Baker worked within this system in her mid-teens, joining the Jones Family Band and later the Dixie Steppers, touring the circuits and developing the professional skills and discipline that professional performance requires. The specific skills she refined in this period — the ability to read an audience, to adjust a performance in real time, to hold attention in conditions ranging from enthusiastic to indifferent — were the foundation of everything she did in Paris later.
Shuffle Along, the 1921 Broadway production in which Baker joined the chorus, was a landmark in the specific story of Black American entertainment reaching mainstream American audiences. Written and produced by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, with Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, the show was the first major all-Black Broadway production in decades and ran for 504 performances — far longer than most observers had predicted. Its success demonstrated to the commercial entertainment establishment that Black artists could produce work that white audiences would pay to see, a demonstration that had to be made, and remade, repeatedly because the establishment’s reluctance to believe it was remarkably persistent.
Baker’s role in Shuffle Along was initially in the chorus. She developed a specific comedic approach within that role — the exaggerated, wide-eyed mugging and deliberate stumbling that she had refined on the streets and in traveling troupes — that made her stand out within the ensemble. She was given more prominent placement and more stage time as the production continued, and she was developing a reputation among the production’s creative team as someone worth watching.