Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Pavel Smutný

Black Jazz and the Silver Screen Master ’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Jeffrey A. Vanderziel, B.A.

2008

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Peter Kramer, Senior Lecturer at the University of East Anglia, for his extremely helpful tips concerning the secondary sources for my thesis, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr., for his willingness to lend me a significant number of titles on African-Americans and cinema from his personal collection, and last, but not least, my supervisor Jeffrey A. Vanderziel, B.A., for his valuable advice, kindly guidance and pleasant atmosphere during our discussions over the thesis.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1 Chapter One: Acting Jazz ...... 4 Chapter Two: Hollywood Histories of Jazz ...... 22 Chapter Three: Sinful Syncopations...... 39 Chapter Four: Jazz Cartoons – The Jungle Rhythm & The Swingin’ City ..... 55 Conclusion ...... 76 Bibliography: ...... 80 Introduction

On October 23, 1927, Al Jolson in blackface appeared on the movie theater screen at Warners’ Strand in New York City, to sing a couple of sentimental songs. The film, Jazz Singer (Warner Bros.), as the first feature-length movie with synchronized sound sequences officially marked the end of the silent era in Hollywood. What is more,

Jazz Singer symbolically embodies the policies applied to jazz and African-American jazz musicians by the film studio industry during its heyday: even though the skin of the jazz singer is (or seems) black, behind that image is a white man 1 and the performance is his interpretation of what it means to be a jazz singer, and what it means to have black skin. In a similar fashion, the films discussed in the present thesis are precisely that – the white interpretations of the African-American roots of jazz, of African-American jazz musicians, and of the African-American community as seen through the prism of music. Focusing on a roughly twenty year period of Hollywood cinema from 1927 to

1948, the thesis attempts to show how segregation, prejudice and racial stereotypes influenced the transformation of African-American jazz and its proponents onto the

‘silver screen,’ and how these phenomena helped determine the interactions between

African-American jazz musicians and their white counterparts when performing and/or acting in a single film. This period represents an era when the Hollywood film studios

(unrivaled by the television or other audiovisual media) controlled, by means of vertical integration and block booking, 2 the production, distribution, as well as the screening of movies and, therefore, had the most profound influence on the American public and its opinions on any topic, including jazz and racial relations in the USA. For the music

1 Al Jolson was, of course Jewish, but by contrasting himself against the African-Americans, he could become assimilated into the white American culture. 2 Block booking “enabled producers to extract agreement from exhibitors to take all their pictures in a total package, sight unseen, thus guaranteeing a screening for their product and making the exhibitor bear much of the risk for the film’s success or failure” (Turner, 17).

1 itself, the period marks the rise and peak of jazz’s worldwide popularity which by the late 1940s started to decline, as jazz was gradually becoming to be perceived less as a popular music and more as an art form.

Since the Hollywood cinema had from its early days constructed the American

“whiteness as the norm by which all ‘Others’ fail by comparison” (Bernardi, xiii), and during the studio era “systematized [its] popularization” (Bernardi, xv), ‘blackness’ in the Classical Hollywood movies is often constructed as the antithesis of ‘whiteness,’ played out in the ‘white – black’ opposites of ‘innocence – sin’ ‘beauty – ugliness’

‘mind – body,’ etc. Jazz, as music with ‘black’ roots, naturally suffered from these binary opposites when it was given exposure on the silver screen. Not to become involved in this ‘white – black’ game, I decided to use mostly the term African-

American in the thesis when referring to the musicians, however, when the emphasis on the color is important, black and white come into play as well.

The thesis is divided into four chapters, each of them discussing a group of

Hollywood films (feature-length, short subjects or animated cartoons) linked together by a topic.

The first chapter “Acting Jazz” deals with the special position that African-

American jazz musicians as film actors held in the industry – since their popularity with audiences could increase the drawing power of Hollywood movies, the musicians appeared in a number of productions from the late 1920s to 1940s, yet in order to maintain segregation, barriers were drawn between the African-American and white performers, the African-American jazz performers were segregated into all-black cast short subjects or encapsulated in cameo performances with no reference to the story.

The second chapter “Hollywood Histories of Jazz” analyses the five studios’ attempts to tell a history of jazz produced between 1930 and 1948, showing several

2 tendencies: the increasing importance of African-Americans in the narratives of these films, the selectivity of the narratives as to the ‘unpleasant’ parts of the history (e.g. playing down, if not altogether erasing it, the importance of slavery in the music’s development), and the open preference of the white band leaders over the African-

American ones.

The third chapter, called “Sinful Syncopations,” shows how African-American jazz music was used in several film narratives as an expression of sin, evil, and decadence within the African-American community, put in a musical contrast to the pious spirituals or folk songs. In other movies, jazz, because of its connection to the

African-American culture, was used to ‘blacken’ the white female characters, rendering them immoral. The concluding part of the chapter pays attention to two productions which defy this definition of African-American jazz as sinful, and the reason behind such discrepancy.

The final chapter “Jazz Cartoons – The Jungle Rhythm & the Swinging City” analyses a number of short animated cartoons made by the studios during the 1930s and

1940s in which African-American jazz performers (be it the musicians themselves, their caricatures or a group of nameless performers with obvious African-American features) have considerable parts, and where the white fantasies about the music and its champions are unbound from the constraints of the live action films, in a number of cases showing the stereotypes and myths surrounding the music in the extreme.

These chapters will demonstrate that the cinematic representations of African-

American jazz musicians defy a simple ‘black and white’ analysis – Hollywood was at once a stereotyping, denigrating, even racist institution and yet it provided African-

American jazz performers with unique opportunities to spread their music to nation- wide audiences; opportunities otherwise denied to their fellow African-American artists.

3 Chapter One: Acting Jazz

Even before the African-American jazz musicians made their first appearances on the film screen in the late 1920s, the sound of their performances could be already heard in the movie theaters – from the orchestra pit of the de facto segregated movie theaters in the North, as accompaniment to the silent movies; and as Louis Armstrong recalled his performances with Fats Waller in the Chicago’s Vendome theater in 1925, they “used to really romp” (Carbine, 25). Although the movie house orchestra usually had a score to follow during the course of the movies, the musicians did not always adhere to it, and Mary Carbine, basing her claim on the recollection of movie goers, suggested that “Race [i.e. African-American] orchestras might have gone beyond simply ignoring the narrative or the sheet music library to read the films against the grain, undermining ‘preferred readings’ with satirical interpretations” (31). By inserting for instance a hot number in the funeral scene, the African-American jazz musicians could ‘spoil’ the scenes they did not approve of, an opportunity that in many of their later sound film performances was lost because of the wide spread strategy of prerecorded performances, forcing the musicians to only ‘act jazz,’ not play it.

Nonetheless, the sight of African-American jazz could earn the musicians much greater popularity than the mere sound of it, and therefore, the few African-American musicians that could ‘make it’ to the movies during the two decades following the arrival of ‘talkies,’ embraced the opportunity without hesitation.

The advent of sound cinema in the late 1920s created a short-lived hope in the

African-American community that a possibility for more acting opportunities in the

Hollywood industry was opening up. As some believed, African-American voices had a special quality and, therefore, they “recorded with higher fidelity than white” voices

(Cripps 1977, 218). James Weldon Johnson was especially optimistic when he wrote: “I

4 do not see how they are going to keep the Negro from achieving a permanent place in the movie world so long as they have talkies,” confessing that he noticed such quality in the African-American voices himself (Ibid.). Another African-American, Bill Foster in

California, tried to reinforce the myth by claiming that even “tests proved one great outstanding fact – the low mellow voice of the Negro was ideally suited for the pictures” (Cripps 1977, 219). Despite the fact that the early sound era did bring some new opportunities for the African-Americans in the field of musical performance, any real revolution in the cinematic depiction of African-Americans did not materialize, perhaps because of another myth that the white film studios representatives believed (or rather pretended to believe) in much more profoundly – the myth of the Southern box office. The power of the Southern box office was for decades a common explanation and alibi for Hollywood’s anti-African-American representational practices which allowed African-Americans to appear in a motion picture only in ridiculously stereotypical and/or entertaining roles. The reasoning went that if this rule was broken, and African-Americans were cast in more daring characterizations, the Southern audiences as one would resent such movies and cause significant losses on the studios box office revenues. Analyses of the cinematic revenues from the American South from the 1920s to 1940s however showed that compared to the Northern cinemas, the average Southern box office was negligible, 3 so the financial loss could not be the primary reason. Moreover, the same statistics indicate that movies with African-

American actors in important roles did not flop in the ‘deep’ South, but usually earned a decent profit (Cripps 1970). And lastly, any attempts at protecting the white Southern audiences were unnecessary; the regional censors would cut the scenes they did not find fit anyway, despite any efforts on the side of the studios to make them as little

3 See: Thomas Cripps, 1970, and Anna Everett, pp. 300-301.

5 objectionable in the racial matters as possible (Everett, 300). In brief, the myth of the

Southern box office only enabled Hollywood studios to hide their own pervasive racism and backward attitudes towards the US minorities in general and African-Americans in particular (Cripps 1970, 144).

Now, what does the myth of the Southern box office have to do with jazz? Well, naturally, the representational strategies coming from it affected the way African-

American jazz musicians were depicted in the early sound Hollywood movies of the

1930s and 1940s in a similar manner that they affected African-American actors, since the stress during that era was obviously more on the race than on the music, as the almost ubiquitous adjective “black” in the titles of many short subjects featuring

African-American jazz performers illustrates. If African-American actors could be shown as inferior to the white actors in the Hollywood movies simply by casting them as servants, maids or lazy, unemployed and irresponsible Stepin Fetchit type characters, the African-American jazz musicians in their immaculate suits and elegant robes represented a problem for the white supremacist studios; a problem that needed a solution since the Hollywood filmmakers realized the commercial potential of the popularity of these performers for its movies.

In order to maintain segregation, African-American jazz performances were during the 1930s and 1940s frequently relegated into all-black shorts and if the performance included white performers as well, various types of barriers were constructed to achieve the separation of the races. For instance in The Singing Kid

(Warner Bros. 1936) Cab Calloway sings a duet of “I Love to Sing-a” with Al Jolson, backed by Calloway’s orchestra – to achieve their separation the scene shows them looking at each other from the balconies of two different skyscrapers and performing over the urban abyss beneath them. When later Jolson meets Calloway face to face and

6 they perform the “Swinginist Man in Town” together, Jolson is safe behind the mask of blackface. This scene however seems absurd, since Jolson’s complexion under the burnt cork is much darker than Calloway’s, and Calloway, therefore appears as the ‘whiter’ of the two singers. Their final joint performance Jolson undergoes without make-up, but because Jolson employs Calloway who does not have any spoken line in the film, is entirely irrelevant to the story, and it is Jolson who is the main character of the movie, the racial hierarchies remain intact.

Similarly in Belle of the Nineties (Paramount, 1934), the white actress Mae West performs “Memphis Blues” accompanied by Duke Ellington and his band, in front of a white audience. The band is positioned in the orchestra pit and thus segregated from both the audience and the white singer, and so the boundaries between African-

Americans and whites are clearly cut in the scene, with the white singer towering above the band. On the other hand, it is remarkable that the band appeared in the movie at all – the studio’s intention was to accompany Mae West with its own Paramount orchestra.

West stubbornly protested against the Ellington’s replacement with an awkward argument that the African-American songs such as the “Memphis Blues” (written by W.

C. Handy) should be performed by African-Americans, exempting herself from the reasoning. Since the actress represented a ‘gold mine’ for the studio (her previous two films broke the box office records all around the USA and helped Paramount from financial crisis), in the end Paramount consented (Lawrence 231-3).

Ellington’s first feature film appearance is marked by an extensive racial masquerade. The film, Check and Doublecheck (RKO, 1930) is an attempt to transfer a popular radio show of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” (about two Southern African-American characters that came to Chicago to find better life) onto the silver screen. The fact that both impersonators of Amos and Andy were white complicated the matter only little –

7 they wear blackface in the movie. Duke Ellington’s band is itroduced in the movie as a band hired to supply entertainment on a birthday party of a white upper-class lady. The first shot of the band is their arrival to the white suburb house – Amos and Andy operate a taxicab service and are paid to bring the band which creates a comical view as their cabriolet suitable for four persons has to hold the whole orchestra including instruments.

Arriving late, the nervous white butler hurries the band into the house calling them boys. Nobody except the butler speaks to the band and the lady of the house is interested in the band only because of her horror that she would fail to entertain her guests, had they not arrived at all. The band gets for the time unprecedented exposure, however the filmmakers’ attempts to achieve the illusion of a perfectly segregated band made the light-skinned Creole clarinetist Barney Bigard and Puerto Rican trombonist

Juan Tizol wear burnt cork make-up (Carney, 145), and the band’s performance of

“Three Little Words,” is a clear ‘black and white’ sham – while three Ellington’s sidemen pretend to sing into megaphones, the real singers who recorded the piece and are listed on the soundtrack are Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker, a.k.a the white Rhythm Boys trio. The film reveals that for Hollywood studios the sound of a mixed band was not dangerous, but the sight of it and the implications it would carry – what a horror.

Two cameo appearances of the Nicholas brothers, the jazz step-dancers, from the early 1940s show another tactic of segregating and subordinating the African-

Americans in a musical number involving white musicians as well. These ‘separate and unequal’ numbers in two movies with the white Glenn Miller orchestra, “Chattanooga

Choo Choo” in Sun Valley Serenade (1941, Twentieth Century-Fox) and “Kalamazoo” in Orchestra Wives (1942, Twentieth Century-Fox), share the same structure. The brothers come to sing/step-dance their parts after the white singer and his male chorus

8 finished their part – the songs might as well be over at those moments, since the

Nicholas sing only a variation on the lyrics we have already heard, and these second,

African-American, parts make the performances over seven minutes long. The brothers do not mix with the orchestra, they have a separate stage, and only a few short shots (in fact only one in the Orchestra Wives ) show the dancers and the orchestra together.

Moreover, the lyrics of “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” suggest also a class difference between the white singer Ten Beneke from Miller’s band and the African-American

Dorothy Dandridge who sings in “Chattanooga” with the Nicholas – while Beneke sings that he intends to board the train to the named destination as he “got [his] fare, with just a trifle to spare,” and later wants one of his companion to shine his shoes, Dorothy sings that she cannot afford to board the Chattanooga train as she does not have “a nickel to spare” (Hill, 164). It is obvious that these scenes were designed by the filmmakers to enable censors to cut the second parts of the performances if they deemed it necessary which seems more as the filmmakers’ invitation for the censors to do so rather then an attempt to prevent any damage to the film material. Incorporating the African-American performances into the storyline of the movies would make them harder to remove and many a regional censor might have abandoned the idea of ‘improving’ the racial balance of the piece, yet the opposite seems to have been the rule for the studios and African-

American jazz musicians frequently appeared in such “Jim Crow” specialties of otherwise white films (for instance all five 1943 performances of Count Basie’s orchestra in Hollywood musicals share this characteristics [Knight, 214]). Speaking of the “Chattanooga Choo Choo” performance, however, it was spared the censor’s intrusion, as a moviegoer remembered seeing Sun Valley Serenade , including the

Nicholas in an all-white theatre in Birmingham, Alabama: “For some reason, they did

9 not cut the Nicholas Brothers out, and the people were screaming. You couldn’t hear the rest of the picture when they finished their dance.” (Hill, 165)

In some of their film appearances, the African-American jazz musicians fall victim to a crude joke – in Murder at the Vanities (Paramount, 1934), a backstage musical, a performance number called “The Rape of The Rhapsody” starts with Franz

Liszt working on his Second Hungarian Rhapsody, dreaming of the premiere of his masterpiece. When the great day comes, the performance of the Rhapsody is unexpectedly (and inexplicably) destroyed by Duke Ellington’s orchestra’s intrusion and taking over of the symphony, as the band emerges behind the white symphonic orchestra, performing the “Ebony Rhapsody,” a ‘jazzed-up’ Liszt variation, turning the composer’s dream into a nightmare. As the conductor and the orchestra leave the stage in disgust, the band throws away the score – the symbol of the civilized European classical music now contrasted to the wild ‘Ebony’ music which seems to be fully improvised, but which in fact must have been composed and scored as well, as the orchestra ‘borrows’ the motifs from the Second Hungarian Rhapsody in a rendition full of intricate and rich harmonies. Unable to hold his anger, the composer returns at the end of the “Ebony Rhapsody,” and with a prop machine gun shoots the whole band and the dancers on stage to death (everybody pretends to be dying). The scene was meant to be funny and the invisible audience laughs after the whole band has been exterminated.

During the “Ebony Rhapsody,” a chorus of African-American dancers enters the stage with a white female singer who functions as a sort of interpreter of the African-

American performance in progress for the white audience, as she sings: “instead of playing the music like you do, they supply a little classical voodoo… they sing their dirty hosanna…” Even though she wears quite a similar dress to the African-American chorus dancers, by speaking of ‘them’ the singer distances herself from the other

10 performers and their racial identity, perhaps in order not to get ‘dirty’ as well – the problem of many white performers of the era who were attracted to the rhythm of

African-American jazz, yet feared that the connection with the ‘black’ music would make them ‘dirty,’ and they would lose their whiteness. A section of dialog from a 1941

Paramount film Birth of the Blues (further discussed in the following chapter) situated in 1910s New Orleans shows this white anxiety – two white jazz musicians are enthusiastic about jazz, however one of them fears the reaction of the white audiences:

The cornetist says: “You know, this blue music is darkie stuff; how do you know the white folks are gonna like it?” The clarinetist responds: “You and me are white folks, aren’t we.” “Yes, sure.” “We like it, don’t we.” The mere fact that they are playing the authentic ‘darkie stuff’ does not threaten their whiteness, the Clarinetist tries to reassure his fellow musician.

Just as in Murder at the Vanities , in an early Vitaphone 4 short Pie, Pie Blackbird

(1932) African-American jazz performers face death as well, this time their own hot music is to blame – in a country kitchen, the singer Nina Mae McKinney is preparing dough for a pie, explaining to the barely teenage step-dancer Nicholas brothers duo that it is a ‘blackbird’ pie. In the next shot pianist Eubie Blake, his band (dressed as cooks),

McKinney and the Nicholas perform several songs (e.g. an extract from the Second

Hungarian Rhapsody – what a coincidence – which segues into “Memories of You”) in a gigantic pie – apparently they are the ‘blackbirds.’ As the performance reaches its end and becomes increasingly hotter and hotter, the temperature is rising which is signaled by smoke surrounding the pie, followed by fire and pretended shriek. When the fire disappears, only skeletons are what were left of the musicians and step-dancers – the pie

4 A sub-division of Warner Brothers.

11 is ready. For both Murder at the Vanities and Pie, Pie Blackbird it is hard to imagine that they would be considered amusing if the performers were white.

On several occasions, jazz music gave the performers a weapon to escape and resist the white racist setting or story – Ethel Water’s brilliant modification of song lyrics in the Vitaphone short Rufus Jones for President of 1933, thick with the worst

African-American stereotypes, is one such wonderful example. The short’s story revolves around Ethel Water’s dream about her son Rufus being elected the president of the United States (since it is segregated, the short shows only the watermelon eating, razor wielding and pork chop frying part of United States ). As one of the songs Waters sings “Underneath the Harlem Moon” a song written by a Polish Jewish immigrant

Mack Gordon in 1932. The original lyrics read as follows:

Creole babies walk along with rhythm in their thighs, Rhythm in their feet and in their lips and in their eyes. Where do high-brows find the kind of love that satisfies? Underneath the Harlem moon.

There’s no fields of cotton, pickin’ cotton is taboo; They don’t live in cabins like old folks used to do: Their cabin is a penthouse up on Lenox Avenue Underneath the Harlem moon.

They just live on dancing, They’re never blue or forlorn. It ain’t no sin to laugh and grin, That’s why darkies were born.

Once again the pronoun ‘they’ shows the white interpretation of African-Americans, with the usual stereotypes of rhythm, carelessness and the everlasting grin that each and every ‘darkie’ is bound to possess. Ethel Waters, nonetheless made some changes in the lyrics of the first verses and also added new lyrics to the existing ones, transforming the song into a confession of an experienced African-American performer in the white- controlled entertainment industry – first of all, she changed “they” to “we,” moved the

“penthouse” from St. Lenox Avenue, where for instance the famous Cotton Club

12 resided, to St. Nicholas Avenue, a street closer to Broadway and the more affluent part of New York, and most significantly she swapped “schwarzes” for “darkies.”

“Schwarze” is a Yiddish term to refer to African-Americans. While it might seem that by using ‘we’ Waters identified herself with the stereotypical notions of African-

Americans, the Yiddish word may be a reference to the strong Jewish presence in the

American entertainment industry and so in her line “That’s why we schwarzes were born” the ‘we’ refers rather to African-Americans as seen through the eyes of the (not only) Jewish songwriters, filmmakers or managers. In her new lyrics, she stresses pragmatically the lot of the African-American entertainer, with its obvious positive effects on the quality of life if the entertainer is successful:

Once we wore bandannas, now we wear Parisian hats, Once we were barefoot now we wear shoes and spats, Once we were Republican but now we’re Democrats Underneath our Harlem moon.

We don’t pick no cotton, pickin’ cotton is taboo. All we pick is numbers, and that includes you white folks too, ’Cause if we hit, we pay our rent on any avenue, if we hit. Underneath our Harlem moon.

At the time when racial and social equality was a wild dream for the US minorities and the very notion that an African-American boy could become the president of the country was beyond the scope of imagination, success in the entertainment industry was one of the few possibilities for the African-Americans to climb higher on the American social ladder. By the new lyrics, Waters managed to separate the performance of ‘blackness’ imagined in the minds of the white filmmakers from the real African-Americans.

Louis Armstrong’s success to withstand the derogatory setting in the short A

Rhapsody in Black and Blue (Paramount, 1932) is another example – the all-black cast short tells a story of a hen-pecked husband who spends his days (he is most probably unemployed) listening to Armstrong’s records, playing along on a homemade drum set.

13 His wife, irritated by his laziness, hits him with a mop, the blow transfers him into a dream world called Jazzmania full of soap bubbles where leopard skin-clad Armstrong performs to entertain him since the man is the king of this half-jungle-half-bathtub land.

When Armstrong sings “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead and the following “Shine,” his wild grin is on a par with the irresponsible husband, however his trumpet solos catch him fully concentrated on the improvisation and instead of a grinning Ol’ Satchmo there stands a confident young man in his prime, aware of his musical skills and eager to show them to the audience. Few African-American actors would be allowed to project such a clear picture of masculinity as Hollywood tried to avoid any depictions of

African-American men in productive age, rendering most of its African-American male characterizations either child-like or too old to represent any erotic power.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Louis Armstrong also appeared in four scenes

(daring for the era) where he represents a man who desires beautiful women, and who is also an object of their desire and admiration; scenes that Hollywood in the period would not allow any African-American male actor to play in. In Artists & Models (Paramount,

1937), white singer Martha Raye donning a dark make-up in a musical gangster number

(literally) sings praises about Armstrong’s hot cornet which is more dangerous than the famous gangsters Al Capone, and John Dillinger with their machine guns (Gabbard,

219). Although the scene is not that ‘hot’ as one would imagine, since Raye’s and

Armstrong eyes seldom meet, Variety expressed their fears about Raye’s career after the performance: “this intermingling of the races isn’t wise, especially as she lets herself go into the extremist manifestations of Harlemania torso-twisting and gyrations. It may hurt her personally” (quoted in Cripps 1977, 256). Two performances from 1944 and

1945 show Armstrong in a scene not integrated in the plot of the movie in order to be removed from if found too daring: in Jam Session (Columbia Pictures, 1944) Louis

14 Armstrong as a bartender in uniform sings “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”to a whole row of light-skinned African-American women in evening gowns, sitting on bar stools, and he seems to really mean it. His Pillow to Post (Warner Bros., 1945) performance did not escape the censor scissors, as reviewer John Rogers reported for

Chicago Defender from Memphis: “It is evident that the local censor has been busy with his shears again in ‘Pillow to Post.’ One scene is at a night spot. A sign in front of the place says ‘Louis Armstrong featured by this week only.’ But when you’re taken inside Armstrong is never being shown.” 5 The snipped performance is “Whatcha Say,” a lovers’ duet between Armstrong and the African-American beauty Dorothy

Dandridge. The Memphis censor perhaps could not stand the sight of Dandridge addressing Armstrong with lustful lyrics, such as: “Do I get that little kiss? Whatcha say? Must you let me down like this? Oh, honey will, you won’t you?” and Armstrong’s final (ostensibly coy) consent “All reet,” followed by her triumphantly erotic sigh “Oh baby.” The last of Armstrong’s duets, this time with Billie Holiday appeared in New

Orleans (United Artists, 1947). Unlike the other performances, the “Blues Are

Brewing” performance is incorporated into the plot and Armstrong and Holiday play husband and wife.

Even if in New Orleans the fictional relationship between Armstrong and

Holiday is treated with unusual sensitivity, in general it can be said that more often than not, African-American jazz musicians were better off when they ‘played’ themselves and stood outside of the Hollywood stories, because when they become involved in the story or a story of a short subject is constructed around their performance, they are likely to play similar roles as the ‘real’ African-Americans. Armstrong is again a great example – by choosing his occupation as both musician and actor, he was often cast in

5 See: “Satchmo Left At Post: As Memphis Censors Perform Odd Tricks With His Pictures.” Chicago Defender , June 23, 1945, p. 17.

15 stereotypical or derogatory roles – in Pennies from Heaven (Columbia Pictures, 1936) he manages to drive off the skeleton in the “Skeleton in the Closet” number and by doing so simultaneously fight the stereotype of African-American superstitiousness, yet minutes later, he personifies another stereotype as he jumps through a window when the police comes into the restaurant, where the band performed for the chicken thieves (i.e.

Armstrong and the band) (Gabbard, 216-17). In Every Day’s a Holyday (Paramount

1936) he was cast as a poor trumpet-playing street cleaner, in Going Places (Warner

Bros. 1938) as a groom to a horse called Jeepers Creepers, and some of the white characters in the film call Armstrong Uncle Tom (Meckna, 365).

Similarly, in a Vitaphone short Smash Your Baggage (1933) the band Small’s

Paradise Entertainers play a group of train station redcaps who perform musical numbers in the train station to raise money for a sick member of their group. In another short, Boogie Woogie Dream (Official Films, 1944) 6, singer Lena Horne, and two of the three most prominent boogie-woogie pianists Albert Almonds and Pete Johnson play a dishwasher and two painters (respectively) working in the middle of night, who dream about having a concert, and since they are employed as helping hands in a small music club and there are instruments left on stage, they pretend to have a concert

(interestingly, the third, Meade Lux Lewis, plays a piano-playing painter as well, in

New Orleans ). Plumes of smoke appear suggesting they are dreaming and the trio is by magic dressed in tuxedos and evening dress to perform the title song and “Unlucky

Woman.” By accident one of the white patrons, a talent scout, stays in the club, and after having heard their performance offers the trio an audition. As usual, the man and the African-American trio stay as separated as possible, the final scene being the only one when they all appear in one shot. While all the African-American characters in

6 As Konrad Nowakowski suggested the short was probably made earlier, in 1941, but there is no official record of it. See: . Accessed: 1 November 2008

16 Boogie Woogie Dream , A Rhapsody in Black and Blue , and Rufus Jones for President , dream about their elevation from poverty, it is only the performers in Boogie Woogie

Dream that can cherish a promise of becoming better off – with the help of the powerful white man. The instrumental role of white men in the careers of African-American musicians is also alluded to in Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho (Paramount, 1934), where

Calloway, while on the train to New York, receives a telegram from his manager Irving

Mills asking him to create a new number for his upcoming Cotton Club show taking place the next day. Calloway wakes the band and they rehearse in the aisle of the sleeping wagon. The telegram enabled the filmmakers to manifest white power over the musicians without even having to include a single white character in the story.

Reflecting their position in the American society, it were the African-American female singers that suffered most from their cinematic representations, especially during the 1930s. Ethel Waters, for example, almost never played herself, in her singing performances she is usually tied to the washboard or plays a mother (in Rufus Jones for instance) or a wife (in Cabin in the Sky , discussed in the third chapter) who has left for a while the domestic environment to sing a couple of jazz songs only to return back home. While Armstrong in New Orleans plays a character loosely based on his career,

Billie Holiday in her only feature film role does not play a singer, but a maid of the main female character. This must have been a bitter pill to swallow, as Holiday made a promise to herself “that she would do anything to avoid domestic service” (Clarke,

246). Her other film role in the 1935 short Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro

Life (Paramount, 1935) did not do her any justice either – Holiday is a nameless girl betrayed by her lover who from the sudden rush of emotions sings a blues. Bessie Smith received similar treatment in the only film material that she ever appeared in, the St.

Louis Blues (RKO, 1929) short. There her acting only illustrates the story of the title

17 song she is singing – a love triangle between the good Bessie, her lover and the St.

Louis woman. Bessie financially supports her unfaithful lover, only to be rejected at the end all the same, expressing her sorrow with her blues.

All these shorts or features in which lower-class characters suddenly burst into song without any explanation when and where they learned to play their instruments or sing as professionals helped reinforce in the white audiences the stereotype of African-

Americans as naturally endowed with impressive musical skills. In stark contrast to these performances then stand three remarkable shorts produced between the years 1929 and 1937, all featuring Duke Ellington’s orchestra, which show slices of life of jazz musicians otherwise neglected by the film industry. In the opening scene of Black and

Tan (RKO, 1929) Ellington, playing himself, is working on a new composition with his trumpet player Arthur Whetsol – Ellington is sitting at his piano, showing Whetsol some details in the score – this is an unusual moment to appear in a short with African-

American jazz musicians, especially as early as in 1929, because it was a common belief that African-American jazzmen could not read a score and their music was not written down. Later in the short, in a night club scene, Ellington is also characterized as a man of good morals, as he refuses to go on with the performance when he realizes that his girlfriend, a dancer in the show, suffered a heart attack – Duke stops the band in the middle of the song, furiously taking the band backstage. The aforementioned Symphony in Black short was designed as a visual accompaniment to Ellington’s long composition of the same name. The short starts with a letter explanation that a fictional agency called

National Concert Bureau is reminding Ellington that “the world premiere of [his] new symphony of Negro moods takes place two weeks from today.” Again, a written message from a white person is instrumental in African-American creativity. In the next shot Duke is alone at his piano, working on the composition, and in the close-up the

18 camera reads the inscription Part One: The Laborers, followed by a footage of African-

American workers, and in a similar manner the short takes us through the four parts of the symphony: Dance, The Blues (with Billie Holiday), and the Harlem Rhythm. The

1937 Paramount magazine newsreel Record Making with Duke Ellington and his

Orchestra shows a rare footage of Ellington and the band working in a sound studio.

The voiceover stressing the new advancements in phonographic technology makes some extraordinarily praising remarks on the band leader: “Let’s look in on the leader

Duke Ellington as he prepares for a recording, working toward that accurate balancing of musical tones required for effective reproduction. In the monitor booth the sound technician… in cooperation with maestro Ellington brings the music to its highest sound perfection.”

Hearing in 1937 such laudatory phrases as “accurate balancing of musical tones” and calling an African-American jazz musician “maestro” must have sounded like a talk from another world, nevertheless, it is necessary to realize that Ellington’s or any other

African-American jazz musician’s success in Hollywood could only reach so high as the white-controlled industry allowed it, and it is crucial that these words of praise do not appear in a feature film but in a mere unimportant newsreel. In a nutshell, when compared to the white swing band leaders, the African-American jazz film representation during the 1930s and 1940s was falling remarkably behind. While the

African-Americans were lucky to have a cameo appearance in a few Hollywood features, white jazz bands received much more prominent exposure in Hollywood and several jazz biopics were produced with the bandleaders as leading characters (e.g.

Orchestra Wives , or The Fabulous Dorseys [United Artists, 1947]) during the discussed period, with others to follow in the 1950s. In fact, by 1948 the only African-American bandleader to appear in a movie which would at least resemble a biopic was Cab

19 Calloway 7 in Hi-De-Ho (All-American, 1947). However if we take the white jazz biopics as the norm, Hi-De-Ho certainly fails by comparison – the low budget of the movie is visible in every shot and even though Calloway undergoes a certain path to success as is typical in this type of movies the scale of the success is from a small night club at the beginning to a bigger one at the end. The montage of different European locations in the middle of the film – the Tower Bridge in London, Ancient Greek ruins in Athens, etc., superimposed over Calloway’s singing figure, and an occasional airplane – suggests an international tour (in the real life Calloway toured all over

Europe in 1935) and international success, however this montage only shows the limitations of the budget as we do not get to see any European audiences. The final concert that is supposed to seal the musician’s triumph looks more like an early 1930s short of Harlem specialties as Calloway’s performances are altered with African-

American burlesque dancers – the all-black cast (including audiences) of the film only contributes to such an impression.

In 1944, Lawrence Reddick, an African-American sociologist, wrote in his essay

“Of Motion Pictures” that “the ceiling above which the Negro on screen is seldom, if ever, permitted to rise is [significantly] lower than the ceiling for the Negro in American life itself (quoted in Everett, 289). If we included the phrase “jazz musician” after

“Negro,” the statement would not be any less true, since the Hollywood’s celluloid

African-American musicians of the early sound era never achieved as much as the real ones did – there is for instance not a single scene of an African-American musician performing in a symphony hall, although at least Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis

Armstrong or Billie Holliday had one or more concerts in the Carnegie Hall during the

1940s. For the white bandleaders, then, there was no such ceiling, the sky was the limit.

7 Louis Armstrong got close to having his life story told on the screen in New Orleans; why the final product can hardly be considered a full-fledged biopic is discussed in the next chapter.

20 If most of the jazz performances discussed in this chapter were not tightly connected to the storyline, the next chapter will focus on Hollywood attempts to make jazz and its history the core of its narratives.

21 Chapter Two: Hollywood Histories of Jazz

Between the years 1930 and 1948 Hollywood industry produced five movies whose fictional narratives attempted in one way or another to touch upon the issue of the origins, creation or development of jazz music: King of Jazz (Universal, 1930), Birth of the Blues (Paramount, 1941), Syncopation (RKO, 1942), New Orleans (United

Artists, 1947) and A Song Is Born (Samuel Goldwyn, 1948). As Peter Townsend aptly noted on Hollywood representations of jazz: “from the cinematic point,” with jazz being the less powerful medium than cinema, the music “has no higher status as subject matter than gunfighting, espionage or teenage romance” (Townsend, 92). Thus, these five movies are basically romantic melodramas, musical comedies or a vaudeville show where jazz and its development plays only a secondary part. Most historical events depicted in these films are treated with little respect to the then-known facts and so the resulting historical accuracy of the productions is generally low. However, besides the foregrounding of conventional Hollywood plots and characters, one tendency is obvious in all of the five films – it is an effort to belittle the African-American contribution to the creation of jazz and a clear promotion of the contemporary white jazz musicians over their African-American counterparts.

The first film dealing with some sort of history of jazz was John Murray

Anderson’s King of Jazz starring the famous bandleader Paul Whiteman and his orchestra is also the most radical in its treatment of the origins of the music. Paul

Whiteman is known as the first musician to organize a concert around the development of jazz – in his 1924 Aeolian Hall concert called An Experiment in Modern Music

Whiteman presented his lily-white interpretation of the music’s history, deleting entirely the African-American influence on jazz from its contents. The band started with “Livery

22 Stable Blues, recorded by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, the first jazz record,” working “its way in a clearly evolutionary manner to Victor Herbert's

Serenades and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue” and ending with Edward Elgar’s

“Pomp and Circumstance” (Early, 409). Whiteman’s intentions to gain the music some respectability in 1924 when jazz was despised by the general public and especially its connections to the exuberant and savage ‘black’ culture represented a serious threat to the Victorian mores is clearly evident in the 1930 film as well.

Unlike the other four following films, King of Jazz contains no narrative, it is a musical revue drawing heavily on the vaudeville tradition, filmed in a highly spectacular style, and consisting of a medley of short sketches and songs and elaborate choreographies in extravagant settings. When concerning the film craft, King of Jazz is truly an extraordinary production (and also extraordinarily expensive one, with its costs amounting to $2 million “making it the most expensive musical for some years to come” [Barrios, 182]); it was shot in two color Technicolor, included the first color animated cartoon sequence in the history of cinema, and Herman Rosse, art director of the picture, received an Academy Award for his work (Barrios, 183). The whole vehicle serves to promote the work of Paul Whiteman and consequently, his interpretation of the development of jazz.

The first scene of our interest is the animated cartoon at the very beginning.

Introduced by Charles Irwin, the animated sequence is supposed to tell us how

Whiteman “came to be crowned the King of Jazz.” Irwin explains: “Once upon a time

Paul, tiring of life in great city had a grand idea – he would go big game hunting. We find him a few weeks later in the Darkest Africa.” In the cartoon, Whiteman’s character, while trying to shoot a lion with a rifle, is engaged in an musical (and cultural) exchange as his first bullet plays on the lion’s ribs as on the xylophone, and the second

23 shot resonates on the animal’s teeth resembling in their shape a piano keyboard (this is all synchronized with Whiteman’s score based on popular tunes his orchestra was playing at that time). Having no more ammunition, the hunter becomes the hunted and the lion starts chasing Whiteman. During the chase Whiteman sings (dubbed by Bing

Crosby) “My lord delivered Daniel, why can’t he deliver me.” In a movie that is trying to repress and belittle the African-American influence on jazz this is an interesting moment indeed, since “My Lord Delivered Daniel” is a Negro Spiritual – music that was meant as a lament over the African-American plight and a protest against slavery

(Negro Spirituals ) is appropriated by a white character as a prayer to save him from this

African danger. Nonetheless, Whiteman is not ‘delivered’ and when the lion catches him, the beast prepares to butcher his pray by removing his sharp-toothed jaw from his mouth and stropping it as a razor on his stretched tongue. With the metaphor of a razor we have temporarily moved from the African jungle to the American city, as razor was one of the trademarks of white caricatures of urban African-Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century ( Ethnic Notions ). Whiteman manages to soothe this

‘dark’ danger by playing the violin. The tamed lion stretches out his paws and exclaims in Al Jolson style “Mammy.” The cartoon concludes with various musical mini- numbers featuring an elephant, a ‘jungle rabbit’ and a snake, all reacting to and joining the Whiteman’s music. In the last shot, Whiteman is standing in the middle of a circle composed of numerous African animals, and finally he is ‘crowned’ by a monkey throwing a coconut at him making a crown-like lump on his head. As a production sketch note to the cartoon reads, the last scene indicates that “Whiteman finished playing [and] whole jungle applauds him” (Goldmark, 82). The message of the whole cartoon is perhaps as follows: Paul Whiteman while enlivening the ‘natural’ African

24 musicality in its ‘natives’ managed to tame the wild side of this musical ‘energy source’ bringing this inspiration home as a new style of music – jazz.

Before moving to the final number of the film, the Melting Pot of Jazz, which gives a long musical explanation of the origins and creation of the music, let us consider several moments preceding the finale as they are contributive to the underlying racial politics of the film as well.

One of the songs in the film featuring the Rhythm Boys trio with Bing Crosby as the main vocalist starts with the trio is singing: “Just as happy as a cow chewing on a cud, when the darkies beat their feet on the Mississippi mud.” The song is suddenly put to an end as one member complains that this “isn’t the type of music” for that “super super special special production.” Then Bing muses: “You’re right; we should get out of the mud and reach for the higher and finer things in life.” Obviously, this movie is not about ‘darkie mud’ – it has ‘higher’ aims.

If in 1924 Paul Whiteman deprived the African-Americans of any credit for jazz, in King of Jazz their contribution is acknowledged to a certain (very limited) extent, under strict conditions set by the bandleader. Announcing the “Rhapsody in Blue” number, Whiteman speaks: “No record of American music would be complete without

George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’... The most primitive and the most modern musical elements are combined in this rhapsody, for jazz was born in the African jungle to the beating of the voodoo drum.” The announcement is followed by a scene with white “dancer Jacques Cartier [in a black costume], done up as a Zulu chief” (Barrios,

184), beating with his feet a monotone rhythm accelerating in tempo on a gigantic drum. However, there is no connection between this number and Gershwin’s opus that follows right after. The boundaries are clear cut indicating the distance between the

“primitive” and “modern,” since the extravagant “Rhapsody in Blue” number with an

25 enormous piano containing the whole Whiteman’s orchestra begins in an entirely different setting.

Paul Whiteman’s intention to “make a lady of jazz” (Early, 398) is metaphorically expressed in a scene where the orchestra members in sailor clothes play each with a girl either on their laps or sitting next to them. Whiteman is sitting on a bench with his back to the camera. When he turns around, we see him holding a little

African-American girl in a short dress, her hair braided with ribbons; she is smiling, and playfully pinches Whiteman’s cheek. This is a clear metaphor of a white foster father of the African-American jazz infant who will, after a proper upbringing, of course, grow into a real musical lady.

The King of Jazz culminates with the twelve-minute grand finale that in its monstrosity outclasses all the preceding numbers. Charles Irwin proclaims: “America is a great melting pot of music wherein the melodies of all nations are fused into one great new rhythm, JAZZ,” and a defile of Russians dancing kazachoc, Italians singing “Santa

Lucia,” Scottish bagpipers and highland dancers, German Waltzes, Irish liras, and

Spanish flamenco commences. After the parading, all these European nations and their musical traditions descend into a huge melting pot, upon the top of which Paul

Whiteman is pretending to stir the ‘ingredients’ and blending them together. The dancers then emerge bellow as unified American tap dancers in golden dresses and suits, accompanied by a proper American tune, “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Even though the previous musical numbers of King of Jazz contained (if awkwardly put) references to African-Americans, the grand finale is white-only, erasing the African-

Americans from the creation of jazz, suggesting that this American music was ‘cooked’ by a single man, out of a mixture of European musical ingredients. Such an erasure of

26 African-Americans from the last moments of a film will become a recurrent motive in all other Hollywood histories of jazz (with the exception of A Song Is Born ).

If in the 1930 it was still possible to tell a story about the creation or development of jazz without any active participation of African-American musicians, after the international success of Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington and numerous cameo appearances of African-American jazzmen in Hollywood movies during the

1930s it would have been much harder for the filmmakers to make a similar claim. The

Birth of the Blues solved the ‘problem’ by putting the African-American jazz performance at the beginning and then focusing entirely on the white pioneers of jazz.

The film revolves around a story very loosely based on the Original Dixieland Jazz

Orchestra, the first band to make a jazz record (in 1917), whose bandleader Nick

LaRocca famously claimed to be the originator of the music, denying any African-

American influences on his style; a more apt candidate for distorting the history of the music, after Whiteman, would be hard to find. The movie orchestra, the New Orleans

Hot Shots, with their leader Bing Crosby (as clarinetist Jeff) do acknowledge the non- white origin of jazz, however only to confirm the white superiority in its excellence. In the opening sequence (a title has informed us that this is “New Orleans in the nineties”), we see Jeff (as a boy) playing along with an African-American jazz band. He is hidden behind a pile of sacks, the band members on the other side of the pile being unaware of him until they stop their performance, and a clarinet keeps playing ‘hot licks’. The band is surprised, searching for the sound source and then they discover the boy. Even more shocked that it is a white boy, one of the band members is prying him: “Where did you learn the hot stuff?” “I just picked it up hanging around Basin Street.” The amazed

African-American clarinetist invites Jeff to sit beside him: “There’s a few things I

27 wanna pick up.” By merely listening to the music, Jeff has been able to learn it better than an adult African-American musician who has been probably playing it for years.

Jazz in the Birth of the Blues (which is not about birth of the blues at all, a fact that was noted by the Chicago Defender and is also reflected in the foreign translations of the title 8) is shown as a music that comes from the African-American people but which will gain the respect and renown only when the whites start playing it as well.

Most scenes with African-Americans in the movie serve as a confirmation that the white

Hot Shots’ music is authentic: during the band’s performance in front of a jailhouse, the

African-American prisoners in the barred windows clap their hands in abandon, one exclaims: “Man, what a rhythm,” and a shoeshine working on the street is scrubbing shoes to the rhythm, smiling widely. Not only is the white band playing ‘real darkie’ music (almost every description of the music in the film uses the word ‘darkie’), but

African-Americans approve of it, content like Louey (a former servant of Jeff’s father who stays with Jeff as a true ‘loyal soul’) when he hears the band playing from a high- society restaurant: “Our music sure is going high-brow.” No hard feelings about white stealing and commercializing the African-American musical idiom are expressed, on the contrary – in another scene Louey eagerly explains to Betty Lou, Jeff’s future girlfriend how to sing in the ‘blue’ style, concluding that there is nothing to it: “it’s just like walking down the street.”

If the African-American community in the movie is highly appreciative of the

‘first white Dixieland band’ (the uniqueness of Jeff as a white hot clarinetist and of the

8 In an article of Nov 15, 1941 James H. Purdy, JR. lamented that the film is “mis-titled” – it is not about blues, continuing that “it is now history everyone knows that W. C. Handy [who is generally given credit for creating the standardized twelve-bar form of the blues] took the music of the delta cotton hands …. and gave it to the world.” We can only agree with his remark that the “picture is more about the discovery of the musical form by white men.” See: “‘Birth of the blues’ Is Really Development Of Race’s Music” Chicago Defender , Nov 15, 1941, pp.20-21. According to the International Movie Database, the film was distributed also under the following titles: Kiihoittavaa rytmia in Finland, Swingens födelse in Sweden, and Oi Tragoudistai tis jazz in Greece. Into English the titles can be translated as The Awakening of Rhythm , Birth of Swing , and The Jazz Singers, respectively. See: .

28 band as the pioneers of white jazz is stressed in several scenes during the film) the white community naturally opposes such immoral music and the band has to struggle hard to convince the public of the value of their music. These moments may vaguely reflect the real history of the music, since jazz during the 1920s was perceived much more as a threat when it left the confines of the African-American ghetto and the danger of

‘spoiling’ the white youth became more eminent. However the way the band persuades the patrons in the elegant restaurant and why it got the opportunity to play there is purely Hollywood style – it is owing to Jeff’s girlfriend, singer Betty Lou, who chooses the band as the accompaniment for her performance and shows the whole restaurant how to dance to this new music. The film ends with the band’s departure to Chicago where they secured a musical contract thanks to their recording session in New

Orleans, 9 and on their steamboat bound to Chicago, Jeff confesses to Betty Lou: “I’m crazy about you honey.” To this she replies: “As much as you are about your blue music?” and Jeff proclaims: “That ain’t mine, that’s going to be everybody’s music.”

After the conversation, backed by the theme song, follows a montage of short footage

(taken from other movies) of several jazz figures (their names superimposed over the image): Ted Lewis, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey,

Benny Goodman, George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman. According to jazz historian

Krin Gabbard, the montage was “designed to suggest that jazz was developed by both white and black artists but that the music did not come to age until the maturation of composers such as Gershwin and impresarios such as Paul Whiteman” (Gabbard, 110-

11). Jeff’s proclamation reflects the common belief of folk nature of jazz and somehow serves as a further apology for the white appropriation of the African-American musical

9 The Original Dixieland Jazz Band first moved from New Orleans to Chicago and then on March 17, 1917, in New York they made their famous record (Tirro, 131); but since the film does not even attempt to be historically accurate, this is just one of its numerous historical inconsistencies.

29 idiom, covering the fact that while jazz may be “everybody’s” music, the white part of its professors exploited its commercial appeal to a substantially greater extent.

Unlike the Birth of the Blues , Syncopation , produced only one year later, “makes a sincere effort to narrativize jazz history” (Gabbard, 113). Well, at least at the beginning. Subtitled “The story of a nation from ragtime to boogie-woogie”

Syncopation in its prologue goes even further to the past: “Under the main titles” dissolves “a montage map of Africa, a black king under a parasol dickering for a coffle of slaves, a ‘blackbirder’ under full sail, a sprawling cotton field, and a New Orleans streetscape in 1906” (Cripps 1993, 12). Near a former slave auction place on the Congo

Square stands an African-American college of music, and “an instructor is teaching his pupils to play Bach” ( AFI 1). In a scene resembling young Jeff’s musical education in

Birth of the Blues only here the boy has a different color of skin, the seven-year-old

African-American cornetist Reggie ‘Rex’ Tearbone, “is unable to follow the sheet music, and after playing a few bars, begins to improvise a jazz composition” (Ibid).

Later the boy meets King Jeffers played by Duke Ellington’s trumpeter Rex

Stewart, an encounter that is based on the bandleader Joe King Oliver’s employment of

Louis Armstrong. Reggie’s mother opposes her son’s affinity for jazz, seeing his future rather in the classical music. Jeffers manages to persuade her about jazz being the right choice for Reggie explaining that her son possesses an extraordinary talent that needs to be carefully worked upon (Gabbard, 113). The narrative of Syncopation so far represents a great progress with its treatment of African-American jazz musicians – in contrast to the animals and a small girl in King of Jazz or the carefree ‘darkies’ of the

Birth of the Blues here we have a talented African-American musician whose choice of jazz over classical music is more a question of aesthetic inclination than of ability. What is more, the main male character of the movie, white cornetist Johnny Schumacher,

30 expresses his admiration and envy of Reggie’s musical skills (Gabbard, 114) – a rare moment indeed in any Hollywood jazz movie with both African-American and white players. As Krin Gabbard in his book Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American

Cinema (1996) proved extensively, it is almost always the African-American artist, in a similar fashion as with the young Jeff in Birth of the Blues, that voices his admiration and admits the white musician’s superiority.

However, at that point the progressive nature of Syncopation comes to an end.

To more than make up for the African-American skill and relative success, Johnny with his new band create a brand new style ‘swing,’ which “revolutionizes the sound of jazz,” ( AFI 1). Contrasting this ‘new style’ with African-American New Orleans jazz

(which as we have learnt, in contradiction to the scenes with Reggie, is just a means of getting one’s troubles off one’s mind), Kit, Johnny’s girlfriend, assures him that the white swing is something, more, “a music that comes from the heart – music that is

American born” (Gabbard, 115). The film ends with a dissolve into a jam session of the

“Saturday Evening Post All-American Jazz Band” including ‘all-white’ mostly swing musicians Harry James, Jack Jenney, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Joe Venuti,

Howard Smith, Alvino Rey, Bob Haggart, Gene Krupa, the winners of a Saturday

Evening Post contest. Somehow, no African-American found their way into this All-

American sequence which was shot after the whole movie was finished. Nevertheless, since the jam session only reflected popularity of the listed musicians among the magazine readers, at least for this particular scene the filmmakers are hardly to blame.

Perhaps the most interesting production, at least in terms of the expectations and unfulfilled potential of the five films is New Orleans. The film has an unusual history that in five years precedes the actual making of it. The picture was initially a part of

Orson Welles’s unprecedented film project – an “anthology of [four] short stories,”

31 based on fact and “pan-American in its range” (and this time its ‘pan-Americanness’ would include African-Americans as well). In July 1941, Welles “registered the project under the title It’s All True .”(Conrad, 179) Two episodes in the anthology covered aspects of ethnic experience in the United States: an Italian immigrant love affair and a history of jazz based on the “biography of Louis Armstrong with a score by Duke

Ellington” (Conrad, 179-80). Welles’ intention “had created high expectations” in the jazz community since the Hollywood portrayals of jazz to date had been largely inauthentic (Hasse – Marsalis, 345); also the African-American community seemed very enthusiastic as the overblown labels “the most talked of film since Gone with the

Wind, ” “picture of pictures” and “one of the greatest screenings ever thrust upon a movie” given to the project by Earl Shaw of the Chicago Defender in 1942 indicate 10 .

Despite the fact that Ellington commenced work on the film score (with a generous salary of $1,000 per week) 11 , later in 1942 Welles changed his mind and dropped the jazz episode, replacing it with samba (Conrad, 180).

In 1946, a project concerning Louis Armstrong playing himself and Billie

Holiday as his wife was still alive (under a different production company and director), and as Thomas Cripps suggested, it began with “a hidden agenda designed to break some Hollywood stereotypes,” and placing “blacks and whites together in a dramatic exchange” (Cripps 1993, 208). Unfortunately, the final product can be described rather as a romantic musical revolving around a white opera singer than as a biography of

Louis Armstrong. Several authors suggested, 12 that the coming of McCarthyism to

Hollywood may be responsible for the diversion from the original idea that focused on

African-American musicians towards a safer white romance and it is true that New

10 See: “Hear Orson Welles Eying New Talent For Satchmo Film.” Chicago Defender , May 2, 1942. 11 See: John Edward Hasse – Wynton Marsalis. Beyond Category – the Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, p. 345. 12 See: Michael Meckna, p. 367 and Laurence Bergreen, p. 428.

32 Orleans was the last Hollywood film produced by Herbert J. Biberman, one of the

“Hollywood Ten,” 13 who was later sentenced to six months of prison ( AFI 2).

Nonetheless, what is left is still worth discussing – since a feature length story concerning the life of Louis Armstrong has never been filmed (with the exception of a

1975 television production Louis Armstrong – Chicago style ) (Gabbard, 87), New

Orleans remains the most complete Hollywood attempt at such a project; moreover, it is the only feature film with performances of Billie Holiday. The opening scene camera slide makes it clear that the racial politics which in the previous films placed African-

American musicians vertically below their white counterparts or horizontally at the beginning of an imaginary evolutionary line of musical development ending with a white musical success will be, to a certain extent, observed in New Orleans as well. In the basement of the Orpheum Cabaret which the camera enters through the back door, plays Armstrong (as himself) with an all-star jazz orchestra consisting of such stars of the early jazz as the trombone player Kid Ory or clarinetist Barney Bigard; yet they are obviously playing just for their own amusement. The European classical music played at the Cabaret’s casino is not only ‘higher’ in terms of elevation but also in prestige. In addition to that, this scene where we over the title “New Orleans 1917” hear the unmistakable “trumpet cadenza that began Armstrong’s 1928 recording of ‘West End

Blues’” (Gabbard, 120), one of the most important jazz recordings of the 1920s, indicates the way historical details connected with the development of jazz are going to be treated in the movie – carelessly.

The year 1917 marked the closing of New Orleans’ red light district of Storyville and this event, which supposedly caused the dissemination of African-American jazz in the rest of the USA, since the legend has it that the jazzmen playing in the quarter’s

13 “Hollywood Ten,” was a group of directors, producers, writers and actors who were blacklisted in November 1947 after refusing to state their political alliances during testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

33 cabarets, barrel rooms and whore houses lost their jobs and had move elsewhere, is the only accurately dated (a newspaper front page with an article about the closure shown in a close-up reads the correct date – midnight of November 12, 1917) in the whole film.

Otherwise, the film is full of anachronisms – Armstrong (who in 1917 was 16 years old) is called Satchmo, when he only got the nickname in 1932 in England (Armstrong –

Kinzer, 21), on his international tour (which also took place in 1932) in the film he is presented with his first autobiography Swing That Rhythm , published in 1936 (Gabbard,

121); in the film Armstrong leaves New Orleans for Chicago with his boss, the white cabaret owner Nick Duquesne right after the district is closed – in reality Armstrong came to Chicago in 1922. The list of the anachronisms in the film is, of course, incomplete.

Despite its deficiencies in the historical details, New Orleans does contain several scenes that correspond with Armstrong’s life – in a montage of footage of trains, club posters, and performances from various venues throughout the whole USA we follow Armstrong’s road to fame, crowned with international success in France and

Great Britain. The fact that this success was facilitated by his now-agent Nick Duquesne who decided to promote jazz all over the world is also not far from the truth, as

Armstrong’s white agent Joe Glaser was in large measure responsible for the success of his career (taking a significant share of Armstrong’s salaries).

After some fine duets of Armstrong and Holiday, towards the end of New

Orleans, the film takes the familiar direction of bypassing the African-Americans in order to promote white musicians – Nick Duquesne is not only agent of Armstrong, but also of the white clarinetist and bandleader Woody Herman 14 (playing himself), and

14 The only reason Woody Herman was chosen for the picture seems to be his popularity in the year of the production – in 1946 his band won Downbeat , Metronome , Billboard and Esquire polls for best band, nominated by their peers in the big band business (Clancy, 90) – which might secure, in a similar fashion as the jam session at the end of Syncopation, higher appeal with the young audience.

34 Nick is struggling hard to secure Herman a concert in a Symphony Hall and, therefore, elevate jazz on the same level as the ‘serious’ music (this is perhaps alluding to Benny

Goodman’s series of Carnegie Hall concerts). The conflict between the classical music and jazz permeating the whole film is what Jane Feuer calls a typical Hollywood

“‘opera vs swing’ narrative,” a formula used in a number of Hollywood musicals in the

1930s and 1940s usually involving “a son who wants to sing swing and a father or matriarchal grandmother figure who prefers classical musicianship” (Feuer, 54). New

Orleans works with the formula, only altering the gender – here it is the mother who opposes her daughter Miralee, a classically trained singer in her effort to incorporate a blues song “Do You know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” that she learnt from her maid Endie (Billie Holiday) in her program.

The ultimate song number on the stage of the Symphony Hall is a spectacular

‘symphonic jazz’ performed by Miralee, a symphonic orchestra and Woody Herman’s band performing “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans”. Finally, jazz has reached the gates of a respected venue, only the African-American singer who composed the song is now long forgotten and the respect and financial reward belongs to the white performers. It is somewhat ironic that the artist who really played in a concert hall in the 1947 was Louis Armstrong; it was at the New York Carnegie Hall on

February 8 (Goia, 69).

In Song Is Born (the only color feature film discussed in the thesis) jazz is a subject of study for a group of eccentric scientists who, locked up in a villa, are working on a comprehensive encyclopedia comprising of all music of the world which includes recorded samples of the plethora of world’s musical styles (mostly recorded by the professors). Being isolated for years and immersed in their work, the professors realize that in the meantime the world has changed and new exciting musical styles emerged.

35 Serious as it may sound, the film is again another musical romance and true to its title, it tells the history of jazz with a song. Professor Frisbee, specializing in folk music decides to leave the house and find out more about jazz. On his journey around various

“night clubs, the dance halls, and yes even the honky-tonks” he gets to hear some of the most prominent (not only) swing bands and artists of the era: Tommy Dorsey’s, Charlie

Barnet’s, Mel Powell in a jam session, a combo of Lionel Hampton and Louis

Armstrong, the African-American gospel group the Golden Gate Quartet and finally his future love Honey Swanson (played by Virginia Mayo; her vocals were dubbed by Jeri

Sullavan). During the evening Frisbee persuades all the musicians to come to the professors’ house with their instruments, so that the history of jazz with its stylistic development can be re-constructed and samples recorded.

The history of jazz in the form of a song that is presented after several days of musical performances is probable the craziest account of it ever written, still after the previous experience it just makes some cockeyed sense that yet another Hollywood version of jazz development is read by the fair-haired Danny Kaye (Professor Frisbee), part of it – a ‘pure Negro spiritual’ (in fact the whole text written by white Don Raye , who is also the author of words and music for one of the Hollywood’s most overtly racist cartoons: Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat , discussed in the last chapter) sang by a commercial African-American gospel group, another by a blonde actress whose performance was dubbed and all that confirmed by the ever-smiling Louis Armstrong.

In Frisbee’s introduction (accompanied by an appropriate instrument, ultimately resulting in the whole band playing), Africa is, as usual, credited with “the first musical instrument, a drum. The hollow trunk of a tree or a tawed animal hide supplied the rhythm or beat.” However after that the music that was to become jazz is mysteriously brought to the USA through the “countries that shared the Spanish language—Cuba,

36 West Indies, and South America,” there “the rhythm or beat assumed a new form of expression. The ever widening cycle finally reached the shores of southern United

States where the beat was momentarily lost, but the melody was woven into pure Negro spiritual.” Any mention of slavery and its influence on the music’s development is completely erased. It is extremely interesting how the title song of A Song Is Born

(written by a different author) in its imagery resembles the title song of the Birth of the

Blues . Compare: “They took the tune and the words right from the Mockingbirds that’s how a song was born ( Song ) and “From a Whippoorwill out on a hill, they took a new note” ( Blues ) or “And then a soft evening breeze hummed through the willow trees that’s how a song was born” (Song) and “They heard the breeze in the trees, singing weird melodies, and they made that the start of the blues” (Blues). While Honey

Swanson in A song Is Born muses that “the Blues must have come from a sigh” Jeff in

Birth of the Blues explains it by a dissimilar motif: “From a jail came the wail of a downhearted frail, and they played that as part of the blues.” What all of these lines have in common is the lack of guilt on the white part and absence of suffering of the

African-Americans, as they are obviously the ‘they’ in both songs. If the blues has come from a sigh, it was rather a feeling of utter despair from the “rise in racial violence, discrimination, and loss of black voting rights at the turn of the century” (Cohen,

Harvey G., 1016) than “a wail of a downhearted frail.” Even if A Song Is Born shows some interracial musical performances and a relaxed interaction between African-

American artists and their white counterparts – so relaxed, in fact that the film was censored in Memphis, since “there is no segregation” (Strub, 693) – the history of the music, as told in the film, bears no resemblance to the reality. At its best it serves the goal of ‘innocent’ amusement and at its worst to once again soothe the twinging white conscience. Perhaps to compensate for the egalitarian look of the musicians’ joint final

37 performance, the racial hierarchies are clearly drawn in the divided performances at the beginning of the film, as Armstrong and Hampton play in an underground, dark, and smoky venue without a stage, with mostly African-American audience and stereotypical playing card wall decorations, while the Dorseys perform in an upper-class intellectual looking (there is a bookcase next to one of the walls) club for an expensively dressed white audience. Even the opening titles indicate the superiority of the famous white bandleaders, as Benny Goodman’s and Tommy Dorsey’s name come right after the stars Kaye and Mayo, with the soundtrack singer singing: “and then you add a clarinet”

(Benny Goodman’s name appears), “two sweet moans on the trombone” (Tommy

Dorsey) and only then, as the singer continues “let the other cats get set” Louis

Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, Mel Powell’s names appear.

If in the Hollywood’s stories of jazz the African-American contributions to the music were belittled, ignored or the music was shown as inferior to the white swing, at least African-American jazz was not condemned as pure evil. The same cannot be said about the movies discussed in the following chapter.

38 Chapter Three: Sinful Syncopations

In August 1921, Anne Shaw Faulkner, head of the Music Department of the

General Federation of Women’s Clubs, wrote an article called “Does Jazz Put the Sin in

Syncopation?” 15 In it she argued that the music “originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds … brutality and sensuality;” and as was demonstrated by “many scientists,” jazz “has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain” (35). Moreover, she wrote, “jazz disorganizes all regular laws and order;” it encourages “breaking away from all rules and conventions; it is harmful and dangerous, and its influence is wholly bad” (36). By stating that jazz “was the natural expression of the American Negroes,” used “as the accompaniment for their bizarre dances and cakewalks” (35), Faulkner linked all the negative effects listed above with African-Americans and, hence joined a large group of white critics who between 1917 and 1930 condemned jazz as being primitive, evil and, also black (Anderson, 135). All films discussed in this chapter (with two exceptions put in contrast to them) to a certain extent resonate with Faulkner’s arguments, since they all “put sin into syncopation,” i.e. they use jazz (and its connection with ‘blackness’) as a signifier of moral corruption, evil and/or sensuality of their characters or settings.

Between 1929 and 1943, Hollywood produced five all-black cast musicals, and three of them: Hallelujah! (MGM, 1929), The Green Pastures (Warner Bros., 1936), and Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943) express the conflict between Good and Evil in their narratives by way of a musical conflict between the spirituals/folk songs and jazz/the

15 Originally published in The Ladies' Home Journal , August 1921, pp. 16, 34.

39 blues. 16 This conflict is not the only thing the three musicals have in common – they were all written, and produced by white authors and filmmakers, however in one way or another, they indicate that their products were inspired by or even captured a genuine

African-American culture; King Vidor’s Hallelujah! through its realistic settings and camera shooting (much of the film was shot on location in Memphis [Cripps 1977,

245]) and both Marc Connelly and William Keighley’s The Green Pastures and

Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky in their forewords: The Green Pastures is supposed to be “an attempt to portray” how “thousands of Negroes in the Deep South visualize God and Heaven in terms of people and things they know in their every day life” whereas the story of Cabin “springs from” the “folklore of America” and “seeks to capture [its] values.” In addition to this, as several authors argued,17 all these musicals are also structured around the binary opposition between country and city.

Jazz music in Hallelujah! is first heard after the main character, young Zeke

(Daniel L. Haynes) living in a Southern plantation, comes to town to sell his, and his family’s, cotton crop. Having received the money for the cotton, Zeke is charmed by a prostitute named Chick (Nina Mae McKinney) who, interested only in his cash, takes

Zeke to a saloon in order to involve him in a fraudulent craps game with her pimp Hot

Shot (William Fountaine). Bewitching Zeke by her seductive dances and singing performance of “Swanee Shuffle” with the local jazz band’s accompaniment, Chick persuades Zeke to shoot craps with Hot Shot. After Zeke’s inevitable loss of all his money, a fight breaks out resulting in Zeke accidentally killing his own younger brother with Hot Shot’s gun. Until the saloon scene, Zeke’s simple life in the country filled with work in the fields and singing spirituals or folk songs seemed perfect. The short episode

16 Another all-black cast musical, Hearts in Dixie (Fox, 1929) uses similar conflict, however instead of jazz there are Stephen Foster’s songs (Knight, 125-127). The last musical of the five, Stormy Weather (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1943) differs from all the others for reasons discussed at the end of the chapter. 17 See: Knight, 124; Naremore 170; Knee 193.

40 in the city with its dangerous temptations and sensual jazz music which stimulates “to the vilest deeds” abruptly changes the course of his life. Upon his return home, and a family mourning over the killed brother, the desperate Zeke repents and is ‘shown the light of God’ and all of a sudden he becomes a preacher, traveling the country and spreading the word of God, followed by the family. The diabolic nature of jazz is explicitly articulated in one of Zeke’s staged preaching scenes – fighting an imaginary fist fight with the devil Zeke reproaches devil for his turning people into “gamblers, backbiters and midnight ramblers, corn-whiskey drinkers and jazz dancers.” The soundtrack of the film for that part shifts back to the ‘good’ spirituals.

The paths of Chick and Zeke nonetheless cross once again when he arrives to the town where Chick is living with Hot Shot. This time she is the one bewitched by Zeke and his religion, and after attending to one of his sermons Chick decides to leave Hot

Shot and return to Zeke. Her decision to atone for her evil deeds and leave the world of sin is also expressed in music – while dressing up for the sermon, she is singing “Give

Me That Old Time Religion.” That night Zeke’s affection for Chick resurfaces and they elope together from the sermon and from their previous lives to another village, where

Zeke finds a job in a lumber mill. However, their relationship is put to an end thanks to

Chick’s capricious nature; when Hot Shot seeks her out, Chick chooses the world of sin and city again, her choice underscored by her singing W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues”.

The song, telling a story about a love triangle, serves both to lull Zeke who has come home from work so that Chick can escape and to express her wickedness – sitting in

Zeke’s lap, she is singing in a happy vein: “Feeling tomorrow, just like I feel today, I’m gonna pack my trunk and make my getaway.” Once again, jazz (or urban blues) music plays an important role in a scene which escalates in violence and death – despite of his

41 falling asleep, Zeke notices Hot Shot and Chick’s escape and after chasing their buggy he hits Chick with his shot gun and minutes later strangles Hot Shot.

Similarly to the use of different music genres, the color of Chick’s clothes serves as an indicator of the changing moral status of her character – during her first meeting with Zeke, she is wearing a mostly black dress with a pair of white dice on her breasts, during her atonement, the color of her dress is light and at the end when she sings Zeke

“Saint Louis Blues” her dress is black again, this time with a white heart, symbolizing the only good part of her being taken over by immorality (and the despicable jazz music).

The Green Pastures was released more than six years after Hallelujah!, yet since it was based on a successful play “running on Broadway … for five years before the film was” produced (Knight, 144), the work is almost contemporary with Hallelujah! , and its use of jazz is almost identical. The film is supposed to be a rural African-

American interpretation of various episodes from the Old Testament narrated by the local preacher to a group of Sunday school children. The narrative moves “back and forth between De Lawd 18 in Heaven and the results of and prompts for his actions on

Earth” (Knight, 145) set vaguely in the environment of 20th century American South.

Most of the music heard throughout the film is spirituals performed by the famous Hall

Johnson Choir and “jazzy secular music” is used only to “signify unredeemable evil”

(Knight, 146). Thus when De Lawd (dressed as an ordinary priest) comes down to look about the Earth on a Sunday, after being first delighted by the sound of a church bell in a town on the horizon, he is disturbed by a “kind of song that is not to be sung on a

Sunday” – Zeba, a girl in a fashionable dress and “reeking with cologne,” is playing a syncopated tune on the ukulele, scat-singing. Surprised by the (in her eyes) ‘priest’s’

18 i.e. The Lord – this is how Rex Ingram’s character is called in the presumably ‘rural Negro’ dialect.

42 reproach that it is Sabbath, she disinterestedly replies: “Who cares for Sabbath, people now use Sunday to get over Saturday.” Bewildered De Lawd resumes his walk to the town, passing on his way a group of very young gamblers, drinking alcohol. When he reaches the town there is ragtime heard from the houses, and people on the street are drunk, hugging, women wearing immodest dresses, one man is frantically improvising on a drum set. Posters on the wall announce: “Gin – It’s a pleasure” and “Big Sunday

Dance.” Seeing this “breaking away of all rules and conventions” of which the disorganized (and disorganizing) jazz is a part, De Lawd decides to punish the mankind and destroy the world, except for he local preacher Noah and his family, by deluge.

In another scene (we have returned back from the imagined world to the Sunday school) the priest is speaking about the Babylonian captivity and the “wicked city of

Babylon, where the Hebrews sinned against De Lawd.” When the children ask him how they sinned, the priest explains that only adults would understand this, then he (loudly) whispers to the only other grown-up in the church, a grandfather of one of the kids:

“Just like [in] an all-night barrel house open in New Orleans,” and the grandfather knowingly nods. The biblical scene that follows shows us the sinful dark-skinned

Hebrews in a nightclub, with barely dressed dancing girls and a ‘jazzed up’ Klezmer music. A prophet comes to warn them, to “repent before it’s too late,” and he is shot to death. De Lawd’s punishment comes immediately – he abandons his children, promising never to come back to the Earth. Because in the middle section of the film there are no scenes showing any condemnable deeds, there is, therefore, no need for jazz; the soundtrack instead relies on the spirituals.

Even though Cabin in the Sky was produced in a markedly dissimilar situation than the two previously discussed projects – the USA had become involved in World

War II, and the film, supported by the Roosevelt administration, should have served

43 African-Americans as an encouragement during the war years (Boggle, 136-7), its treatment of jazz is different only stylistically, not structurally – the music retained its narrative function as an indicator of evil and sin, only the jazz performances per se were shot in a more attractive way.

The story revolves around the struggle for redemption of Little Joe, a notorious gambler who has been shot in Jim Henry’s Paradise, the local nightclub and only because of the powerful prayers of his religious wife Petunia (Ethel Waters) he has not gone to hell, but gets a six-month period to repent his sins – with a little catch – after waking up, he will not remember anything about his task. Throughout this period the powers of God and the Devil personified by the General (Kenneth Spencer) as the messenger of God and Lucifer, Jr. (Rex Ingram), the Devil’s son, are fighting over his soul; the opposites of good and evil are also indicated by their white and black uniforms, respectively.

The first indication that jazz is going to be associated with sin is more than obvious – one of the six devils in a scene taking place at the “Idea Dept. of Hotel

Hades” (the hell) is played by Louis Armstrong (the name of his character is simply the

Trumpeter). The scene opens with Armstrong’s playing his horn and the other five devils happily clapping their hands to the rhythm. They are interrupted by anxious

Lucifer, Jr. who reminds them that something must be done to gain Little Joe’s soul back. After a while, Armstrong gets the idea, enthusiastically embraced by the other devils, to corrupt Little Joe with money – let him win Irish sweepstakes and send one of their worst sinners, the temptress Georgia Brown 19 (Lena Horne) who happens to be the object of Joe’s sexual fantasies to further stimulate his demoralization. The effectiveness of the jazz trumpeter in seducing the mortals to sin is emphasized earlier

19 “Sweet Georgia Brown” is a famous song from 1925, used also as a jazz standard; its lyrics, written by A. Ken Casey, speak about the ‘colored’ temptress Georgia Brown with beautiful legs who makes all “gals” in town jealous and “pals wanna die” for her.

44 in the scene, as Armstrong claims that he started his career when owing to him “Eve got

Adam to nibble on that apple.”

Naturally, Georgia Brown, besides being a girl of loose morals, who does not object others admiring of her ‘advantages,’ is a jazz singer, and a barfly at Jim Henry’s

Paradise. Domino Johnson (John W. “Bubbles” Sublett), the villain who shot Joe at the beginning of the film, is a crap-shooting gambler, a convict, and he too has a jazz performance in the film, singing “Shine,” a song famous for Louis Armstrong’s renditions of it. In contrast to all these sinners stands Petunia, who cannot miss a single

Sunday sermon at the local church and whose character is musically defined by spirituals which she ardently sings (she even has a brief solo in an early scene) with the other God-fearing town citizens (the soloists are, just like in Green Pastures , members of the Hall Johnson Choir). So far the musical stereotypes have been the same as in

Hallelujah! and Green Pastures ; nonetheless these binary oppositions between spirituals and jazz become a little bit more complicated after a misunderstanding between Joe and Petunia which results in Joe’s leaving home and starting a romance with Georgia Brown. Having won the sweepstakes, Joe has now become a rich man and to celebrate his new status, he invites Duke Ellington and his orchestra to play at Jim

Henry’s Paradise.

Contrasting to all expectations and previous actions in the film, this event is not depicted as a moral catastrophe, but was actually photographed rather favorably: the orchestra’s performance starts with the camera sliding over the street that leads to Jim

Henry’s, where lines of already dancing couples are approaching the night club in an air of cheerful anticipation of a great entertainment. Inside the club, the orchestra swings with ease and great control and the crowded place swarms with dancing couples enjoying themselves. Because in Green Pastures the role of jazz was mainly to express

45 chaos and disorder, Ellington’s orchestra would not be the right choice for creating such an atmosphere, since it was one of the most (if not the most) sophisticated African-

American jazz bands whose bandleader was equally influenced by African-American folk music and European classical music and whose own work reached far beyond a dance band repertoire, and it seems that because of that Vincente Minnelli, the director, chose Ellington’s orchestra for the scene. As James Naremore noted in his essay on

Cabin in the Sky , Jim Henry’s Paradise does not look like a “smoky den of iniquity,” and this sequence strongly resembles “a showcase for a famous orchestra” (182).

Naremore is perhaps right in his argument that Minnelli tried to work against the ‘rural innocence’ versus ‘urban decadence’ stereotype used in Hallelujah! and Green

Pastures , for instance by creating non-realistic settings, or by focusing more on the nightclub than the church; however the ultimate result is the same – in the end the club is proclaimed as a place of evil and the whole building is destroyed. Before leaving to the other musical numbers of the film, let us stay with Duke Ellington for a while. After the initial dancing scene, the orchestra suddenly stops, and the dancers come closer to the bandstand where Ellington’s trombone player Lawrence Brown delivers a short

‘jazz sermon,’ during which each of his phrases, his ‘call,’ receives a ‘response,’ a shout, from the by-standing dancers. Jazz historian Krin Gabbard suggested that this solo, a part of Ellington’s composition “Going Up” written exclusively for the film, was composed as an attempt to subvert the dichotomy working in the film which condemned jazz (and consequently the band itself) as evil. To execute this ‘protest,’ Ellington chose a man who was a minister’s son and a teetotaler, and who started his career in church – a jazz musician as far from sin as one can imagine. (Gabbard, 183-4)

The narrative of the film continues towards the final conflict and its resolution – arriving at the club are Domino Johnson, freshly released from prison, who performs the

46 “Shine” number to celebrate his return to his ‘surrogate home,’ followed by Joe with

Georgia Brown. The last person to enter the club is Petunia, determined to win her husband back. Georgia starts singing “Honey in the Honeycomb,” and when Petunia arrives, clad in an expensive, glittering dress very distinct from the humble clothes the she has worn until this scene, she competes with Georgia, singing the same jazz song, surprisingly with much more pep and in a faster tempo than Georgia did, and she finishes her performance with a series of step figures with Domino, thus beating

Georgia with her own weapons, and at the same time making Joe jealous. As the jazz performance and the extravagant robe is for the pious Petunia only a masquerade to make Joe fall for her once again, before long she grows uneasy with the proximity of the sinful Domino, and Joe sensing her feelings rushes to help her. A fistfight between the two men breaks loose, and when Petunia realizes that the inexperienced Joe cannot win, she prays to God for help. The non-present God answers to her prayer with a tornado, yet before the storm reaches the club destroying the whole building, Domino manages to shoot both Joe and Petunia to death. A minute after Joe awakes and realizes that everything that happened after he had been wounded by Domino at the beginning of the film was merely a dream. Learning from his previous mistakes, he promises

Petunia to change for the better so that they could one day reach the heavenly cabin in the sky, her notion of their personal paradise. The final catastrophe shows that despite

Minnelli’s effort the film’s overall message does not differ from Hallelujah! or Green

Pastures , it is perhaps even worse – by making jazz attractive and alluring, by making the murderous Domino seem a happy and elegant dancer and jazz singer just before he shoots two persons the ultimate effect is even more profound – no matter how enchanting the music is, it still remains devil’s means of temptation, only the more elaborate the more harmless it seemed. After all, Jim Henry’s Paradise was only a fake

47 paradise, and it is better for Joe that he stops thinking of it, focusing only on the rural cabin in the sky that is awaiting him and Petunia. By their insistent preference of the safe country over the dangerous city, these three films seem to promote the idea that

African-Americans were better off in the rural South, and that their migration to the

Northern cities during the past decades must have been harmful even for them with all the clubs full of dangerous jazz music, illicit behavior and illegal substances awaiting there to lead them onto the path of sin. Moreover, the statements about the source of these narratives in the opening credits must have served as a further evidence for those white Americans inclined to believe this concept; that such anxiety over the city was a genuine feeling among African-Americans.

If all the three discussed films suggest that African-Americans favoring jazz stay away from church, the real attitude of the persons favoring jazz the most, that is jazz musicians, towards the church was rather different. Buddy Bolden, who was probably the most important cornetist in New Orleans, and who markedly contributed to the early developments of jazz solo performance, attended church to draw inspiration from the music. According to banjoist Johnny St. Cyr: “Bolden got most of his tunes from the

Holy Roller Church, the Baptist church on Jackson Avenue and Franklin” (quoted in

Goia, 31). Another musician from New Orleans, drummer Paul Barbarin, recalled how similar the rhythms he heard in the African-American Baptist church were to ragtime

(Ibid) and Willie Smith and Eubie Blake, two jazz piano players arrived at the same conclusion with regards to rhythmic chord progressions (Tirro, 108-109). Some musicians learned how to play their instrument in the church as children, and only later started to play jazz, just like Sarah Vaughan who became organist at her church when she was twelve, and moved to the Earl Hines’ band at the age of nineteen (Tirro, 283).

As Albert Murray in his book Stomping the Blues about the African-American

48 community and blues (Murray does not distinguish between jazz or blues) music summarized: “such is the nature of the blues musician’s development that even when he or she did not begin as a church musician, he or she is likely to have been conditioned by church music from infancy to a far greater extent than by blues music as such” (27).

In contrast with the cinematic fantasies, where the notorious gamblers and other sinners seem to inhabit a space divided from their pious counterparts, Murray reminds us that many of the ‘Saturday Night revelers’ were “present at Sunday Morning Service, sometimes with bloodshot eyes and queasy stomachs.” It is clear that both events had a certain and unique function in the everyday life of the community, they did not stand against each other.

Hallelujah! , Green Pastures and Cabin in the Sky used African-American jazz to signify the moral corruption within the African-American community, however many

Hollywood films in the late 1920s and 1930s used jazz and its connection to ‘blackness’ as a metaphor for “transgressive female sexuality” of the sexualized white woman who through the music is constructed as a “symbolic octoroon,” losing her white purity

(Stanfield, 95-6). According to Peter Stanfield, jazz was ideal for such constructions because of its “cultural instability,” since it seemed at the same time as a “product of an overcultivated metropolitan sensibility, and the natural primitive instinctual urge of a rural premodern sensibility” (95). On the example of “St. Louis Blues” (song that was used in Hallelujah! as well) Stanfield shows how white women characters in

Hollywood movies could be ‘blackened’ merely by listening to the song on their phonographs or when in proximity to an African-American woman who was singing the song. Even though Stanfield limits his analysis with the end of the 1930s, echoes of such a Hollywood strategy can be found in later films as well. In two movies discussed in the previous chapter, New Orleans and A Song Is Born , “St. Louis Blues” or a song

49 with similar motives is used to accomplish the same result – to show the low virtues of a white female character. In New Orleans , when Nick Duquesne wants to save Miralee from moral harm, seeing her growing enchantment with Storyville, he takes her on a car ride through the white part of the quarter where corruption and decay proliferates – the streets are full of drunk patrons, jazz music is heard from the open doors of the numerous bars and then a woman on the street starts singing a paraphrase of St. Louis

Blues: “I said ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. If drinking don’t get you, dancing must.” 20 The song indicates that this woman, standing alone on the street in the middle of the night is most probably a prostitute. In A Song Is Born , Honey Swanson sings

“Daddy-O,” a jazzy tune that was written by white authors Don Raye and Gene de Paul, but which just like “St. Louis Blues” is about a love triangle (Honey sings: “the lipstick on your shirt isn’t mine”). The lyrics of the song do not make it clear what race do the protagonists belong to, but Honey’s line “I’m gonna teach you some blues” suggests she is in command of the ‘black’ idiom which she later proves even further when explaining the professors how to conduct a ‘jam session.’ Through the character of Honey, jazz, organized crime, and white and African-American cultures are linked together since her ex-boyfriend is a mobster boss, she speaks jive just like the uneducated Bucks and

Bubbles window washer characters and she falls in love with one the professors, the result being she is neither ‘white’ nor ‘black’ but staying somewhere in the middle. It is worth noting that Honey’s predecessor, the stripper “Sugarpuss” O’Shea, in the comedy

Ball of Fire (Samuel Goldwin, 1941) of which A Song Is Born is a remake, was played by Barbara Stanwyck, whose “portrayals of sexually transgressive women” in a number of her 1930s films were, according to Peter Stanfield, accompanied “by ‘St. Louis

Blues,’ making the song something of an intertextual signifier of her star persona” (96).

20 The original ends with: “If my blues don’t get you, my jazzing must.”

50 In 1948, the aura of jazz as a dark and sinful music befitting low instincts because of its

‘black’ origin seems to have faded but it was still recognizable.

The US involvement in World War II caused a temporary change in Hollywood politics of using jazz, and so in the all-black musical Stormy Weather (1943) and a war propaganda short Shoe Shine Boy (MGM, 1943), African-American jazz not only is harmless to the general public, but the music also conveys a message that surpasses the limitations of a mere entertainment – African-American jazz is presented and celebrated as a manifestation of patriotism. Unlike the other all-black cast musicals already mentioned, jazz in Stormy Weather is treated as a part of “the magnificent contribution of the colored race to the entertainment of the world during the past twenty-five years”

– a statement written on a special edition of “Theatre World” magazine which Bill

Williamson (Bill Robinson), the main male protagonist, is reading at the beginning of the film. Seeing familiar faces in the magazine, Williamson recalls some moments in his career as a Hollywood entertainer. His first memories take us back to the end of World

War I, as he and his fellow members of Jim Europe's 15th New York Regiment band receive a great welcome upon their return from France. The shots of Williamson walking in the parade are crosscut with the authentic footage showing the real regiment’s return, an educational passage reminding the Americans that African-

Americans served in World War I as well. As the film’s narrative is stretched between the two wars, most of its musical performances are ‘just’ entertainment, however the conclusion is set at the beginning of World War II and here patriotism comes into play again. Cab Calloway (playing himself) comes to visit the now-retired Williamson, and invites him to join in “the big party [they] are having downtown.” “It’s for the soldiers,” says Calloway. Williamson: “For the soldiers?” Calloway: “Sure, a big blow up before they go over seas, and Bill I want you to be there.” As a good American, Williamson

51 eagerly replies: “You bet I’ll be there, anything for the soldiers.” The final performance is a medley of performances by Calloway, Lena Horne, Bill Robinson Cab Calloway and the Nicholas Brothers. Despite the limitations of the all-black cast musical that the film inevitably suffered – that is, the necessity of creating an all-African-American world without any presence of whites whatsoever, two letters sent to the Chicago

Defender newsroom illustrate that it had a profound effect on the African-American soldiers overseas: Sgt. Elijah Brown described the film as “one of the greatest movie productions ever released,” adding that he is “fighting in order that stars like Lena

Horne, Bill Robinson, and Cab Calloway will continue to invade Hollywood and give to the world performances like ‘Stormy Weather.’” After having mentioned the cinema he continues to list some more general reasons for his fight – “the perpetuation of these rights to demonstrate our abilities and skills, to attain knowledge, and to express out attitudes, emotions and ideas.” 21 Sgt. Fred Thomson expressed his belief about the power of movies over public opinion, especially with regards to opinions about the

‘other,’ praising the film as an example of a work of art that can positively “bias the minds of people.” Because of that the new type of African-American artists such as

Lena Horne, Catherine Dunham, and Cab Calloway “should be allowed to shine in their arts on equal basis with the other contemporary [white] artists of Hollywood” and the old type “Mammy and Yassuh” types such as Louise Beavers or Eddie “Rochester”

Anderson should not be given Hollywood opportunities any more, since their influence on the public is obviously negative. 22

The MGM’s Shoe Shine Boy short which was released in the same year as

Stormy Weather is perhaps an even more radical example of how World War II temporarily changed racial politics in Hollywood. It starts with a written introduction,

21 See: “What I Am Fighting For.” Chicago Defender , August 21, 1943, p. 14. 22 See: “Soldiers Write on Negro in Films.” Chicago Defender , August 5, 1944, p. 12.

52 using the form of a fairy tale, the text being supplemented with pictures: “Once upon a time there was a kid who loved – (a picture of horn). He could listen to it all day. He loved it so much that he was offered (a picture of a sack inscription on which reads

$1,000,000). Now this complicated matters because the kid loved two things. One was

(horn) and the other – well that’s our story.” What is most interesting is that the kid is an African-American boy, the only African-American in the picture, but all of a sudden, nobody in the short seems to be surprised, or bothered by it, nor is there any need to point the fact out. The boy’s dream is a trumpet in a pawnshop, yet his job, he is a boot black, cannot earn him more enough than to pay the first installment. When desperately seeking some new customers, by accident he meets two white musical talent scouts, who, when they find out what he needs the remaining two dollars for, decide to test his talent, and as they are sitting in a café featuring a jazz band, the boy is lent a trumpet to show how good player he is. As he starts playing with the band in the café, gradually the whole place stands in amazement, astonished by his technique and performance – the cooks, the patrons who were about to leave stay; everybody looks genuinely pleased by his music, smiling.

One of the men immediately offers him his services, promising that he is “going to make a million dollars” Surprisingly the boy refuses: No, “I just want you to give me two dollars [to buy the horn]. I’ve got to practice all night. I’ve got to blow the horn for something big. I don’t want my conscience to bother me. I’m going in the army tomorrow; I’m going to blow the horn for Uncle Sam.” While the first man is left speechless, the other gives the boy the two dollars he asked for, saying proudly: “Kid, you’re a real American…. I want you to blow one in Hitler’s eye. Just for me.” Then the short concludes with a montage of the kid, wearing the U.S. uniform, blowing the horn, and war action, followed by a capture: “Yes – this kid loved two things – his horn…

53 and his country.” Of course, the short had no other ambitions than those of soothing the racial tensions in the society during the war, but the scene of white appreciation of an

African-American jazz musician without any sense of superiority or patronizing would be extremely rare to find in any Hollywood movie produced before the Civil Rights era.

54 Chapter Four: Jazz Cartoons – The Jungle Rhythm & The Swingin’ City

The tremendous impact that jazz had on American culture manifested itself not only in the early Hollywood feature films but also in a great many short animated cartoons produced in the 1930s and 1940s. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of cartoons featuring jazz on their soundtrack, employing famous jazz performer caricatures or adapting the rhythm of the music as the driving force for the narrative were created during the studio era in all animation studios. The union of jazz and the animated cartoon truly was quite natural, since the two art forms have a lot in common. As Berry

Keith Grant pointed out: “Just as jazz escapes the constraints of melody and notation, so the cartoon is the one type of cinema that has frequently been able to break away from the tyranny of the narrative” (22). Moreover, the incredible “transformations of objects and the visual surprises typical of cartoons are analogous to the unpredictable musical potential extracted from standard pop tunes by jazz musicians” (Ibid). With all their seeming artistic freedom, however, most cartoons dealing with jazz could not escape the constraints of the ‘collective imagination’ of white America as to the associations that the music evoked at those times, or the pervasive stereotypical visualization of African-

Americans. The strong link between jazz and African-American culture as perceived and interpreted by white Americans resulted (especially in the 1930s) in the materialization of the aura of jazz as a threatening, mysterious, and foreign phenomenon in the choice of the cartoons’ settings – frequently they take place in dark, uncanny locations such as caves, a coal mine, a swamp, a graveyard, jungle, an abandoned ghost town; or characters – ghosts, or cannibal jazz performers appear in a number of animated short subjects. If the setting was urban in character, the main jazz performance was inevitably set in or near a quarter full of equally dangerous night clubs the patrons of which overindulged in hazard, alcohol and/or mad dances.

55 While nowadays short cartoons are primarily considered as children’s entertainment which can be mostly seen on television, in the 1930s and 1940s, thanks to the so-called diversified bill, the animated cartoon was merely one course on the movie theaters’ cinematic menu that usually consisted of a newsreel, comedy short, a travelogue, a couple of trailers, and a live stage show, all wrapped around the main course – the feature film, and that was intended for every possible age group (Doherty,

149-51). The overall idea of the film bill was to offer something interesting for the parents as well as the children, for the members of the working class as well as the middle class. Sometimes the ‘balanced program’ was also meant to offer some treat for the ‘separate-but-equal’ balconies of the segregated movie theaters where the ‘colored’ spectators had their designated seats. Eric Loren Smoodin who has studied the actual film bills from the 1930s and 1940s gives an example of the exhibitor’s attempt to balance the bill so that the African-American spectators too would be “given value” – in

March 1934, an RKO theater screened together for three weeks It Happened One Night , a feature film fantasy about the Great Depression, where “black people have no place” and, to outweigh this disproportion, an “Amos ‘n’ Andy” series animated cartoon called

The Lion Tamer (Smoodin, 59-60). Just like the feature film Check and Doublecheck

(see Chapter One) The Lion Tamer cartoon was based on the highly popular radio show of Amos and Andy, a white fantasy about the life of the “black people.” Similarly to the feature films discussed in the previous chapters, all animation studios were owned by whites and most likely all the animators working for the studios were white as well, their work is merely a white interpretation of what jazz and the life of African-

Americans was like. Thanks to the diversified bill, these interpretations helped further shape the opinions of the all-age movie going public on jazz and African-American jazz performance, reinforcing certain stereotypes and myths surrounding the music.

56 The first animation studio to create important jazz animated cartoons was the

Fleischer Studios of the three Fleischer brothers: Max, Dave and Lou. The Fleischer studio has been interested in music from its very beginning, and so it were the

Fleischers who in 1924 produced the first sound cartoons and who revolutionized the popular sing-alongs in movie theaters by featuring a bouncing ball moving around the projected lyrics of a song, leading the audience syllable by syllable through their favorite tunes (Austen, 62). Max Fleischer also developed the Rotoscope, “a method of filming live action and then tracing over it frame by frame,” and the Rotograph, which made the combination of live action with animation easier (Austen, 61) – methods utilized in the jazz cartoons as well.

In the early 1930s, the studio made a number of unprecedented co-operations with popular African-American jazz musicians, including Cab Calloway, Louis

Armstrong, Don Redman, and the Mills Brothers. Paramount, the Fleischer cartoons’ distribution company, provided the necessary venues and equipment and live performances of the artists’ well-known tunes were photographed, in order to be combined with the animated sequences based on these performances (Austen, 62). The enterprise was mutually advantageous – the studio acquired for a modest fee a valuable material of favorite musicians, and the musicians gained access to a highly effective promotion device of their work, since Paramount consented to book these artists in their theater chain, screening the cartoons (which were usually titled according to the particular songs performed in them) during the weeks preceding the performances

(Austen, 62-3). As former Fleischer animator Myron Waldman recalled: “The performers jumped at the chance to appear on screens all over – coverage they could not get before” (Lehman, 30).

57 Some of the cartoons from the series, for instance I Ain’t Got Nobody (1932) featuring the Mills Brothers quartet, were rather innocent works when compared to the others. This cartoon was one of the studio’s Screen Songs that used the bouncing ball to indicate to the audience what to sing, and it starts (as all the other cartoons) with live footage of the musicians, a title with their name and information that all the instruments heard during cartoon, except for the guitar, are emulated by the quartet’s voices (a trademark skill of the group) is superimposed over their performance. The initial part of the cartoon consists of various tricks that a lion magician performs in his living room – animating the furniture and statues, etc., while watching the quartet in his television.

The rest of the time is given to the title song performance and the bouncing ball.

Artistically not an extraordinary cartoon, but must have served the promotion sake well.

Don Redman’s appearance in the cartoon I Heard (1933) is another relatively harmless short. Unlike I Ain’t Got Nobody , the I Heard cartoon is a Talkaroon with the studio’s most popular star, Betty Boop – an attractive and impudent young girl donning a dangerously short black dress (the garter on her left thigh is clearly visible whenever she dances or walks) with a childlike voice dubbed by Mae Questel, usually accompanied by her friends: a dog Bimbo, and inky clown Ko Ko. The cartoon is set in a coal mine called “Never mine,” and Don Redman’s orchestra is playing in Betty

Boop’s Tavern, where the animal miners eat their lunch (the band is not represented in the cartoon, only in the initial live-footage part; the title “Betty Boop’s Saloon” over their heads, albeit incorrect, however implies their presence in the locale). The orchestra supplied background music for the whole piece, with the title tune being performed in the second half of the short (a rule applied to most of the Fleischer cartoons discussed here). While stoping in one of the mine’s shafts, Bimbo discovers an opening out of which strange noises are coming. His alarmed exclamation “I heard” triggers the title

58 song performance, while the animation evolves into a chase, since the source of the noise, a group of ghosts playing baseball with a dynamite bomb, start pursuing Bimbo and Betty. The motif of a jazz soundtrack-driven ghost chase is quite common in the

Fleischer cartoons. In 1930 the studio produced a short called “Swing You Sinners” with a black chicken-stealing dog who, hiding on a graveyard, is reproached by a group of ghosts and live grave stones with stereotypical African-American features, exhorting him: “You’ll never rob another chicken house, brother !” – an indication that the black dog is an African-American character as well. To claim that the ghosts in the “I Heard” cartoon are to represent Don Redman and his orchestra would perhaps be a little far- fetched, a completely different situation is however with the ghosts and the formidable

Old Man of the Mountain in the Fleischer cartoons featuring Cab Calloway.

When the Fleischer brothers decided to co-operate with African-American jazzmen, Lou Fleischer, a studied musician and a person responsible for cartoon soundtrack choice, visited their shows in Harlem Cotton Club and other venues

(Goldmark, 85). Cab Calloway’s dance style captivated the Fleischers to such an extent that the band leader is featured in three of their Betty Boop cartoons, each of them rather interesting in both the animation art and the underlying racial and sexual politics.

By way of rotoscoping, the Calloway’s personifications in the cartoons are endowed with a precise emulation of steps and gestures Calloway was famous for. In Minnie the

Moocher (1932), a cartoon named after Calloway’s biggest hit, the bandleader was drawn as a walrus ghost who tells Betty and Bimbo the story of Minnie’s life. After the obligatory intro with the orchestra (which continues to play throughout the cartoon), the animation sets the narrative in Betty’s home, where her angry Jewish parents (the father has a yarmulke on his head) “pick on her” so persistently that she decides to leave home. Meeting her friend Bimbo, they head out of the safe neighborhood into an ever

59 darkening forest, with numerous clues given to the spectator that something scary is about to happen (the wind starts blowing, an owl is whooping). Out of fear they hide in a gloomy cave, when suddenly the Calloway’s translucent walrus materializes in front of them. As the walrus starts his performance, other scary scenes open in front of the terrified Betty and Bimbo – three skeletons in a stylized bar drink a potion that blackens their bones until they disintegrate, prisoners are electrocuted, eyeless dead cats drink from a milk bottle with multiple hoses which resembles a hookah, etc. – all accompanied by the walrus singing about Minnie, a “red-hot hoochie-coocher” who

“messed around with a bloke named Smokey,” and kicked “the gong around” (i.e. smoked opium). Just in the moment when Cab’s song attracted other ghosts who gathered near and the infectious rhythm managed to dispel Betty and Bimbo’s fear of the dark music (they are swinging to the music) a gigantic flying witch appears and chases everybody out of the cave, the music having risen in speed from the slow

“Minnie” into a hot jazz stomp. Pursued by all ghosts from the cave, Betty reaches her secure home, hiding under the blanket in her room. But for the witch, Betty was close to being seduced by the dangerous music lurking in the cave-like Harlem night clubs to become a “red-hot hoochie-coocher” herself. The remains of her farewell letter shown in the cartoon’s last frame say it clearly: “Home, sweet home.”

In another Calloway “Betty Boop” cartoon of 1932, The Old Man of the

Mountain , Betty is again outside the safe confines of her home – on a tourist trip to visit the Old Man of the Mountain. In the cartoon, the Old Man is not a piece of rock resembling a human face, it is an actual man, and according to numerous indications in the cartoon, not only a formidable person but also a highly sexually potent one – every living creature is fleeing from the proximity of the mountain (except for Betty who decided to visit it, despite being warned by an owl whose beak is moving in sync with

60 Calloway’s singing that the Old Man “will eat you up”), including a hippopotamus woman with a triplet of ‘little Men of the Mountain’ in her pram, lamenting desperately:

“The Old man of the Mountain.” Betty’s own sexual attractiveness is underlined several times; for example at the beginning when a crippled man throws away his sticks after having lustfully gaped at her body ‘from top to bottom.’ When Betty reaches the cave near the top of the mountain, the Old Man’s dwelling, the Old Man (who looks like a

Caucasian hermit with a long white beard and an animal hide around his body) jumps out at her and entering the cave, they start singing a duet. In this cartoon, Betty is much less afraid of Calloway’s music, swinging her hips to the rhythm of their Hi-De-Ho duet despite the fact that the Old Man asks from her, in order to get along with him to “kick the gong around.” When they finish the duet, Betty even exchanges a dialog line with the Old Man – Betty: “Whatcha gonna do now?” “I’m gonna do the best I can,” responds the Old Man, starting a rotoscoped dance, Calloway fashion. The duet had soothed the Old Man’s desires towards Betty, but soon, he cannot resist showing his true nature and starts chasing her down the mountain, scatting wildly “The Scat Song.”

Finally, the animals that hid from him in the forest help Betty and overcome the Old

Man. It seems that only the white character of the Old Man enabled Calloway to get away with this sexually charged exchange between a white woman and an African-

American, since the fear of ‘miscegenation of white and black races’ was so ubiquitous during the segregation period that the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 explicitly banned such scenes in movies. Nonetheless, the flexibility of the cartoon characters allowed a similar scene in the Fleischer’s animated take on the Snow White fairy tale.

Produced in 1933, the Fleischer’s Snow White cartoon based some of its humor on the literal reading of the name – the short takes place in a ‘snow white’ winter, and

61 Betty Boop, the beautiful niece of the evil queen, escapes her execution only to be frozen into an icy coffin after falling from a hill into a pond. Taken by the seven dwarfs to the Mystery Cave, Betty is followed by Bimbo and Ko Ko, and later also by the evil queen who transformed herself into a dark-faced witch. This cartoon differs from the other Fleischer’s shorts with African-American jazz musicians in that Cab Calloway recorded only one song, “St. James’ Infirmary Blues,” for the piece, the rest was probably composed by the studio staff. As they are entering the cave, Ko Ko, representing Calloway, gets down to singing, telling ‘folks’ that he is going to see his dead baby in the hospital, “she’s so sweet, so cold, so fair.” The baby, “so cold and fair,” is of course meant to be Betty. The whole procession with the dwarfs carrying the icy coffin with Betty in front and the witch-queen in the rear seems to be floating on an enormous ice floe in an underground river, since the background is in motion. The witch by magic transforms Ko Ko into a white ghost with trousers (this is analogous to

Calloway’s white dresses) who dances-rotoscopes while singing about his plans for his own funeral. The background follows closely the images of the lyrics, so for instance when Calloway sings about “six crap shooting pall bearers,” there are crap shooting skeletons frozen on the sides of the cave, and later a ghostly jazz band. If in the Old

Man Calloway’s impersonation expressed desire for a white girl, in Snow White this impersonation shows grief about his white girlfriend, an inconceivable scene in any feature film of the era.

The metaphor of underground vaults for jazz clubs and ghosts for African-

American jazz musicians (both are active at night) was not the only one the Fleischer studio utilized. As Louis Armstrong’s appearance in a Fleischer cartoon I’ll Be Glad

When You’re Dead You Rascal You (1932) shows, Cab Calloway should be glad to have been drawn as a ghost, for Armstrong’s impersonation is way more degrading than that

62 of a ghost. Set in the African jungle, the cartoon starts (after a brief appearance of

Armstrong and his band performing an instrumental version of “Shine”) with Betty being kidnapped by a cannibal tribe, and Bimbo and Ko Ko trying to find her whereabouts. Before they can realize it, both of them are in a large cauldron, surrounded by natives, who dance with knives in their hands around the cauldron. Music for this passage is a simple drum beat with an oriental xylophone melody – a nonsensical convulsion of two stereotypical motifs of ‘otherness’ – the beat of the ‘dark continent’ with a vaguely Asian melody. Luckily they escape, yet one of the natives pursues them with a spear. During the chase the title melody emerges as the band takes up the tempo set up by the tom-tom drumming. As the sky darkens, the cannibal’s head grows larger until his whole body becomes the head soaring over Bimbo and Ko Ko. With

Armstrong’s voice and facial expression (and with the stereotypical thick lips, a feature common in all African-American caricatures of the era) the animated head starts singing the title chorus. After the first couple of lines the cannibal head transforms into

Armstrong’s actual head, the footage taken from the live performance shot in the same angle as the cannibal was drawn only a few frames before. The lyrics of the song tell a love-triangle story, and are not free of ambiguous naughty lines such as: “You gave my wife a coca-cola so that you can play on her Victrola 23 ,” yet the Fleischers were interested in the literal meaning of the title only, and unlike with the Calloway cartoons there is no ambiguity in I’ll Be Glad . After finishing the chorus, Armstrong’s head transforms back into his caricature head and this into the native. Finally, Bimbo and Ko

Ko discover to where Betty was dragged by the cannibals. Tied to a stake in another native village, a group of cannibals dance around Betty in the same fashion as in the

23 Victrola was a popular phonograph model. As Peter Stanfield pointed out, Hollywood feature films of the 1920s and 1930s frequently depict women playing records on their phonographs, as a part of the women’s active seduction of the men. See: Peter Stanfield. Body And Soul: Jazz, Blues, And Race In American Film, 1927-63 . University of Illinois Press, 2005, pp.104-7.

63 previous scene with Bimbo and Ko Ko. Their dance is supported by a sound combination of Armstrong’s solo backed by his band and the ‘cannibal beat’ from the aforementioned scene. These two elements are visualized on the screen as a cannibal bongo drummer on the left side of the screen, and a cannibal trumpet player on the right side – a few seconds before this composition there was a crosscut to the live performance, where Armstrong moved to the right side of the screen near the microphone, to play a solo. Just like in the chase scene, Armstrong is again linked to a cannibal, this time a trumpeter whose performance matches the sound on the soundtrack. This unflattering comparison befell not only on Armstrong – the movements and facial expressions of a cannibal cook/percussionist beating a cauldron with a pair of sticks shown in a close-up during this second cannibal dance were modeled after Armstrong’s drummer, and to make the point crystal clear, there are two crosscuts from animated action to live action ‘revealing’ this resemblance between the modern suit-wearing African-American drummer and the grass skirt-clad native.

Naturally, I’ll Be Glad When You Dead was not the only cartoon striving to link jazz music with jungle. In 1938, Warner Bros. produced a color (all the cartoons discussed so far were black and white) animated cartoon called The Isle of Pingo-

Pongo , a travelogue spoof about an island near Africa, narrated by a voiceover.

Although it was obviously meant as a parody, the cartoon makes similar claims and uses similar imagery as the other cartoons linking African-American jazz with jungle. As the camera approaches a native village, the voiceover informs us: “Near the village we hear the primitive beat of jungle tom-tom. We come upon a group of native musicians beating the savage rhythm that is as old and as primitive as the jungle itself.”

Meanwhile the camera focuses on a group of four cannibals with massive white lips and bones in their hair, beating the same simple rhythm as we could hear in I’ll Be Glad ,

64 and then all of a sudden they rise and perform a short song in country & western style with perfect American English accent, and as abruptly as before they sit down and continue their ‘native’ drumming. Another scene shows “a pandemonium of vibrant jungle rhythm” when “a native celebration gets under way,” but instead of a ‘primitive dance’ the cannibal couples are dancing a minuet with grace and high style, followed by a cannibal jive to “Sweet Georgia Brown,” announced by a short cannibal wearing a grass skirt, a vest, with a bowler hat on his head and a cigar in his mouth who strikingly resembles Fats Waller. As the camera refocuses, the Fats cannibal sings with Mills

Brothers resembling cannibals (wearing grass skirts and black ties) a rendition of the song over a microphone. The song performance is interrupted by a short tom-tom group break (this time a more sophisticated drum pattern is used) which leads into a big band swing performance by the natives who suddenly acquired all the proper instruments needed and to which a row of female ‘Cotton Club’ dancers (with grass skirts and bras) shake their bodies, and a native trumpet player hits high notes while simultaneously bouncing off a large native drum which he ‘plays’ with his bottom. A similar gag where a native drummer bounces off a drum with his bottom appeared also in The Old Mill

Pond (MGM, 1936). In this cartoon a group of African-American frog caricatures gather for a swamp jazz concert and an Ethel Waters frog sings a jazzy pop tune about her musical inspiration coming from a “King Kong man from a jungle land” who taught her the jungle rhythm (presumably played by the frog native on the stage) so she stopped “doin’ old style wooin’” and now sings jazz, a music based on this primitive rhythm.

A Walter Lantz cartoon of 1944, Jungle Jive takes on the connection between the primitive nations and hot jazz from a different angle. Here a group of natives (with dark skin, but closer in their looks to inhabitants of a Pacific island than a group of

65 Africans) find on the beach a case drifted ashore which contains a complete set of jazz band instruments. After a few false starts and shy attempts to play the instruments, the natives burst into a professional swing performance executed with high precision and coordination, an exceptional or rather impossible view, considering their inexperience with the instruments. This cartoon seems to extend the notion of jazz coming directly from the African jungle to an idea that the music comes in fact from an inherent quality of any primitive culture which, given the circumstances, would foster the style just as the African-Americans did.

The roots of such visual connections of jazz and jungle sprang from several sources – the early analyses of the music written by white critics in the 1920s (or even before), and the environments where African-American jazz performances frequently took place. Both persons who condemned the music, like Anne Shaw Faulkner (her article is quoted in the previous chapter), and persons who found elements of the music unique and interesting, explained jazz in similar terms, as “the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer,” (Faulkner, 35) “an attempt to reproduce the marvelous syncopation of the African jungle” or “the music of contemporary savages” (Goldmark, 80). The black- and-tan jazz clubs in New York or Chicago then were amply decorated with palm trees and African artifacts, and often the dancers wore grass skirts or animal hides (see for example one of the expensive production numbers in Stormy Weather where dancers are clad in zebra costumes and Bill Robinson steps over a cascade of enormous tom-toms, dressed like a native). Such fantasies, when exposed to the almost limitless possibilities of the animated cartoon could then easily be transformed into the animated ‘reality’ – in the cartoon there is no difference between the performance and narrative, anybody, including inanimate objects, can become a performer of a jazz song, there is no need for any explanation how the cannibal tribe obtained modern jazz instruments and musical

66 skills to play them. Hence, such cartoons could reinforce the white notion that African-

Americans, under the thin layer of modern clothes, were still savage in nature. It is ironic that the “marvelous syncopation of the African jungle” was in most cases scored as the simple unimaginative one-two-three-four beat lacking any syncopation and complexity whatsoever and which is hardly imaginable as a potential source for jazz rhythm.

While the Fleischer studio worked directly with African-American jazz musicians and could therefore boast with the ‘real stuff,’ other studios usually sufficed with caricatures. The Warner Bros.’s Isle of Pingo-Pongo and MGM’s The Old Mill

Pond have already been mentioned, but during the 1930s these two studios produced other animated cartoons with such caricatures. MGM, for example made a series of three cartoons featuring frog caricatures of Armstrong, Calloway, Mills Brothers, or

Fats Waller in interaction with a small African-American boy Bosko. The narrative formula for the series was quite simple – Bosko was asked by his mother to bring his grandmother a bag of fresh cookies (ala Little Red Riding Hood). On his way to grandma, Bosko with his wild imagination experienced various adventures with the jazzy frogs. As the title suggests, in the first episode Little Ol’ Bosko and the Pirates ,

(1937) Bosko fancies an encounter with a ship full of frog pirates. The captain – a vague

Louis Armstrong caricature (a frog with a trumpet and coarse voice) – as soon as he finds out that the little boy carries the delicious cookies, mobilizes the whole crew to rob the boy of this alleged culinary treasure. The attack is accompanied by a simple jazzy tune (no melodies by the respective artists caricatured in the series were used) performed in alternative takes by Armstrong, Mills Brothers frog quartet, and Fats toad

Waller with trivial lyrics focusing only on the contents of the bag and containing lines such as: “You’ve got cookies and we’ve got no cookies” and so on. The other two

67 episodes, Little Ol’ Bosko and the Cannibals (1937) (yes, African-American jazzmen as cannibals once again) and Little Ol’ Bosko in Bagdad (1938) go about in a similar vein as the first one, only the cookie-focused attack is led by cannibal frogs or the sultan of

Baghdad and his subjects, respectively. The most interesting aspect of these cartoons is in fact not connected with jazz – in contrast to most of the other cartoons depicting

African-Americans (with jazz or without), and in contrast to the animal caricatures of the musicians (frogs have been considered as “suitable animals” since they have large mouths, one of the MGM animators recalled [Lehman, 39]) Bosko is a realistically drawn African-American boy without large lips or bulging eyes.

In 1934, the Production Code Administration began enforcing the Production

Code enacted in 1930 which meant that every movie script had to be approved of before exhibition (Lehman, 38). Fearing the financial losses, by 1935 all animation studios became “more cautious about the content of their films and were educating their staffs about what was and was not acceptable” (Cohen, Karl F, 50). The Fleischer Betty Boop cartoons of the early 1930s, ripe with sexual allusions and substance abuse were unthinkable after this date, they too had to be “cleaned up” (Austen, 65). The Little Ol’

Bosko series, by letting the African-American jazz caricatures sing only about the harmless cookies, tried to avoid such motifs of drug abuse or illicit sexual relationships present in many lyrics of the contemporary jazz songs, making their cartoons less susceptible to censorship. Nonetheless, the MGM studio had produced two jazz frog cartoons before this series (with basically the same caricatures), The Old Mill Pond

(1936) and Swing Wedding (1937), where such an effort was inconsistent. In the Swing

Wedding cartoon a Calloway frog sings: “A million couples sing the Hi-de-hi-de-hay!,” while the standard lyrics of this song (called “Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day”) speak about a million cokies (that is, people addicted to cocaine). But in the same song,

68 the frog invites the listeners to “come to China town” to “see them kick the gong around” (this phrase means, as was mentioned earlier, to smoke opium). As the phrase appeared in The Old Mill Pond cartoon as well, where the Calloway frog even performs a song called “Kicking the Gong Around,” it seems that the producers were unaware of its figurative meaning which can be also inferred from the sound of a gong heard when the line is sang in the cartoon. In the light of the studio’s effort to minimize drug abuse hints in the lyrics, the following scene from Swing Wedding is seemingly inexplicable: during the final performance which builds up into a real ‘pandemonium of sound’ where the tempo of the song soars high (and so does a thermometer in one of the shots, until it explodes, indicating how hot the music has become), the frogs go insane and start destroying their instruments, and as one of the trumpet players smashes his trumpet into pieces, what is left morphs into an injection which he pushes into his hand, and obviously intoxicated becomes even more insane than before, jumping through the kick drum. Yet if Richard Maltby’s argument about the film studios’ self regulation during the 1930s can be extended to the cartoons as well, the MGM animators might have been aware of the second meaning of the phrase, but assumed that it would be decoded only by the “sophisticated mind, [and] would mean nothing to the unsophisticated and inexperienced” segment of the audience (in Stanfield, 58), including the catholic censors. Paramount’s promotion department further supports such a claim – many visual gags in the Cab Calloway & Betty Boop cartoons, such as the Old Man drinking a beer mug emerging from his beard were called “smartness for the sophisticates”

(Austen, 66). Moreover, the injection gag in Swing Wedding is so fast that it could have been easily overlooked.

A Similar musical built-up followed or accompanied with destruction of instruments or any objects ready at hands which concluded Swing Wedding concludes

69 all five MGM’s jazz frog cartoons, drawing on the white notion of the absolute abandon with which the African-American jazz musicians allegedly play their hot music, leading them into an ecstatic state so close to insanity. Such images can serve as yet another piece of evidence, how pervasive was the notion that African-Americans lack constraint, how they, just like some native tribe, become so overwhelmed by the music and its hypnotizing rhythms that they do not realize what they are doing.

If most of the cartoons from the 1930s connected jazz with wilderness and places remote from civilization, a group of cartoons produced by various studios from the late 1930s to 1940s used African-American jazz as a symbol of modernity, city life and/or a catalyst of change and progress. This paradox springs from the associations that white authors ascribed to the music in its early stages as well, because if for some writers jazz symbolized the reproduction of the jungle beat, others heard in its steady, repetitive rhythm the monotonous clap-trap of the assembly-line, the patterns of mechanical reproduction, the speed and polyphony (if not even cacophony) of the modern society.

Warner Bros.’ short Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943) shows the dark side of modernity. The main character, a thick-lipped black cat caricature of Fats Waller with all attributes of Waller’s persona present in other cartoons (a cigar, bowler hat and short figure), strolls about the streets of a big city, arriving at a quarter where next to one another stand two buildings – the old-timers’ “Uncle Tomcat’s Mission,” painted in blue color, in front of which a black cat quartet accompanied only by a drum performs and sings “(Gimme That) Old Time Religion,” and the modern “Kit Kat Klub,” painted in red, where a jazz band is playing and in the club’s windows silhouettes of obviously

African-American dancing couples and drinkers can be seen. A preacher from the quartet warns Fats against the Kit Kat’s temptations of wine women and, songs, which

70 seems to be exactly the reason why the Fats cat is so eager to enter the club. Coming in,

Fats joins right in the music on the drum set, swiftly swapping the set for piano, and a few bars later a black cat trumpeter/singer draws his attention, promising in his song that he will send Fats out of this world. Enchanted by the idea, Fats enthusiastically consents and the trumpeter literally blows him up into another world with his instrument. This surreal, chaotic and mad musical world of black jazz, full of alien characters and actions defying all rules scares Fats to the core, and upon his return to the

‘Klub’ he wants no more jazz and seeks refuge with the revivalist quartet in front of the

Uncle Tomcat’s Mission, as enthusiastic about the “old time religion” as he was about the modern-time jazz only minutes ago; the dizzying pace of modernity does not suit everyone.

While this contrasting motif of religion and jazz in an all-black world reminds oneself of the all-black cast religious musical Green Pastures , the cartoon parody Clean

Pastures (Warner Bros.) produced one year after the feature film’s premiere in 1936 complicates this contrast, as it uses African-American jazz as both a symptom and a remedy to the earthly sins. The plot of Clean Pastures springs from the increasing ineffectiveness of the “Pair-O-Dice” (i.e. the African-American heaven) in recruiting new souls from the Earth, as an increasingly larger number of African-American souls is drawn to “Hades, Inc.” (the African-American hell). With the use of a Financial

Times newspaper, the heaven and hell are depicted as two competing companies. A dark-skinned angel (a Stepin Fetchit caricature; all of the cartoon’s characters are meant to be African-Americans) is sent to Harlem to gain back the sinful Harlemites, yet his speech praising the qualities of Pair-O-Dice does not attract a single one of the jazz club-attending, crap-shooting and liquor-drinking sinners. The other angels (caricatures of Calloway, Armstrong, Mills Brothers and Waller) see the failure and persuade God

71 about the necessity of modernization of Pair-O-Dice and employing rhythm in their efforts for new souls. Sent to Harlem, this time as an angelic all-star jazz band, the angels perform “Swing for Sale,” the Calloway character as the main vocalist, and other choruses taken one by one by the rest of the musicians. The effect upon the Harlemites is immediate – they pour out of their homes in large numbers to hear what the angels are offering to them and in the next moment the open gates of Pair-O-Dice welcome the angelic orchestra leading the swinging Harlem crowds on a beam of light stretched from the Earth, and the Pair-O-Dice is full again. In fact the transforming power of the angelic swing was so strong that in the concluding scene Satan comes to the gates of

Pair-O-Dice asking for permission to come in; it is granted and we see a halo over his head.

The ‘jazz as a symbol of modernity’ formula works also in another Warner Bros. cartoon, Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943) a modern urban all-black antithesis to the traditionalist Disney cartoon “Snow White” (1937). Nonetheless, a different narrative strategy was applied to the Coal Black – instead of caricaturing African-

American jazzmen, the cartoon uses jazz as a ubiquitous driving force of the modern life – the score is an “ongoing groove” and the actors deliver their lines “with a keen rhythmic sense of swing” emerging from the music only to be absorbed back in a couple of seconds later (Goldmark, 100). Warner’s Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears (1944) repeats this strategy of retelling the old fairy tales, and again, the African-American counterparts (even Goldilocks is an African-American girl) to the traditional white characters symbolize that times have changed. In 1943, MGM produced a cartoon in a similar vein, with a telling title: Red Hot Riding Hood , in this case with no visual reference to African-Americans.

72 In Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat and Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of

Company B , two cartoons produced in 1941 by Walter Lantz studio, jazz functions as a force bringing change to an African-American community. A sleepy all-black Lazy

Town down South in Scrub Me Mama experiences a musical earthquake when a steamer from the North anchors in their haven for a short break, carrying on board a

Harlem jazz singer. First the attractive light-skinned woman wakes every local man from lethargy by her very presence and later, advising the laundry woman that rhythm is what is needed to make her work better, she sets the whole town into motion by her rendition of the “Boogie Woogie Washerwoman.” The local musicians come and join in the boogie and everybody else gets a new spark to their lives – two ‘mammies’ vigorously scrub their ‘picaninnies,’ an African-American wearing white gloves eats a watermelon and similar highly stereotypical imagery follows. While the Lazy Towners are specimen of the most offensive African–American caricatures ever drawn – the musicians are more ape-like than human, and the other inhabitants are missing teeth, not to mention their enormous red lips, strikingly the singer and one of the musicians

(shown only in a brief sequence) are drawn quite realistically, without any exaggeration of any part of their bodies. That a light-skinned African-American woman would be drawn as attractive, is not too surprising, since such ‘exotic’ beauty could please the white male spectators who were used to light-skinned African-American women as preferred in Hollywood features anyway. Nonetheless the few seconds of a realistic

African-American jazz musician figure performing a jazz tune while surrounded by his supposed fellow musicians, who, when compared to his features, in fact look more like a group of chimpanzees, seem to represent a statement, a protest against the established order of African-American visualization by white cartoonists, considering that every frame in the cartoon must have been well studied before realization. Shortly after the

73 performance the singer resumes her steamboat journey, leaving the now-awakened Lazy

Town behind. Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B presents an African-American trumpet player from New York with an unexpected challenge – being drafted as a new bugle boy of the Company B he struggles with the violent resistance of the all-black military camp to his 5 a. m. reveilles. Luckily Harry discovers a trumpet in the camp and his jazzy improvised reveille played on the trumpet (so far he had to play a ‘corny’ military cornet) not only wakes everybody up but makes them work and drill to the rhythm. Both cartoons imply an uneasy notion that African-Americans are extremely lazy and only the hot music can mobilize their potential (which is even worse in the

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy cartoon as it implies that African-American soldiers serving in World War II lack morale and are unwilling to take action). Another Walter Lantz cartoon, Boogie Woogie Man (1943), uses jazz in a similar fashion as Clean Pastures , that is as a progressive method that is more sufficient than the old ones; a modern method whose implementation is presented as inevitable, otherwise the fate of the organization is sealed. This time however it is not angels competing hell, but ghosts. At a large meeting in a ghost town in Nevada, the chair complains about the rapidly decreasing efficiency of the “old nightmare” which sparks a debate between old traditionalist ghosts and the young ones who demand an addition of “beat” to the haunting business. A very old ghost argues that “what was good enough for grand- spook is good enough for me” which is reminiscent of the “Old Time Religion” lyrics, but his voice is in obvious minority and the “ectoplasmic delegates from the Lenox

Avenue,” a group of dark brown ghosts in zoot suits and oversized hats (and of course, just as ‘oversized’ lips), is invited on the scene, as the experts on “beat.” They start their

“Boogie Woogie Man” performance, in which they explain why boogie-woogie is the most efficient method of scaring people. The rhythm is taken up by white Spook Jones

74 Orchestra, marking the only racially mixed performance of jazz in all the cartoons discussed here. In fact, except for the Fleischer cartoons, all the other shorts take place within strictly segregated, homogeneous (the members, if drawn as animals, are mostly of a single species, e.g. in Swing Weeding , and if there are several species, they all have dark skins/furs) communities which makes the cartoons, in the same way as the live action Hollywood films even more rigidly segregated than the reality surrounding jazz was.

All in all, the animated cartoons produced in the 1930s and 1940s did not do

African-American jazz much justice. Instead of celebrating the music, the performances are wrapped around by various stereotypes, either concerning the music itself or

African-Americans in general, and in many respects, the Fleischer Betty Boop series were the most successful of all in bringing the audience the most successful visualizations of African-American jazz music – some passages verge on a synaesthetic experience as the whole cartoon (including inanimate objects) swings with the music and in several scenes elements on the screen correspond to the musical ones (a ghost flying over the screen whenever a trumpet ‘barks’ a piercing tone, etc.). On the other hand the statement of Walter Lantz that he “never felt his caricatures were racist,” nor were they “meant to be offensive,” a Fleischer Studios animator Shamus Culhane’s memory of the frequent ethnic jokes and racial abuses the staff called one another at the studio (Cohen, Karl F., 50) or MGM animator Mel Shaw’s honest acknowledgement about the suitability of frogs for African-American caricatures (Lehman, 39) testify how little were the sensibilities and awareness of the white filmmakers over such issues in the 1930s and 1940s.

75 Conclusion

In the late 1920s, African-American jazz musicians began to appear on the silver screen in Hollywood short subjects, feature-length films and from the early 1930s, in the studios’ animated cartoons as well. In addition to various musicals, the rising popularity of jazz in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s encouraged the filmmakers to include jazz performances even into those films that had otherwise nothing to do with music. However, because of the inferior status of African-Americans in American society in the era, and also because of the studios’ own pervasive attitude of intolerance towards racial minorities, African-American jazz musicians were either relegated into segregated vehicles or when they appeared with the white stars, a clear color line was drawn between the two groups and their interaction was limited to a bare minimum. If the musicians were not cast to play ‘themselves’ or characters that were primarily musicians, their race determined the filmmakers’ choice of occupation and social status – almost always the musicians had to impersonate lower-class characters such as manual workers, housewives stricken by poverty or servants – roles not too dissimilar from those that African-American professional actors from the era usually played. Therefore, the occupation with the highest position on the social ladder that was available for the musicians to play in a movie was their very vocation – for example

Duke Ellington’s roles as a revered composer in two of his shorts can be considered as the ceiling of the African-American musicians’ acting options. Unlike the white bandleaders, African-American jazz musicians were never cast as educated middle- or upper-class characters (consider for instance Benny Goodman’s character in A Song Is

Born – he plays a scholar, an expert in classical music). The filmmakers simply made sure that the position and success that the African-American jazzmen and women could reach in the Hollywood movies was well below their still limited possibilities in the

76 segregated America of the 1930s and 1940s; thus the cinematic inequality between the

‘lovely white’ race and its ‘black’ opposite was constructed as even deeper than the reality of everyday American life was. If the music was incorporated into the narrative and/or used metaphorically, the white filmmakers’ interpretations of jazz and its function in the society reflected the attitude of white critics, most prevalent during the

1920s – jazz, because of its ‘black’ roots was perceived as an immoral, evil, savage, and disorganizing energy that threatens to corrupt those who answer to its seductive call.

The jazz animated cartoons then reflected both the myths and stereotypes surrounding jazz and African-Americans, and these in the Hollywood live action productions of jazz performance, only to create an even more demeaning and distorted picture of African-

American jazz music. Through such representational strategies, Hollywood movies made from the late 1920s to late 1940s not only supported the status quo in the

American society but also helped to justify it. As a powerful tool of white propaganda, the movies certainly did not serve the African-American jazz and its professors well.

Nonetheless, African-American jazz musicians did in the end benefit from their cooperation with the studios, as their film performances represented a highly valuable form of advertisement of their music, spreading their art across the United States.

In 1948, the Supreme Court issued the Paramount decree, ordering the major studios to “separate their exhibition holdings from the production-distribution sectors of the firms” (Bordwell – Steiger – Thompson, 332). This decision lowered the degree of control that the studios could exercise over the film industry. The rising popularity of television during the forties and fifties and the gradual segmentation of the film market diminished the studios’ power over America’s imagination as well. Likewise, the popularity of jazz was diminishing too, during the last years of the 1940s, as the emergence of bebop and the end of the swing era transformed jazz from a primarily

77 dance music enjoyed by masses to an art form that only connoisseurs take relish in.

Because of the loss of popularity, Hollywood lost interest in jazz, especially the modern forms of the music, so if during the 1950s a jazz biopic was produced, it was usually a nostalgic glimpse back at the heyday of the music – the white swing bandleaders Benny

Goodman, Glen Miller, Gene Krupa and Red Nichols had all their life stories told on the silver screen during the decade. The African-American jazz legends continued to be neglected by the industry as before, and so until today, no feature-length biopics have been produced about the lives of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong or Count Basie. Yet some of the famous African-American musicians did make it to the Hollywood biopics after all. A few decades later, the story of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker were narrated in Lady Sings the Blues (Paramount, 1972) and Bird (Warner Bros. 1988), respectively. The fact that some of the stereotypes discussed in the thesis are still visible in productions made more than thirty years later than the films discussed in the thesis illustrate that Hollywood was (and perhaps in a sense still is) only reluctantly giving up its time-worn representational strategies of African-American jazz musicians. For instance Billie Holiday is shown as composing her songs ‘naturally,’ as emotional reactions to unexpected events, without any mental processes of composing the lyrics

(she often wrote music to her songs as well) involved and Parker is depicted as a mysterious person whose actions need to be interpreted by his white wife and a white psychiatrist.

The most recent biopic about an African-American jazz legend, Ray (Universal

2004), telling the first part of the life story of the blind pianist Ray Charles, the man who probably tried more musical styles during his career than anybody, yet blues and jazz were still at the core of his musical creations, represents a welcome break from these tendencies. It seems that it took Hollywood eighty years to finally produce a film

78 that really is about an African-American artist. In Ray , we see Charles as a complex personality – a man of extraordinary musical talents and enormous creativity but also a shrewd businessman who is determined to succeed in the musical field and goes straight toward his goal. The scenes with musical performances show all aspects of a famous musician’s life – recording sessions, rehearsals, spontaneous creativity on stage, work on new compositions, the growing success etc. In a nutshell, if this film was set as the norm for the African-American musical performance, all the other films would certainly fail by comparison.

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