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Soundie
Soundies are three-minute American musical films, and each short displays a performance. The shorts were produced between 1940 and 1946 and have been referred to as "precursors to music videos" by UCLA. Soundies exhibited a variety of musical genres in an effort to draw a broad audience. The shorts were originally viewed in public places on "Panorams": coin-operated, 16mm rear projection machines. Panorams were typically located in businesses like nightclubs, bars, and restaurants. Due to World War II, Soundies also featured patriotic messages and advertisements for war bonds. More adult shorts, such as burlesque and stripteases, were produced to appeal to soldiers on leave. Technology Produced professionally on 35 mm black-and-white film, like theatrical motion pictures, they were printed on the more portable and economical 16 mm film. The Panoram "movie jukebox" was manufactured by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago. Each Panoram housed a 16 mm RCA film projector, with eig ...
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Louis Jordan
Louis Thomas Jordan (July 8, 1908 – February 4, 1975) was an American saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and bandleader who was popular from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as " the King of the Jukebox", he earned his highest profile towards the end of the swing era. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an "early influence" in 1987. Specializing in the alto sax, Jordan played all forms of the saxophone, as well as piano and clarinet. He also was a talented singer with great comedic flair, and fronted his own band for more than twenty years. He duetted with some of the biggest solo singing stars of his time, including Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Jordan was also an actor and a film personality—he appeared in dozens of "soundies" (promotional film clips) He also made numerous cameos in mainstream features and short films, and starred in two musical feature films: Swing Parade of 1946, probably targeting white viewers ...
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Ray Kinney
Ray Kinney (September 26, 1900 – February 1, 1972) was a singer, musician, composer, orchestra leader, and performer on radio, stage and screen. Biography Kinney was born in Hilo, Hawaii to Irish-Hawaiian parents William & Pilialoha Kinney. At age 15 he and his six brothers were sent to school in Salt Lake City, Utah. Already skilled on the ukulele and with a fine tenor voice, Ray and his brothers formed their own band and began touring the western US. He returned to Hawaii in 1920 upon the death of his mother. Early career Ray was cast in 1925 as the lead in the opera "''Prince of Hawaii''" by noted Hawaiian composer Charles E. King. The opera began touring in California in 1926. In 1928 bandleader Johnny Noble chose Kinney among others to appear on his radio show. The show originated from station KPO in San Francisco and was basically an hour long promotion for Hawaiian tourism. Later that year Brunswick Records signed Noble, with Kinney as one of the singers, to a cont ...
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Music Video
A music video is a video of variable duration, that integrates a music song or a music album with imagery that is produced for promotion (marketing), promotional or musical artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a music marketing device intended to promote the sale of Music Recording, music recordings. Although the origins of music videos date back to musical short, musical short films that first appeared, they again came into prominence when Paramount Global's MTV based its format around the medium. These kinds of videos were described by various terms including "illustrated song", "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional clip", "promotional video", "song video", "song clip", "film clip" or simply "video". Music videos use a wide range of styles and contemporary video-making techniques, including animation, live action, live-action, documentary film, documentary, and non-narrative approaches such as Non-narrative film, abstract fi ...
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Les Brown (bandleader)
Lester Raymond Brown (March 14, 1912 – January 4, 2001) was an American jazz musician who led the big band Les Brown and His Band of Renown for nearly seven decades from 1938 to 2000. Biography Brown was born in Reinerton, Pennsylvania. He enrolled in the Conway Military Band School (later part of Ithaca College) in 1926, studying with famous bandleader Patrick Conway for three years before receiving a music scholarship to the New York Military Academy, where he graduated in 1932. Brown attended college at Duke University from 1932 to 1936. There he led the group Les Brown and His Blue Devils, who performed regularly on Duke's campus and up and down the east coast. Brown took the band on an extensive summer tour in 1936. At the end of the tour, while some of the band members returned to Duke to continue their education, others stayed on with Brown and continued to tour, becoming in 1938 the Band of Renown. The band's original drummer, Don Kramer, became the acting manager and ...
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Johnnie Johnston
Johnny Johnston (December 1, 1915 – January 6, 1996) was an American actor and singer who was popular in the 1940s. Early years He was born John Clifford Johnston in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Radio In the late 1930s, Johnston had his own program on NBC-Blue. Recordings Johnston had several hits on the Capitol Records, Capitol label. Personal life Johnston was married five times, and had five children. One of his marriages was to actress Kathryn Grayson at an August 22, 1947 ceremony in Carmel, California, Carmel, California. Grayson was his second wife. On October 7, 1948, the couple's only child, daughter Patricia "Patty Kate" Kathryn Johnston was born. Grayson and Johnston separated on November 15, 1950. On October 3, 1951, Grayson was given a divorce from Johnston on the grounds of mental cruelty. Johnston's ''This Time for Keeps'' co-star, Esther Williams, claimed in her 1999 autobiography that while making the film, Johnston would read Grayson's intimate lette ...
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Kay Starr
Katherine Laverne Starks (July 21, 1922 – November 3, 2016), known professionally as Kay Starr, was an American singer who enjoyed considerable success in the late 1940s and 1950s. She was of Iroquois and Irish heritage. Starr performed multiple genres, such as pop, jazz, and country, but her roots were in jazz. Life and career Kay Starr was born Katherine Laverne Starks on a Indian reservation, reservation in Dougherty, Oklahoma. Her father, Harry, was an Iroquois Native Americans in the United States, native American; her mother, Annie, was of mixed Irish and Native American heritage. When her father got a job installing water sprinkler systems for the Automatic Sprinkler Company, the family moved to Dallas. Her mother raised chickens, whom Starr serenaded in the coop. Her aunt Nora was impressed by her 7-year-old niece's singing and arranged for her to sing on a Dallas radio station, KTCK (AM)#WRR, WRR. Starr finished 3rd one week in a talent contest, and placed first every ...
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Stan Kenton
Stanley Newcomb Kenton (December 15, 1911 – August 25, 1979) was an American popular music and jazz artist. As a pianist, composer, arranger and band leader, he led an innovative and influential jazz orchestra for almost four decades. Though Kenton had several pop hits from the early 1940s into the 1960s, his music was always forward-looking. Kenton was also a pioneer in the field of jazz education, creating the Stan Kenton Jazz Camp in 1959 at Indiana University.Sparke, Michael. ''Stan Kenton: This is an Orchestra.'' UNT Press (2010). . Early life Stan Kenton was born on December 15, 1911, in Wichita, Kansas; he had two sisters (Beulah and Erma Mae) born three and eight years after him. His parents, Floyd and Stella Kenton, moved the family to Colorado, and in 1924, to the Greater Los Angeles Area, settling in suburban Bell, California. Kenton attended Bell High School; his high-school yearbook picture has the prophetic notation "Old Man Jazz". Kenton started learning pian ...
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Spike Jones
Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones (December 14, 1911 – May 1, 1965) was an American musician and bandleader specializing in spoof arrangements of popular songs and classical music. Ballads receiving the Jones treatment were punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, burps, and outlandish and comedic vocals. Jones and his band recorded under the title Spike Jones and His City Slickers from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, and toured the United States and Canada as "The Musical Depreciation Revue". Biography Lindley Armstrong Jones was born in Long Beach, California, the son of Ada (Armstrong) and Lindley Murray Jones, a Southern Pacific railroad agent. Young Lindley Jones was given the nickname 'Spike' for being so thin that he was compared to a railroad spike. At the age of 11 he got his first set of drums. As a teenager he played in bands that he formed himself; Jones' first band was called Spike Jones and his Five Tacks. A railroad restaurant chef taught him how ...
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Jimmy Dorsey
James Francis Dorsey (February 29, 1904 – June 12, 1957) was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer and big band leader. He recorded and composed the jazz and pop standards "I'm Glad There Is You (In This World of Ordinary People)" and " It's The Dreamer In Me". His other major recordings were "Tailspin", " John Silver", " So Many Times", " Amapola", "Brazil ( Aquarela do Brasil)", " Pennies from Heaven" with Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and Frances Langford, "Grand Central Getaway", and "So Rare". He played clarinet on the seminal jazz standards "Singin' the Blues" in 1927 and the original 1930 recording of "Georgia on My Mind", which were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Early life Jimmy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, United States, the first son of Theresa Langton Dorsey and Thomas Francis Dorsey. His father, Thomas, was initially a coal miner, but would later become a music teacher and marching-band director. Both Jimmy and his younger ...
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Harry McClintock
Harry Kirby McClintock (October 8, 1882 – April 24, 1957), also known as "Haywire Mac", was an American railroad man, radio personality, actor, singer, songwriter, and poet, best known for his song "Big Rock Candy Mountain". Life Harry McClintock was born on October 8, 1882, in Uhrichsville, Ohio. Both his parents were from nearby Tippecanoe, Ohio; however, his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee soon after his birth. In his youth, McClintock ran away from home to join the circus and drifted from place to place throughout his life. He railroaded in Africa, worked as a seaman, supplied food and ammunition to American soldiers while working as a civilian mule-train packer in the Philippines, and in 1899 worked as an aid to newsmen in China covering the Boxer Rebellion. In America, he worked for the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway in the Pittsburgh area, then from there traveled as a railroader and a minstrel. On October 8, 1917, McClintock married Bessie K. Johnso ...
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