br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched a “Snappy Video” Blu-Ray disc containing a compilation of “Soundies,” the three-minute music videos shot between 1941 and 1947 to be played on a “Panoram.” The Panoram was a sort if self-contained movie projector and screen, and if you put a dime into it (twice the going rate for an audio-only jukebox in the early- to mid-1940’s) you saw and heard a shirt filmclip of a big band, a country outfit, a vocal group or some other sort of audio-visual entertainment. The Snappy Video compilation featured 20 short films, though three weren’t Soundies; one was a band short with Ted Lewis and His Orchestra playing a 10-minute program. I suspect the folks at Universal (the opening logo said “Castle Films,” which in addition to being a logo used for educational films shown in schools was also an imprint Universal used to sell three-minute bits of their feature films for home viewing) whipped this one into production while Lewis was at their studio appearing with Abbott and Costello and the Andrews Sisters in the 1941 comedy Hold That Ghost. The other two songs that weren’t Soundies were “telescriptions,” made in the early days of TV and meant to be used the way audio transcription discs had been used by radio stations. You could either show them one after each other to creat a 15- or 30-minute program featuring a single artist, or stick them in one at a tome to serve as filler for holes in the schedule.
The 2007 documentary Soundies: A Musical History which Charles and I had watched recently on a digital rental from Amazon.com said that Soundies disappeared surprisingly quickly after World War II ended. They explained the sudden demise of the format as being due to the disinterest of most returning veterans to go out as much as they had before they served. Instead they wanted to get married, start having families and settle down. (This was the beginning of the so-called “Baby Boom.”) They were also buying the brand-new technology of television, and they were letting the self-contained box entertain them at home without needing to go out. Soi it seems like either the same companies that had previously produced Soundies or a different bunch started making “telescriptions,” which were basically like Soundies except you watched them at home. I hadn’t anticipated having to take notes on the order in which the Soundies (and other items) on the Snappy Video Blu-Ray came on, but the order in which they were shown was wildly different from the one listed on the box.
The film opened with one of its most spectacular Soundies, Louis Armstrong playing the song “Shine” with a tap dancer named Nicodemus. I remember hearing somewhere that Nicodemus had only one leg; I have not been able to confirm that online, but it may be true because in the final scene he’s shown doing his athletic movis with his left leg while his right just drags along. A decade after Armstrong’s even wilder filming of this same song in hos 1932 band short A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (he plays the “King of Jazzmania,” into which a no-account Black man dreams himself while he falls asleep while he’s supposed to be washing his floorsl he’s dressed inan African tribal leader’s costume and there are soap suds all around to symbolize this was all happening in the head of someone who was supposed to be mopping, he returned to the song for this Soundie,filmed with a giant mockup of a trumpet in front of Armstrong’s band. The next one was one of my favorite Soundies, Gene Krupa with vocalist Anita O’Day and singer-trumpeter Roy Eldridge doing “Thanks for the Boogie Ride,” their sequel to the giant hit “Let Me Off Uptown” and to my mind an even better film. The song featured various actors impersonating motorcycle cops with painted cut-outs of cars and motorcycles to illustrate the lyric, “I like riding in jalopies/Away from motorcycle coppies.”
Then came a clip of Thomas “Fats” Waller doing his huge hit, “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” with several Black women in various states of undress (one interesting thing about the Soundies is they weren’t subject to the strictures of the Motion Picture Production Code the way feature films were, so they could get a lot more exually risqué) as Waller cruises them all while he plays, and finally picks one to pledge that he “ain’t misbehavin’, I’m saving my love for you.” Watching this clip, I can readily understand why the blind British-born jazz pianist George Shearing described the experience of shaking hands with Waller as “like grabbing a bunch of bananas.” The next song was Cab Calloway doing his star-making hit, “Minnie the Moocher,” with a much more musically advanced band than the one he’d recorded it with 10 years earlier; his trumpet section featured Dizzy Gillespie and Jonah Jones, and while Dizzy is just in the brass section Jones,who would become a star in his own right in the 1950’s, is featured. After that comes a Soundie of Jerry Stewart with a quite good dancer named Ceci Eames doing “What a Difference a Day Makes.” Stewart’s vocal is O.K. but he’s not Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan. Then comes a really odd selection called “At Your Service,” which takes place at a drive-in restaurant when such things were still novelties, and it features another adenoidal male singer and a quite nice group of three women whose names are identified on screen as “Betty,” “Ann” and “Mary.” I’m guessing those were their names in real life as well. They’re shown harmonizing about the joys of the place they’re working at and dancing on the hoods of the cars of their customers, which if they’d tired that in real life would probably have freaked people out but in the context of a Soundie looks like the most normal thing in the world.
Then comes the Ted Lewis short, The Band Parade, directed by Reginald Le Borg, whom I recently mentioned in these pages towards the end of his rather strange career. He first worked as an assistant to avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg and theatre director Max Reinhardt in his lative Vienna, then got a job directing band shorts at Universal and ultimately graduated to feature films, though mostly retrograde horror from the dregs of Universal’s history in the genre. The Lewis film is interesting for two songs, “Me and My Shadow” with the great Black dancer Teddy Hale literally playing Lewis’s shadow (Hale caught it from the racial Thought Police, accused of playing up to white stereotypes, though his defense was that Lewis treated him like a gentleman and paid him well); and “Three Blind Mice” with a quite good female vocal trio. After that came one of the most fascinating clips, Alvino Rey and His Orchestra doing an uptempo version of “St. Louis Blues” with the Lennon Sisters swinging surprisingly hard on the vocals. You’d never guess it from th is clip that the Lennon Sosters would end up with a decades-long surety for Lawrence Welk! This is also noteworthy for Rey’s solo on the pedal steel guitar, and the camera goes in close enough to show how Rey is manipulating thos ungainly instrument to get those spacy sounds out of it. Rey was one of only two guitarists to lead a big band during the swing era; the other was Django Reinhardt, who had one in France during World War II.
Then came a country-flavored novelty by Spike Jones called “Pass the Biscuits, Morandy” – the joke is that Mirandy’s biscuits are so hard they serve as weapons for the Jones boys to defend themselves. After that comes another novelty, Barry Wood singing “Allá en el Rancho Grande” in Spanish and then in English. Ths was the title song from a Mexican musical film from 1936 starring Tito Guizar that was a hit on both sides of the border, and after the film’s U.S. release Bing Crosby picked up the song and became the first person to record it in English. There’s also a dynamite version from a 1939 live broadcast by Artie Shaw with Tony Pastor doing one of his typical comic vocals. Wood’s isnt at the level of Crosby or Shaw but it’ll do even though it’s pretty obvious that Spanish is not his native tongue. Next up is Larry Clinton’s orchestra doing “Myt Reverie,” which Clinton more or less wrote himself – I say “more or less” because he borrowed the main theme from an old piano work by Debussy, also called “Réverie.” The song features Clinton’s haunting-voiced singer, Bea Wain. Next up is another novelty, Johnny Long and His Orchestra with singer-dancers Paul Harmon and Helen Young called “When a Girl Loves a Sailor” – obviously a topical theme during America’s involvement in World War II.
After that came a fragment of “Beer Barrel Polks” by Frankie Yankovic, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s father and a star of polka music – though, alas, the clip is incomplete and cuts off just when Frankie was about to take his accordion solo. Next come some highly risqué dance numbers, including one called “My Gal Salomé” played by the David Rose Orchestra (Rose had an odd career and he’s best known today for writing the tune “The Stripper” and beint the first husband of Judy Garland); “Can Can Capers” featuring a dance company showing a lot more lingerie thant hey’d have been allowed to in a U.S. feature at the time; and “Pepetito” featuring a quote good Spanish-language vocalthat just might have been Lydia Mendoza; it looks and sounds vaguely like her and it would have been nice to know that shis El Paso-born singer, most famous for her wrenching folk song called “Mal Hombre” in which a woman recalls her titular ruin at the hands (and other parts) of the titular “bad man” and now she’s trying to warn a younger woman about him, made a Soundie. The nest two songs are the “Telescriptions,” Connie Haines (surprisingly good; she was one of those talented big-band singers who got lost in the shuffle even though during her stints with both Harry James and Tommy Dorsey she had to share the bandstand with a male singer who became a far bigger star than she did, Frank Sinatra) doing a marvelous song caled “Who’s Gonna Shoe My Foot?” (I learned this from Harry Belafonte’s version on his The Many Moods of Belafonte album, but hers is just as good and I especially loved it when she sang, “I don’t need no man”) and Bobby Troup’s “Daddy.”
“Daddy” is a song about an unashamed gold-digger, something like Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” (which actually came later), and Troup sings and plays piano with two other men on guitar and bass. They were obviously trying to be the white version of the Nat “King” Cole Trio, and Trou9p’s song “‘Get Your Kicks on’ Route 66” became one of Cole’s biggest hits. This verison of “Daddy” is marked by a great woman singer who plays the gold-digger and is regrettably unidentified; there’s a later Troup recording of the song from a 1958 album called The Feeling of Jazz, but somehow with Troup singing it alone it doesn’t pack the punch this version, with a woman in the part of the goid-=digger, does. The last two songs on the disc ware June Valli, a show singer rather than a jazz singer but still a strong, powerful voice, doing “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” which like “My Reverie” is based on a theme from classical music – in this case the big theme from the final movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto; and a really authoritative performance of a song called “Carry My Heart Out Over You” by Rose Marie, Yes, that Rose Marie, who’s best known today largely for being one of the three people in the writers’ room of the 1960’s TV sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show (the gimmick was that Divk Van Dyke, Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie would be playing the writers of a TV show hosted by “Alan Brady,” played by Carl Reiner, who had developed the show’s premise and headed its real-life writers’ room). But at age nine she had delivered a phenomenal performance of a torch song called “My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues” in the film International House, and here as a young adult she’s equally good. Overall, this is a reasonably good collection of Soundies (plus other items), and the Armstrong, Krupa, Waller, Calloway, Haines and Rose Marie segments achieve greatness.
