Noble Sissle and The Sizzling Syncopaters

Noble Sissle and His Band from Ciro's Club

The noun "soundies" seems to originate in 1941 with the company that built & distributed Mills Panoram Jukeboxes.

A soundie was, then, a three-minute music-film played on visual jukeboxes, though in reality these films were also batched together in sets of three to show as one-reel shorts in theaters, & to sell to the 8 mm & 16 mm home projector market, so "soundie" came to mean any music-oriented film short of a full-blown feature-length musical.

But in the black community "soundies" was used to mean a short film anywhere from three minutes to an hour but usually one or two reels (ten or twenty minutes) with all-black casts, & by extension any musical-short without race reference.

Whether this use of the word developed after the Panoram soundies appeared in the 1940s, or whether the Mills Panoram company latched onto pre-existent street slang, is probably unknowable. In any case the antecedants to the soundies, like the short-short Vitagraph music-films & a plethora of one-reelers, are in essence also soundies.

"Noble Sissle & His Band from Ciro's Club & of Radio & Gramaphone Fame" (1930) is a three-minute British Pathetone, precursor to the jukebox soundies of the 1940s. Pathetones of this vintage were filmed on location, so this really is at Ciro's.

Sissle is out in front of The Sizzling Syncopaters. He's slim & youthful, singing ragtime in his sweet high voice:

"The moon was all aglow
And heaven was in your eyes
The night that you told me, those little white lies
The stars they seemed to know
That you didn't mean all those sighs
The night that you told me, those little white lies."

I absolutely love Sissle singing this.

As Noble finishes the lyrics for "Little White Lies," the trumbone & sax trade off on soloing through the instrumental break. Then without missing a beat we're into a second song.

Drummer Jack Carter leaps up to sing a rapid rendition of "Happy Feet" at the back of the band. For close, tuba player Edward Coles rushes up front to tapdance a fine example of the aforementioned happy feet. - Weird Realm Reviews

Lena Horne

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and raised largely by her grandparents. Her family, with roots African, European and Native American, was part of the "Black Bourgeoisie" a stratum of well-to-do people of color. Horne's own parents were looked down upon by the extended family, her father a numbers runner and her mother a traveling actress.

She spent time in the South with her mother, and later with her uncle Frank who became an advisor to FDR. Returning to New York she attended a public high school before leaving school without a diploma. At age 16 she joined the chorus of the Cotton Club, yes she did, and by 1934 had a featured role in the Cotton Club Parade. The next year she began touring with Noble Sissle and his orchestra.

According to BlackClassicMovies.com she headlined with Sissle under the name Helena Horne because he thought Helena sounded "classier" than Lena. However, when they played The Palace in early October, she was billed as Leona Horne.

Clevelanders on Palace Stage
The Cleveland News, October 1, 1936

Noble Sissle, who left Central High back in 1912 for the war and later success down the dance lanes, isn’t the only local-boy-makes-good at the Palace tomorrow.

The habitues of the Cedar and Central Avenue hot spots will remember Billy Banks. They swore by this lad a few years back as he danced and sang his way up and down the town’s Harlem.

Included in Sissle’s “Savoy Stompers” revue are the dancing stars of the Harlem Cotton club, “Pops and Louie”, Leona Horne, songstress, and Buddy Doyle, who comes out of the band to clown, figure prominently in the show.

Sources:
Wikipedia
BlackClassicMovies.com
The Cleveland News

Noble Sissle

Noble Sissle (July 10, 1889 – December 17, 1975) was born in Indianapolis, and moved with his family to Cleveland in 1906 when his father became minister of Cory Methodist Church at E. 35th & Scovill. At the age of seventeen he attended Central High where he played baseball and football, and sang with the glee club.

During World War I, Sissle entered the Army and became the drum major of an Army band that caused a sensation in France by playing a form of ragtime music. The 369th Infantry Band, led by Lt. James Reese Europe, began calling itself a "jazz band." Reese’s Army band not only helped popularize the new music among U.S. soldiers, but it was the first exportation of jazz, America’s new art form. Sissle said at the time, "The jazz germ hit France and it spread everywhere" they went. 

- Joe Mosbrook, Jazzed in History

Mosbrook also credits Sissle with discovering Sidney Bechet, and being part of a vaudeville act with Eubie Blake. Sissle composed the classic tune I'm Just Wild About Harry, and three years before The Jazz Singer created a short film with Blake called A Phonofilm that was first shown at the Palace Theatre in December, 1923. He had a history of breaking racial barriers, working clubs that had previously hired only all-white ensembles.

In 1935 Sissle hired a young chorus girl from the Cotton Club to sing with his Franco-Harlem Revue, and she was singing for them when they played in Cleveland for a week in October, 1936. Her name was Lena Horne.