Word: minstreling
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...socially conscious minstrel show in which Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters find $50,000 in the tail coat, and with the help of Jack Benny's Rochester divide it with the Hall Johnson Choir and other Hollywood sharecroppers...
...variety, too. Before it really settles down for the evening, it tosses off a whole minstrel show, peels off a vaudeville bill complete with jugglers, acrobats, magicians. After that, it turns into a big-scale revue, with Russian ballets jostling Harlem hurlyburly, with a rousing salute to the Navy and a resounding one for the Air Force. It makes copy of Broadway's Stage Door Canteen, with amateur-night take-offs of Jane Cowl, Joe Cook, Gypsy Rose Lee. And at last it brings Irving Berlin on the stage, to let him dig down into the Yip, Yip, Yaphank...
...warm share of Sal's appeal is owing to the man it celebrates: genial, sentimental, gargantuan (300 lb.) Paul Dresser, onetime minstrel, most popular song writer of the '90s, and oldest brother of lugubrious Novelist Theodore Dreiser (who kept the original family name). Dreiser, who wrote the first verse and the chorus of one of his brother's best songs (On the Banks of the Wabash), also wrote the story on which Sal is based...
...airwaves. The twangs came from an instrument which legend says was invented by a son of Methuselah-the lute, an instrument resembling an archaic mandolin. Rare too was the young lutanist who plunk-a-plunked and sang ballads on an NBC Sunday sustainer. Richard Dyer-Bennet, 28-year-old minstrel, is probably the only U.S. radio entertainer listed in Burke's Peerage...
...into lute-playing less simply. Although born in England, he had a U.S. mother, chose to become a U.S. citizen on his 21st birthday, went to the University of California. There he met a voice teacher who remodeled his youthful tenor and told him of a great Swedish minstrel named Sven Scholander. When Dyer-Bennet inherited $500, he hotfooted to Sweden, learned the Swedish lute and some balladeering tricks. He was just in time: within a year, Scholander and his lute-maker were both dead...