Phil Moore Four Who Put The Whiskey in the Well

The Phil Moore Four perform "Who Put The Whiskey in the Well" in this musical short. Phil Moore started his career as a teenage Seattle jazz-piano prodigy with a live music show on KXA radio June 7, 1935. The two-studio station, based in the Bigelow Building at 4th Avenue and Pike Street in downtown Seattle, was marketed as "The Musical Station" -- "one with a little something for everyone. Before long Moore split for Los Angeles, where he fell into the Central Avenue jazz scene, crossing paths with Lionel Hampton and Jimmie Lunceford -- and was hired to write arrangements for their orchestras. In 1937 he was hired by the Million Dollar Productions firm to work on a musical film, "The Duke Is Tops" where he met singer Lena Horne and soon became her vocal coach. Then in 1938, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) hired him as a writer/arranger of film-soundtrack music, including one of the first big-budget black-oriented films, MGM's Cabin in the Sky, which featured Horne, Ethel Waters, and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.