Imagine a meeting between 1930s cinema’s proudest white man and an African-American blues singer who sang about the Deep South and its tribulations.
These two were connected, but only after the death of the dazzling blonde. Their postmortem encounter says something about America, something about the Great Depression: something about the importance of movies in the vintage era.
There was blonde Jean Harlow, an unashamedly working-class woman, beautiful and bright as well as plain and simple. practical.
She was known as a “bad girl” in films, which could mean many things. Being a working class person, she was not under the protection of the aristocracy. She was there in the air.
Harlow always said what needed to be said. He tolerated no nonsense.
There was always something insecure about him, something half-said, the rest hidden somewhere deep and inaccessible.
She had experienced tragic events even before the tragedies that befell her – the suicide of her second husband when she was only 21, his death from kidney failure at only 26.
She rose quickly and she rose from nothing, a perfect image of the 1930s, and a perfect example of what it meant to be a woman from nothing.
Harlow said what needed to be said with a kind of smile, but perhaps that smile symbolized her uncertainty, her weakness. Nearly 20 years later Marilyn Monroe played this image of the so-called blonde bombshell, but only in her last picture do we truly realize the tragedy.
But somehow in Jean Harlow, the audience could feel the broken places almost through the screen. Although the acting he did was comedy.
She remained connected to all the poor and all the working class. They collected their hard-earned money to sit and watch him in the dark. My ancestors too, in the far south,
There was something in it that they understood; They recognized and, unlike Marilyn, it was easy to believe that Harlow could take a different train south, get off, and wander across the fields in her heels, walking up and holding her hand. Can mix.
On the surface, Bones was the exact opposite of William Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly.
He was descended from people who were considered only three-quarters human at the time of his birth, born to become slaves. He grew up in the Deep South doing all that work and surviving all the things that you could have survived if you had been born black in 1888, or maybe 1889. No one kept records of people like him.
Lead Belly played twelve-string guitar and using that instrument, he expressed not only his people and their hardships, but also the reality of being poor and rural and living in the South.
There was a cover story in 1937 life Magazine about him. They used the “N” word when describing his musical talent.
The caption on one photo read: “These hands once killed a man”.
An inspiration to Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and everyone else who composed folk music after his early death, he never knew how important he would become. Nor would Harlow have been aware of her place in the group of screen beauties.
Both had the same essence of similarity, these two people, trapped in depression, symbolized the American dream before they died. Symbol still.
The tune of Lead Belly’s tribute to Harlow is surprisingly entertaining. But it says something about the importance of movies, cinema, during the Great Depression, and why movies never really got that good and, in a way, that important.
“Jean Harlow died last day
These are the words I heard him say
his mother was sitting on his bed crying
believe my soul my baby is dying
Shang-a-lang, shang-a-lang, ba da-da diddly
Shang-a-lang, shang-a-lang, ba da-da diddly
Shang-a-lang, shang-a-lang, ba da-da diddly, oh…”