It wasn’t easy to become a member of the premium-level all-girl 1920s orchestra ‘The Ingenues’. As you’ll see, you not only had to be a woman who’d mastered one of many instruments that, for various reasons, were not necessarily associated with female players (saxes, trombones, tubas etc.) but you had
Here’s another Fats Waller short made for jukebox consumption in 1941 (see yesterday’s post for ‘Your Feets Too Big’). ‘The Joint Is Jumpin’, written by Waller, Andy Razaf and J.C.Johnson, is another of his hit novelty numbers and it’s given a rowdy treatment in this dramatization of what a Harlem
Last Friday I posted about a beautifully restored jukebox that was equipped to show films of the bands performing the songs in the jukebox. These films, known as ‘soundies’, are a great preservation tool as far too little film of performers of the day exist, especially black performers who were