 Radio Music and Wartime Dance Halls
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Jitterbug dance
With its high levels of energy discharge, the jitterbug provided unprecedented opportunities for inventiveness.
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A boom in social dancing began during the second decade of the twentieth century, along with the first recognition of music called jazz. Nat Shapiro quotes Variety as estimating that in the mid-1920s there were 60,000 dance bands playing on the dance floors of jazz age America. Beginning in 1920, radio broadcasting brought recorded and live music into homes, posing an economic challenge to pianos and combining with the Depression in 1929 to decimate record and phonograph sales. The music that America absorbed through these media came mostly from New York, from Tin Pan Alley publishing houses and from the flourishing Broadway stage, reproduced also in vaudeville houses across the country. When in the middle of the 1920s recording engineers developed microphones to replace recording horns, a new softer "crooning" performance became possible and stylish on records and over the radio.
Al Jolson's songs on screen in 1927 opened another medium. When the Depression crippled the New York musical theater, Hollywood studios became the patrons of much of professional songwriting, for the movies that were the country's largest entertainment indulgence during the 1930s. The record industry struggled back late in the decade, dominated by the big swing bands and their vocalists. As the war overtook the United States, a significant economic struggle surfaced in musical entertainment. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers ( ASCAP) had been formed in 1914 to collect performance royalties for the owners of song copyrights.
By 1939 it held monopoly power over popular music performance, and a contract dispute with radio broadcasters led to the formation of Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) as a rival guild. Following a ten-month interval in 1941 during which no ASCAP music could be played on the radio, causing a boom in classical, folk, and public domain music generally, ASCAP entered into a new broadcast contract, but BMI continued and grew.
BMI, growing out of the dispute where its rival stood for established interests, came to represent popular music from outside the New York-Hollywood establishment, and local markets compared with the network emphasis of ASCAP. An institution had appeared to reflect the regional, rural, and minority interests in the music world that would gain great audience support after the war.
The history of popular music suggests that it is very unlikely that musical entertainment can induce new behavior, or even introduce new ideas to the audience it must court in order to sell itself. Though popular music has been blamed in the past for undermining community standards or otherwise damaging society, it is a new phenomenon for popular music to have the pervasive presence that prosperity and the portable radio and tape deck have given it lately, and for such conspicuous economic power to be vested in a youth audience. The history of popular music that is now happening cannot be fully schematized and managed by the patterns of earlier popular music. Its development has always been contingent, surprising, and even discontinuous except when we rationalize it with hindsight, and it is continuing that unpredictable development now.
As the United States pulled out of the Depression, a more vigorous style of band music began to be widely heard. Reviving fortunes far the record industry - in particular Decca's introduction of a cheap (35-cent) record - played a part, but radio was preeminently responsible. One crucial element, however, was new: the beginnings of a youth audience.
When band leader Benny Goodman won popular acdairn in Los Angeles and thus inaugurated the "swing" era in July 1935, his audience were in their teens and early twenties. Let's Dance, the show on which Goodman's band appeared, was broadcast too Iate for the younger audience on the East Coast, but feli right into the mid-evening listening slot of the young West Coast audience, who turned out in force to hear the band live.
Goodman's hugely popular music was not new. It operated on principles borrowed from the Fletcher Henderson band of the Iate twenties and early thirties. Swing took the form of simplified melodies, using riffs, or short, rhythmically interesting melodic fragments: a propulsive, even meter, cali and response between brass and wind sections; and a swinging relationship between rhythm and melody.
Always eager students, the average Americans turn to the idealistic Englishman H. G. Wells for a popular historical outline. Edwin E. Slosson 's Creative Chemistry, Paul deKruif's Microbe Hunters, Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, Harry Overstreet's About Ourselves, Lewis Mum ford 's Technics and Civilization, and the pseudoanthropological writings of Freud, Adler, and Jung take the place of Benjamin Franklin's humanist and Biblical backgrounds. For his economic and political theory the American depends too greatly upon the daily press and the radio. The actual drama of modern life has become so thrilling that the arts pale by comparison. In 1939 a radio drama telling of the invasion of this world by people from Mars appeared to be so real that many could not distinguish it from actual reports of armies in Europe about to destroy civilization.
Swing echoed the familiar pattem: a challenge to the status quo, based on approaches and techniques derived from black music; partial absorption into the white mainstream; conflict with the cultural establishment; eventual compromise. In the case of swing, the conflict took the form not of moral or esthetic condemnation but of a turning by some bands to classically-derived techniques and traditions.
This process was clearest in the music of Glenn Miller, whose band led the popularity polls in the early 1940s. Miller's trademark was the sonority of his wind section, achieved by using saxophones topped by a clarinet. The discipline and precision needed to realize his sound were equally important, whether the effect was romantic, up-tempo or even improvised. As a result of these processes, the music did not threaten the mainstream; but for all that, when Glenn Miller's music is compared with that of Paul Whiteman, we can see just how far the black influence on white America had advanced.
Like ragtime and jazz before it, swing was first and foremost a music for dancing; and once again that dancing - "jitterbugging" - was derived from black America. it was also much closer to black America. Taken to extremes (as they often were) the physical demands of such dancing confirmed the more youthful fans as the principal consumers.
Radio music in the home, while still the main source of family entertainment, did not satisfy the social and physical requirements of the new dance craze. By the forties, wartime dance halls, throbbing with life as no fantasy nightspot of the Depression had done, became focal points of activity. The reviving record industry, through its newoutlet, the jukebox, also encouraged the consumptian of music outside the home. Records and jukeboxes were gradually increasing the familiarity of both whites and blacks with each other's bands, but the mainstream was still not ready to accept black music on its own terms.
Perhaps only Duke Ellington was able to "cross over" without sacrificing the essential nature of his music to commercialism. Dances were stili largely segregated. Most were for whites only, and featured white bands. it was rare for a white band to play for a black dance - but then, few white bands could have satisfied the black dancers. In the bands themselves, efforts to increase integration had not made much progress.
An important gesture was Goodman's inclusion in his band of black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, on the prompting of impresario John Hammond. Nevertheless, too many black musicians had been exposed to the trauma of racial insult while performing with white bands for this to kindle any enthusiasm.
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