Ford (he later married and divorced vaudeville star Eva Tanguay).[29]

• Mayme Gehrue at IMDb
• Mayme Gehrue at the Internet Broadway Database
• A 1926 publicity photograph of Mayme Gehrue, in the J. Willis Sayre Collection of Theatrical Photographs, University of Washington Libraries.