Harlem on the Prairie

Harlem on the Prairie 1937 is a race movie, billed as the first allcolored western musical. The movie reminded audiences that there were black cowboys and corrected a popular Hollywood image of an allwhite Old West.

The story concerns events in the life of Doc Clayburn, who returns with his medicine show and young daughter, Carolina, to the country whereyears before he had been a rider with a gang of outlaws and assisted in a gold robbery. The gold was hidden when all but Doc were killed in a fight with a posse, and never recovered. When Doc is on his way to recover the gold and wipe out the memory of those early days and his straying from the straight and narrow, his caravan, which had been trailed by a rival gang, is attacked and he is mortally wounded. Just before he dies, Doc gives a map of the gold cache to Jeff Kincaid, a younger rider whom he entrusts with the plan of finding the gold and restoring it to its rightful owners. In doing this, Jeff encounters the heavies, and Mistletoe and Crawfish supply the comedy relief.The film combines all the typical elements of a good oldfashioned western. Melodrama, comedy, romance, action, and suspense are woven together as the characters strive to complete the old mans last wish and search for the gold. Somewhere within all of the riding, shooting and fighting bad guys Kincaid and his pistoltoting backup group, The Four Tones, manage to sing both the title song, Harlem on the Prairie, and the once popular hit Romance in the Rain. The films hero, Herbert Jeffrey, who at the time was a popular singer with Earl Fatha Hines Band, initially conceived of making an allblack cowboy picture. He intended to distribute the film to the hundreds of movie houses across the South that catered exclusively to black audiences, as the strict racial segregation in effect in the South at the time forbade blacks and whites from being in the same theater at the same time. However, with the help of Gene Autry, another wellknown screen cowboy, Jeffrey made a deal with Dallasbased Sack Amusements for national distribution. ........

Source: Wikipedia