• The Silver Screen
• Jazz and Popular Music
• Stage and Vaudeville
• Visual Artists
• Literary Artists
• Miscellany

The Silver Screen 

The Silent Artists Index 

Excellent Site! The "Silents Majority" has done a tremendous job of compiling information on the stars of the silent screen. Do not miss this site! 

EDITOR'S CHOICE - This site reprints original documents from the silent film era.  Nickelodeons in NYC, Roxy, D.W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, 1915-1927 Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount Lawsuit, Salaries of silent stars

A hundred of the best, organized by year.

Excellent Site! "Photo Galleries of Silent Film Actresses Over 1,500 JPEGs of 300 actresses from the silent era."

A fairly simple but interesting account of film in the 20s, by Hollywood Center Studios

Excellent page on a specific theatre built in 1929. "These were the golden years for the birth of movie palaces in America. This was a time when where we went to the movies was as Important as the movies we went to see - And 1929 was the year the Orpheum opened in Phoenix at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Adams."

A tribute to one of the biggest stars of the silent era.

Homepage of the Louise Brooks Society, dedicated to silent star Louise Brooks.

A History of Jazz before 1930: The Red Hot Jazz Archive 

Great jazzpage with material (espescially RA-format) from the early jazz age  - Contributed by Trond Hansen

Jazz musician Milt Hinton remembers the 20s and 30s, including Al Capone, and racism

A 30's and 40's vocalist, Maxine Gray led a long and interesting career.  An excellent collection of pictures, and details of her injury in a train wreck.

"The first nationally promoted Vitaphone talking picture was "Don Juan," starring John Barrymore, and the production was accompanied by other short entertaining video pieces including one entitled "His Pastimes" featuring our man Roy. (Al Jolson's "Jazz Singer" was issued a year later.)" This page discusses Smeck's career, and the ukelele and steel guitar. 

An Excellent page of Vaudeville and American Popular Music Links - Contributed by Roots

Excellent Site! The Library of Congress sponsors this exhibition of some of their materials. Old Playbills and photos, with a lot of great history. Harry Houdini, Theater Playbills and Programs, Sound Recordings, Motion Pictures, English Playscripts, Yiddish Playscripts. 
"The American Variety Stage is a multimedia anthology selected from various Library of Congress holdings. This collection illustrates the vibrant and diverse forms of popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, that thrived from 1870-1920. Included are 334 English- and Yiddish-language playscripts, 146 theater playbills and programs, 61 motion pictures, 10 sound recordings, and 143 photographs and 29 memorabilia items documenting the life and career of Harry Houdini. Groups of theater posters and additional sound recordings will be added to this anthology in the future."

This site is full of sound clips and other useful information on Vaudeville, including a section on the Palace Theatre in New York, which was the "center" of vaudeville.

The "Big Three" Fathers of Ragtime, Short biographies of Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Joseph Lamb. Links and CD information.

Incredible Site!!! - this site is crammed with technical information on every aspect of early 20th century sound recording. If you wanted to know anything about the history of sound, or a long list of artists, check this site. 
 

Ray, Man (1890-1976), American painter, photographer, and leading figure in the artistic avant-garde in Paris of the 1920s. 
 

Dutch Falconi and his Twisted Orchestra 

This is a Sacaramento band which has apparently concocted a fictional character as its leader, whose exploits date back to the Jazz age. Intereating, but not historical in the least. It does give an interesting view of developing a "character" from out of the 1920s.

An excellent search engine, which purports to have 20,000 individuals indexed.  Great for checking birth and death dates.