Back home but separated from loved ones, civilian audiences were also hearing music in new ways. For the third time in the record industry’s fifty-year life, a new boom was being provoked largely by women. Perhaps because the horrors of the First World War were within living memory, women this time weren’t particularly jubilant about working in factories. In this vacuum of uncertainty, songs brought invaluable solace.
John Hammond’s personal experiences summed up what was happening to many young men and their families. By 1942, as Columbia’s recording studios lay idle, he was married and the proud father of a baby son. Suddenly, in early 1943, he was drafted while his wife was six months pregnant with their second child. Filled with dread, he boarded a train in Manhattan surrounded by a sorry-looking troupe of draftees, all visibly fearful about what lay ahead. He had heard that most of Count Basie’s band had been ordered to report to Fort Dix the same day, but unlike his familiar surroundings in Greenwich Village, the military base turned out to be segregated.
Within days, Hammond realized that his whole life had been swallowed up by the war. Now simply Private Hammond, following orders from a number of Southern bigots who took pleasure in bullying him for his airs and graces, he was reassigned to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to become a combat engineer. Enduring daily marches with an eighty-five-pound pack, Hammond began rapidly losing weight as depression locked down his mind.
As a result of his passing out in physical exercises, he was kept on American soil throughout the war and assigned tedious clerical jobs in race relations and camp entertainment. He was given leave to see his newborn son in a New York maternity hospital, where he watched the baby die on his ninth day. Heartbroken and in shock, Hammond was ordered to return to Fort Belvoir. His wife would have to overcome the tragedy alone while looking after their first-born son. As she descended into grief and lethargy, Hammond’s letters home were all screened by military security and arrived with censorship stamps. The war against Hitler and Hirohito was necessary, but the war effort was a terrible upheaval for families.
While popular memory and perhaps the lingering effects of propaganda tend to paint those years as heroic, music reveals a different story. In England, Vera Lynn’s 1939 smash hit “We’ll Meet Again” was a tragic sort of anthem revealing the uncertainty people were feeling in Britain. Glenn Miller’s sumptuous “Moonlight Serenade,” with its woozy clarinet and saxophone harmony, seemed to express both tears and yearning at the same time. Also recorded in 1939, it snowballed into one of the nostalgic theme tunes of the war years.
Granted an exemption by Petrillo, the U.S. Army launched its V-Discs in 1943. Some 4 million records were distributed throughout the military networks, a not inconsequential quantity considering the grooves were worn out by entire companies of servicemen. Uncle Sam shaped popular memory with a certain style of homely music—comforting songs capable of unifying diverse social groups.
Illustrating how fear heightened emotions, bandleader Artie Shaw remembered an unforgettable scene aboard the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier patrolling the South Pacific. Having been bombed seventeen times by Japanese planes in the previous weeks, the ship’s inhabitants were feeling more than a little homesick. To boost morale, his orchestra was called aboard to play a concert. For dramatic effect, the band was lowered on a hydraulic platform into the vast aircraft hangar below the deck where three thousand marines awaited in full dress uniform. When the band appeared, a huge roar went up like Shaw had never heard in his life. “It really threw me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing or hearing, I felt something extraordinary. These men were starved for something to remind them of home and whatever is mom and apple pie. And the music had that effect.”
The true musical icon of the war was another Decca star, Bing Crosby, whose crooning style would influence several giants in his wake. Yank magazine, a weekly army publication for wartime servicemen, which broke sexual barriers at the time by featuring suggestive pictures of glamour models, certainly had a handle on its audience. In a telling reminder of how important music can become in a time of extreme crisis, Yank made the bold but plausible claim that Bing Crosby had done more for GI morale throughout the entire war than any religious leader or any other celebrity.
In particular, among his long and impressive string of smash hits for Decca, Crosby broke all existing sales records with a crooning interpretation of an Irving Berlin song, “White Christmas,” the biggest-selling record in America for eleven weeks in the winter of 1942–43. “White Christmas” was even rereleased before war’s end, hitting the No. 1 spot again. Its simple lyric about “dreaming of a White Christmas, just like the ones I used to know” struck a poignant chord in the depths of war. To this day, by most accounts the recording stands as the best-selling single of all time.
One spectacular new arrival into the record business was Capitol, the first significant record label to emerge in Los Angeles. Hollywood tycoons had attempted to buy into New York’s record business, but Capitol was founded by an experienced trio of music-business veterans—in particular, Johnny Mercer, a prolific songwriter and a frequent collaborator with Hoagy Carmichael. Originally from Georgia, the thirty-three-year-old had written a string of hits for Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Fred Astaire, Jimmie Lunceford, Cab Calloway, the Andrews Sisters, and just about every other big name in the game. Like an early bird catching the worm, he wrote words in that dreamy stillness just after dawn—never toiling beyond lunchtime.
His partner Buddy DeSylva, then a Paramount Films executive, had written the musical Blue Monday with George Gershwin and had served on ASCAP’s board of directors. The third man in the Capitol story was Glenn Wallichs, owner of Music City, the biggest record store in Los Angeles. Wisely convincing Mercer and DeSylva not to seek investment from Paramount Pictures, he put up $15,000 to keep Capitol independent.
Johnny Mercer’s first big discovery was Nat King Cole, whom he signed but was unable to record. Fortunately, Jack Kapp hammered out a deal with James Petrillo whereby Decca agreed to pay the union trust fund and even throw open its accounting books, supplying serial numbers for every record pressed. In return, Decca could, in the event of another strike, lock in the artists it had under contract. Aching to record the King Cole Trio, Capitol followed Decca’s lead a month later. Cole’s first recording, “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” was a musical reinterpretation of one of his father’s favorite sermons. It sold 500,000 copies—a windfall that financed much of Capitol’s early development.
Among the crooners, the most dazzling young star would belong to Columbia. Frank Sinatra was a handsome, blue-eyed Italian American who had started out as a guest singer on a record by swing bandleader Harry James. From there he was spotted by another bandleader, the tough-talking, smooth-playing trombonist Tommy Dorsey, who talked the twenty-six-year-old into signing a management contract. By May 1941, Sinatra was not only topping the male singer polls in both Billboard and Down Beat, he seemed to be gathering his very own fan base among teenaged girls. What would later be termed Sinatramania started in the winter of 1942, when Sinatra sold out New York’s Paramount Theatre for eight solid weeks. One witness, the comedian Jack Benny, claimed, “I thought the goddam building was going to cave in. I never heard such a commotion … All this for a fellow I’ve never heard of.”
Columbia pounced on the opportunity to sign him up. In fact, it was John Hammond’s superior, Manie Sacks, who convinced Sinatra to sign with Columbia and eventually untangle himself from Dorsey. With Sinatra signed, in high demand, but unable to make records, Columbia simply repackaged the 1939 Harry James record and rereleased it as a Sinatra solo record. Although the original version hadn’t sold well, with a new sleeve it sold a million copies throughout the summer of 1943. Sinatra quickly woke up to his management contract with Dorsey, which siphoned off 43.3 percent of his royalties. Under Sachs’s guidance, he bought his way out of it in exchange for a $25,000 check. Columbia advanced Sinatra the money.
As the war raged in the
Pacific, in North Africa, and across Russia, conscription intensified in 1943. That December, Sinatra was classified 4-F, “registrant not acceptable for military service,” on the grounds of a perforated eardrum. With the press full of photographs of the handsome playboy either surrounded by pretty women or being screamed at by adoring bobbysoxers, the young Sinatra became one of the war’s most controversial celebrities. According to one rumor, his handlers had paid a bigwig $40,000 to keep Sinatra out of the service. It surfaced years later that a recruitment psychologist deemed him “neurotic” and “not acceptable material from a psychiatric standpoint.” The journalist William Manchester, serving his country at the time, confidently observed, “I think Frank Sinatra was the most hated man of World War II, much more than Hitler.”
The final years of the war transformed the music business. Due to the size of their orchestras, swing bands were the most severely affected by drafting. Glenn Miller was killed flying over the English Channel in 1944. Down Beat’s “Killed in Action” column had been documenting fallen jazzmen since 1942.
Although swing was given mass exposure by the army, its roots were being cut. A 20 percent entertainment tax in 1944 closed struggling ballrooms. The rationing of rubber and gasoline made touring by bus difficult; trains were often block-reserved for migrating servicemen. For black musicians, because of institutional racism, the war was particularly cruel. Lester Young, Basie’s legendary saxophonist and Billie Holiday’s closest friend, was drafted in 1944 and sent to an Alabama training base. Caught with marijuana and promptly court-martialed, he spent a year languishing in a detention barracks. Many black musicians dodged conscription by claiming psychosis, drug addiction, or homosexuality or simply by moving around with no fixed address. Horn player Howard McGhee cleverly won an exemption by requesting to be trained in the South so that he could organize black soldiers to shoot whites. He raved with psychotic logic to a bemused army psychiatrist, “Whether he’s a Frenchman, a German, or whatever … how would I know the difference?”
It was from this mind-set that a more abstract, militant branch of jazz began to thrive. Bebop, as it became termed, was the vibrant new movement among a younger generation of jazz players connected to Earl Hines’s band—in particular Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who explained, “The enemy, by that period, was not the Germans, it was above all white Americans who kicked us in the butt every day, physically and morally … If America wouldn’t honor its Constitution and respect us as men we couldn’t give a [damn] about the American way. And they made it damn near un-American to appreciate our music.” For some, bebop strove to expose the limitations of the white bandleaders who, they felt, had robbed black musicians of their rightful music. As Thelonious Monk put it, “We wanted a music that they couldn’t play.”
Bebop was the hungry new beast of the underground. A new wave was in motion, and bebop’s radical departure into abstract harmonic complexity undoubtedly contributed to jazz becoming more of an elitist and peripheral niche genre in the postwar period than it had been in the twenties and thirties.
During the recording ban, Billie Holiday drifted further astray, still sore from the “Strange Fruit” episode and falling deeper into heroin addiction. Her contract with Columbia simply expired. After one disappointing recording with Capitol in 1942 under the pseudonym Lady Day, Billie would have to wait until the end of the Petrillo Ban to record twelve new songs on Milt Gabler’s Commodore label. Jack Kapp, however, hired Gabler as a producer, probably in the hope of luring Billie Holiday to Decca. The gamble worked, and with bigger resources at his disposal, Milt Gabler organized some of Billie’s biggest standards on Decca.
One of the most beautiful creations of the wartime repertoire was surely her exquisite 1944 classic “Lover Man,” with its risqué yet melancholy lyric, “I go to bed with a prayer that you’ll make love to me.” Between 1944 and her eighteen-month jail sentence in May 1947 for heroin possession, Billie recorded twenty-one lushly orchestrated jazz ballads including many of her finest moments: “That Ole Devil Called Love,” “Don’t Explain,” and “Good Morning Heartache.”
With Decca’s and Capitol’s recording studios open and scoring hits, Ted Wallerstein was itching to convert public demand for Sinatra into dollars. Despite President Franklin Roosevelt’s personal intervention, Petrillo didn’t budge an inch, comparing CBS and RCA to “the slave owners of the Civil War days” and warning that his union “will not hesitate to break off relations with these companies and leave them to die by their own nefarious schemes.” Forced to capitulate, Wallerstein chose Armistice Day to issue his humiliating surrender. “We must now either sign or go out of business,” he said.
In January 1946, after three long years in different military bases around America, John Hammond was discharged. Like many disoriented servicemen, “I returned to a son I did not know, to a wife with problems—and to be sure, good reasons for them. Another baby was due in a month and I faced responsibilities I felt unable to cope with. I was a stranger in my own home and I knew I needed help.”
Musically, Hammond tried to find what he’d left behind. Returning to the Greenwich Village scene where in 1941 he had produced the seminal Chain Gang recordings by Josh White, he was happy to see that thanks to Café Society’s influence, Washington Square had become a Sunday meeting point for folksingers, banjo pickers, and balladeers. His old friend and sponsor Eric Bernay, owner of New Masses, had even set up his own cutting-edge jazz and folk label, Keynote, whose Almanac Singers included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Josh White, and Burl Ives.
Alongside Guthrie, Bernay, and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Hammond joined Pete Seeger’s People’s Songs organization, whose aim was to provide labor movements around America with protest songs. Naively thinking he could combine his day job at Columbia with producing cutting-edge jazz for his friends at Keynote, Hammond underestimated Ted Wallerstein’s patience. Once again, he was fired and began roaming the underground, surviving on odd jobs.
With the Petrillo Ban still a raw nerve, Ted Wallerstein had no time for trade unions or musicology. Between 1946 and 1947, record sales in America rocketed spectacularly from 275 million to 400 million. Capitol alone had sold 42 million records in its first four years of trade. Feeling this miraculous renaissance, in April 1948, Ted Wallerstein’s long-awaited secret project was prepared for launch—the 331/3 rpm 12-inch long player.
In a historical meeting in the CBS boardroom, on one side of the table sat the group chairman, Bill Paley, flanked by Ted Wallerstein, CBS president Frank Stanton, and their engineer, Peter Goldmark. The guest was David Sarnoff, accompanied by his eight engineers. For the demonstration, Stanton set up two turntables, a standard 78 and a prototype LP.
When Stanton touched down the stylus on the second turntable, the effect on the guests, according to Goldmark, “was electrifying, as we knew it would be. I never saw eight engineers look so much like carbon copies of tight lipped gloom.” Sarnoff pulled the cigar from his mouth and glared down his side of the table. “You sonsabitches got caught with your pants down again!” He could not “believe that little Columbia Graphophone invented this without my knowing.”
CBS chairman Bill Paley suggested he was open to a licensing deal to share the technology. Sarnoff courteously congratulated his hosts for their impressive work and replied he would consider their offer. Although, he added, there was probably no reason to do so because Columbia’s system utilized nothing patentable, just the tools at hand.
Sarnoff’s legal instincts were on the money. There was no intellectual property as such, except the name “LP,” which CBS-Columbia copyrighted. Symbolically, on the summer solstice of 1948, the LP was publicly showcased to forty journalists at the Waldorf Astoria. For visual effect, a wobbling tower of 78s was stacked alongside a squat pile of LPs containing the same amount of music.
As Columbia basked in the limelight, RCA Victor retaliated in February 1949 with its 45 rpm 7-inch—allowing up to eight minutes of audio space. With the bi
rth of two new disc formats, the record business was truly back from the dead.
This miraculous renaissance was, of course, being fueled by the postwar spirit of rebuilding. With 70 million people dead and entire countries in ruins it was obvious—to young parents, at least—who would really inherit all that had been fought for. They say the Second World War marked the end of American innocence. The next age in American music would be a sort of adolescence.
9. SUNRISE
Then there was rock ’n’ roll. The location was Memphis, the very crossroads that for years had attracted blues kings and hunters alike: W. C. Handy, Harry Pace, Henry Speir, Robert Johnson. As far as music was concerned, this nineteenth-century city, named after the ancient capital of Egypt, seemed to be built along a cultural fault line, exactly where the redneck and Afro-American continental plates were precariously interlocked.
Memphis was a major port along the Mississippi and effectively the only big city for a hundred miles in every direction—attracting farmers, black and white, from the Delta and the Tennessee plains. Its famous black neighborhood was centered around Beale Street, a legendary stretch of bars, brothels, and pawn shops leading from the heart of the city all the way down to the river.
Although R&B had many key players throughout the late forties and early fifties—Atlantic, King, Chess, Specialty, RPM, Duke, Imperial, Excelsior, Liberty, VJ—there was one label at the very epicenter of the imminent explosion. Marking the dawn of a new musical age, even its name and logo couldn’t have been more appropriate: Sun Records.
The supposedly contradictory ingredients that went into early rock ’n’ roll make sense when viewed through the childhood of Sun’s founder. Sam Phillips was a poor white Southerner whose cotton-picking parents grew up on a 300-acre farm in Florence, Alabama. As a boy working in the blistering heat, Sam Phillips dragged heavy canvas sacks between the rows and filled them with the fibers plucked from the prickly twigs. “I was right in the middle of people who worked hard, black and white,” explained Phillips. “And even though I lived in the South, we didn’t see the color line like a lot of people. We weren’t better than anybody.
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