Glenn's Picks #4. Nine nifty little musical film clips
Glenn Allen Howard
glennallenhoward at yahoo.com
Mon Jul 6 10:46:33 PDT 2009

A hardy hi-yo Silvertone to all you crazy chucks and chicks out there!
Welcome to GP #4-–a brand spankin’ new stash of “old” film
clips scientifically designed to get your mojo workin' and your eyes,
ears and rear in gear.
I've been working the past several weeks cruisin' youtube for buried
treasures and have rounded up another nice little panful of nuggets
for all you YouthTubers and Grouch Potatoes to sift through. Don’t
try this at home – I can do it faster & more efficiently since
I’ve been collecting music on film almost as long as I been stackin'
up the wax. I already know what exists, and only a small fraction is
up there with the cyberspace cadets.
You wouldn't believe how much youseless, tubeless trash I've waded
through, but buried deep in the swill are some swell gems: clips from
old movies, TV, newsreels, and documentaries containing incredible
music of all styles and eras.
The concept of this little missive is that I'll post one email every
two or three weeks, containing links to 5-10 brilliant old musical
clips. Anyone can join the list and start getting these posts, and
anyone can leave the list by unsubscribing. No one can see your email
address and it won’t be sold into slavery or shared with anyone
outside of the AMHF and yours truly.
I’ve scribbled some semblance of program notes for your education
and Edison-ification, which start right after the links.
If you got any kind of “kind” speakers, now’s the time to plug
‘em in and turn ‘em up, or forever hold your peas.
1 a. Benny Goodman Orchestra with Johnny “Scat” Davis
“Hooray for Hollywood” 1937
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxGWOi66-4U
1 b. Benny Goodman Orchestra “Sing, Sing, Sing” 1937
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mJ4dpNal_k
2. Annie Ross (of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross) with Count Basie
“Twisted” 1959
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StDLnFrbi78
3. George Jones “You Gotta Be My Baby” with Joe Maphis, lead
guitar 1956
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDwf79a2y5M
4. Stringbean with Flatt & Scruggs “Run, Rabbit,
Run” early 1960s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uOy3WdT3mY
5 a. Little Tich 1900
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpnjB5MsOh4
5 b. Wilbur “Willie” Hall The greatest trick fiddling of all
time 1930
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XA16CzV_Y0
5 c. Wilbur Hall on the Spike Jones TV Show 27 years later 1957
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18LA4TN9jqM&
6. Ray Charles “Hit the Road, Jack” 1961
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Tiz6INF7I
7. Georgia Sea Island Singers “Adam in the Garden” mid-1960s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRy5MoWPyS0
8. Rev. Louis Overstreet & Congregation “Working on a Building”
1963
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLfOjQRRL5g
9 a. Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker with Hank Jones, Ray Brown &
Buddy Rich Part 1 1950
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ5eGEest0g
9 b. Lester Young, Bill Harris, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Flip
Phillips, Ella Fitzgerald with Hank Jones, Ray Brown & Buddy Rich
Part 2 1950
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCV_wB9c8zw&NR=1
++++++++++++++++++++
OK, that's the gold; here come the notes. You should be at least
this tall to go on this ride or at least get guidance from somebody
else’s parents. If you are easily offended by any kind of off -
beatnik humor and attempted satire, you can bail on the notes. Now
fasten your seat belts and ready or not, off we go into the wild blue...
Too many notes (and not nearly enough rests) by Glenn Allen Howard,
Founder and Curator of the American Musical Heritage Foundation–a
501 (c) 3 non-profit phonograph record library.
1. This is THE Benny Goodman Orchestra with Harry James, Gene Krupa
and the original cast of cats that put swing over big time on a
Greatly Depressed and totally down and out and unsuspecting American
Q. Public. Starting in 1935, Jazz, in the form of Swing, became the
popular music of the Benighted States of America and was an
irresistible influence on almost every man, woman and child in the
whole wide. America and democracy became sin-nonymous with the pure
pleasure that this brand new brand of hot jazz brought to the head,
hands, heart and especially the feets.
The Swing Era was the last time that the best musicians in the world
(the jazz musicians) were playing dance music. Any stud or studette
looking to pick up on what makes folks move and groove should bend
their little headbone in the general direction of the jazz that went
down just before the Bop came to Be. The post-maudlin academics tend
to rush past the first and most fun decades of jazz history to get
down with Bird and Diz so they have something their classical
training can dissect and discuss amongst their fallow intellectuals.
How can they possibly analyze the likes of Louis Armstrong or Count
Basie? Explaining the rhythm, the blues and the groove is much harder
than bitching all the live long day about distended 13th chords with
flat fivers and like dat dere.
Jazz is much more about listening to the actual records than reading
all about it in a textbook or seeing it notated, castrated and put
down and out in musical staph notation that’s only a pale shadow of
what it really is. You gotta put it on the table-turner and crank it
all the way up to really get it down. And ferchristsakes don’t
forget the repeats– the one semester jazz history courses they
grudgingly teach in the little red schoolhouses don’t allow any time
for repeats so even the straight A-sters graduate with nuttin’ but a
lotta nada.
“Hooray for Hollywood” is about as iconic a number as ever laid
down about the glory days of Tinseltown in the thirties that would
peak in just a couple in 1939, when too many movies should have
scored with Oscar if the World were Fair. The lyrics are hilarious,
and AMHF award-winning singer Johnny “Scat” Davis, (for this
little ditty and “Congratulate Me”), nails the vocal down with
some solid swing singing from Francis Langford, Harry James and Gene
Krupa.
As the coda approaches, you can take a little tour of several of the
swingingest 1937 Hollywood hangouts. In the late 30s this little pre-
smog paradise was probably the coolest place on Planet Earth, with
more artists and musicians per square inch than anywhere else in the
great gasser of a galaxy they had goin’ on.
1 a. Benny Goodman Orchestra w/Johnny “Scat” Davis “Hooray for
Hollywood” 1937
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxGWOi66-4U
1 b. Here’s where drummin’ really gets goin’, with Gene Krupa
skinin’ the snare and thumpin’ the toms on Louis Prima’s all-
time pretty and primo people-pleaser. The Carnegie gig is still a
year down the pike, but the band is not only gettin’ off, but
gettin’ off often. The skinny on the trumpeter is that it’s Harry
James before he changed into a corny commercial caterwauler and just
prior to when he made the big grab for Betty Grable, the blonde
bombshell who had her gams covered by Lloyd’s of London (derriere)
for a cool million frogskins. She was the most popular pinup during
the rave up called the Big One # Two which was also known as the
“pre-British” or “German Invasion.” Fortunately for the
various volks, the hits didn’t keep comin’ for Herr Hitler and he
forever remains a “one shit wonder.”
This little clip is pure endorphins on a stick.
1 b. Benny Goodman Orchestra “Sing, Sing, Sing” 1937
http://www.youtube.and com/watch?v=3mJ4dpNal_k
2. With “Twisted” Annie Ross whipped out one of the first and
easily the “best” song in the bop / jazz style called vocalese.
She wrote a lyric that laid down a syllable onto every note of
Wardell Gray’s tenor solo of the same title. Later, in 1959, she did
an even more righteous version with Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks
for Columbia –“required” listening at the AMHF. Get it on vinyl
if you can.
Here’s a Howard’s “hip tip” for a multiple wig-flip to take
you further still:
To really check out vocalese, pick up on the Wardell Gray Prestige
take on “Twisted” (which is easy to find from Fantasy Records, but
not on youtube) and compare the original sax solo with Annie’s
vocals on Prestige and the LHR romp on Columbia.
Then, repeat the instrumental vs. the vocal versions with everything
else Lambert, Hendricks & Ross ever waxed–especially the 1958 tour
de force “Sing a Song of Basie” with the Count’s originals,
starting with the Columbia versions of “Avenue C” and “Little
Pony.” Hold on tight to the lyric sheet, ‘cause it’s quite a
ride, but
you’ll wake up an easy eighth of–an–ounce lighter and twice as
tall. Like Geets Romo useta say, “like it will be good for you,
man.”
2. Annie Ross (of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross) with Count Basie
“Twisted” 1959
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StDLnFrbi78
3. Here’s a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Possum. Even then,
little Georgie was (and always will be) the baddest ass honky tonk
singer in the whole history of actual, genuine, for real, plain old
three-chord country western music. Back in the days when his flattop
could have been used as a carpenter kitty’s square to check for all
the right angles, his vocal cords came up with all the right moves
from the get-go. He still had a lifetime of excess and “no shows”
in front of him, but here at the beginning of the run, everything he
sang turned to gold, if not the occasional actual gold record.
The lead guitarist is Joe Maphis with his trademark double–neck
Mosrite guitar and mandolin combination plate, and George’s gitbox
looks like it’s covered in real cowhide. I can’t see the brand,
though. Note the Nudie-cutie fruit suits with the lunatic fringe–
garish enough to make even ol’ Webb Pierce blush like a red–faced
Russkie spy caught with his hand in the top-secret cookie jar.
Tex Ritter’s comment that “he’s little but he’s loud,” had
always been used to describe the even more diminutive Little Jimmy
Dickens. This clip is real country western music, the kind that most
city folks didn’t dig. It don’t mean a thang, if it ain’t got
that twang.
3. George Jones “You Gotta Be My Baby” with Joe Maphis, lead
guitar 1955
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDwf79a2y5M
4. Fifth–string banjoist Dave Akeman continued the Uncle Dave Macon/
Grandpa Jones tradition of minstrelry, vaudeville and old time banjo
frailing and made several albums for Starday Records that are still
treasured by both the Ivy little League urban–turban bluegrass heads
as well as the real honest-to-goodness old-time straight-outta-
Camptown Grand Old Opry audience.
His sublime sartorial sense of absolute slouch and slacks anticipated
the pants-at-half- mast fashion that came in with the hippety-hop
culture in the late 1980s, but they didn’t look quite as stupid on
Stringbean ‘cause his shirt tail covered up his butt crack.
And how about a big hand for those eyebrows!
4. Stringbean with Flatt & Scruggs “Run, Rabbit,
Run” early 1960s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uOy3WdT3mY
5. The next 3 little clips show how an earlier vaudeville act
influenced a true classic of the genre as Little Tich’s “big
shoe” dance evolved into part of the greatest trick fiddling of all
time, captured on film in 1930 and again, more than two decades later
on early TV.
5 a. Little Tich was a 4’ 6” English Music Hall star who was
miraculously captured on streaming silver nitrate in 1900 dancing
with his 28 inch “big shoes.” Even more miraculously, it was never
found by the evil un-guardians of culture whose job it has always
been to throw these kinds of treasures away. Most vaudeville acts
were never captured on moving pictures or the few made were lost and
the great acts have vanished into the ethers forever. The stage is
temporary, but the films, like phonograph records, are good forever,
but only if they are preserved.
5 a. Little Tich 1900
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpnjB5MsOh4
5 b. Willie Hall, a trombonerista for the classic Paul Whiteman
Orchestra, must have caught Little Tich or the 1900 film clip, or far
more likely, someone on the American vaudeville circuits that had
stolen the little Tichster’s act.
Adding the big shoes to the trick fiddling made for a combination
that is as good or better than any other surviving vaudeville
footage. The bicycle “pump and circumstance” finale of “Be Kind
to Your Web-Footed Friends” should have brought him great rewards,
if not a full pardon, but instead, in the end, he got the “chair.”
I saw him play the bicycle pump on Johnny Carson in the late 1960s or
early 1970s. That footage, along with most of the show’s archives,
have been lost to history because back in the 1970s, an NBC corporate
executive ordered the cumbersome 2 inch reel to reel tapes of the
Tonight Show to be taken for a ride out into the Atlantic Ocean and
given a one-way ticket to Davey Jones’ locker. Everybody who was
anybody was on those tapes, and this moron decided to dump them into
the deep like an inconveniently truthful mob-informer. Those tapes
would be worth millions today, but noooooooooooo!
5 b. Wilbur “Willie” Hall The greatest trick fiddler of all time
+ virtuoso bicycle pump and circumstance 1930
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XA16CzV_Y0
5 c. I can’t begin to wrap my wig around how many times ol’
Wilbur must have trotted out his trick fiddling act in the 27 years
between the 1930 film and this live performance on Spike Jones’ TV
show. Like most great vaudevilles performances, the act changed
gradually, if at all, but over the eons this one evolved into an
almost completely different dance.
5c. Wilbur Hall on the Spike Jones TV show 1957
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18LA4TN9jqM&
6. So here’s one even the squarest of hexagon-heads knows, but it
is, after all, a great live rendition of Percy Mayfield’s most
righteous royalty–raker, filmed just as Ray was moving into the top
of his game and into the depths of his heroin jones. Still, it’s
the man hisself getting’ dissed with finesse and distinction by four
of the greatest back up singers that ever backed up anything.
According to legend, the singers were called the Raelettes because
they “let Ray.” I don’t know, I was only told.
6. Ray Charles “Hit the Road, Jack” 1961
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Tiz6INF7I
7. One of the liveliest, loveliest and loftiest Big Al Lomax finds
was Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers. The islands
were physically and culturally isolated from the mainland and
inhabited entirely by descendents of slaves who retained the old
school spirituals, ring shouts, slave music and folk culture well
into the second half of the 20th century, just in time for the
folklore kitties to nail it down solid into wax, tape and a little
bit of flicks.
This short clip by Bess Lomax Hawes gives a hint of what kind of
groove they could grok ‘n’ roll on with just voices, clapping,
stomping, a tambourine and an old man hitting a wooden staff against
the floor.
They made a few records from the 1950s through the 1970s and you
should run out and get them pronto–before they go out–of–print
–o.
Georgia Sea Island Singers “Adam in the Garden”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRy5MoWPyS0
8. I first caught the Rev. Overstreet from an early 1960s LP put out
by St. Christopher Strachwitz on his uber-tubular Arhoolie label.
You can still get it from him. I had to have my wig repeatedly re-
attached after spyin’ this ragin’ congregation and their
smokin’, reachin’, preachin’ guitarist. This was filmed about a
half-a-second before the Civil Rights Movement really kicked into
overdrive and started staring down the Old Segregated South. ‘Cause
of all this, it is far more precious and valuable than scoring
Boardwalk, Park Place and the three green pastures on that side of
the board. This is that “old, weird America” and truly captured
something forever that few white folks of the day were ever in a
position to eyeball on their own.
Rev. Louis Overstreet & Congregation “Working on a Building” 1963
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLfOjQRRL5g
Here’s a Howard’s “hip tip” for a weally wighteous wig-flip to
make you “move on up a little higher” in the general direction
of squirrelly gates:
If you like your gospel guitar down home and dirty, bend your
eardrums for a count of 155 tick tocks towards “Two Wings” by the
Rev. Utah Smith. There’s no known film clips, but the audio alone
will get your tail feather to testify and shake your socks all the
way down. All ya gotta do is point and click so you got no excuse.
Here ‘tis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py1qEPQCyBM
Dave Alvin and Jerry Garcia will both be proud of you for takin’ the
time to check out one of their gospel faves.
9 a. Long before Garth Hudson of The Band hipped me to the infamous
“Buddy Rich Tapes,” I got in on a B.R. Big Band post-show yakfest
backstage during which some cat asked him if he had ever played with
Charlie Parker. With his legendary lack of humility, he boasted that
not only had he played with Bird, but that a session was filmed! I
socked that nugget in my noggin and started to peel my eyes on a
daily basis in case I ever ran across that mother movie.
Eventually, the 1952 short film of Bird & Diz burnin’ up “Hot
House” surfaced with the Hollywood Squaresville columnist Earl
Wilson presenting a Downbeat Award to a couple of jazz cats he’d
obviously never heard of. The drummer was not Buddy Rich, and after
hearing the “B.R. Tapes” I wondered if Buddy was full of something
browner than his own outgoing, going, gone personality. Years flew by
and there was nary a word about this lost clip of the Bird, until
just recently.
Buddy may well have been full of it, but he was right on the money
about the film of hisself scrapin’ the skins with Charlie Parker and
there were a couple of other jazz cats he forgot to mention that are
definitely worth mentioning. Bird is just beaming and beautiful even
when he stops blowing and is pegged diggin’ Buddy’s solo in silent
repose. Can you believe that no one bothered to film him more than
once after this, let alone every day all day long? Jazz was still
declasse in those days, when all the real phonies showed up right on
schedule to show off their furs and ice at the Symphony every
Saturday Night.
Bird Lives! At least as long as his records and films survive.
9 a. Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker with Hank Jones, Ray Brown &
Buddy Rich Part 1 1950
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ5eGEest0g
9 b. Prez and his Porkpie are present and accounted for and
absolutely cool school every step of the way on this little romp.
Even Flip flips out farther than he usually flies. Ella is in fine
form, scattin’ for all the cats in the band and especially for her
favorite fella, her handsome hubby, Ray Brown.
Lester Young, Bill Harris, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Flip Phillips,
Ella Fitzgerald with Hank Jones, Ray Brown & Buddy Rich Part 2 1950
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCV_wB9c8zw&NR=1
Well kiddies, the clock on the Clubhouse wall hit the sack hours ago,
so as the sun rises slowly on the Easter Bunny, this is Glenn Allen
Howard, signin’ off, noddin’ out and keelin’ over.
I’ll sendya another that’ll really sendya–eventually, if not
sooner.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++
=======================================
Glenn Allen Howard
Founder, Curator
American Musical Heritage Foundation
(831) 335-4356
PO Box 66224
Santa Cruz County CA 95067
(360) 691-2105
PO Box 163
Arlington, WA 98223
glennallenhoward at yahoo.com
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