Saturday, 4 May 2024

No one wanted to kill him; they just wanted him to play the piano

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[Fats] Waller’s playing was so special that it became a threat to his own safety. Leaving a show in Chicago in 1926, he was grabbed and bund...
Friday, 29 March 2024

It’s almost obscene how big a star Crosby once was, and how little he seems to mean now

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It’s almost obscene how big a star Crosby once was, and how little he seems to mean now. His hugeness can be proven with science. During the...
Thursday, 28 March 2024

No one would have guessed back in 1912, when it first made its presence known on vaudeville stages, that the blues would become one of the defining sounds of the twentieth century

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No one would have guessed back in 1912, when it first made its presence known on vaudeville stages, that the blues would become one of the d...
Wednesday, 27 March 2024

This was a high water mark for musical theatre – for great American songwriting, even

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In 1927, within a few blocks of Showboat you could have also seen George and Ira Gershwin’s Funny Face, Vincent Youman’s Hit the Deck or Ro...
Tuesday, 26 March 2024

No-one had previously been aware that red-hot mamas were endangered

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No singer was more indicative of America’s new found effervescence than the insatiable Sophie Tucker, who emerged in 1912, aged twenty-six, ...
Friday, 19 January 2024

The great epic tales stank, I think, more than the historians give them credit for

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'But ... I'm totally unprepared! I have no luggage with me, no nothing.' 'None of us do. We none of us expected this. That i...
Thursday, 18 January 2024

Some sentences have the power to change everything

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Some sentences have the power to change everything. They are the usual suspects: I love you , I hate you , I'm pregnant, I'm dying, ...