Errata List of Traveling Blues >here Got the book and massively impressed by both the quality of the research and the superb production and I congratulate you both – well done! One small point, but an important – and previously unreported one: you state that it is a shame that the 1926 Billy Fowler band didn’t record- but they did! Well, they made a Lee De Forrest experimental sound film in 1926 – and I have a copy (on video). I discovered the film in the Library of Congress catalogue of De Forrest films and Joe Laura and I got a copy each, albeit the speed is fast and it is out of sync by about 2 seconds. It is entitled ‘A Night In Dixie’ and features, what I have now discovered to be, after considerable research, the cast and band of the Club Alabam Revue of early 1926, including Abbie Mitchell, Jean Starr, Johnny Hudgins and the Billy Fowler Band. In one scene Hudgins does his famous ‘wah-wah’ mime act with a trumpeter who COULD be Ladnier – but he looks rather heavier-set than Ladnier – but a superb blues solo all the same, followed by the band joining in for a real slow drag blues. They also accompany the cast for a romping finale with a song that A YEAR LATER Ellington ‘appropriated’ as ‘Blue Bubbles’!!! The band really go to town on this and at one stage the balance alters and up to the front comes a romping stride piano from Walter R. Johnson. Mark Berresford |
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