Recently, a Youtube video of 100-year-old Alice Barker went viral, becoming not only a much-shared feel-good item, but also a peek into a rich slice of American history. Barker, a dancer at such iconic clubs as The Cotton Club, the Apollo, and Zanzibar in the 1930s and ‘40s, now lives in a nursing home. Some workers there, after a few years of digging, discovered rare old movie footage of her in action, and it’s glorious. Miss Barker had never seen any of the footage, and her own memorabilia of that time in her life was slowly lost over the years. Her filmed reaction to the footage is both moving and funny. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing,” she quips, quoting the jazz classic of the same name while watching herself shake a tail feather.
A full examination of the time and milieu in which Miss Barker was working can be found in the 2006 documentary Been Rich All My Life directed by Heather MacDonald. Though the film itself is merely competent in terms craftsmanship, the information it contains reveals a lot about American mores all those decades back. MacDonald turns her camera on still-amazing senior citizens who were once glamorous dancers at old New York nightlife hotspots. The memories they share are fleshed out by stock footage, newsreels, film clips, and still photos.
It’s mesmerizing stuff, especially as the dancers fill in the ways that shady business practices girded the monetized racial codes of the day – no dark-skinned black women were hired to dance at the “black” clubs where whites came to slum; the white Rockettes wouldn’t allow a black dancer in their iconic troupe (no matter how fair-skinned), while Rockettes choreography was nowhere near as demanding as what was expected of their black counterparts.
What makes the film relevant to today isn’t just the historical blanks it fills in, but the way it illustrates the resilience of fucked cultural biases; the color-line enforced back in the jazz-filled day is still in effect in so many ways right now.
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New YorkTimes, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
