BENNY GOODMAN - "THE KING OF SWING." 1909-1986.
THE KING SWINGS
Benny Goodman was born the ninth of twelve children to a poor Polish immigrant tailor and his wife in the slums of Chicago on May 30, 1909. It was his father, insisting that all of his children become familiar with music, who first guided the youngster to the clarinet.
Ten year old Benny took to the instrument immediately, impressing his teachers at the local synagogue and Jane Addams Hull House. By the time he was 14 and taking advanced lessons, he was a card-carrying professional musician playing in local bands and at 16 landed a job with Ben Pollak’s West Coast outfit, The Californians. Traveling across the country with Pollak’s band and playing a few recording dates along the way, he left the group at New York City’s Park Central Hotel to free lance in 1929. His sight reading, transposing and improvisation skills soon made him a first-call sideman for recording studio and radio jobs.
Goodman is quoted in Thomas DeLong’s 1980 text The Magic Music Box, “Radio was just beginning to spread out and it seemed to me that a musician’s future was going to be tied up wih it. I felt that I could find a pretty secure living in that field.” And he did - by 1932 he was earning $300 a week, but the Great Depression was underway and before long his income was reduced to a fraction of that amount. Coupled with his disdain for the “square” arrangements he was obligated to play when he did find work, 25 year old Benny Goodman decided to form a band in 1934.
He learned that composer/impresario Billy Rose needed a house band for his new Broadway nightclub, The Music Hall, in June. Goodman and his hastily formed band got the job and as an added bonus, radio exposure with three remote pickups a week by WMCA/New York City. But that came to a crashing halt three months later when Rose left for Europe and brought in new management who promptly fired Goodman’s crew.
During his final week at The Music Hall word reached Goodman that NBC was conducting auditions for a third band to complete its regular weekly trio of orchestras - one sweet, one Latin and one jazz - for Let’s Dance, a three hour, Saturday night musical marathon from 10:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. ET beginning December 1,1934. Santa Claus came early for the Goodman band because it won the contract with NBC and sponsor National Biscuit Company which generously paid for new arrangements every week. (1)
Enter jazz great Fletcher Henderson, who over the next six months, provided the band with some of its memorable swing arrangements - King Porter Stomp, Sometimes I’m Happy, You Turned The Tables On Me, Get Happy, Somebody Loves Me, etc. The guaranteed income also allowed Goodman to add pert 18 year old Helen Ward as its vocalist - later dubbed The Queen of Swing Singers and predecessor to Goodman chirps Martha Tilton, Helen Forrest and Peggy Lee. (2)
The show also gave Goodman the name for his His familiar opening theme, Let’s Dance, a swing adaptation of Carl Maria von Weber’s 1819 concert waltz, Invitation To The Dance. (3) Benny’s mournful closing theme, Goodbye, was written in 1935 by Gordon Jenkins when he was an arranger for the Isham Jones orchestra only to have it turned down by Jones as “too sad”.
Let’s Dance did its job furthering the popularity of Nabisco's Premium Saltines, Oreos, Honey Grahams, Shredded Wheat and the rest of the line. But a crippling labor strike halted production in the spring and the program was cancelled in late May.
Nevertheless, the show had brought a degree of fame and familiarity to Goodman’s band which earned it a booking at New York’s Hotel Roosevelt Grill as vacation replacement for Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians. Diners used to the sedate rhythms of Lombardo’s businessman’s bounce seemed shocked by Goodman’s brand of orchestrated jazz - or swing - 14 sidemen driven by the beat of Gene Krupa’s drums.
Benny was warned to back off and “go commercial,” if he wanted to keep the gig. The band finished the engagement as told then left on a cross-country tour of mostly one nighters that would take them to Los Angeles.
The tour began disastrously. The few fans of the new music called swing wanted to see the band they had heard on Let’s Dance but Goodman was under orders to hold back. The results were dissatisfaction all around, uninspired performances, poor reviews, bad attendance and threats of cancellation. The band finally limped into Los Angeles for its last engagement of the tour at the Palomar Ballroom on August 21st.
The night started as all the others on the tour - soft, sweet arrangements of saccharine songs met by bored, disappointed dancers who paid their 65 cents per couple to hear the Benny Goodman they had heard on Let’s Dance. But this crowd was different.
Goodman’s portion of the Saturday night show that had been performed to a sparse audience from 12:30 to 1:30 a.m. Eastern time was broadcast live by Los Angeles affiliate KFI from 9:30 to 10:30 p.m., in the heart of prime time. The shows created swing fans - Benny Goodman swing fans - who began shouting out their favorite titles up to the Palomar bandstand.
Goodman described the night in his autobiography The Kingdom of Swing thusly: “The whole thing had gotten to the point where it was make or break. If we had to flop at least I’d do it my own way, playing the kind of music I wanted to. For all I knew it might be our last night together and we might as well have a good time while we had the chance. I called out some of our big Fletcher Henderson arrangements for the next set and the boys seemed to get the idea. From the moment I kicked them off they dug in with some of the best playing I’d heard since we’d left New York.”
The crowd responded with deafening cheers. Wednesday, August 21,1935, has been noted in popular music history as the beginning of the Swing Era and a half-hour of the event was broadcast beyond the Palomar by KHJ/Los Angeles at 11:00 p.m. when the memorable evening was at its peak. (4) Far from his last night at the massive ballroom, Benny Goodman’s stay was extended to two months, often playing to crowds that neared 10,000.
The success of this engagement led to a six-month booking at Chicago’s Congress Hotel and weekly exposure - sometimes as many a four late night remotes a week - on NBC’s powerful WMAQ and any affiliates that wanted the sustaining half-hours. Goodman was busy in the recording studio, too, cutting such memorable sides as Goody Goody and Stompin’ At The Savoy for RCA’s Bluebird label. (5) And on March 17, 1936, the band debuted on NBC’s Elgin Revue starring comics Eddie Dowliing and Ray Dooley - a 13 week variety show that earned a weak 5.6 rating that placed 82nd in the 1935-36 ratings.
But it gained more exposure for Goodman’s group and they spent the summer in Hollywood filming The Big Broadcast of 1937 starring Jack Benny and Burns & Allen at Paramount and played on a CBS Tuesday night half hour R.J. Reynolds' Camel cigarettes in a pitch for the youth market. (6)
The band’s big Network Radio break came on December 29, 1936, when it took up residence at Jack Oakie’s College, an hour long variety show sponsored by Camels. The combination of Oakie’s humor and Goodman’s music paid off in a 9.6 rating and a Top 30 ranking but it was broken up in the summer when the band left for East Coast engagements and R.J. Reynolds split the hour in half with the comedian and clarinetist each taking half an hour and the 10:00 p.m. ET portion called Benny Goodman’s Swing School.
The first available air check of the Goodman band is the Swing School from August 10, 1937. The technical quality of this recording is not great, but the music is.
The band began an engagement at the Manhattan Room of the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City in the fall and was obligated to three late night remotes a week, two on CBS and one on Mutual in addition to the polished Tuesday night Swing School for Camels. The October 13, 1937 CBS remote is also posted below. The 30 minute broadcast was split at 14:45 with a CBS system cue and cutaway for station identification or break point for affiliates leaving the network for local programming. The show features the Goodman Trio with Teddy Wilson and the Quartet with Lionel Hampton, but the novelty of the broadcast is Martha Tilton’s singing I’d Like to See Some More a Samoa without laughing. Two more broadcasts from this stand are: November 4, (Mutual), and December 22, 1937, (CBS).
Benny Goodman’s Swing School took on a finished sound in the fall of 1937 as evidenced in the air check from November 16, 1937, although Goodman and announcer Dan Seymour continued their ridiculous “campus” dialogue, referring to each other as Professor and Doctor. Nevertheless, the audience liked it and Swing School returned a 10.7 average rating which ranked 33rd among all prime time programs for the season.
The show’s title and silly pretense were dropped for the 1938-39 season when the program simply became The Camel Caravan as evidenced in the show from September 6th. But competitive trouble was brewing when NBC scheduled its popular sitcom Fibber McGee & Molly on Tuesday at 9:30 p.m. ET opposite Goodman’s band.
CBS and sponsor R.J. Reynolds reacted at the first of the year by adding composer/vocalist Johnny Mercer to the cast. Mercer is highlighted in the post from January 3, 1939, when only passing mention is given to the now legendary Carnegie Hall concert performed by the Goodman band a year earlier. (7)
Johnny Mercer’s role in the program was increased to co-host and head of another contrived group of Goodman fans, The Hot Club. The band and Mercer left on a tour of one-week stands in metropolitan theaters in the early spring and the show originated wherever they were playing. The pair attempted to make light of their poor script reading abilities as evidenced in their broadcast from Philadelphia’s Earle Theater on February 14, 1939. But their humor couldn’t match the competition - Camel Caravan’s season rating slipped to 8.6 and 55th place against Fibber McGee & Molly’s Top Five rating of 17.6.
Perhaps the best broadcast of this series is posted below from May 2, 1939, at the Chicago Theater in Benny’s hometown which opens with Jumpin’ At The Woodside, includes Chicago by the Goodman Quartet, the wonderful And The Angels Sing sung by Martha Tilton with the classic trumpet solo by Ziggy Elman who composed the piece with Mercer, then concludes with the breathless Clarinet Marmalade.
The band's Camel Caravan was moved to Saturday nights on NBC at 10:00 p.m. ET for its final season in 1939-40 without Mercer or Tilton and became little more than a remote as it toured the country breaking attendance records. Its ratings didn’t budge from the previous season's 8.6 but its rating slipped to 78th.
Benny Goodman led his band on to other radio series, movies and huge record sales, never losing his crown as The King of Swing. His words from 1929 proved prophetic: “I felt that I could find pretty secure living in that field.”
He did.
(1) Goodman later said of the audition, “I played as if my life depended on it for in a way it did.” His “hot” outfit rotated with Xavier Cugat’s Latin unit and a sweet house orchestra led by Murray Kellner aka Kel Murray.
(2) Historians differ on the year of Helen Ward’s birth, 1913 or 1916, but agree that she and Benny Goodman were temporarily engaged in 1936 until he broke up with her to concentrate on his career.
(3) A concert waltz is defined as one which is intended for listening rather than dancing - an apt description of many titles in the Goodman repertoire.
(4) Benny Goodman’s four weeks at the Palomar was broadcast Monday through Saturday from 11:00 to 11:30 p.m. PT by KHJ/Los Angeles and Don Lee Network stations along the West Coast.
(5) During this period Goodman broke the industry’s racial barrier by hiring black pianist Teddy Wilson to join Gene Krupa and himself as the Benny Goodman Trio. In 1936 he added vibraphone great Lionel Hampton to create the Benny Goodman Quartet.
(6) The band later appeared in Warner Brothers’ Hollywood Hotel, (1937) and Stage Door Canteen, (1943), 20th Century Fox’s The Gang’s All Here, (1943) and Sweet & Low-Down, (1945).
(7) The legendary Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert in New York City on Sunday, January 16, 1938, was performed to a sold out audience of 2,760. The concert was privately recorded by wealthy Albert Marx as an anniversary present for his wife, Helen Ward, Goodman’s vocalist from 1935-37, with a second copy for Goodman which was duplicated for Columbia Records’ best selling album of 1950.
Copyright © 2016, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
Benny Goodman was born the ninth of twelve children to a poor Polish immigrant tailor and his wife in the slums of Chicago on May 30, 1909. It was his father, insisting that all of his children become familiar with music, who first guided the youngster to the clarinet.
Ten year old Benny took to the instrument immediately, impressing his teachers at the local synagogue and Jane Addams Hull House. By the time he was 14 and taking advanced lessons, he was a card-carrying professional musician playing in local bands and at 16 landed a job with Ben Pollak’s West Coast outfit, The Californians. Traveling across the country with Pollak’s band and playing a few recording dates along the way, he left the group at New York City’s Park Central Hotel to free lance in 1929. His sight reading, transposing and improvisation skills soon made him a first-call sideman for recording studio and radio jobs.
Goodman is quoted in Thomas DeLong’s 1980 text The Magic Music Box, “Radio was just beginning to spread out and it seemed to me that a musician’s future was going to be tied up wih it. I felt that I could find a pretty secure living in that field.” And he did - by 1932 he was earning $300 a week, but the Great Depression was underway and before long his income was reduced to a fraction of that amount. Coupled with his disdain for the “square” arrangements he was obligated to play when he did find work, 25 year old Benny Goodman decided to form a band in 1934.
He learned that composer/impresario Billy Rose needed a house band for his new Broadway nightclub, The Music Hall, in June. Goodman and his hastily formed band got the job and as an added bonus, radio exposure with three remote pickups a week by WMCA/New York City. But that came to a crashing halt three months later when Rose left for Europe and brought in new management who promptly fired Goodman’s crew.
During his final week at The Music Hall word reached Goodman that NBC was conducting auditions for a third band to complete its regular weekly trio of orchestras - one sweet, one Latin and one jazz - for Let’s Dance, a three hour, Saturday night musical marathon from 10:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. ET beginning December 1,1934. Santa Claus came early for the Goodman band because it won the contract with NBC and sponsor National Biscuit Company which generously paid for new arrangements every week. (1)
Enter jazz great Fletcher Henderson, who over the next six months, provided the band with some of its memorable swing arrangements - King Porter Stomp, Sometimes I’m Happy, You Turned The Tables On Me, Get Happy, Somebody Loves Me, etc. The guaranteed income also allowed Goodman to add pert 18 year old Helen Ward as its vocalist - later dubbed The Queen of Swing Singers and predecessor to Goodman chirps Martha Tilton, Helen Forrest and Peggy Lee. (2)
The show also gave Goodman the name for his His familiar opening theme, Let’s Dance, a swing adaptation of Carl Maria von Weber’s 1819 concert waltz, Invitation To The Dance. (3) Benny’s mournful closing theme, Goodbye, was written in 1935 by Gordon Jenkins when he was an arranger for the Isham Jones orchestra only to have it turned down by Jones as “too sad”.
Let’s Dance did its job furthering the popularity of Nabisco's Premium Saltines, Oreos, Honey Grahams, Shredded Wheat and the rest of the line. But a crippling labor strike halted production in the spring and the program was cancelled in late May.
Nevertheless, the show had brought a degree of fame and familiarity to Goodman’s band which earned it a booking at New York’s Hotel Roosevelt Grill as vacation replacement for Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians. Diners used to the sedate rhythms of Lombardo’s businessman’s bounce seemed shocked by Goodman’s brand of orchestrated jazz - or swing - 14 sidemen driven by the beat of Gene Krupa’s drums.
Benny was warned to back off and “go commercial,” if he wanted to keep the gig. The band finished the engagement as told then left on a cross-country tour of mostly one nighters that would take them to Los Angeles.
The tour began disastrously. The few fans of the new music called swing wanted to see the band they had heard on Let’s Dance but Goodman was under orders to hold back. The results were dissatisfaction all around, uninspired performances, poor reviews, bad attendance and threats of cancellation. The band finally limped into Los Angeles for its last engagement of the tour at the Palomar Ballroom on August 21st.
The night started as all the others on the tour - soft, sweet arrangements of saccharine songs met by bored, disappointed dancers who paid their 65 cents per couple to hear the Benny Goodman they had heard on Let’s Dance. But this crowd was different.
Goodman’s portion of the Saturday night show that had been performed to a sparse audience from 12:30 to 1:30 a.m. Eastern time was broadcast live by Los Angeles affiliate KFI from 9:30 to 10:30 p.m., in the heart of prime time. The shows created swing fans - Benny Goodman swing fans - who began shouting out their favorite titles up to the Palomar bandstand.
Goodman described the night in his autobiography The Kingdom of Swing thusly: “The whole thing had gotten to the point where it was make or break. If we had to flop at least I’d do it my own way, playing the kind of music I wanted to. For all I knew it might be our last night together and we might as well have a good time while we had the chance. I called out some of our big Fletcher Henderson arrangements for the next set and the boys seemed to get the idea. From the moment I kicked them off they dug in with some of the best playing I’d heard since we’d left New York.”
The crowd responded with deafening cheers. Wednesday, August 21,1935, has been noted in popular music history as the beginning of the Swing Era and a half-hour of the event was broadcast beyond the Palomar by KHJ/Los Angeles at 11:00 p.m. when the memorable evening was at its peak. (4) Far from his last night at the massive ballroom, Benny Goodman’s stay was extended to two months, often playing to crowds that neared 10,000.
The success of this engagement led to a six-month booking at Chicago’s Congress Hotel and weekly exposure - sometimes as many a four late night remotes a week - on NBC’s powerful WMAQ and any affiliates that wanted the sustaining half-hours. Goodman was busy in the recording studio, too, cutting such memorable sides as Goody Goody and Stompin’ At The Savoy for RCA’s Bluebird label. (5) And on March 17, 1936, the band debuted on NBC’s Elgin Revue starring comics Eddie Dowliing and Ray Dooley - a 13 week variety show that earned a weak 5.6 rating that placed 82nd in the 1935-36 ratings.
But it gained more exposure for Goodman’s group and they spent the summer in Hollywood filming The Big Broadcast of 1937 starring Jack Benny and Burns & Allen at Paramount and played on a CBS Tuesday night half hour R.J. Reynolds' Camel cigarettes in a pitch for the youth market. (6)
The band’s big Network Radio break came on December 29, 1936, when it took up residence at Jack Oakie’s College, an hour long variety show sponsored by Camels. The combination of Oakie’s humor and Goodman’s music paid off in a 9.6 rating and a Top 30 ranking but it was broken up in the summer when the band left for East Coast engagements and R.J. Reynolds split the hour in half with the comedian and clarinetist each taking half an hour and the 10:00 p.m. ET portion called Benny Goodman’s Swing School.
The first available air check of the Goodman band is the Swing School from August 10, 1937. The technical quality of this recording is not great, but the music is.
The band began an engagement at the Manhattan Room of the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City in the fall and was obligated to three late night remotes a week, two on CBS and one on Mutual in addition to the polished Tuesday night Swing School for Camels. The October 13, 1937 CBS remote is also posted below. The 30 minute broadcast was split at 14:45 with a CBS system cue and cutaway for station identification or break point for affiliates leaving the network for local programming. The show features the Goodman Trio with Teddy Wilson and the Quartet with Lionel Hampton, but the novelty of the broadcast is Martha Tilton’s singing I’d Like to See Some More a Samoa without laughing. Two more broadcasts from this stand are: November 4, (Mutual), and December 22, 1937, (CBS).
Benny Goodman’s Swing School took on a finished sound in the fall of 1937 as evidenced in the air check from November 16, 1937, although Goodman and announcer Dan Seymour continued their ridiculous “campus” dialogue, referring to each other as Professor and Doctor. Nevertheless, the audience liked it and Swing School returned a 10.7 average rating which ranked 33rd among all prime time programs for the season.
The show’s title and silly pretense were dropped for the 1938-39 season when the program simply became The Camel Caravan as evidenced in the show from September 6th. But competitive trouble was brewing when NBC scheduled its popular sitcom Fibber McGee & Molly on Tuesday at 9:30 p.m. ET opposite Goodman’s band.
CBS and sponsor R.J. Reynolds reacted at the first of the year by adding composer/vocalist Johnny Mercer to the cast. Mercer is highlighted in the post from January 3, 1939, when only passing mention is given to the now legendary Carnegie Hall concert performed by the Goodman band a year earlier. (7)
Johnny Mercer’s role in the program was increased to co-host and head of another contrived group of Goodman fans, The Hot Club. The band and Mercer left on a tour of one-week stands in metropolitan theaters in the early spring and the show originated wherever they were playing. The pair attempted to make light of their poor script reading abilities as evidenced in their broadcast from Philadelphia’s Earle Theater on February 14, 1939. But their humor couldn’t match the competition - Camel Caravan’s season rating slipped to 8.6 and 55th place against Fibber McGee & Molly’s Top Five rating of 17.6.
Perhaps the best broadcast of this series is posted below from May 2, 1939, at the Chicago Theater in Benny’s hometown which opens with Jumpin’ At The Woodside, includes Chicago by the Goodman Quartet, the wonderful And The Angels Sing sung by Martha Tilton with the classic trumpet solo by Ziggy Elman who composed the piece with Mercer, then concludes with the breathless Clarinet Marmalade.
The band's Camel Caravan was moved to Saturday nights on NBC at 10:00 p.m. ET for its final season in 1939-40 without Mercer or Tilton and became little more than a remote as it toured the country breaking attendance records. Its ratings didn’t budge from the previous season's 8.6 but its rating slipped to 78th.
Benny Goodman led his band on to other radio series, movies and huge record sales, never losing his crown as The King of Swing. His words from 1929 proved prophetic: “I felt that I could find pretty secure living in that field.”
He did.
(1) Goodman later said of the audition, “I played as if my life depended on it for in a way it did.” His “hot” outfit rotated with Xavier Cugat’s Latin unit and a sweet house orchestra led by Murray Kellner aka Kel Murray.
(2) Historians differ on the year of Helen Ward’s birth, 1913 or 1916, but agree that she and Benny Goodman were temporarily engaged in 1936 until he broke up with her to concentrate on his career.
(3) A concert waltz is defined as one which is intended for listening rather than dancing - an apt description of many titles in the Goodman repertoire.
(4) Benny Goodman’s four weeks at the Palomar was broadcast Monday through Saturday from 11:00 to 11:30 p.m. PT by KHJ/Los Angeles and Don Lee Network stations along the West Coast.
(5) During this period Goodman broke the industry’s racial barrier by hiring black pianist Teddy Wilson to join Gene Krupa and himself as the Benny Goodman Trio. In 1936 he added vibraphone great Lionel Hampton to create the Benny Goodman Quartet.
(6) The band later appeared in Warner Brothers’ Hollywood Hotel, (1937) and Stage Door Canteen, (1943), 20th Century Fox’s The Gang’s All Here, (1943) and Sweet & Low-Down, (1945).
(7) The legendary Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert in New York City on Sunday, January 16, 1938, was performed to a sold out audience of 2,760. The concert was privately recorded by wealthy Albert Marx as an anniversary present for his wife, Helen Ward, Goodman’s vocalist from 1935-37, with a second copy for Goodman which was duplicated for Columbia Records’ best selling album of 1950.
Copyright © 2016, Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL Email: tojimramsburg@gmail.com
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