St. Louis Blues Mordecai, Jimmy performer Washington, Isabel performer Film 1929-09-08 Radio Pictures (2 reels)/ RKO Productions Featuring the music of W. C. Handy and J. Rosamond Johnson. Bessie Smith, at the peak of her career, was cast as a misused cabaret singer, and the dancer Jimmy Mordecai played a hustler and gigolo in this spare, gritty story of black street life. In the last scene, Mordecai enters, a sporting dandy, and performs a strutting soft-shoe dance as he makes his way past the tables of a café where the singers are seated. Later, he dances grind with Bessie Smith. This brief section demonstrates the legomania and smoothness of his jazz dancing. Regarded as one of the earliest musical films that successfully depict certain aspects of urban Negro life with a semblance of reality and dignity. Built around the famous W.C. Handy composition of that title. Features Bessie Smith aside tap dancer Jimmy Mordecai, Isabel Washington, and an orchestra led by pianist James P. Johnson, with several fletcher Henderson men in its ranks. The choral arrangements by J. Rosamond Johnson were performed by the choir of Dr. Hall Johnson. Short subject sound film starring blues singer Bessie Smith and dancer Jimmy Mordecai (of Wells, Mordecai and Taylor) who performs a specialty tap dance number; there is a brief bit of slow-drag dancing during the cabaret scene in the film in which Smith sings the title song with the Hall Johnson choir. In the last scene of the film, Mordecai, the cruel and two-timing lover of Smith, enters the club bar, dapper in a three-piece suit, waving his bowler hat and shaking hands with everyone seated at tables. His takes off his hat to salute the crowd of watchers as he struts a circle around the dance floor and breaks (though the camera focussed on the upper body, into a time step and wing steps; when the camera tilts down to his feet, he is dancing one-legged wings, Charleston over-the-tops, and a dozen in-the-trenches (with his torso parallel to the ground), and then pulls himself upright for a tight spin finish. It is a superlative example of jazz tap dancing by the end of the 1920s. Performing Arts Encyclopedia http://www.loc.gov/performingarts Frank, Rusty E.: Tap! The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and their Stories 1900-1955. New York, William Morrow. (1990). Smith, Ernie: Selected List of Films and Kinescopes. In Jean and Marshall Stearns' Jazz Dance (1968). Tap Dance America http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/tda/tda-home.html tda IHAS 151216 loc.music.tda.32