Ain’t these tears in these eyes tellin’ you?

Warner Brothers’ full-color 1929 musical film On With the Show featured Ethel Waters singing “Am I Blue?”, a song so pervasive that it was also in 3 other films that year. Singers that have since covered this standard include Billie Holiday, Eddie Cochran, Ray Charles, Cher, Bette Midler, and Linda Ronstadt. It’s also been in later films like To Have and Have Not, Funny Lady, and The Cotton Club. The song and the movie it debuted in join the public domain in 54 days.

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About John Mark Ockerbloom

I'm a digital library strategist at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
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1 Response to Ain’t these tears in these eyes tellin’ you?

  1. @everybodyslibraries.com As with yesterday's #PublicDomainDayCountdown feature, preservationists may feel a bit blue about the film featured today. While critics at the time praised On With the Show's use of color, today only the black and white version of the film survives, except for some recently resurfaced color fragments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_with_the_Show!_(1929_film)

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