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Many entertainers launched their careers at Ciro's Nightclub, often referred as 'The Nightclub of the Stars.' Ciro's was patronized by both famous and non-famous guests who enjoyed dancing, dining, and comedy routines featuring top-name entertainers such as Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Sophie Tucker, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Liberace, Nat King Cole, Joe E. Lewis, and Sammy Davis Jr., just to name a few. The nightclub's house band was led by Dick Stabile,...
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The fascinating tale of Hollywood powerhouse Paramount Pictures - beginning with its birth in the 1910s through the turbulent decade of the 1930s - was told in Early Paramount Studios by Marc Wanamaker, Michael Christaldi, and E.J. Stephens. Now the same authors are back to tell the next 60 years of the studio saga in Paramount Studios: 1940–2000, with a foreword by former Paramount head of production Robert Evans. This book picks up the story during...
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Ten years after Chicago saw its first full-time comedy club open, the landscape was decidedly different. "Stand-up comedy has exploded in the last couple of years, " a club owner told the Chicago Tribune in 1985, "that's the only way to describe it: exploded." It was truly a comedy boom, with as many as 16 clubs operating at once, and it lasted nearly a decade before fading, taking with it some of Chicago's oldest comedy stages, including the Comedy...
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Theaters have always been the places where memories are made. There, on Saturday afternoons, children could escape the pressures of growing up to live for two hours in a fantasy world of daring heroes, dastardly villains, and dazzling magic. They were the places where awkward teenage boys could nervously, and often clumsily, put their arms around equally nervous girls. In years past, every neighborhood had its own local theater. Downtown was home...
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Dick Dale & the Del-Tones began holding weekend dances at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, California, in the summer of 1960. Over the next year and a half, Dale developed the sound and style that came to be known as "surf music." The result was the development of more powerful guitar amplifiers, a dramatic increase in the sales of Fender guitars and amplifiers, and a shift from New York to West Coast recording studios. More and more people were...
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The great American composer George Gershwin was a product of the energetic Jazz Age city of New York. Yet Pittsburgh may have been his adopted town, through road tours of his Broadway shows, his appearances as a concert pianist, and his myriad associates with ties to the Steel City. Meticulously researched, Gershwin in Pittsburgh chronicles these surprisingly consequential connections. Theatrical venues such as the Nixon and Alvin Theatres and colleagues...
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In 1957, WHO-TV asked staff performer Duane Ellett to come up with an idea to help teach children how to better care for their pets. Ellett created Floppy, a high-voiced beagle dog puppet that became his sidekick for the next 30 years. Together, the iconic duo made 200 personal appearances every year at community festivals and events. The Floppy Show aired weekday afternoons in part of four decades, featuring a live studio audience of children telling...
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The Starr Piano Company, based in Richmond, Indiana, quickly became one of the largest piano manufacturers in the United States during the 19th century. In 1915, the Starr Piano Company opened a recording division, Gennett Records, that led to a dynamic change in the music industry and American culture. Gennett embraced the vastly under-recorded genres of jazz, blues, and country music in the 1920s. They recorded artists who were groundbreakers and...
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The Delta Lowlands, a place of stunning innovation and creativity in music and film, has laid an incredible foundation for American entertainment. Talented singers, producers, and musicians from a narrow stretch of Arkansas Delta land-traversing U.S. Highway 65 south near England down to Pine Bluff and on through Lake Village/Eudora-have garnered every conceivable distinction, including Grammys as well as Country Music Association (CMA), Gospel Music...
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Everyone loves to have fun! Over the years, Cantonians have enjoyed a wide variety of amusements, from traveling theatrical shows to community-wide celebrations. Louis Schaefer opened the town's first opera house in 1868, attracting some of the 19th century's biggest stars to Canton. The tradition of first-rate entertainment continued in the 20th century, with stars like Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Guy Lombardo gracing the stage of the Moonlight...
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For over 100 years, Paramount Pictures has been captivating movie and television audiences worldwide with its alluring imagery and compelling stories. Arising from the collective genius of Adolph Zukor, Jesse L. Lasky, and Cecil B. DeMille during the 1910s, Paramount Pictures is home to such enduring classics as Wings, Sunset Boulevard, The Ten Commandments, Love Story, The Godfather, the Indiana Jones series, Chinatown, Forrest Gump, Braveheart,...
12) Chicago blues
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Blues was once described as the devil's music. It eventually became some of the most beloved American music that was embraced by a global audience. Originating in African American communities in the South in the late 1800s, it was inspired by gospel and spiritual music sung by field hands and sharecroppers who worked on plantations. During the Great Migration from the early 1900s to the mid-1970s, many African Americans moved north for a better
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San Francisco is probably best known for its hills, ubiquitous fog, dungeness crab and the Golden Gate Bridge. But jazz music's threads are similarly woven into the fabric of the city and its environs. Whether performed in renowned clubs like So Different, Jimbo's Bop City, Black Hawk, and the Jazz Workshop or in halls like the Primalon Ballroom and Great American Music Hall, jazz has infused the city from the Barbary Coast to the Fillmore, thrilling...
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From the late 1910s until the early 1950s, a series of aggressive segregation policies toward Los Angeles's rapidly expanding African American community inadvertently led to one of the most culturally rich avenues in the United States. From Downtown Los Angeles to the largely undeveloped city of Watts to the south, Central Avenue became the center of the West Coast jazz scene, nurturing homegrown talents like Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, and Buddy...
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The varieties of music venues in Seattle have been as vital and vibrant for the people of the Emerald City as the genres that have graced these famous halls. These houses of music have nurtured the entertainment legacy of this region. Each holds a beautiful, haunting, and unique history that has helped shape the Pacific Northwest's musical culture, which, in turn, has helped shape our community. Out of the ashes of the Great Seattle Fire of 1889,...
16) Elks Opera House
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For over 100 years, the Elks Opera House has been a landmark of the cultural scene in Prescott, Arizona, and the western United States. In 1904, the people of Prescott raised $15,000 toward a performance hall to be included in the Elks Building. The original structure featured opera boxes that were later removed to adapt to the demands of motion pictures, and the entire proscenium arch was covered with wood paneling. In 2010, the Elks Opera House...
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Memphis has always been a theatrical town-a crossroads in the center of America for entertainment as well as commerce. Movies are among the many things that travel through the city, both for distribution and exhibition. Thousands of people who have lived here or just passed through, especially during and after World War II, found their way to the movie theatres. From the vaudeville palaces on Main Street to the nickelodeons on Beale Street, these...
18) Thalian Hall
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Thalian Hall is one of the oldest and most beautiful theaters in America. Forming the east wing of Wilmington's iconic city hall, this dual-purpose building has been at the center of the community's cultural and political life since it first opened in 1858. Thalian Hall is the only surviving theater designed by John Montague Trimble, one of America's foremost 19th-century theater architects. It was built at a time when Wilmington was the largest city...
19) New Orleans Jazz
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From the days when Buddy Bolden would blow his cornet to attract an audience from one New Orleans park to another, to the brass bands in clubs and on the streets today, jazz in New Orleans has been about simple things: getting people to snap their fingers, tap their toes, get up and clap their hands, and most importantly dance! From the 1890s to World War I, from uptown to Faubourg Treme and out to the lakefront, New Orleans embraced this uniquely...
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As they watched construction of the block-long flatiron building brick by brick throughout 1927, African American residents of Indianapolis could scarcely contain their pride. This new headquarters of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, with its terra-cotta trimmed facade, was to be more than corporate offices and a factory for what then was one of America's most successful black businesses. In fact, it was designed as "a city within a city,"...
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