![]() ![]() He has been a truck driver, a book packer, a sales clerk. Since 2005, he was also the classical music, opera, dance, architecture and back-up movie critic.īut newspaper work is only one of a long and eclectic series of jobs and “life positions.” ![]() He was art critic with “The Arizona Republic” from 1986 to 2012 and is proud of the fact that he was never shot at, although he was once hanged in effigy by “Western Horseman” magazine after a nasty review of Cowboy Art. He was born in New Jersey and handed down one of his first significant opinions by leaving. Richard Nilsen made a living out of having opinions. Everybody is always borrowing from everybody else. But when an artist finds something from another culture that piques his interest and creativity, well, that’s just normal. That isn’t cultural appropriation, it is simply fraud. I am not talking here about cases such as when an Anglo artist sells his work as Indian art, pretending to be Native American. The whole issue of cultural appropriation is bothersome, to say the least. We could make the claim that scat began with Stephen Foster and Camptown Races and its “doo-dah, doo-dah” or trace it back to the 16th century and Josquin de Prez’s frotolla El Grillo, where the singer imitates the sound of a cricket.Īs the Fleischer trial judge ruled, “the vocables ‘boop-boop-a-doop’ and similar sounds had been used by other performers prior to the plaintiff.” Very few things have virgin birth most things are developments of other things. ![]() In the Fleischer trial, the famous pianist and composer, Clarence Williams testified that he’d been using the scat technique since 1915. Each performer borrowing from the previous. The actual Mills took over on Broadway from Gertrude Saunders in the 1921 hit, Shuffle Along. “Miss Kane’s attorneys strove vainly to have the sound tracks included, saying they wished to show how Betty Boop has ‘simulated our voice and our style of singing,’ but Justice McGoldrick ruled that any ‘booping’ would be incompetent, immaterial and irrelevant.”Īfter all, Baby Esther was known as a “Little Florence Mills,” imitating that singer. ![]() “Give us as nearly as you can how they sounded?” A: “I could do it better if I had rhythm with it.” Q: “Give us the sounds.” A: “Boo-did-do-doo.” Q: “Where there other sounds besides the one that you have just mentioned?” A: “Yes, quite a few.” Q: “Will you give us as many as you can remember?” A: “Whad-da-da-da” Q: “Others.” A: “There are quite a few - ‘Lo-di-de-do’” Q: Any others that you recall?” A: “Sounds like a time she would make a sound like sort of a moaning sound, finished off with ‘de-do’”Īccording to one newspaper account, “That’s when the court stenographer threw up the sponge and admitted he couldn’t spell such things.”Īt one point, film of Betty Boop and film of Helen Kane were shown, without sound, to compare their styles.Īnother newspaper account reported “Except for the occasional throat-clearings of a roomful of attorneys, it was strictly a silent performance, the court having ruled agains any audible ‘booping.’ Asked what Baby Esther did on stage, the manager said, “She sang the chorus and during her choruses, we had four bars omitted, which we called the break, of so-called ‘hot licks.’” Question: “During those breaks or ‘hot licks,’ what did Baby Esther do?” Answer: “A funny expression in her face and a meaningless sound.” Q: Will you tell us what those sounds were?” A: “At various times they differed, they sound like ‘boop-boop-a-doop,’ and sometimes…” Kane’s lawyer then objects. Trial transcripts can be quite a kick in the pants to judicial dignity. ![]()
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