CHIRP: The Chicago Independent Radio Project

Dustin Drase writes

Reg Kehoe and His Marimba Queens

In the early days of “soundies”, movie makers often found larger-than-life vaudeville style musicians like Roy Smeck to showcase the medium. I’m a gigantic sucker for the musicians of the 30s and 40s as the level of musicianship is of a quality that is rarely seen today. Luckily alongside such amazing record labels as Yazoo, a smattering of archival film preserves this amazing period in music.

Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens was a marimba-based musical group active from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. They were based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and toured extensively.

The lasting legacy of Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens is in “A Study In Brown”, a two-minute black & white film done in early 1940 (link below).

One of hundreds of “Soundie” films, they were printed backwards (mirror image) so they could appear correct when played in a Panoram machine (an early film jukebox about the size of a refrigerator) which employed a series of mirrors to reflect an image from a projector onto a 27-inch, reverse-projection, etched-glass screen in the tight, enclosed cabinet. The popular machines were first produced in 1939 by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago, Illinois, (which also made art-deco, fancy slot machines) and found their way into countless soda shops, taverns, bus and train stations and other public places across the nation. The specially-made 16mm films ran in a continuous loop and stopped when an in-line metal strip passed a sensor. The patron then put another nickel (or dime) in the machine to run the series of four to six 2- to 3-minute films again. The Panoram mechanics were housed in art-deco, high-quality wood cabinets and played Soundies, 8 to 12-minute films that typically showed jazz and other musicians of the day, as well as dance troupes and other acts. With the beginning of World War II, production of the Soundies and Panoram machines was drastically reduced due to a wartime raw material shortage and the Mills Panoram’s 1940 success quickly faded.

“A Study In Brown” was also shown in movie houses as a bonus before the main feature. Reg Kehoe and His Marimba Queens played from about 1938 to 1955 and was a hugely popular act, starting and ending each yearly tour with appearances at Hersheypark in Hershey, Pennsylvania. In between, the troupe played up and down the East Coast and throughout the Midwest, traveling by bus ala the Big Bands and making the rounds of all the major dance halls — including in Chicago The Aragon, Willowbrook (Oh Henry Ballroom), Melody Mill, Midway Gardens and Trianon.

Stealing the show in “A Study In Brown” was ‘hep-cat‘ bass player Frank DeNunzio, Sr., of Hershey, Pennsylvania, who played his standup/slap bass almost until his death in February, 2005. The woman playing the marimba next to the maraca player in the film is Reg’s wife, Fern Marie, who died in July 2006.

The reappearance of a grainy copy of the haunting “A Study In Brown” — which is now in the public domain — on Internet video sites has sparked a resurgence in curiosity and interest among a new legion of fans, and has rekindled the band’s notoriety. Most viewers notice the sound is not necessarily synched to the video; this is because when making Soundies the artist first recorded an acceptable copy of the audio, then various camera takes were made using different camera angles and closeups as the performers lip-synched the lyrics and acted as if they were playing the instruments. The results were edited to create the appearance of several cameras doing the filming, when in most cases only one camera was used.

Unfortunately, no other Panoram recordings made by Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens are known to exist. However, thanks to their two-minute “Soundie”, the legacy of the Marimba Queens lives on.

• From research by Phil Kosin