by Ben Yagoda
The “sweet” technique, hardly connected with true jazz save by its employment of saxophones and banjoes, consists primarily of hiring expert arrangers. These gentlemen proceed to take a given song, and do what they can to relieve the monotony of its fox-trot rhythm, and its usual lack of inspiration, by assigning successive choruses to different voices, writing in connecting passages between repetitions, changing keys, and so on. The result is refined, but still dull.
“Hot jazz” had emerged from New Orleans, Memphis, and other points in the South, and was mainly (but not exclusively) played by African-Americans. It was in origin a small-group form, but eventually black big bands emerged, including those led by Fletcher Henderson, Bennie Moten, and Duke Ellington, playing innovative up-tempo jazz. Of course, their music wasn’t heard on network radio and their records didn’t get wide distribution. In time, some white big bands adopted some of their styles, notably the Casa Loma Orchestra, which created a sensation in the early thirties by alternating up-tempo numbers with cleverly arranged ballads. In 1933, Fortune magazine observed, “The best white ensembles usually compromise by playing both sweet and hot music. This is true of Ben Pollack’s excellent swing band of Chicago (with Trombonist [Jack] Teagarden and other crack soloists).”
A clarinet player named Benny Goodman, also from Chicago, broke through on a national level in 1935, playing hot jazz with a large ensemble. He very explicitly scorned the sweet bands, later calling their music “a weak sister incapable of holding its own in any artistic encounter with the real music of America.” The style needed a name, and the one that emerged was a term that had for decades been part of the lexicon of African-American musicians, as noun, adjective, and verb, to describe rhythmic qualities of jazz, or sometimes jazz itself. The bandleader and pianist Duke Ellington used it in the title of a 1932 song: “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” No matter that Goodman stood on the shoulders of Ellington’s and other black bands—and employed numerous Henderson arrangements. The press now determined he was “the King of Swing.”
Many other swing bands, both white and black, followed Goodman, almost always taking the name of their leader: Harry James, Count Basie, the Dorsey brothers (together and separately), Artie Shaw, Charlie Barnet, Andy Kirk, and so on. They featured virtuoso soloists who sometimes became stars themselves, and in general focused on musicianship, arrangements, and rhythm rather than the song. They were able to take that approach in part because of the economic woes of record and music publishing companies, which previously had wielded a strong influence on singers’ and musicians’ choices of material. “The stranglehold music publishers had on the performance of popular songs was broken,” recalled John Hammond, a young Yale graduate who actually arranged the introduction of Goodman and Henderson, and who would become an influential record producer. With the publishers thus weakened, Hammond observed, musicians could “take liberties with the melody.”
Sweet bands did not go away, and in fact flourished. The long-forgotten Shep Fields had a number-one hit in 1936 (just as Goodman was breaking through) with “Did I Remember” and charted a total of thirty-eight times through 1943. The better sweet bands were given at least a modicum of respect by the jazz magazine Metronome, which conducted annual polls of best swing band, sweet band, and “favorite of all,” but generally the more popular they got, the more jazz snobs loved to disparage them. “Hot musicians look down on sweet bands, which faithfully follow the composer’s arrangements,” Vanity Fair explained in 1935. (A favorite quip of swing fans: “What does Guy Lombardo’s drummer tell people he does for a living?”) The song was paramount for sweet bands—bandleaders commonly served as vocalist—and songwriters and publishers could claim success to the extent they could place tunes with one or more of these outfits. The most important chronicler of the big-band era, George Simon, provides a taxonomy of the sweet category: Isham Jones and Ray Noble “projected rich, full musical sounds. . . . Others played more in the society manner—Eddy Duchin with his flowery piano and Freddy Martin with his soft, moaning sax sounds. And then there were the extrasweet bandleaders. [Guy] Lombardo, of course, was one. So was his chief imitator, Jan Garber. So was the Waltz King, Wayne King.” Other sweet bands were led by Sammy Kaye, Lawrence Welk, Horace Heidt, Fred Waring, Ozzie Nelson, Kay Kyser, Vaughn Monroe, and others whose names are even less familiar today.
Johnny Mandel, born in 1925, was a trombonist in Buddy Rich’s, Jimmy Dorsey’s, and other swing bands in the 1940s; later he was an arranger, songwriter, and film composer. “In Chicago and the Upper Midwest,” he recalled, “you had all these bands that really sucked when it came to jazz, but they had good music. There was a huge crowd that loved to dance to Blue Barron, Sammy Kaye, and Lawrence Welk in particular. We used to laugh at Guy Lombardo, but in retrospect, Gerry Mulligan and I came to the conclusion that Lombardo was a perfect museum piece of a band in 1920. This was what they also sounded like before swing came in. They always had a tuba bass, three-part harmony, and it got to [where] it sounded awful. But they were very good at it.”
It’s not as though the swinging bands threw songs overboard. Their most famous pieces tended to be instrumentals, but, in a given concert, vocal numbers predominated. For these, the band would play one or several choruses of the song, then a boy or girl vocalist—up till that point sitting demurely to the side, hands folded—would approach the microphone and sing one straight. In an eight-month period in 1941 and 1942, Benny Goodman made thirty-two recordings with vocalists and only twelve straight instrumentals. Goodman’s singers weren’t too shabby: at various times, Billie Holiday, Helen Ward, Martha Tilton, Mildred Bailey, Helen Forrest, Peggy Lee, and Dick Haymes were part of the orchestra. (As necessary as they were, singers were decidedly second-class citizens in the country of big bands. They were often paid lower salaries than instrumentalists, and in some cases did double duty as music librarians, instrument wranglers, or travel agents.)
Historian Lewis Erenberg has a good description of how the best bands deployed the best songs: “Swing fused love songs to a jazz style that gave ballads a lift and heightened their emotional power. Each band’s use of individualized arrangements and versatile instrumentation helped make love songs seem more personal. Band singers performed a chorus of a song much as an instrumental soloist would, while the full band teased out the emotional nuances. At the end, no matter the sentiment, the band picked up the tempo as if to affirm that life goes on despite obstacles and that dreams come true.”
Pop songs formed the basis of the repertoire of even the hottest bands of the period, and bands vied to see who could chart highest with a particular number. “Skylark”—music by Hoagy Carmichael, words by Johnny Mercer—is a quintessential standard. It was published in 1941, and almost immediately afterward the recordings started appearing. Glenn Miller, Harry James, Bing Crosby, and Dinah Shore all charted with the song in 1942; the bands of Gene Krupa, Woody Herman, Bunny Berigan, and Earl Hines didn’t do quite as well with their disks. A subsequent Mercer song, “Blues in the Night”—music by Harold Arlen—was recorded thirteen times from September 1941 through March 1942 by such diverse artists as Cab Calloway, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, and Big Joe Turner.
Swing or sweet, big bands became the country’s principal popular music delivery system. Live bookings were helped by the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. By 1937, Variety estimated, some eighteen thousand musicians traveled the country in bands; the business as a whole grossed some $40 million in annual bookings. All the top bands were heard regularly on the radio, either via remote broadcasts of live shows in nightclubs or ballrooms or, in the case of the top dozen or so outfits, through their own weekly network shows. (By 1937, networks accounted for 88 percent of the total broadcast wattage.) These appearances served to promote their records, more and more successfully as the decade progressed. After falling to a low of about four million in 1933, national record sales rose steadily, reaching 130 million in 1941; an
average hit sold about 250,000 copies. An important factor starting in the thirties was the introduction of jukeboxes; by the end of the decade there were an estimated 500,000 of them, in taverns, bus stations, ice cream parlors, and even beauty parlors. They consumed about 13 million records a year—over half of the industry’s total production. The 1942 hit “Jukebox Saturday Night” offered a charmingly self-conscious commentary on the cultural phenomenon they represented, especially how they turned music into a shared public experience. The song mentioned the top performers—and was ecumenical in the sweet-swing controversy, endorsing a mix of the hot Benny Goodman, the “vanilla” Kay Kyser, and the down-the-middle bandleader who had the biggest success with the song, Glenn Miller. It opens up:
Moppin’ up soda pop rickeys
To our hearts’ delight,
Dancin’ to swingeroo quickies,
Jukebox Saturday night.
Goodman and Kyser and Miller
Help to make things bright,
Mixin’ hot licks with vanilla,
Jukebox Saturday night.
The often unheralded keys to the big bands were the arrangers. Johnny Mandel talked about realizing this when he was a kid listening to broadcasts of the big bands night after night:
Laying in bed after lights-out, I was glued to the radio, as most kids were then. Looking back on it, I realized this was the greatest laboratory, because the focus was completely on radio—there was no television, nothing visual. Every band—from Goodman and Dorsey on down—was broadcasting, and the publishers were constantly forcing songs on them. The whole idea was to get your song played on the radio. And the band’s idea—especially if it was a struggling band—was to be heard more and more, so that when they went out on the road, they’d be able to get higher prices at better ballrooms.
I’d hear these different bands playing the same songs. That’s what I mean by “laboratory.” I would think to myself, “What’s so great about this song that’s supposed to be so popular? I think it’s mediocre.” Then another band would play the same damned thing, because everybody is restricted to those songs on the Hit Parade, and it would sound wonderful. And then another band would come on a half hour later, and that song would sound dreadful. At one point, a lightbulb went on over my head. I said, “Wait a minute. It’s not about the song at all, it’s about the way the band plays it.”
The Hit Parade Mandel referred to was Your Hit Parade, a radio program that began in 1935 and would continue until 1953; a television version aired from 1950 till 1959. The show featured performances, by a regular cast of singers and musicians, of the top songs of the week; the formula by which they were picked was never revealed. Billboard magazine followed its example and in 1940 began publishing charts of the top-selling recordings. In contrast to the big-band dominance of the late 1930s and early 1940s, vocalists and vocal groups accounted for nine of the fifteen number-one records in 1945. The most successful group, Glenn Miller’s, had thirty-six top-ten records from 1940 through 1943, including seven at number one. Miller had started as a trombone player with Ben Pollack’s orchestra; when he formed his own group in the late thirties, he managed to achieve a sort of sweet-swing amalgam with tight arrangements, sophisticated harmonies, and a “silvery,” reed-dominated sound. “When we started out . . .” Miller was quoted in a 1940 newspaper interview, “none of the big bands played pretty tunes . . . and the majority of people like to hear pretty tunes. We’ve tried to hit a happy balance between the two.”
• • •
This was the environment in which the next cohort to contribute to the American Songbook reached their musical majority. In contrast to Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, and Porter, who’d focused on the shows and revues that kept popping up in the twenties, this younger group often had early success writing for jazz bands, which consumed material at a rapid pace; consequently, they deeply understood jazz harmony and rhythm. And for these men the sign of arrival wasn’t a Broadway show but a Hollywood contract. (All would find their way to Broadway in the late forties or fifties, with varying success.) A transitional figure was Hoagy Carmichael (born in 1899), an Indiana native who practiced law before moving to New York in 1929 to pursue songwriting full-time. He had success that year when Mitchell Parish wrote lyrics for a melody of his called “Stardust” (the bandleader Isham Jones had a hit with it in 1930, the first of hundreds of versions over the decades). Carmichael was hired as a staff writer by Ralph Peer’s Southern Music, and composed such songs as “Rockin’ Chair,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “Lazybones”; lyrics to the last were written by a young Georgian named Johnny Mercer. In 1936, Paramount Pictures offered Carmichael a $1,000-a-week contract, and he was off to Hollywood.
Harold Arlen, born in Buffalo in 1905, was a real-life jazz singer not too far removed from Al Jolson’s character in the first talking picture. From an early age he sang in the synagogue choir led by his father, the cantor, but jazz beckoned to him, and by fifteen he was playing the piano and singing in local cafés. He ultimately formed a band called the Buffalodians, which played several dates in New York City in 1925. Arlen stayed on in the city, singing and playing the piano in other bands. In 1929 he was working as a rehearsal pianist for a Broadway show, and one day he was fooling around with a rhythm and some chords that seemed like they could be a song. The result was “Get Happy,” a propulsive jazz tune and a big hit; the lyrics, sort of anti-blues in spirit, were by Ted Koehler, Arlen’s most frequent collaborator in his early career. Arlen was hired by a Tin Pan Alley publisher for a salary of $55 a week and with Koehler wrote scores for Cotton Club revues in the early thirties. Their songs of the period included “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” “I’ve Got the World on a String,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” and “Stormy Weather,” the classic torch song performed at the Cotton Club by Ethel Waters. Arlen was in Hollywood by 1934 and soon was working with the great lyricists Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, and Yip Harburg, all of whom would be regular collaborators over the next two decades. In 1938, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hired Arlen and Harburg to write the music for The Wizard of Oz; their songs included, of course, “Over the Rainbow,” which was ranked number one on the “Songs of the Century” list compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts and named the greatest movie song of all time by the American Film Institute.
Mercer moved from his Georgia home to New York in 1928, at the age of nineteen, to be an actor and singer; he had modest success, including landing a job as a vocalist with Paul Whiteman. But he had been writing lyrics on the side and struck gold with the 1933 “Lazybones,” a hit for Whiteman. Launched as a songwriter, Mercer went to Hollywood the same year and over the next half decade produced a string of standards. For “I’m an Old Cowhand (from the Rio Grande)”—sung by Bing Crosby in the 1936 film Rhythm on the Range—he supplied both words and music, but his genius was in writing lyrics that combined wit, panache, and a wonderful ear for the American vernacular. Between 1934 and 1941, the following Mercer lyrics were sung on screen: “Goody Goody,” “Too Marvelous for Words,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “Hooray for Hollywood,” “I Thought About You,” “Blues in the Night,” and “Skylark.”
Jimmy Van Heusen (born Edward Chester Babcock in 1913 in Syracuse, New York) was a rehearsal pianist in New York and scruffed about for a few years before scoring in 1939 with “Darn That Dream,” written for Benny Goodman. By the end of the year he was in Hollywood. In 1939 and 1940, according to the Jimmy Van Heusen website, he published sixty songs, including “All This and Heaven Too,” “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” and “Imagination.” The lyricist for the last two was Johnny Burke (born in 1908), who in the thirties wrote (with other composers) big-band hits for Guy Lombardo, Ben Pollack, Paul Whiteman, and Ozzie Nelson. Burke went to Hollywood in 1936 and four years later formed an unbeatable combination with Van Heusen, often providing material for Crosby. Each member of the team brought, on the one hand,
a purity and simplicity of emotion and, on the other, a mastery of his craft that together achieved near perfection in such songs as “Like Someone in Love,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “But Beautiful,” “Here’s That Rainy Day,” and “Swinging on a Star.” Mercer collaborated with Van Heusen in 1939 on the enduring standard “I Thought About You” and later observed, “He seems to have a series of chords waiting at his command to which he can fashion a melody the moment his lyricist springs any idea on him. All of the highest quality, in my opinion.”
Success took longer for Jule Styne, who was born in New York in 1905. He started out as an arranger and bandleader, moved to Hollywood to be a vocal coach and conductor, and began to get steady songwriting assignments as the thirties drew to a close, writing forgettable songs in forgettable pictures. In the early forties the pictures were still forgettable but the songs started to shine, especially on three collaborations with Sammy Cahn (born Samuel Cohen on New York’s Lower East Side in 1913): “I’ve Heard That Song Before,” “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week),” and “It’s Been a Long Time.” Styne wrote “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You” with Frank Loesser, yet another New York boy, born in 1910, who was also a relatively late bloomer. Loesser had little success as a New York songwriter in the early thirties but managed to get a Hollywood contract in 1936. He and Hoagy Carmichael wrote “Heart and Soul,” “Two Sleepy People,” and “Small Fry” in 1938, and he went on to work with Burton Lane (“Says My Heart”), Arthur Schwartz (“They’re Either Too Young or Too Old”), and Jimmy McHugh (“Let’s Get Lost”).
A final composer in this group was an extraordinary musician and entertainer with a built-in outlet for his songs: his own band. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., in 1899; his parents were both accomplished pianists and he had extensive musical training. By the mid-1920s he was leading and playing piano for a top jazz orchestra. Like George Gershwin, Ellington straddled the line between popular and classical music, and throughout his career he composed ambitious orchestral pieces he sometimes called “suites.” But he also wrote a collection of great standards, including, in the thirties alone, not only “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” but “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Solitude,” and “In a Sentimental Mood.” Ellington’s most recent biographer, Terry Teachout, writes that Ellington frequently relied for his melodies on the extemporaneous solos and improvisations of his band members, “who did not always receive credit—or royalties—when the songs were recorded and published.” In 1939, Ellington began working with Billy Strayhorn—an inordinately talented young composer, lyricist, and arranger—and the two were creative partners until Strayhorn’s death in 1967.
