Word: minstrell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Negro Soldier opens in a Negro church with the sermon of a Negro preacher (Carlton Moss). From its first moment, it is arresting. For the preacher is no Uncle Tom. He does not talk minstrel-show dialect or advise his flock that, for those who bear their afflictions meekly, there will be watermelon by & by, or the Hall Johnson Choir in the sky. He talks sober, unrhetorical English, and before long he is reading aloud (from Mein Kampf) some of Hitler's opinions about those "born half-apes." While he reads, the camera moves among his listeners, quietly contradicting...
...first-class hot-jazz players (Muggsy Spanier, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey, George Brunies*). But usually the musicians are purely a supporting cast to Lewis himself. He is a one-man synthesis of U.S. show business at its showiest. Under full steam, Ted Lewis embodies the Shakespearean ham, the minstrel strutter, the carnival drum major, the medicine barker, the vaudeville tearjerker, the circus buffoon, the ragtime sport-all among the most fondly regarded figures in U.S. life...
First into the 1944 race for Tennessee Governor last week went the name of a hillbilly minstrel, Roy Acuff, 40, of Nashville. Fiddler Acuff insisted that his friends had put in his name, that he was still undecided whether to run. He thereupon resumed his fiddling, while his friends hoped that Memphis' Boss Ed Crump burned...
...minstrel shows also contained the leading clowns of their day (Lew Dockstader's specialty, delivered in a dress suit the seat of whose pants dusted the floor, was a farcical satire entitled "Modern Mother Goose"). For a First Part grand finale the entire company would pass in review in what was known as the "Walk Around...
Minstrelsy gradually died with the onset of the vaudeville chains, then the movies, then the radio. "I doubt," said pensive Neil O'Brien last week, "whether people would pay much more than $1 to see a good minstrel show today...