Here's a great little excerpt from an interview with Eubie Blake by Max Morath, about playing in bordellos as a teenager:
Morath: Were you . . . when you were a teenager or in your early professional days, were you in that . . .ah, kind of work. I mean were you close enough to that that you could tell us about it?
Blake: Yeah. Now you see when I first start to play in these houses, see, it must have been around nineteen hundred.
Morath: So you were about fifteen . . . sixteen.
Blake: Yeah. I used to have to go across to the pool room. A guy named Rab Walker, he ran the pool room. And I got a pair of long pants to put on, you see, because I can't go in this house with short pants on, see. The pants come way up here, Max, way up here and roll up, and I go and play. The woman paid me three dollars a week. But she never paid me nothing because I made tips. Boy, sometimes I'd make seven and eight, ten dollars, see? I've been lucky all my life: I've always made good money. So, I'd take the guys to the theater, to the burlesque theater. They'd go up in the gallery, you know. Ten cents. If I'd take fifteen guys I'd spend . . . I had Max this is true I had money all under the carpet. So the lady next door, Harp's mother. When they heard that I was playing, then my mother said, this woman . . . "I heard somebody play just like little Eubie," see. "Little Eubie." She says, "Where?" Says "Up in Aggie Shelton's." Well, she don't know who Aggie Shelton is. She says, "What time?" "Oh, it must have been about twelve o'clock." And I'd steal out at night.
Morath: You'd sneak out of the house at night.
Blake: Sneak out of the house and go get my long pants and put'em on, see. Then I'd come back and put'em back, see. Twenty-five cents I had to pay him. And my mother says, "Oh, it couldn't have been him, that boy went to bed at nine o'clock." I did go to bed, see, but my mother was at the front and I'd go out the alley. Go right out the alley and go across the street, get my long pants, put'em on, go up to Aggie Shelton's to work. Well, I worked up there for about three or four months. Then I went down on what they call the line: sporting houses on this side, sporting houses on that side, see. That was Annie Gilly's and I played down there. That's where the man come and got me to play for the . . .