Like Red Ribble’s photograph, this discussion provides but a snapshot of the African American world of the southern coalfields of the Mountain State. That world was populated by men and women of similar background who at the same time reveal a rather wide array of occupations and, implicitly, levels of education. What they obviously shared in common was their race, and many of them also shared an interest in social dancing. What remains to be explored in detail is the nature of their collective taste in dance music. As has been argued in earlier chapters, that taste embraced a variety of styles of dance music. The evidence that bands catered to that variety and the music that enabled them to do so is the topic of the next chapter.
CHAPTER NINE
The Dance Repertory Played in the Coal Fields
In what ways does the admittedly rough sample of the black population of the southern coalfields discussed in the previous chapter—by implication an equally rough sample of those likely to attend dances—shed light on the variety of music which the touring bands would perform? First of all, consider the age range in 1930 of the sample. The youngest of them was Lola Perkins of Price Hill. She was just 16, thus born around 1914, and was the wife of eighteen-year-old Thomas Perkins who mined coal. The oldest was the McDowell County Justice of the Peace, Samuel Crider, age 62, born around 1868.
Just as forty-six years separates the respective years of Perkins and Crider’s birth, that same time period embraces a wide range of African American musical styles. Whereas Mr. Crider came of age before the advent of ragtime at the end of the nineteenth century, young Mrs. Perkins could have regarded jazz of the late 1920s as a well-established element of the American soundscape. The shared musical culture of these two would have been the variety of vernacular styles, both sacred and secular, that constituted the indigenous black musical culture of the Mountain State.
When we consider all thirty-two individuals discussed in the last chapter whose ages in 1930 were documented by the census enumerators (unfortunately, no data could be located for two of the Kings of Amusement: C. W. Hart or Thomas L. Mitchell, both of Charleston), the following facts come to light. First, the average age of this cohort is thirty-three years and five months. Second, the vast majority were in their thirties at the time of the census; the rest were distributed as follows: six were in their twenties, five in their forties, four in their teens, two in their sixties, and one was fifty years old.
What do these data suggest about the nature of the audience for big band dance music in the decade to come? First, it must be conceded that an arbitrary sample of people from 1930, some of whom we know to have been actively cultivating an audience for this music while others constituted its potential audience, is not necessarily predictive of that audience five and ten years later. It does suggest, nevertheless, that the musical tastes of black Mountaineers were probably broad, extending outside the realm of what has come to be defined as big band jazz, something that would appear to be even more likely as they heard a increasing variety of musical styles aired on network radio.
Moreover, as noted earlier, when we look at statements by black Mountaineers that found their way into various newspapers in the 1930s—especially the Pittsburgh Courier during the course of its band popularity contests and in comments send to the radio editor of that newspaper, whose weekly column informed readers of upcoming broadcasts by black bands—the extent of the variation in preferences for dance music becomes clearer.
In October 1932, as previously noted, Talitha G. Saunders let the Courier know that “Noble Sissle and his international orchestra are to my way of thinking superior to all the rest. He is my ideal and is appreciated most because of his ultra rhythmic syncopation that is so sweet and hot” (PC 10.15.32, 2/1). Her sentiments were echoed by Gladys Mike of Wheeling who wrote to say that “I think that Noble Sissle has the only Negro band on the radio that can compare with my great favorite, Guy Lombardo. His band has tone, harmony, volume, and sweetness; in fact, everything to make an excellent orchestra. He has certainly made a hit with me” (PC 10.29.32, 1/5). Members of two fraternal organizations on the campus of West Virginia State College held a Snow Fest on December 7, 1935, for which, according to a reporter for the student newspaper, the Yellow Jacket, “Elmer Anderson and his Rhythm Kings played sweet music for the lovely dancers” (YJ 12.21.35, 3).
In contrast, a letter sent to Allan Eckstein, radio editor of the Courier, staked out territory at some distance from the domain of sweet music. A self-described “regular radio maniac” wrote that, while he was always happy to hear the bands led by “Fatha” Hines, Don Redman, Cab Calloway, and Noble Sissle, “if you want to give me an idea of Paradise kindly let me have an occasional idea of the whereabouts of the incomparable Duke Ellington, the renowned Fletcher Henderson, and the one and only McKinney’s Cotton Pickers ... these three constitute the radio world’s idea of heaven” (PC 12/20/32, 2/1).
Hardly surprising should be the fact that music associated with social events attracting a variety of people would reflect a variety of stylistic preferences. At West Virginia State College, a dramatic club known as the Mimes “danced to the familiar tunes of Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo, Chick Webb and many other popular bands” on December 16, 1938 (YJ 12.21.38, 3). One may infer that those “familiar tunes” were probably played on recordings. Previously mentioned was a radio party in Fairmont late in August 1934, hosted by Ernest Owens. As reported in the Courier, the broadcasts were of bands led respectively by Noble Sissle, Wayne King, and Claude Hopkins (PC 9.1.34, 2/6).
What are the implications for the music played for black Mountaineers by the black name bands? It seems clear that those bands must have played in a variety of styles ranging along a continuum from hot, uptempo jazz at one end to sweet, “mellow” dance music at the other. For reasons to be discussed below, it also appears probable that in the period under discussion, touring dance bands played their most diverse repertories on the road, including during engagements in West Virginia.
Consider the four types of settings in which dance bands performed in the 1930s and early 1940s: first, location jobs in northern big-city hotels and ballrooms; second, sponsored or sustaining radio programs often emanating from those hotels; third, the recording studio; and, finally, engagements played on tour. Each had its own set of expectations for the repertory performed, some most welcome by the musicians, others less so. Of the four, it seems certain that among the most inflexible were associated with hotel ballrooms and similar venues. There the constraints on repertory and style of performance reflected the time-tested musical preferences of regular patrons combined with the ambience of the establishment, which its management was committed to maintaining.
Consider the Roosevelt Grill in the Hotel Roosevelt in New York. Beginning in 1929, this venue became, and for several decades would remain, Guy Lombardo’s home base. In his autobiography, Auld Acquaintance, the bandleader claimed that the success of his Royal Canadians lay in the fact that “our listeners recognized the melody because we didn’t dress it up with fancy embellishments.... We were playing for the people who demanded the melody of their favorite songs and the beat that encouraged them to dance” (Lombardo 1975, 80). In addition, the Royal Canadians had established a reputation as a quiet band even before it went to New York, which, according to Lombardo, enabled patrons “to talk or whisper to each other as they danced.... It is difficult to offer an endearment if you have to compete with a loud orchestra” (Lombardo 1975, 40).
Such a formula proved highly successful, and the band’s popularity with the patrons of the Roosevelt led to the expectation that, when Lombardo was on tour, any band that might substitute for the Royal Canadians would adhere to the same standards. Obviously these expectations would not have been consonant with the style of a jazz band the distinctive style of which depended on the “fancy embellishments” he decried, the product of innovative arrangements and individual players’ improvisations. Also to be expected was that a jazz band would typically perform at a higher volume so that th
ose improvised solos could be heard over a noisy crowd. Benny Goodman’s band did not follow Lombardo’s lead, the patrons at the Roosevelt did not welcome it, and it was quickly let go (Erenberg 1998, 4).
When the fit between the audience’s preferences and a band is a good one, the band can expect to settle in for a long stand. One obvious example of such a good fit brought together the dancers who patronized the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem and the band led by drummer Chick Webb. The audience was young and mostly black; the music was hot; the Lindy Hop was the dance of choice. Lewis Erenberg observed: “Chick Webb, leader of the house band, gloried in his ability to work the dancers into a frenzy with ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy,’ ‘Don’t Be That Way,’ ‘In the Groove at the Grove,’ ‘Undecided,’ and others” (Erenberg 1998, 111). Simply put, by fulfilling his audience’s expectations, Webb’s band became the major force in creating the “Home for Happy Feet” that was the Savoy and would serve as its house band for five years as a consequence.
When considering the impact of radio, what must be borne in mind is that whether a broadcast originated in a venue suitably equipped for transmission (having a “radio wire,” in other words) or in a broadcast studio, a band had to accept the constraints both of time and of commercial sponsors’ expectations. A thirty-minute program probably included no more than eight arrangements, few much longer than three minutes, to allow time for commercial advertisements and announcements of each number. A fifteen-minute program would require half that number. An unsponsored sustaining program might allow somewhat greater discretion as to choice of music to perform, but as a band’s self-interest dictated presenting listeners—its potential audience during subsequent local engagements and on tours—with as much music as possible to curry interest in its sound and style, there, too, arrangements would be short and the style varied.
In the recording studio, the Artist and Repertory (A&R) men or other recording company executives determined what was to be recorded, just as they would determine if and when a number would be released, in how many copies, and in what regions of the country. Black bands were presumed to be recording for the “race,” meaning African American fans, and blues and jazz was to many in the recording business the self-evident music to record.
Well known is the determination of Andy Kirk to break out of that stylistic straitjacket when dealing with Jack Kapp of Decca Records in 1934. Kirk, whose Twelve Clouds of Joy also included crooner Pha Ter-rill, wanted to record a ballad. Kapp initially rejected the idea. “What’s the matter with you? You’ve got something good going for you. Why do you want to do what the white boys are doing?” Kapp later backed down, and when “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” was released in 1936 it was a hit with both black and white audiences (Kirk 1989, 84–86).
Only a few black bands recorded in a variety of styles along the hot-to-sweet continuum, Kirk’s being one example. One of the most frequently recorded black bands, presenting a varied repertory, touring extensively, and by all accounts with great success, was Jimmie Lunceford’s Orchestra. Its success was surely due in part to its ability to gratify a variety of musical preferences. As previously noted, Lunceford’s band came to West Virginia nineteen times between 1934 and 1942, far more than any other band in that period.
Before looking in detail at the live music played in West Virginia by touring bands beginning with Lunceford’s, it is important to consider the fourth setting in which bands performed: engagements played on the road. Here I want to review the conditions encountered in the Mountain State. First, there were few permanent venues; most dances were staged in armories and other multi-use spaces. Each dance therefore was a product of the local booker’s initiative, the diverse audience’s musical tastes, and the repertory of the band that came to play. A vision of regular patronage by people whose musical preferences were well known, as would have been the case in the venues of the big cities, did not apply here. Second, the majority of black bands were playing for a percentage of the gate, not a fixed fee, and thus were obviously interested in attracting the largest crowd possible. In those instances where bands had been guaranteed a fixed fee, the local entrepreneur had a major interest in gratifying the tastes of as many attendees as possible to ensure a large attendance and thus more revenue.
Engagements on tours held the promise of a far greater return than did the location jobs in New York where bands were contracted for fixed weekly wages often so low they were in effect working at a loss. In “The Dance Band Business: A Study in Black and White,” published in Harper’s Magazine in June 1941, Irving Kolodin drew on the testimony of an unidentified bandleader in observing that:
a struggling pianist can no more hope to make money by a Carnegie Hall recital than a bandleader can add directly to his savings by an engagement in a New York hotel. As one of them sadly remarked not long ago: “We opened at the Pennsylvania [Hotel] last fall with an $8,500 pay roll to meet. We got $2,500 a week from the hotel for the job that took most of the time.” It was the total of his earnings from radio and recording contracts that made it possible for him to play the hotel job. (Kolodin 1941, 75)
The Pennsylvania Hotel welcomed only white bands, which also had far greater access to radio networks than did black ones. That the bandleader cited by Kolodin had one or more recording contracts put him in an elite company. Most black bands were paid a flat fee per side recorded, and a low one at that. The record companies cashed in on the proceeds of sales without paying royalties.
A third consideration is reflected in the demographic survey of black West Virginians presented earlier: a wide range in age, suggesting the probability that musical preferences would be as widely varied. This was obviously very different from the Savoy Ballroom, for instance, where teenagers and those in their early twenties appeared to dominate the dance floor, making it possible for bands to concentrate on playing swinging jazz arrangements, or, for that matter, the upscale white audience for Guy Lombardo’s “Sweetest Music this Side of Heaven” at the Roosevelt Hotel.
Thanks to radio and newspaper publicity, many of the name bands that came to the Mountain State had already established reputations, thus accounting for the fact that hundreds of black West Virginians turned out for their dances, often traveling many miles to do so. What they expected to hear included the music they had already heard, but a four- to six-hour dance would have exhausted that repertory fairly quickly. What else was played and how did the bandleaders ensure maximum interest in part to hold on to those present and, perhaps, to attract latecomers?
It seems reasonable to suppose that just as a football team may plan out its first twenty plays as a way of testing the defensive ability of the opposition, so too bandleaders developed fixed set lists for the early part of an engagement to assess audience preferences. Those numbers surely represented various styles of dance music, some hot, some sweet, some somewhere in the middle, a fast Lindy Hop to get the younger audience out on the floor, a waltz for the older attendees, a ballad crooned by a band member for dancers and listeners of all ages. The measure of popularity would have been fairly obvious: the greater the number of patrons on the dance floor for a particular style of music, the greater the number of arrangements in that style as the evening wore on.
Discovering the types of music played by any particular band is not easy, nor is the evidence comprehensive to any extent. Most desirable would have been for a bandleader or sideman to go beyond general descriptions of a band’s repertory to citing titles of arrangements associated with various styles of dance music. That such testimony is largely missing from the historical record is understandable: most bands whose members attracted the attention of scholars and critics were associated with jazz, and their contributions to the jazz tradition is what was of interest. Beyond the fact that attention has been focused on the evolution of big band jazz styles, the recordings documenting the work of these bands were in most instances recordings of jazz. As a consequence, perceptions of bands’ musical endeavors not only focused on their cult
ivation of this one musical style but also reflect an unmistakable condescension by authors when dealing with evidence of a band’s performances of “commercial music,” whether recorded or not. In some instances, there is a sense that such an ensemble let down the side, so to speak, by failing to adhere exclusively to the highest standards of jazz expression.
Gunther Schuller was clearly ambivalent about the intrusion of the commercial into the domain of the artistic, that is, performances of sweet music by bands that otherwise played jazz and did a pretty good job of it. Consider observations made in connection with a discussion of the Erskine Hawkins Band in the chapter of The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930–1945 entitled “The Great Black Bands”:
But, as we have often seen on these pages, the temptations of commercial success were never far away in those days, nor are they today. The fusion then of “sweet” and “hot” styles—“commercial” and “creative”—have been replaced in recent years by another fusion: pop/rock and jazz. And then as now, many musicians under the pressure of economics in what is—we must remind ourselves—essentially an “entertainment” field, succumbed to those commercial temptations. For many 1930s-40’s bands a sweet trumpet solo or a couple of singers, or some novelty tunes were sometimes the difference between survival and demise. (Schuller 1989, 406)
Schuller’s argument that economic pressures compelled some bands to play in styles that were not artistically rewarding is true (after all, eating is a hard habit for anyone to break, even a musician). What it fails to take into account is the possibility that bands that ultimately acquired significant reputations in the history of big band jazz may have also taken pleasure in their collective ability to perform a variety of styles and genres including sweet music and pride in being able to do so in a manner that appealed to the diverse tastes of their audience. Andy Kirk made plain that the Twelve Clouds of Joy was, fundamentally, a versatile dance band. “People were dance crazy in those days. And if you played the kind of music they liked to dance to, that’s what mattered. As I’ve said, our band didn’t stress jazz, though we played it. We emphasized dance music—romantic ballads and pop tunes and waltzes—Viennese as well as standard popular waltzes like ‘Kiss Me Again’ and ‘Alice Blue Gown.’ I loved to play waltzes. We were first and last a dance orchestra because people were dancing” (Kirk 1989, 61–62).
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 18
