Rhythm for Sale

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Description

Rhythm For Sale the Chanticleer Grand Prize Journey Award Winning 5 Star book that was voted by the IndieReader Staff as probably the most Best Self-Published books of 2015. Bookawards.com 2015 Gold Award Winner.The book is a deeply researched account of Harlem Renaissance producer Leonard Harper’s life story.

Grant Harper Reid has documented Harper’s tale with a very careful chronological arrangement of the details and facts. The book comes alive because or Reid’s entertaining and descriptive writing style. On account of the contents in Rhythm For Sale.

A Harlem, N.Y. street was named “Leonard Harper Way” in 2015.

Reid begins with Leonard Harper as a young Alabama pickaninny boy dancing in Medicine shows in the racist South. After leaving Alabama, Harper tours the country with his song and dance partner Osceola Blanks, and they wind up performing at the Empire Theater in London. As a married couple Harper and Blanks, arrive back in the States smack dab in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. Master pianist Duke Ellington moves in with them. Harper is hired to be the main in-house producer at Harlem’s fabled Connie’s Inn nightclub.

Harper opens up his downtown Times Square Dance Studio. He teaches the Marx Brothers, Ruby Keller, Adele Astaire and Busby Berkeley’s chorus-line in the fine art of (Dirty Colored), dancing with “that little extra something in the butt department.” He forms his famous chorus-line the Harperettes, who jiggle and joggle in skimpy outfits whilst setting dance floors on fire. Leonard Harper produces in at least eight nightclubs and theaters just in New York City alone. The Cotton Club, the Hollywood Inn, Al Capone’s Grand Terrace Cafe, the Lafayette Theater ant the Apollo Theater all owe their status and particular place in nightclub and theater history to Harper and his fast variety revues. He rules the nightclub and Black Musical Comedy world on The Great White Way and uptown in Harlem. Black And Blue and Ain’t Misbehavin all came from Harper’s Hot Chocolates’ and only Rhythm For Sale tells the true story in the back of the making of that all-time legendary Broadway sensational revue.

The book is full of celebrities and gangsters who come and go. Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Lena Horne, Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano are all integral players in Harpers show business world. Grandson Grant does not disappoint. These real life characters come to life. No cardboard cutout characters are in this book.

Rhythm for Sale finely peals away beyond the surface to reveal what lurks underneath the facade. Like a master chef, the writer delves deep inside the ingredients of Leonard Harper’s complicated personal life. We examine his relationships with his possessive mother, jealous brother, crippled and bitter wife, sexy girlfriends and his loving daughter.

The book ends with Harper’s 1943 downfall. When his variety revue form of Colored Musical Comedy is , deemed out of date with his audience time on earth expires. His sad downfall is inevitable as the master stager is trapped and held captive of his past success. Perhaps the racial pigeonhole that forced him into working for only small-time Harlem nightspots caused his death. 


 “Clearly Leonard Harper was just about the most important contributor to the entertainment mystique that enveloped Harlem in the 1920’s and 1930’s. He essentially invented the nightclub floorshow, Harlem style that everyone, uptown and down, then emulated. He was probably the most great dancers of his generation and one hell of a stage director and choreographer. Without him, I doubt we would have Broadway musicals as we know them today.”-Barry Singer writer of Black And Blue.

 “Harper’s abnormal accomplishments as an artist and innovator spanned the worlds of vaudeville, cabaret, burlesque and Broadway musical comedy. “-Jed Bernstein President of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. 

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IndieReader FIVE STARS
A vibrant portrait of a dynamic, multi-talented American who battled daunting ordinary, with an innate business acumen and flamboyant hope; RHYTHM FOR SALE reveals a different America and how perspectives and aspirations have altered and evolved. Leonard Harper (1899-1943) was in the thick of the Harlem Renaissance, the bright lights and the low life, the big venues and the back alleys, as performer, promoter, owner—in front of the audience and in the back of the scenes. His grandson, Grant Harper Reid, has spent years piecing together this remarkable tribute. Many famous names croup up in Harper’s story; his fans included Franklin Roosevelt, Charles Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, and Lady and Lord Mountbatten. Reid does not tiptoe within the restrictions of political correctness. But instead uses contemporaneous terms such as “coon” and “pickaninny” when appropriate. Harper’s show titles are sufficient reminder of the era: Lucky Sambo, Plantation Days, Blackbirds of 1926, and Hot Chocolates. His extravaganzas featured cameo performances from the likes of Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, and Bill Bojangles Robinson. Writing exuberantly, Reid transforms a well, researched biography into a richly tonal fable with emotive observances like this reference to Harper’s many infidelities right through his marriage to former dance partner Osceola Blanks: “Osceola’s domesticity could not compete with the young females that rhythm tapped with an abundance of bouncy seductive energy on the dance floor and in his backstage office.” Harper died suddenly of a heart attack at age 44, on a dance floor, right through a rehearsal. At his funeral, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. eulogized that, in Reid’s words, “there was little difference between church life and the show business world because both seek to serve the Lord by making man’s existence a little bit nicer.” The honorary flower bearers were a bevy of “the most angelic, striking and mouth-watering—showgirls on the planet.”

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