Shelton Brooks - Hole in the Wall
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- Shelton Brooks, composer of "Some of These Days" and "Darktown Strutters' Ball," sings "Hole in the Wall." From a 1939 all-black film, Double Deal. The credits state Brooks also wrote another song for the movie, "Jitterbugs Cuttin' Rugs," but apparently it was cut from the film.
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My cousin Shelton Brooks!! :) :) My mom is the historian for our family and it's wonderful to know where you came from. :)
Now THAT'S ragtime singing!!! Listen to how far in front of the beat Mr. Brooks is singing, and the kind of syncopation. It's so wonderful to hear this in high fidelity in the 40s, and also have this footage. It's the next best thing to being able to go to the vaudeville theatres in the 'teens and actually see and hear the greats.
Late 1930s all-black film-very sharp, charismatic guy. He also wrote "Some of These Days" in 1910 (his first hit) and "I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone," among others.
He was born in 1886 in a small southern Ontario town about 50 miles east of Detroit. There are quite a few black families in the area, descendents of escaped US slaves who settled in the area (it was a straight shot up through Ohio from Kentucky; once you crossed the river into Canada near Detroit, you couldn't be caught and sent back). Many of them are farmers and at least one became a Canadian member of Parliament. My guess is that Brooks was from this background. He also had American Indian ancestry.
He was raised in Detroit and entered the music business there as a teenage saloon pianist. He toured America and Europe in vaudeville and musical theater for years doing music, comedy and mimicry. He made some records in the '20s, but most of them are apparently spoken 2-man black vaudeville comedy routines about courtrooms, stealing chickens and such. I've never heard any of them, or any music recordings he might have made.
He had a network radio show in the '30s. He lived till 1975 and it's a shame nobody did an album of him singing and playing some of his tunes.
Reseda Mickey Mr. Brooks did some live performances for the Maple Leaf Club ragtime club of Los Angeles in the mid to late 1960s. I have a flyer for one of these concerts, at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. My friend Robbie Rhodes was on this bill and I'll see if he can help me trace any homemade recordings of this and other concerts.
This is AWESOME! Thanks for posting!!!
Check out Brooks' "All Night Long," with lyrics complaining about being "blue" in 12-bar, copyrighted in June 1912, before W.C. Handy copyrighted any blues.
Famous emcee for the great Chicago Regal Theatre on South Side 47th Street during the 1930s and on.