Word: minstreling
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...Manhattan last week for University of Texas alumni. And John Lomax was nervous. Theatrical agents and radio scouts insisted on hearing his protege, who had been out on a wild 24-hour rampage in Harlem. Until it was time for him to sing Lomax kept his hell-raising minstrel locked up in a coat room. But the performance went off without mishap. Lead Belly's voice is rich and clear. He plays and sings with his eyes closed, taps single time with one foot, triple with the other. He claims that most of his songs...
Typical last week was an editorial in the New York World-Telegram: " 'The Wreck of the Old 97,' according to the Supreme Court, belongs not to a soulless corporation but to a flesh and blood minstrel, David Graves George of Gretna, Va." But, unfortunately for Minstrel George, his wife, his 14 children and the World-Telegram editorial writer, the Supreme Court had not undertaken to decide the ownership of the ballad. All it-The Press estimated the royalties as high as $2,000,000. A more likely figure is $375,006.* had done was to pass...
...which he has sung of machine tools, electric toasters, coal breakers, Mergenthalers, vacuum cleaners. He has bombarded the quality magazines. Harper's stood out against him five years, Century ten, Scribner's twelve, Atlantic, 28. All succumbed except Vanity Fair which he is still attacking. It is nothing for Minstrel Braley to turn out six verses a week for a newspaper syndicate, four for trade publications, while keeping 25 to 60 in the mail as a matter of routine. On an average, a "poem" is rejected eight times, travels 500 miles. He figures his postage overhead alone has cost...
...Marks was better at spotting good songs and marketing them than he was at writing them. In the '90s a song might make a hit in New York but the problem was how to spread songs over the country. Marks planted his with minstrel shows. "The Lost Child" (1894) and "Asleep in the Deep" (1898) went big on the road. In New York the new songs were "You're Not the Only Pebble on the Beach" (1896), "Take Back Your Gold" (1897), "She's More to be Pitied than Censured" (1898). Then ragtime started its rage...
...background, the duel, the darkies and pickaninnies, the decayed family, and finally, the deserted mansion. But Davis is not true to the romance of "swords and roses"; he fumbles a little psychopathology into the plot, and his play quavers ridiculously for two acts between Eugene O'Neill and a minstrel show. At the last the dying hero is borne out on a litter, while an offstage chorus chants "Oh, Lord, Ah'm comin'" or some like...