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Partly in imitation of the successful Broadway Melody format, backstage musicals became the most popular type of early musical. While Warner Bros.' Gold Diggers of Broadway was a huge success, others veered too closely to the original These included Jolson rival Harry Richman in Irving Berlin's Puttin' on the Ritz, Erich von Stroheim in the strange Great Gabbo, and Jolson in Mammy. Other backstage elements included heartbreak, nightclub settings, songwriters, and gangsters. The overabundance of these films contributed to growing audience impatience with musicals in the spring of 1930.

Just about every American city had a White City and a Midway, a respectable entertainment zone and a red-light district, sparkling movie palaces and dark nightclubs. What made Atlantic City different from Philadelphia and Reading and even Las Vegas was the close proximity and relative safety of the two sites. For most of the social climbers walking on the Boardwalk, doing a little slumming on the side in the glitzy nightclubs and at risqué shows represented a just reward for hard work. The excesses of these places, like the colossal hotels, underscored the presumed perfection of middle-class values. But for others, the city's Midway extended the range of the town's playacting possibilities.

This chapter explores the history of the “B-girls”—young women employed by bars or nightclubs to act as a companion to male customers and to induce them to buy drinks, and usually paid a percentage of what the customers spent. B-girls were part of important changes in sexual and commercial culture in the 1940s and 1950s. During World War II, they joined prostitutes, pickups, and victory girls in bar-based heterosexual encounters, strategically adapting their practices to evade social protection authorities. This further developed in the 1950s when the B-girls created a professional subculture which blurred the line between commercial and casual sex and took advantage of citizens' declining support for legal campaigns to control women's sexuality. With creativity and ingenuity, mid-century drink solicitors expanded the possibilities for women's sexual license.

This chapter begins with a survey of the history and development of European cabaret (specifically in France and Germany) in order to show that serious artists learned from cabaret even as they developed it. The chapter then focuses on the creation of the show's ambience, noting that this ambience frequently ran counter to the tone and impulse of the real cabaret world in Europe of the thirties. Although John Kander and Fred Ebb did not explicitly exploit the political and social wit of German cabaret or the wide scope of the form, they did reproduce the role of the Emcee. The show's look was completed by Patricia Zipprodt's costumes, which were divided into the presentational and metaphorical, on the one hand, and the realistic and the mundane, on the other hand. The chapter examines the limits placed on Harold Prince's concept by the sociology and politics (including the scope of eminent performing satirists) of America in the sixties.

Organizational models comprise this chapter, which looks at the growth of Chicago’s African American music industry and how it engaged with other expressions of black capitalism during the early 1970s. These collaborations include musicians’ work with such organizations as Operation PUSH and its PUSH Expos, as well as in emerging black advertising firms. Within recording studios, musical influences and techniques from the previous decade informed work from The Dells, The Chi-Lites and Lowrell Simon’s group, The Lost Generation. Emerging media outlets for the music included Don Cornelius’ nationwide television program, “Soul Train” and Johnson Publishing entering the radio business. Meanwhile, older venues and outlets—nightclubs and jukeboxes—contended with changing local demographics.

By nearly any measure, college-based music programs have largely replaced the proverbial “street” as the primary training grounds for young jazz musicians and have replaced urban nightclubs as the main professional homes for hundreds of jazz performers and composers. Even so, this far-reaching and seemingly inexorable move from clubs to schools remains ignored, marginalized, or denigrated throughout a wide range of jazz discourse. By examining some deeply held conceptions of both jazz history and music education, the chapter encourages readers to reconsider the roles schools now play in the development and dissemination of jazz.

For the author who had grown tired of the frenetic life of the West End, the teashops and the red-lipped girls, Soho seemed to be the natural refuge. As the West End’s shabbier cousin, tucked away in the narrow streets behind Piccadilly, Regent Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, Soho was often seen as an anomaly, an island of heterogeneity and irregularity in the very heart of the commercialised central London where everything and everyone appeared to be increasingly standardised. By the 1930s Soho had long enjoyed a reputation as London’s most mixed quarter, home to a heady variety of nationalities and professions.

This chapter examines the work of Frank Loesser. It begins with an extended commentary of his career, followed by details on productions, with data and song information. Loesser came from a musical family. His father, Henry, was a Prussian-born piano teacher; his older brother Arthur was a renowned concert pianist. Frank, though, was a musical black sheep; refusing to study the classics, he taught himself piano and immersed himself in popular music. His first published song was In Love with the Memory of You (1931), with music by William Schuman (later a classical composer and the president of Juilliard). By the mid-1930s Loesser was singing and playing in nightclubs, as well as writing special material with composer Irving Actman.

This chapter explores the rise of London's night-time economy as a particular example of the potentially risky environments within which individuals are being asked to regulate and modify their own behaviour. Just as with the food economy, London's night-time economy — composed of the nation's largest selection of bars, pubs and nightclubs — is now an important element of the city's broader economic success. Beyond the issues raised by the commodification and commercialisation of the night-time experience, changing drinking environments also raise associated questions of how these may problematise existing codes of sanctioned behaviour. Indeed, with the conscious efforts to create the ‘24-hour city’, or to encourage ‘café culture’ through licensing reform, the ways in which people drink and, therefore, the risks associated with these practices, have inevitably altered.

Nightclub singer Helen Morgan defined the important role of Julie. The interpolated song “Bill,” a signature moment in act two, was chosen specifically to match Morgan's existing persona as a singer of torch songs. Hammerstein changed Julie's character as described in Ferber's novel to match Morgan's public persona as a symbol of resistance to Prohibition. Morgan's difficulties with the law during Show Boat's Broadway run proved important to the show's continuing profitability. Julie's role in act one was written before Morgan was cast. She performed “Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man” in a manner that deflected issues of race surrounding her character. Morgan's approach to the song—singing in a “white” manner—is compared to the very different style adopted by blackface singer Tess Gardella who performed under the stage name Aunt Jemima.

This chapter introduces the "calypso craze" of the 1950s and the central figure of the story, Harry Belafonte. Stolen Time is not an exhaustive history of the fad, but rather looks at specific instances of the calypso craze that illuminate the shape of black fad performance in the United States across a range of overlapping media: nightclub acts and sound recordings (chapter 1), film (chapter 2), television (chapter 3), musical theater (chapter 4), and dance. Rather than a sociological approach that details where and how the calypso craze was consumed, Stolen Time instead looks at the creative and unexpected ways that black performers themselves used the conditions of fad culture to (dis)engage with the entertainment industry, trip the performance circuit between the United States and the Caribbean, and shape the history of performance in the United States and its relationship to the black diaspora.

This chapter discusses jazz education and the shift from urban nightclubs to schools as the primary homes of hundreds of jazz composers and musicians. However, this shift continues to be marginalized, ignored, or belittled throughout the wide range of jazz discourse. The chapter also examines several deeply held conceptions of jazz history and music education in order to encourage people to reconsider the roles that schools currently play in the development and spread of jazz music.

Even before 1914, Harlem's small nightclubs and honky-tonks had begun to nourish talented young black musicians and entertainers. Unlike black Bohemia's notorious clubs in the old Tenderloin along West 35th Street that catered to the common vices of gambling and prostitution, several of these clubs offered a professional and congenial social atmosphere in which artistic ideas were born and exhibited. This was still the era of ragtime, the precursor of jazz. From 1900 up to World War I, black entertainers rushed to tour concert halls and music halls in Europe, where race relations were more relaxed than in the United States.

This chapter surveys Fred Astaire's films through the lens of what industry types called the background, the general setting of a film that plays host to the story, characters, and, most crucially, song-and-dance routines. It examines the big decisions producers made: many reflect straightforward attempts to leverage popular music groups—dance bands—for the benefit of a given film product, and Astaire's tastes often seem to be driving the choices. Producers had real power in Hollywood. They made the key casting and story decisions, whether it was conceiving a film for Astaire or adjusting an existing script to his persona. Certain backgrounds allowed Astaire to move more freely, and the range of backgrounds within which he could comfortably dance was, unsurprisingly, somewhat limited. Astaire functioned best against a popular entertainment background. Quite often these backgrounds included jazz or dance bands and popular music contexts. The chapter divides Astaire's films into three more-or-less-discrete categories based on their backgrounds: theater, nightclubs, and non-showbusiness. As will be evident, jazz-friendly contexts dominate.

Chapter 2 explores how the young Puneites of the café culture understood and positioned themselves in their world through their dressed bodies. By wearing jeans they not only clearly distinguished themselves from their elders and the rest of society but also communicated ‘normality’ before an imagined global audience.

This chapter explores how the tradition of English poetry harbors a kind of rude song—a fugitive lyric—written in the jargon of the demimonde, garbled and misplaced by design, which draws the reader into a historical underworld of taverns and nightclubs. The manifestos and rude songs of the ultraradical “tavern underworld” anticipated the convergence of avant-garde practice and modern nightlife in the early part of the twentieth century. Yet one could argue that poetic rhapsody has always been modern, in the sense that the rhapsodic measures are symptoms of modernity. As the praxis of nightlife became more deliberately politicized (as a laboratory for radical culture following the French Revolution) and more highly mediated (by its association with the underground press), the manifold obscurity of nightlife became increasingly susceptible to commodification—just like the fetishizing of cant, appealing to classes well beyond the subculture of the demimonde. The territory of nightlife thus yielded historically to rationalization and to sentimentality, as Schiller understood the category of the sentimental: an object, event, or place infused with verbal reflection—with reflections of itself—and with rational feeling. The chapter further analyzes how obscurity became a mode of publicity.

This chapter begins with the successful appearances of dance team “Fox and Walters” at the Versailles nightclub. Walters meets rising choreographer Robert Alton and performs in the Theatre Guild’s critically-panned Parade. Chapter 3 presents a detailed look at the production and reception of the Cole Porter musical Jubilee, where Walters partnered June Knight, introduced “Just One of Those Things,” and danced “Begin the Beguine.” Walters’ development as a dancer — under the tutelage of Albertina Rasch and Tony and Rene De Marco — is discussed. This chapter also explores his friendship with young Montgomery Clift.