A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Episode 3: Ida Red

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 Photo of Bob Wills in a cowboy hat

Welcome to episode three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at Bob Wills and "Ida Red".

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

I mention a PhD thesis on the history of the backbeat in the episode. Here's a link to it.

Bob Wills' music is now in the public domain, so there are many different compilations available, of different levels of quality. This is an expensive but exhaustive one, while this is a cheap one which seems to have most of the important hits on it.

The definitive book on Bob Wills, San Antonio Rose, is available here, though it's a bit pricey.

And for all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum.

Clarification

In the episode I talk about two tracks as being "by Django Reinhardt", but the clips I play happen to be ones featuring violin solos. Those solos are, of course, by Reinhardt's longtime collaborator Stephane Grapelli. I assume most people will know this, but just in case.

Transcript

"Rock and Roll? Why, man, that's the same kind of music we've been playin' since 1928! ... We didn't call it rock and roll back when we introduced it as our style back in 1928, and we don't call it rock and roll the way we play it now. But it's just basic rhythm and has gone by a lot of different names in my time. It's the same, whether you just follow a drum beat like in Africa or surround it with a lot of instruments. The rhythm's what's important."
 
Bob Wills said that in 1957, and it brings up an interesting question. What's in a name?
 
Genre names are a strange thing, aren't they? In particular, did you ever notice how many of them had the word "and" in them? Rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country and western? There's sort of a reason for that.
 
Rock and roll is a special case, but the other two were names that were coined by Billboard, and they weren't originally meant to be descriptors of a single genre, but of collections of genres -- they were titles for its different charts. Rhythm and blues is a name that was used to replace the earlier name, of "race" records, because that was thought a bit demeaning. It was for the chart of "music made by black people", basically, whatever music those black people were making, so they could be making "rhythm" records, or they could be making "blues" records.
 
Only once you give a collection of things a name, the way people's minds work, they start thinking that because those things share a name they're the same kind of thing. And people start thinking about "rhythm and blues" records as being a particular kind of thing. And then they start making "rhythm and blues" records, and suddenly it is a thing.
 
The same thing goes for country and western. That was, again, two different genres. Country music was the music made by white people who lived in the rural areas, of the Eastern US basically -- people like the Carter Family, for example.
 
[Excerpt of “Keep on the Sunny Side” by the Carter Family]
 
We'll hear more about the Carter family in the future, but that's what country music was. Not country and western, just country. And that was the music made in Appalachia, especially Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially especially Nashville.
 
Western music was a bit different. That was the music being made in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, and it tended to use similar instrumentation to country music -- violins and guitars and so on -- but it had different subject matter -- lots of songs about cowboys and outlaws and so on -- and at the time we're talking about, the thirties and forties, it was a little bit slicker than country music.
 
This is odd in retrospect, because not many years later the Western musicians influenced people like Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard, who made very gritty, raw, unpolished music compared to the country music coming out of Nashville, but the thirties and forties were the heyday of singing cowboy films, with people like Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers becoming massive, massive stars, and so there was a lot of Hollywoodisation of the music, lots of crooning and orchestras and so on.
 
Western music was big, big business -- and so was swing music. And so it's perhaps not surprising that there was a new genre that emerged around that time. Western swing.
 
Western swing is, to simplify it ridiculously, swing music made in the West of the USA. But it's music that was made in the west -- largely in places like California --by the same kinds of people who in the east were making country music, and with a lot of the same influences.
 
It took the rhythms of swing music, but played them with the same instrumentation as the country musicians were using, so you'd get hot jazz style performances, but they'd be played on fiddle, banjo, guitar, and stand-up bass. There were a few other instruments that you'd usually get included as well -- the steel guitar, for example. Western swing usually also included a drum kit, which was one of the big ways it differed from country music as it was then. The drum kit was, in the early decades of the twentieth century, primarily a jazz instrument, and it was only because Western swing was a hybrid of jazz and Western music that it got included in those bands -- and for a long time drum kits were banned from country music shows like the Grand Ole Opry, and when they did finally relent and let Western swing bands play there, they made the drummers hide behind a curtain.
 
They would also include other instruments that weren't normally included in country or Western music at the time, like the piano. Less often, you'd have a saxophone or a trumpet, but basically the typical Western swing lineup would be a guitar, a steel guitar, a violin or two, a piano, a bass, and drums.
 
Again, as we saw in the episode about "Flying Home", where we talked about *non*-Western swing, you can see the rock band lineup starting to form. It was a gradual process though.
 
Take Bob Wills, the musician whose drummer had to hide behind a curtain.
 
Wills originally performed as a blackface comedian -- sadly, blackface performances were very, very common in the US in the 1930s (but then, they were common in the UK well into my lifetime. I'm not judging the US in particular here), but he soon became more well known as a fiddle player and occasional singer.
 
In 1929 Wills, the singer Milton Brown, and guitarist Herman Arnspiger, got together to perform a song at a Christmas dance party. They soon added Brown's brother Derwood on guitar and fiddle player John Dunnam, and became the Light Crust Doughboys.
 
 
[clip of the Light Crust Doughboys singing their theme]
 
That might seem like a strange name for a band, and it would be if that had been the name they chose themselves, but it wasn't. Their name was originally The Aladdin Laddies, as they got sponsored by the Aladdin Lamp Company to perform on WBAP radio under that name, but when that sponsorship fell through, they performed for a while as the Wills Fiddle Band, before they found a new sponsor -- Pappy O'Daniel.
 
You may know that name, as the name of the governor of Mississippi in the film "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", and that was... not an *entirely* inaccurate portrayal, though the character in that film definitely wasn't the real man. The real Pappy O'Daniel didn't actually become governor of Mississippi, but he did become the governor of Texas, in the 1940s.
 
But in the late 1920s and early thirties he was the head of advertising for Burrus Mill and Elevator Company, who made "Light Crust Flour", and he started to sponsor the show.
 
The band became immensely successful, but they were not particularly well paid -- in fact, O'Daniel insisted that everyone in the band would have to actually work a day job at the mill as well. Bob Wills was a truck driver as well as being a fiddle player, and the others had different jobs in the factory.
 
Pappy O'Daniel at first didn't like this hillbilly music being played on the radio show he was paying for -- in fact he wanted to cancel the show after two weeks. But Wills invited him down to the radio station to be involved in the broadcasts, and O'Daniel became the show's MC, as well as being the band's manager and the writer of their original material. O'Daniel even got his own theme song, "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy".
 
[insert Hillbilly Boys playing "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy"]
 
That's not the Light Crust Doughboys playing the song -- that's the Hillbilly Boys, another band Pappy O'Daniel hired a few years later, when Burrus Mill fired him and he formed his own company, Hillbilly Flour -- but that's the song that the Light Crust Doughboys used to play for O'Daniel, and the singer on that recording, Leon Huff, sang with the Doughboys from 1934 onwards. So you get the idea.
 
In 1932, the Light Crust Doughboys made their first recording, though they did so under the name the Fort Worth Doughboys -- Pappy O'Daniel didn't approve of them doing anything which might take them out of his control, so they didn't use the same name. This is "Nancy"
 
[insert clip of "Nancy"]
 
Now the music the Light Crust Doughboys were playing wasn't yet what we'd call Western Swing but they were definitely as influenced by jazz music as they were by Western music. In fact, the original lineup of the Light Crust Doughboys can be seen as the prototypical example of the singer-guitarist creative tension in rock music, except here it was a tension between the singer and the fiddle player. Milton Brown was, by all accounts, wanting to experiment more with a jazz style, while Bob Wills wanted to stick with a more traditional hillbilly string band sound. That creative tension led them to create a totally new form of music.
 
To see this, we're going to look forward a little bit to 1936, to a slightly different lineup of the band. Take a listen to this, for example -- "Dinah".
 
[insert section of Light Crust Doughboys playing "Dinah"]
 
And this -- "Limehouse Blues".
 
[insert section of Light Crust Doughboys playing "Limehouse Blues"]
 
And now listen to this -- Django Reinhardt playing "Dinah"
 
[insert section of Reinhardt playing "Dinah"]
 
And Reinhardt playing "Limehouse Blues"
 
[Reinhardt playing "Limehouse Blues"]
 
Those recordings were made a few years after the Light Crust Doughboys versions, but you can see the similarities. The Light Crust Doughboys were doing the same things as Stephane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt, years before them, even though we would now think of the Light Crust Doughboys as being "a country band", while Grapelli and Reinhardt are absolutely in the jazz category.
 
Now, I said that that's a different lineup of the Light Crust Doughboys, and it is. A version of the Light Crust Doughboys continues today, and one member, Smoky Montgomery, who joined the band in 1935, continued with them until his death in 2001. Smoky Montgomery's on those tracks you just heard, but Bob Wills and Milton Brown weren't. They both left, because Pappy O'Daniel was apparently not a very good person to work for.
 
In particular, O'Daniel wouldn't let the Doughboys play any venues where alcohol was served, or play dances generally. O'Daniel was only paying the band members $15 a week, and they could get $40 a night playing gigs, and so Brown left in 1932 to form his own band, the Musical Brownies.
 
The Musical Brownies are now largely forgotten, but they're considered the first band ever to play proper Western Swing, and they introduced a lot of things that defined the genre. In particular, they introduced electric steel guitar to the Western music genre, with the great steel player Bob Dunn.
 
For a while, the Musical Brownies were massively popular, but sadly Brown died in a car crash in 1936.
 
Bob Wills stayed in the Doughboys for a while longer, as the band's leader, as O'Daniel gave him a raise to $38 a week. And he continued to make the kind of music he'd made when Brown was in the band -- both Brown and Wills clearly recognised that what they'd come up with together was something better and more interesting than just jazz or just Western.
 
Wills recruited a new singer, Tommy Duncan, but in 1933 Wills was fired by O'Daniel, partly because of rows over Wills wanting his brother in the band, and partly because Wills' drinking was already starting to affect his professionalism. He formed his own band and took Duncan and bass player Kermit Whalen with him. The Doughboys' steel guitar player, Leon McAuliffe, soon followed, and they became Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. They advertised themselves as "formerly the Light Crust Doughboys" -- although that wasn't entirely true, as they weren't the whole band, though they were the core of it -- and Pappy O'Daniel sued them, unsuccessfully.
 
And the Texas Playboys then became the first Western Swing band to add a drum kit, and become a more obviously rhythm-oriented band.
 
The Texas Playboys were the first massively, massively successful Western swing band, and their style was one that involved taking elements from everywhere and putting them together. They had the drums and horns that a jazz band would have, the guitars and fiddles that country or Western bands would have, the steel guitar that a Hawaiian band would have, and that meant they could play all of those styles of music if they wanted to. And they did. They mixed jazz, and Western, and blues, and pop, and came up with something different from all of them.
 
This was music for dancing, and as music for dancing it had a lot of aspects that would later make their way into rock and roll. In particular it had that backbeat we talked about in episode two, although here it was swung less -- when you listen to them play with a heavy backbeat but with the fiddle as the main instrument, you can hear the influence of polka music, which was a big influence on all the Western swing musicians, and through them on rock and roll. Polka music is performed in 2/4 time, and there's a very, *very* strong connection between the polka beat and the backbeat.
 
(I won't go into that too much more here -- I already talked about the backbeat quite a bit in episode two -- but while researching these episodes I found a hugely informative but very detailed look at the development of the rock backbeat -- someone's PhD thesis from twenty years ago, four hundred pages just on that topic, which I'll link on the webpage if you want a much more detailed explanation)
 
Now by looking at the lineup of the Texas Playboys, we can see how the rock band lineup evolved. In 1938 the Texas Playboys had a singer, two guitars (one doubling on fiddle), three fiddlers, a banjo player, steel guitar, bass, drums, piano, trumpet, trombone, and two saxes. A *huge* band, and one at least as swing as it was Western. But around that time, Wills started to use electric guitars -- electric guitars only really became "a thing" in 1938 musically, and a lot of people started using them at the same time, like Benny Goodman's band as we heard about in the first episode. Wills' band was one of the first to use them, and Western musicians generally were more likely to use them, as they were already using amplified *steel* guitars.
 
We talked in episode two about how the big bands died between 1942 and 1944, and Wills was able to make his band considerably smaller with the aid of amplification, so by 1944 he'd got rid of most of his horn section apart from a single trumpet, having his electric guitars play what would previously have been horn lines.
 
So by 1944 the band would consist of two fiddles, two basses, two electric guitars, steel guitar, drums, and a trumpet. A smaller band, an electrified band, and one which, other than the fiddles and the trumpet, was much closer to the kind of lineups that you would get in the 50s and 60s. A smaller, tighter, band.
 
Now, Wills' band quickly became the most popular band in its genre, and he became widely known as "the king of Western Swing", but Wills' music was more than just swing. He was pulling together elements from country, from the blues, from jazz, from anything that could make him popular.
 
And, sadly, that would sometimes include plagiarism.
 
Now, the question of black influence on white music is a fraught one, and one that will come up a lot in the course of this history. And a lot of the time people will get things wrong. There were, of course, white people who made their living by taking black people's music and watering it down. There were also, though, plenty of more complicated examples, and examples of mutual influence.
 
There was a constant bouncing of ideas back and forth between country, western, blues, jazz, swing... all of these genres were coded as belonging to one or other race, but all of them had musicians who were listening to one another. This is not to say that racism was not a factor in who was successful -- of course it was, and this episode is, after all, about someone who started out as a blackface performer, race was a massive factor, and sadly still is -- but the general culture among musicians at the time was that good musicians of whatever genre respected good musicians of any other genre, and there were songs that everyone, or almost everyone, played, in their own styles, simply because a good song was a good song and at that time there wasn't the same tight association of performer and song that there is now -- you'd sometimes have five or six people in the charts with hit versions of the same song. You'd have a country version and a blues version and a swing version of a song, not because anyone was stealing anyone else's music, but because it was just accepted that everyone would record a hit song in their own style.
 
And certainly, in the case of Bob Wills, he was admired by -- and admired -- musicians across racial boundaries. The white jazz guitarist Les Paul -- of whom we'll almost certainly be hearing more -- used to tell a story. Paul was so amazed by Bob Wills' music that in 1938 he travelled from Waukesha Wisconsin, where he was visiting his mother, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to hear Wills' band play, after his mother made him listen to Bob Wills on the radio. Paul was himself a famous guitarist at the time, and he got drawn on stage to jam with the band.
 
And then, in an interval, a black man in the audience -- presumably this must have been an integrated audience, which would have been *very* unusual in 1938 in Oklahoma, but this is how Les Paul told the story, and other parts of it check out so we should probably take his word for it absent better evidence -- came up and asked for Les Paul's autograph. He told Paul that he played guitar, and Paul said for the young man to show him what he could do. The young man did, and Paul said “Jesus, you *are* good. You want to come up and sit in with us?”
 
And he did -- that was the first time that Les Paul met his friend Charlie Christian, shortly before Christian got the offer from Benny Goodman. Hanging out and jamming at a Bob Wills gig.
 
So we can, for the most part, safely put Bob Wills into the mutual respect and influence category. He was someone who had the respect of his peers, and was part of a chain of influences crossing racial and stylistic boundaries.
 
It gets more difficult when you get to someone like Pat Boone, a few years later, who would record soundalike versions of black musicians' hits specifically to sell to people who wouldn't buy music by black people and act as a spoiler for their records. That's ethically very, very dodgy, plus Boone was a terrible musician.
 
But what I think we can all agree on is that just outright stealing a black musician's song, crediting it to a white musician, and making it a massive hit is just wrong. And sadly that happened with Bob Wills' band at least once.
 
Now, Leon McAuliffe, the Texas Playboys' steel guitar player, is the credited composer of "Steel Guitar Rag", which is the instrumental which really made the steel guitar a permanent fixture in country and western music. Without this instrumental, country music would be totally different.
 
[insert a section of "Steel Guitar Rag" by Bob Wills]
 
That's from 1936. Now, in 1927, the guitarist Sylvester Weaver made a pioneering recording, which is now often called the first recorded country blues, the first recorded blues instrumental, and the first slide guitar recording (as I've said before, there is never a first, but Weaver's recording is definitely important). That track is called "Guitar Rag" and... well...
 
[insert "Guitar Rag" by Sylvester Weaver].
 
Leon McAuliffe always claimed he'd never heard Sylvester Weaver's song, and came up with Steel Guitar Rag independently. Do you believe him?
 
So, the Texas Playboys were not averse to a bit of plagiarism. But the song we're going to talk about for the rest of the episode is one that would end up plagiarised itself, very famously.
 
"Ida Red" is an old folk song, first recorded in 1924. In fact, structurally it's a hokum song. As is often the case with this kind of song, it's part of a massive family tree of other songs -- there are blues and country songs with the same melody, songs with different melodies but mentions of Ida Red, songs which contain different lines from the song... many folk songs aren't so much songs in themselves as they are labels you can put on a whole family. There's no one song "Ida Red", there's a whole bunch of songs which are, to a greater or lesser extent, Ida Red. "Ida Red" is just a name you can slap on that family, something you can point to.
 
Most versions of "Ida Red" had the same chorus -- "Ida Red, Ida Red, I'm plum fool about Ida Red" -- but different lyrics, often joking improvised ones. Here's the first version of "Ida Red" to be recorded -- oddly, this version doesn't even have the chorus, but it does have the chorus melody played on the fiddle. This is Fiddlin' Powers and Family, singing about Ida Red who weighs three hundred and forty pounds, in 1924:
 
[insert Fiddlin Powers version of "Ida Red"]
 
Wills' version is very differently structured. It has totally different lyrics -- it has the familiar chorus, but the verses are totally different and have nothing to do with the character of Ida Red -- "Light's in the parlour, fire's in the grate/Clock on the mantle says it's a'gettin' late/Curtains on the window, snowy white/The parlour's pleasant on Sunday night"
 
[insert Bob Wills version of "Ida Red"]
 
Those lyrics -- and all the other lyrics in Wills' version except the chorus, were taken from an 1878 parlour song called "Sunday Night" by George Frederick Root, a Civil War era songwriter who is now best known as the writer of the melody we now know as "Jesus Loves the Little Children". They're cut down to fit into the fast-patter do-si-do style of the song, but they're still definitely the same lyrics as Root's.
 
"Ida Red" was one of many massive hits for Wills and the Texas Playboys, who continued to be hugely successful through the 1940s, at one point becoming a bigger live draw than Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey, although the band's success started to decline when Tommy Duncan quit in 1948 over Wills' drinking -- Wills would often miss shows because of his binge drinking, and Duncan was the one who had to deal with the angry fans. Wills replaced Duncan with various other singers, but never found anyone who would have the same success with him.
 
Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys had a couple of hits in the very early 1950s -- one of them, indeed, was a sequel to Ida Red -- "Ida Red Likes The Boogie", a novelty boogie song of the type we discussed last week. (And think back to what I said then about the boogie fad persisting much longer than it should have. "Ida Red Likes The Boogie" was recorded in 1949 and went top ten in 1950, yet those boogie novelty songs I talked about last week were from 1940).
 
[insert "Ida Red Likes The Boogie"]
 
But even as his kind of music was getting more into fashion under the name rock and roll, Wills himself became less popular. The band were still a popular live attraction through most of the 1950s, but they never again reached the heights of the 30s and 40s, and Wills' deteriorating health and the band's lack of success made them split up in 1965.
 
But before they'd split, Wills' music had had a lasting influence on rock and roll, and not just on the people you might expect. Remember how I talked about plagiarism? Well, in 1955, a musician went into Chess studios with a slight rewrite of "Ida Red" that he called "Ida May". Leonard Chess persuaded him to change the name because otherwise it would be too obvious where he stole the tune... and we will talk about "Maybellene" by Chuck Berry in a few weeks' time.
 
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Episode 1: Flying Home

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Photo of Charlie Christian

Welcome to the first episode proper of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs! As this is the first real episode, you may notice a couple of flaws in the production -- those will hopefully get ironed out in the coming weeks. In the meantime, sit back and listen to the story of "Flying Home" by the Benny Goodman Sextet!

Resources

As always, I've put together a Mixcloud mix of all the songs talked about in this episode, which you can stream here. That mix has "Rhapsody in Blue" by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, "Memories of You" by Louis Armstrong, "Sing Sing Sing" by Benny Goodman, "Flying Home" by Benny Goodman, and "Flying Home" by Lionel Hampton.

For all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book "Before Elvis" by Larry Birnbaum, which goes into these subjects in far more detail than I can.

Lionel Hampton's autobiography is out of print, but you can find second hand copies very cheap.

This is the MP3 compilation I mention of many different versions of "Flying Home", and it has the Benny Goodman Sextet version on it as you'd hope. However, it doesn't have the classic Lionel Hampton version -- you can find that on the four-CD box set The Lionel Hampton Story, which is definitely worth getting.

There are various issues of the Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall show -- here's a decent one.

 

Transcript

We have to start somewhere, of course, and there's no demarcation line for what is and isn't rock and roll, so we're starting well before rock and roll itself, in 1939.
 
We're starting, in fact, with swing.
 
Swing was a form of music that had its roots in 1920s jazz. It's hard to remember now, but when Dixieland jazz was first popularised, in the early 1920s, the reaction to it from "polite society" was essentially the same as to every other black musical form -- it was going to be the end of the world, it was evil "jungle music", it was causing our children to engage in acts of lewdness and intoxication, it was inciting violence... it was, in short, everything that was later said about rock and roll, about hip-hop, and... you get the idea. This might sound ridiculous to modern ears, as we don't normally think of the cornet, the trombone, and the banjo as the most lascivious of instruments, but back in the 1920s this kind of music was considered seriously arousing.
 
And so, as with all of the moral panics around black music, some white people made the music more appetising for other white people, by taking the rough edges off, cleaning it up, and putting it into a suit. In this case, this was done by the aptly-named Paul Whiteman.
 
Whiteman was a violin player and conductor, and he became known as "the king of jazz" for being the bandleader of an all-white band of musicians. Where most jazz bands consisted of eight to ten musicians, all improvising based on head arrangements and interacting with each other, Whiteman's band was thirty-five musicians, playing from pre-written charts. It was polite, clean, and massively popular.
 
Whiteman's band wasn't bad, by any means -- at various times he had musicians like Bix Beiderbecke and Joe Venuti playing for him -- and as you can hear in this performance of "Rhapsody in Blue" they could play some quite exciting jazz. But they were playing something fundamentally different -- something tamer, more arranged, and with the individual players subsumed into the unit.
 
Whiteman still called the music he made jazz, but when other people started playing with similarly big bands, the music became known as "swing". And so from Whiteman, we move to Goodman.
 
Benny Goodman, the "King of Swing", was the leader of the most popular of the pre-war swing bands, as well as being an excellent clarinet player. His band hired arranger Fletcher Henderson (a black musician who led his own excellent band, and who had provided arrangements for Whiteman) to provide their arrangements, and managed to create music that had a lot of the excitement of less-formalised jazz. It was still highly arranged, but it allowed for soloists to show off slightly more than many of the other bands of the time.
 
This is partly because Goodman himself was a soloist. While Whiteman was a bandleader first and foremost -- someone whose talent was in organising a group of other people, a manager rather than a musician (though he was a perfectly serviceable player) -- Goodman was a serious player, someone who would later premiere pieces by Bartók; Poulenc, Aaron Copland and others, and who had, before becoming a band leader, been one of the most in-demand players on small group jazz sessions. Goodman's band was still a big band, but it allowed the soloists far more freedom than many of his competitors did -- and many of Goodman's band members became well known enough individually to go off and form their own big bands.
 
And because Goodman's band had a lot of great soloists in, as well as the thirty-plus-person big band he ran, he also had a number of smaller groups which were made up of musicians from the big band. These would play sets during the same shows as the big band, allowing the best soloists to show off while also giving most of the band a rest. Their performances would be proper jazz, rather than swing -- they would be three, or four, or six musicians, improvising together the way the old Dixieland players had.
 
And importantly, Goodman was one of the first band leaders to lead an integrated band during the segregation era. His small groups started with a trio of Goodman himself (white and Jewish) on clarinet, white drummer Gene Krupa, and black pianist Teddy Wilson. 
 
This integration, like the recruitment of Fletcher Henderson for the arrangements, was the idea of John Hammond, Goodman's brother-in-law. Hammond was an immensely privileged and wealthy man -- his mother was a Vanderbilt, and his uncle on his father's side was the US Ambassador to Spain -- who had decided to use his immense wealth in the service of two goals. The first of those was racial integration, and the second of them was to promote what would now be called "roots" or Americana music -- pre-bop jazz, folk, blues, and gospel. Hammond is someone we'll be hearing a lot more of as this story continues, but at this point he was a DJ, music journalist, and record producer, who used his wealth to get records made and aired that otherwise wouldn't have been made. 
 
Goodman certainly believed in racial equality, by all accounts, but it was Hammond who introduced him to Fletcher Henderson, and Hammond who persuaded him to include black musicians in his band.
 
Goodman wasn't the first white bandleader in America to hire black musicians -- there had been three in the 1920s -- but when he hired Teddy Wilson, no-one had led an integrated group for seven years, and Goodman was hiring him at a time when Goodman was arguably the most popular musician in the USA.
 
And this was a far more radical thing than it seems in retrospect, because Goodman was pushing in two radically different directions -- on the one hand, he was one of the first people to push for mainstream acceptance of jazz music in the classical music world, which would suggest trying to be as conservative as possible, but on the other he was pushing for integration of musicians. Lionel Hampton later quoted him as saying "we need both the black keys and the white keys to play music", which is the sort of facile comparison well-meaning white liberals make now, in 2018, so Goodman saying it eighty years ago is a genuinely progressive statement for the times.
 
Lionel Hampton was another black musician, who joined the trio and turned it into a quartet, He was a virtuoso vibraphonist who more or less defined how that instrument was incorporated into jazz. He appears to have been the first person to use the vibraphone on a jazz record, on a recording by Louis Armstrong of the song "Memories of You" from 1930. Before that, the vibraphone had only ever been used as a novelty instrument -- it was mostly used for radio intermission signals, playing a couple of chimes.
 
In fact, the vibraphone was so new as an instrument that its name had never been settled -- "vibraphone" was just one of a number of trademarks used by different companies making the instrument. The instrument Hampton played was put out under another brand name -- Vibraharp -- and that was what he called it for the rest of his life.
 
Hampton had trained as a drummer before becoming a vibraphone player, and was often billed as "the fastest drummer in the world", but he had a unique melodic sensibility which allowed him to become the premiere soloist on this new instrument. Indeed, to this day Hampton is probably the most respected musician ever to play the vibes.
 
By 1938 Goodman actually reached the point where he was able to bring an integrated band, featuring Count Basie, Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, and Lionel Hampton, plus other black musicians along with white musicians such as Goodman and Krupa, on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, at the time the US' most prestigious music venue. Like many of Goodman's biggest moments, this was the work of Hammond, who after the success of Goodman's show put together a series of other concerts at Carnegie, the "Spirituals to Swing" concerts, which are some of the most important concerts ever in bringing black American music to a white audience. We'll almost certainly talk about those in the future.
 
But getting back to the Goodman show, that Carnegie Hall concert is still one of the greatest live jazz albums ever recorded, and shows that it was entirely possible to create truly exciting music using the swing band template. One particularly impressive performance was the twelve-minute long version of "Sing Sing Sing". Obviously we won't hear that in full here, but here's a brief excerpt of that staggering performance.
 
You can hear the full performance, along with all the other songs excerpted in this podcast, at the Mixcloud page linked in the blog post associated with this podcast).
 
For US cultural context, it would be another nine years before Jackie Robinson was able to break the colour bar in baseball, to give some idea of how extraordinary this actually was. In fact Lionel Hampton would often later claim that it was Goodman hiring him and Wilson (and, later, other black musicians) that paved the way for Robinson's more well-known achievement.
 
The original Benny Goodman Quartet were an extraordinary set of musicians, but by 1939 both Wilson and Krupa had departed for other bands. There would be reunions over the years, but the classic lineup of the quartet had stopped performing together.  Various other pianists (notably Count Basie and Fletcher Henderson) sat in with the Goodman small groups, but he also realised the need to make up for the loss of two such exceptional musicians by incorporating more, and so the Benny Goodman Sextets were formed.
 
Those sextets featured a rotating lineup of musicians, sometimes including the great jazz trumpeter Cootie Williams, but revolved around three soloists -- Goodman himself on clarinet, Hampton on vibraphone, and a new musician, the guitarist Charlie Christian -- a musician who would only have a very short career, but who would come to be better known than any of them.
 
Christian is sometimes erroneously called the first electric guitarist, or the first person to play electric guitar on record, or even the inventor of the electric guitar. He was none of those things, but he was a pioneer in the instrument, and the first person to really bring it to prominence as a solo instrument. The electric guitar allowed a fundamentally different style of guitar playing -- before, the guitar had only really worked either as a solo instrument, as accompaniment for a single vocalist, or at best as a barely-audible rhythm instrument drowned out by the louder pianos and horns of jazz bands. Now the guitar could play single melody lines as loudly as any trumpet or saxophone, and could be used as a solo instrument in an ensemble in the same way as those instruments. This changed the whole approach to the guitar in popular music.
 
While Goodman claimed responsibility for the head arrangements the small groups used, a lot of people think that Christian was responsible for these, too, and certainly the sextet's music has a much more exhilirating feel than the early quartet or trio work.
 
The first song the new Goodman Quintet recorded, on October 2 1939 -- exactly seventy-nine years ago on the date this podcast comes out, if its release goes to plan -- was a pieve called "Flying Home".
 
"Flying Home" is a great example of the early work of the sextet, and quickly became in many ways their signature song. The story of its writing is that the band were on a plane from LA to Atlantic City -- the first time many of the band members had flown at all -- and Hampton started humming the riff to himself. Goodman asked "what's that you're singing", and Hampton said "I don't know, we can call it 'Flying Home' I guess".
 
Goodman and Hampton were credited as the writers, although John Hammond later claimed that he'd heard Christian improvising the riff before it was picked up by the other two men.
 
Before we start looking at the record, I want to address one problem you find with out-of-copyright jazz recordings, and that's that if you're trying to get hold of, or talk about, the right version of a track. Many of the musicians involved recorded multiple versions of songs, those tracks get released on multiple compilations, and tracks get released under different names. For example I have one compilation album -- one which says it's just sixteen different versions of "Flying Home" -- which has the Benny Goodman Sextet recording of the track *and* a "Charlie Christian" recording. Except, of course, the Charlie Christian recording is exactly the same one as the Benny Goodman one, although on that compilation it's taken from a different source as there are different amounts of tape hiss...
 
So it may be that at some point here I identify a recording wrongly -- particularly one of the many, many, Lionel Hampton recordings of the song. I am not pretending to be authoritative here, and I may get things wrong, though I'm trying as best I can to get them right.
 
But what I do know is what the Benny Goodman Sextet version of this song sounded like, and we can hear that now.
 
It's hard to emphasise just how strange this record must have sounded then, nearly eighty years ago, when you consider that electronic amplification was a new thing, that only one electric guitar had ever been recorded before the Sextet sessions, and that the record contained two separate electronically amplified instruments -- Christian's guitar and Hampton's vibraphone. 
 
Other than the vibraphone and clarinet, though, this small group was almost the prototypical rock band -- piano, electric guitar, double bass and drums would be the hallmark instruments of the genre a full twenty years after this record -- and the record seems to anticipate many aspects of the rock genre in many details, especially when Charlie Christian starts his soloing -- his playing now sounds fairly tame, but at the time it was astonishingly advanced both in technique (he was a huge influence on bop, which wouldn't come along for many more years) and in just the sound of it -- no-one else was making music that was amplified in that way, with that timbre.
 
The song, in this version, starts with a simple stride piano intro played by Fletcher Henderson, with Artie Bernstein on the bass and Nick Fatool on the drums. This intro is basically just setting out the harmonic structure, of the verses before the introduction of the main riff. It does a common thing where you have the chords at the top end stay as close to being the same as they can while you have a descending bass -- and the bass includes a few notes that aren't in the same key that the melody is in when it comes in, setting up a little bit of harmonic tension.
 
Once it does come in, the riff sounds *really odd*. This is a vibraphone, a clarinet, and an electric guitar, all playing the same riff in unison. That's a sound that had never been recorded before
 
We then have a very straightforward swing-style clarinet solo by Goodman. I like Goodman's clarinet style a great deal -- he is, in fact, one of the musicians who shaped my sense of melodic structure -- but there's nothing particularly notable about this solo, which could be on any record from about 1925 through about 1945. After another run through of the riff, we get Charlie Christian's solo, which is where things get interesting.
 
Punctuated by bursts from the clarinet and vibraphone, this longer solo (which includes a whole section that effectively acts as a middle eight for the song) is unlike pretty much anything ever played on guitar in the studio before. Christian's short bursts of single-note guitar line are, to all intents and purposes, rockabilly -- it's the same kind of guitar playing we'll hear from Scotty Moore sixteen years later. It doesn't sound like anything revolutionary now, but remember, up to this point the guitar had essentially only been a rhythm instrument in jazz, with a very small handful of exceptions like Django Reinhardt. You simply couldn't play single-note lead lines on the guitar and have it heard over saxes or trumpets until the advent of electification.
 
After Christian's solo, we have one from Lionel Hampton. This solo is just a typical example of Hampton's playing -- he was a stunning jazz vibraphone player, and at the time was on top of his game -- but it's not as astonishing as the one from Christian.
 
And then at the end, we get a whole new riff coming in. This kind of riff had been common in Goodman's work before -- you can hear something similar in his hit version of "King Porter Stomp", for example -- but it would become the hallmark of the jump band style a few years later. This call and response, repetitive riffing, would be the sound that would dominate dance music in the next decades.
 
The song would go on to have a long life after this recording. A couple of years later, Lionel Hampton left Goodman's band to form his own big band, and "Flyin' Home" became their signature song. That band would be one of the first bands to perform a new type of music -- "jump band" music -- which was rooted in swing but had more emphasis on riffs and amplified instruments. That jump band music is the same music that later became known as rhythm and blues, and musicians such as Louis Jordan were clearly inspired by Hampton's band. We'll be looking in future episodes of this podcast at the way in which jump bands became one of the biggest influences on rock and roll.
 
Hampton recorded the song multiple times, starting in 1940, but the most famous example is the version he recorded in 1942 for Decca (with "instrumental foxtrot" on the label. That version features Ilinois Jacquet on saxophone, and like the Benny Goodman version, it would introduce a whole new sound to people.
 
This time, it's Jacquet's tenor sax playing, which has a honk and skronk to it that was unlike anything people had heard before. There are predecessors to it of course -- as I said earlier, there's no "earliest example" of anything in music -- but this saxophone solo became the one that defined a whole new genre, a genre called rhythm and blues. Jacquet's solo was so exceptional that when he left the band, every tenor sax player who replaced him would copy his solo note-for-note rather than improvising their own versions as would usually be the case. 
 
There's another person involved in that recording of "Flying Home" who probably needs mentioning here -- Milt Gabler, the producer. Like John Hammond, he's someone we'll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes.
 
Hampton himself remained a respected and popular musician for many more decades. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the big bands lost a lot of their popularity, and Hampton started playing yet another style of music -- he became one of the greats of bebop music, and played in small groups much like the Goodman ones, just playing more harmonically and melodically complex variations of what he had played earlier. But he was also recognised by the rock musicians as a pioneer -- you can see him in the 1957 Alan Freed film "Mr. Rock and Roll", playing his vibraphone as the only jazz musician in a film which otherwise features Little Richard, Clyde McPhatter, and other rock and R&B stars of the time.
 
Charlie Christian, on the other hand, never even lived to see the influence he had. Even though he was one of the most influential musicians on both jazz and rock music -- Chuck Berry later said that Christian was one of the biggest influences on his guitar playing (though he wrongly said that Christian played with Tommy Dorsey's band, a rival to Goodman's) while Christian was responsible for the name "bebop" being given to the form of music he helped create in jam sessions after his regular work -- he was already suffering from tuberculosis in 1939, when "Flying Home" was recorded. And on March the second, 1941, aged only twenty-five, Charlie Christian died. He was buried in an unmarked grave, which was later concreted over. A memorial was placed for him fifty-three years later, but it was later discovered to be in the wrong place.
 
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