We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
The John Kirby Show
by Paul Phillips
<LSUULJLJL.QJlSLSLSL2JLSL2JLajLSLSLSlSU^
Many readers will think it strange to find this piece of writing included in this book. To those in radio it will not be strange. The writing is individual and peculiar, and it belongs to a moment that will soon be over. It describes something that is and has been immensely popular, the vulgar music of the late i93o’s. The orchestra for which the following pages were written is the versatile Negro sextet put together by John Kirby. It is one of the most successful bands in America today. It will pass; but it is having its day, and it is making its impression. Music changes and decorates speech, and the reader will see some of this influence at work in this continuity. Some of the phrases are as irresponsibly arboreal as the music they seek to explain. Paul Phillips wrote them. His is one of the great talents of radio, one not yet put to its fullest use. Comedians need him and will presently use him, for comedy is his particular gift. But he is a thoroughly sound radio writer in all departments, with a special penchant for describing the special penchants of others. He knows Negroes and Negro talk. He is radio’s most inquisitive musical explorer. He understands “ear music.” When the special overtone in the phrase “he could play it and say it” first reached his ears in a New Orleans honky-tonk, its full meaning was apparent to Phillips. It moved into his vocabulary, to¬ gether with many hundreds of other words and phrases, and they have been sprinkled through his writings ever since. He has translated something for the average conscious mind that had belonged theretofore to its instinct alone and never to its expression.
Here is the continuity for the John Kirby show of May 5, 1940. The words are read by Canada Lee, a young Negro actor and prize fighter, the prototype of all the strong and silent men.
323