In the thirties, the swing bands of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, the Dorseys, Benny Goodman et al took over from what became known retroactively as “classic jazz.” The bands were bigger, and they read arrangements from sheet music, while retaining improvised solos. The texture of the music was lush and smooth after the frenetic stomp of New Orleans jazz, with even stress on all four beats replacing the jumpier emphasis on the one and three. Swing bands featured sections of brass and reeds calling and responding en masse, and playing short repeated riffs under the solos. Gradually, singers were brought to the fore. Above all, swing was really made by the behind-the-scenes musical arrangers, which led to some interesting Black and White relationships.
Swing was the style that brought Whites closer to jazz than any other form before or since. It was the popular music of the late thirties and early forties, which is something that merits a session with the music microscope. Some credit this popularity to the growth of radio and the recording industry, which forced the record companies to modify the music to make it palatable to larger audiences. It was easy for Whites to embrace swing because it was a smoother version of the original rough stuff. That’s no different from the route any other form of folk music has taken into the popular embrace, but it’s interesting that it took place during the Depression, which was a period of increased interracial cooperation in some quarters.
Let’s look at some of the principals who schooled a nation.
Duke Ellington had one of the most remarkable careers in popular music history. It went on forever. Playing as he often did to all-White audiences in Harlem, it didn’t hurt to have a White manager, although it might have hurt that Irving Mills took forty percent of the Duke’s fees, including composition royalties. Mills did write some lyrics, though not as many as he was paid for. In fact, Duke sideman Louis Metcalf claimed that under the band’s early contract, any and all new compositions had to be sold to Mills for twenty-five dollars.[i] Adam Clayton Powell likened it to sharecropping. But Mills did get Ellington the Cotton Club gig and many more, including clubs that had never had a Black band and didn’t want one, and railroad cars to travel and sleep in so they wouldn’t have to find the one Black hotel, at most, in each town. Ellington stayed with Mills till 1939.
And then there was Benny Goodman, the King of Swing. That was hype, of course, which wouldn’t have mattered except that it relegated the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie to lower echelons of the royal court. Goodman’s main Black musical arranger was Fletcher Henderson. He could have been called the Grand Vizier of Swing, but no one called him that because his work for the clarinetist wasn’t well advertised: the general public enjoyed the music without knowing who really made it. When John Hammond first approached Goodman about teaming with Black musicians on record, he replied “John, you know I worship these guys, but if I play with Negro musicians I’ll never get another job on the radio.”[ii]
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JOHN HAMMOND
A single visionary from the recording industry “discovered,” recorded, and steered the careers of Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan. John Hammond put Benny Goodman on a Bessie Smith record, then brought Goodman together with Teddy Wilson to create the first integrated swing band. He also matched Goodman with Fletcher Henderson and Billie Holiday.[1] Hammond brought Billie to Basie’s band, which connected her to Lester Young, with whom she made her most important music.
[1] Holiday’s dad Clarence had played guitar with Fletcher Henderson,
who had also arranged for Goodman.
Hammond organized the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938-39. They opened with West African music and swept through American spirituals to swing and the blues. Performers included Count Basie, Joe Turner, James Rushing, Helen Humes, Big Bill Broonzy[2] and the Golden Gate Quartet.
[2] Broonzy, who followed the blues from his home in Clarksdale, Mississippi to Memphis and later Chicago, played guitar on hundreds of recordings, from which he made, perhaps, hundreds of dollars. He ended up in Europe, embittered over the American treatment of Black musicians and Blacks in general.
Hammond, a Vanderbilt heir who, like Stephen Foster, learned music from folks working in his family’s kitchen, forced the integration of Greenwich Village’s cafés in the thirties, bringing in Billie Holiday and Count Basie and demanding integration of the audience. He did it again at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, transforming the whole town and the whole idea of American popular music festivals. Not content just to integrate racially, he risked a taste riot by bringing Chuck Berry to the jazz crowd. And when Pete Seeger was blacklisted, he brought him to Carnegie Hall.
By the time Hammond died in 1987, he had done as much for race relations as anyone in music.
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Henderson had the best swing band of all in 1932, before Goodman really got going, but he couldn’t get the gigs in the White halls, and as his musicians got better offers in Europe, they drifted off and the band dissolved.[3] Henderson was thus apartheided out of his just acclaim. He proceeded to make good money arranging for Goodman, which made Goodman even better money. Here we recall the arranger in the background for the Ziegfeld Follies.
[3] Jazz and Black musicians in general had long been better accepted in Europe. In 1921 a German-American woman living in Austria complained:
Vienna has been flooded with them. We are hardly able to live from hand to mouth while these jazz band players strut around in fur coats and diamonds. I even saw one the other day driving an automobile…It is positively disgusting the way the kids have gone crazy over them…And worst of all I have seen women dancing with them. It makes my blood run cold. We ought to form a society here to teach the “darkies” that they have no more rights than in America. (quoted by Rayford W. Logan in The Negro Caravan, 1048.)
Some would argue that no one played better than Benny. I like Benny, though he had a tendency to substitute pyrotechnics for more thoughtful innovation. Go back and listen to Henderson’s band and decide for your own self.[iii]
The Henderson/Goodman formula took familiar tunes, added a Harlem taste, and put a White face on it. In fact, some of the arrangements were the same ones Henderson’s band had used.
Sharp businessman though he was, Goodman subordinated profit to principle and scrupulously refused to play for segregated audiences. He also pioneered integrated bands (see section on John Hammond), despite his early caution. He also ended up using a lot of Black musicians on recordings, including Charlie Christian, Cootie Williams, and Count Basie. On one session the group was all Black except for Benny.
A number of other great White big bands formed in this period, including those of Artie Shaw, Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, Harry James, Gene Krupa, Bob Crosby (Bing’s brother), Bunny Berigan, and of course the Dorseys. Tommy Dorsey’s biggest hit was his Boogie Woogie, based on Clarence “Pine Top” Smith’s 1928 piano solo hit. Dorsey’s Black arranger was Sy Oliver, from Jimmy Lunceford’s band.[iv]
Charlie Barnet came from a rich family, and he exercised his privilege to play outside the rules of the business. He was quite open about his love for Black music, and hired more Black musicians than any other White bandleader. Barnet recorded a tune called “The Wrong Idea,” lampooning “sweet” bands; on the flip side was “The Right Idea,” jazzed more to his taste. He only played where integrated bands were kosher.[v]
As the record companies turned swing into their cash cow, they encouraged the production of recorded hits, to be reproduced note-for-note in live performance. Jazz became Pop, if not pap. Even the improvisations were rehearsed: real improvisation was being drummed out of the bugle corps. The companies, and their White customers, also influenced the music in a calmer, sweeter, more respectable direction. As Duke Ellington wrote in 1939, “Once again it is proven that when the artistic point of view gains commercial standing, artistry itself bows out, leaving inspiration to die a slow death.”[vi]
Sanding and bleaching, the industry sold millions of records. Today there are people who associate swing with Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey—a bit like saying Irving Berlin invented ragtime. For those who love Miller and Dorsey, I can only say that it would sound sweeter to me if I hadn’t followed the money trail. It’s a clean sound with a dirty secret. As Schuller put it, “The public did not know that its White musical idols, bandleaders or instrumentalists, had acquired their jazz and swing conceptions from the Blacks.”[vii]
Miller in particular pursued a formula calculated to capture the White youth market. Compared to the jazz coming out of Harlem, it was simple and smooth, and was barely jazz at all. There’s nothing wrong with that, aside from the unfair advantage given to it by the industry. The unfairness continued until big bands played more like Guy Lombardo than Duke Ellington.[4] Glenn Miller still played dance music, but without the pizzazz it just wasn’t jazz. As his sax player Al Klink put it, “We were too scared to swing.”[viii] However, as with General Motors, what’s good for RCA is good for the country.
[4] Much later, the 29 year-old King of Thailand, who was a big jazz fan, came to visit the U.S. He got Duke Ellington’s autograph in Los Angeles – the high point of his visit – and then went to the White House, where he was treated by President Eisenhower to a concert;
the featured attraction was Guy Lombardo.
Lombardo followed a similar path, diluting the jazz elements gradually until my grandmother, who preferred Lawrence Welk, could recommend it to me. Lombardo was the third biggest seller of the first half of the century, after Bing Crosby and Paul Whiteman.[ix]
At this point one might make the standard case that the industry was only giving the young dancers what they wanted. Usually such a case conceals the work of the industry in determining for the audience what it wants, and then giving it to them. The result in this case, as in so many, was some kind of compromise between the previous European-derived music the kids were used to and the Black dance music that was sweeping the country.
But let’s dig a little deeper. It is often true that most White Americans prefer a milder blend. It’s partly because many of us are brought up in greater alienation from our bodies. As Donald Clarke puts it, “a lot of people still clapped on one and three, and things are not much different fifty years later.”[x] OK, that’s only alienation from two and four, but it leads to the harder stuff. The Puritan heritage has an enduring influence that is seldom recognized. Compare with Italian gesticulating, Latin American hip-friendly dancing, French cheek-kissing, African-American women’s neck-slide-point-making, etc. etc., to see who shakes their boodie. The relatively subdued sensuality (or RSS) of so many among us is partly a holdover from the self-denial of the “Protestant work ethic” used to conquer the frontier. It’s an inheritance from the Calvinists and Puritans. Its effects have radiated out through churches, barn dances, and proms for three centuries.[5] It’s another often-unacknowledged influence.
[5] Baptist-based Baylor University in Waco, Texas, founded in 1845,
first permitted dancing on campus in 1996.
Still prohibited were “vulgar gyrations.”
(San Francisco Chronicle, 1/3/96, A4.)
In any case, freedom of taste is a pretty poor excuse for eviscerating someone else’s culture for your own use. But sometimes that’s just the way the culture crumbles.
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THE INTERNATIONAL SWEETHEARTS OF RHYTHM
One of the most remarkable bands ever assembled was an all-women’s outfit that toured all over the country and in Europe in the late thirties and early forties. The Sweethearts, formed in 1937, was a band of teenaged girls living at a school for poor and orphaned children. Following the model of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, school founder Dr. Laurence Jones had been sending out groups to sing for their supper and schooling since 1921. When he heard some of the “girl groups” then making the rounds in show biz, he got his charges a music teacher and turned them into a dance band. It was the height of swingtime, and the time was ripe.
The Sweethearts rose to become a top dance band, playing the Apollo and entertaining the occupation forces in Europe in 1945. The band was International long before its travels, counting among its number Willie Mae Wong, Chinese saxophonist; Alma Cortez, Mexican clarinetist; Nina de La Cruz, Indian saxophonist; and Nova Lee McGee, Hawaiian trumpeter. The rest of the original members were Black, with White players joining down the line.[xi]
The band was a splendid example of music as a communicator across race lines. Saxophonist Roz Cron said of the Black women in the group, “What they had was a relaxed way of approaching the music. Their beat was different from our uptight white rhythm.”[xii] Living, working, and playing together, confronting discrimination with joyful jazz, they touched their audiences with a larger vision of American culture.
Mixed hues led to challenges for the group. The White women, along with the mixed race members, often had to blend themselves in with dark makeup or hide in the bus to escape the Jim Crow authorities and their never-ending defense of American apartheid. “We white girls were supposed to say “My mother was black and my father was white,” recounts Roz Cron. “I swore to the sheriff in El Paso that I was black.”[xiii]
The band was virtually ignored in the White press, as well as in a number of later books about the swing era.[7] Count Basie used to hover backstage at Sweetheart shows and grin enthusiastically, but he was in no position to overthrow the caste system.
[7] Even the White female bands got pretty short shrift,
but Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears were quite successful. Hutton wasn’t actually a musician,
but more of a show biz front woman/conductor. She had the advantage of agent Irving Mills, who was
also Duke Ellington’s agent, and Black arranger Alex Hill, who worked for Mills.
The band criss-crossed the country in their own tour bus and did a convivial tour with the Fletcher Henderson band, but were able to record only three poorly-distributed singles.[8],[9] Most of the White folks who heard them were occupying Europe; in America the Sweethearts played mainly for Black audiences. When Whites did attend, they sat in the balcony (in an ironic twist on traditional segregation) and watched the Blacks dance. Other Black touring acts made progress: when mixed audiences were first allowed, a rope was tied across the dance floor to keep them separate—a new rope trick, this time keeping both races in their places. But once the dancing began, it was only a matter of time before the rope came down.
[8] Radio broadcasts have been collected and re-released;
there is also a lively film on the band.
Both are eponymous, and they swing.
[9] James “Buster” Williams, a Black man who passed for White in Virginia, became President of a Whites-only American Legion post and concealed the fact that the old bus he talked them into buying had been the touring bus of the Sweethearts.
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The end of the swing era saw a branching of jazz players and fans into swing diehards, New Orleans revivalists, streamlined swing (“jump blues”—see below under Rock and Roll), and the more experimental beboppers and modern jazzers. Fed up with White bands takin’ home the bacon in the swing era, the Young Turks resolved to make a music “they can’t copy,” and came up with bebop, a music of greater rhythmic complexity but narrower commercial appeal.[6] Whites did eventually get the hang of it, and all the forms that followed it, and became, in many cases, respected contributors.
[6] Seattle trumpeter Leon Vaughn tells a story from the forties about White musicians coming to hear black bands and writing down the improvisations they heard – “and the next night they’re playing your licks!” When asked if Blacks went to the hotels where the White bands played to pick up a lick or two he replied, “We weren’t allowed in.” (Remarks in panel discussion, Seattle, July 1994.)
Bebop was a sophisticated music that required a kind of attention beyond that required for dancing. Solos were longer, chords more complex; drums floated atop the rhythm rather than grounding it, the cymbal keeping time and the bass keeping the pulse while the rest of the drums embroidered. The piano’s left hand no longer anchored the rhythm either, instead bopping around the beat. Dancing to such rhythmically experimental—and sometimes fast—music as modern jazz was left to experimental modern dancers.
Bop and its evolutionary children rescued improvisation and revitalized the function of jazz as community expression, but they had to compete with other forms that had arisen over the first four decades of mass music dissemination. Modern jazz secured a place in the soundscape of America and the world, but the nation would soon groove to a new and different drummer, schooled in swing and the hard knocks of rhythm and blues.
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[i] Nicholson, 80.
[ii] Hammond, 52.
[iii] Schuller 1989, 9.
[iv] Clarke, 216.
[v] Clarke, 218-20.
[vi] Downbeat, February 1939, 16.
[vii] Schuller 1989, 662.
[viii] Clarke, 221.
[ix] Clarke, 129.
[x] Clarke, 224.
[xi] Reitz, Rosetta, liner notes to International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Rosetta Records RR 1312, 1984.
[xii] “International Sweethearts…”, see Videography.
[xiii] Handy, 27.