Carolina Blues

I tuned into this movie half way thru, but apparently I've seen more than poster "It Lives", who wrote a review apparently without seeing any of this movie. This movie has a great musical section with spectacular dancing from Harold Nicholas, The Step Brothers, the Layson Brothers, well you can read the credits. So his comments about the lack of black performers in a Kay Kyser movie isn't true of this movie. This movie preserves the work of these wonderful dancers. "It Lives" comment should have been put on Kay Kyser's page or the the page of the movie he's actually referring to, if he could remember which one.

If you look him up, Kyser called his band the Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Corny yeah, but how is that racist? Where is the 3 K's in that? If there was a movie where a big band was dressed like the KKK I think that movie would be famous for that, and I've never heard of it. I looked on Wikipedia and I didn't see anything about Kyser and race, I googled it and I didn't see any connection with him and the KKK, though please correct me if its there. At one point in this movie there's a discussion about whether Ann Miller will sing with another famous band, such as Cab Calloway.

I'm guessing that the music business, especially the big bands, were not nearly as racist as other US institutions at the time, because black musicians were so talented they were pretty much in the process of inventing modern music and everybody sort of jumped on board what they were doing. If there were no black musicians in Kyser's band in the movie the first poster saw, maybe its because he played music, per quotes in his IMDb bio, that was "corny" and "sweet" and that's not where black musicians were going.

I'm not saying there wasn't something racist about Kyser's success, I mean obviously, he got to be a movie star, not a more talented band leader, like Duke Ellington, but "It Lives" post doesn't exactly make the case for Kyser being a symbol of racism, or whatever he was trying to say.