Tent Show: Arthur Names and His "famous" Players (West Texas A & M University) - Hardcover

Whisenhunt, Donald W

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 089096954X ISBN 13: 9780890969540

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Before movie screens filled the country and television screens filled our homes, entertainment had to travel to the people. The traveling tent show was a popular form of melodrama and variety entertainment through much of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. One of the last of these shows belonged to Art Names and His “Famous” Players, a show that played to venues in Kansas, western Oklahoma, eastern Colorado, and West Texas from about 1920 to 1945.

Tent Show captures the glamour the shows held for audiences and the hard work and financial jeopardy faced by their performers. Donald W. Whisenhunt, whose father was one of Names's partners, draws on family papers, letters, original documents, and interviews to shed light on this form of entertainment.

Anyone interested in the entertainment business—or curious about life before television and movie theaters—will find Tent Show to be an unaffected look at this fastpaced, often unglamorous business and the people who chose this way of life.

About this title

About the Author

DONALD W. WHISENHUNT is a professor of history at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He is also the author of The Depression in Texas: The Hoover Years and Poetry of the People: Poems to the President, 1929–1945.

Review

“Art Names personified American individualism in his brief career as poet, playwright, and promoter of traveling tent shows in the Midwest during the 1920s until mid-1940s. His tenacity in keeping alive a dying art form demonstrated his self reliance and fulfillment of the Bard’s admonition of being true to one’s self. And Don Whisenhunt’s revisiting his grandfather’s association with Names is but a continuation of the dream. Much can be learned here about show business development from Kenneth Waters’ extended introduction.”--Archie P. McDonald, SFASU (Archie P. McDonald, SFASU)

Edition details

• Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 089096954X
• ISBN 13: 9780890969540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 194