During the 1920’s, lack of money and technology did not stop folks from making great music. Take this duo who put on a porch concert with a ukulele, washboard & kazoo. A teapot becomes a horn, a wooden tube creates an added acoustic element, while the infectious rhythm keeps it swingy.
MORE ...A bevy of flappers prances around the beach, having such a good time they can’t help but strip to their skivvies. A ragamuffin, who watches them from behind a rock, swipes their clothes as they play carelessly in the waves. What to do this time? Guess they’ll be walkin’ home again.
MORE ...Minnie the Moocher with Cab Calloway & Betty Boop – 1930’s Starting with a phenomenal live moment where Cab Calloway free-form dances to his orchestra swinging slow & sweet to St. James Infirmary. Then things get rolling. Home life is tough for Betty, so she hits the road with her friend Bimbo. They venture into […]
MORE ...An authentic, rare classic version of the standard “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” sung by the Mills Brothers, shot in the early 1930’s.
MORE ...Newsreel documentary from the 1920’s with photography and animations illustrating old New Orleans, the Crescent City, at work and at play. Duelling oaks. Influences of colonial France and Spain. Iron grille work. The old townhouses surrounding open courts. New Orleans, the industrial city, where ports and depot junctions distribute throughout, and out from, the heart […]
MORE ...Max Fleischer paired Betty Boop with viper man Louis Armstrong in the mid 1930’s. In it Fleischer mixes jazz, live action, and animation to create an innovative, dreamlike world. Pops or Satchmo, as he was often called, was a lifelong tea head who enjoyed cannabis not just to unwind, but also smoked gage, as he called it, […]
MORE ...In this clip, the undocumented Brown sisters sing the number “Underneath the Harlem Moon.” The soulful trio starts the song slow and syncopated. But this gives way to an almost swingy up-tempo rhythm more than worthy of being captured on film.
MORE ...Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is just a click away with our next short feature, Lady Life Guards, produced during the 1930’s.
MORE ...Duke Ellington makes his film debut in the short produced in 1929 based on his pivotal composition Black and Tan Fantasy.
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