11,870 stories by "Trav S.D."
Filed under: Music, PLUGS Tagged: David Mallamud, Laurie Beechman
Today is the birthday of Blind Willie McTell (William McTier, 1898-1959). Originally from Georgia, he was an exponent of the Piedmont style of blues picking. His recording career lasted from…
Today is the birthday of Alice Faye (Alice Leppert, 1915-1998). I’m not sure what to make of the claim in her Wikipedia entry that the New York City native “got her start a…
Today is the birthday of Arthur James Caley, billed as Colonel Routh Goshen, the Middlebush Giant (1837-1889). While Middlebush sounds very English, and he may have been born in a village on…
Captain Fred Walters (1855-1923) was an officer in the British army who was prescribed a compound containing silver to treat a certain neural condition. The regular ingestion of silver turne…
Today is the birthday of Albert Whelan (1875-1961). Born in Melbourne, as a young man he moved to Western Australia where he sang and danced for miners employed in the gold fields (…
Today is the birthday of Dick Dale (b. Richard Monsour, 1937), a major player in the development of what came to be known as surf music. A surfer himself, he began exploring ways to make roc…
Charles Nestel was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1849; his sister Eliza followed in 1857. Both were midgets. They began performing publicly in 1861 in a show called The Little People. At fu…
Today is the birthday of the great magician Servais Le Roy (1865-1953). Belgian born, he ran away to England as a boy, and began his career in magic in his teens when he became apprentice an…
Filed under: Burlesk, PLUGS, SOCIAL EVENTS, Women Tagged: April March, burlesque
Filed under: AMERICANA, BOOKS & AUTHORS, BROOKLYN, Indie Theatre, PLUGS Tagged: Brave New World, Moby Dick Rehearsed, Orson Welles, Red Hook, Waterfront Museum
These are exciting times in our exciting city (NYC) when there seem to be silent comedy film screenings going on all the time, as there do these days. Two great shows coming up this weekend,…
Today is the birthday of soul singer-showman Mr. James Brown (1933-2006). By rights I suppose I should include him in my Hall of Hams, so elaborate were his histronics. He and his Famous Fla…
Today is the birthday of Doug Henning (1953-2000). I’ll be frank: when I was a kid, Henning was the absolute measure of awful, unwatchable, the thing one must never do, the thing one m…
Having already done posts of just about all of the other principle cast members of the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz (most of them having been in vaudeville) it gives me great pleasure to f…
Today is the birthday of Percy Abbott (1886-1960). Originally from Australia, he began performing magic and ventriloquism professionally in his early twenties, at the same time working in a …
Martin Laurello (born Martin Emmerling in Nuremberg Germany in May 1886) was born with the unique gift of being able to turn his head around 180 degrees backwards. The above photo may look l…
Today is the birthday of Pinky Lee (for my full article on this important burlesque comedian and children’s tv host go here). A special treat today: a clip of him doing his old schtick…
I had a chance to go down to Philly this past weekend to see a show with Cynthia Fujikawa (she of this sextet of posts). On the agenda was If She Stood, a new play by Cyndy’s old…
Today is the birthday of Vernon Castle. For more on him and his wife Irene (the pair of whom revolutionized social dancing in America) go here. If you’ve heard of their famous da…
Today is the birthday of pop singer Lesley Gore (b. Lesley Goldstein, 1946), best known for her 1963 #1 hit “It’s My Party”. While that tune has its musical virtue…
Today is the birthday of Jack Paar (1918-2004). I’ll admit to you right here and now that my exposure to him has been nearly nil. His time as the “middle caretaker” of T…
Today is the birthday of the hysterically funny Louie Nye (1913-2005). Born Louis Neistat in Hartford, CT he started out as an actor in radio before doing his hitch in World War II (w…
Today is the birthday of George Dewey Washington (1898-???). Named after an Admiral in the Spanish-American War, George Dewey Washington was a African American bass-baritone who sang in vaud…
Today is the birthday of Marion Walter Jacobs (1930-1968), a.k.a. “Little Walter”. This legendary master of the blues harp was born and raised in rural Louisiana, leaving as a te…
