I was delighted to learn, while doing research about Kate Smith, that she was the person who brought Josephine Baker to American Television. In 1951 it was not a foregone conclusion that the incredibly brilliant Baker — who had left America to become a sensation in Europe — would be accepted in the U.S., given the state of American racism.<\/p>\n
But Kate Smith cut through all that, inviting Baker onto her popular TV show, thereby helping to bring home one of our great American geniuses. Which sort of makes sense.<\/p>\n
I mean, consider that about twenty years earlier Smith had performed — in parallel with the great Paul Robeson — one of the great satirical songs taking down racism. Alas, we now live in an age where the satire of another era is incomprehensible to most people.<\/p>\n
These days we may be woke, but we sure aren’t fully awake. What can I say? God bless America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was delighted to learn, while doing research about Kate Smith, that she was the person who brought Josephine Baker to American Television. In 1951 it was not a foregone conclusion that the incredibly brilliant Baker — who had left America to become a sensation in Europe — would be accepted in the U.S., given … Continue reading “Kate Smith”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21026"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21026"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21030,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21026\/revisions\/21030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}