Crash Course Timeline, No. 23: Introducing the 1930s, Conductors, Crooners, and Big Bands

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the then-common radio with his famous Fireside Chats, and the country collectively decided it needed a damn drink and repealed Prohibition; the Securities and Exchange Commission launched in 1934, along with the Master’s Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club (dude who won it hit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.”

Crash Course Timeline Music History Index: The 1920s, the 1930s & Early Popular Genres

The roots of this haphazard history of American popular music originally started about a year earlier and at least one music blog before this one. The former timeline started with the 1820s - when the United States as we (sort of) know it was just over 30 years old - and continued up to the 1920s. It introduced a multiplicity of themes and pathways, among them: the homesickness genre, a product of the Industrial Age and families scattered as wide as they’ve been in human history; the interaction between popular music and waves of immigration; the bloodthirsty/God-is-on-our-side anthems of America’s wars, both civil and others; the massive, popular, semi-utopian “Jubilee” concerts that followed; the noteworthy spasm of Christmas carols that bloomed alongside the commercialization of that holiday; the odd devotional number; marching bands and the arrival of modern brass instruments; the maudlin borderline hackery of the late Victorian era; the establishment and growth of Tin Pan Alley and its remarkable marketing machinery; and, perhaps more important than any of them in terms of what came later, minstrelsy. No less significant: literally all of that moved about the country by way of sheet music, the first conduit for the mass marketing of popular music.

All of that both informed and laid the foundation for much of what followed, but it also existed and operated in a vastly different and slower world. I think citizens of the 21st century can conceptualize, even appreciate those times, but actually wrapping one’s head around all that silence requires more imagination that most of us have. So, I took down those posts (twice, in fact) and restarted this follow-up project from a different foundation: the dawn of recorded sound, aka, the beginnings of a time when people could hear music without having friends who knew how to play it and, by the same devices, listen to a song until it either inspired them or made them puke.

Recordings existed well before the 1920s - singers ranging from John McCormack and Eddie Murray to the famous tenor Enrico Caruso (who recorded for one label's “high-class series”) - but I decided to start with the 1920s for several reasons. The ability to record sound came several decades before (by memory, the mid-1870s), but even 40 years later the sound remained limited - e.g., the recordings literally could not pick up pitches on the high end and some instruments all together - and, therefore, terrible. It took a decade or five for all the tinniness/recording-in-a-bucket-inside-a-box to the leech out, but recording and records (it’s all still 78 rpm at this point) reached the lofty heights of reasonable listening experience as early as the mid-1920s and continued to improve into the 1930s. Once film and radio arrived, they opened avenues for musical artists to spread their presence and influence across multiple mediums - i.e., the essence of modern stardom. That brings the story to the beginning of the modern era, at least in my mind. That said, keep in mind that the entire concept and culture of radio belongs to the 1930s - i.e., a time when the collapse of the consumer market made something one owns and turns on for entertainment the thriftier choice over something one buys and collects. As you’ll see if you read the posts below, a lot of them end with the Great Depression.

That gets ahead of the story, so, pulling back ten years, people call the 1920s the Jazz Age, but that does a real disservice to proliferation of genres that started and blossomed in jazz’s shadow. While none of them actually started in the 1920s, the way communications shrunk the world made once regional sounds available to a national audience - and one with resources to burn. That included the beginnings of country music - which, incidentally, came from the folk traditions of the 19th century - and at least three kinds of blues - e.g., 1) the female royalty of the early 20s, 2) the lone, often haunted blues men of the late 20s, and 3), at the tail-end, boogie-woogie. To back up even further, all of those borrowed something from ragtime - aka, the first “scary” (read: black) music to spook establishment white audiences - and Tin Pan Alley blended all that with popular sounds and themes from earlier eras, and that’s what the 1920s sounded like. Innovation meets mass-marketing, basically; strip away technologies that forever expand availability and accessibility and it’s not so different today.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 17: Lead Belly, The Man Who Sang His Way to Freedom*

Per the saying, build the statue

They turned Lead Belly’s life-story into a newsreel back in 1935 - according to Open Culture, the site that posted it, said newsreel “is the earliest celluloid document of American folklore.” Both Lead Belly and John Lomax, the famous musicologist and folklorist who recorded him at Louisiana’s Angola state penitentiary, appear in it, each playing himself. It's more artifact than art - i.e., a film short starring two men who can't act chewing stiff dialogue  - and it's a white-savior narrative on top of that. Fascinating as it is to see the real Lomax and Lead Belly interacting, it elides and sanitizes too much of the story, not to mention their actual relationship, to work as actual history. Now, here’s my stab at the same.

“When he give it to me,’ Ledbetter recalled, ‘glory to God, I was gone some.’”
- Lead Belly, remembering getting his first guitar from his father

As with most blues artists, and most Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, some uncertainty surrounds Lead Belly’s actual date of birth, but nearly all place it either in 1888 or 1889. All sources agree he was born Huddie (“hew-die”) William Ledbetter and on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana, a town in that state’s northwest corner. While he took an early interest in music - an uncle gave him his first accordion around the age of five and he played the church organ as well; that first guitar came later - Ledbetter married somewhere around 1908, held a day-job, and, for a while, didn't take any clear steps on the path that led to becoming Lead Belly.

There appears to be some overlap between those two lives: most sources have him playing Shreveport, Louisiana’s red-light district (suggestively named St. Paul’s Bottom) by age 15 (circa 1903), but the closest any source I read comes to naming the moment he left the straight life behind comes from Wikipedia, which went with his early 20s. He spent enough time in and around St. Paul’s Bottom that people now refer to it as Ledbetter Heights, but few details from that period go beyond montage-esque placeholders like “He began to develop his own style of music after exposure to various musical influences.” Ledbetter continued to work throughout this time, mostly as a laborer and a good one; as noted in the bio posted on the Lead Belly Foundation’s website “he was legendary for picking 1,000 pounds of cotton a day.”

When he played, Ledbetter played in rough rooms - e.g., the juke joints and “sukey jumps” (phrase lifted from the Lead Belly Foundation bio) of the South - something that mixed fatefully with his reported short temper. He picked up his first conviction in 1915 on charges of carrying a pistol. He escaped, even lived and worked under the surname Walter Boyd for a while, only to run violently afoul of the law in 1918 when he killed a relative, Will Stafford, in a fight over a woman somewhere in Dallas. [Ed. - Just to note it, some sources speak to Lead Belly’s criminal past more directly than others.] The state handed down a 30-year sentence and sent Ledbetter to either Imperial Farm, a prison near Sugar Land, TX (now called Central Unit), or some unnamed prison in Huntsville, TX, which may or may not have been where he killed a fellow inmate in self-defense (Wikipedia’s phrasing is loose). That incident left him with a scar on his neck, which he took to concealing with a scarf or bandana.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 5: Blind Lemon Jefferson Lays the Foundation

A strong riff on the original photo.

There’s an entire book written about 1920s blues legend, Blind Lemon Jefferson, but there isn’t a whole lot about him online. Don’t expect this post to improve much on Wikipedia's entry, basically; a couple decent quotes notwithstanding, it provides the bulk of this post. That said, and because I have them, let's start with one of those quotes (from Oldies.com):

“He had a good vocal range, honed by use in widely different venues, and a complicated, dense, free-form guitar style that became a nightmare for future analysts and copyists due to its disregard for time and bar structure.”

One more, this one’s from Wikipedia:

“It is likely that he moved to Deep Ellum on a more permanent basis by 1917, where he met Aaron Thibeaux Walker, also known as T-Bone Walker. Jefferson taught Walker the basics of playing blues guitar in exchange for Walker's occasional services as a guide.”

To answer the first question, yes, Jefferson was really blind. Born in 1893 (or 1894), the seventh (or eighth) child of sharecroppers Alex and Clarissa Jefferson in Coutchman, Texas, his lack of sight precluded working as a farm-hand, which, if nothing else, freed up his hands for the guitar. He started playing at an early age, first at parties and picnics near home; his late teens saw him busking on street corners in the cities of East Texas, all the way up to Dallas. Most accounts agree that Jefferson traveled widely - presumably, with someone standing in for T-Bone Walker at each stop - without his blindness getting in any part of his way (as noted most succinctly on Blackpast.org):

“It was widely thought that he played in every Southern state at one time or another and several artists recount stories of playing with him multiple times. Lemon was a firm businessman, playing only for money, with a reputation for stopping as soon as it did.”

Among those “several artists”: the famous Huddie William Ledbetter, aka, Lead Belly. Beyond a collection of names and places, tracing Jefferson’s footsteps involves jumping over some gaps. It’s unclear, for instance, who discovered him or how, but the fact he lived and worked in Deep Ellum feels like the likeliest answer to how - i.e., the gathering of blues artists drew music industry interest looking for people to record. Some things never change...