Tag Archives: jazz

Americana Lost and Found: 1940-1947

Film Reel Container

On April 14, 1891, a Chicago businessman named Mortimer Birdsul Mills was granted a patent for a major improvement in what was then called a coin-actuated vending apparatus. It gave consumers of cigars the opportunity to select which one of several brands housed inside of a machine that they wanted to purchase. Mills established the Mills Novelty Company, and over the next several decades manufactured slot machines for gambling and separate devices that dispensed chewing gum, hot coffee, and cooled Coca-Cola bottles. With Mills’ son and grandchildren running the business, in 1928 it added coin-operated radios, phonographs, and eventually jukeboxes to its offerings.

One of the coin-operated machines of particular interest delivered to the public a new music configuration called Soundies. These three-minute black-and-white musical films were produced between 1940 through 1947, shot on 35mm film stock, and then transferred to a more affordable 16mm loop that featured eight different performances. For 10 cents you would get to watch one at a time with no ability for selection, but hopefully you’d enjoy whatever clip was next up and keep feeding the dimes.

At least seven production facilities in New York, Hollywood, and Chicago produced Soundies, for which the performers recorded the songs in advance and then lip-synced for the film. The machines that played them were sold and marketed under various brand names — Hi-Boy, Troubadour, Dancemaster, Do-Re-Me, Swing King, Zephyr, Studio, Throne of Music, Empress, Constellation, and The Panoram.

The Mills Panaram

The Panoram, built with high quality wood and designed in an art deco motif, was placed in public areas such as soda shops, cafés, taverns, roadhouses, and bus and train stations. While the first year was a runaway success, bringing the Mills family millions of dollars, World War II quickly interrupted its distribution with a shortage of raw materials to build more cabinets. By 1947, with television in the beginning stage of home entertainment dominance, Mills discontinued the Panoram, leaving an archive of approximately 1,800 Soundies.

Merle Travis – “Old Chisolm Trail”

Covering all genres of music, such as classical, big-band swing, hillbilly novelties, and patriotic songs, Soundies also added comedy sketches in 1941. In American roots music you had Merle Travis, The Hoosier Hot Shots, many jazz bands, and what has become their legacy: a huge catalog of African American artists who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to be filmed. Eventually the Soundies were sold off to several home video companies and distributed in a variety of formats, with many currently available to view on YouTube.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe and The Lucky Millinder Orchestra – “The Lonesome Road”

In the mid-1960s, the Scopitone jukebox made its debut based on a similar technology as The Panoram but now offering color format. They were initially available in Western Europe but soon spread to the United States. Some of the performers included The Exciters, Procol Harum, Neil Sedaka, Jody Miller, Bobby Vee, and Nancy Sinatra’s popular “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Bypassed by The Beatles and others from the British Invasion, the Scopitone jukebox faded by the late ’60s, although its technology continued for several years.

Lani McIntyre – “Imua Ailuni”

The Panoram and Scopitone systems each preceded and predicted the popularity of music videos popularized by MTV. Two recommended sources for more information about Soundies, the Panoram and Scopitone:

The Soundies Book: A Revised and Expanded Guide
The 2007 PBS-produced documentary Soundies: A Musical History, available on Amazon Prime Video

I’ll close this out with a cornucopia of clips, and encourage you to go forth and explore these three-minute slices of old-time historical Americana and American roots music.

 

 

 

 

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. 

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Jazz For People Who Hate Jazz

Louis Armstrong/Public Domain

Has anybody ever asked you “What kind of music do you like?” and you’ve replied, “I like all kinds”? I have. And that would not be truthful. I never liked jazz.

As a columnist who regularly writes and takes pleasure in sharing with you what music I’m enjoying and listening to in the moment or have discovered along the way that I find of interest, I’ve often rejected the notion of critical review. My mantra has been that all music is good to someone, somewhere, sometime. It compares with the position that places emphasis on perception over some hocus-pocus make-believe qualitative measurement. Or as David Hume wrote way back in 1742: ‘”Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.”

With an affinity and preference for roots music, or perhaps that still hard-to-define genre we’ve classified as Americana, my own truth is that I do not love all music. I can differentiate between that music whose audio signals my brain can’t process with any sort of clarity — metal, punk, a lot of (but not all) hip-hop, experimental and free-form — and that which I simply can’t listen to because I have a negative emotional response. Like this song, which is closing in on 30,000,000 views on You Tube.

So … jazz. From my very first job in the mailroom of an indie music distributor in 1972 and throughout the next 35 years doing sales and marketing, I’ve represented some of the greatest labels and musicians, yet found most all of it barely listenable. I just couldn’t get my head or ears around it. The rare exceptions were an album on Riverside by Lil Hardin Armstrong, Ornette Coleman’s 1960 Change of The Century, John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, and anything by Django Reinhardt.

That changed in 2001 with the release of Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz, which covered the history of the genre in America from the beginning of the 20th century to present day. As I watched and listened to those ten episodes, I realized that it wasn’t that I couldn’t relate to jazz, but rather that I hadn’t yet been exposed to what pleased my ears. My “sweet spot” ran from the early recordings of Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton, through the New Orleans and Harlem Renaissance period, the Chicago and Kansas City bands, and into the swing era and big bands of the late-’40s.

For a kid who only knew Louis Armstrong from his recording of “Hello, Dolly” and later “What a Wonderful World,” it was surprising for me to discover that he was as important to the history and development of jazz as the Carter Family or Jimmie Rodgers were to folk and country music. Armstrong moved in and out of bands for decades, playing with Kid Ory, King Oliver, and Fletcher Henderson, and accompanied vocalists Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and Bessie Smith. He didn’t start singing himself until 1929, when he joined the pit orchestra for an all-black revue in New York called Hot Chocolates and performed “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

That clip speaks volumes to how closely jazz, blues, and the music from Appalachia were intertwined, and along with the Ken Burns film, it inspired me to go off and search for jazz recordings for people like myself, people who felt unable to connect with that genre. And the more I focused on studying the historical context and growth of all-American music instead of sticking to the school of strict genre-classification, the more my auditory palette grew.

If you’d like to take a trip down the jazz highway, here’s a few of the recordings and artists that I keep in rotation. They fit like fingers in a glove with all of my other roots music favorites.

Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers

Jay C. Higginbotham & His Six Hicks

King Oliver and Henry “Red” Allen

Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra

Bessie Smith

Fats Waller

Cab Calloway and His Cotton Club Orchestra

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.