Shelton Brooks was a Canadian-born African American composer of popular music and jazz. He was known for his ragtime and vaudeville style, and wrote some of the biggest hits of the first third of the 20th century.
Lou Monte was an Italian American singer best known for a number of best-selling, Italian-themed novelty records which he recorded for both RCA Victor and Reprise Records in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most famously "Lazy Mary" (1958) and the 1962/63 million-selling US hit "Pepino the Italian Mouse", plus the seasonal track "Dominick the Donkey". He also recorded on Roulette Records, Jubilee Records, Regalia Records, Musicor Records, Laurie Records, and AFE Records.
A strut is a structural component.
Roger Earl Mosley is an American actor, director and writer best known for his role as the helicopter pilot Theodore "T.C." Calvin in the CBS television series Magnum, P.I. which originally aired from 1980 until 1988.
A dark horse is a political candidate who is nominated unexpectedly; or an underdog in other fields who achieved unprecedented success.
Coney Island is a 1943 American Technicolor musical film released by Twentieth Century Fox and starring Betty Grable in one of her biggest hits. A "gay nineties" musical it also featured George Montgomery, Cesar Romero, and Phil Silvers, was choreographed by Hermes Pan, and was directed by Walter Lang. Betty Grable also starred in the 1950 remake, Wabash Avenue.
Loose Shoes is a 1980 comedy film directed by Ira Miller and featuring Bill Murray. The film is presented as a series of movie trailers with titles such as The Howard Huge Story, Skate-boarders from Hell and The Invasion of the Penis Snatchers. The film was shot around 1977 and only released years later in 1980, probably to capitalize on Bill Murray's success as a box office film star.
Kurt Voss is an American film director, screenwriter and musician-songwriter. Voss's credits include Will Smith's debut Where The Day Takes You; the Justin Theroux, Alyssa Milano and Ice-T action film Below Utopia; actress Jaime Pressly's debut feature Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, and rock and roll related films including Down and Out with the Dolls and Ghost on The Highway: A Portrait of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and The Gun Club.
Shirley Washington the first Miss Black America was a television and film actress who appeared in television shows from 1970. She appeared in two episodes of Mission: Impossible playing a Stewardess in the 1970 TV episode Flight and as a Travel Agent in the 1972 TV episode The Puppet and as Maggie in a Wonder Woman TV episode, "Chinese Puzzle". In the mid 1970s she starred in some Blaxploitation films as Mrs Jefferson in Bamboo Gods and Iron Men 1974, T.N.T. Jackson in 1975, as Theda in Darktown Strutters 1975 and in Disco 9000 in 1976.
"Darktown Strutters' Ball" is a popular song by Shelton Brooks, published in 1917. The song has been recorded many times and is considered a popular and jazz standard. There are many variations of the title, including "At the Darktown Strutters' Ball", "The Darktown Strutters' Ball", and just "Strutters' Ball".
I'm with You Always is a live album by Mike Bloomfield. It was recorded in 1977 at McCabes Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. It was originally released as a CD on Demon Records in Europe and finally released in the US in 2008 on the Benchmark Recordings label. Bloomfield shows off his ability to master all forms of blues, from acoustic delta blues, to Chicago electric blues, to full-out blues-rock.
"Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get" is a 1971 single written and produced by Tony Hester and performed by The Dramatics.
Darktown was an African-American neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. It stretched from Peachtree Street and Collins Street, past Butler Ave. to Jackson Street. It referred to the blocks above Auburn Avenue in what is now Downtown Atlanta and the Sweet Auburn neighborhood. Darktown was characterized in the 1930s as a "hell-hole of squalor, degradation, sickness, crime and misery".
Eugene Harold Corman was an American film producer and agent. With his older brother Roger Corman, they co-founded New World Pictures.
Darktown Strutters is a 1975 blaxploitation musical comedy film from New World Pictures. Despite having mixed reviews at the time it has gained cult status over the years with praise from film director Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino called it "a ridiculous satire."
Boardwalk Empire Volume 1: Music from the HBO Original Series is a soundtrack for the HBO television series Boardwalk Empire, released in September 2011 through Elektra Records. The album reached a peak position of number eight on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart and earned the 2012 Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media.
The Struts are a British rock band formed in Derby, Derbyshire in 2012. The band consists of lead vocalist Luke Spiller, guitarist Adam Slack, bassist Jed Elliott, and drummer Gethin Davies.
Edna Woods, also known as LeJeune Richardson, is an American singer, dancer and actress. She was an Ikette in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in the 1960s and 1970s, and later a dancer for Tina Turner in the 1980s and 1990s. Richardson was a backing vocalist for Gayle McCormick and John Mayall. She was also a member of the vocal group Silver, Platinum & Gold.
Bubbles in the Wine is an album by Lawrence Welk and His Orchestra. It was released in 1956 on the Dot label.
Darktown Comics is a series of Currier and Ives prints first produced in the 1870s that depicted racist vignettes ostensibly portraying a Black American town. It was a perennial bestseller for the New York-based firm, with some prints selling 73,000 copies via pushcarts and country stores, and all of them becoming bestsellers. The series represented one-third of Currier and Ives' production by 1884.
