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Transcription: [00:46:03]
{SPEAKER name="Willie "Ashcan" Jones"}
Willie Ashcan Jones: So you will see that then you'll see a comedian and then they all would bring the band on and Miller did a what you call uh, a band number.
[00:46:13]

Willie Ashcan Jones: Well, everybody want to hear the band, they would do 2 number - 2, 3 number. And then after that they'd bring the chorus girls on again, at the end, at the end of it, everybody come on the stage.
[00:46:24]
That was the finale. You had to know the opening and the beginning of the show.

[00:46:35]
{SPEAKER name="Speaker 2"}
Speaker 2:Now a lot of people when they hear stories like this, they, we're talking about a form of professional entertainment. The first question is, why are you addressing this at a folk festival?

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Speaker 2:A folk festival is some place where you're supposed to talk about traditions going from generation to generation. What is this have to do with entertainment, professional commercial entertainment?

[00:46:53]
Speaker 2:The answer is this: in entertainment, in forms such as African-American minstrelsy, black vaudeville, black medicine shows, black carnival shows, you had born traditions of entertainment, traditions of comedy, forms of dancing, such as forms of tap dancing and flash dancing. Forms of music which were not born on the street, which we not born in the community, but were actually developed on the entertainment stage.

[00:47:17]
Speaker 2:These traditions were then passed down, not from father to son and mother to daughter, but rather, performer to performer. So that generation after generation after generation of performers working those shows would pass down the same traditions of comedy, of dance, of music.

[00:47:37]
Speaker 2:Now with Willie Jones who was working at this time as a Lindy-hop dancer with a combined minstrel and vaudeville show, he began to realise that as he got older, it was going to be harder and harder to for him to keep doing the sort of flash Lindy-hopping that he was doing at the time.

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Speaker 2:As he said, the Lindy-hoppers were maybe doing maybe 3 minutes each. That flash dancing took everything out of you.

[00:48:09]
Speaker 2:What he did then was turn to one of the other tradition forms in the show.

[00:48:16]
Speaker 2:Now what did you begin to do, Willie, as you realised your dancing days wouldn't last forever? --
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