Pitch a Boogie Woogie
# Pitch a Boogie Woogie

Pitch a Boogie Woogie is a musical comedy featurette made by Lord-Warner Pictures in North Carolina. It was produced for Black audience theaters and its performers were a mix of local talent and cast members from two traveling vaudeville shows, Winstead Mighty Minstrels, from Fayetteville, N.C., and Irvin C. Miller's Brown Skin Models, a New York-based troupe that began in Harlem in the 1920s. According to one source, the bookkeeper for Winstead's, the Brown Skin Models had become stranded and were added to the Winstead group as they played one-week stands in tobacco towns in the Carolinas. They were familiar to the filmmaker, John W. Warner, who operated a Black-audience theater, the Plaza, in a lively section of Greenville, North Carolina known as "the Block."

John Warner, who was White, wrote and co-produced the movie with his brother Walter, who had changed his name to William Lord while living in New York. Lord is credited as director and composer of the movie's original songs. Warner also filmed commercials for Black businesses in the neighborhood for screening prior to his movies, and he filmed documentary-style footage of the neighborhood so that patrons might never know when they were going to appear on the big screen as part of a program. Warner also wrote another script in 1957 for an unproduced film about the successful integration of a Southern town's public schools. "Pitch a Boogie Woogie" was restored by the American Film Institute in 1985 and re-premiered on the campus of East Carolina University in 1986—its first ever screening before an integrated audience. Materials relating to the film are housed at East Carolina University in the John W. Warner Papers. The film played in 8 theaters in North Carolina.

Saxophonist Lou Donaldson performs on the soundtrack as part of the Rhythm Vets, who were hired to add music to the performances after Warner discovered that musical accompaniment provided by Don Dunning's orchestra and recorded during the singing and dancing performances he had filmed was not good enough to use in the movie. The Rhythm Vets, a regionally popular dance band from Greensboro, N.C., were hired to play the instrumental part of the soundtrack music.

In 1988 the UNC Center for Public Television made a documentary called Boogie in Black and White, about the film and its rediscovery, restoration, and re-premiere.

