"SWING YOU SINNERS" (1930)
An animated musical mystery for Halloween
Hallowe’en Night - Tuesday October 31 - I’m doing what has become an annual tradition: my virtual Hallowe’en Party for the New York Adventure Club! This will of course include the funniest, spookiest cartoon of them all, Swing you Sinners! (1930) If you’ve never seen it, you are in for a mystifying treat. I’ve been fascinated by this rather amazing little film for many years now, and was moved to do a whole post about it - concentrating on both the visuals and the soundtrack. To wit:
(This is the best print of Swing You Sinners I have come across - on vimeo here.)
Swing You Sinners! was produced by the Max and Dave Fleischer in 1930. The brothers were affiliated with Paramount Pictures, which gave them the use of the song “Sing You Sinners” from the 1930 Paramount feature musical Honey.
(Below is the “Sing You Sinners” number in Honey - apologies for the poor quality of this print, I have never been able to find a good copy of this early talkie movie musical.)
The cartoon itself is rather amazing. Although there are no specifically Black stereotypes on screen, the entire premise seems like a sketch lifted from a Black minstrel show. The title “Swing You Sinners” has a double meaning: the term “swing” already referred to a jazz performance: Duke Ellington would introduce his classic “It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)” in 1931, and there already was a spiritual tune called “Swing Along.” But here, “swing” also refers to a hanging, or receiving capital punishment through some other means, both ghastly and ghostly.
The protagonist is an early incarnation of the Fleischer character Bimbo, an anthropomorphic, vaguely-dog-like entity who would later more famously serve as Betty Boop’s costar. Between the onscreen action and that described in the lyric, we learn he is the epitome of a minstrel show ne’er-do-well: all he does is steal chickens, shoot craps, and chase girls. He’s in the middle of trying to rob another henhouse, when a cop starts chasing him, and he hides in a graveyard. There, the spooks, goblins, ghosts and zillions of creepy characters chase after him, until in the last shot, he is swallowed whole by a giant skull. The whole scene keeps reminding me of “Tevya’s Dream” in Fiddler on the Roof, as well as the spooky seance sequence in the Colosseum in The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.
The visuals are, to say the least, memorable: Max and Dave Fleischer seem to have said to their central animators, including Grim Natwick and Shamus Culhane (who would both go on to a different kind of immortality working for Walt Disney, most famously in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs): “just throw in any kind of spooky, funny, creepy, weird thing you can think of.” (There’s also a Jewish caricature, apparently the work of Culhane, who was, perhaps ironically, one of the few major animators at Fleischers who wasn’t Jewish.)
The visuals are the trippiest ever - there are images that look for all the world like the weirdest, most extreme sights ever conceived by Basil Woverton a generation later and Robert Crumb another generation after that. Instead of the piece ending with the whole nightmare being a dream, or some sort of moral lesson, it concludes with Bimbo essentially being swallowed whole by a giant levitating skull.
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For what it’s worth, I first discovered Swing You Sinners it around 1975 when Jerry Beck and I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to see Betty Boop Scandals of 1974, a compilation of vintage Fleischer cartoons that, then and now, was a rare chance to see these amazing films in good 35MM prints. The imagery grabbed me, and the soundtrack no less so, although it remaings a mystery. There’s no credit to any of the performers, and fifty years later there’s still no satisfying answer as to who’s playing and singing.
The soundtrack of Betty Boop Scandals was released on an LP - with an especially gorgeous cover by Leslie Carbaga - including Swing You Sinners. At one of my very first visits to the old Record Research group, I brought said LP with me and played it for a group of early jazz collectors and experts, including the now-late Len Kunstadt. No one had any real idea who was playing or singing. More recently, I asked again, putting the question to a half dozen or so authorities on both 1920s jazz and animation and we still don’t know for sure. I will, however, share what we do know and summarize all of the possibilities that have been suggested.
(Special thanks to Jerry Beck, Keith Scott, Mark Cantor, David Jessup, Brad Kay, James Parten, Steven Lasker, and Tim Brooks for getting back to me with their thoughts. Thanks also to Barbara Effros, granddaughter of the late, great Bob.)
The soundtrack appears to be a combination of white studio musicians and African American singers and comedians. We do have some good guesses as to the players, but the singers and voices remain a total mystery. There’s all kinds of African American vocal expression here: spirituals, blues, and even some wild and crazy scat singing.
One more curious point: about halfway, the audio quality changes, and it sounds like the soundtrack is taken from a disc - there’s something that sounds like surface noise. James Parten, who has made a thorough study of needle drops in early sound cartoons, has not been able to place it. My theory is that while it almost definitely sounds like a disc, it is most likely a private transcription or a special recording made just for the cartoon. The “disk” portion contains the vocal of the main song, “Sing You Sinners,” and the lyrics have been rewritten to make them more specially describe the action of the cartoon, so there’s no doubt that they were written for the film, and not reused from a previous source.
For what it’s worth, here’s an outline of everything we hear, in sequence:
Audio sequence
Tuba (throughout) probably Joe Tarto
Trumpet : definitely Bob Effros (possibly Mike Mosiello in spots)
0:00 Main titles - choir
0:40 Bob Effros (pretty definitely) muted trumpet over tuba
1:25 cop grunts, snarls, and other vocal effects by Billy Murray
1:40 "Down South" (Spaeth-Myddleton) (an “oldie” even in 1930)
2:35 choir: "Song of the Bayou" (Rube Bloom) with special lyrics
2:35 Bob Effros #2
3:40 Jewish caricature (“Mahzel-Tov”) “You needed this?”
4:00 Bob Effros #3
4:41 African American choir and soloists, reminiscent of Hall Johnson Choir
5:30 needle drop - audio quality changes noticeably (“Sing You Sinners” starts)
6:30 ghost plays trombone (possibly Tommy Dorsey)
6:55 “Nice Bix-like cornet, who, I can't imagine... “ (Brad Kay)
7:21 clarinet solo (possibly Jimmy Dorsey)
And that’s it! At the very least, I hope I have exposed some of you to a classic cartoon that you might not have otherwise seen. Needless to say, if anybody has any guesses as to the performers - especially the vocalists, let me know in the comments below.
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more from three experts:
Keith Scott (email) : The bane of my life and book is the lack of existing records for 30s jazz cartoons. In the case of New York and especially Fleischer it is even more frustrating as Max’s records were destroyed by Paramount in 1941. It sounds like a large ensemble in Swing You Sinners! I would love to know if Lou Fleischer or Sammy Timberg contracted a group from a big-time Harlem nightspot, or if it was a group of session singers of the day. Billy Murray also scouted talent for the studio, but hopefully at some point a news item might be discovered now that vintage newspapers are able to be sourced.
James Parten (on cartoon research.com) : Swing You Sinners! (9/25/30) – A black proto-Bimbo rings almost all the changes on the accepted black stereotypes of the day (leaving out only watermelon). More importantly, the film features one of the hottest jazz soundtracks appearing on a Fleischer film to date. The protagonist displays temerity in attempting to steal a chicken despite the watchful eye of a cop (giving our “hero” visions of prison stripes and the electric chair), then displays characteristic timidity when surrounded by the headstones of a haunted graveyard, which self-locks him within its walls, Transformation gags abound, as the spooks lead the dog on a one-way trip to Hades. The title song was a big hit from the feature “Honey”, starring Lillian Roth. Principal recordings include the High Hatters on Victor, Duke Ellington on Brunswick with Irving Mills vocal (also re-recorded anonymously by Ellington for Durium’s cardboard “Hit of the Week” series under the pseudonym “Harlem Hot Chocolates”), the Charleston Chasers on Columbia, and in vocal recording by Lee Morse and her Bluegrass Boys on Columbia with Benny Goodman on clarinet. The song was successfully revived in the 1950’s by Tony Bennett for Columbia with lively big band backing by Percy Faith. Also included in the score are passages from “Down South”, most notable recording of which treated the number as an intermezzo, by the Eveready Hour Group on a 12″ black seal Victor release. Also again, a brief quote from “Mazel Tov” appears."
Tim Brooks, author of two specific books that are pertinent to this topic, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Music in American Life) (2005) and The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film and Television (2019):
Don't know that I can add much except to say the chorus sounds to me very much like a black group (and arrangement), which would be consistent with the way the song was presented in Honey (first by a black chorus, and later by little Mitzi Green and a group of black kids). Lots of black stereotyping of course.
Black spirituals and pseudo-spirituals were very much in the air at this time (the only type of "serious" music that African Americans were supposed to sing--just ask Roland Hayes). Only a few of the active groups were recorded (e.g. Clarence Cameron White's Brunswicks in 1927), so I don't know how you'd identify this one by sound alone. I checked a bunch of reviews and none of them mentioned (or probably knew) the performers, although they did show that this "Talkartoon" was very well received by audiences in late 1930, a few months after Honey was released. Rave reviews.
Here’s the info on my two Halloween themed presentations for Tuesday evening:
Tuesday, October 31
7:00PM (EST) - THE NEW YORK ADVENTURE CLUB presents:
''American Halloween: A Century of Spooky Fun Pop Culture' Webinar' Webinar
click here
Tuesday, October 31
9:30PM (EST) - Will Friedwald's CLIP JOINT presents:
HALLOWEEN! encores including CLASSIC SPOOKY CARTOONS! BOO!
no cover charge!
click here
Very Special thanks to the fabulous Ms. Elizabeth Zimmer, for expert proofreading of this page, and scanning for typos, mistakes, and other assorted boo-boos!
Sing! Sing! Sing! : My tagline is, “Celebrating the great jazz - and jazz-adjacent - singers, as well as the composers, lyricists, arrangers, soloists, and sidemen, who help to make them great.”
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To listen to KSDS via the internet (current and recent shows are available for streaming.) click here.
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I'm here for your music writing, but always nice to see you writing about animation, Will.
"If you want to be saved/sing, you sinners..."