Barbara Bailey

Her marker at Middlesettlements Cemetery, Maryville, Tennessee. Photo: Allison Hotchkiss, via Find A Grave.

Barbara Bailey was working a dummy named Jerry by the time she was about five years old. That is not a guess. It is the plain math behind the number her own family put on her memorial: eighty four years with the same partner, and she died at eighty nine.^[1] In between those two numbers sits a whole life. A marriage. Two daughters. A stretch of years when she set the act down completely, the way plenty of women did back then once a wedding ring showed up. Then, in 1952, something in Louisville, Tennessee changed her mind. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about the comeback.

The dummy she never really put down

By May of 1952, the trade newsletter The Oracle had the whole story in one paragraph. Sister Barbara Bailey, nee Holt, of Louisville, Tennessee, had belonged to the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists once already, some years earlier. She dropped out after she married. She raised two daughters. Then, in the newsletter's own words, she "reconditioned her dummy" and rejoined the club, "making progress by degrees."^[2] That is the whole arc of a comeback in two sentences, and notice what she did not do. She did not go buy a new figure and start fresh. She got the old one working again.

A busy season in Tennessee

Once she was back, Barbara worked. The Oracle's FLASH column that same year had her doing banquets, cancer drives, school dates, and a full week on WROL radio in Knoxville.^[3] She was also one of only two women on the bill at a Southeastern magicians' convention that year, the newsletter noting "two on the distaff side," Marie Murphy of Gallatin, Tennessee, and Barbara Bailey of Louisville.^[3]

The next year she leveled up. She was working two figures now, Jerry and a second one named Judy, and the July 1953 issue of The Magnet, the country's only magic-only newspaper, ran her name alongside fellow members Marie Murphy and Eddie Turner.^[4] Playing the Tennessee Valley Fair that season with "Jerry & Judy," Barbara made the front page of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, her picture next to Tennessee Governor Frank Clement's, the two of them shaking hands with Jerry.^[5] A kid-show act out of a small East Tennessee town, and the governor came to shake her dummy's hand.

The night at the Kentucky Hotel

By 1954 Barbara had TV work too, appearing several times with her two figures.^[6] That June she traveled to the IBV's national convention at the Kentucky Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, a different Louisville than her own hometown, and the kind of coincidence this trade collects without trying. She sat for the group photograph in the front row, right alongside the club's founder W.S. Berger and the figure maker Finis Robinson.^[7] Then she got up and performed, and The Oracle's own writeup did not hold back: "an outstanding performance with Jerry, in timing and technique."^[7] The reviewer singled out a specific piece of craft, what the newsletter called "the baby dummy vibrations," a technique detail that tells you this was a worked act, built and polished over years, not a hometown favor.

The circle

She did not do any of this alone. Here is who shares the record with her.

Married sixty three years, partnered eighty four

Barbara married Gerald Bailey, and it lasted sixty three years. The two of them were charter members of St. Mark's United Methodist Church in Louisville, Tennessee.^[1] When she died on September 3, 2017, her memorial service was held right there at St. Mark's, with the Reverend Curt McKee officiating, and she was laid to rest at Middlesettlements Cemetery in Maryville, Tennessee.^[8]

Her marker calls her a "loving wife and mother," and it carries one more line that took eighty four years to earn: "entertained for 84 years with her ventriloquist partner 'Jerry.'"^[1] I do not have many performers in this whole project who worked one figure from childhood into their eighties, set the act down completely in the middle of it, and came right back to that exact same dummy instead of a fresh one. Barbara Bailey did. She was one of a handful of women working conventions built almost entirely by and for men, out of a small Tennessee town, and by every account this trade left behind, she belonged there completely.

Eighty four years and she never traded me in for a newer model, not even when she had two babies and every reason to. That's not luck, that's loyalty, and I'd like the record to reflect Jerry knew it too.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy