 |
| The medium of the moment. |
This post kicks off the exploration of bands and artists from the 1930s, which will extend over the next 21(?) posts in this series. Before digging the selected artist, I wanted to provide a little context for the decade to help put people in the mood for the music.
The 1920s ended with a literal crash, of course, when an overheated, over-leveraged stock market imploded in October 1929. The rot went deeper - farms had been struggling through the 1920s - and soon seeped into every corner of the economy, leading to insolvent banks and the collapse of the consumer economy. Decades of over-farming/grazing in habitats that couldn’t handle it (America’s Great Plains) created the infamous Dust Bowl (it was no spontaneous event), which expanded the misery still further and sent people scrambling to the cities and the coasts in search of work. A popular statistic notes that 25% of Americans couldn’t find work in the depths of the Great Depression, something that points to the long-standing, glass-half-empty that most people (myself flaming included) talk about the news - i.e., that means 75% of the country could. Belts tightened, but the world still turned, basically, as demonstrated by the series of details I mined out of a 1930s timeline.
1930 saw the invention of the analog computer by Vannevar Bush and Clarence Birdseye patented the quick-freezing process that made frozen food possible; the Empire State Building opened for business in 1931 and Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the “Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem the same year; voters swapped Hoover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following year and Bruno Hauptmann kidnapped the son of (Nazi afficionado) Charles Lindbergh; the New Deal launched during FDR’s first 100 days in early 1933, which he promoted over the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit only four under par); Social Security started the next year, but wouldn’t pay out benefits until two years later, and Porgy & Bess (“the first distinctly American opera") opened, but Babe Ruth’s career ended; in 1936, a strong majority of Americans handed FDR a second term (he won 62% of the vote) and Jesse Owens took four giant, salutary shits on Hitler’s “master-race” delusion at the Berlin Olympics (one for each gold medal); San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, first to pedestrians, then to cars; a National Minimum Wage was set at $0.25 in 1938 and Orson Welles broadcast his radio drama, War of the Worlds; and, finally, the United States held not one but two big, optimistic World’s Fairs in 1939, one in Queens, New York, the other, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition: a lot of shit happened, and that’s just about a quarter of it.
Popular culture did what it could to soothe all the trouble and uncertainty by putting on a happy face. For instance:
“Hollywood responded to the economic anxiety that dominated the lives of Americans during the Depression by producing films that maintained a self-conscious optimism.”
Songwriters left unemployed by the collapse of Broadway decamped from New York’s famous Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood - a detail that suggests capital didn't dry up, so much as transfer to more profitable ventures (movie-going remained very popular) - where they provided scores of scores for the 1930s famous movie musicals, e.g., Bright Lights (1930), 42nd Street (1933), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), Showboat (1936), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), and The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms (both in 1939). Famous actors became famous singers and vice versa; Fred Astaire (also a singer) started his famous partnership with Ginger Rogers, which established the dance/musical genre.
Tastes in popular music didn’t end as abruptly as the Roaring 20s. A site hosted by the University of Virginia titled Manufacturing Memory broke the 1930s into two parts - 1930-1934, then 1935-1939 - to separate the sounds left over from the 1920s to the Big Bang/swing music that most people associate with the 1930s. Part of that choice comes from wanting to distinguish between, as the site puts it, “the bland and unchallenging ‘sweet’ sound of Guy Lombardo and the Jazz Age dance bands” from “the more rhythmically involved and aggressive horn arrangements of the bandleaders of the Swing Era such as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and many others.” Manufacturing Memory also stuffed their selection of popular tunes with blues and country numbers from artists I’ve already covered in this series. I'll address that in the sampler the best I can, but, back to the broad idea of popular music and how it was produced and consumed...
With the recording industry and the market for 78 rpm records knocked to its knees, most of it came by way of the radio, a fairly old medium by that time - e.g., the first commercial radio station launched in Pittsburgh, PA (of all places) in 1920 and, by January of 1923, the market and mechanics had developed enough to broadcast the Rose Bowl live over the airwaves. That “live” piece is significant: because playing a shellac 78 rpm record into a microphone didn’t create the best sound, with some notable exceptions, just everything broadcast meant doing the show live - and twice, one for each coast. That included news broadcasts, serialized comedies (e.g., Amos and Andy; hugely popular, btw), crime/detective shows (think The Shadow and Dick Tracy, both pulled from comic strips), day-time dramas, and, of course, music.
As I’ll cover in later chapters, a lot of conductors, crooners, performers and jazz/country bands hosted their own dedicated radio shows. Some of them transmitted bands performing live at the jazz clubs in the big cities, or even classical orchestras (Wikipedia name-drops Arturo Toscanini) who showed up at the studio and played, while others - see the National Barn Dance and the Grand Ole Opry - performed (at least) weekly shows that mixed skits with the music in the old vaudeville tradition. 50,000 watt clear channel stations gave that programming enormous available audiences, in the neighborhood of half the country in some cases. And the market only grew as more households bought more radios: according to Wikipedia’s entry on the “Golden Age of Radio,” 40.2% of households owned a radio in 1930, a percentage that would more than double (to 82.6%) when the calendar turned to 1940. Reaching half the country meant reaching millions.
The limits on channels of distribution had the unexpected, yet logical knock-on effect of shrinking the total number of musical acts that could get on the airwaves. That produced a secondary knock-on effect that seems less obvious:
“Many bands created different arrangements of the same songs, leading to slightly different versions vying for popularity on the charts.”
I suspect it’s hard for 21st-century Americans - i.e., people blessed/cursed with access to more...things than any selection of people in human history - to comprehend the essential lack of options, never mind variety, available to their forebears from the 1930s (oh, the stories those compatriots could tell you about walking 10 miles to the radio, both ways and through snow). Seeing the same names repeat in the No. 1 spot over and over in Your Hit Parade, a weekly radio show/(marketing) list launched in 1935, should help drive home that reality.
Before getting to the sampler, I wanted to point to a few more musical milestones from the 1930s - with a few gems excavated from a Wikipedia timeline that runs from 1920-49, besides the ones noted above - both because I think the timing of some of them will surprise some people, but also because it’ll preview upcoming chapters.
1930: Don Azpiazu dropped “El Manisero” (aka, “The Peanut Vendor”), which shows America’s long-standing appreciation for “Latin” music, Ken Maynard became the silver screen’s first singing cowboy, and Benny Moten develops Kansas City jazz.
1931: Rickenbacker produced the first commercial model electric guitars (#RIP, the 12-string/resonator guitars) with their A22 and A25 models, the Mills Brothers became the first black artists to combine tight harmonies with jazz instrumentation and orchestration, Sarah Gertrude Knott organized the first National Folk Festival, and Texas swing legend Bob Wills lands his first gig with Fort Worth’s Light Crust Doughboys.
1932: A revue called New Americana gives the Great Depression an anthem with the hit, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”, while another revue, Zora Neale Hurston’s, The Great Day, brings the black experience to Broadway.
1933: The repeal of the Volstead Act (aka, Prohibition) leads to the opening of clubs, juke joints and honky tonks all over the country, FM radio becomes viable (though it wouldn’t become widespread for a couple decades), and the great saxophonist, Lester Young, joins Count Basie’s band.
1934: Alan and John Lomax conduct one of their most famous “recording trips” when then put a mike in front of the famous Hudie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, the jazz periodical/fanzine Down Beat debuts and Benny Goodman buys up Fletcher Henderson’s catalog to use in a radio show called, Let’s Dance, an NBC radio show; the same confers legitimacy on Goodman as “a jazz master.”
1935: The Federal Music Project, a wing of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, provides work for unemployed musicians (estimated as 70% of them), funds a number of civic orchestras and provides music lessons to millions of Americans, Goodman launches the “Big Band” era when his orchestra starts broadcasting from Los Angeles Palomar Ballroom, and Your Hit Parade launches as history’s first radio chart show.
1936: A performer named Al Dexter puts the words “honky” and “tonk” in a song’s title for the first time through “Honky Tonk Blues,” the Harlem Hamfats establish “the precursor to the modern blues band,” and Goodman does more righteous damage to the color barrier by making Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton among the first black musicians to play as regular members of a largely white big band.
1937: Duke Ellington seasons his orchestras sound with Cuban influences, Woody Guthrie begins his career as a radio personality, and Nat “King” Cole forms a jazz trio built around piano, guitar and bass, thus beginning the rhythm and blues genre.
1938: Ella Fitzgerald scores her first big hit with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” John H. Hammond (the “first important jazz critic and record collector to become an impresario”) organizes the famous/legendary From Spirituals to Swing at Carnegie Hall, a celebration of black Americans' massive contribution to American popular music (noted in earlier chapters on Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy), and, in a preview of things to come, Louis Jordan checks out of Chick Webb’s orchestra to form the Tympany Five, a stepping stone to the jump blues sound that would bring popular music still closer to rock ‘n’ roll.
1939: Glenn Miller finally achieves a “pinnacle of popular success beyond that of any other group” when he starts the string of 70 top 10 hits over the ensuring four years, The Wizard of Oz is released, and, how did it happen this early, Lawrence Welk records his first polka.
Hopefully, that’s enough framing to get anyone reading this proverbially “there.” And now…
About the Sampler
The sampler came entirely from the 1930-34 and 1935-39 collection of songs posted on Manufacturing Memory (links above). The handful of people following this series will recognize about as many names in those collections, so, rather than link to the individual songs, I decided to direct people to earlier posts in this series on The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Ethel Waters, Lead Belly, Fats Waller, Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, and Roy Acuff, each of which will give readers 20+ songs by all those artists. That is, you'll get more there than you'll get here.
Because the rest is a literal grab-bag, and because I’ll be covering (nearly) all of these artists/performers in future chapters, I’m just going to list…oh, a dozen songs from the 37-song sampler to give people a taste of what’s ahead - all of them songs I haven’t posted before. In rough order:
Ben Selvin & His Orchestra, “Happy Days Are Here Again” (FDR's main jam, btw)
Fred Astaire, “Puttin’ on the Ritz”
Ruth Etting, “Ten Cents a Dance”
The Mills Brothers, “The Tiger Rag”
Tommy Dorsey & His Clambake Seven, Edythe Wright, “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around”
Cleo Brown, “(Lookie, Lookie, Lookie) Here Comes Cookie"
Johnny Rodriguez Y Su Orchestra, “Mulatica”
Bing Crosby, “Sweet Leilani”
The Andrews Sisters, “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen”
Benny Goodman, “Don’t Be That Way”
Artie Shaw, “Begin the Beguine”
Glenn Miller, “Moonlight Serenade”
Needless to say, there’s a long road ahead. About half a year, in fact. With this post, I’m officially strapped in. As always, I hope this interests a couple dozen people. So far, so good.
The 1920s ended with a literal crash, of course, when an overheated, over-leveraged stock market imploded in October 1929. The rot went deeper - farms had been struggling through the 1920s - and soon seeped into every corner of the economy, leading to insolvent banks and the collapse of the consumer economy. Decades of over-farming/grazing in habitats that couldn’t handle it (America’s Great Plains) created the infamous Dust Bowl (it was no spontaneous event), which expanded the misery still further and sent people scrambling to the cities and the coasts in search of work. A popular statistic notes that 25% of Americans couldn’t find work in the depths of the Great Depression, something that points to the long-standing, glass-half-empty that most people (myself flaming included) talk about the news - i.e., that means 75% of the country could. Belts tightened, but the world still turned, basically, as demonstrated by the series of details I mined out of a 1930s timeline.
1930 saw the invention of the analog computer by Vannevar Bush and Clarence Birdseye patented the quick-freezing process that made frozen food possible; the Empire State Building opened for business in 1931 and Congress and President Herbert Hoover made the “Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem the same year; voters swapped Hoover for Franklin Delano Roosevelt the following year and Bruno Hauptmann kidnapped the son of (Nazi afficionado) Charles Lindbergh; the New Deal launched during FDR’s first 100 days in early 1933, which he promoted over the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit only four under par); Social Security started the next year, but wouldn’t pay out benefits until two years later, and Porgy & Bess (“the first distinctly American opera") opened, but Babe Ruth’s career ended; in 1936, a strong majority of Americans handed FDR a second term (he won 62% of the vote) and Jesse Owens took four giant, salutary shits on Hitler’s “master-race” delusion at the Berlin Olympics (one for each gold medal); San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, first to pedestrians, then to cars; a National Minimum Wage was set at $0.25 in 1938 and Orson Welles broadcast his radio drama, War of the Worlds; and, finally, the United States held not one but two big, optimistic World’s Fairs in 1939, one in Queens, New York, the other, San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition: a lot of shit happened, and that’s just about a quarter of it.
Popular culture did what it could to soothe all the trouble and uncertainty by putting on a happy face. For instance:
“Hollywood responded to the economic anxiety that dominated the lives of Americans during the Depression by producing films that maintained a self-conscious optimism.”
Songwriters left unemployed by the collapse of Broadway decamped from New York’s famous Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood - a detail that suggests capital didn't dry up, so much as transfer to more profitable ventures (movie-going remained very popular) - where they provided scores of scores for the 1930s famous movie musicals, e.g., Bright Lights (1930), 42nd Street (1933), The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), Showboat (1936), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), and The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Arms (both in 1939). Famous actors became famous singers and vice versa; Fred Astaire (also a singer) started his famous partnership with Ginger Rogers, which established the dance/musical genre.
Tastes in popular music didn’t end as abruptly as the Roaring 20s. A site hosted by the University of Virginia titled Manufacturing Memory broke the 1930s into two parts - 1930-1934, then 1935-1939 - to separate the sounds left over from the 1920s to the Big Bang/swing music that most people associate with the 1930s. Part of that choice comes from wanting to distinguish between, as the site puts it, “the bland and unchallenging ‘sweet’ sound of Guy Lombardo and the Jazz Age dance bands” from “the more rhythmically involved and aggressive horn arrangements of the bandleaders of the Swing Era such as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and many others.” Manufacturing Memory also stuffed their selection of popular tunes with blues and country numbers from artists I’ve already covered in this series. I'll address that in the sampler the best I can, but, back to the broad idea of popular music and how it was produced and consumed...
With the recording industry and the market for 78 rpm records knocked to its knees, most of it came by way of the radio, a fairly old medium by that time - e.g., the first commercial radio station launched in Pittsburgh, PA (of all places) in 1920 and, by January of 1923, the market and mechanics had developed enough to broadcast the Rose Bowl live over the airwaves. That “live” piece is significant: because playing a shellac 78 rpm record into a microphone didn’t create the best sound, with some notable exceptions, just everything broadcast meant doing the show live - and twice, one for each coast. That included news broadcasts, serialized comedies (e.g., Amos and Andy; hugely popular, btw), crime/detective shows (think The Shadow and Dick Tracy, both pulled from comic strips), day-time dramas, and, of course, music.
As I’ll cover in later chapters, a lot of conductors, crooners, performers and jazz/country bands hosted their own dedicated radio shows. Some of them transmitted bands performing live at the jazz clubs in the big cities, or even classical orchestras (Wikipedia name-drops Arturo Toscanini) who showed up at the studio and played, while others - see the National Barn Dance and the Grand Ole Opry - performed (at least) weekly shows that mixed skits with the music in the old vaudeville tradition. 50,000 watt clear channel stations gave that programming enormous available audiences, in the neighborhood of half the country in some cases. And the market only grew as more households bought more radios: according to Wikipedia’s entry on the “Golden Age of Radio,” 40.2% of households owned a radio in 1930, a percentage that would more than double (to 82.6%) when the calendar turned to 1940. Reaching half the country meant reaching millions.
The limits on channels of distribution had the unexpected, yet logical knock-on effect of shrinking the total number of musical acts that could get on the airwaves. That produced a secondary knock-on effect that seems less obvious:
“Many bands created different arrangements of the same songs, leading to slightly different versions vying for popularity on the charts.”
I suspect it’s hard for 21st-century Americans - i.e., people blessed/cursed with access to more...things than any selection of people in human history - to comprehend the essential lack of options, never mind variety, available to their forebears from the 1930s (oh, the stories those compatriots could tell you about walking 10 miles to the radio, both ways and through snow). Seeing the same names repeat in the No. 1 spot over and over in Your Hit Parade, a weekly radio show/(marketing) list launched in 1935, should help drive home that reality.
Before getting to the sampler, I wanted to point to a few more musical milestones from the 1930s - with a few gems excavated from a Wikipedia timeline that runs from 1920-49, besides the ones noted above - both because I think the timing of some of them will surprise some people, but also because it’ll preview upcoming chapters.
1930: Don Azpiazu dropped “El Manisero” (aka, “The Peanut Vendor”), which shows America’s long-standing appreciation for “Latin” music, Ken Maynard became the silver screen’s first singing cowboy, and Benny Moten develops Kansas City jazz.
1931: Rickenbacker produced the first commercial model electric guitars (#RIP, the 12-string/resonator guitars) with their A22 and A25 models, the Mills Brothers became the first black artists to combine tight harmonies with jazz instrumentation and orchestration, Sarah Gertrude Knott organized the first National Folk Festival, and Texas swing legend Bob Wills lands his first gig with Fort Worth’s Light Crust Doughboys.
1932: A revue called New Americana gives the Great Depression an anthem with the hit, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”, while another revue, Zora Neale Hurston’s, The Great Day, brings the black experience to Broadway.
1933: The repeal of the Volstead Act (aka, Prohibition) leads to the opening of clubs, juke joints and honky tonks all over the country, FM radio becomes viable (though it wouldn’t become widespread for a couple decades), and the great saxophonist, Lester Young, joins Count Basie’s band.
1934: Alan and John Lomax conduct one of their most famous “recording trips” when then put a mike in front of the famous Hudie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, the jazz periodical/fanzine Down Beat debuts and Benny Goodman buys up Fletcher Henderson’s catalog to use in a radio show called, Let’s Dance, an NBC radio show; the same confers legitimacy on Goodman as “a jazz master.”
1935: The Federal Music Project, a wing of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, provides work for unemployed musicians (estimated as 70% of them), funds a number of civic orchestras and provides music lessons to millions of Americans, Goodman launches the “Big Band” era when his orchestra starts broadcasting from Los Angeles Palomar Ballroom, and Your Hit Parade launches as history’s first radio chart show.
1936: A performer named Al Dexter puts the words “honky” and “tonk” in a song’s title for the first time through “Honky Tonk Blues,” the Harlem Hamfats establish “the precursor to the modern blues band,” and Goodman does more righteous damage to the color barrier by making Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton among the first black musicians to play as regular members of a largely white big band.
1937: Duke Ellington seasons his orchestras sound with Cuban influences, Woody Guthrie begins his career as a radio personality, and Nat “King” Cole forms a jazz trio built around piano, guitar and bass, thus beginning the rhythm and blues genre.
1938: Ella Fitzgerald scores her first big hit with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” John H. Hammond (the “first important jazz critic and record collector to become an impresario”) organizes the famous/legendary From Spirituals to Swing at Carnegie Hall, a celebration of black Americans' massive contribution to American popular music (noted in earlier chapters on Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy), and, in a preview of things to come, Louis Jordan checks out of Chick Webb’s orchestra to form the Tympany Five, a stepping stone to the jump blues sound that would bring popular music still closer to rock ‘n’ roll.
1939: Glenn Miller finally achieves a “pinnacle of popular success beyond that of any other group” when he starts the string of 70 top 10 hits over the ensuring four years, The Wizard of Oz is released, and, how did it happen this early, Lawrence Welk records his first polka.
Hopefully, that’s enough framing to get anyone reading this proverbially “there.” And now…
About the Sampler
The sampler came entirely from the 1930-34 and 1935-39 collection of songs posted on Manufacturing Memory (links above). The handful of people following this series will recognize about as many names in those collections, so, rather than link to the individual songs, I decided to direct people to earlier posts in this series on The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Ethel Waters, Lead Belly, Fats Waller, Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, and Roy Acuff, each of which will give readers 20+ songs by all those artists. That is, you'll get more there than you'll get here.
Because the rest is a literal grab-bag, and because I’ll be covering (nearly) all of these artists/performers in future chapters, I’m just going to list…oh, a dozen songs from the 37-song sampler to give people a taste of what’s ahead - all of them songs I haven’t posted before. In rough order:
Ben Selvin & His Orchestra, “Happy Days Are Here Again” (FDR's main jam, btw)
Fred Astaire, “Puttin’ on the Ritz”
Ruth Etting, “Ten Cents a Dance”
The Mills Brothers, “The Tiger Rag”
Tommy Dorsey & His Clambake Seven, Edythe Wright, “The Music Goes ‘Round and Around”
Cleo Brown, “(Lookie, Lookie, Lookie) Here Comes Cookie"
Johnny Rodriguez Y Su Orchestra, “Mulatica”
Bing Crosby, “Sweet Leilani”
The Andrews Sisters, “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen”
Benny Goodman, “Don’t Be That Way”
Artie Shaw, “Begin the Beguine”
Glenn Miller, “Moonlight Serenade”
Needless to say, there’s a long road ahead. About half a year, in fact. With this post, I’m officially strapped in. As always, I hope this interests a couple dozen people. So far, so good.
No comments:
Post a Comment