SWING DANCE ~ LINDY HOP ~ HUSTLE ~ Alaska
Archive 6
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(Text is adapted from “The Swing Book”):
STILL MORE
OF “THE GLORY DAYS OF SWING”!!
Swing music and
dancing “opened doors for black people to go through,” Norma Miller.
Despite black
and white musicians playing and socializing together at the Savoy and Carnegie
Hall, there were still serious inequities that even the most famous
African-American bandleaders and entertainers endured because of their
color. White bands enjoyed a number of
advantages. They got lucrative hotel
bookings and radio shows that few black bands could nail down. If a white group and a black group recorded
the same song, as with Goodman’s and Basie’s versions of “One O’Clock Jump,”
the white band’s version stood a much greater chance of being a hit.
Count Basie’s Band
Without
long-term hotel contracts, black bands were forced to take endless tours made
up mostly of one-night gigs. Traveling,
especially in the South, was often a series of painful humiliations and
difficulties. Black musicians couldn’t
stay at most hotels, even the ones where they were performing. In some cities they sometimes couldn’t even
find a restaurant that would serve them.
Cab Calloway was beaten in Kansas City when he tried to enter the
Pla-Mor Ballroom, where his friend Lionel Hampton was playing.
The Pla-Mor
Ballroom was open from 1927-1957 Dancing at the Pla-Mor Ballroom
In another incident, a theater manager in
Detroit forced Billie Holiday to wear greasepaint onstage during an appearance
of the count Basie Orchestra – because he was afraid that the light-skinned
Holiday might look white under the stage lighting and offend the audience.
Billie Holiday singing on stage - 1947
In other ways
the swing movement was a model of racial equality. Many bands, arguing that they wanted to play the best music
possible, fought for integration. In
addition to Goodman’s quartet, other breakthroughs included white bandleader
Artie Shaw’s hiring of Billie Holiday, and Gene Kruppa adding black trumpeter
Roy Eldridge to his orchestra. A number
of black bands, including those of Lucky Millinder and Earl Hines, began to
include white members, too. The
sentiment expressed at the time was that song (and dance at places like the
Savoy) was a common meeting ground.
Lucky Millinder Lucky
in Action The
Earl Hines Orchestra
But, the ground
wasn’t as common where women were concerned.
Women were pointedly not given equal status in the swing world. While most bands had female singers, few
orchestras, white or black, would consider hiring anything but male
instrumentalists. So the “Girls” formed
their own bands:
The Best All Girls’ Band
in 1937 The Girls were
still playing by themselves in the 1940s
But the late
1930’s is often considered the high point of the swing era. Duke Ellington was moving into a period of
enormously inspired activity. Spurred
by the arrival of composer Billy Strayhorn, bassist Jimmy Banton, and
saxophonist Ben Webster to the band, Ellington created such classics as “Take
the ‘A’ Train and “Cotton Tail.” The
integrated nightclub Café Society opened in 1938 in Greenwich Village. The boogie-woogie piano style of Kansas City
caught on and became a national craze.
From Basie to Goodman, from Lunceford to Barnet, swing brought blacks
and whites together as never before. It
was a golden age in American music.
Ben Webster
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