Unit 5 -- The Swing Era and World War II

Unit 5 – The Swing Era and World War II

(ca. 1935-1945)

 

By the 1930s, jazz had become an important mainstream style of popular music in the United States. Jazz bands had been getting bigger and bigger, and by the time of the mid-1930s there was a new style of jazz called the big bands, or swing. The term swing refers to a particular rhythmic feeling in jazz (the word was used in earlier jazz as well) that results from a combination of a steady beat with flexible syncopation that compels one to dance or move physically to the music. Indeed, an important social function of swing jazz as popular music was to provide music for people to dance to.

Because the bands (also called orchestras) were larger, it was necessary for performances to involve more composed elements in the music—too many musicians improvising at once would have been unwieldy. The music for swing orchestras was largely composed ahead of time by a staff composer or arranger. Only the featured soloists in a performance had room to improvise. It was the bandleaders who were the real stars of this era—people like Duke Ellington who were usually composers and performers but were best known as the directors of their orchestras.

Below is a recording of Take the A Train, a piece played by Duke Ellington and his orchestra and composed by Billy Strayhorn. Billy Strayhorn was Ellington’s composer for many years and helped to define the sound of the orchestra as well as provide its signature tunes. When Ellington and Strayhorn first met at the suggestion of a mutual friend, Ellington gave Strayhorn directions to get to Harlem, where Ellington was based. One of the directions, once Strayhorn got to New York City, was to “take the A train.” This became the name of the tune Strayhorn wrote, and it became the trademark tune of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

 

The form of the performance is typical of the big band era. It opens with Ellington himself playing an intro on the piano. Then the band plays the tune once. Notice that the tune is in the same AABA form that is typical of Tin Pan Alley songs. After the first statement of the tune, various soloists or sections of the large orchestra improvise or play variations on the tune, with the original chord sequence always serving as the organizing principle. Each repetition of the tune (or improvisation on it) is called a chorus.

 

You can read more about Duke Ellington here and Billy Strayhorn here. 

Here is a live performance of Take the A Train, with Ellington speaking at the beginning and introducing Strayorn.

 

 

Harlem in the Swing Era 

That Ellington was based in Harlem is not surprising. As in the 1920s, Harlem continued to be a capital of African American art, music, literature, philosophy and politics. Many of the prominent jazz musicians naturally had connections to this section of New York City, and many of the most famous jazz clubs were located there. The Cotton Club, the Savoy Ballroom and the Apollo Theater were among the most popular venues for jazz. It was fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s for whites in New York to travel uptown to Harlem for jazz-related entertainment—a practice they referred to as “slumming.” However things were still pretty segregated. Audiences for jazz and other performances were typically all-white or all-black. These were rules that were enforced, regardless of the racial makeup of the performing group. For example, Duke Ellington and other black musicians often performed at the Cotton Club, but only whites were allowed in the audience.

 

Country Music in the Swing Era

Country music also continued to grow in popularity during this era (the late 1930s to early 1940s), largely as a result of radio programs like The Grand Ole Opry, which had been making the music available to the masses over the airwaves since the 1920s. Traditional country music, continuing the work of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, was exemplified by Roy Acuff.

 

It was during this era that the idea of country and western music began to emerge. In the beginning country music had a mostly Southern image (its roots were deepest in Virginia and Tennessee). In order to appeal to a wider audience, many country musicians began grooming themselves as Western and began wearing cowboy hats and projecting much of a certain image that is still associated with country music today.

The singing cowboy was a popular phenomenon. Geny Autry is a typical example. He began as a musician influenced by country music but really became popular when he began appearing in his cowboy persona in movies.

 

An important development was a synthesis of country and jazz know as Western swing. This style was developed primarily in Texas and also incorporates elements of blues and Texas-Mexican (Tejano) music. The most famous was Bob Wills, whose band was called the Texas Playboys. This style of music would become influential outside of country music—in particular, it had an important influence on the development of rock and roll in the 1950s.

 

You can read more about Bob Wills here.

 

American Nationalism

We earlier noted that George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and his opera Porgy and Bess, were part of an effort by American composers to create a distinctly American style of classical music (art music or cultivated music). Aaron Copland was another example of this American nationalist movement in cultivated music, though he approached it in a different way.

After pursuing a modernist style influenced by Igor Stravinsky and jazz in the 1920s, Copland turned to what is described as his populist style in the 1930s and 1940s. In works like Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Billy the Kid (all ballets), Copland drew on American folk music sources and impressions of rural America for his musical style. Although, he was a native New Yorker, he had a knack for writing music that sounds like the wide open spaces of Middle America. His “Hoedown” from Rodeo is a good example.

 

 

You can read more about Copland here.

The Context of the Great Depression and World War II

All of the music discussed above has an important relationship to the historical moment of the Depression and World War II. Swing, with its impulse to dance, was an important escape for people who were suffering hardship or had relatives at war. Both country music and Copland’s American nationalist works projected a nostalgic image of the United States that gave people an ideal image of the country to remind them what they were fighting for—whether that ideal (admittedly white-washed) image of the country ever actually existed or not, it served as inspiration in a time of need.