Dema Harshbarger
American concert promoter and talent manager (1884–1964)
Dema Harshbarger (September 8, 1884 — February 20, 1964) was an American businesswoman, concert promoter, and talent manager.
Early life
Dema E. Harshbarger was born in Abingdon, Illinois, one of the seven children of Richard Henry Harshbarger and Sarah Belle Lewis Harshbarger. She survived polio and rheumatic fever in her youth. She attended Knox College. Soon after college, she went traveling with her music teacher Mrs. Parry; the two were among the rescued passengers in the wreck of the RMS Slavonia off the coast of Portugal.
Career
Harshbarger started her career at the Century Lyceum Bureau in Chicago, booking lecturers and entertainers in small towns in Illinois and Indiana.
From 1919 to 1921 she and Jessie B. Hall ran the Fine Arts Bureau in Chicago. In 1921 she left Hall to become co-owner of Harrison and Harshbarger, a Chicago concert booking agency. Their first exclusive client was tenor Charles Marshall, and they helped to develop the "Organized-Audience Plan", a subscription model for entertainment bookings in smaller cities.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dema Harshbarger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.