Paramount short (under 10 mins) from 1934, featuring Cab Calloway, a few musical numbers, a fan dance, and a plot involving Homefire Radio – "brings the leading radio artists into your home" – and some naughty goings-on with the wife of a train worker….
[Loosely based on Ibsen's forgotten masterpiece The Train Conductor's Wife, where bored housewife Frida, stifled by her bourgeois life, and often left alone as her husband travels round the country, develops an obsession for the music of local composer Knut Knullogard. One evening, when her husband is away on another trip, she goes to a performance of Knullograd's work and is overwhelmed by the thrust and vigour of his majestic 7th symphony. She meets Knullograd, and they embark on an ill-fated affair – with tragic consequences for all concerned.]
The wife is played by Fredi Washington:
Despite receiving critical acclaim, she was unable to find much work in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s. On the one hand, black actresses were expected to have dark skin, and were usually typecast as maids. On the other hand, directors were concerned about casting a light-skinned black actress in a romantic role with a white leading man; the film production code prohibited suggestions of miscegenation, so Hollywood directors did not offer her any romantic roles. As one modern critic explained, Fredi Washington was "too beautiful and not dark enough to play maids, but rather too light to act in all-black movies." She also tried to find work in radio, where most opportunities for black performers were as musicians in bands, or as comedic sidekicks, such as Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, in his role as Jack Benny's valet.
Washington had an important dramatic role in a 1943 radio tribute to black women, Heroines in Bronze, produced by the National Urban League. But there were few regular dramatic programs in that era with black protagonists. Washington wrote an opinion piece for the black press in which she discussed how limited the opportunities in broadcasting were for black actors, actresses, and vocalists, saying that "radio seems to keep its doors sealed" against "colored artists."
In 1945 she said:
"You see I'm a mighty proud gal and I can't for the life of me, find any valid reason why anyone should lie about their origin or anything else for that matter. Frankly, I do not ascribe to the stupid theory of white supremacy and to try to hide the fact that I am a Negro for economic or any other reasons, if I do I would be agreeing to be a Negro makes me inferior and that I have swallowed whole hog all of the propaganda dished out by our fascist-minded white citizens."
Calloway previously:
Jumpin' Jive, with the fabulous Nicholas Brothers.
St. James Infirmary, from the Fleischer Brothers' 1933 Snow White Betty Boop cartoon.
Sensations of 45, with pianist Dorothy Donegan.
Mick Hartley 
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