Female singers have been popular since ancient times. Earlier this year a tomb was discovered in Egypt housing the earthy remains of Nehmes Bastet, a singer who lived and died some 2,900 years ago and is to date the only female buried in the Valley of Kings not related to the royal families.

Nearly 3,000 years after her death, female singers were still popular. As far as female musicians, at least in the western world, they mostly played piano or harp and few did so professionally. All-female bands didn't begin to appear until the 1920s AD. An important development in all-female bands was Lee De Forest's invention of Phonofilms in 1919. Before then, a few early attempts at marrying music to short films with Kinetoscopes, which were hampered by their length of 22 seconds. Many Phonofilms were essentially music videos and some of De Forest's first subjects were female musicians. Soon, Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes, Visual Music and Photophones followed. (Read about early music videos here). 

Predictably, a large part of the appeal of the all-female bands that formed afterward were chosen as much for their looks as their musical talent and even though many included capable musicians and in some cases talented performers, they've never really been the subjects of serious academic attention and information, when available, is usually scant. As Sherry Tucker's book Swing Shift (one of the few books on the subject) put it, the public "looks first and listens later."

Today is the 98th birthday of actor/singer Herb Jeffries. Although not widely recognized today (especially among non-black audiences, during his heyday in the 1930s and '40s he was an enormously popular singer and the first black actor to star in Westerns. I'd probably know nothing of him except for my tenure in the Black Cinema section at Amoeba, where elderly gentleman reguarly treated me to their reminiscences about a black singing cowboy they'd idolized as kids. 

 

Herber Jeffries was born September 24, 1913 in Detroit, Michigan to Afro-Sicilian pianist Umberto Balentino and his Irish-American wife, Mildred. He never knew his father and was raised by his single mother, who ran a boarding house. Although light-skinned and almost surely able to "pass," he identified as black and associated himself with Detroit's Howard Buntz Orchestra, which brought him a measure of local fame.

Video and the Radio Star

I think it's safe to say that many, if not most, people seem to assume that music videos began with the initial broadcast of MTV on August 1, 1981. That first video, the Buggles' excruciating "Video Killed the Radio Star," came out in 1979, so what were they singing about? Were the Buggles prophets or were there videos before MTV?


For a long time, there have been musical numbers both in film and on TV. And hundreds of people have probably seen the PBS documentary about Soundies, where Michael Feinstein suggests that "an amazing forty years before MTV made its debut came a revolution in sight and sound." Hacktually, the marriage of music, advertisement and visuals within discrete shorts is almost as old as film itself and this, part one of The evolution of the music video, actually ends with Soundies.  

*cue the Ken Burns music*

1890s - The Kinetoscope

   
William K.L. Dickson, one of the most important pioneers of early film, was working on the Kinetoscope, which played short films matched sound recorded on wax cylinder to film. In what to me is the first music video (filmed around 1894), Dickson plays "Song of the Cabin Boy" on the fiddle whilst two dudes grind suggestively.

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