29 WHY DON’T YOU DO RIGHT: AMERICA AT WAR

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For some time after Britain had declared war on Germany, the US lived in a phony peace. Everyone was aware of what was going on in Europe, but in 1940 the country carried on much as it had before. America danced on as European nations began to fall one by one to the Germans. Over the next half-decade the make-up of popular music would undergo accelerated change, taking on board previously hidden influences thanks to two factors: a foreseeable war and totally unforeseen music-industry turmoil.

In 1940 you could go to twenty different places in New York, any night of the week, and catch a big band. Ballrooms, supper rooms, hotels – they were everywhere, and they were very much what the young generation of 1940 wanted. The dance hits of the year were Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’ and ‘Tuxedo Junction’; the romantic hit ‘Darn That Dream’ by Benny Goodman with Mildred Bailey; the big ballad was Tommy Dorsey’s ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’, featuring a vocal refrain from rising star Frank Sinatra. It was boom time in the New World.

If you were a teenage swing fan in 1940, you probably favoured the out-of-town venues, like New Jersey’s Meadowbrook ballroom, and the amusement parks. You might also have been able to sneak into the uptown hotels, because the cover charge was usually no more than seventy-five cents, meaning kids could afford to catch the biggest bands in person. If your particular favourite was playing at a theatre, you could go in the morning, pay your seventy-five cents and stay all day; you would see the same feature film three or four times, but you would also get to see your favourite band three, four or even five times. Band loyalty remained fierce.

Bands that weren’t in residency were on buses and trains, criss-crossing the country, nabbing musicians from each other with the lure of more money and greater prestige. Fletcher Henderson had been the man behind the curtain who wrote Benny Goodman’s arrangements, and Sy Oliver performed the same role for Tommy Dorsey. In 1939 he was with black bandleader Jimmie Lunceford, when he got an offer from Dorsey that he couldn’t refuse: an extra $5,000 per annum. 1939 was a good year for Oliver: he also wrote ‘It Ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)’, cut in the States by Ella Fitzgerald and in Britain by Nat Gonella. ‘Bandleaders would pay much more than they could really afford to get a particular star,’ reckoned Oliver. It was ‘a matter of professional pride’. Dorsey also poached Frank Sinatra from Harry James’s band; when Sinatra went solo, Dorsey then grabbed James’s replacement, Dick Haymes. You could be a well-known singer, or cornet player, or arranger, but working with Tommy Dorsey would make you a household name. ‘Tommy was a star-maker,’ said Haymes. ‘Consider the people he had in his band, my lord… The travelling arrangers were Axel Stordahl, Sy Oliver and Paul Weston. A showcase like you wouldn’t believe.’ Dorsey had not only Sinatra, but also Jo Stafford, who was known for her absolutely perfect pitch.

Big bands and swing had bossed the scene for six years straight, but the war would change this set-up for ever. This was partly down to conscription and partly gradually diminishing demand, but the real revolution – with singers like Sinatra and Stafford moving centre stage, the bandleader’s role being diminished and the professional songwriter’s role challenged – was due to what we would now call ‘industrial action’.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) had been set up by operetta writer Victor Herbert in 1914 to collect money from public performances. Early beneficiaries were Herbert himself, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, who probably heard their own songs played back to them by a band, without recompense, every time they sat down in a restaurant. ASCAP was a very exclusive club, and if you weren’t a member, you got nothing. In 1940 an existing agreement was coming to an end, so ASCAP decided to ask broadcasters for more money. Heck, didn’t Rodgers and Hart deserve it? The broadcasters decided they didn’t and refused to accept the new rates; from 1 January 1941 they simply wouldn’t play any ASCAP music over the air. All that was left for them were foreign songs, folk songs, hillbilly songs and the blues. Bands and singers were faced with the prospect of going off the air. Bands couldn’t promote their new records; songwriters couldn’t push their new songs.

ASCAP sat tight, believing that the public would complain. Nobody did. Nobody. What’s more, ASCAP effectively handed the broadcasters a means to make money from the performing-rights business: between January and October 1941 virtually no ASCAP music would be heard on the air, as the broadcasters had set up their own licensing and collection agency – Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI). And BMI wasn’t snobbish about whether you could write your own sheet music: anyone with a guitar who could whistle a tune could have their song registered with the agency.

So what on earth were the radio stations playing? Clarinettist and bandleader Les Brown had to abandon his regular set and dig out some antiquities: ‘We played [Stephen Foster’s] “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” every show. We had to get a new book overnight if we wanted to play on the air. So we did, because we wanted the exposure.’ Turning to out-of-copyright classical material, Brown also came up with a hit called ‘Bizet Has His Day’. He remembered seeing a memo being passed around radio stations: ‘People will never miss what they don’t hear.’

In the long run, BMI helped to democratise the American music business. No matter how hot the new hillbilly writer from Tennessee, or how exciting the new blues talent from Alabama, they couldn’t get into ASCAP in 1940 – the old school weren’t interested. They considered Broadway shows and film scores to be a league above, and assumed the public agreed. Pretty soon, drummer Gene Krupa’s band had to ditch Gershwin and write new arrangements for Stephen Foster’s ‘Old Black Joe’ and ‘My Old Kentucky Home’, both close to a century old. Foreign songs worked for BMI too: Glenn Miller took a Russian folk melody, ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’ (otherwise known as ‘Yo Heave Ho’), to the top of the nascent Billboard chart; Guy Lombardo played the Viennese theme from the Ingrid Bergman movie Intermezzo; Xavier Cugat, who had been leader of the resident orchestra at the Waldorf-Astoria before the war, capitalised on the tango craze and hit with ‘Perfidia’ in 1940; while Jimmy Dorsey had umpteen new stamps on his passport, bringing ‘Yours (Quiéreme Mucho)’, ‘Maria Elena’ and ‘Amapola’ over from Spain.

By the end of October 1941 ASCAP relented and agreed to a lower licence fee. ‘Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair’ had been played so many times in the previous ten months that Time magazine noted that ‘she was widely reported to have turned grey’. If the ASCAP boycott had unexpectedly broadened the American public’s palate, then another was about to test its patience a little further.

In the spring of 1928 a new machine called the Orchestrope had been unveiled. It was a record player that could take twenty-eight records, and it came with a remote-control wall box with which you could select the record you wanted to hear. Made by the Capehart Automatic Phonograph Corporation, more than six hundred had been manufactured by October, in time for the Chicago Radio Fair, where the Orchestrope caused a sensation, equalling the gasps drawn by another new machine being exhibited at the fair: the television.

Within a year Orchestropes could be found in bars, sweet shops and drug stores across the country. The Capehart Corporation played music to its workers on one of the machines, which was also connected to speakers outside the factory. The company’s newsletter said that ‘every afternoon and evening’, large numbers of cars parked in front of what Capehart called its Singing Tower ‘to listen to the splendid programmes offered’. It’s hard to think of a more classically American scene.

The jukebox – as it became known – would save the record player, record production and record companies. In 1934 the AMI, Seeburg and Mills companies were making 15,000 ‘automatic phonographs’ between them, and they must have been pretty happy with those figures. Then, in 1936, Homer E. Capehart took his know-how to the Wurlitzer company, and they alone shipped 63,000 machines that year. Every bar, every café, every possible jukebox location had a machine. During the Depression, the black jukebox market was one of the main reasons record companies survived. They would be wheeled into houses, where ‘rent parties’ paid the bills for black Americans who weren’t allowed into segregated clubs in the South; then, a week later, they would be taken to another rent party. They were in amusement arcades and drug stores and anywhere that served alcohol. Homer Capehart got rich and became governor of Indiana. Everybody loved a jukebox. Everyone was pretty happy with the situation.

Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?

James Caesar Petrillo was the president of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), a highly disciplined and well-organised union. By the start of 1942 60 per cent of Petrillo’s members were out of work, and he vocally blamed the jukebox. No matter that the Pearl Harbour attack had dragged America into the war a few months earlier, decimating bookings for his musicians at home; Petrillo reckoned the jukebox was ‘scab number one’.I

Petrillo’s intentions were largely honourable, but as misguided as those of anyone from ragtime-baiting George Robey to microphone-hating Al Jolson to the high-horse ASCAP – other folks who had historically tried to jab a stick into the spokes of music-industry progress. There had been hundreds of dance halls and thousands of restaurants employing tens of thousands of musicians not so long ago, Petrillo reasoned. If they now couldn’t get work, why couldn’t they at least get a cut of the record companies’ action? He had been arguing his case for years. Jukeboxes, and the unrestricted playing of records over the air without further payment, were reducing the amount of work for musicians. And so the grim logic for the union was that musicians should stop making records altogether. Eventually, Petrillo instructed artists across America not to take on any recording work after 31 July 1942.

There was a rush by record companies to get into the studio before the strike began. Peggy Lee recalled cutting a last-minute best-seller with Benny Goodman: ‘I used to play Lil Green’s “Why Don’t You Do Right” constantly, and Benny’s room was next to mine. It drove him up the wall. So he said, “Would you like to sing that song and get it out of your mind?” We were told there was about to be a record strike. Benny recorded everything he had in his book. “Why Don’t You Do Right” was at the bottom of the barrel, and it was an instant hit.’

Once the new recordings had all been released, the record companies needed to find old stuff that they could pass off as new, so they dug around in their vaults. When Casablanca came out, Rudy Vallee’s 1931 version of ‘As Time Goes By’ became a hit, as Dooley Wilson – who sang it on screen – was unable to record it for lack of players. Another way around the strike was to make a cappella recordings.

Indeed, the real winners of the strike weren’t the musicians but the vocalists. The Mills Brothers – Donald, Harry, Herbert and bassman John Jr – were a black, jazz-fired barbershop quartet from Piqua, Ohio, where they had started out singing in cinemas between Rin Tin Tin features. Their 1930 recording of ‘Tiger Rag’, a three-minute slice of pure joy made up of just their muted yet zippy harmonies, backed by a single acoustic guitar, was a huge seller; very soon they became regulars on Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, as well as having their own nationally networked show on CBS. Further beautiful records followed with Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Rockin’ Chair’ (1932) and ‘Lazy Bones’ (1934), and Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn’s ‘Sleepy Head’ in 1935. These were international hits, and the Mills Brothers became the first black Americans to play a Royal Command Performance. They were playing in London againII when war broke out. Unable to sail back to the US, they went on to Australia and didn’t get back to the States until 1941. By then the more lugubrious Ink Spots (‘Whispering Grass’, 1940; ‘Do I Worry’, 1941) had stolen their thunder as the new black vocal group of choice. Nevertheless, Decca welcomed them back with open arms: as a self-sufficient a cappella act, the strike had suddenly made the Mills Brothers one of the label’s priority acts. They were rushed into the studio and recorded their biggest-ever hit, ‘Paper Doll’, which went to number one on the Billboard chart in November 1943 and stayed there for twelve weeks.III By the end of the war it had sold six million copies. The Mills Brothers sent a gold disc to James Petrillo.

The big bandleaders were not exactly in sympathy with Petrillo. They wanted to keep their names in the papers – they had investments to protect. Petrillo could claim he was just doing what he was employed to do – acting in good faith for the jobbing sidemanIV – but in doing so he was sacrificing the future of the big bands, and the progress of instrumental music would be hugely affected by the strike. In the end the dispute was settled without fuss, but only once both sides were exhausted. Decca gave in first in September 1943, with RCA Victor and Columbia finally caving more than a year later, on Armistice Day 1944 (either they had a sense of the theatrical or it was a good day to bury bad news). The record companies were now forced to pay a small royalty – roughly 1 per cent of the retail price of each record sold – into the AFM’s fund. The balm of money did its job. Why did the strike end so suddenly? Simply because popular music was constantly evolving, and fobbing the public off with reissues and a cappella songs couldn’t work for ever.

By the start of 1942 World War II had enveloped the American consciousness. The Andrews Sisters put themselves forward as something to fight for, and captured the thoughts and concerns of GIs abroad: ‘Every little Dutch girl says, “Ja, ja,” every little Russian girl says, “Da, da,” why won’t you say, “Sí, sí”?’ A trio from Minnesota, Patty (the youngest, and the lead singer), LaVerne and Maxene modelled themselves strongly on the beloved Boswell Sisters, but sold far more records. After signing to Decca in 1937, they had quickly struck gold with ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen’ (1938), a Yiddish song that has mapped the way for every close-harmony vocal group since; ‘Beer Barrel Polka’ (1939), ‘Ferryboat Serenade’ (1940) and ‘(I’ll Be with You) In Apple Blossom Time’ (1941) followed in short order. The breakneck-speed ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’, released a few months before Pearl Harbour, ensured that when war broke out, they became darlings of the troops, culminating in an eight-week USO tour in 1945.

The main difference between the Boswells and the Andrews Sisters was down to subtraction rather than addition. The Andrews’ ‘Bounce Me, Brother, with a Solid Four’ was a terrific dancer with a telltale, mono-minded title. Did they have a slightly sweeter sound? Maybe, but more significantly they cut out the Boswells’ wild tempo changes and trombone impressions and delivered streamlined dancefloor fillers that would still be getting played in clubs decades later. Their radio and film performances were so numerous that, at their peak, they were earning $20,000 a week. As long as there was a war on they were untouchable, there was no stopping them. Their golden era ended on VJ Day; 1949’s ‘I Can Dream, Can’t I’ would be their sole post-war number one.

The Andrews Sisters’ major addition to the Boswells’ harmonies was boogie-woogie. Originally a piano-based sound, with the left hand playing a walking bassline, it had been cemented as a style by Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith’s ‘Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie’ back in 1928, which itself had been mostly filched from Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis’s ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues’ from a year earlier (Smith and Lewis lived in the same Chicago boarding house, so it’s probably not a coincidence). The style was rhythmically irresistible, and by the turn of the 1940s every swing band had a couple of boogie-woogie numbers, with the bass and treble parts from the piano transposed to brass and reeds. The Andrews Sisters scored their biggest hit with ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’; Will Bradley’s band (‘Boardwalk Boogie’, ‘Down the Road Apiece’, ‘Cryin’ the Boogie Blues’), with star player Freddie Slack on piano, built a whole career around it. But not everyone was a fan. Fats Waller apparently had it written into his contract that he could not be forced to play boogie-woogie. He considered it cheap and unmusical, all repetition and lacking in harmonics (though that didn’t stop him taking on Roosevelt Graves’s boogie-woogie milestone ‘Crazy About My Baby’). Aaron Copland, usually a champion of jazz, moaned that it didn’t have ‘any shred of melodic invention’.V

When swing died, boogie-woogie went back underground, a minority interest for ‘race’ record-buyers and, for the first time, the ‘hillbilly’ market. It switched from piano and big-band arrangements to electric guitar, working its way into R&B, with Big Bill Broonzy, and country, with Arthur Smith and his million-selling 1945 single ‘Guitar Boogie’. Country boogie became an early-1950s craze: there was the Delmore Brothers’ ‘Hillbilly Boogie’ – ‘in the low-down way’ – and Tennessee Ernie’s early hits, such as ‘Catfish Boogie’ and ‘Shotgun Boogie’.VI

The popularity of boogie-woogie was in line with a greater presence of black faces in the entertainment world during America’s war years, even as forces abroad were being segregated in pure Jim Crow fashion. Lena Horne became the first black singer to be booked by the Savoy Plaza Café Lounge in Manhattan; the Ink Spots, working with black bandleader Lucky Millinder, played at the Palomar club in Norfolk, Virginia; and black punters were allowed into suburban as well as downtown theatres in Columbus, Ohio, for the very first time – Billboard, being an industry magazine, saw this as potentially ‘60,000 new customers’.

Industry economics, rather than any shift towards civil rights, dictated this change. A 1944 incident involving Cab Calloway showed how little had really changed. Calloway had been Duke Ellington’s replacement bandleader at the Cotton Club back at the turn of the 1930s, had starred opposite Al Jolson in The Singing Kid (1936) and had written his own guide to jive speak, Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: A Hepster’s Dictionary, in 1938. By the early 1940s he was something of a superstar, a flamboyant figure nicknamed ‘His Hi-De-Ho Highness of Jive’ after the refrain from his million-selling record ‘Minnie the Moocher’. ‘People used to say I had forty suits and forty pairs of shoes,’ he laughed. ‘They were wrong. I had fifty suits and fifty pairs of shoes, with fifty pairs of pearl grey gloves to match.’ Calloway was the snappiest dresser in Harlem, resplendent in long jackets that reached his knees, worn over voluminous trousers, and always with a long watch chain – an outfit that was tagged the ‘zoot suit’. He was a fashion icon. Finding himself at a loose end in Kansas City one night in 1944, he bought a ticket to see Lionel Hampton, but when he got to the door, he was told, ‘No Negroes admitted.’ What happened next led to an NAACP investigation. A security guard claimed he was pushed to the floor, to which he reacted by pulling a gun and beating Calloway around the head. While recovering in hospital, the zoot-suited superstar was charged by the Kansas City police with intoxication and resisting arrest.VII

Still, wartime economics meant that more black Americans had defence-work money to spend, and so more black clubs and cocktail bars began to open, playing more black music on stage and on the jukebox. Philadelphia’s Town Hall switched from booking predominantly white bands to predominantly black as its clientele changed; the beneficiaries were acts like Fats Waller, Nat King Cole and His Trio and the bands of Jimmie Lunceford, Lucky Millinder, Jay McShann and Earl Hines. By 1945 small, black-owned independent record labels like Exclusive (Joe Liggins’s ‘The Honeydripper’, covered with even greater success a year later by Cab Calloway on Columbia) and Gilt Edge (with Cecil Gant’s beautiful blues-based piano ballad ‘I Wonder’) were finding themselves with million-sellers and struggling to keep up with demand. Before too long, smarter operators began to sense a potential gold mine, and the next generation of record labels aimed at black audiences, in both the jazz and the nascent R&B scenes, would be white-run.

In early 1942 the US government rationed record production. The simple reason was that 78s were made of shellac, and the biggest supplier of shellac in the world was Burma, now occupied by the Japanese; any remaining stocks were to be requisitioned by the military. Record companies had to think on their feet and announced that they would pay for any unwanted records, even if they were chipped or cracked, so they could recycle the shellac. Heaven knows how many rarities were lost this way.

The armed forces, though, could still obtain strange hybrid records called V Discs. The ‘V’ was presumably for ‘victory’, though it could have been for ‘vinylite’VIII or possibly ‘Vincent’. Bob Vincent was a five-foot-four army captain who, after lobbying the Pentagon, convinced Army Special Services that music would boost morale and that they should press records expressly for the troops abroad. During World War I record companies had discovered that soldiers didn’t particularly want to be sent blatantly patriotic songs; Talking Machine World had written in 1918 that ‘Rag is the rage… a rag, or at least a song with some syncopation, that is what the boys always ask for.’ So the V Disc was all about popular music, the very best available. It would be used to remind the troops of their friends back home and the towns, soda shops and ballrooms they were fighting for. All fees and profits were waived; government money paid for the recordings, which got around the AFM strike.

V Discs played at 78 rpm but were twelve-inch records rather than the usual ten, and were made of, for the most part, unbreakable vinyl. From 1943 until the immediate post-war period they would be shipped to conflict zones in boxes of twenty-five, along with hand-cranked record players. Bob Vincent was the director of production, and he delegated the selection of the music to half a dozen people, including George T. Simon, editor of Metronome magazine. ‘A lot of the recordings were taken from the air, from broadcasts, or the record companies gave us permission to reissue things that the guys had, like Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine”,’ remembered Simon. ‘The really great thing about V Discs was the fresh material they couldn’t possibly hear any place else [because of the AFM strike].’ V Discs also gave musicians a rare opportunity to go into the studio during the strike. Many of them worked for nothing: not just out of patriotism, but because of the opportunity – they hadn’t had a chance to cut a record, get their message across, be creative, in months or even years. Simon relished the opportunity, and made Vincent sound like a pretty fun boss: ‘This little captain who was in charge of V Discs said, “Just record them wherever you want, whenever you want, as long as you can get them for free.” Well, I talked to Goodman, I talked to Woody [Herman], I talked to Harry James… Louis Armstrong did a fantastic session. It was a ball for me.’

Back in Tin Pan Alley, Irving Berlin ran World War II just like he’d run World War I.

Aside from individual hit songs like ‘When That Man Is Dead and Gone’ (cut by Al Bowlly and Anne Shelton in Britain) and ‘A Little Old Church in England’ (written after he’d heard about the Blitz), Berlin wrote songs whenever he received requests and seemed incapable of turning them down; the hymnal ‘Angels of Mercy’, recorded by Glenn Miller, among others, was written for the Red Cross. On top of this, he took on an all-soldier Broadway show called This Is the Army (1943). He contacted General George Marshall and proposed the show as a way to channel his patriotism, as well as a means of raising money for Army Emergency Relief. Secretly, he also loved the idea of another revue in which he would be the sole producer and songwriter, with a cast of three hundred, including – unlike in World War I, when blackface had been used in Yip Yip Yaphank – black soldiers. He hoped that if any good were to come from the war, it would be to strike a blow for integration: the company of This Is the Army would be the US’s only integrated service unit during World War II. Berlin also saw a different attitude while working alongside these soldiers, compared to those of World War I: ‘They are more serious and grim. They know what they are up against… all the stock standard forms of patriotism are out of this war. Nowadays, the fellows go off quietly and we watch them go quietly.’

Berlin had the main course; Georgia-raised Johnny Mercer mopped up the leftovers. Mercer also wrote a bunch of patriotic songs – ‘GI Jive’ (a hit for Louis Jordan and for Mercer himself) struck a chord – but most didn’t hit. He had a theory about this: ‘I wrote one called “Old Glory”, a funny one called “He Loved Me Till the All-Clear Came”. There was “I’m Doing It for Defence”, “On a Swing Shift”… didn’t mean a thing. I don’t think people believed in wars any more, I don’t think people believed in propaganda.’ He had a point: in America, the biggest song to come out of the conflict was ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’, a huge hit for both Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sisters. Mercer didn’t really need to worry, though, and we’ll be hearing more from him in the post-war age.

The sound of imminent victory came with a silvery big-band burst called ‘Skyliner’ by Charlie Barnet and His Orchestra, with the marvellous Barney Kessel on guitar and a thrilling Neal Hefti arrangement. The optimism, the confidence, the absolute joy of this record are undeniable. Maybe the most potent American war song, though, was ‘I’ll Walk Alone’, with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Sammy Cahn, which was sung by Dinah Shore in the 1944 film Follow the Boys. Cahn was a true professional. ‘We tried to stay one step ahead of the generals,’ he recalled. ‘One day I looked at the maps, and I said to Jule, “You know, I think this war might be turning.” So we wrote “Victory Polka”. A while later I looked at the maps again. I said to Jule, “You know, I think this war might be coming to an end.”’ The pair duly obliged returning soldiers with the warm hug of ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time’, a sensuous lullaby – just what America needed in 1945.

  1. I. You might think that the AFM would have been better off going after radio stations, which were starting to play more records as it was so much cheaper than using live musicians. You’d be right, but the US government had legislated to stop the union doing this, and so the AFM focused on the record labels.
  2. II. John Jr had died in 1936, aged just twenty-five, after falling ill during their first visit to Britain, and was replaced by John Sr. Dad had form, having led his own barbershop quartet – in his own barbershop! – in the 1910s.
  3. III. ‘Paper Doll’’s composer, Johnny S. Black, didn’t live to reap the dividends. He had died after trying to break up a fight in his own Club Dardanella in St Louis, Missouri, five years earlier.
  4. IV. Petrillo’s union was choosy about which musicians it wanted to look out for. The AFM had 673 local branches across the US, of which thirty-two were ‘coloured’. Of the 641 ‘white’ local branches, eight had a subdivision for black musicians. Many, especially in the South, simply didn’t allow black artists to join. Given the high percentage of jukeboxes in black-run venues, and the predominantly black musicians played on those machines, you have to wonder just who Petrillo thought was benefiting from the strike.
  5. V. Copland wasn’t wrong. Boogie-woogie pointed to a future where rhythm and repetition were more significant than the tune. Ahead of it lay rock ’n’ roll, disco, Krautrock, Status Quo. When American concertgoers shouted, ‘Boogie!’ at bands in the 1970s, they may as well have been shouting, ‘Boogie-woogie!’
  6. VI. There’s some geographical intrigue here. Boogie-woogie’s roots seem to lie in east Texas, where George Thomas wrote the confusingly titled ‘New Orleans Hop Scop Blues’, which sounds like primitive boogie-woogie, as early as 1910. In Houston, Dallas and Galveston, workers on the railroads and in the oil fields called this style of playing ‘fast western’ or ‘fast blues’, marking out its difference to the ‘slow blues’ piano styles of New Orleans and St Louis. When George and his brother Hersal migrated from Texas to Chicago, they took boogie-woogie with them. Boogie-woogie heroes Albert Ammons and Meade ‘Lux’ Lewis both claimed the Thomas brothers’ 1922 composition ‘The Fives’ as a major influence.
  7. VII. Taking Cab Calloway’s lead, the zoot suit would come to be favoured by Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. After Pearl Harbour, white servicemen began to regard these dandies in oversized clothes as unpatriotic for wasting valuable American fabric. On 3 June 1943 a group of sailors in downtown Los Angeles were rumoured to have been attacked by a number of ‘pachucos’ – Mexican Americans clad in zoot suits. The next day two hundred uniformed sailors headed for the Mexican American community to take their revenge on any zoot-suiters they spotted. The violence lasted for several days. On 10 June, after playing at Philadelphia’s Met Ballroom, two members of Gene Krupa’s band were rushed to hospital after sailors took exception to the way they were dressed. Thousands of servicemen were by now prowling the streets of Los Angeles, attacking not only any unfortunate zoot-suiter, but also random members of ethnic minorities. The next day Los Angeles City Council banned the wearing of zoot suits, although copycat ‘zoot suit riots’ continued in Chicago, San Diego, Oakland and New York City. Six hundred Mexican Americans were arrested. Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron was keen to state that the riots had been caused purely by ‘juvenile delinquents’. The LA Times was all sympathy: ‘Those gamin dandies, the zoot suiters, having learned a great moral lesson from servicemen, mostly sailors, who took over their instruction three days ago, are staying home nights.’
  8. VIII. This was a new material, used initially because shellac was a scarce resource. It was also more durable, and if vinylite hadn’t also become scarce during the war, it may have found its way into commercial production sooner than 1949.