15 "Soundies" (Turner Classic Movies, Kino Lorber, 2022, assembled from clips from the early 1940's)

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

My husband Charles threw my schedule for yesterday somewhat out of whack when he called me from work and told me that at 6:30 p.m. Turner Classic Movies was doing a program in honor of “Soundies,” the early-1940’s experiment in music videos. “Soundies” were three-minute short films that were watched on a pay-per-view device called a “Panoram,” and they mostly featured musical acts (though I think there were a few comedy routines in there as well) in at least semi-staged performances of their hit songs. Sometimes they featured artists performing other people’s hit songs; I remember one from a VHS tape I bought in the 1980’s of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark,” an enormous hit by Harry James with singer Helen Forrest, played on the “Soundie” by the far lesser-known Sonny Dunham and his orchestra. (Dunham was the firmer lead trumpeter with Glen Gray’s Casa Loma Orchestra who, like a lot of other big-band sidemen, took a foray into leading his own band and got hardly anywhere.) As things turned out, by the time I put on TCM to watch the “Soundies” tribute, they had already shown a documentary on the history of “Soundies” and they proceeded to show 15 of the actual films in three groups of five each.

The first was devoted to “Sounides” featuring stars who became iconic figures later: Dorothy Dandridge singing and dancing to “Cow Cow Boogie,” Ricardn Montalban doing a surprising novelty called “He’s a Latin from Staten Island,” a pianist originally billed as “Walter Liberace” (his real name was Wladziu Valentino Liberace and “Walter” was a legitimate Anglicization of “Wladziu,” but later he abbreviated his name to just “Liberace” and caled himself “Lee” for short) playing “Tiger Rag,” Stan Kenton performing “This Love of Mine” with a young Cyd Charisse doing a dance number with her lover’s coat, and a quite remarkable song by Doris Day with Les Brown and His Band of Renown doing a quite haunting song called “My Lost Horizon.” It was a surprise to see Doris Day with dark hair – later she would dye her hair blonde and that’s the version everyone remembers – but the song here, like her hit records with Brown, “Sentimental Journey” and “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time,” showcases Day’s potential talent as a jazz singer, a road not taken since she decided going pop was a better and more lucrative career for her.

Not all of these songs were done in the best versions – Dandridge’s “Cow Cow Boogie” is serviceable (and she looks great in the clip!) but hardly in the same league as the two Ellas: Ella Mae Morse, the white singer who introduced the song with Freddie Slack and His Orchestra; and Ella Fitzgerald, who covered it beautifully with the Ink Spots. The definitive version of “This Love of Mine” was by the young Frank Sinatra (who actually co-wrote it!) with Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. And though Liberace was properly virtuosic in his ultra-fast version of “Tiger Rag,” Art Tatum’s 1933 recording is just as fast, just as virtuosic, but miles better in terms of jazz feel and swing. It’s also amusing to watch Liberace’s clip for the two scantily clad women standing in front of his piano, serving the same decorative function his candelabrum did later. At least they didn’t have to worry about him hitting on them!

The second group of "Soundies" was called the “Battle of the Bandleaders,” and the opening song was Gene Krupa and His Orchestra doing “Let Me Off Uptown” with singer Anita O’Day and singer-trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Commentator Susan Delson, who wrote a book about “Soundies” and credited them with expanding the range and reach of Black performers, claimed that Eldridge was the first Black musician who got to be part of a white band as a regular member rather than a special feature (as Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton had been with the Benny Goodman Trio and Quartet), though I’m not share that’s true. Jimmy Dorsey had hired Black singer June Richmond in 1937 and Artie Shaw had hired Billie Holiday in 1938, but maybe Delson was putting singers in a separate category. (Come to think of it,white trumpeter-bandleader Bunny Berigan hired Black trumpeter Carl "Bama" Warwick for his trumpet section in 1939, two yers before Krupa hired Eldridge.)

The next “Soundie” was Cab Calloway and His Orchestra doing a version of “Minnie the Moocher” from 1941, almost a decade after he made the original hit (based on a song originally written and recorded by his sister, Blanche Calloway, called “Growlin’ Dan”). The edition of Calloway’s band was considerably better than the one that had made the hit: the trumpet section includes Dizzy Gillespie and Jonah Jones (Dizzy is unheard but Jones is featured in a growl-muted solo), and the rhythm section is Bennie Payne on piano (Calloway picked him up after Fats Waller fired him; the two did a staged duel in which Payne soloed first and then Waller was supposed to top him, but according to some accounts Payne either outplayed Waller or at the very least made it too close a contest for Waller’s comfort), Milt Hinton on bass and Cozy Cole on drums. Next up was a peculiar clip by Johnny Long and His Orchestra, not one of the better-known bands of the period, but with Helen Young on vocal doing a really strange song called “Swingin’ at the Seance.” (I’m not making that up, you know!)

After that is a quite remarkable clip from Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra playing a song called “Swingin’ on Nothing,” and while I’d have picked Armstrong’s “Soundie” of “Shine” from the same session because it featured a one-legged tap dancer called Nicodemus, they no doubt picked “Swingin’ on Nothing” because of the amazing break-dance by Armstrong’s singer, Velma Middleton. Middleton also sings a vocal duet with a tall, rather gangly man she calls “George.” I’m assuming it was George Washington – no, not that one, but a Black trombone player in Armstrong’s band); he also partners Middleton in a few dance steps (though nowhere learly as spectacular as the ones she does on her own!), and offhand I can’t think of another big-band Armstrong record, aside from his 1929 recording of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair” with Carmichael on second vocal, that has a male singer other than Armstrong himself. The final “Soundie” in the second group of five was a vest-pocket history of Stan Kenton and His Orchestra via a song called “Jammin’ at the Panoram,” featuring vocalist Helen Huntley (who also may have been the singer in “This Love of Mine” – Kenton never had a truly great girl singer until Anita O’Day, but once she joined he had an excellent series of women vocalists including June Christy and Chris Connor, both of whom became stars on their own).

The third group of “Soundies” showcased country music ≠ or “country-and-western,” ad it was known then – though not really. At least two of the clips were only tangentially country; one was a big-band version of “Deep in the Heart of Texas” by Van Alexander and His Orchestra. Van Alexander was a Harlem native who played piano but worked mostly as an arranger; his most famous credit was for his co-omposition with Ella Fitzgerald of the jazz version of tne nursery rhyme “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” which Ella recorded with Chick Webb’s band in 1938 and it became her star-making hit. I’d always assumed Van Alexander was Black, but the two photos of him on his Wikipedia page are racially ambiguous and all the musicians seen here are white. The other racially odd clip here is of the song “Along the Navajo Trail” – which isn’t really country music, but a pop hit drawing on Western and Native American themes – by singer John Shadrack with Johnny Moore and His Three Blazers. Shadrack is a rich-voiced baritone and the Three Blazers were an unusual group. Johnny Moore’s brother Oscar was the guitarist for the Nat “King” Cole Trio, and Johnny was also a guitarist who was jealous of the money Oscar was making. So he decided to form a band of his own using the same lineup as Cole – for which he needed a Black guy who could play piano and sing. The first person he hired was Frankie Laine, who qualified in only one out of three (he sang but he was white and couldn’t play piano), but eventually they hired Charles Brown, who not only was Black, sang and played poano, he had an amazingly beautiful, distinctive voice that would make him a blues star for decades. (I’m wondering if it was Charles Brown in this clip; he vaguely resembles Cole and certainly doesn’t look like the Charles Brown I saw at the 1976 San Francisco Blues Festival, but the brief bits of singing we hear from him could easily be either Brown or Cole himself.)

The other three country selections were “Why Did I Fall for Abner?” by a group called, at least if I heard Delson’s introduction correctly,the “Glee Glenn Trio” (though there were at least six female musicians in the clip, along with a man), featuring a woman lead singer who yodeled in the best Jimmie Rodgers tradition. (The enormous success of Rodgers and his patented throat-yodeling made it de rigueur for at least the next generation of country singers to yodel.) The last two clips in the country section were a quite good (and unnamed) band doing a song called “No Vacancy” and Dick Thomas covering Gene Autry’s star-making hit “Back in the Saddle Again” and showing off quite a lot of yodeling. (Gene Autry himself had got his first record contract with Columbia in 1930 as their answer to Jimmie Rodgers on Victor.) Susan Delson referred to “Soundies” as the first music videos, which they weren’t – indeed , the earliest sound films were music videos, including Lee De Forest’s experimental sound shorts in the early 1920’s,which consisted of recruiting vaudeville singers and having them perform songs in front of his camera and microphone.

Well before “Soundies” there had been some quite remarkable band shorts – and Susan Delson should have known about them because at least two of them, St. Louis Blues (starring Bessie Smith) and Black and Tan (starring Duke Ellington), were made in1929 by the quirky director Dudley Murphy, whom Delson had previously written a biography about. In fact, Ellington’s band shorts – not only Black and Tan but A Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935), both directed by Fred Waller, later the inventor of Cinerama – were unusually creative visually, and I’ve often wondered if Ellington, who had begun as a visual artist and then settled on music as his career, had anything to do with their visual inventiveness. One thing I hadn’t realized about “Soundies” before was that, though they were often referred to as “video jukeboxes,” they had one major difference from regular audio-only jukeboxes: you could not select the song you wanted to hear (and see). You paid your dime and the Panoram showed you whatever was next on the reel of eight Soundies on which they were distributed, so if you liked a particular clip and wanted to see it again, you had to cycle through eight more playings before the reel once again reached the point where it carried your favorite song.