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Soundies
A soundie is a three-minute American film displaying both the audio and video of a musical performance. Over 1,850 soundies were produced between 1940 and 1946, regarded today as "precursors to music videos". Soundies exhibited a variety of musical genres in an effort to draw a broad audience. The shorts were originally viewed in public places on some 5,000 " Panorams", coin-operated, 16mm rear projection machines built by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago. Panorams offered multiple selections of a constantly changing rotation of soundies, and were typically located in public venues like nightclubs, bars, and restaurants. As World War II progressed, soundies also featured patriotic messages and advertisements for war bonds. Hollywood films were censored but Soundies weren't, so the films occasionally had daring content like burlesque acts; these were produced to appeal to soldiers on leave. Technology Soundies were filmed professionally on black-and-white 35mm theatrica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Panoram
The Panoram is a coin-operated jukebox produced by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago that played short musical films known as soundies, historic precursors to the modern music video. Reaching their greatest popularity in the United States during the 1940s, soundies featured both audio and video, with Panorams offering multiple selections of a constantly changing rotation of shorts. In all, over 1,850 soundies were made, and approximately 5,000 Panorams were built before their end of production in the late 1940s. History The Panoram was conceived and produced by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago under several patents, including 123,473 and 2,286,200, which involve the cabinet design and endless reel workings. Development took place in the late 1930s with production and sales beginning in 1940. A Grand Premiere took place on September 16-19, 1941, in Hollywood, California. The company wrote over $3 million in Panoram orders that week. The Panoram used RCA projectors, amp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Will Bradley
Wilbur Schwichtenberg (July 12, 1912 – July 15, 1989), known professionally as Will Bradley, was an American trombonist and bandleader during the 1930s and 1940s. He performed swing, dance music, and boogie-woogie songs, many of them written or co-written by Don Raye. Career Born in Newton, New Jersey, Wilbur Schwichtenberg was raised in Washington, New Jersey. In 1928, he moved to New York City and became a member of bands such as Red Nichols & His Five Pennies. During the 1930s, except for one year with the Ray Noble orchestra, he was studio musician for CBS Radio, and was the resident hot trombonist on the network's popular jam session ''The Saturday Night Swing Club''. He also led the studio band for the '' Summer Silver Theater'' on CBS in 1941, with Ed Sullivan as the show's host. In 1939, he changed his name from Wilbur Schwichtenberg to Will Bradley, and started a big band with Ray McKinley, a swing drummer and vocalist from Texas. The band included Freddie Slack (pi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 "Honorific nicknames in popular music, the King of the Jukebox", he earned his highest profile towards the end of the swing era. Specializing in the alto saxophone, 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 began his career in big-band swing jazz in the 1930s coming to the public's attention as part of Chick Webb's hard swinging band, though he became better known as an innovative popularizer of jump blues—a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. Typically performed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vincent Lopez
Vincent Lopez (December 30, 1895 – September 20, 1975) was an American bandleader, actor, and pianist. Early life and education Lopez was born of Portuguese immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, Distinguished Americans & Canadians of Portuguese Descent and was leading his own dance band in New York City by 1916. On November 27, 1921, his band began broadcasting on the new medium of entertainment radio; the band's weekly 90-minute show on the Newark, New Jersey, station WJZ boosted the popularity of both himself and of radio. He became one of North America's most popular bandleaders, and would retain that status through the 1940s. Career He began his radio programs by announcing "Hello everybody, Lopez speaking!" His theme song was "Nola", Felix Arndt's novelty ragtime piece of 1915, and Lopez became so identified with it that he occasionally satirized it. (His 1939 movie short for Vitaphone, ''Vincent Lopez and his Orchestra'', features the entir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spike Jones
Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones (December 14, 1911 – May 1, 1965) was an American musician, bandleader and conductor specializing in spoof arrangements and satire of popular songs and classical music. Ballads receiving the Jones treatment were punctuated with various sound effects, including gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, burps, sneezes, animal sounds and outlandish and comedic vocals. Jones and his band recorded for RCA Victor under the title Spike Jones and His City Slickers from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, and they toured the United States and Canada as "The Musical Depreciation Revue". Early years 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 himse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music Video
A music video is a video that integrates a song or an 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 recordings. These videos are typically shown on music television and on streaming video sites like YouTube, or more rarely shown theatrically. They can be commercially issued on home video, either as video albums or video singles. The format has been described by various terms including "illustrated song", "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional clip", "promotional video", "song video", "song clip", "film clip", "video clip", or simply "video". While musical short, musical short films were popular as soon as recorded sound was introduced to theatrical film screenings in the 1920s, the music video rose to prominence in the 1980s when American TV channel MTV based its format around the medium. Mus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martha Tilton
Martha Tilton (November 14, 1915 – December 8, 2006) was an American popular singer during America's swing era and traditional pop period. She is best known for her 1939 recording of " And the Angels Sing" with Benny Goodman. Tilton was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, United States. Her family moved to Edna, Kansas, when she was three months old. They relocated to Los Angeles when she was seven years old. While attending Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, she was singing on a small radio station when she was heard by an agent who signed her and began booking her with larger stations. She then dropped out of school in the eleventh grade to join Hal Grayson's band. After singing with the quartet Three Hits and a Miss, she joined the Myer Alexander Chorus on Benny Goodman's radio show, ''Camel Caravan''. Goodman hired Tilton as a vocalist with his band in August 1937. She was with Goodman in January 1938, when the band performed at Carnegie Hall. She continued to appear as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mills Novelty Company
The Mills Novelty Company, Incorporated of Chicago was once a leading manufacturer of coin-operated machines, including slot machines, vending machines, and jukeboxes, in the United States. Between about 1905 and 1930, the company's products included the ''Mills Violano-Virtuoso'' and its predecessors, celebrated machines that automatically played a violin and, after about 1909, a piano. By 1944, the name of the company had changed to ''Mills Industries, Incorporated''. The slot machine division was then owned by '' Bell-O-Matic Corporation''. By the late 1930s, vending machines were being installed by ''Mills Automatic Merchandising Corporation'' of New York. Family The origins of the business lie with Mortimer Birdsul Mills, who was born in 1845 in Canada West (today's Ontario, Canada) but who later became a citizen of the United States, resident in Chicago, Illinois. Mortimer Mills would have 13 children. One son, Herbert Stephen Mills, was born in 1872 when his father was ab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scott MacGillivray
Scott MacGillivray (born June 29, 1957) is an American non-fiction author specializing in motion picture history. His book '' Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward,'' revised and expanded in 2009, chronicles the later films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Some of his other books are ''The Soundies Book: A Revised and Expanded Guide'' (2007, co-authored with Ted Okuda), '' Gloria Jean: A Little Bit of Heaven'' (2005, co-authored with Jan MacGillivray), and '' Castle Films: A Hobbyist's Guide'' (2004, foreword by Okuda). MacGillivray has been the chairman of the Boston chapter of the international Laurel and Hardy Laurel and Hardy were a British-American double act, comedy duo during the early Classical Hollywood cinema, Classical Hollywood era of American cinema, consisting of Englishman Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and American Oliver Hardy (1892–1957) ... society '' The Sons of the Desert'' since 1977, and is the longest-tenured chairman in the organization. His commen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ted Okuda
Ted Okuda (born December 8, 1953) is an American non-fiction author and film historian. He has many books and magazine features to his credit, under his own name and in collaboration with others. Career Okuda's long-held interest in movie comedies led to his first book, ''The Columbia Comedy Shorts'' (1986, with Edward Watz), an in-depth account of Columbia Pictures' short-subject department, detailing the production of two-reel comedies starring The Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, Andy Clyde, Charley Chase, and Gus Schilling & Richard Lane, among many others. Since the book's first publication in 1986, Okuda has explored other areas of popular culture, including science fiction, children's television, and silent films. Okuda's other books include '' Dorothy Lee: The Life and Films of the Wheeler and Woolsey Girl'' (2013, with Jamie Brotherton), ''Stan Without Ollie: The Stan Laurel Solo Films'' (2012, with James L. Neibaur), ''Chicago TV Horror Movie Shows'' (2007, with Mark Yurk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Roosevelt
James Roosevelt II (December 23, 1907 – August 13, 1991) was an American businessman, Marine officer, activist, and Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party politician. The eldest son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, he served as an official Secretary to the President of the United States, Secretary to the President for his father and was later elected to the United States House of Representatives representing California, serving 5 terms from 1955 to 1965. He received the Navy Cross while serving as a United States Marine Corps, Marine Corps officer during World War II. Early life and career Roosevelt was born at 123 East 36th Street in New York City. He was named after James Roosevelt I, his paternal grandfather. He attended the Potomac School (McLean, Virginia), Potomac School and St. Albans School (Washington, D.C.), St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., and the Groton School in Massachusetts. At Groton, he rowed, played football, and was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anita O'Day
Anita Belle Colton (October 18, 1919 – November 23, 2006), known professionally as Anita O'Day, was an American jazz singer and self-proclaimed “song stylist” widely admired for her sense of rhythm and dynamics, and her early big band appearances that shattered the traditional image of the "girl singer". Refusing to pander to any female stereotype, O'Day presented herself as a "hip" jazz musician, wearing a band jacket and skirt as opposed to an evening gown. She changed her surname from Colton to O'Day, pig Latin for "dough", slang for money. Early career Anita Belle Colton (who later took the surname "O'Day") was born to Irish parents, James and Gladys M. (née Gill) Colton in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Chicago, Illinois, during the Great Depression. Colton took the first chance to leave her unhappy home when, at age 14, she became a contestant in the popular Dance marathon, Walk-a-thons as a dancer. She toured with the Walk-a-thons circuits for two years, occas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
