Body and Soul: Jazz and Blues in American Film, 1927-63 / Edition 1

by Peter Stanfield

Overview

The minstrel show and striptease played an indelible role in early mass culture and influenced the popular culture that followed. Peter Stanfield focuses on Hollywood to explore this phenomenon. The movies used blackface minstrelsy to represent an emerging urban American theatrical history while American film at the end of the studio era used the image of the burlesque dancer and stripper to represent urban decay. Stanfield considers the representation of American urban life in jazz, blues, ballads, and sin-songs and the ways film studios exploited this range of so-called scandalous music. Stanfield’s analyses of standards like "Frankie and Johnny” and "St. Louis Blues” stand beside original thinking on blackface minstrelsy in early sound movies, racial representation and censorship, torch singers and torch songs, burlesque and strippers, the noir cityscape, the Hollywood Left, and hot jazz.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252072352
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	06/15/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Peter Stanfield is Emeritus Professor of Film at the University of Kent. His books include Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972 and Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy.

Editorial Reviews

"This is a unique volume in that the author confirms the overlap of American cultural forms and racial and gender practices. . . . Appealing as much to cultural historians as to students and scholars of film and musicology, this volume is a must read for those interested in US cultural studies. Essential."—Choice

"[An] absorbing and convincing account of white America's fraught, imitative, fascinated, repressive and denial-ridden relationship with black culture."—The Wire

"Body and Soul is [Stanfield's] incisive report back from the field of Hollywood films - melodramas, crime films, musicals, comedies - that use, sometimes centrally but more often in crucial but taken-for-granted ways, jazz and blues-inflected music to figure and probe American identity."—Film Quarterly

From the Publisher