Jazz Blog #3

America in the 1930s. I think of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the New Deal. I think of FDR, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. I think of backbreaking agricultural work, and I think of groundbreaking feats of engineering and infrastructure. I think of a country nostalgic towards the simpler and more prosperous days of the past, and a country ready to lead the world in science, art, and moral values. I think of swing.

            It’s hard to consider the impact swing music had on America because at first glance it seems inconsequential. The American economy collapsed, unemployment was at an all time high, people were literally dying of starvation and were willing to work ungodly hours of backbreaking labor in the hot sun just to feed themselves, yet even in the face of adversity, jazz survived. At the end of the day, a man might only have a quarter to his name and a belly half full from dinner, but that man would still be willing to spend that precious quarter at a music club and spend the night dancing to swing. Swing acted, not only as a distraction from the bleak lives most people of the time were enduring, but on a deeper level it embodied the contradictions embedded in American culture.

            Jazz had finally entered the mainstream, and America was comfortable with the idea of Jazz music, but nobody could afford to keep musicians around on a contract for nightly performances at their clubs as was popular in the 20s. In order to survive, musicians had to travel around, living gig to gig and hoping that there would always be one lined up after the next. Luckily the invention of the radio came around just in time to give an impoverished nation access to more or less free information, and savvy musicians (or more than likely their agents) took advantage of this resource to disseminate songs and personas all across the country. In this way, swing musicians like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman could book a gig anywhere in the country because even though they had never previously been to, or even heard of many of the small towns they performed in, they had fans there.

            Now I mention Ellington and Goodman not by coincidence. These were perhaps the two biggest names in swing in the 1930s. They were both exceedingly popular on the radio, but dealt with very different responses in their live performances. Ellington, a black man, dealt with racism across the country. Some venues would not allow him to perform because he was black, others booked him after hearing his radio singles and were surprised to discover his blackness only when he arrived. He was often disbarred from the very clubs and hotels he performed in and would have to seek lodging elsewhere when the show was over, and whether it was the realization that a black man could produce art or the dismissal of his work as art because he was black, his presence, and that of other black jazz artists, perturbed the social status-quo. Meanwhile, white musicians, such as Goodman, were reaching critical acclaim playing the same music that other were performing. In 1938, Goodman’s band finally brought Jazz into the realm of high culture and respectability by playing at Carnegie Hall. But it was not because they played any better than other Jazz musicians. In fact, Goodman conceded that many black musicians were more talented than himself. No, the issue lay in race. Goodman and his band were white, so their ceiling for success was much higher than other Jazz Bands. And in the 1930s, when Jazz had become well established as not only a central part of mainstream popular culture but as a respectable aspect of America’s contribution to art, the racial contradictions in Jazz became very apparent and even concerning. People like John Hammond were devoting their lives to Jazz in a critical way that before this time had never occurred and they realized that Jazz was more than just a musical genre but a social movement. I don’t think it can be said better than what David Stowe wrote in his book Swing Changes:

The contradictions of jazz criticism were a symptom of the difficult task with which these writers saddled themselves: explaining to America that swing was in a fundamental sense an African-American music, that somehow, for the first time since antebellum minstrelsy, black culture had become for many of its young people the American culture of choice (Stowe, 54).

Swing revealed some of the major contradictions in American society. In the 1930s, we wanted to lead the world in science, art, and moral values, yet our economy was in tatters, our society was racially segregated, and our main artistic contribution to the world came from the oppressed African Americans that were popularly considered to be inherently inferior to the white American. It was a tough time to live in and most people were too busy working to put food on the table to worry about larger issues race and class structures. But after the depression, the ideas that swing catalyzed would certainly be felt.