Word: minstreling
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...MINSTREL BOY-L. A. G. Strong- Knopf ($3.75). The middle half of the 18th Century, in Europe, was a kind of waiting time. Artistically an awkward bridge between classicism and the fierce romantics, politically a feudal afternoon of dying magnificence, it was a Golden Age gone tinsel without anyone quite realizing the change. Good and bad, wealth and poverty, freedom and tyranny seemed to have struck a permanent balance. It was a time of elaborate facades and filthy backstreets, of nearsighted perceptions and long-range emotions. If a gentleman, posting hastily through the slums, had a tear...
Most readers will find The Minstrel Boy the more balanced, more understanding account. As Author Strong points out: if Moore sought preferment wherever he could get it, consorted with the lords and ladies, whose power his poetry was attacking, that was no more than the gracefully graceless way of the times he lived in. If he ran from the battles he fomented, that was because he was a poet, not a man of action. And if his poetry "glows at no great heat," seems largely facile and sentimental now, it had a quality, incommunicable to present ears, which made...
...career before becoming a pianist). Shaw on Patti: There has not yet been witnessed a dramatic situation so tragic that Madame Patti would not get up in the middle of it to bow and smile if somebody accidentally sprung his opera hat. She is simply a marvelous Christy Minstrel, and when you have heard her sing Within a Mile in the Albert Hall, so perfectly that not a syllable or whisper of it is lost, you have heard the best...
Pennies from Heaven (Columbia) is a textbook example of the oldest adage in cinemaking: Nothing ruins a picture more effectively than too many good ideas. Best idea wasted is the character of Larry (Bing Crosby), a jailbird minstrel whose most prized possession is a 13th-Century lute, in an elaborate routine, involving a letter from a condemned man to Patsy Smith (Edith Fellowes), orphan of a murdered father. "Pennies from Heaven-the coins tossed down to him from tenement windows-are the currency with which Larry undertakes to support Patsy and her Grandpa (Donald Meek...
...Harlem vaudeville theatre when Researcher Lomax again made news with another singing convict. This one was James ("Ironhead'') Baker, a Negro who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. At John Lomax' request Governor James V. Allred granted Baker a furlough to tour as a minstrel, visit penitentiaries in Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, sing his songs so that other convicts will understand what Lomax wants for his folk-song files in the Library of Congress...