On this week’s Phantom Dancer…
There’s jazz harpsichord by Sylvia Marlow from 1941 radio, a set Duke Ellington’s women singers on live 1930s-50s radio, and a set of  1943-45 recordings by Sydney swing band leader, George Trevare, with a track by singer Lawrie Brooks, father of Pulitzer author, Geraldine Brooks.

See the full play list, program link and weekly video here.

New Music

I’m Greg Poppleton, 1920s-1930s singer. I’ve been bringing you the Phantom Dancer on 107.3 2SER Sydney every week since December 1985. It’s your non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV. And it’s now heard on 23 radio stations around Australia.

You can hear this week’s show online for the next four weeks on the website of radio station 2SER. And as always, the last hour of The Phantom Dancer is all vinyl.

LAWRIE BROOKS
The father of author, Geraldine Brooks, sings with the George Trevare Orchestra on today’s Phantom Dancer.

Quoting from a review of one his daughter’s novels in The Australian newspaper, 6 February 2008,
“Lawrie Brooks was American, ‘a big-band singer in Hollywood and Hawaii in the 1930s’ who, stranded in Australia in 1938 (when the band manager made off with the earnings), became an early star of Australian radio, and who, at the age of 54, transformed himself into a proofreader for a daily newspaper. He was a man of opinion and integrity, angry, flawed, eccentric and delightful.
An obsessive subject to drinking bouts, he was addicted also to firing off letters to notables such as Albert Einstein and Rupert Murdoch (and often receiving replies). With his mysterious past and an assumed name, he is the most vivid character in Brooks’s memoir: loveable, infuriating, certainly less than perfect, but a fellow most of us would stand in a queue for the pleasure of meeting.”

GERALDINE BROOKS (Officer of the Order of Australia)
is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author now based in the U.S.

Recognition
2006: Pulitzer Prize for ‘March’ (a chronicle of wartime service for the ‘absent father’ of the March girls in Louise May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’.)
2008: Australian Publishers Association’s Literary Fiction Book of the Year for People of the Book[12]
2009: Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award[13]
2010: Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award[14]
2016: Officer of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours

Novels
Year of Wonders (2001)
March (2005)
People of the Book (2008)
Caleb’s Crossing (2011)
The Secret Chord (2015)

Nonfiction
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. 1994.
Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over. 1997.
Boyer Lectures 2011: The Idea of Home (or “At Home in the World”). 2011.

Also on this week’s Phantom Dancer, Rosa Rio. His a short obit about her. She was still performing on the theatre organ age 107

Make sure you come back to this blog, Greg Poppleton’s Radio Lounge, every Tuesday, for the newest Phantom Dancer play list and Video of the Week!

Thank you.