Roy Smeck

Complications ensue when a singer discovers he has a double in this musical short film.

Roy Smeck (1900-1994) sits on a bench in a garden. He's wearing a bow tie, a white on white shirt, and a sweater. First he plays the guitar, which is lying across his lap - it's a steel guitar sound using a slide in his left hand. Next he picks up the ukulele for an up-tempo number. After a few choruses, he stops and adds a mouth organ, playing it while both hands continue to play the uke. He finishes with a piece on a four-string banjo. With all three instruments, he gets percussive as well as melodic effects. Roy smiles a lot but doesn't say or sing a word.

This short was released in connection with the 20th anniversary of Warner Brothers' first exhibition of the Vitaphone sound-on-film process on 6 August 1926. The film highlights Thomas A. Edison and Alexander Graham Bell's efforts that contributed to sound movies and acknowledges the work of Lee De Forest. Brief excerpts from the August 1926 exhibition follow. Clips are then shown from a number of Warner Brothers features, four from the 1920s, the remainder from 1946/47.

Profiles Roy Smeck, a former vaudeville star known as "The Wizard of the Strings" because of his virtuoso talents on the guitar, banjo, ukelele and Hawaiian guitar, and who is shown to be still active, in his mid-80s, teaching students and giving occasional public performances.