Soundies: A Musical History Hosted by Michael Feinstein (Liberation Entertainment, Multicom Entertainment, 2007)

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

After “The Golden Door” my husband Charles and I rented from Amazon.com a 2007 documentary on the history of “Soundies,” the three-minute short films (over 1,000 were produced during the seven years of the company’s existence, 1940 to 1947) that were meant to be viewed on coin-operated machines called “Panorams.” “Soundies” were about three minutes long and were shown on a screen that was part of a unit that looked very much like the console televisions of a few years later; the screen itself was made of ground glass and the films were carried on an endless loop, with a brief bit of metal separating each of the eight films on a reel to tell the machine to shut itself off after showing a single film. It was essentially the principle of the eight-track cartridge well before eight-track cartridges existed. One problem with “Soundies” was that, unlike the audio jukeboxes after which they were patterned, there was no way the consumer could select a particular “Soundie” to watch; once you put your dime in the “Panoram,” it showed the next film up on the endless loop. If you wanted to see a particular film over again, you had to keep putting dimes into the machine until the reel cycled back to it. The documentary on “Soundies” Charles and I watched was made in 2007 and was officially called Soundies: A Musical History.

It was directed by Chris Lamson and hosted by Michael Feinstein, who also got to sing a song at the end as part of the closing credits. The Panorams were manufactured by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago, and once they had got them into locations like nightclubs, bars, train stations, airports and everywhere else large numbers of people gathered and spent large amounts of time waiting, their next task was to make movies that could be shown on them. To do this, Mills Novelty and other producers ultimately opened three studios, in the centers of the music business in the U.S.: New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Soundies were not just filmed performances; like the music videos of the 1980’s and since, they were essentially miniature movies inspired by the songs they presented. Indeed, when I ordered three videotapes containing Soundies in the 1980’s, I would show them to people and say, “This is what MTV would have looked like if it had existed in the 1940’s.” Soundies: A Musical History featured some rather curious “talking heads,” including interviews with people like Kay Starr and singer-songwriter Hugh Martin who actually made them, as well as cultural commentators like Hugh Hefner (who already looked like death warmed over in 2007) and Stan Ridgway, whom Charles was surprised to see because he’d remembered Ridgway as the leader of the 1980’s band Wall of Voodoo. Their biggest hit was a song called “Mexican Radio,” and Charles remembered hearing it quite often on 91X because it was a Mexican radio station (though aimed at the U.S. – aside from some home-based Spanish-language programming insisted upon by the Mexican equivalent of the FCC, most of its content was in English) and they would play it right after their obligatory weekly playing of the Mexican national anthem.

The documentary really didn’t get into much of the business history of Soundies as an enterprise – and Charles wondered how they handled the Mafia influence that essentially controlled the jukebox industry in the early- to mid-1940’s. Most of the focus was on the artistic content of them, and in particular the surprising degree of sexually explicit content. Many of the Soundies featured scantily clad girls standing around while the male musicians performed – sometimes they danced and sometimes their function was just decorative, notably in the clip of Liberace (then billed as “Walter Liberace,” a legitimate Anglicization of his full name, Wladziu Valentino Liberace) doing “Tiger Rag” with two girls standing in front of his piano, performing basically the same function that his candelabrum did later. Most of the truly interesting performances were, not surprisingly, of the big-band swing units that dominated popular music during the Soundies years, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Gene Krupa (whose Soundies, “Let Me Off Uptown” and, unseen here, “Thanks for the Boogie Ride,” featured Black singer-trumpeter Roy Eldridge and white singer Anita O’Day doing a vocal duet; Krupa had been part of the Benny Goodman Trio and Quartet, the first racially mixed band to perform live in the U.S. for a popular audience, and by 1941 he was leading his own band and when his white trumpet soloist, Shorty Sherock, left the band and took his wife, singer Irene Daye, with him, Krupa hired Eldridge and O’Day to replace them), Louis Armstrong, and others, including a magnificent all-woman band called the International Sweethearts of Rhythm whose surviving recordings on Soundies, broadcast airchecksw and their one commercial session show then the equals of any make ensemble of the period.

There were also country acts, notably a great singer and yodeler named Carolina Cotton (as you might suspect, that wasn’t her real name – her real name was Helen Hagstrom and she was born in Cash, Arkansas) doing a great duet with Merle Travis (who as a singer was a great guitar player) on a song called “Why Did I Fall for Abner?” Some of the most fascinating clips were by vocal groups like the Mel-Tones (though for some reason the leader of the Mel-Tones, Mel Tormé, was not allowed to appear in their Soundies even though his voice is unmistakable on the soundtrack; instead he’s being mimed to by a tall, blond man who looks nothing like him aside from their both being white men) and the Martins. One can draw a direct line of influence from the multi-part harmony vocals of the Mel-Tones and the Martins to the Four Freshmen, Four Aces, Four Lads and the Brothers Four in the 1950’s and then to the Beach Boys in the 1960’s. (Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson said, “Take a Chuck Berry song, add Four Freshmen harmonies on top of it, and you’ve got the Beach Boys”.)

One musical phenomenon that gets mentioned in the film is the bizarre strike against the record companies called by American Federation of Musicians president James Caesar Petrillo in 1942, which lasted over two years. Officially it was called a “ban” instead of a “strike” because Congress had passed a law declaring strikes illegal for the duration of World War II. But its effect was the same: union musicians were not allowed to make records for the period of the “ban” (1942 to 1944, with a second, shorter “ban” in 1948). The talking heads in this documentary credit that with ending the big-band era and enshrining singers at the top of the music business, which is arguable – since singers weren’t part of the AFM they were still allowed to record, nd there were a few attempts to record singers with choruses instead of orchestras backing them. But it wasn’t only that: it was also the tax on dance floors the U.S. government imposed as a war financing measure, and an equally bizarre conflict between the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP) and the radio industry from 1940 to 1942. ASCAP triggered the battle when they unilaterally doubled the fees radio stations had to pay to play ASCAP members’ songs on the air. As a result, radio stations formed their own music licensing company, Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI), and because ASCAP had most of the Broadway and Hollywood songwriters locked up, radio stations started playing music in genres the mavens of ASCAP had considered beneath them: Black rhythm-and-blues and white country music. The cumulative effect was to keep big bands from either playing live (due to the tax on dance floors that put a lot of their former venues out of business), getting their music on the radio (due to the ASCAP-BMI imbroglio) or making records, and that triple whammy was a good way of putting the big bands out of existence. (So was the trend towards even larger bands, started by Stan Kenton – other bandleaders complained that with Kenton’s success, their audiences were demanding ever-larger bands as well, and most of the jobs that were still available didn’t offer enough money to support such outsized orchestras.)

There were some surprises on this show, including Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail” (one of a series of five Soundies he made with the cast of his pioneering 1941 musical Jump for Joy, which was his attempt to create a show that would destroy the racist stereotypes of what Black performers were expected to do on stage; these Soundies are the only evidence we have of what Jump for Joy looked like) and jazz numbers by Kay Starr and Doris Day. Both of them had real potential chops as jazz singers in the 1940’s (Starr made a quite beautiful series of broadcast transcription records – made to be played by radio stations rather than sold directly to consumers – and a great side for Capitol, “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight,” on which she was backed by a band led by pianist Nat “King” Cole; alas, he and Starr didn’t sing together on it!) who had to mothball their jazz skills to sell pop records in the 1950’s. (Rosemary Clooney also had to do that, but she got to make a jazz comeback for the Concord label in the 1970’s and 1980’s.) There are also Soundies of Cole himself, showing off his brilliant skills as a jazz pianist which he had to put on the back burner when his singing, not his piano playing, became the focus of his career. Cole made some charming Soundies in which he sits in the audience at a club, while he also performs on a Panoram, winking at himself.