Word: harmonica
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Specialist is young, handsome Lawrence Loy, a Kansan who has called dances since he was a boy, did the calls for Columbia's square-dance album. To back up Caller Loy, Columbia hired rangy, twinkling Carson Robison, a harmonica-burbling Kansas balladeer, no stranger to records and radio. Carson Robison's chief problem in making square-dance discs in the East was to find city fiddlers who could saw scratchy enough. He finally found them in Manhattan...
...Last year the U. S. imported $853,094 worth of reeds from Italy and Germany for American-made harmonicas. Faced with a shortage this year, Philadelphia's Harmonica Reed Corp. and Chicago's American Harmonica Corp. handed the problem to their reed experts. Foreign reeds were tone-tested by hand. Lacking skilled labor for that job, the experts invented a machine which not only tests U. S. reeds for tone but also cuts them to size and rejects imperfect strips...
...says he "loves all the women in the world," and sounds that way when in his wailing, rackety voice he sings something like Big Leg Women Gets My Pay. Blind Boy is sometimes accompanied by his friend Sonny Terry, who is nearly blind, and whose noises on the harmonica, interspersed with incoherent shouts and screams, are some thing to hear...
...Bolger can, still dance with the best of them, and a girl named Virginia O'Brien is surprisingly funny singing torch songs in a monotone, with a completely dead pan. Larry Adler does much better with a harmonica than anyone could possibly expect. And there's a bum (Emmet Kelly) who sits wordlessly on a park bench, removes a ham sandwich from a paper bag, eats it, then lazily brushes his teeth. He provides the one inspired moment of an otherwise uninspired show...
After a side foray at industrial design, a field he left after turning out a streamlined harmonica so big that a normal man couldn't get his mouth around it, Nat Karson headed straight for Broadway. Now it keeps him as busy as brokers ever did. In the past five years he has done sets for 35 Broadway productions. Near tops in Broadway stage painting last season was Nat Karson's rapid-fire blend of Negro jazz and Japanese formalism in the sets of the Hot Mikado. His latest, Let's Go, opened last week...