11 "Soundies" (Kino Lorber Films, Library of Congress, Turner Classic Movies, 2022, from original films from 1940-1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies ran the second half of its two-night tribute to “Soundies,” the miniature three-minute films produced between 1940 and 1947 to be shown on a machine called a “Panoram,” essentially a video jukebox. The “Panorams” were set up in restaurants, bars, nightclubs and other places of public entertainment where audio jukeboxes were commonly set up. The Panoram consisted of a 16 mm projector, a series of mirrors that bounced the image onto a ground-glass screen, and a continuous loop of eight films spliced together and running continuously, sort of like an eight-track audio tape cartridge (which wouldn’t exist for another two decades). You put a dime in the Panoram (twice the price to play an audio jukebox then), and you got to see a three-minute film before a metal strip on the film told the machine to stop until you or someone else inserted another dime. One difference between audio jukeboxes and Soundie Panorams was that you couldn’t select the song you were going to see and hear: you got whatever was next up on the endless-loop reel. I watched the first two of the three groups of Soundies TCM showed last night. I skipped the third one so I could watch the third and final episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Sarah Botstein documentary mini-series The U.S. and the Holocaust – which was especially ironic because it was the set that most directly related to World War II. The World War II-related Soundies included Doris Day’s “Is It Love or Is It Conscription?” and four songs with no cast or crew information listed on TCM’s Web site: “G. I. Jive” (a great hit for Louis Jordan, though I don’t know whether it was Jordan’s own performance or someone else’s), “Love’s Gonna Be Rationed,” “Take It Off” and “When Hitler Kicks the Bucket.”

The two groups of Soundies I did get to see last night included three spectacular songs by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: “Bli-Blip,” “Cottontail” (renamed “Hot Chocolate” for the Soundie) and “‘C’ Jam Blues” (renamed “Jam Session” for the Soundie). “Bli-Blip” and another song Ellington filmed for a Soundie, “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” were written by Ellington and lyricist Paul Francis Webster for a remarkable 1941 musical revue called Jump for Joy! which he premiered in Los Angeles. Ellington’s plan was to record the major songs from his show and promote them in his live appearances as he worked his way across the country from L.A., to his home base in New York, then use the popular demand for them to get funding to produce his musical on Broadway. Alas, he ran afoul of one of the senseless economic battles that plagued the music business during the war years: the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP), to which Ellington belonged, had unilaterally doubled the royalty rate it demanded from radio stations to play ASCAP songs. The radio stations and the giant networks refused to pay the new rates, and instead formed their own music licensing arm, Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI). Since most of the composers of the so-called “Great American Songbook” were ASCAP members, radio stations and BMI looked for talent that the people running ASCAP had considered beneath them – and found it in Black rhythm-and-blues and white country music.

Between that, the government tax on dance floors that drove a lot of the venues where the big swing bands had performed out of business, and the strike the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) called against the record companies that lasted from 1942 to 1944, these pointless economic conflicts sped the end of the big-band era and the domination of pop music by solo singers. So Ellington was unable to play the songs he’d written for Jump for Joy! on the radio, and since he couldn’t play standards either he was forced to rely on two composers who weren’t affiliated with ASCAP – his son, Mercer Ellington, and his newly hired arranger and co-composer Billy Strayhorn – for new material to broadcast. So the Soundies Ellington shot in L.A. of “Bli-Blip” and “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good” are historically invaluable as the only evidence we have of just what Ellington’s mega-musical looked like. The loss is especially sad because Ellington had deliberately intended Jump for Joy! as a once-and-for-all destruction of just about all the racist stereotypes that had dominated the4 portrayal of African-Americans in popular entertainment and culture. Most of is socially conscious songs, including one called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-In Now,” went unrecorded, but the title song was cut by Ellington in two versions (one sung by his male vocalist, Herb Jeffries; and one by his female vocalist, the woefully underrated Ivie Anderson), and its affirmative lyrics lay bare Ellington’s ideological intent for his musical as an expression of racial pride:

Fare thee well, land of cotton,
Cotton lisle is out of style,
Honey chile, jump for joy!
Don’t you grieve, Little Eve,
All the hounds, I do believe,
Have been killed, ain’t ya thrilled?
Jump for joy!
Have you seen pastures groovy?
“Green Pastures” was just a Technicolor movie.
When you stomp up to Heaven and you meet Old St. Pete,
Tell that boy to jump for joy:
Step right in, give Pete some skin, and jump for joy!

(Actually, The Green Pastures – based on Marc Connelly’s hit Broadway play which featured Black actors re-enacting scenes from the Bible in Black dialect – was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1936 in black-and-white.)

Most of what I know about Jump for Joy! came from the 1988 reconstruction for the Smithsonian Institution, compiled by music historian Patricia Willard, who not only assembled as many of the original recordings as she could find, working from Soundies soundtracks and broadcast transcription discs as well as studio recordings and, in one case – a comedy routine by Wonderful Smith [that’s really his name!] in which he’s supposedly on the phone to President Roosevelt – from the soundtrack to a Monogram service comedy called Top Sergeant Mulligan. (Monogram had originally asked Smith to sell them the rights to the routine so their great Black comedian Mantan Moreland could play it, but Smith insisted that the only way he’d sell tmen the rights is if they let him perform it himself.) In addition to the three by Ellington, last night’s 11 Soundies on TCM included Count Basie playing a full-band version of “Air Mail Special” (originally written in 1941 by Benny Goodman, Jimmy Mundy and pioneering jazz electric guitarist Charlie Christian for a Goodman small band), Jimmy Dorsey with singer Helen O’Connell performing “Au Reet” (a white band paying tribute to a great – and fictional – Black musician in Harlem), Louis Jordan doing an instrumental called “Jordan Jive” with some spectacular acrobatic dancing on screen and Jordan’s alto sax clearly audible on the soundtrack even though he’s not shown playing on the film, Larry Clinton’s great instrumental “The Dipsy-Doodle” (though my favorite version of the song by far is by Chick Webb’s band with the young Ella Fitzgerald singing infectiously) and a not-bad performance by Lawrence Welk doing a song called “Doin’ Ya Good.”

There’s a nice semi-jazz tenor sax solo as well as Welk’s own accordion and a typically adenoidal vocal, but what makes Welk’s clip remarkable is that the band includes several women. It’s a sad commentary on the sexism of the jazz world that, despite the existence of quite a few excellent female players, the big swing bands mostly remained resolutely male throughout the war even though one would have thought the bandleaders would have seen that women offered a solution to the problem of so many male performers getting drafted. (Instead they resorted to hiring men who were, as the saying went, “:either too young or too old”; Stan Getz got his first major gig with Jack Teagarden’s band when he was just 13.) Woody Herman had hired a women trumpeter, Billie Young, in 1940 (before the U.S. entered the war), but she only lasted six months. One of the problems was how to dress her: band musicians usually wore matching outfits and Herman had a female version, a top and skirt matching the male members’ suit jackets and slacks, tailored especially for her. I give Lawrence Welk a lot of credit for being more progressive about gender roles than a lot of the great swing leaders whose music I much prefer to his!

The first two Soundies on TCM’s program last night were by vocal groups: “Swing for Sale” by the Charioteers and “Cool Song” by the King’s Men. One thing I hadn’t known before last night is that the 1942-44 AFM ban on union musicians making records applied to Soundies as well. That shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, since the main issue in the strike (which was officially called a “ban” rather than a “strike” because Congress had in 1942 passed a law making most strikes illegal for the duration, but it amounted to the same thing) was the way restaurants, nightclubs and bars that had formerly hired live musicians now were installing either record players or jukeboxes instead. The AFM recording ban did not apply to the major Hollywood studios – AFM musicians could still record for feature-film soundtracks – but it did to the Soundies producers. So the Soundies producers (there were quite a few of them, including RCM Productions – which made Ellington’s Soundies – and Minoco Distribution) were forced to rely on vocal groups,

just as the record companies briefly experimented with having their star singers record backed by choruses (since singers were part of a different union,as were solo instrumentalists like the young pianist Liberace, who got to make his film debut in a Soundie of “Tiger Rag”). Heard today, the chorally backed records of singers like Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dick Haymes and Sarah Vaughan sound preposterous, but at the time it was a stopgap so record companies could put new songs before the public without risking the ire of the AFM and its notoriously dictatorial president, James C. Petrillo. (The “C” stood for “Caesar,” and a lot of jokesters wagged about how appropriate his middle name was.) Last night’s hosts, Dave Karger and Susan Delson (who wrote a book about Soundies with the lengthy title Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time that has been short-listed for the 2022 Ralph J. Gleason Award – who knew that the veteran jazz and rock critic for the San Francisco Chronicle who co-founded Rolling Stone magazine and who was a friend of my mother’s had a book award named for him?), faulted some of the Soundies for their dated racial attitudes – including Paul White’s odd eye-rolling and tongue-flapping even in the context of a show by Duke Ellington intended to denounce such racist stereotypes – but they also admitted that at least some of their criticism was applying modern-day standards to historic material.