Al Bowlly – Melancholy Baby
An evening pause: Even though it is more seven decades since this was recorded, it remains as fresh and as vibrant as anything sung today. Almost more so because of its simplicity. Bowlly was a big name singer in the 1930s, and he shows why here.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
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Great selection. Very cool.
Got turned onto Al Bowlly from the John Batchelor Show. He was a Rock-Star in his day. All his music (audio) is up at YouTube, but very little actual film still exists.
Nice clean print & sound quality.
btw– in the United States they called these “soundies” -forerunner of music-video’s. (No idea if they used that term in Britain.)
The Internet Archive has maybe a dozen really good examples from the 1940’s. (But no Al Bowlly.) http://www.archive.org
quick follow-up;
Check out—https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22soundies
for some good examples.
For anyone not familiar with the Internet Archive– take a look. They archive ‘The Internet’ (466 billion pages & counting via the “Wayback Machine”), through their Guttenberg-Project they scan old books, and otherwise archive & permanently host millions of audio/video files. Non-profit and everything is free to the public.
(The “Prelinger Archives” sub-collection is one of my favorites.)
Fans of Al Bowlly might like John Wrights “British Dance Band Show”.
http://www.r2ok.co.uk/dancebandshow.htm
Frank C
Frank,
Looks interesting! (Have my auto-download software going wild as I type.)
Thanks!
The BBC has some good archival-material, but it’s buried deep & navigating their website is a chore.