The University of Southern California’s Trojan Marching Band (1918- ) has made many media appearances since its formation at the end of the First World War., including two musicals. In 1969, it featured prominently in Twentieth Century-Fox’s Hello Dolly and, forty years earlier, marched in the big football game at the end of So This Is College.
Ann Brody Goldstein (1884-1944) made her theatrical debut aged nine and spent years working with Stock companies. The date of her first screen appearance is disputed, but her earliest indisputable performance was in the wonderfully-titled Cupid Puts One Over on the Shatchen, made for the Vitagraph Company in 1915. (A shatchen is a Jewish marriage broker.)
Brody was commended for her combining of comedy with pathos, which inevitably led to Yiddisher Momma roles. She notched up fifty years in the show business, but was still working on Broadway in 1940.
Ann Brody played Moe’s wife in So This Is College.
British-born Douglas Frazer Scott (1925-88) moved with his parents to Los Angeles aged three, and almost immediately began working as a child actor.
Scott’s career was over by the time he was eighteen, but it still encompassed working with Cecil B DeMille in Dynamite 1929), with Dorothy Arzner in Sarah and Son (1930), John Ford in Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and with William Wyler, as the young Hindley in Wuthering Heights (1939).
Less auspiciously, Scott appeared without credit in Marianne.
Seymour Kupper (1915-34) made an appearance as a child actor in The Jazz Singer (1927), but his career was over a couple of years later. His last film was an uncredited role in Marianne. He would appear to have suffered a tragically-early death.
Georgia Rodgers Woodruff (1906-81) was a Memphis-based pianist who was cast to be the lead soprano for the Dixie Jubilee Singers in Hallelujah. She became a close friend of Eva Jessye, who also appeared in the film. Jessye had been assigned by King Vidor to find a soprano, and was told she would find what she wanted at Memphis’s Central Baptist Church.
Woodruff had previously been working with the celebrated gospel songwriter Lucie Campbell. After making Hallelujah, she returned to playing in her church, and eventually became a teacher.
Edgar Hughes Washington (1898-1970) was a junior boxer, then a pitcher and first baseman in the Negro baseball leagues, mostly known for playing in Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri. His nickname, Blue, was apparently given him by Frank Capra when they were children.
Washington began a parallel acting career in 1919, and had accumulated nearly 90 appearances by the time of his last film, The Hustler (1961). He was usually uncredited, and this was the case when he played a member of the congregation in Hallelujah.
Arvert Potts (1923-2005) was one of the four Potts brothers who played children in films of the 1920s and 30s.
Arvert was the oldest, and made his first film aged 3, Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927). His connection with MGM musicals is an appearance in Hallelujah.
William Allen Garrison (dates unknown) played a heavy in Hallelujah. As with a number of Black performers in early Hollywood pictures, no other information seems available.
Eddie Conners (dates unknown) is listed in most sources as a singer who appeared in Hallelujah, but no further information is available.
Evelyn Pope Burwell (1904-74) graduated with a degree in music from New York University, which had been one of the first American universities to admit Black students. After graduation, she worked in the chorus line at the Cotton Club, and was pianist and tutor for the dancing Berry Brothers.
Burwell first joined the cast of Hallelujah as one of the Dixie Jubilee Singers, but was singled out by King Vidor, who nicknamed her ‘Hot Shot’.
She only made a couple of other uncredited film appearances.
