Word: minstrell
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...Alan Lomax went on the air, introduced Burl (Blue-Tailed Fly) Ives, Josh (One Meat Ball) White, Woody (Dust Bowl Ballads) Guthrie and Lead Belly, a Negro minstrel who had done time for murder, and was an encyclopedia of "sinful" songs (TIME, May 15, 1939). Lomax, now a hefty Army private, disapproves of his own twangy Texas voice, uses it constantly to "sell the Archive." At sings late at night in his Greenwich Village apartment, he is often joined by his sister, Bess Lomax Hawes, who has handled the music for OWI's overseas broadcasts. By last week...
...celebrating the McDowell family butler. For $15 Foster sold the performing rights to his greatest-selling song, Old Folks at Home. It started as Way Down Upon de Pedee Ribber but Stephen, not liking the sound of that, consulted an atlas and discovered Florida's Suwannee River. Minstrel Edwin P. Christy even brought the right to list himself as composer. Yet, in all, Stephen's 200 songs earned him some $15,000, which wasn't bad for those days...
...this afternoon he was going to a barbecue. He had told his friend Jess Long, Georgia peach grower, to "make some of that good Brunswick stew of yours." In the evening, the polio patients at his beloved Warm Springs Foundation were going to give a minstrel show for him. He was looking forward to both affairs...
Unfrocked Altar Boy. Morton Downey's father was fire chief of Wallingford, Conn. At six, Morton got $1 for singing at a local minstrel show. "That money," says he, "made a terrific impact on me." Since then Downey claims to have gotten "more mileage" out of his voice than any other singer in the business...
Founded four years ago, the American Negro Theater wants, above all, to deal realistically with its race. "With few exceptions," it insists, "plays about Negroes have been two grades above the minstrel stage-the cork is missing, but the spirit is there." Many of the company, including Actress Simms, have been at universities but never on Broadway. Most of them are war workers who have kept the A.N.T. alive with a slice of their earnings. Last April, however, the Theater was saved from shoestringing along for a while by a $9,500 grant from the General Education Board...