Discordant Visions: The Peculiar Musical Images of the Soundies Jukebox Film

By Amy Herzog

In September 1940 the Mills Novelty Company premiered its Panoram movie machine in Hollywood: a jukebox cabinet containing a screen on which patrons could watch three-minute musical films, one number for every ten cents deposited.1 “Soundies,” as these films came to be known, were distributed to Panorams in bars, restaurants, transit stations, and hotels throughout the United States. One of several coin-operated image and sound devices being developed in the early 1940s, the Panorams success, while limited, far exceeded that of its competitors.2 The Soundies catalog featured a range of musical styles: big-band swing, country-and-western and “hillbilly” acts, romantic ballads, and “exotic” Hawaiian and Latin numbers. Perhaps most significantly, a large number of African American artists and jazz orchestras created Soundies at a time when the circulation of these performances on film was exceedingly rare. The distribution of film reels for the Panoram was exclusive to the Soundies Distributing Corporation of America, which released nearly two thousand Soundies during the company's seven years of operation.