OW Almanac Question

[Terry]

I found the All-Star Jazz Band playing "Sugar Foot Stomp," introduced by Welles, from the Almanac series.

Any idea what the date for this was? I can't find it in the complete shows I have or in the show descriptions I found online.

[Jeff Wilson]

It was on the April 26, 1944 episode, which is generally considered lost, as far as I know. Guest star was Carole Landis. The clip you have is just of their number, I take it?



Edited By Jeff Wilson on 1137119347

[Terry]

Thanks, Jeff. Yeah, just the number by the band, with Welles' intro.

I also have them playing Panama Rag, from the 4-12-44 episode. No intro on that one.

[Terry]

Although, in order for a lost episode to be excerpted, it seems as though someone has a copy (like whoever compiled that Kid Ory CD.)

[Le Chiffre]

Which Kid Ory CD do you mean? I've got the NEW-ORLEANS-CREOLE-JAZZ-NEW CD_which I think is pretty good. Welles introduces several of the songs, and tells a good anecdote about how New Orleans Jazz started out as a brass band at funerals.

[Terry]

No, I've got this one. Yours looks like it has more clips from the Almanac series. Mine is very limited on Welles intros.

On which song does he talk about the brass band at funerals? (Just found it - it's Oh, Didn't He Ramble.) I may be missing one or two of the ones on your disc (and the rest of the episode as well.)

Do the liner notes on yours list the sources? Tracks 1 through 12 look like being from Almanac.

Here's the Amazon link for yours, which lets you sample all the tracks (and lets you hear some Welles intros.) Much nicer sound quality than my hissy old audio cassettes.

[Le Chiffre]

The liner notes only say the tracks were all recorded in LA in 1944. It's possible that the performances on the OW Almanac were not live, but tapes of Ory's band. I don't know.

BTW, Kid Ory can also be seen in the film NEW ORLEANS, with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. It's on TCM tomorrow morning. Not a great film by any stretch, but it's got some good musical numbers in it. It originated as a project by Orson Welles, although he had nothing to do with the film as it finally turned out.

[Terry]

The band accompanied Welles on his tour of military camps and played live.

Here is proper track info:

March 15, 1944 - High Society
March 29, 1944 - Muskrat Ramble
April 5, 1944 - That's a Plenty
April 12, 1944 - Panama Rag
April 19, 1944 - Jimmie's Blues (I'm guessing about this date)
April 26, 1944 - Sugar Foot Stomp
Broadcast from LA
May 3, 1944 - Savoy (?) Blues
Broadcast from the Naval Air Station (what city?)
May 17, 1944 - Worry (Weary?) Blues
Broadcast from LA
May 24, 1944 - Blues in E Flat (with Helen Andrews)
Broadcast from Air Service Command Center, Fresno
May 31, 1944 - Tiger Rag
Broadcast from Air Transport Command, Long Beach
June 28, 1944 - Oh, Didn't He Ramble
Broadcast from Camp Hahn, Riverside
July 5, 1944 - "A Little Jive" (with Lud Gluskin's band)
Broadcast from Los Angels Point of Embarkation, Wilmington
July 12, 1944 - Royal Garden Blues
Broadcast from Camp Cooke, Lompoc

[Le Chiffre]

Welles was capable of being very funny in the Almanac radio series, though usually it was due to some ad-lib, not due to the scripts (which weren't great comedy.)

True, but those ad-libs were a mixed bag and sometimes got him into trouble. Ever hear the April 5th, 1944 program with Dennis Day? Welles inadvertently makes a racist ad-lib about Rochester from The Jack Benny Show, then stops the program cold for a few moments in order to apologize!

[Terry]

I agree about the ad-libs not always being funny.

Here's the exchange to which you refer:



Day: Which one of you two is Orson Welles?

Welles: Well I'm Orson Welles.

Day: Glad to know ya, kid! Well here I am, ready to start. What do you want me to do?

Welles: What do I want you to do?

Day: Yeah, don't you remember? You won me from Mr. Benny in a crap game.

Audience laughs

Welles: Oh, I did? Well I must have been using Rochester's dice.

Audience titters

Welles: Dennis, how...no, I'm sorry I said that now.

Sporadic laughter

Welles: I'm sorry I said that about Rochester and I'm sorry I said it. Dennis -

Welles laughs in embarassment



So, if it was ad-libbed, the inference was that Rochester played craps with loaded dice - and the script infers that Dennis Day is a slave. I'm not sure if that was a racial slur at the time. It seems like nothing to me. 5 years earlier Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were doing those black-faced picaninny shows in the "Babes" movies, and Disney had just done Uncle Remus. Given what was permissable then concerning racial stereotyping, I don't think Welles insulted his audience, but he did embarrass himself - that line certainly gave him a pang of guilt.

As far as insulting his audience, I'm afraid a lot more people were offended by his support of Isaac Woodward a few years later, and by his crusade to see unmasked and punished Officer Shull.

[Le Chiffre]

So, if it was ad-libbed, the inference was that Rochester played craps with loaded dice - and the script infers that Dennis Day is a slave. I'm not sure if that was a racial slur at the time. It seems like nothing to me.

Or the inference could have been that playing craps with a black man's dice might result in a white man being turned into a slave.

5 years earlier Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were doing those black-faced picaninny shows in the "Babes" movies, and Disney had just done Uncle Remus.

Yes, but Garland and Rooney were just kids taking orders from Louis B. Mayer, while Disney's latent racism and anti-semitism has been pretty well documented. In both cases the latent racism of the American public at the time was being pandered to. On the other hand, Welles's slip-up seems much more unbecoming, since his career owed so much to the black community. To his credit however, he realized the mistake and apologized immediately. It was undoubtedly a little monster from the id that managed to escape at the wrong time.

[R Kadin]

Something else to bear in mind is that offstage banter between the performers could well have been full of teasing and kibbitzing intended to needle a good-humoured rise out of their targets but no more meant for a public audience than they were indicative of the players' actual sentiments.

So Welles' edgy joke might have gone over just fine with Eddy "Rochester" Anderson (himself by no means an unarmed verbal combatant) over a boisterous post-broadcast round of drinks; it's just that the spontaneous high spirits of that radio moment let him forget for an instant that he wasn't holding forth at Chasen's.

Things like that happen and Welles was quick and gracious enough to pull himself up on the spot. While not necessarily of the comic variety, that took no less admirable a wit. No, more than that: it took character.

[Glenn Anders]

I think R Kadin and Hadji have it about right.

Two comments:

No one of Orson Welles' stature did more to advance people of color in the Arts in the 1930's and 1940's, or to fight the kind of bigotry which saw about a black man a week lynched somewhere in the U.S. during that period.

But the racism (I make the distinction) was (and pretty much "is") all pervasive. The careless, unconscious assumption of differences, superiority, and inferiority was learned at mothers' knees.

Welles might have been as guilty as anyone else.

Let me, however, throw in a possible extra special pleading for Welles, in this case. If we remember how careless Welles was about rehearsals for radio shows in his long experience, it is possibe that he had not read that line, written by someone else, until he got on the air. The stereotypical behavior the line refers to was the bread and butter of most radio shows that dealt in any way with black actors back then.

And after all, much of the point for this Orson Welles' Almanac series was to introduce Dixieland Jazz to the wider American Radio Public. It made a career for Kid Ory and other jazz muscians involved, black and white.

In that regard, and in reference to NEW ORLEANS, already mentioned, you might be interested in my review of the film, in which I reconstruct its history, make reference to Ory and the Welles' radio shows, etc., and give some further, rather extensive background:

http://www.epinions.com/content_91456573060

Orson Welles may have been a racist, like most any American -- but many black people would have thought him one in a marginally good sense. He certainly was not a bigot.

Glenn

[Jeff Wilson]

Eddie "Rochester" Anderson had just appeared in CABIN IN THE SKY the previous year, where he played a good-hearted if easily tempted dope who gambles (with someone else's loaded dice) and womanizes (with Lena Horne no less), so that image of him was out and about, and certainly from his work on the Benny show. I didn't find Welles' joke especially shocking; more so to me was Welles' having Amos and Andy on the Campbell Playhouse production of "State Fair," IIRC, where he converses briefly with Correll and Gosden in that stereotypical black dialect.

[Glenn Anders]

You make good points, Jeff.

In Radio, Eddie Anderson was one of a number of black artists who, in a sense, crossed the color line successfully because the medium enabled a wider audience to absorb another culture without becoming "uncomfortable" about its own racism and bigotry. And the FCC, by the means of logs and airchecks (the main reason we still have the shows to listen to), kept Network Radio from giving, for the most part, vent to the more extreme forms of American bigotry.

In fact, it is quite remarkable, if you listen to much Radio of the time, across the spectrum, how many appeals are made for "tolerance" of all kinds. So unlike our media world today, where gasoline is cheerfully thrown onto horrendously volatile situations.

Anderson and Benny, in part because of the understood but unstated recognition of a minority partnership on Radio, appear to have been accepted with near universal affection.

In connection to our subject here, your reference to Lena Horne in CABIN IN THE SKY, reminds me that Welles in the recent past had been negotiating a professional relationship with Miss Horne, and carrying on a romantic one.

[It was a reason J. Edgar Hoover directed that an FBI file be opened on him.]

As for Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, it is hard to fathom now, given what was the reality of race in America in the period, how popular their continuation of minstrelry in our national life. It has been noted that, during the Depression, companies often allowed those lucky enough to have jobs to take off work early in order to be home to hear "Amos n' Andy" during the dinner hour.

Largely because of the medium of Radio, Freeman and Gosden were were able to appeal to people of good will and bigots alike. They were regarded with a wide acceptance. It is said that "Amos n' Andy" had a considerable following in the black community back then. Thus are hatreds, guilt, and grief often assuaged.

Growing up in a little Northern Ohio town, I seldom saw a black person. [Not until long after did I realize that, in the late 1920's and early 1930's, the fathers of some of my schoolmates, as part of the Klan (almost as popular in a number of Midwestern States as it was in the South), had run most black people out of the area.] The only black person my age I knew personally was the only black kid in our high school. I'm sure that gathering around the radio in my family home, I did not know that "Amos n' Andy" were white minstrels.

Much bigger and of longer duration than Orson Welles, Freeman and Gosden were major stars in Radio, a medium which in the early 1930's, at least, Hollywood thought its major rival.

This may explain (but not excuse) Welles taking Freeman and Gosden into his production of State Fair. My guess, too, is that Welles, with his habit of associating himself with theatrical traditions of America's past, would have appreciated, without necessarily approving, the place of minstrelry in American Social History.

He certainly made up for his racial gaffes, at very great cost to his career, later. It might be said that the defense of minorities, the perfection of our democracy, was a driving, if not the driving force behind his most of his artistic endeavors in regard to America.

Glenn