November 27 movie: Let's Hear It For the Girls. Another collection of musical shorts, this one featuring women. Mostly female vocalists and also a couple of all-female orchestras. These were mostly not soundies the way I understand the term (discrete short films, like a music video forty years early). A few were soundies but most looked like clips from old TV shows, with the terrible image quality you would expect.
There were some terrific artists on there -- June Christy, Lena Horne, Anita O'Day, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Ethel Waters. There are also some little-known artists we'd never even heard of, like Ina Ray Hutton and Thelma White, and a few I was only vaguely familiar with like Velma Middleton. It seemed like maybe there was a problem with music rights. Because why would you make a DVD "Celebrating the Queens of Swing" and include three songs by Ina Ray Hutton, and none by Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Ivie Anderson, Mildred Bailey, etc etc. On the other hand it was nice to see a few singers we weren't familiar with.
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