Friday, February 21, 2014

The "Buckeye Bullet" & Research

A good approach to research is to look for whatever it is you are interested in. If you get lots of results, that's great, and you may want to even narrow your search down, be more specific. On the other hand, sometimes you just aren't finding much, so you may want to back it up and be a little more general.

As an example, in helping someone researching a black dancer and singer of the 1930s, there just wasn't much coming up on her. So the suggestion was to be more general; this singer had been active in the Harlem music and dance scene, dancing at the Cotton Club and so on, so the suggestion was to look for books about the Cotton Club, biographies of performers she had worked with, like Cab Calloway, in the hope of finding references to her, or sources that might be helpful.

Shown here is a photo from our AP database of the opening of the Cotton Club in 1936, featuring Jesse Owens, the famous athlete also known as the "Buckeye Bullet," and his wife Ruth.

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