Swing in Austin

Many of the concerts discussed in this exhibit happened during the height of the iconic Swing Era (1935-1945), a period which typically brings to mind the beautiful and acrobatic dance maneuvers of jitterbugs and the up-tempo propulsion of big bands. Swing was a young people’s music and UT students were not exceptional—they also participated in the Swing moment . Benny Goodman’s orchestra , usually seen as the quintessential example of the Swing band, played at UT in November 1935, just a handful of months after his famous appearance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles (which is often considered the starting moment of the Swing period).

And Goodman’s concert was not an isolated event—his was only one of many national Swing bands to show up in person on the 40 acres. UT students heard many of what are now considered to be the premier Swing bands of all time: Ellington’s orchestra with Jimmy Blanton and Ben Webster; Count Basie’s 1941 band with the legendary rhythm section of Freddie Green, Walter Page, and Jo Jones (plus blues vocalist Jimmy Rushing; saxophonists Don Byas, Tab Smith, and Buddy Tate; and trumpeters Harry “Sweets” Edison and Buck Clayton); Jimmie Lunceford’s band from the mid-to-late 1930s with Sy Oliver; Fletcher Henderson ; Benny Carter (probably with Max Roach or J.J. Johnson); the Dorsey Brothers (with Frank Sinatra and Buddy Rich/Gene Krupa on drums); and Stan Kenton (with June Christy).

There seems to have been a lively swing dance culture at the Cotton Club and UT . During the 1938 Fall semester, “no dance was complete unless it found students shining and shagging [through the Big Apple swing dance] til they were ready to drop,” the 1938 Cactus claimed. There were enough good dancers that the Driskill Hotel hosted a competition to “find the best Big Apple dancers in Austin” and the Cotton Club held a benefit “Big Apple Contest” with the dance band from Prairie View University in 1938 to raise money for the construction of the Tillotson College Gym.3 Jimmie Lunceford’s band was especially popular with jitterbuggers at UT and there was a “Jitterbug Jam Session” which featured champion white dancers.

The University of Texas had its own local version of John Hammond and Leonard Feather: E. Gartly Jaco. Jaco, a young student and jazz drummer, participated in the wider birth of jazz criticism in the 1930s and reflected many of the same Popular Front ideas about jazz that the critics in New York espoused. An editor for the Daily Texan, Jaco began to write a series of jazz columns in the early 1940s. In one “Record Session,” he covered the pioneering jazz magazines Down Beat and Metronome’s “anti-prejudice campaign” in the entertainment business. African American musicians faced economic discrimination, he reported, because of racism. “Jazz and swing were originally the Negro’s music,” he maintained, and “the immortals of the various instruments are Negroes.” As the primary innovators, it was especially unfair that black bands were not given the top jobs. Jaco connected the anti-prejudice campaign in jazz to a larger black freedom struggle: “this racial prejudice in the swing industry is just another cog in the entire nation’s discrimination against the Negro, in American life and business. After the present war, this will be one of the many problems that will have to be settled once and for all before we can call these United States a true democracy.”6

This integration was not always welcomed, however. In 1941, Artie Shaw had organized a tour throughout the South. As part of the string of dances, he was scheduled to play at UT on October 4th. A number of Southern hotel owners tried to persuade Shaw to not include Hot Lips Page, his African American trumpeter from Texas, in the band’s performances. In response, Shaw cancelled all his Southern dates in early September, including his dance in Austin.

The bands that played at the “Germans” and fraternity/sorority formals in the Swing Era did not uniformly or even predominantly play Swing tunes. Many of the groups made a more rhythmically subdued dance music that was often augmented by string sections and known at the time as “Sweet” music. If Goodman and Henderson were icons of Swing, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians were the epitome of “sweet.” In fact, Lombardo and Vincent Lopez were probably more popular overall in this period than their now more well-considered contemporaries. A major name since the late 1920s, Lombardo led the most well-known and well-liked band of the 1930s, despite that decade’s deep association with Swing. And more “sweet”-identified bands played at UT than Swing: not just Lombardo and Lopez, but Jan Garber , Kay Kyser , Shep Fields , and many others.

The same 1938 poll that found Goodman to be the most popular bandleader at UT also ranked the much sweeter bands of Wayne King , Lombardo, and Jan Garber in second through fourth places. After the high of 1938, Swing enthusiasm seemed to have waned by the following year. The Daily Texan dance music column “I’m in a Dancing Mood” insisted that “the hot type of band” was declining in popularity in Texas and that recent concerts around campus showed that “the sweet side is right side up.” Despite this, bands identified as “hot” or Swing continued to play UT and draw crowds. The balance in popularity between “sweet” and “hot” seemed to have ebbed and flowed as the student bodies changed. In 1944, for example, a UT student polled thousands of other students and local army camps on his KTBC radio show. Count Basie, the “jump king of swing,” won first place, while all other spots in the ranking were occupied by other “swingsters.”7

As reviews and descriptions from the Daily Texan bear witness, many groups were versatile, performing some swing songs, some sweet songs, Tin Pan Alley tunes, movie themes, waltzes, and novelty music. According to the DT, Joe Reichman played “new arrangements of old time favorites with the latest swing hits.” Bernie Cummins played “an evening of waltzes and rhumbas, interspersed with a few jitterbug numbers” at his concert in Gregory. Similarly, Herbie Kay’s band “[strove] for versatility with moderate amounts of swing and sweet”; Vincent Lopez played “rhumbas and danzons”; and Malcolm Beelby and his Royal Hawaiian Orchestra featured “rhumbas, tangos, and waltzes.”