Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Take the family out49 for dinner – where they have Wurlitzer Music. Your friends will be there with their families. All of you, young and old, will have fun talking, laughing and listening to tunes as stimulating as your first fresh breath of spring.

  Advert for Wurlitzer jukeboxes, c.1947

  At a Wurlitzer sales convention, one of the company’s executives revealed the secret of their market-leading jukeboxes. In front of a hall packed with eager sales staff, he opened up the front of their most popular model – to reveal a scantily clad young woman inside.

  Commercial boxes operated more conventionally, using state-of-the-art mechanical and electrical engineering. Wurlitzer came late to the jukebox industry, though the company could be traced back to a mid-seventeenth-century family musical instrument business in Saxony. The family name became synonymous with the cinema organ (‘the mighty Wurlitzer’) in 1910. But the invention of the talking picture drained the cinema market dry, and so the company joined forces with a pioneering jukebox manufacturer, Homer Capehart, in 1933.

  Capehart and his competitors had followed different routes to the same destination. Seeburg made their name with coin-operated pianos, before developing the all-in-one Orchestrion, which mimicked the sound of an entire band with one pneumatically driven instrument. When Brunswick launched the all-electric phonograph for domestic use in 1926, Seeburg and Capehart investigated the possibilities of using similar technology to create record players which would hold multiple discs, and offer customers a choice of titles at the drop of a coin. After Wurlitzer bought Capehart out, they and Seeburg were joined in the race by AMI, Rock-Ola and Mills – flooding America with their machines through the mid-1930s until every conceivable outlet had been serviced.

  The jukebox industry was so successful that it seemed to have put itself out of business. But in the great tradition of consumer capitalism, Wurlitzer introduced premature obsolescence into their sales patter, constantly updating and refining their boxes. To ensure return sales, they offered to remove outdated machines free of charge. In a competitive market, bars, restaurants and clubs felt the need to modernise their equipment annually – especially once they discovered that patrons were selecting their venues for drinking and dining on the quality of their jukeboxes.

  City bars would often rent the machines for the weekend, on the assurance that the manufacturer would refresh them with the latest jazz, blues or hillbilly tunes, depending on the location. The jukebox offered a choice of music far wider and earthier than any American radio station. In time, though, as the jukebox migrated from bars of ill repute into upmarket establishments, the musical menu varied. Wurlitzer’s marketing campaigns hailed the choice of ‘sweet numbers, jazz classics50, hillbilly hits, waltzes, foxtrots [and] polkas’ on offer, and promised: ‘You’ll go home humming their haunting melodies, higher in spirit, happier at heart for having spent a pleasant musical interlude by spending only a few small coins.’

  Before the Second World War, the jukebox was a peculiarly American innovation. ‘Phonograph kiosks’ had been installed in several major British railway stations, but they were a short-lived gimmick. The jukebox was launched in Britain in 1932, but didn’t catch on. A second marketing campaign followed in 1935; again the response was nugatory. When war broke out, there were fewer than a hundred functioning boxes across the British Isles, while in America, a population four times larger was being serviced by more than 200,000 machines. Anyone in Britain who wished to seek out the best of American jazz, blues and country music had to enlist in what amounted to a secret society, and go underground.

  We demand that this habit51 of associating our music with the primitive and barbarous negro derivation shall cease forthwith, in justice to the fact that we have outgrown such comparisons.

  Melody Maker editorial, 1926

  It was a subject of some embarrassment to British lovers of jazz that the music owed its existence to African-Americans. In the 1920s, this prejudice was justified on purely aesthetic grounds, as Albert McCarthy explained: ‘The sophisticated music52 of the white New Yorkers was considered the epitome of jazz, and when the classic Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven recordings first appeared in Britain they were dismissed as crude, while blues in their purest form were virtually unknown and would have been met with incomprehension.’ Armstrong’s first appearance in Britain in 1932 was met with vile insults from the press, who described him as the ‘ugliest man53’ ever to appear on a London stage, an ‘untrained gorilla54’. The usually liberal-minded Pearson’s Magazine warned: ‘Negroes Invade Our Theatres55’. Only a minority of aficionados acknowledged that both black and white performers had contributed to jazz. Their enthusiasm persuaded the Parlophone company to issue a limited number of hot-jazz items to the British public, in its ‘New Style Rhythm Series’. Despite its early racism, Melody Maker provided a rallying point for Britain’s scattered jazz fans. It was through the newspaper’s pages that a Hot Rhythm Club (officially named Rhythm Club No. 1, in the accurate expectation of many more to follow) was established in June 1933, its first gathering held in London’s Regent Street. Jim Godbolt, who played key roles in British jazz history between the 1940s and his death in 2013, joined Rhythm Club 161 at the Station Hotel in Sidcup. There ‘the club – maximum attendance56 of nine – met and listened to records played on a portable turntable plugged into the electric light socket … Our sessions were solemn affairs. Jazz was a serious matter that called for avid listening and profound comment. We would take it in turns to give “recitals” followed by fierce and asinine debates … We were an underground movement. There was a pristine spirit of romance, the adventure of discovering new musical joys on record, and these were rare enough, as the record companies issued only one new jazz record a month.’ Across the country, these isolated assemblies gathered and swapped information (and misinformation), creating godheads of their favoured instrumentalists.

  Such obsessions were anathema to those who hankered after a more resolutely English form of entertainment. Among the most vocal proponents of this doctrine were Oswald Mosley’s blackshirt-clad British Union of Fascists. ‘The fight to build the Greater57 Britain is giving rise to a new national music’, claimed the paper Fascist Week in 1934. The entertainment they favoured included the Blackshirt Military Band, and communal singing of such anthems as ‘Come All Young England’, ‘Mosley!’ and ‘Britain Awake!’ (exclamation marks testified to the urgency of their crusade). Fascist commentators found it simple to apportion blame for Britain’s appallingly decadent modern culture: it was, said Dr Leigh Vaughan-Henry, all the fault of ‘the Negroid-Jewish strata58 which is undermining American life’. Captain Cuthbert Reavely recommended the BUF’s String Quartet to his fellow fascists, as an escape from ‘Jew-boys wailing jazz59 and gold-toothed niggers disseminating the “culture” of the jungle and the swamp’. The BBC was apparently engaged in a plot to convince the public that only Jews could play dance music: ‘The Jew and the alien60 generally ruin the music with the aid of the British subscribers – with their ten shillings a year [radio licence fee] – to hear Jew jazz bands.’ To prove that ethnically pure jazz was achievable, the fascist paper Action advertised an ‘Aryan Dance Band61’, who guaranteed to play ‘Jazz without Jews’. But the same journal also covered the latest films, and a few weeks later their reviewer blatantly evaded the party line: ‘Louis Armstrong, the famous62 coloured trumpeter, puts in a welcome appearance [in Pennies from Heaven, 1937]. We should see more of him; he acts as well as he plays.’

  Such treachery would not have been allowed among fascists in mainland Europe. In Germany, as the paper Blackshirt boasted, ‘there is no jazz63. Hitler has strenuously discountenanced it. He sees no national ascent through the crooner’s adenoids. More, he realised, being, like his fellow dictator [Mussolini, in Italy], a keen music lover, that jazz is the expression of neurasthenia, debilitating to the youth exposed to its down-grade influence.’ Hitler’s propaganda supremo, Joseph Goebbels, had ridiculed ‘America�
�s contribution64 to the music of the world’ as ‘jazzed-up Nigger music’.

  That contribution had been pervasive in Germany since the early years of the century, when the first strains of ragtime reached the Berlin cabarets. Germany’s defeat in the Great War sparked economic chaos, death to convention and censorship, and an obsession with the apparently liberated culture of America. Jazz took Berlin by storm, as it had Paris and London. But whereas Paris adopted it and London imitated it, Berlin assimilated it into the explosion of modernism and the bohemian which reached from concert halls to nightclubs. ‘The Negroes are here65’, proclaimed the poet Yvan Goll in 1926. ‘All of Europe is dancing to their banjo. It cannot help itself. Some say it is the rhythm of Sodom and Gomorrah. Why should it not be from Paradise?’

  That ambiguity was reflected in Jonny spielt auf, or Jonny Strikes Up (the Band), a 1927 jazz-inspired opera by Ernst Krenek – based on a 1920 cabaret tune about a seductive American violinist. The opera extended that theme, as the African-American Jonny brushed aside the music of classical Europe with his hypnotic, barbaric jazz rhythms. The academic Alan Lareau explained: ‘The nightmare image66 of the Black taking over Germany, seducing white women and destroying the national culture, had a special topicality and political resonance in the early 1920s, for French colonial troops from North Africa had been sent to occupy the Rhineland following the war. This occupation, seen as a rape of German soil and industry, was popularly referred to as die schwarze Schmach, “the black disgrace”.’ No wonder that the infiltration of jazz into German culture provoked reactions every bit as alarmist as anything heard in Britain or the United States. In Vienna, meanwhile, a performance of Jonny spielt auf was greeted with stink bombs and sneezing powder by ‘race-conscious Austrian students’.

  When Austrian-born Adolf Hitler assumed the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933, he resolved to preserve the nation’s culture from foreign influence. In his textbook for his obsessive pursuit of power, Mein Kampf, he had lamented Germany’s ‘collapse in its political67, cultural, ethical and moral aspect’, under artistic influences that ‘could be regarded as entirely foreign and unknown’, which had caused ‘a spiritual degeneration that had reached the point of destroying the spirit’. He was alluding to Jewish culture, not black America, but in his world view both races were equally subhuman. Jazz was not only American, but it came from an inferior race, and was transformed into songs which emanated from another (via the supposed Jewish domination of Tin Pan Alley). The genre was denounced alongside other pernicious examples of modernist culture in the fields of art, classical music, literature and architecture. The Nazis staged an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ in 1937, and another of ‘Degenerate Music’ the following year – the catalogue for which displayed the image of Jonny, from Ernst Krenek’s opera. Hitler’s regime had already banned broadcasts of jazz music in 1935, widened the restrictions to include all recordings by Jewish or black musicians in 1937, and even abolished the trade of musical criticism. With compositions by Jews also prohibited by 1938, the German public was denied access to the work of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, either on record or on film.fn3

  Despite those strictures, jazz musicians and dance bands continued to play and perform in Nazi Germany as long as they did not openly challenge the new laws. Certain musical motifs were overtly ‘jazz-like’, and therefore forbidden – the drum solo, for example, or anything that provoked an outburst of jitterbugging. But there remained a wide audience for American jazz tunes, often with their titles translated into German to suggest that they were authentic products of the Third Reich. Some jazz clubs in Berlin were also allowed to operate openly, with the aim of encouraging foreign visitors to believe that Nazi Germany was not a repressive society.

  As the European situation deteriorated, British bands continued to accept lucrative invitations to tour Germany. Jack Hylton’s outfit had paid regular visits to Europe during the 1930s; Hylton was even awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1932 for services to French music. In 1937 and 1938, the band broke box-office records in Berlin. ‘These days nearly everyone68 here is doing the Lambeth Walk’, a German reporter noted of a song and dance that Hylton had helped to popularise. Another British bandleader, Jack Jackson, was offered the phenomenal salary of £1,500 per week in 1938 if he would relocate to Berlin, take control of Germany’s output of light music, and record anthems for the Hitler Youth movement. ‘I was offered a guarantee69 of diplomatic immunity for myself and the band’, he told a British magazine. ‘Although the band then included two “star” instrumentalists who are Jews, this was not to be a stumbling block.’ Fortunately, the future BBC disc jockey declined the invitation.

  Concerned about the plight of Jewish refugees from Nazism, many branches of the British entertainment industry offered a day’s profits from their work in January 1939 to a charitable fund. Two weeks later, Henry Hall – who had recently left his post as the BBC’s official bandleader – led his orchestra on a four-week visit to Berlin. ‘They will play at a State Ball70 attended by high German state officials,’ the magazine Radio Pictorial said proudly, ‘and provided they’re not called upon to give the salute in the middle of a number, everything should go with a swing. Luckily for the project, there are no Jewish members in the outfit.’ To ensure that there would be no embarrassment, Hall dropped all songs by Jewish composers from his band’s repertoire for the duration of the visit. ‘Naturally, I don’t want71 to spoil good relations by behaving in a way that would offend in Berlin’, he said. ‘What I am doing is merely a matter of common sense.’ ‘I don’t blame him for that72, as some papers have’, a friendly magazine journalist wrote. ‘He’s got to earn his living like the rest of us.’ Their engagement at the Scala was a sell-out, and Hall’s band received a rapturous reception. Anti-fascist campaigners were outraged by Hall’s behaviour, while Melody Maker said merely that ‘nobody could possibly challenge73 his patriotism’. Less than three weeks after Hall’s band returned to Britain, the German Army invaded Czechoslovakia, and British musicians no longer had to battle with their consciences about the ethics of performing under a fascist dictatorship.

  * * *

  fn1 Bandleader Woody Herman, whose outfit could really swing, took pleasure in satirising Miller’s success with a song about playing records backwards, ‘Ooch Ooch A Goon Attach’.

  fn2 As a snapshot of the chasm between British and American tastes, Gramophone magazine reviewed competing interpretations of a new song in 1932. US torch singer Ruth Etting performed ‘with all the American’s lack38 of reticence’. How much more delightful was ‘the clear, soulless voice’ of the British contender, Anona Winn (actually Australian). This was probably the last occasion on which ‘soulless’ was applied to a performance as a compliment.

  fn3 Other totalitarian regimes were not as strict. In 1933, Alexander Tsfasman was forced to bring his band before the Moscow Workers Theatre Club to decide whether his Soviet equivalent to Paul Whiteman’s arrangements was suitable for working-class ears. His orchestra passed their political audition with such ease that they were required to play an encore. As a contrast: dance bands in post-Second World War Hungary were instructed to perform a smattering of American material during each performance, so that Communist Party officials could note the names of those rebels who didn’t immediately leave the dance floor when these dangerously decadent pieces began.

  1, 2

  ON 17 SEPTEMBER 1939, the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland, and 519 of her crew were lost. Adrift in the sea, the survivors sang music-hall tunes such as ‘Daisy, Daisy’ to keep their spirits up.

  Britain’s shared heritage of popular music was vital to wartime morale. In Frank Launder and Sydney Gilliat’s patriotic 1943 film Millions Like Us, Celia (played by Patricia Roe) is working in an aircraft factory. When her husband is killed, Celia forces herself to attend a concert in the factory canteen. Music-hall star Bertha Willmott sings ‘Just Like the Ivy (I’ll Cling to
You)’ from 1903 and then the equally venerable Vesta Victoria vehicle, ‘Waiting at the Church’. Watching her today, you’d expect Celia to find this sentimentality unbearable; but instead she is unable to resist the communal celebration of national identity. As the film ends, she is caught up in the singalong of ‘My Wife Won’t Let Me’ – just another of the ‘millions like us’, determined to see it through and win the war.

  After Britain declared war on Germany, on 3 September 1939, the public seemed far more resolute than its national mouthpiece, the British Broadcasting Corporation. Gramophone editor Compton Mackenzie reviewed the first fortnight of schedule changes, with popular programmes cancelled and the BBC’s airtime drastically reduced, and lamented ‘the most pitiful exhibition3 of complacent amateurishness to be heard in the whole of this planet during the first weeks of war’. With most popular music exiled from the airwaves for the winter of the so-called ‘Phoney War’ (1939–40), how could morale be sustained?

  The entertainment industry rallied to the flag. As the nation’s favourite singer, Gracie Fields’s contribution was vital. Although she was still convalescing after surgery for cervical cancer, she kept up a fierce schedule of patriotic duties, from radio concerts to a live recording of Gracie with the Troops. (Her audience of soldiers recorded their own sing-song of First World War favourites, entitled Flanders Memories.) On Christmas Day 1939, Fields performed at a secret location ‘somewhere in France’ as part of another live broadcast. But three months later, she married an Italian-born film director, Monty Banks (né Mario Bianchi). When she realised that he was liable to be interned by the British government as an alien, Fields took her husband to Canada and then California, provoking criticism that she was abandoning her homeland at its hour of need. As if to fill the gap, the much-loved balladeer of the pre-jazz era, John McCormack, emerged from retirement to raise funds for the Red Cross.