Entry · catalog no. 1188
TOBA
/ /ˈtoʊbə/ /TOH-buh
proper noun; also acronym · the South and Midwest, East Coast to Oklahoma · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
The Theater Owners Booking Association, the circuit that routed Black vaudeville, blues, and comedy acts through Black theaters from 1920 until roughly 1930. At its height it moved performers through more than eighty houses, from the East Coast west to Oklahoma. Everyday speech called it Toby Time — time being the ordinary vaudeville word for a circuit.
“She came up on TOBA, three shows a day, and could still hold a room at seventy.”
2.
The initials as the performers themselves read them: Tough on Black Asses. Given in print as Tough on Black Artists or Tough on Black Actors where the first version would not run. The joke names the conditions — the pay, the travel, the hours, the houses — and it is the sense in which the word is still spoken.
“TOBA. You already know what that stood for.”
Origin & Attribution
Black vaudeville performers, 1920s. The association was formally organized in 1920 under Milton Starr, a white theater owner in Nashville, with Sam Reevin of Chattanooga booking — but it was built on the circuit the Black performer and entrepreneur Sherman H. Dudley had been assembling since about 1909, which had more than twenty theaters by 1914. Roughly a third of the member houses were Black-owned, among them the Morton in Athens and the Douglass in Macon. The backronym is the performers' own, not a later invention.
1909
Sherman H. Dudley begins assembling a Black-owned theater circuit, the foundation the association is later built on; more than twenty houses by 1914
1920
The Theater Owners Booking Association is formally organized under Milton Starr of Nashville with Sam Reevin booking; it grows past eighty houses
1930
Dudley sells his theaters and the circuit collapses; the acts scatter onto what becomes the chitlin circuit
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
the South and Midwest, East Coast to Oklahoma · 1920s
Spoken by
Black vaudeville, blues, and comedy performers, and the Black press that covered them
$TOBAThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical106 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
35/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1920
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
Michelle R. Scott, T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners' Booking Association in Jazz-Age America, University of Illinois Press, 2023
book · printed
■
Preston Lauterbach, The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll, W. W. Norton, 2011, pp. 38, 303
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceColin Larkin, ed., The Guinness Who's Who of Blues, 2nd edition, Guinness Publishing, 1995, p. 338
reference · printed
See also