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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue Taking Henry Flynt Seriously by Benjamin Piekut Hearing Hip-Hop’s Jamaican Accent by Wayne Marshall Capturing Sound and Making Beats: Review by Joseph Auner Ives's 129 Songs: Review by Gayle Sherwood Magee American Popular Music: Review by Daniel Sonenberg |
Jungle Jive: Race, Jazz, and Cartoons by Daniel Goldmark
Louis
Armstrong in the jazz cartoon I’ll
Be Glad When You’ re Dead,
You Rascal You (Fleischer, 1932) Jazz was
an integral element in the sound and appearance of animated cartoons produced
in Hollywood from the late 1920s through the late 1950s.1 Everything from big
band to free jazz has been featured in cartoons, either as the soundtrack to a story or the basis for one.
The studio run by the Fleischer brothers took an unusual approach to jazz in
the late 1920s and the 1930s, treating it not as background but as a musical
genre deserving of recognition. Instead of using jazz idioms merely to color
the musical score, their cartoons featured popular songs by prominent
recording artists. Fleischer was a well-known studio in the 1920s, perhaps
most famous for pioneering the sing-along cartoon with the bouncing ball in
Song Car-Tunes. An added attraction to Fleischer cartoons was that Paramount
Pictures, their distributor and parent company, allowed the Fleischers to use
its newsreel recording facilities, where they were permitted to film famous
performers scheduled to appear in Paramount shorts and films.2 Thus, a wide variety of musicians, including
Ethel Merman, Rudy Vallee, the Mills Brothers, Gus Edwards, the Boswell
Sisters, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong, began appearing in Fleischer
cartoons. This arrangement benefited
both the studios and the stars. Once the Fleischers chose a song from the
featured artist to use in a cartoon, the writers constructed a story that
made the song’s performance the centerpiece of the short. That the
song’s title usually was borrowed for the cartoon’s title was
just one way in which such cartoons helped publicize a performer’s
work. The Fleischers also responded to local influences of the
Manhattan music scene in their choice of performers: they combined themes
from their own lives as middle-class, secular Jews in New York with their own
cultural and musical notions of African Americans, funneling all these raw
materials into a popular representational form—cartoons. Their earlier success with the Song
Car-Tunes was owed to their use of Tin Pan Alley tunes and nineteenth-century
popular songs, styles familiar in the city on vaudeville and other stages.
The proximity of the Fleischer studio to premier music venues, particularly
the uptown clubs in Harlem that featured artists such as Duke Ellington,
Fletcher Henderson, and Cab Calloway, clearly shaped their creation of
cartoons in the nascent jazz era. The aura of danger and excitement that
surrounded jazz, especially during the Harlem Renaissance, likely added to
the attraction. As Nathan Irvin Huggins describes it: “How convenient!
It was merely a taxi trip to the exotic for most white New Yorkers. In
cabarets decorated with tropical and jungle motifs—some of them
replicas of southern plantations—they heard jazz, that almost forbidden
music. It was not merely that jazz was exotic, but that it was instinctive
and abandoned, yet laughingly light and immediate—melody skipping atop
inexorable driving rhythm. . . . In the darkness and
closeness, the music, infectious and unrelenting, drove on.”3 Lou Fleischer, the brother in charge of music
for the studio, remembered going to the Cotton Club to listen to Calloway so
that he could choose the songs that might work well in a cartoon.4 The performances themselves no doubt gave the writers at the studio
ideas for future cartoons. They could easily take the numbers they had seen
onstage and, choosing to view them
from the contrived primitivist perspective then dominant, create
stories that blended the performers’ music and the visual trappings of
the clubs with the animators’ ideas. Amiri Baraka points out that whites eagerly engaged with
the new black music that offered such a novel image of America,5 desiring to experience the sensual overtones
ascribed to “primitive” music. By visiting clubs in Harlem and
even by viewing cartoons, whites could gain access to something they felt
implicitly lacking in their lives: the freedom and hedonism believed to be
characteristic of a simpler, more instinctual society. By couching the
featured songs within the stereotyped narratives that shaped the
musicians’ live acts, the Fleischer cartoons enabled moviegoing
audiences around the country to experience an even more fantastical version
of those narratives that previously had been enjoyed by only a small group
of nightclub patrons in New York City.
Just as they had done while attending live stage shows with blackface
performers, white audiences could watch blacks in these newer mediated spaces
and hope for what Huggins calls “the possibility of being transported
into black innocence.”6 The cartoons that simultaneously
presented the idea of jazz and primitivism also emphasized, in a tone mixing
envy and condemnation, the stereotyped notion that blacks live their lives
with careless freedom. Louis Armstrong and his band made their sole appearance
in a Fleischer cartoon in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You
Rascal You (Fleischer, 1932). Like
most of the cartoons in this series,7 the
film opens with a sequence of live footage following the title cards. Armstrong and his band are featured
performing before moving on to the animated story, thereby both giving
the audience the opportunity to see the actual musicians and providing
Armstrong with valuable publicity. But
rather than performing the title song right away, Armstrong and his men play
another piece, “Shine,” that segues neatly into the background
music for the animated sequence. The audience must watch what amounts to half
the cartoon before Armstrong begins the title song. This clever strategy on the part of the studio
kept viewers’ attention on the characters and reflects a technique
commonly used in the musical cartoons created by Warner Bros. The story centers on Betty Boop and her companions, Bimbo
the dog and Ko-Ko the clown, as they explore the depths of the African
jungle. They inevitably become involved in a chase with some natives, which
culminates in the performance of the title song. As Bimbo and Ko-Ko try to
give the slip to their pursuer, a repetitive “ONE-two-three-four”
drum beat—a musical stereotype often associated with Native American
drumming patterns—starts playing in the background. This short rhythmic
cue transitions almost immediately into the title song, for which the drums
have set up the tempo. As the beat ostensibly comes from “native”
drums and is heard as if being played off-screen, the music establishes,
before any lyrics are heard, the supposedly native origin of the song, which
then springs full-formed from the primordial rhythm. During the chase, the
native pursuing Bimbo and Ko-Ko literally loses his head, which, detached
from his body, flies after them in the sky. As the introduction to the song
ends and its opening verse begins, the head dissolves into Armstrong’s
own live-action head in profile, singing the title song. This transformation
focuses on another facet of the primitivist caricature, implying that
Armstrong is still a denizen of the jungle himself. The skies even darken
forebodingly as the native/Armstrong initially runs up behind Ko-Ko and
Bimbo, who clearly fear Armstrong, his jazzy song, and the black community
that created it. By placing Betty into
a perilous setting in the jungle juxtaposed with Armstrong’s savage image, the
animators created a compelling story. This plot was so successful, in fact,
that in the three Betty Boop cartoons starring Cab Calloway, Betty likewise
finds herself in what the animation historian Paul Wells describes as a
“dark, mysterious underworld, characterized by transgressive behaviour
and taboo imagery. Even in its crudest forms, representations of blackness or
black-oriented contexts, operate as signifiers of danger and cultural
threat.”8 Betty represents the
quintessential flapper: a young, newly liberated, and highly sexualized woman
who is vulnerable to the visceral temptations of jazz. Betty is exposed to black men, who,
stereotypically, want to make off with and possess white women, a
characteristic of “bucks,” as Donald Bogle defines them in his
history of blacks in film: “Bucks are always big, baadddd niggers,
oversexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white
flesh.”9 In the jazz cartoons with
black musicians, Betty almost always ends up being chased by the animated
representatives of jazz—Cab Calloway in Minnie the Moocher
(Fleischer, 1932) and The Old Man of
the Mountain (Fleischer, 1933), Don Redman and a bunch of other literal
“spooks” in I Heard (1933),
and natives in I’ll Be Glad, a trope that perpetuates cultural
myths about rapacious black males. To be sure, Betty is pursued by men in
many of her cartoons, but the issue of race complicates the chase by making
her a forbidden object of desire. A number of features of these cartoons made them
attractive for white viewers. Not only were audiences transported to faraway lands,
but the humorous and fantastical sight gags that characterized the Fleischer
style also removed the aura of danger from
Africa by offering comical
and dehumanizing images of African natives. Such portrayals could naturally
be extended to the urban American black, who could become less (or more)
fearsome to white audiences through such caricatures. Their experience of the
forbidden music of Armstrong or Calloway as a soundtrack to the journey
created an additional level of excitement. Armstrong, of all the
jazz personalities featured in Fleischer cartoons, probably received the most
extremely stereotyped treatment in his single appearance. The dissolve
between Armstrong’s live-action head and that of his animated savage
counterpart made the animators’ visual statement about theconstitution
of his “inner” nature absolutely clear. Even Armstrong’s
voice lent itself to the stereotype of the savage persona. In vaudeville, as
Huggins points out, the dialect associated with minstrelsy characters
“was coarse, ignorant, and stood at the opposite pole from the soft
tones and grace of what was considered cultivated speech.”10 Of course, Armstrong’s raspy and
ebullient singing was a signature element of his act, yet in the context of
this cartoon, his style of making music suddenly takes on primitive
characteristics—especially given his frequent exclamations that often
bordered on the unintelligible. Later cartoons that caricatured Armstrong
fetishize the same idiosyncratic elements of his performing style; his voice
is usually the most obvious, most easily imitated (albeit poorly), and
therefore most often satirized aspect of his public image. Many of these features highlighting Armstrong’s
“savage” qualities first appeared in A Rhapsody in Black and
Blue (1932), a one-reel Paramount musical short that was directed by
Aubrey Scotto. The film opens in a rundown home where a black man sits
listening to his Louis Armstrong records and playing a makeshift drum kit
while his wife admonishes him to clean the house. When she knocks him out
cold with a mop, the bubbles in the soap bucket, combined with the jazz music
in background, lead to his wild fantasy in which he is the king of Jazzmania.
The scene is apparently set in a throne room where, dressed in a military outfit,
the “king” is entertained by Armstrong and his band, all dressed
in leopard skins and similar costumes, while unseen machines churn away and
fill the foreground with bubbles.
Armstrong sings “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You
Rascal You,” followed by “Shine” before the man awakens
from his reverie. A Rhapsody in Black and Blue clearly had a powerful influence on the
Fleischer animators. In I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead,
they used the same songs and primitive ambience featured in Rhapsody. Though the live-action short never leaves
the soundstage, the Fleischers took advantage of the immense freedom of their
medium by setting the story in the jungle itself. They even retain some of
the camera work from Rhapsody. Only two musicians get close-ups in Rhapsody,
Armstrong and his drummer, Tubby Hall.
Likewise, both Armstrong and Hall receive special emphasis in the
Fleischer cartoon, as both have their visages transposed with those of
jungle natives. * * * I’ll Be Glad When You’re
Dead portrays African
Americans as “contemporary savages” whose music quickly changes
from stereotypical jungle rhythms (beating drums) to a much more modern and
swinging sound, though one still understood to be primitive in origin. The Fleischer
cartoons were not alone in fostering images of the emergence of jazz from the
savage hinterland as all the major studios reproduced and circulated this
prevalent stereotype of jazz’s origins.11 Juxtaposing urban African American jazz
musicians with a primitivist performance of uncivilized music by uneducated
savages creates a fictive identification that serves only to stereotype. What
makes the Fleischer cartoons uniquely significant
is that they provide films of actual performances, mediated by the cartoons
into which they were placed. While not all their cartoons focus on such
offensive generalizations, they nevertheless serve as reminders of both the
popularity of jazz and the racist stereotypes that were inextricably bound
into its consumption. —University of
Alabama Editors’
note: This article is a revised excerpt from Daniel Goldmark’s book, Tunes for ’Toons: Music in
Hollywood Cartoons (University of California Press, in press). Notes 1 Jungle Jive is a 1944 Walter
Lantz cartoon, directed by Shamus Colhane. 2 Leslie Cabarga, The Fleischer Story,
2nd ed. (Da Capo Press, 1988), 63–64. 3 Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem
Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1971), 89. 4 Cabarga, The Fleischer Story, 63. 5 LeRoi Jones [Amiri
Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Morrow Quill
Paperbacks, 1963), 149. 6 Huggins, Harlem
Renaissance, 300. 7 Others in this cartoon series from Fleischer include Cab
Calloway and his orchestra in Minnie the Moocher (1932), Snow-White
(1933), and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933); the Mills
Brothers in I Ain’t Got Nobody (1932), Dinah (1933), and
When Yuba Plays the Rumba on the Tuba (1933); and Don Redman
and his orchestra in I Heard (1933). 8 Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (Routledge, 1998),
217. Sean Griffin similarly describes
Betty’s descent into the cave in Snow-White as “much like
the entrance to a speakeasy, dark and secret.” See Sean Griffin, “Pronoun
Trouble: The ‘Queerness’ of Animation,” Spectator: USC Journal of Film and Television
Criticism 15/1 (Fall 1994), 99. 9 Donald Bogle, Toms,
Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Films (Continuum, 1994), 13. 10 Huggins,
Harlem Renaissance, 255. 11 Henry
Sampson’s chronicle of black images in cartoons, That’s
Enough, Folks, confirms
the ubiquity of the jungle portrayal of jazz’s origins. See Henry T.
Sampson, That’s Enough, Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons,
1900-1960 (Scarecrow Press, 1998). ISAM home Who we
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