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Transcription: [00:13:26]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 1"}
Was in a number of feature films, many of which you're probably familiar with. But that's not what we're here to talk about.

[00:13:32]
What we're going to be speaking about today more specifically is traditions of entertainment.

[00:13:39]
Now, when you come to a folk festival, a festival of folk lives such as this, you expect to hear about folk culture, you expect to hear about the old times.

[00:13:48]
But you don't expect to hear that much about "commercial entertainment", Tent shows, Vaudeville theater.

[00:13:55]
Yet we have to realize that, especially in the Black community, the traditions of music, of dance, of comedy that we see on the stage were often traditions that were born in the folk community,

[00:14:11]
brought onto the stage, and developed there into new forms that became traditions themselves, except traditions of the stage.

[00:14:19]
Traditions that were passed down from older generation of performer to younger generation of performer, not mother to father, excuse me, not mother to son,

[00:14:29]
or mother to daughter, or father to son, or father to daughter. But rather older comic to younger comic, older dancer to younger dancer.

[00:14:37]
With us here is Willie Jones. Willie started off on the entertainment circuit as a dancer when he was quite a young man and then traveled literally the entire circuit.

[00:14:51]
Willie, could we start by talking about how you started as a dancer-- where you were, how you first got on showbiz, and then the different stages of show business that you've worked with?

[00:15:02]
{SPEAKER name="Willie"}
Well I started show business, I was, I went to see a carnival.

[00:15:07]
And I saw the carnival, I liked what the people was doing, and I, I was on the farm, I can tell you, I was down in Georgia. And we was on a farm.

[00:15:18]
And I saw those people dancing and carrying on, so I asked them, could I go to the store for them?

[00:15:23]
So I went to the store for them, they let me go the the store for them, and when they got ready to leave, they let me go with them.