SUMMERTIME, BUT THE livin’ ain’t easy. It is 1939 and the news is bad. Europe is headed toward war. Everyone knows it and almost everyone dreads it. The final straw is the nonaggression pact negotiated by the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, von Ribbentrop and Molotov. Signed in August, the agreement gives Hitler a free hand to roll his tanks into the countries on either side of Germany: first Poland to the east, then France and Belgium and Holland to the west. Hitler has taken Austria, the Rhineland, and Czechoslovakia without resistance. His next move will trigger the cataclysm. Stalin, meanwhile, will gobble up Finland. Churchill can see it happening. So can Roosevelt, to whom the threat is not nearly so immediate. It is just a matter of time.
In music, the big bands are playing, and the joint is jumpin’. When the decade is young, the Duke Ellington Orchestra and the voice of Ivie Anderson deliver the message: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” In Hollywood, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields collaborate on songs for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to sing and dance to in Swing Time. “The Way You Look Tonight,” which Fred sings to Ginger, walks off with the year’s Academy Award for best song in 1936. Swing officially becomes king in 1938 when the Benny Goodman Orchestra gives a concert in Carnegie Hall that is hailed as a breakthrough. Goodman starts with Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” and Rodgers’s “Blue Room” and moves on to “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Sing, Sing, Sing,” the very sound of the decade with Gene Krupa on the drums.
In 1939 the most successful bands in the country were those of Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. The top singers were Bing Crosby, Jack Leonard, and Bob Eberly on the male side and Ella Fitzgerald, Mildred Bailey, and Billie Holiday among the women. The Benny Goodman band’s recording of “And the Angels Sing,” Ziggy Elman’s klezmer classic with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, was the top song. The previous year’s biggest hit, Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine,” was still up there, and Glenn Miller had three hits on his hands: “Moonlight Serenade,” “In the Mood,” and “Little Brown Jug.” Harry James’s “Ciribiribin” made it into the top ten and became his theme song.
On Thursday, August 31, 1939, Frank Sinatra and the Harry James Orchestra recorded “All or Nothing at All” (music, Arthur Altman; words, Jack Lawrence). The boy singer stretched his two-octive range to the max by hitting a high F at the end of the song. It sold eight thousand copies when originally released and a million when rereleased four years later. Two things had happened in the interim. James Caesar Petrillo, the despotic head of the American Federation of Musicians, called for a strike of instrumentalists to commence on August 1, 1942. Columbia Records was desperate for material other than that produced by a lonely voice surrounded by a syrupy a cappella chorus in place of musical instruments. The second thing that had happened was the phenomenon. Call it what you will: Frankophilia, Swoonatra, the rise of the unlikely bony heartthrob with the big Adam’s apple, the “Voice That Has Thrilled Millions.”
On Thursday, August 31, 1939, Germany issued an ultimatum, making sixteen demands of Poland and its allies, none of them realistic, and Britain began evacuating children and invalids from London to country shires. The next day Germany marched into Poland, firing the first shots of a conflict destined to end in the unconditional surrender of one side or the other. The ambiguities that marked the end of World War I would stand as a lesson to President Roosevelt. This time there would be no negotiated outcome. This time it would be all or nothing at all.