Film clips from the documentary American Music - From Folk to Jazz and Pop

Source catalog description

This description refers to material held by Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Visual details below describe the original material.

A motion picture film with clips from the documentary American Music - From Folk to Jazz and Pop. It consists of a single reel of positive, black-and-white, 16mm acetate film with bilateral variable-area optical sound. The film opens with footage from a funeral service and the Eureka Marching Band conducting a street procession. Percy Humphry, the leader of the Eureka Marching Band, describes how the band conducts these funeral parades. In the next scene, a ferry can be seen traveling up a river. The narrator describes how jazz "traveled up the Mississippi to Memphis, to St. Louis where it developed its own forms, and northeastward to Chicago where a young man with a horn by the name of Bix Beiderbecke captured the style of such emigrants such as King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.” Other musicians featured include Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman who the narrator says transformed jazz into swing.

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