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News from the Great Wide World: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Black Popular Music, 1927–1943

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Lewis A. Erenberg
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Extract

In numerous essays Ralph Ellison highlighted the special role that musicians and big swing bands played in defining a new future for black America from the late 1920s through World War II. Led by sophisticated and glamorous Dukes and Counts, big swing bands represented a flowering of black folk culture in the new urban centers of the black migration. With New York City acting as their national capital, moreover, these bands acted as traveling representatives of the modern city as they conducted national tours, produced endless recordings, and performed live on radio for a new mass audience for jazz music. While their travels took them through the indignities of a segregated society, black bands offered release from the Depression and expressed heightened expectations for people whose lives were still bound by racial restraints. As Ellison recognized, they provided ecstasy and communion to their many followers, performed in secular rituals on the dance floor. As such, the most famous bands of the 1930s and 1940s held out an urban model of freedom that climaxed with the renewed mass migrations to Northern cities during World War II. In the big band form, folk culture and modern life were united in new ways to offer optimism tinged by hard reality in the middle of the Depression. In the process, black entertainers stood as heroes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 18 , October 1993 , pp. 483 - 506
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

NOTES

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2. Susman, Warren (“Culture and Commitment,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Culture in the 20th Century [New York: Pantheon, 1985])Google Scholar established the conservative side of the national culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Baraka, Imamu Amiri (Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed From It [New York: William Morrow, 1963])Google Scholar dismisses most middle-class black swing. His view of Basie as a regenerator of black music is persuasive. Murray, Albert (Stomping the Blues [New York: Vintage, 1982])Google Scholar and Ralph Ellison (Shadow and Act) see swing music and musicians deeply embedded in African-American culture.

3. Schuller, Gunther, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Smith, Isadora, “Duke Ellington Rated ‘Joe Louis of Music,’” Pittsburgh Courier, 07 16, 1938, p. 20.Google Scholar

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5. “We all shared …” is in Love, Preston, “Chords and Dischords,” Sounds and Fury 1 (07–08 1965): 59Google Scholar, as quoted in Hennessey, , “From Jazz to Swing,” p. 449Google Scholar; Calloway as quoted in Calloway, Cab and Rollins, Bryant, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York: Crowell, 1976), pp. 64, 66Google Scholar; and, for Jimmie Lunceford, see Hennessey, , “From Jazz to Swing,” p. 451.Google Scholar

6. See Hammond, John with Townsend, Irving (On Record [New York: Penguin, 1977], pp. 164–80)Google Scholar on Hammond's discovery and promotion of Basie. For his views of Ellington, see pp. 132–39. For more on swing and radicalism during the 1930s, see Erenberg, Lewis A., “Swing Left: John Hammond and the Politics of Jazz,” in Swinging the Dream: Big Bands, Popular Music and American Culture (forthcoming).Google Scholar

7. Baraka, (Blues People, pp. 182–84)Google Scholar discusses the folk origins in Basie's music; and see Count Basie as told to Murray, Albert, Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie (New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 196–97.Google Scholar

8. Basie, , Good Morning Blues, pp. 196–97, 217–18.Google Scholar

9. The list was derived from The Sound of Harlem, booklet 3 (Columbia Records); and Schuller, , Early Jazz, pp. 318–57.Google Scholar

10. Murray, , Stomping the Blues, pp. 3–6.Google Scholar

11. Lipsitz, George, “Against the Wind: Dialogic Aspects of Rock and Roll,” in Time Passages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 109–13Google Scholar. Lipsitz suggests that these themes were the basis of black rhythm and blues. These themes go farther back in black music, however. Related themes are forcefully made by E. J. Hobsbawm's perceptive “Playing for Ourselves,” a review of Basie, , Good Morning Blues, in New York Review of Books (01 16, 1986): 3.Google Scholar

12. Ellington as quoted in Ulanov, Barry, Duke Ellington (1946; rept. New York: Da Capo, 1975), p. 142.Google Scholar

13. For this view of the Harlem Renaissance as applied to literature, see Baker, Houston A. Jr., “Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,” American Quarterly 39 (Spring 1987): 84–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Collier, (Duke Ellington, pp. 278–98)Google Scholar finds the classical pieces musically wanting; and see Ellison, , “Homage to Duke Ellington,” pp. 219–21.Google Scholar

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19. Jo Jones quoted in Dance, Stanley, World of Count Basie, p. 55Google Scholar, as quoted in Hobsbawm, , “Playing for Ourselves,”Google Scholar

20. Basie recounts this story in Good Morning Blues (pp. 161–62).

21. Basie, , Good Morning Blues, pp. 194–96.Google Scholar

22. Basie, , Good Morning Blues, p. 5Google Scholar; and, for the Jo Jones quote, see Shapiro, Nat and Hentoff, Nat, Hear Me Talkin' To Ya (New York: Dover, 1966)Google Scholar. An excellent analysis of the Kansas City musical style as embodied by Basie is Palmiè, Stephan, “Jazz Culture in the Thirties: ‘Kansas City, Her I Come!’” Jazz Forschung/Jazz Research 16 (1984): 43–85Google Scholar. He is instructive on how this folkloric element began to revitalize all jazz.

23. Schuller, (Swing Era, pp. 222–25)Google Scholar emphasizes the blues roots.

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31. Jarrett quoted in Terkel, , American Dreams, pp. 81–83Google Scholar; and Murray, , Stomping the Blues, pp. 118–25.Google Scholar

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33. Malcolm X, Autobiography, pp. 50, 56–57, 64.Google Scholar

34. Malcolm X's descriptions, Autobiography, p. 51Google Scholar; and Leon James as quoted in Stearns, Marshall, Jazz Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 325Google Scholar. For more on African-American dance, see Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina, Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

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36. Ellison, , “Homage to Duke Ellington,” p. 220.Google Scholar

37. Horace Silver as quoted in Lee, Gene's Jazzletter (04 1990): 4Google Scholar; Calloway, , Minnie the Moocher, p. 146Google Scholar; Milt Hinton as quoted in Gitler, Ira, Swing to Bop (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 11–12Google Scholar; and Hinton, Milt and Berger, David, Bass Line (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 74–78, 109–10, 122.Google Scholar

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40. Smith, , “Duke Ellington Rated,” p. 20Google Scholar; Burley, Dan, “Basie Plunking Way to Top at Famous Door; Wants to Write,” New York Amsterdam News, 10 29, 1938, p. 20Google Scholar; and see Pittsburgh Courier (06 11, 1938, p. 15)Google Scholar for “excluded mostly from politics.…”

41. Smith, , “Duke Ellington Rated,” 1938, p. 20.Google Scholar

42. Rowe, BillyPittsburgh Courier, 01 31, 1942, p. 21.Google Scholar

43. Jack Gould, a white show business columnist, quoted by Smith, Isadora, “Count Basie's Opening Causes New Interest for Negro,” Pittsburgh Courier, 07 30, 1938, p. 21.Google Scholar

44. See Smith, (“Count Basie's Opening,” p. 21)Google Scholar for quotes from Jack Gould; Stokowski as quoted in Pittsburgh Courier, 12 12, 1936, p. 7Google Scholar; Rowe, Billy, “Rowe Says ‘Swing More Popular Than Ever’,” Pittsburgh Courier, 01 29, 1938, p. 20Google Scholar; Robinson, Major (“Set Arrangements for Millers, Shaw,” Chicago Defender, 02 15, 1941, p. 20)Google Scholar is an example of self-confident acceptance of the black creative role in music; and Rowe, Billy, “Famous French Critic's Book Says Colored Musicians Tops,” Pittsburgh Courier, 01 23, 1943, p. 21.Google Scholar

45. Levine, Lawrence, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 433–40Google Scholar; and Ellington, Mercer with Dance, Stanley, Duke Ellington, In Person An Intimate Memoir (1978; rept. New York: DaCapo, 1979), p. 79.Google Scholar

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47. Basie, , Good Morning Blues, pp. 250–51Google Scholar. Lyrics reprinted in Mead, Chris, Champion-Joe Louis (New York: Dodd, Mead), p. 203.Google Scholar