Not Elvis :a puzzle in a photo

That's not a guitar, but a type of Chinese ukulele - itinerant street musician, 1950's.The other urious thingabout this photo is that the guy is wearing a silk gown and cap, like a gentleman, whereas travelling musicians wore simple working man clothing. No wonder the crowd freak out - usually they took street singers for granted. So we have a puzzle in a picture. In the 1920's, the US and Canada passed las to exclude Chinese settlement, and in Hispanic America  Chinese people weredepirted wholesale,even if they'd settled many generations and were part Hispanic.  Unless we learm from history, we repeat it. Whoever this man is and why he's dressed up effectively in a costume, we will never know, but we need to think why he was doing this.

Posthumous Christmas : Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Christmas Overture is "posthumous", in the sense that the present form in which it's known was made thirteen years after the composer’s death by a popular arranger, Sydney Barnes.  Colerdge-Taylor's original music was more extensive, being incidental music for a children's play, The Forest of Wild Thyme, in 1910.  There must be dozens of Christmas compilations but this is robust and rather jolly. One wonders what remains of the original manuscript. There's a good recording by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth.

While still a student at the Royal College of Music, Coleridge-Taylor came to the attention of August Jaeger and Edward Elgar who arranged a commission for him at the 1897 Three Choirs Festival.    Hiawatha's Wedding Feast followed soon after, then the full Song of Hiawatha. By the age of 25, Coleridge-Taylor was a resounding success.   Hiawatha was a hit because it suited the taste of the time for grand excess, but it's actually a more more sophisticated work than its reputation might suggest.  Even in Hiawatha, Coleridge-Taylor experiments with non-western form, following Longfellow's attempts to recreate Native American chant and the use of exotc speech rhythm. 

Although he never knew his father and was brought up in an entirely English  environment, being half Black might have shaped his sense of identity, though his interest in the possibilities of "new world" music might also have been sparked by Dvořák and German and French composers of the era. Imagine if he had lived to know Ravel or Starvinsky, or to experience the Jazz Age and the innovations of the 1920's!  Understanding Coleridge-Taylor means understanding the social context in which he was operating, and very specifically the black and non-western culture  of his time.  

Thus I cannot recommend highly enough the book Samuel Coleridge -Taylor: a Musical Life by Jeffrey Green (Pickering & Chatto, 2011, 296pp). This is the kind of proper examination that Coleridge-Taylor deserves. Green is a meticulous researcher, with an encylopedic knowledge of Black society in Britain in Coleridge-Taylor's time.  Green's research is meticulous, drawing on sources rarely explored, and is presented with intelligent analysis. It's absolutely essential for anyone interested in multi-cultural Britain. But he's also superb on the social context of Victorian  and Edwardian Britain: a lesson for anyone really interested in knowing what life might have been like in crowded terrace houses and large extended families. Indeed, anyone interested in modern Britain needs to know Green's work.  

The first books on Coleridge-Taylor were written in the early years of the 20th century, before most could even conceive the subtleties of race and class politics. Thus the early books were a sanitized mix of myth and wishful thinking.  The tag "The Black Mahler" for example which has nothing to do with Coleridge-Taylor as a man and his music. It was coined in reference to Coleridge-Taylor’s celebrity when he arrived  in the United States, the reference being to the celebrity as a conductor accorded to Mahler when he visited America in the same period.  Nowadays anything with the word "Mahler" in it sells, so the temptation is to exploit the term for money value even though it's highly misleading.

Natives and freedom - The Hurricane 1937

"A sense of honour in the South Seas is as about as silly as  a silk hat in a hurricane"  says Dr Kersaint to M. De Laage, the tyrannical governor of Manikura, a French colony in the South Pacific, who is "under the spell of honour and duty" and defines honour as the need to impose control on feckless natives. A ship arrives, bringing Mme De Laage, and Terangi, the First Mate, a born sailor who "kept hanging from the mast like a bird, with wings stretched for home".

The natives rush cheerfully aboard the ship to welcome the crew home, to the strains of Aloha Oe (read more about that song here). The natives, as the Doctor says, "are like birds who need to flock together in the breeze" The village celebrates the wedding of Terangi and Marama. Great shots of native girls in leis and Terangi's muscular bare chest.  Terangi and Marama set off in a dugout for an island honeymoon.  But Terangi smells a good wind: the ship sets sails again. In Tahiti, Ternagi and his friends are in a bar with loose women who smoke. Terangi plays with a mechanical hula doll with childish delight.  "Get up when a white man tells you!" sneers a drunk. Ternagi fells him with one blow.

But in colonies, fighting back is insurrection. The Hurricane's subtext was dangerous. Setting the movie in a French colony disguised the fact that the same brutal rules applied elsewhere, including Hawaii.   Or in the mainland US, for that matter.

Terangi is imprisoned. Being a free spirit, he keeps escaping and his sentence gets extended.   "Sixteen years in a cell with rats as companions".in chains, being whipped, doing hard labour., but Terangi remains unbroken.  He escapes again from maximum security, but inadvertently kills a guard. He steals a canoe and paddles 600 miles back to Manakura, navigating by the winds, braving storms at sea.  The local Priest takes him in secrecy to an island, where he's reunited with Marama and their child.

Back in Manakura, a hurricane is building up.  "Imagine Paris", says Mme De Laage, "civilizations don't do well in a hurricane"   The natives are restless : they know something, they're smiling.  Terangi's a legend, a symbol of freedom. De Laage finds out where he's hidden and sets off to capture him.  "You'll find a stronger authority than me in that storm!" cries the Priest. The hurricane hits Manakura.  People take shelter in the church, whose bells won't stop ringing in the wind. Fabulous cinematography - sheets of rain, flying debris, palm trees crashing, pounding waves. I've been in hurricanes. When I first saw this film on TV, it seemed realistic enough (to a kid).  

Terangi appears in a boat and the priest tells him to save those he can, who include Mme De Laage.  Eventually the church bell falls silent. But by then the church has been flattened, the priest and most of his parishioners killed. Terangi and his family wash up on a beach and light a fire. M. De Laage comes and rescues his wife. Terangi and his family escape in a war canoe.  De Laage spots it in the distance from his ship. "It's just debris" says his wife.

Given that The Hurricane was made in 1937, the director John Ford and producer Samuel Goldwyn really couldn't take risks with the authorities, so they probably needed to play up the pseudo-religious moralizing, which is pretty turgid. Overlook that, though, and the movie is daringly radical. It challenges racism outright, and the idea of rigid, relentless power structures.  Although  Ternagi and Marama are acted by white people in  brownface (Jon Hall and Dorothy Lamour) and the characters they play are cardboard, the stereotypes aren't negative.  Compare The Hurricane to Typhoon, the 1940 Paramount movie shot in (then) glorious Technicolor and maximum special effects. There, the natives are no more than scenery and Dorothy Lamour's part serves only to offer glimpses of her body. Typhoon is  B movie crime flick set in the tropics. The Hurricane is much more, and would have been even better had Hollywood, and the West in general, been ready for something stronger.

Race, Religion and Whaling : Down to the Sea in Ships

Down to the Sea in Ships (1922, Elmer Clifton) is famous because it made Clara Bow a star, but it's even more interesting as a semi-historical document.  It's also a surprisngly subversive commentary on race, religion and hypocrisy.

When this film was made whaling in tall ships was still an important industry, and many of the shots are authentic, shot with local whalers, who still practised their trade. This film is much more than a movie. The plot is melodrama, but plays out against a background which would be impossible to replicate today.  Though the story is set in the mid-nineteenth century (the Gold Rush is news), those times were living memory to many people 100 years ago. Just as Nosferatu (1921 - read more here) depicts a Germany of the recent past which was soon to vanish, So when we look at the whalers in their small boats, struggling with the ocean, we aren't watching stunt men, but men who really did know how to ride the waves.  There are shots where we can see whole herds of whales, and porpoises, swimming freely. Possibly not so easy to envisage today.  Down to the Sea in Ships is like a last, loving snapshot of a world we might reconstruct but can never experience. The best scenes, shot on the high seas, are grainy and not posed for dramatic effect, but they were made when motion picture technology was barely 25 years old.  Special credits then, to the two photographers, A G Penrod and Paul H Allen, "who, in small boats, stood by their cameras, at the risk of their lives, to film the fighting whales".  But there's even more to this film than meets the eye: its sub-texts on social issues are way ahead of its time. 

Down to the Sea in Ships was made by "The Whaling Film Corporation", specially set up for the purpose and shot in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the premiere took place. At the time, cinema wasn't dominated by big studios but by small independents, so this film is also a record of a film making model completely different to Hollywood, much closer to European art film of the period.  The director/producer was Elmer Clifton (1890-1949) who worked with D W Griffith, though in this film he shows a very different approach to movie-making.  

This film is not studio spectacular but direct engagement with Nature.  Nowadays there'd be warnings that "no real animals were harmed in filming". Not so in 1922. The massive sperm whale the whalers kill was probably a real whale.  No way the technology of the time was fancy enough to fake a whale like this. It fights back, flipping over one of the boats. The men fall into the sea but look as though they've done that before.  When the whale pulls three boats and their crews (weighing 6000 tons the subtitles tell us) the whale wasn't acting.  There are shots of blubber being stripped off the carcass, buckets filled with sperm and so on, lovingly captured in detail.  Presumably that's what happened : the whalers had to make a living and weren't paid much by the film company.  So if the filming is grainy, and the shots unposed, without the special effects we expect today, we shouldn't complain.  Although some scenes are clearly staged, technology of the time wasn't advanced enough to fake all that we see. The whaling ship, with three masts and nine sails, was almost certainly authentic. As the credits say "The brawny boatsteerer still throws the hand harpoon".  Though the hero is cast as boatsteerer, the man doing the job was evidently the real thing. 

It's interesting, then, hat the close knit community depicted is staunchly Quaker, though Quakers eschew killing.  I had a hard time squaring that with hunting whales almost to extinction, but I guess that's because we live in more enlightened times and don't depend on whales for fuel, bones and oil.  Quakers were whalers for economic reasons.  Captain Morgan is a retired whaleman, ramrod straight and unbending, and rich.  A bit of a tyrant too, who insists his daughter Patience cannot marry outside the faith or profession.  He's so uptight he complains that Patience's wedding shawl is "gay" because it has a fringe.  Being pig-headed is his downfall, though he doesn't live to find out.  For he's easily fooled.  Two men plot to steal his ships. One is Finner, a ne'er do well, the other is Siggs, from a "nearby city".

Siggs is seen dressed in Chinese clothes with Chinese antiques.  "You're almost white" says Finner.   Down to the sea in Ships is a whole lot less innocent than you'd expect.  Although race laws prevailed in the United States and elsewhere, not everyone was racist. Please see my piece  Broken Blossoms : Racist reversal the 1919  film by D W Griffith, Clifton's mentor, which subverts racist stereotypes and was banned in British colonies for fifty years as a result.  Griffith's Birth of a Nation presented the KKK in a good light, demeaning their victims.  But Clifton, who never made it big in Hollywood,  went on to make low-budget independent movies on difficult social issues. As in Broken Blossoms, and other films on race relations like The Cheat : racism and dishonesty (read more here)  fiendish orientals are defined as sex-obsessed maniacs, lusting for white women. The actor playing Siggs leers and grimaces, like a masked demon.  All Siggs has to do to pass as Quaker is wear a Quaker hat and talk thee and thou.  Is he mixed race, (in the 1850's) or is his race a ruse to justify titilliation? .And, in this film,  Finner is even more of a lecher, salivating over Dot,  Morgan's pre-pubescent  orphan granddaughter.  Later he attempts to rape her. (Dot and Finner in the photo below)

Dot is played by Clara Bow then aged 16 and chubby faced.  Captain Morgan cannot understand Dot, who was found floating on a raft when her parents' ship,went down.  Maybe she's not his at all.  She's a forceful whirlwind of a girl, more tomboy than lady, who hangs out with the labourers at the copper works and shamelessly pulls Jimmy's newly grown whiskers. Grandad grew rich from killing animals. Dot confronts men who tease a dog. She gets into fights. Eventually, she dresses as a boy to run off to sea when Jimmy signs on as a whaler.  Bow plays the part so well that she steals the show: the other actors are wooden in comparison.  And what a part it is, so unusual and so daring for its time.  Her more famous It Girl roles are tame stereotypes in comparison.

Patience is a wimp, who still plays with dolls, though she's at least in her 20's.  Siggs prevails on Captain Morgan, who,lets him court Patience. But Dexter, the Boy Next Door, returns from college and he and Patience fall in love. Finner gets Dexter shanghai'd on a whaling ship. Unfortunate term, given the racism in the depiction of Siggs, but a reminder that white men got screwed by a brutal system too.   Finner kills the master of the ship and takes control.  Dot, dressed as a cabin boy defends Jimmy when Finner fights him, and reveal she's a girl.  Finner gets caught molesting her and is locked in a cage. Dexter ends up becoming Boatsteerer, having earned the respect of the crew.  Having caught the big sperm whale (more innuemdo) the ship sails back to New Bedford. That very day, Patience is marrying Siggs, having promised her Dad on his deathbed to do so.  Dexter runs through a thunderstorm to the church, smashing a window, disrupting the ceremony and the decorum of Quaker propriety. Love prevails!  Next year Patience has a baby instead of a doll, and Dot cavorts in a flower strewn meadow with Jimmy. Along the way we see other vignettes of "real" life, like the Black ex-slaves of the Sea Islands, and Tacoma, Patience's First Nation maid, with an uncredited actress who clearly isn't white, and is dressed in Missionary Indian costume.

Black Britain - murder at RAM

"Sapphire - the sensational story of a girl whoi didn't belong". Basil Dearden's film from 1959 would be shocking today, especially in an increasingly divided society.  Filmed at the Royal Academy of Music, and at a jazz club in Charlotte Street. The students have changed, though. David Harris, a student architect, who has a scholarship to study in Rome, looks middle aged , though he's only 20.  The only hip thing about him is his duffle coat.  His girlfriend, Sapphire Robbins, has been murdered on Hampstead Heath.  The police break into Sapphire's room and discover she used to play records all the time "She was at the RAM!" says the landlady.  The cops assume she's been killed by a jealous lowlife from her double life. Then Sapphire's brother comes down from Birmingham. He's black.  "Are you her half brother?" ask the cops. "No" says brother.Sapphire was mixed race but passed for white in white society.

Sapphire was pregnant. "I've seen the autopsy" said her brother. He's a doctor.  "We'll find who I did it" say the cops. Dr Robbins isn't so sure. "When I was a boy", he says, "another boy touched me, and said 'nothing rubbed off ". But something rubbed onto him. Sapphire's landlady's scared in case word gets round that she rented rooms to blacks.  Even David didn't know Sapphire was black "until last week". A policeman visits Sapphire's GP. "Didn't you know she was....coloured ? You can always tell, you know". "Can you tell a policeman by his big feet?" says the GP.  The police track down Sapphire's black friends who say she started passing for white after being snubbed by someone who remarked "I see you like the junglies".  The jazz club owner says, sarcastically, "once the lilyskins hear the beat of the bongo, they can't hide". Even Sapphire's friends think Sapphire's black ex, Johnny, might have killed her.  He gets beat up by a white gang. Luckily - ironically - the cops arrest him.

Tensions in David's family.  His mother's worried. His sister, a bitch, snaps at her kids "Ask no questions and you'll get no lies". Wonderfully tight script which keeps up the tension without stop.  The racist cop says "These spades are trouble, send them back where they came".  If crimes could so easily be solved ! His inspector, though, doesn't agree. "Given the right atmosphere" her says "you can  organize riots against anyone. Blacks, Jews, Irish, evern policemen with big feet". Racist cop checks out Johnny's alibi and realizes he's in the clear.  David would lose his scholarship if he married.  Kaput to the family's ambitions. David snaps. Far from welcoming Sapphire, his family hate blacks.  The killer confesses ! But of course, it's Sapphire's fault for being black and uppity.  Brilliant film, utterly relevant today. Now at least, mixed race or any race, don't have to hide.

Chinese ukulele star 1925 ?

Dressed in a "Chinese" costume, strumming a ukulele and singing skat.  Nee Wong was a novelty act in vaudeville, who appeared on Broadway and in London's West End. Billed as "a regular Chinese 'Ukulele Ike'" and "The Gentleman of the Orient" and  "One of vaudeville's most talented entertainers in Nee Wong, a lackadaisical young Chinese (sic). Nee Wong can make a ukulele talk. He sings American songs and translates them into Chinese, giving his audience a little lesson in Chinese pronunciation."
Audiences marvelled, and even today some  are fooled.

 

But even his identity was an act. Nee Wong's costume isn't Chinese. It's a circus clown version of the kind of tunic Chinese women - not men - wore or rather weren't wearing in the 1920's. The famous movie clip from 1925 shows him singing,  but he's singing gobbledegook, not Chinese.

Nee Wong was no more "Chinese" than white folks in blackface playing banjos and singing "African" were black. In reality, Nee Wong was Filipino, born Alfredo Oppus in Baclayon in 1895.  He worked as a labour organizer  with a Filipino battalion in California just after the First World War.  As "Nee Wong" he made a living impersonating "the gaits and mien of the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino as observed by an Occidental at the cross roads of Oriental San Francisco".  Read more HERE on a specialist ukulele blog which is ace on ukulele technique, and also read the comments below about Oppus, the man.

Nee Wong presumably had to make a living and didn't do badly. His act says much more about his era, when non-whites couldn't break into the mainstream unless they pandered to racist stereotypes, pretending to be what they were not, serving an audience that didn't care. White guys donned blackface, strummed banjos and pretended to be "African". Real black guys had to adopt demeaning caricature. Stepin Fetchit's very name implies servility and borderline mental defectiveness.  Even as late as the 1960's Screamin' Jay Hawkins pranced about on prime-time TV, grunting "voodoo", in a get-up that came straight out of 1920s' witch doctor movies. There were lots of acts like these then, many of them white folks pretending to be what they were not. But what was the psychological toll of demeaning oneself and living a lie? These acts weren't harmless fun because they reinforced racist values.  At least, Oppus seems to have broken away. By the 1940's he's seen in photos doing a straight act.  Others didn't, some trapped in tragic fantasy. I don't know what happened to Alfredo Oppus, but I'm glad he saw past illusion.

Black in Britain - musicians and stereotypes

Good article "From slavery to singing star: celebrating Thomas Rutling, by Ronald Samm, who is a singer himself. Samm is starring in a piece on Rutling's life at Harrogate, where Rutling settled down. Samm was also one of the security guards in Tansy Davies' much misunderstood  Between Worlds  at the ENO. What must it have been like to be black in Britain in late Victorian times when any kind of non-white person was an exotic alien?  Rutling is seated above, middle row left. In his tux he could pass for a banker or a patron of the Royal Opera House. But look at the banjo and guitar in the foreground. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were admired but they still had to conform to stereotypes. No way was the public ready for blacks  as equals in "serious" music.

Rutling (1854-1915) was a contemporary of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), whose blackness was an accident of birth, and who grew up in an all-white environment, admired by Elgar and feted at the Three Choirs Festival. To Coleridge-Taylor's credit, he set out to learn about black identity, writing music influenced by generic "African" ideas and Black American music. Being a proper English gentleman meant he was received by the President of the United States. Ordinary black Americans  didn't get invited to the White House except as menials.  To Coleridge-Taylor's credit, he went out of his way to learn about black culture and meet black American artists and intellectuals, Coleridge-Taylor's music is possibly better known in the US today than in Britain. Read my article "Who really was Coleridge-Taylor ?" HERE, and my other pieces on him by clicking the label below.

Coleridge-Taylor's music is fascinating because he was genuinely trying to come to terms with non-white western aesthetics, much in the way that French composers from Bizet on explored exotic themes. Imagine if he'd worked with Ravel and developed a whole new musical language?  But he's also important as a perspective on race in late colonial times. Jeffrey Green's biography Samuel Coleridge-Taylor:: a Musical, Life is  essential reading. It's based on exhaustive first-hand research, presented with genuine knowledge of background and the composer's position in society. Even now, black people are exploited for novelty value, an approach which is fundamentally racist even if it's not intentional.  Jeffrey Green's sensitive book gives Coleridge-Taylor the dignity and respect he deserves.

William Grant Still (1895-1978) grew up in a black community in the South, so his experiences of black identity were more acute than Coleridge-Taylor's, and very different indeed to the prettified fantasy of Delius's Koanga. Grant Still was middle class and educated, but had to adapt to a certain amount of stereotype to make a living.  Fortunately, he lived long enough to be recognized as a musician and part of the Harlem Renaissance.

Back to Ronald Samm and his ideas on the role of black singers today. If this really was an equal world, the issue wouldn't arise, but the fact is, the number of black people in classical music doesn't reflect demographic reality.  Like it or not, classical music is perceived as being elitist. The myth reinforces prejudice, intensifying the problem.  One of the stupidest things in current arts policy is the idea that music can somehow change society, but in reality, unless society itself changes, we aren't going to get more blacks on stage and in the audience. Non-white people get patronized all the time. More talking down doesn't help. Besides, being non-white can sometimes be an artistic advantage. Last year, Eva-Maria Westbroek sang Puccini Manon Lescaut.  Westbroek's lush blonde voluptuousness was nicely set off by Lester Lynch as her brother. In a sense having a black guy as lowlife feeds stereotype, but the dynamic between Westbroek and Lynch was electric. Brother and sister, enthusiastic parters in crime, enjoying every moment.

The Forgotten Soldiers of Empire

If you do only one thing to remember the First World War do this : watch David Olusoga's powerful documentary Martial Races on BBC i-player (link here)  This opens up a whole new dimensions which many British people know nothing about. We're never going to appreciate the magnitude of 1914-1918 until we appreciate its world-wide significance.

Did Empire save Britain and France? Could they have won the war without using colonial nations?  A million African, Indian, Black American and Chinese people took part, some fighting front line in the trenches, others supplying the back-up labour without which no army can survive. Hundreds of thousands died, and each man left behind a family and a community. These men didn't march off to war cheering. They were not volunteers, but men trapped by circumstances. In Africa and Asia, people were so poor that men would join up from sheer desperation.  Many of the Africans were rounded up by agents and chained. Slaves, not jolly volunteers fighting for a cause.

These men were simple peasants who didn't know much past their own villages, far less about the world. Thousands had never worn shoes in their lives. Suddenly they had to wear heavy, ill-fitting army boots and live in damp trenches.Nowadays even in remote areas people have TV, internet and mobile phones, even a smattering of education. A hundred years ago, these peasants might as well have been rocketed into space, so alien was the environment they found themselves in. Even now there are dozens of different language groups in Africa and Asia. A hundred years ago men from diffrerent villages might not speak the same dialect. Suddenly they're all thrown together, with hardly anyonen to talk to.

The concept of  "Lesser breeds" underpinned Imperialist thinking. The West didn't colonialize for love. Social change and modernization were side effects, not goals. Olusoga reads from British Army records which describe the different communities of the Indian subcontinent as if they were breeds of dogs or horses. Unpleasant as these things are, we need to acknowledge them if we're  to move on.

1914-1918 was a world war, with global causes and global consequences. It came about in many ways as a continuation of colonial rivalry. The British and the French grabbed colonies first, excluding the Germans, Japanese and Americans.  1914-18 didn't happen because some Serb shot an archduke. In the Middle East, the Germans (and their allies the Turks) were struggling with the Russians and British for control of oil fields. Then, as now. And so the British and French used their "resources" in the form of human fodder.

Olusoga's documentary is meticulously well researched and presented. This is the kind of exceptional high quality that the BBC was once known for. Most of this material is well documented in academic circles, but there's  material here that's never been seen in public before. Olusoga makes it human and personal.  To understand our present we need to understand our past. This series is very, very important.

Who really was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ? Hiawatha BBC

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's complete Song of Hiawatha from this year's Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester is available on BBC iplayer for six more days. I was at the performance, on one of the hottest days of the year, but as ever The Three Choirs Festival people were gracious, and let us take shelter in the cool of the Cathedral, though they themselves may have been melting in their three-piece frock coats. True Christian values!  Please read my review HERE.

Hiawatha is an important piece in music history, and not just British music. Dvorák's Symphony from the New World preceded Hiawatha's Wedding Feast by only five years. Delius had started composing in Florida but hadn't yet made his mark, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, older than Coleridge-Taylor, had yet to work with Ravel. At the age of 23, Coleridge-Taylor was already striking away from Charles Stanford's insular world.  Hiawatha is not so much a throwback to tradition but a rebirth. Stylistically, it's innovative, with angular, repetitive lines that suggest "primitive" music, following Longfellow's syntax which suggests the speech rhythms of an oral tradition. Perhaps Coleridge-Taylor was drawn to African and other alien forms because he never knew his father. But it's even more important that he was among the first to intuit the direction in which European music and culture was heading. Picasso, for example, loved African art, but Coleridge-Taylor was well on the way, years before.

So why has Coleridge-Taylor been neglected?  Far from being appreciated as a man and as a musician, he's been pigeonholed into stereotypes, many of which are totally misleading. If even the BBC doesn't care enough to research the background properly, what hope is there? In the early 20th century, there were reasons why the image of Coleridge-Taylor should be transmuted into silly, sentimental bluff.  The "Black Mahler" tag is musically illiterate: we should be thinking past puff like that.  If we have any respect for the composer at all, or indeed for music, we need to be mature enough to handle genuine scholarship and analysis.

Thus I thoroughly recommend Samuel Coleridge -Taylor: a Musical Life by Jeffrey Green (Pickering & Chatto, 2011, 296pp). This is the kind of proper examination that Coleridge-Taylor deserves. Green is a meticulous researcher.  There's no need for fantasy when there is such a wealth of factual information readily available in many archives. Green's decades of work on Black Britons is unique, and absolutely essential for anyone interested in multi-cultural Britain. But he's also superb on the social context of Victorian  and Edwardian Britain: a lesson for anyone really interested in knowing what life might have been like in crowded terrace houses and large extended families.

But most importantly of all, what emerges from Jeffrey Green's book is a full and vivid portrait of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor himself.  Because there's so much genuine information about the composer, his music and the world he lived in, there is no need for fantasy. We have enough here that we can "feel" what Coleridge-Taylor might have been like, and understand him as a human being. There's even a record of a black child in an orphanage opposite the composer's childhood home. Never underestimate the value of good research and methodology.

The first books written about Coleridge-Taylor skirted around the truth to fit the expectations of the time. The myth about the composer getting a violin from a Curiosity Shop dealer is easily debunked. Coleridge-Taylor's grandfather was a remarkable character who played the violin himself, and whose relatives were musicians. By the standard of working-class Britain, he was very comfortably off, owning two houses and paying poll tax. He adored his grandson so much that there's no way that the boy would have been deprived. But his daughter was illegitimate. In an unusual arrangement, the child grew up with her natural father, his wife and the other children in the family. So for public consumption, the situation, and the relationship between the composer's parents, had to be discreetly underplayed.  In real life, the composer's father was feckless, but had to be romanticized to fit what white middle class people considered acceptable in blacks. Green tackles difficult issues of racial prejudice in the United States where Coleridge-Taylor was feted but coloured people were excluded. The composer was no fool, he knew what was going on. Even in Hiawatha, we can feel his sympathies for the oppressed. Green is, naturally, especially good on Coleridge-Taylor's relationship with American Black intellectuals.

And as for the idea that The Song of Hiawatha should be revived with audiences dressed up as Red Indians?  That  might have been cute once, but now we know that the "Indians" were ethnically cleansed on an epic scale, such behaviour would be racially offensive. Does the BBC really want that in modern Britain where all classes and colours should mix?  This is the very sort of thing that demeans Coleridge-Taylor's reputation and leaves him open to uninformed criticism. Here we have one of the most fascinating British composers but does anyone care?  I have no connection to Jeffrey Green, It's just that I believe in getting to the truth..

PS Get the recording of Coleridge-Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha with Bryn Terfel, Kenneth Alwyn conducts.

The Keys of the Kingdom Gregory Peck busts stereotypes

"A Christian is a good man, but I have found that a Confucianist usually has a better sense of humour".

The Keys of the Kingdom (1944) is such a famous movie that it hardly needs to be written about. But I love it because of its moral values. It's spiritual but mocks cant. It's also an interesting insight into western attitudes on China.  All his life, Francis Chisholm (Gregory Peck) has been a failure in the eyes of the world. To get him out of the way, the Church sends him to a God-forsaken outpost in China. There's no parish, and the locals resent him. He's reduced to living in a derelict stable. If that's God's wish so be it. Jesus was born in a stable, too.

Then Joseph turns up, and things change. Joseph is played by Benson Fong. Fong's roles were defined by the Hollywood stereotype of Chinese as well-meaning but simple-minded menials. In real life, Fong, second generation US born, spoke good Cantonese and went along with the game. because he  had no choice.

Father Chisholm doesn't know medicine but cures the son of a high official, Mr Chia, played by a Caucasian in yellowface. Think about that, when Mr Chia's aide - a very minor role - is played by Philip Ahn, a good actor and a Chinese-American.  Father Chisholm won't accept the man's conversion in return, because he believes religion should be chosen by free will. Nonetheless, Mr Chia gives land and money for a mission.  Nuns arrive to help. They're dressed in white starched wimples, despite having trekked a thousand miles from the nearest sea port.  They're also arrogant, ordering a "Chinese coolie" around. It's Father Chisholm, or Shen Fu as he's known in the local community. He's dressed in native clothes, working with the earth, helping "hands on".

Miraculously, Father Francis's boyhood friend Willy turns  up. He's a hard-drinking atheist, but he does good because he's a doctor, and sets up the mission hospital. .On his deathbed he still rejects religion. The town is being besieged by warring forces.  Richard Loo, also US-born Chinese, plays Major Shen, the  leader of the Imperial Army. He's sophisticated and elegant. He lets the mission use a mansion for a hospital. It's burned to the ground when Gregory Peck and Benson Fong outwit the corrupt rebel commander (played by a Caucasian with a very high voice). Loo thanks Peck and Fong."We wiped out 32 of the enemy", he says. "One more killing like that and you'll force ME to become a Christian".

The Bishop arrives, It's Vincent Price oozing unctuous nastiness. "I must admit China fascinates me", he drools. He's done well for himself, thanks to his position of privilege. "And I disagree violently with those of our world who still regard the Chinese as an inferior race. Truly, there are no limits to the benefits of a belief in God and plenty of soap and water" It's horrifying, but even to this day, there are many who profess to "love" China but regard the Chinese as no more than servants or scenery.

After dinner, Joseph is washing up in the kitchen. He tells Father Chisholm, "I'm thinking a sinful thought". He drops the Bishop's prized bottle of Amontillado, brought from "home". Benson Fong looks sheepish, but defiant. "The benefits of soap and water" he says "made the sherry bottle fall and break". The Bishop leaves in Mr Chia's fancy sedan chair. He can't understand why the High Official doesn't want to convert, given the benefits that might accrue. "I shall never be able to fathom the oriental mind. It's inscrutable, positively inscrutable".  The Reverend Mother comes to Father Chisholm, saying she had wanted to go home. But witnessing the Bishop's arrogance made her realize that Father Chisholm's simple goodness restored her faith and vocation. Ten years later, they're still together, having rebuilt the mission and prospered. Father Chisholm, now old and grey, asks one of the children what he'd rather do, learn Cathechism or eat honey. "Eat honey" says the kid, without hesitation. The priest grins. "God loves you for telling the truth"

Eventually Father Chisholm has to go back to Europe,. The people of the mission line up to bid him farewell  Benson Fong delivers a sincere farewell. The Church hasn't been good to Father Chisholm and he's forced to retire. But he accepts it with good grace. Perhaps the Church thinks he's a failure because he hasn't achieved enough and his parishioners think he's an oddball. Maybe he was happy in China because he identified with it and its resilient people. "Exploited and abandoned by the world around her, starving and struggling to realize what was then just a dream. Unity and dignity  and a place in the sun"

The film was made at the height of the Japanese invasion of China, when the US government wholeheartedly supported the Chinese war effort. The sentiments, and the optimistic farewell scene, reflect the politics of the time. The US was instrumental in negotiating the end of the extra-territorial system and the creation of New China. But The Keys of the Kingdom works on another level which unfortunately is all too relevant today.  It dissects casual stereotypes about race and culture and treats people as Father Chisholm does, "all creatures of heaven" whatever that heaven might be.We don't need the "missionary position". The "natives|" wherever they may be, aren't passive children but  people can think and choose whatever they want to believe.

The Cheat 1915 - hypocrisy and dishonesty

Oriental Villain burns brand onto White Woman! Even today the subject would be sensitive. Racial prejudice, violence. Exotic, erotic aliens. The Cheat (1915) is shockingly prescient even now, a hundred years after the film was made. Modern audiences can't hide behind the illusion that things have really changed.

"Haka Arakau, a Burmese Ivory King to whom the Long Island smart-set is paying social tribute" is played by Sessue Hayakawa, (1889-1973) the first non-white to have a major film career. That in itself is telling. Not until Bruce Lee did Asians get to play important dramatic leads that didn't pander to stereotype. Arakau is seen using a Chinese incense burner to heat a branding tool to burn his seal onto ivory idols: the alien making his mark, in every sense. Because he's immensely wealthy, he doesn't get sidelined like nearly every other non-white in a era where race laws nullified reinforced prejudice. Arakau can switch from "oriental" to sophisticated western gentleman in elegant dinner jacket. He's threatening because he doesn't conform to stereotype.

Edith, a socialite, flirts with Arakau, even though inter-racial relations were illegal, and she's married as well. Not a nice lady. Her husband Richard teeters on the edge of bankruptcy but she can't stop spending wildly and showing off. She steals money from a Red Cross fund raiser to help her husband on a money making venture. Edith borrows from Arakau to cover the misappropriation, with the implication that she'll sleep with him in return.  She slips into the inner rooms of Arakau's home. There's a struggle. He coat slips off, revealing her naked shoulders. It's not very clear what's happening until Arakau grabs his branding iron and pushes it into her flesh. She falls to the ground: even then it's not completely clear how she feels. She doesn't scream, but gasps ambiguously. Then she picks up a gun and shoots him, also in his shoulder. Branding iron and gun: both symbols of sexual penetration.

Richard tells the police that he shot Arakau. The truth is too dangerous. The grid of the shoji screen is now reflected in the shadow of the bars in a prison cell. Edith, hardly in fear of being raped or attacked, goes to Arakau. He's reclining in bed, and she leans close to him. Note the hands that don't quite touch. She wants to bribe him to drop the case. "You can't cheat me twice", he says. "It's in the hands of the law". But he concurs with Richard's story. At last Edith is spurred to tell the truth. She rips her clothes off in front of the courtroom and displays her scar. This scene alone is quite shocking, given the proprieties of the time. Mayhem. The crowd attacks Arakau and Richard is freed. It's not very clear but Arakau seems to be arrested by the police. Better than than get lynched by the mob, I guess. Despite her duplicity, Edith is a "heroine". Who are the "cheats" here?

Apart from Hayakawa's dignified performance, the acting in this film is exaggerated, even by the standards of the time. Perhaps the direction is a further clue to meaning. Edith is the fake, Arakau has integrity even though he assumed she would sleep with him if she couldn't repay the loan. The director was Cecil B De Mille. Four years later, D W Griffiths made Broken Blossoms, on a similar theme of dishonesty, sexuality and racism, (read more here). Significantly, Griffiths used a white actor in yellowface for his later movie, defusing some of the impact.  De Mille couldn't confront racism head-on, but disguised it under a story audiences then - and now - take at face value. How modern audiences read The Cheat tells us a loit about racism today. Some will assume that Arakau gets what he deserves, since he's a foreigner and doesn't "know his place". Others will read the film as something much more disturbing and brutally honest.

Prem Sanyas, Die Leuchte Asiens

Prem Sanyas, Die Leuchte Asiens (The Light of Asia)  is unique. It's much more than a movie. Since the film was funded by the Maharajah of Jaipur the film makers were able to use authentic palace areas where outsiders weren't normally allowed to enter. Absolutely stunning - elaborate detail that no artificial set could ever deliver. This movie is so gorgeous that you need to watch over and over to appreciate how gorgeous it is, preserved forever in beautifully made film..

Yet this is the story of Prince Gautama who became the Lord Buddha. so the scenes shot in slums and markets are, if anything even more important. Real street people and beggars, in their thousands - watch the children, some of whom have hardly seen a camera before.

Gautama is born into untold wealth but from an early age seeks something unknown. His father wants to sheild him from all knowledge of sorrow and death. He marries a princess and is blissfully happy, but goes off to seek wisdom among the poor. That's why Buddhism is so hard for some to comprehend. The whole point is letting go, disposing of judgemental ego games and fixed outcomes. The narrative unfolds slowly. No rushing, no need to grab. We all know how Gautama will become the Buddha.  The drama is in the contemplation of each moment. Buddhism doesn't "solve", but offers alternative resolution. The Light of Asia is poetic, and spiritual  in the way most movies cannot be.

The Light of Asia is also unique because it was made in India, by Indians, at the height of the Raj, in 1925.  Obligatory scenes of white tourists looking at exotic locals : they had to give context to the film if it were to be seen in the west. But as the credits roll, we're told that the actors are "members of the Indian Players Company, each of whom gave up his or her career as Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer and Professor to bring about a renaissance of the Dramatic Art of India". It's highly idealistic, in keeping with Buddhist values. The film was directed by Himasu Rai, who plays Gautama. Significantly, it was co-produced by a German, Franz Osten, which is perhaps another reason the film doesn't sentimentalize or play to colonial stereotypes. Of course the script follows a British epic poem, but the story itself is obviously Asian. So this film is important in itself as a document of Indian dignity at a time when colonial values prevailed. Since the world is becoming increasinbgly west centric, we need this film now even more than before, to remind us that there are other alternatives.

Read much more about this remarkable film HERE on Memsaab's blog,  Full of screengrab photos, scene by scene description, so even if you can't track down the full film (BFI restored) you can feel what it's like. As the blogger says, it's good karma, rewarding Rai and those involved in making the film for the love they put into it.

The Platters - radicals of Rock

Herb Reed, who founded The Platters, has died, aged 83. The Platters? Even the name sounds antique. Modern audiences don't know LPs and probably wouldn't know the word "platter" if it hadn't been revived in  restaurant-speak. But the Platters were one of the biggest names in popular music in the 50's and 60's. Those were the days before the concept of "teenager" even existed, and everyone listened whatever their age or culture. The Platters were radical because they were part of the Rock and Roll Revolution, though they were more crooners than R'n'B. They were also radical because they were black musicians who crossed race boundaries. Movies made black people visible.

Below is a clip from Rock Around The Clock, the 1956 film that created teenagers in the media. Nice, sheltered whitebread kids throw a party and dance to bands that don't wear tuxes or croon. Bill Haley and the Comets star. Plaid shirts, duck tail quiffs instead of GI  haircuts. When Elvis came along, Haley seemed so tame. But in 1956, this movie created shock waves. The Platters featured, a black band given star treatment next to whites. The front man is tenor Tony Williams. Hear the trademark crack in his voice!  Get the full movie if you can, as it's well made, full of pithy quotes. (If you like this, enjoy The Secret History of Louie, Louie)

Si j'etais blanche

"I'd like to be white. It would give me such joy if my breasts and thighs changed colour". Listen to the full song HERE. Immediately, Josephine Baker gets to the nub of what white folks thought of blacks.  Read this excellent analysis of the song by Anna Biller here. Even the dolls little girls play with enforce the idea that white is the only way to be. "Et je disais à l’air accablé, me croyant toute seule brune au monde". But as Anna Biller points out, the girl in the song subtly turns things round in her own favour

Josephine Baker confronted assumptions about race, class and orientation. In the photo, she's wearing her famous banana outfit which of course moved tantalizingly as she danced. Note the fingers pointing and the banana imagery! The show was set in a fake jungle, a metaphor for the Dark Continent where forbidden, erotic things happen, and white people don't really rule. What a frisson fancy Paris society would have felt as she gyrated on stage while they sat, "civilized" in starched tight collars.

Josephine Baker was part of the cultural revolution that reached Europe from the mid 19th century. Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, Pierre Loti, the  Impressionists, Debussy, Ravel, Picasso and his friends collecting African art.  (British colonialism was very different). Non-western cultures showed Europeans that other forms of experience were valid. Without non-western cultures, the west might not have become "modern". The whole imperialist world model we're supposed to follow is upside down.

There's perhaps more on this site than most elsewhere on the dialogue between western and non western cultures. Lots on non western culture and on cross-culture issues and stereotypes, particularly as expressed in music and early film). For example, see this, a proper Cantonese opera but a satire on Viennese operetta !

Below is Josephine Baker dancing in 1927. So energetic, so angular, nothing like the way white women danced then. Nor like black American women either, I suspect, who were finding their own way ahead (see my post on Within Our Gates ). But the spirit of the Jazz Age freed up inhibitions and let people express themselves in new ways.  It's no coincidence that the best book about Josephine Baker was written by Patrick O'Connor, the music critic whose speciality was French music and opera. He was too secure to need to sneer at crossover. How the horizons of music writing have narrowed since he's been gone. (read more about him here).

Mix up matrimony

"Racial segregation I can see universally, fading gradually. Mixed marriage is the fashion...the organs are always playing, and the parsons are saying, co-operate and amalgamate..... the races are blending harmoniously, white and coloured people are binding neutrally, it doesn't take no class to see it come to pass, coloured Britons are rising fast." Note the reference to "Chinee man" and the huge (male) Chinese community in the Caribbean.

Eid in Woking 1926

Mixed Britannia BBC

This song makes me weep. It's so specific that it seems like it's about a real woman. She's half African, half Norwegian, went to Cambridge, acculturates white. But her feelings do not count.  She can "can never get away from the fact, if you're not white you're considered black". It's a calypso by Lord Kitchener, from around 1950 when mixed race was much less common than now. The man assumes the woman is acting superior because she doesn't fancy him. Years later when Lord Kitchener sang the song in Jamaica, he made it even more sexist, as if the woman was doing a crime for choosing not to sleep with him. At least calypso songs deal with race issues openly. But why should any woman, or any person, be defined by race?

Currently there are several programmes on the BBC about race issues. George Alagiah's Mixed Britannia must have taken ages to make because it's extremely well researched and outstandingly well made.They've uncovered completely new material, which has lain unnoticed in the archives and needs to be publiicized. Like the "Eugenics" movement which tried pseudo-scientific measurements of "mongrels" as mixed race people were called in those days. Someone must have realized where such things led, as they were quietly phased out after the Nuremberg race laws in Germany.

That didn't stop vindictive racism. As soon a WWII ended some bright spark had the notion of rounding up Chinese in Liverpool and shipping them back to China. The men were rounded up in the street, like animals,  and put on board a waiting ship. Many of the men werre long established UK residents, and had wives and families, but weren't allowed to make contact, or collect their belongings and papers. So hundreds of women and around 1000 children thought they'd been suddenly deserted, and never found out what happened..

If the men did make it back to China (they may have been dumped in India), the country was still in chaos, millions of refugees, destitute and homeless. Ironically many of these men would have worked for the British navy and merchant navy, where thousands of Chinese were enrolled, a huge proportion killed serving the British war effort.

Fortunately most normal people are sane. But racism is alive and well, for too many have vested interests in fuelling hate. The recent riots showed just how skewed assumptions really are.  Far Right white gangs attacked the police, immigrants gave their lives to defend their neighbourhoods, and  looters were most colours and classes. So programmes like Mixed Britannia are vitally important, to remind us that race is packaging, it isn't the person within. 

Please also see my posts on race issues, under labels like Africa, Chinese stereotypes, social issues etc. Watch the full movie Within Our Gates here too, the earliest known movie by a Black American that confronts things like lynching and exploitation. Also full download of Broken Blossoms, and a critique of Piccadilly, the Anna May Wong film much lauded by the BFI as progressive. The more I think about that film, the more offensive I think it is, but its appeal to Chinese outside Chinese culture is genuine, and needs to be analysed. You might also like this piece on Ghana Freedom, which mentions George Appiah, whose marriage to Stafford Cripps's daughter Peggy features in the second Mixed Britannia episode. Theirs wasn't the first high profile mixed marraige. My mole in FCO archives told me about the Govt of South Africa protesting mixed marriage in Britain, threatening to quit the Commonwealth. There are thousands of other stories waiting to be told. Like, a Colonial Police Officer held prisoner in a Japanese camp wants to marry. Under colonial rules he needs his commanding officers' approval.  They're all prisoners in the Japanese camp too but they forbid the marriage because the fiancee can't prove she has no mixed blood. Of course she can't. She's Eurasian. This is April 1945, right at the end of the war, but these colonials don't twig that the world's changed. Imagine what the Japanese thought. (and the irony still rankles with non whites today)

Within Our Gates

That Within Our Gates should exist at all is pretty remarkable. How did a film like this come to be made at the time it did (1920)? And such high quality despite being low budget and way off grid in mainstream terms. Within Our Gates is a race movie, a sub genre reflecting the apartheid of segregation, which meant that blacks and whites couldn't go to the same cinemas and blacks had to make films for and financed within their community. Like so many very early movies, it was thought lost until 1993 when a single copy turned up in Spain, from which the present restoration was made.  Despite its period, it's remarkably well shot and well preserved. and worth watching, because i's the earliest existing film that deals unflinchingly with racism in the US.  A lot of race movies were pretty camp (like Son of Ingagi, full of private in-jokes) but this is sophisticated, better than many mainstream movies of the time.

Within Our Gates was made by Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), a self-made man whose intelligence overcame his lack of money and conventional education.  His movies followed on from his books, which dealt analytically with situations facing black people at the time. The protagonist, Sylvia Landry, is an aspirational figure, whose education has been paid for by a secret donor, though she was brought up by poor sharecroppers. She goes up north to raise money for a school for black kids. The plot is complicated by love interests, which serve to show different ways of being black, but revolves around Sylvia's past. Because she is educated, she helps her parents manage their money so they don't get exploited by the evil boss, Philip Gridlestone, who preys on poor whites and blacks, and is hated by all.  Throughout the film, Michaeux is even-handed and fair: neither race has a monopoly on good or bad, all people are fundamentally equal, what they do with their lives isn't defined by race. Hence the dodgy pastor, the crook Conrad and Efram, Gridlestone's servant, who thinks he can win favour with whites by betraying blacks.

Sylvia's stepfather Jasper goes to Gridlestone with proper accounts so he can't be ripped off, but Gridlestone is shot through the window by a white sharecropper whom Gridlestone has cheated in the past.  Knowing he won't get a fair trial, Jasper and the family run off to hide in the swamp, while the mob hunts them down. Eventually both Jasper and his wife are lynched, and their bodies burned. It's shockingly graphic, particularly hard to watch as such things really did happen all the time: perhaps some of this drawn from real life. The mob even try to lynch Emil, Jasper's son, who is about 10, but he escapes by playing dead when the mob shoot at him, and then steals a horse. Will he get away? While all this is happening, Sylvia gets raped by Armand, Gridlestone's brother. Is this the earliest realistic race rape scene on film? Armand only stops when he sees that Sylvia has a scar on her body. She's his natural daughter. He's the one who paid for her to go to school. So maybe he's not completely evil, either.

There are some bizarrely stilted scenes, such as the one where Doctor Vivian asks Sylvia to marry him, by reciting a long list of battles in which US soldiers fought, from Cuba under Roosevelt to Mexico and Europe. "You should be proud of your country", he says. Perhaps there's still footage missing, or the sole copy was adapted for the Spanish market. Nonetheless, it's still a gripping movie because of its even-handed analysis of the political and economic realities everyone, white or black, is caught up in.  Efram, for example, is also lynched even though he tries to be accepted by whites and didn''t commit any crime. The white sharedropper who shot Gridlestone gets killed by mistake during the hunt for Jasper. Implicitly, the film is saying, nothing's fair, but you make what you can of your life, whoever you are. Notice how many white actors there are, working for a black producer and director in a film that hardly glorifies the white South.
Please also read this thought provoking article about race hate in Little Rock, 1953.  And how some things aren't easily wiped away.

Son of Ingagi full download

A  different movie for Halloween! All black production, scripted and conceived by songwriter Spencer Williams (1889-1965). Hence the snappy dialogue, especially in the scenes where Nelson the Attorney (played by Williams himself) tussles with Dr Jackson ("Hello my friend!" "You're not my friend, you're my lawyer!") and processes the old lady's will for 5 dollars.

Because US cinemas were segregated, there was a whole specialist market for black films. Williams was sharp enough to know that black people wanted horror movies like anyone else. And why should explorers in Africa be a white monopoly? Hence too the positive images of black professional people, police chiefs etc. and the aspirational young couple, Robert and Eleanor Lindsay.

And indeed the central character Dr. Jackson (Laura Bowman) who is a doctor of science and has been to Africa. She also happens to have a lab in her dining room where she mixes up a test tube with a formula that will do good for humanity. "Not that humanity's been good to me", she snaps. She wears Victorian clothes and has "never been in a motor vehicle and won't start now" which may date her to be about 80 in 1940. Anyway, she knew Eleanor Lindsay's natural father who was younger than she, but whom she loved and lost. She did medical work in Africa, and brought back treasures from her many travels, such as a gong from Singapore which she uses to summon up another memento, a gigantic ape man who lives in a secret cellar.

He's N'gina, son of Ingagi, whoever he may have been. Possibly he's half man, half gorilla, which makes you wonder why Dr Jackson's so maternal to him?  Dr Jackson's rich, too, and has gold hidden in the house.

The gold brings out the crooks, including Dr Jackson's conman brother Zeno and Lawyer Nelson, who tries to con the couple out of the house Dr Jackson left them when she died.  Then the plot turns to comedy as the dopey Detective Bradshaw is assigned to stay in the house while murders happen and an apeman wanders about about. Hilarious! Bradshaw is a parody of the venal Stepin Fetchit fool who usually represented blacks in white media. Of course he's a crook too, but an opportunist, who hands the sacks of gold to the Jacksons. "Oh", they cry as their house burns down. "There goes our furniture, our clothes!" When they get the sacks of gold, they cry "Furniture! Clothes! New House!"

This film was made quickly and to a budget, so it's certainly not great art. But it's sharper than the average B movie, given its background. Spencer Williams was an all-round talent, who wrote hits like Basin Street Blues and settled in London. Good businessman too, spotting the market for race movies. Director credited is Richard Kahn and producer is Alfred Sack of Sack Studios. Presumable white and Jewish financiers? Williams's racy spirit pervades much of the film. Enjoy the song sequences by The Toppers, a guitar and falsetto-led group. Ironically I think the only white guy actually in the film is N'gina the mixed species from Africa. Men over seven feet tall are treasured whatever their race.

Movies like this contrast with the films Paul Robeson starred in. They had higher production values and bigger budgets, but Robeson was typecast to represent what white people expected blacks to be. At best noble but doomed and never equal. Race films, and the race music recording industry were a form of apartheid but at least with Williams we can glimpse something irreverent and irrepressible.