Black Brothers

In Manhattan, a few months ago, four black brothers were hanging around Harlem jobless. Four years ago vaudeville all over the U. S. was flat on its back. Talking pictures, long & short, were filling entire bills. But talking "shorts" did not satisfy. Today, cinemansions are putting on 60% more flesh & blood acts than in 1929. Radio-Keith-Orpheum spent $12,000,000 on its vaudeville last year. The four Mills Brothers, their engagement at Manhattan's Palace Theatre extended for a third time, rolled about town last week in their automobile driven by a liveried chauffeur. . . .

Most people know about the Mills Brothers now because they perform over the radio twice a week for Vapex. They sing in trick quartet fashion and when it pleases them they can simulate perfectly a tuba, a trumpet and a pair of saxophones. Their voices, unaided, are too small for vaudeville. But they use their radio technique, huddle around an amplifier-microphone.

Piqua, Ohio, knew about the Mills boys when they were ragamuffins drumming up trade for their father's barbershop. They had no money to buy instruments so they learned to ape them. The family moved to Bellefontaine, 30 miles away. John, the oldest, got a job in a greenhouse. Harry, the fattest, became a bootblack. Herbert, the slickest, turned hod-carrier. Young Don, 17 now, was lazy.

John saved enough money tending flowers to buy a guitar--a $6.25 instrument from a mail-order house. People find it hard to believe, but that same guitar is the only real instrument the Mills boys use. With it they had their first success, in radio station WLW, Cincinnati.

Black Son

Five years ago old Mrs. Timothy B. Blackstone, widow of the man for whom Chicago's expensive Blackstone Hotel was named, was taken with an announcement that for the first time a Negro would be soloist with the Chicago Symphony. Old Mrs. Blackstone investigated. The Negro, 27, was the son of a butler who had served her for 44 years. He had earned his Symphonic engagement through a contest conducted by the Society of American Musicians. Old Mrs. Blackstone took a box for George Garner's concert, invited her butler to sit with her.

She heard the boy's story: He had sold papers on Chicago's South Side, bell-hopped at the Chicago Beach Hotel, sung in the Olivet Baptist Church choir. Mrs, Blackstone invited her butler's boy to lunch with her. There arose an argument as to whether he should go to the front door or around by the back as he had done the countless times he had gone to see his father. His mother telephoned the housekeeper. He used the front way.

Last week Tenor George Garner was the first recitalist of the season to sell out the great Civic Opera House. Widow Blackstone is dead, her musty old mansion demolished. But thanks to her and rich Mrs. Jacob R. Custer, young Garner has had six years' study abroad. Last week, singing for the benefit of unemployed Negroes, he proved that he had made much of his opportunities. He has acquired an Oxford accent, learned better how to manage a voice that is strong, smooth, mellow.

Seasons Cancelled

> Because of Depression the Los Angeles Grand Opera Association, which usually gives ten or more performances annually with stars from New York and Chicago, will give no opera in the autumn of 1932.

> London's Covent Garden will have no opera this spring. The British Government has withdrawn the subsidy of -L-17,600 given last year when Viscount Snowden, husband of music-loving Ethel Annakin Snowden, was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Wagner on the Air

Every winter Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera Company commandeers its best German singers, puts on with great success a series of Wagner matinees. This year for the first time an act from each opera in the cycle is being broadcast. On the stage last week Soprano Maria Jeritza, making her farewell appearance of the season, sang the gracious Elizabeth who pleads for the erring Tannhauser. Backstage in her dressing-room her godson, one Jonathan Rinehart, 2, became involved with her make-up boxes, completely daubed himself with eyebrow-pencil, lipstick, rouge. After the performance, when Signor & Signora Gatti-Cazzaza and many another person came to congratulate her, Maria Jeritza made each and every one shake hands with 'little Jonathan Rinehart.

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