Noble Sissle
Noble Lee Sissle was an African-American jazz composer, bandleader and playwright, best known for the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, its hit song "I'm Just Wild About Harry". Sissle was born in Indianapolis, Indiana on July 10, 1889, around the time his father Rev. George A. Sissle was pastor of the city's Simpson M. E. Chapel, his mother, Martha Angeline Sissle, was a school juvenile probation officer. As a youth Sissle sang in church choirs and as a soloist with his high school's glee club in Cleveland, Ohio. Sissle attended De Pauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on scholarship and transferred to Butler University in Indianapolis before turning to music full-time. In early 1916 Sissle joined one of the society orchestras organized by James Reese Europe in New York, he persuaded Europe to hire his friend and composer Eubie Blake, in the year helped Europe organize a regimental band for the 15th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard. This would become the New York 369th Infantry "Hell Fighters" Regiment that served nobly in France in World War I, with Europe as a lieutenant and Sissle as his sergeant and lead vocalist.
Unlike most military bands it played syncopated music and was credited with introducing jazz to France. Sissle left the army after the war as a second lieutenant with the 370th Infantry Regiment and joined Europe’s civilian version of the 369th band. Sissle began recording for the Pathe label in early 1917, sang several vocals on Pathe discs recorded by Europe's 369th Infantry Band in early 1919, after it had become a civilian band. Not long afterwards, on May 9, 1919, James Europe was murdered by a disgruntled band member in Boston, leaving Sissle, with the help of his friend, Eubie Blake, to take temporary charge of Europe's band. Years earlier Sissle had struck up a partnership with Blake after they first met in Baltimore in 1915. Shortly after World War I, Sissle joined forces with Blake to form a vaudeville music duo, "The Dixie Duo". After vaudeville, the pair began work on the jazz musical revue Shuffle Along, which incorporated many songs they had written, had a book written by F. E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles.
When it premiered in 1921, Shuffle Along became the first hit musical on Broadway written by and about African Americans. It was the first all-black show on Broadway and included a young Josephine Baker among the performers; the musicals introduced hit songs such as "I'm Just Wild About Harry" and "Love Will Find a Way". Sissle and his band appear in a 1930 British Pathétone short filmed at Ciro's nightclub in London, performing Walter Donaldson's "Little White Lies" and "Happy Feet", written by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager. In 1932, Sissle appeared with Nina Mae McKinney, the Nicholas Brothers, Eubie Blake in Pie, Pie Blackbird, a Vitaphone short released by Warner Brothers. In February 1931, Sissle accompanied Adelaide Hall on piano at the prestigious Palace Theatre in New York during her 1931-32 world tour. In 1954, New York radio station WMGM, owned by Loew's Theatre Organization, signed Sissle as a disc jockey, his show featured the music of African-American recording artists. Sissle was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
African American musical theater Notes BibliographyBrooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919, 363-395, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Reef, Catherine. African Americans in the Military. New York City, New York: Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4381-3096-5. Fuld, James J.. The Book of World Famous Music, Classical and Folk. Dover Books. ISBN 978-0486414751. Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake at Jass.com Noble Sissle at the Internet Broadway Database Noble Sissle on IMDb Sissle and Blake Sing Snappy Songs sound film made in DeForest Phonofilm on YouTube
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
Manhattan
Manhattan referred to locally as the City, is the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City and its economic and administrative center, cultural identifier, historical birthplace. The borough is coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U. S. state of New York. The borough consists of Manhattan Island, bounded by the Hudson and Harlem rivers. S. mainland, physically connected to the Bronx and separated from the rest of Manhattan by the Harlem River. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each aligned with the borough's long axis: Lower and Upper Manhattan. Manhattan has been described as the cultural, financial and entertainment capital of the world, the borough hosts the United Nations Headquarters. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, Manhattan is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization: the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, the borough has been the setting for numerous books and television shows. Manhattan real estate has since become among the most expensive in the world, with the value of Manhattan Island, including real estate, estimated to exceed US$3 trillion in 2013. Manhattan traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan. Manhattan is documented to have been purchased by Dutch colonists from Native Americans in 1626 for 60 guilders, which equals $1038 in current terms; the territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York, based in present-day Manhattan, served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790; the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals of liberty and peace.
Manhattan became a borough during the consolidation of New York City in 1898. New York County is the United States' second-smallest county by land area, is the most densely populated U. S. county. It is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with a census-estimated 2017 population of 1,664,727 living in a land area of 22.83 square miles, or 72,918 residents per square mile, higher than the density of any individual U. S. city. On business days, the influx of commuters increases this number to over 3.9 million, or more than 170,000 people per square mile. Manhattan has the third-largest population of New York City's five boroughs, after Brooklyn and Queens, is the smallest borough in terms of land area. Manhattan Island is informally divided into three areas, each aligned with its long axis: Lower and Upper Manhattan. Many districts and landmarks in Manhattan are well known, as New York City received a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017, Manhattan hosts three of the world's 10 most-visited tourist attractions in 2013: Times Square, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal.
The borough hosts many prominent bridges, such as the Brooklyn Bridge. Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, part of the Stonewall National Monument, is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement; the City of New York was founded at the southern tip of Manhattan, the borough houses New York City Hall, the seat of the city's government. Numerous colleges and universities are located in Manhattan, including Columbia University, New York University, Cornell Tech, Weill Cornell Medical College, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top 40 in the world; the name Manhattan derives from the Munsee dialect of the Lenape language'manaháhtaan'. The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at the lower end, considered ideal for the making of bows.
It was first recorded in writing as Manna-hata, in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson's yacht Halve Maen. A 1610 map depicts the name as Manna-hata, twice, on both the west and east sides of the Mauritius River. Alternative folk etymologies include "island of many hills", "the island where we all became intoxicated" and "island", as well as a phrase descriptive of the whirlpool at Hell Gate; the area, now Manhattan was long inhabited by the Lenape Native Americans. In 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano – sailing in service of King Francis I of France – became the first documented European to visit the area that would become New York City, he entered the tidal strait now known as The Narrows and named the land around Upper New York
Storer College
Storer College was a black college located in Harpers Ferry in Jefferson County, West Virginia. Established as a normal school to train black teachers, it operated from 1865 until 1955. Established after the American Civil War with the help of philanthropic Baptists from New England and Maine, it lost state funding after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the United States Supreme Court that said segregated public schools were unconstitutional; the state decided to fund other facilities. The defunct college's former campus and buildings were acquired by the National Park Service, authorized in a 1962 appropriation, as part of what is now called the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. At the same time the NPS began to develop this facility for use as one of its four national training centers. Founded as a one-room school for freedmen, Storer developed over the decades as a full-fledged degree-granting four-year college open to all races and colors, men and women. Former slaves came to Storer as they were eager to learn to read and write, to help them make their way in a new world of free labor.
Some wanted to leave the agricultural fields where most had worked. The first building on Camp Hill, a portion of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to open its doors to students was the Lockwood House the US Armory Paymaster's quarters. In 1865, as a representative of New England's Freewill Baptist Home Mission Society, Reverend Nathan Cook Brackett established a primary school in the war-torn building, he taught reading and arithmetic to the children of former slaves and sometimes to their parents. This school was related to a larger national effort by northern philanthropic organizations and the government's Freedmen's Bureau to set up schools in order to educate the millions of African Americans freed by the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. From Harpers Ferry, Reverend Brackett directed the efforts of dedicated missionary teachers, who provided a basic education to thousands of former slaves congregated in the safe haven of the Shenandoah Valley by the end of the American Civil War. Dedicated as they were, these few teachers could not begin to meet the educational needs of the freedmen in the area.
Across the South, education of freedmen was an urgent priority within their community. By 1867, some 16 teachers struggled to educate 2,500 students. Reverend Brackett realized. In 1867, Reverend Brackett's school came to the notice of John Storer, a philanthropist from Maine, through Rev. Oren B. Cheney, founder of Bates College, a Freewill Baptist school in Maine. Storer offered a $10,000 grant to the Freewill Baptists for a "colored school" in the South if several conditions could be met. First, the school must become a degree-granting college. Second, the school had to be open to all applicants, regardless of gender, and the Freewill Baptist Church had to match his $10,000 donation within the year. After a year-long effort, the money was raised, Storer Normal School opened its doors. By March 1868 it received its state charter. Raising $10,000 turned out to be easy compared to facing local resistance by whites to a "colored school." Residents of Harpers Ferry tried everything from slander and vandalism to pulling political strings in their efforts to shut down the school.
One teacher wrote, "it is unusual for me to go to the Post Office without being hooted at, twice I have been stoned on the streets at noonday." Threats by the Ku Klux Klan caused the faculty and students to carry arms while walking outside. These efforts did not succeed in closing Storer Normal School, local attitudes changed. In his life, Reverend Brackett became a respected citizen of Harpers Ferry. Understanding that former slaves needed to learn more than the three Rs to function in society, Storer founders intended to provide more than a basic education. According to the first college catalog, students were to "receive counsel and sympathy, learn what constitutes correct living, become qualified for the performance of the great work of life." In its early years, in the press to expand literacy among the freedmen and their children, Storer taught freedmen to read, spell, do sums, to go back into their communities to teach others these lessons. Storer remained a Teachers College, but added courses in higher education as well as industrial training.
Students graduated with a normal degree, for teaching elementary school students, or an academic degree, for those going on to college. Buildings were constructed through the 1930s, with Permelia Eastman Cook Hall, a handsome grey stone building, completed 1939-1940. Storer College was a site of various important events in West Virginia and national African-American history. In 1881, the noted abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery as a young man in the antebellum years and become a noted orator, delivered his famous speech on abolitionist John Brown at Storer Normal School. In August 1906, Storer Normal School hosted the second conference of the Niagara Movement and the first on American soil. Formed by a group of leading African American intellectuals, the Niagara Movement planned a campaign to eliminate discrimination based on race; the movement's leader, W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociologist with a PhD, rejected the prevalent theory of "accommodation" promoted by Booker T. Washington.
President of the Tuskegee Institute, Washington advocated conciliation and advancement of the race rather than confrontation as a means of gaining social equality. He encouraged the teaching of conservative rural and industrial skills at his campus to prepare students for the rural worlds most would return to; the Niagara
Dames
Dames is a 1934 Warner Bros. musical comedy film directed by Ray Enright with dance numbers created by Busby Berkeley. The film stars Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Guy Kibbee, ZaSu Pitts, Hugh Herbert. Production numbers and songs include "When You Were a Smile on Your Mother's Lips", "The Girl at the Ironing Board", "I Only Have Eyes for You", "Dames" and "Try to See It My Way". Eccentric multimillionaire Ezra Ounce, whose main purpose in life is raising American morals through a nationwide campaign, wants to be assured that his fortune will be inherited by upstanding relatives, he visits his cousin Matilda Hemingway in New York City, in Horace's view the center of immorality in America. What Ounce finds most offensive are musical comedy shows and the people who put them on, it just so happens that Matilda's daughter Barbara is a dancer and singer in love with a struggling singer and songwriter, her 13th cousin, Jimmy Higgens. On Ezra's instructions, Jimmy the "black sheep" has been ostracized by the family, on pain of not receiving their inheritance.
Matilda's husband Horace meets a showgirl named Mabel, who's been stranded in Troy when her show folds, connives her way into sleeping in Horace's train compartment as a way to get back home. Terrified of scandal, he leaves her some money and his business card, along with a note telling her to not mention their meeting to anyone. Songwriter Sammy Fain, who contributed to the music used in the film, has a small role as "Buttercup Balmer", a songwriter; this character's name, along with "Johnny Harris", came from two men who owned movie theatres in Pennsylvania - this was done at the behest of producer Hal Wallis. Veteran bit-part actor Milton Kibbee, brother of Guy Kibbee, has a bit-part as a reporter. Jean Rogers, who played "Dale Arden", Flash Gordon's girlfriend, in 30s serials, is in the chorus; the musical sequences in Dames were designed and directed by Busby Berkeley - the Warner Bros. publicity office invented the phrase "cinematerpsichorean" to describe Berkeley's creations. By this time, after the success of 42nd Street, Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933, Berkeley had his own unit at Warners, under his total control as supervised by producer Hal Wallis.
"Dames" - by Harry Warren and Al Dubin "I Only Have Eyes for You" - by Harry Warren and Al Dubin. At one point in this number, sung by Dick Powell to Ruby Keeler, all the girls in the chorus wear Ruby Keeler masks as they move around the stage, but in just about every shot, the real Keeler passes by the camera briefly. In 1989, this song won an ASCAP Award as the "Most Performed Feature Film Standard". "The Girl at the Ironing Board" - by Al Dubin. Joan Blondell was seven months pregnant at the time this number was filmed, care had to be taken by her husband, cinematographer George Barnes, not to show her condition. At one point in the number, a property man can be seen in the background, hanging up clotheslines. "When You Were a Smile on Your Mother's Lips and a Twinkle in Your Daddy's Eye" by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal lyrics "Try to See It My Way" - by Allie Wrubel and Mort Dixon One of the effects of the Production Code on this film is a musical number that never made it to the screen. Berkeley had planned one featuring Joan Blondell about a fight between a cat and a mouse that ended with Blondell inviting everyone to "come up and see my pussy sometime".
Producer Hal Wallis removed this number from the script before it got to the censors of the Hays Office. The director slated to do the film was Archie Mayo, a second director before Ray Enright got the job a week before filming began; some early casting considerations had Ruth Donnelly playing "Mathilda" instead of ZaSu Pitts, Hobart Cavanaugh as "Ellsworthy Todd". At one point, it was suggested that Eleanor Powell do a specialty number. Dames began production at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California on March 28, 1934. Ray Enright completed the dramatic scenes in mid-April of that year, while Busby Berkeley continued working on the musical numbers until July 3; the film had its premiere on August 16, 1934 and went into general release on September 1 of that year. The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: 2006: AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals – Nominated Busby Berkeley using alternate takes to circumvent censorship Pre-Code Hollywood Dames on IMDb Dames at AllMovie Dames at the TCM Movie Database Dames at the American Film Institute Catalog Dames at Rotten Tomatoes
