America's Music Makers America's Music Makers

AMERICA'S MUSIC MAKERS

BIG BANDS & BALLROOMS 1912-2011By John Behrens

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 John Behrens
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4567-2952-3

Contents

Prologue...................................................................5Territorial Dance Bands: America's Unsung Music Makers.....................17Ballrooms Made the Big Band Era............................................39Big Band Road Warriors.....................................................59Society Orchestras: Sweet Sounds Were Very Successful......................79Many Think the Beat Made Big Bands Popular.................................101Theme Songs of the Big Bands...............................................117Reminisces of the Big Band Days............................................127Acknowledgements...........................................................145About the Author...........................................................149Index......................................................................151

Chapter One

Territorial Dance Bands America's Unsung Music Makers

They were the bands you danced to and the musicians you talked to as you glided by the bandstand on the soft hardwood floor. You usually knew some of the players. Maybe the leader. He may have sold you an insurance policy or perhaps he came out to unplug your drains. That's what it was like in a territorial band anywhere in America from the early 1900s to today. Musicians worked day jobs to exist and spent weekends, holidays and vacations enjoying their first love; playing gigs in big bands helping people enjoy their evenings. They were paid from $10 to $100 an evening generally; sometimes less, sometimes more.

America was changing too. The Louisville Slugger baseball bat was introduced, the Coca Cola company was formed and Buddy Boldin's Original Jazz Orchestra was playing the streets and amusement parks in New Orleans. George Eastman had developed the famous box camera which recorded some of the early scenes of the country and its jazz roots.

But it would take 27 years before what music historians claimed was the first dance orchestra would be recognized. Wilbur C. Sweatman, a self-taught musician who was able to play three instruments at once, put together an orchestra which played Chicago's PekinTheater in 1912.

Sweatman was a story of musical success at a time when blacks found little or no opportunities in any part of the country. He toured with circus bands in the 1890s before he organized his own group in Minneapolis, MN in 1902. He made his first recording a year later for a local music store which included what is considered the first recorded version of Scott Joplin's famous "Maple Leaf Rag."

He moved to Chicago in 1908 and became bandleader at the Grand Theatre where he attracted attention as the "Sensational Swet." A relationship with Joplin continued and later in life was so close, the famous black songwriter named Sweatman the executor of his estate including many unpublished songs. An Indiana newspaper described Sweatman as diminutive in stature but with "a style and grace of manner in all of his executions that is at once convincing, and the soulfulness of expression that he blends into his tones is something wonderful. His first number was a medley of popular airs and 'rags' and had everybody shuffling their pedal extremities before it was half over.'"

San Francisco was still rebuilding from the devastating 1906 earthquake when Art Hickman and his band, who played in the St. Francis Hotel in the city, came up with special arrangements and introduced the touring big band. A baseball fan, Art followed the San Francisco Seals baseball club and when manager Del Howard took the team to Sonoma County for spring training the bandleader approached club ownership with a novel idea; why not sponsor a series of dances to relieve the boredom at the camp? Howard liked the idea and Hickman found new gigs playing for baseball players and their wives and girl friends. Like so many connections, the celebrated Florenz Ziegfeld of Follies' fame happened to catch the Hickman band at the spring camp—he also was a baseball fan—and invited the group to NYC to play the Biltmore and the Ziegfeld Roof.

Territorial bands got their start in the Jazz Age playing for friends, neighbors and family and rehearsing continually. Variety Magazine, the bible for musicians, singers and booking agents in the 1920s and later, reported in 1924 that there were 900 dance orchestras representing 7,200 musicians. They also reported that some leaders recognized their name value at the same time. Paul Whiteman, who was called the "King of Jazz," had 68 orchestras in his name, 11 of them in New York. Jack Jenny of Mason City, IA, knew he wanted such a life. He started on the trumpet at 8 but switched to the trombone when he entered Cedar Rapids High School. At 18, he was good enough to get an audition with the popular Austin Wylie band when it came through Iowa and he was selected to join the band where he got to know a young Artie Shaw in the sax section.

Within six years he had jumped to Mal Hallett's band and spent a couple of years with legendary Isham Jones playing with another player of later fame, Woody Herman, and he was a section mate with the great trombonist Jack Teagarden. The Depression, meantime, took its toll among musicians as it did many other fields of employment. In 1933, half of the bands working in 1924 were out of business and some of the musicians were stranded in cities and towns throughout the country and surviving on soup kitchens. In the midwest, Serl Frank Hutton organized the National Orchestra Service (NOS) to book territory bands throughout the Great Plains and other regions. NOS was based at Omaha National Bank Building, Downtown Omaha, and represented Glenn Miller styled bands that featured 12 to 15 pieces. It continued through the Depression but folded in early 1960.

In 1938, Jack launched his own band which soon failed and he married Kay Thompson who had her own group at the time. The marriage failed too. He appeared in two movies, Syncopation and Stage Door Canteen during the war years. He took over the Bobby Byrne band when the leader enlisted in the military service. Jack also served in the military for a year before being discharged for poor health. An Iowa Public Television's Jazz feature says that Jack's time with Artie Shaw was perhaps his " nest hour publicly in a 1941 recording of 'Stardust.' The version is still heard today led by the strong trumpet of Billy Butter field, but Jack Jenny's half chorus fits in nicely after Shaw's solo." His touring took him to Hollywood where he did the Dick Haymes radio show, Something for the Boys, as the war was ending. He suffered an appendectomy in Hollywood and died at the early age of 35. His story was too common among young musicians, primarily from the east and Midwest, who sacrificed health and welfare to gain recognition in the sun and fun of the west coast.

Jack got his beginning in territory work but was determined to reach higher. You had to have excellent tools to earn the money touring musicians got. College degrees weren't necessary but because ambitious bandleaders marketed their bands for movies and radio as well of one nighters, you had to be a reader, preferably a "sight reader" someone who could "read" a chart and play it right away. Amazingly, a number of musicians at the territorial as well as the touring levels were non-readers. Well...