Word: minstrell
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Pennies from Heaven (Columbia) is a textbook example of the oldest adage in cinemaking: Nothing ruins a picture more effectively than too many good ideas. Best idea wasted is the character of Larry (Bing Crosby), a jailbird minstrel whose most prized possession is a 13th-Century lute, in an elaborate routine, involving a letter from a condemned man to Patsy Smith (Edith Fellowes), orphan of a murdered father. "Pennies from Heaven-the coins tossed down to him from tenement windows-are the currency with which Larry undertakes to support Patsy and her Grandpa (Donald Meek...
Early last year John Avery Lomax, crack compiler of U. S. folk songs, arrived in Manhattan with a big, wild-eyed Negro known as Lead Belly (real name: Huddie Ledbetter). John Lomax' protègé was a murderer, but he was also a natural-born minstrel. From a Texas jail he won his pardon by singing a petition to onetime Governor Pat Neff. In the Louisiana swamplands his knife made more trouble. Again he was imprisoned, again got out with a song when John Lomax made a phonograph record of it, submitted it personally to the late Governor...
...Harlem vaudeville theatre when Researcher Lomax again made news with another singing convict. This one was James ("Ironhead'') Baker, a Negro who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. At John Lomax' request Governor James V. Allred granted Baker a furlough to tour as a minstrel, visit penitentiaries in Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, sing his songs so that other convicts will understand what Lomax wants for his folk-song files in the Library of Congress...
Added interest in the Leverett House Dance this Friday night is supplied by the announcement made yesterday by Harold E. Jahn '36, chairman of the dance committee, that a wandering minstrel will be present at dinner before the dance to play request numbers...
Died. Theodore August Metz, 87, violinist, minstrel, self-styled Father of the Jazz Era (see p. 30), composer of A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, which spurred Roosevelt's "Rough Riders" up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War; in The Bronx...