Word: minstrell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bend, orphaned at seven, a runaway (from Father Drunogie's orphanage) in his 'teens, Joe Howard had been on the boards for 60 years. His runaway took him to St. Louis where, still in short pants, he got a job with McNish, Johnson & Slavin's Refined Minstrels, singing A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother. This job was the making of him. He became a protege of the late, bully-built William Muldoon (later T.R.'s sparring partner), who was then touring the minstrel circuit with Charley Mitchell, the little man who wouldn...
...dapper young Negro minstrel-show man named James A. Bland penned these words, wrote a tune to go with them, and launched one of the most perennially popular of U. S. songs. Carry Me Back to Old Virginny was sung so long & loud that 63 years later the Virginia Conservation Commission wanted it made Virginia's official State anthem. Few singers of the song knew or cared who wrote it. If the question ever came up, someone usually said it was one of famed U. S. Songwriter Stephen Foster's (Swanee River, Oh! Susanna! etc.). Fame never caught...
...Flushing, L. I. The son of one of the first U. S. Negro college graduates (Oberlin '45), Bland himself attended Washington's Howard University. Handsome and honey-voiced, he could not stay away from music. Because white men in blackface hogged the field of U. S. minstrel shows, Bland did not get very far in his U. S. minstrel career. In London, however, where he went as end man with Billy Kersands' Minstrel Troupe, he made a big hit, earned $10,000 a year and King Edward VII's (then Prince of Wales) personal bravos...
...Sober Woodrow Wilson liked to put on a record in the Oval Room after dinner and practice a jig step, envied minstrel dancers because they "took on no more at their hearts than they could kick off at their heels." Another diversion of the 28th President of the U. S.: after long White House receptions he "loved to get upstairs and twist his face about. . . . He could make his ears move and elongate his face or broaden it in a perfectly ludicrous...
...CROSBY AND MR. MERCER (Decca,). Last June, when the genial Westwood Marching and Chowder Club (North Hollywood Branch) put on its second Breakaway Minstrel Show, the Olio was enlivened by " 'Lasses' (Molasses) Mercer and 'Chittlins' (pig or calf intestines) Crosby in an erudite analyseration of swing." The "analyseration" was sung to the music of the 1920's famed duet Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Shean, new words by Lyricist Mercer (Cowboy From Brooklyn, et al.). The summer's most amusing ditty gets more amusing when Crosby explains to Mercer that jazz is merely old-fashioned...