The Swing Book

by Degen Pener

  Goodman’s break came when he was hired in 1934 to be one of three house bands on the NBC Saturday-night radio show Let’s Dance. The steady paycheck allowed him to purchase scores of hot arrangements by Fletcher Henderson; the show exposed him to a nationwide audience. While the radio program was heard late at night on the East Coast, listeners in California heard Goodman’s band swinging like crazy during peak evening hours. But Goodman himself wasn’t aware of this and, in fact, didn’t see his fortunes improving much. Let’s Dance was canceled after just one season. Goodman then set out on a national tour that was at first nowhere near a smash. At a gig in Michigan, only thirty people showed up. In Denver the manager of the local ballroom threatened to cancel their contract after the first night.

  Benny Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa get their licks in.

  (CORBIS-BETTMANN)

  When the Benny Goodman Orchestra arrived in California, however, it was a different story. On August 21, 1935, Goodman and his exemplary sidemen, including drummer Gene Krupa and trumpeter Bunny Berrigan, wrote the book on overnight success. Opening at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, the band started by playing its safer, sweet material. When that failed to excite the crowd, Goodman decided, as he later wrote in his autobiography, The Kingdom of Swing, “The hell with it, if we’re going to sink we may as well go down swinging.” The band pulled out its most charged Harlem-style arrangements and let themselves go, improvising and blowing with a passion. The dancers, many of whom had been turned on to hotter swing music by listening to the Let’s Dance show, went wild beyond expectation. (Californians would later be the ones responsible for reviving swing too—see the next chapter.) The next day, the engagement at the Palomar was the talk of the music world. The entertainment paper Variety soon began a column titled “Swing Stuff.” And Goodman started calling his orchestra a swing band. At the tender age of twenty-six, Goodman could rightfully lay claim to the title the King of Swing.

  THE GLORY DAYS

  Goodman’s triumph in California was the catalyst for a revolution in music and dance in America. During the late thirties, hundreds of new swing bands formed all across the country. In response to the demand, at least five of Goodman’s own sidemen—Krupa, Berrigan, Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Harry James—were able to go out and start their own orchestras. Established bands such as those led by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Jimmie Lunceford, and Charlie Barnet rode the groundswell of enthusiasm, while Bing’s brother Bob Crosby; Woody Herman, with his hit song “Woodchopper’s Ball”; and Artie Shaw, with “Begin the Beguine,” became household names. Swing fans eagerly awaited each issue of Downbeat and Metronome magazines to see how their favorite band rated in the latest readers poll, or which star soloist had been snatched up by another band. As pianist Ralph Burns put it, “If you were a jazz musician playing with Woody Herman, you were almost like a movie star.” Ellington, as quoted in David W. Stowe’s Swing Changes, noticed a huge increase in attention from fans. “Audiences, today, invariably crowd around the bandstand, eager to grasp every solo note and orchestral trick.” Enormous new ballrooms were constructed across the country—breathtaking dance palaces like the Hollywood Palladium that could hold thousands of couples. The bandleaders even had the gumption to start a practice known as swinging the classics. Tommy Dorsey jazzed up Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India,” while Maxine Sullivan had a hit with a tweaked version of the Scottish folk tune “Loch Lomond.” Opponents argued that Ravel, Strauss, Mozart, and Debussy were rolling in their graves from receiving similar treatment.

  Swing was boffo business. According to Stowe, the recording industry, which had grossed just $2.5 million in 1932, was hauling in $36 million by 1939. Bands fought for lucrative hotel contracts, a slice of the exploding jukebox market, the attention of bookers who controlled national tours, and commercially sponsored radio programs. The relatively new radio business, in fact, was one of the most important factors in promoting swing. Fans would listen to live recordings from such famous ballrooms as the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York and the Meadowbrook Club in New Jersey. Even Hollywood fell hard for swing, producing scores of movies featuring bandleaders (see “Swing on Film” in the appendix for a list of great swing flicks). How popular was swing? One Saturday in March 1937, the Goodman orchestra played at 8:30 A.M. before the showing of a movie at the Paramount Theater in New York. According to awestruck accounts, hundreds of kids showed up before sunrise to wait in line. Three thousand swingers in all turned out, many of them jumping out of their seats and dancing in the aisles during the performance. Suddenly jazz was being played everywhere, from the big city to the small town, all under the guise of a new name, swing. As blues popularizer W. C. Handy, writer of “St. Louis Blues,” once said: “Swing is the latest term for ragtime, jazz, and blues. You white folks just have a new word for our old-fashioned hot music.”

  More than just popular music, swing became an entire lifestyle. Indeed, it was considered the first real youth culture in American entertainment, the beginning of a series of musical uprisings that would continue from rock in the fifties through grunge in the nineties. “It was like when the Beatles came along. The kids were listening to what they considered their music and theirs alone,” says trumpeter Tommy Smith, who played with bandleader Ray Anthony. Swing had its own slang, popularized by Calloway in his Hepster’s Dictionary, and its own styles of dress—just think of the bobby-soxers and zoot-suiters. (For more on swing’s fashion and lingo, see chapter 6.) What really propelled swing, however, was jitterbugging, the new name that the Lindy Hop acquired as it was embraced by an increasing number of white dancers. Back in the thirties, the jitterbug could scare the establishment just as much as Elvis’s pelvis did two decades later. Newspaper accounts used words such as frenzy, pandemonium, and ecstasy to describe the phenomenon. And one psychologist ominously warned of the “dangerously hypnotic influence of swing, cunningly devised to a tempo faster than seventy-two bars to the minute—faster than the human pulse.” In 1938 the swing era even had its own Woodstock, a swing jamboree in Chicago featuring Jimmy Dorsey and Earl Hines that drew 100,000 fans. It was described by the Chicago Daily Times as “the most hysterical orgy of joyous emotions by multitudes ever witnessed on the American continent.” But let the observers make their pronouncements. For the dancers themselves, there was an unparalleled connection being made between themselves and their fave bands. “Really, as a musician you did it as much for the dancing as you did for the music,” said Count Basie singer Joe Williams in Norma Miller’s Swingin’ at the Savoy. “All of that was together at one time, it was one great communication …; the dancers inspired the musicians and vice versa.”

  Swing also began to be taken much more seriously as an art form. In the twenties Paul Whiteman, the leader of one of the most popular dance bands, attempted to put jazz on the same level as European classical music, labeling his endeavor “symphonic jazz.” Yet even in the thirties, jazz still was considered a more lowly form of music. “In those days people thought if you were playing jazz, you were stepping down,” Artie Shaw told writer Fred Hall in Dialogues in Swing. But the pioneers of swing demanded to be accepted on their own terms. And the pinnacle of this push occurred on January 16, 1938, when Goodman’s orchestra made a landmark appearance at Carnegie Hall. On that historic night, tension was high. The band members were a bit overawed by the grand symphony space and got off to a tepid start. But soon they began to play in the same way they would let loose in the most informal dance hall. Drummer Gene Krupa beat the drums like a dervish, his hair flying, sweat dripping. Members of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras made guest appearances. And Goodman’s integrated quartet played the most well-received numbers of the night, with Lionel Hampton’s rhythmic masterpieces on the vibraphones thrilling the crowd. By the time the band went into its closing number, “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the crowd was crying out and applauding in a state of near delirium. It was an epochal success. “Carnegie Hall was always known as the holy of the holiest,
” recalls Hampton. “No jazz had ever come near there.”

  That concert was only the first half of what was easily the most magical night ever witnessed in swing. As soon as the Carnegie Hall show ended, members of the Goodman band raced uptown to Harlem to catch another singular event. Count Basie, the newcomer from Kansas City, was taking on Chick Webb, the king of the Savoy, in a battle of the bands. Basie’s sound represented a new approach to swing. Injecting the blues of the Southwest into the big band format and perfecting a propulsive four-beats-to-the-bar rhythm that moved the music along like never before, Basie’s band was a direct challenge to the sounds of Harlem. Compared with the complex arrangements of bands like Webb’s, Basie’s songs were stripped to their essential elements, touching the simple beating heart as much as the head. The crowd—which included Ellington; vibraphonist Red Norvo and his wife, singer Mildred Bailey; and Goodman—was relishing the face-off. If that wasn’t enough, Ella Fitzgerald, Webb’s singer, and Billie Holiday, Basie’s vocalist, also squared off against each other that night. According to electrified accounts of the evening, the bands blew so hard at each other, it seemed as if the walls of the Savoy were about to fall down. While battles of the bands weren’t actually judged competitions, the audience would often clearly clap more for one orchestra than another. But the crowd’s reactions to Webb and Basie were so close that the debate over who had triumphed lasted long after the night was over.

  Despite these scenes of black and white musicians playing and socializing together at the Savoy and Carnegie Hall, there were still serious inequities that even the most famous African-American bandleaders suffered because of their color. White bands enjoyed a number of advantages, getting lucrative hotel bookings and radio shows that few black bands could nail down. If a white group and a black group recorded the same song, as with Goodman’s and Basie’s versions of “One O’Clock Jump,” the white band’s version stood a much greater chance of being a hit. And without long-term hotel contracts, black bands were forced to take endless tours made up mostly of one-night gigs. Traveling, especially in the South, was often a series of painful humiliations and difficulties. Black musicians couldn’t stay at most hotels, even the ones at which they were performing. In some cities they sometimes couldn’t even find a restaurant that would serve them. Cab Calloway was beaten in Kansas City when he tried to enter the Pla-Mor Ballroom, where his friend Lionel Hampton was playing. In another unconscionable incident, a theater manager in Detroit forced Billie Holiday to wear greasepaint onstage during an appearance of the Count Basie Orchestra. His reasoning? He worried that the light-skinned Holiday might look white under the stage lighting and that the audience would be offended. As Holiday once said about the racism she encountered as an entertainer, “You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.”

  In other ways, however, the swing movement was a model of pluralism and racial equality. Many bands, arguing that they wanted to play the best music possible, fought for integration. In addition to Goodman’s quartet, other breakthroughs included white bandleader Artie Shaw’s hiring of Billie Holiday, and black trumpeter Roy Eldridge’s addition to Gene Krupa’s orchestra. A number of black bands, including those of Lucky Millinder and Earl Hines, began to include white members as well. “The arts led the way in breaking down the discrimination against our people,” says Norma Miller. “It was the arts that opened the door for black people to go through.” The sentiment expressed at the time was that song (and also dance at places like the Savoy) was a common meeting ground. “Audiences don’t draw color lines when they’re listening to music,” said Goodman pianist Teddy Wilson. (Women, on the other hand, were pointedly not given equal status in the swing world. While most bands had female singers, few orchestras, white or black, would consider hiring anything but male instrumentalists.)

  Was it this newfound harmony that fueled the success of swing? The late thirties, a moment when cross-fertilization between black and white musicians was at its greatest peak, is often considered the high point of the swing era. Duke Ellington was then moving into a period of enormously inspired activity. Spurred by the arrival of composer Billy Strayhorn, bassist Jimmy Blanton, and saxophonist Ben Webster to the band, Ellington began creating such classics as “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Cotton Tail.” The integrated nightclub Café Society opened in 1938 in Greenwich Village. The boogie-woogie piano style of Kansas City caught on as a national craze. From Basie to Goodman, from Lunceford to Barnet, swing brought together blacks and whites as never before. It was a golden age in American music. As James Lincoln Collier wrote in his biography, Benny Goodman and the Swing Era, “Swing was better—more sophisticated, more genuinely musical—than virtually any popular music before or since.” No wonder that today, when pop music is dumbed down to such desultory levels, the swing era is drawing us back.

  THE RISE AND FALL OF SWING

  During World War II, swing became even more popular than ever, but did it still really swing? That’s the question that arises with the arrival of Glenn Miller in jazz. Miller was the most famous bandleader of the early forties. On a mainstream level, his songs, including “In the Mood” and “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” are still the most well-remembered tunes of the swing era. But Miller’s rise to prominence signaled a new development in swing. His music, more catchy than ambitious, got further and further away from its roots in jazz and its ties to African-Americans. While swing’s lyrics had previously reflected the urban experience, Miller’s subject matter tended more toward nostalgic images of small-town America. The “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” didn’t stop in Harlem.

  As Americans fought the war, however, Miller’s music took on a deep meaning for both civilians and soldiers. In 1942 Miller gave up his money-making orchestra, enlisted in the army, and started his own military band. A model patriot, he boosted morale playing for the troops throughout Europe. Swing, in general, began to be seen as a representation of the values that America was defending. As President Franklin Roosevelt said at the time, music could “inspire a fervor for the spiritual values in our way of life and … strengthen democracy.” Betty Grable and Rita Hay-worth (both of whom married bandleaders, Harry James and Artie Shaw, respectively) and swing singer Lena Horne became the most popular pinups. The Andrews Sisters had a hit with “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” After the Nazis labeled jazz “nigger-jew” music, swing (as later depicted in the movie Swing Kids) became an anti-Fascist symbol. During the war, as American soldiers moved into Europe, they turned Europeans on to the music as never before. However, the war years also added a new conservatism to swing. The boys overseas generally wanted to hear the songs that they already knew from home, not new tunes. When Miller died in an airplane crash in 1944, he was justly hailed as a hero. But many saw his music as the harbinger of things to come. “I think that band was like the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music,” said Artie Shaw in Dialogues in Swing.

  Soon after the end of the war, and seemingly out of nowhere, the swing business started to collapse. By late 1946 Woody Herman, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Carter, and Les Brown had all disbanded their orchestras. Soon after, Cab Calloway, Charlie Barnet, and Artie Shaw called it quits too. The Basie band held on until 1950. But an era had clearly passed. Trumpeter Johnny Coppola recalls playing a late-forties date with bandleader Stan Kenton in Oakland. “The crowds weren’t there,” he says. “Kenton was in shock. He looked around and said, ‘Where is everybody?’ They were home watching TV.”

  Actually, television was just one of many reasons that the big bands fell by the wayside. A 30 percent cabaret tax instituted in 1944 raised the price of going out. GIs returning from the war, once the young fans of swing, were older and looking to start families. The war effort had also put a major strain on the bands. They were hampered from touring by the rationing of gasoline and rubber, while losing huge numbers of musicians to c
onscription. “The war took all the men out of there,” says Norma Miller. The manufacture of jukeboxes was temporarily stopped, and the production of records was cut 30 percent. Meanwhile, a standoff between the American Federation of Musicians union and the music industry, which created a ban on recordings by orchestras, crippled swing as well. Begun in late 1942, the union strike lasted more than a year. While some big bands held on after the war, their cultural dominance had ended.

  Despite the effect of all these social changes, however, music was simply evolving on its own, the way it always does, decade after decade. In jazz, in the forties, a New Orleans Dixieland revival took off. This interest in earlier jazz was itself a roots revival, reflecting a feeling that swing had become empty and inauthentic. At the same time, bop, many of whose proponents had been swing band players (the foremost being Dizzy Gillespie), ushered in an exciting new sound that, unfortunately, with its emphasis on dissonance and its relative lack of melody, wasn’t danceable. “When I came out of the army we got a gig working with Dizzy Gillespie’s band and afterward I said, ‘Dizzy what is this stuff? What the f — is that?’ I did not understand that music at all. So this is one thing that killed swing,” recalls Frankie Manning.

  Just as jazz and dance split apart, so did jazz and popular music. Vocalists, not orchestras, began to dominate the charts. Previously, during the height of the big band era, singers had been no more important than musicians. Often they felt like mere accessories. “The bandleader never wanted to be outshone by anybody. So most of the male vocalists had to stand there, ramrod stiff, sing a chorus, go sit down, get up, sing the last chorus, and sit down again,” recalls Frankie Laine, one of the biggest new solo singers of the late forties and early fifties. Peggy Lee, Patti Page, Nat King Cole, and others benefited from the change, but the one man to kick it all off was Frank Sinatra. After quitting Tommy Dorsey’s band and creating a sensation at New York’s Paramount Theater in the early forties, Sinatra made the momentous decision to strike out on his own. “One could see the writing on the wall: the focus now was going to be on an individual instead of on 16 men,” said jazz singer Mel Tormé in Dialogues in Swing. In a huge reversal, the band was now mere backup to the singer. While many of these singers still performed music that swung, they were more likely to be doing it at a lounge than in a dance hall. Jazz still enjoyed periods of popular upswing—among the most famous were Ellington’s 1956 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival and Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook recordings. A handful of reconstituted bands, such as those of Count Basie and Les Brown, enjoyed success too. But according to David W. Stowe’s Swing Changes, “None of these ensembles … sought to connect with the dancers swing had reached.”