Word: tonk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Brandied as a Criminal." The son of a lower East Side barber who liked to pass out money in the streets, Jimmy began his career by punching a honky-tonk piano for 75? a night. After working in a score of saloons before he was 22, he graduated to a Harlem cabaret, where he played the piano for $45 a week "from eight o'clock at night till I was subconscious." The boss stifled Jimmy's attempts to be a comedian; he didn't like piano players who tried to be funny. But the comedian could...
Died. Egbert A. Van Alstyne, 73, old-time songwriter (In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree, Pretty Baby, Memories); of a heart attack; in Chicago. After several years as a honky-tonk piano player and song plugger, Van Alstyne, with Lyricist Harry Williams, won Tin Pan Alley fame in 1903 with Navaho, then went on to turn out more than 500 tunes until radio came along to rout the family piano. When sheet-music sales began to drop, Van Alstyne decided it was time to retire...
...story, the directness of the dances, the brassiness of the locale. One or two love songs would scarcely be missed; one or two of the ditties, such as Adelaide's Lament, have lively tunes. Michael Kidd's dances are clean and sharp, whether burlesquing honky-tonk routines or pantomiming the drama of dice games...
When his Maple Leaf Rag (1899) made him independent, he quit the honky-tonk circuit and left Sedalia, Mo., a town revered by ragtimers as New Orleans is by the jazzbos, and set himself up as a respectable teacher in St. Louis. He turned out rags by the dozens (including Peacherine Rag and The Easy Winners), and even six serious etudes to help "amateur players" learn how to keep that steady beat with the left hand while syncopating off the beat with the right. His biggest ambition was to compose a ragtime opera. Before he died...
...difficult to tell why Miss Grable chooses this particular picture to act and Mr. Mature doesn't. Starting out as a honky-tonk singer Miss Grable acquits herself well, for fast music is the only type of song that I'm sure she was intended for. It may be difficult to conceive of her singing "Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" while wearing a gee string and something else, but she does it well. However, when she is called on to tell smiling Phil Harris that she doesn't love him, I felt sorry for her, because words without music...