With her marked individuality, Miss Raymond drifted as a matter of course into character impersonation. In the days when she entered the varieties three distinct types of low-comedy characterizations were recognized—the Irish, the Dutch, and the negro. The first two were genuine burlesques, while the last named was the familiar minstrel type,—a great deal of burnt cork and an insignificant amount of genuine negro. Miss Raymond selected the Dutch type. Whether she was the first woman to attempt a Dutch character sketch, I do not know, but I am willing to risk the statement that she was the best one.
An amazingly grotesque figure she presented, with her figure built on the lines of a meal sack with a string tied around the middle, and her huge sabots that clattered noisily every step she took. Her face was a study in ponderous stupidity, and her movements were slow and unwieldy. Yet, with all its grotesqueness, its mammoth exaggerations, there was human nature in the sketch and rich, full-blooded humor, the brutal, coarse humor of the soil, humor that had not been refined into flavorless delicacy nor polished into insipidness for the moral salvation of too easily shocked tenderlings.
When the "coon" craze struck the stage, Miss Raymond was among the first to take that up, and she has clung faithfully to it ever since. Like all her work, her interpretation of the modern "coon" song is all her own. She does not reproduce so fantastically as some others the antics of the swell cake-walker, but she infuses into her work a rich humor that is infectious. In this one particular she resembles closely Miss May Irwin. May Irwin's "coon," however, is the Southern "mammy" type, while Maud Raymond's is of Northern city birth and training. In this aspect of her "coon" art, Miss Raymond seems nearer the progenitor of the up-to-date stage negro, who was, of course, the "nigger" minstrel of a number of decades ago.
Miss Raymond's method was capitally illustrated in the song "I thought that he had Money in the Bank," which was introduced in "The Rogers Brothers in Wall Street" during the season of 1899-1900. Her dialect was by no means extraordinary. It had not the darky softness and twang, which one finds for instance so faithfully reproduced by Artie Hall. Miss Raymond, however, got a curious comic effect by twisting her words out of the corner of her mouth in a manner indescribable, by hunching up her shoulders, one a little higher than the other, thrusting her head forward, crooking her elbows, and letting her hands hang loose and lifeless as if they had been broken at the wrists.
After seeing Miss Raymond's inimitable Dutch woman, I carried away the impression that she herself inclined toward embonpoint,—that she was grossly notoriously fat, in fact. Later observations, however, have caused me to revise that impression. Miss Raymond is not fat, merely comfortably plump. She is a decided brunette with rather irregular features, but features none the less attractive for that, snapping black eyes that seem always to sparkle with irrepressible merriment, and an inexhaustible amount of vivacity. Vivacity may, indeed, be said to be her specialty. It is always in evidence, and yet it never runs riot and it never becomes wearisome.
Miss Raymond has been a vaudeville feature for the past twelve years. She made her first appearance with Rice and Barton's company, and afterward played two years with Harry Williams's Own Company. Her next appearance was in the soubrette part in "Bill's Boot," in which Joe J. Sullivan starred. She then joined Irwin Brothers' Company, in which she sang with great success. She spent several weeks in the Howard Athenæum Company when it was under James J. Armstrong's management, and finished the season with Fields and Hanson.
Miss Raymond was specially engaged to play the soubrette rôle in Bolivar in Donnelly and Girard's "The Rainmakers." Those popular stars declared that the part had never been so well done as it was by Miss Raymond, but she was obliged to retire at the end of the season on account of illness. During the summer she appeared on the roof gardens and in the continuous houses. She joined Tony Pastor's company in the early fall, and played a season of fifteen weeks with that organization, meeting with great success.
When the Rogers Brothers began starring with "The Reign of Error" in the fall of 1898, she was made a prominent feature of their company, and she continued with them as their leading support the following season in "The Rogers Brothers in Wall Street."
She is also the wife of one of the brothers, though whether of Max or Gus I never can remember.