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INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING SWING
Ralph Ellison once described American culture as "jazz-shaped." He meant that African-Americans have provided the essence of the nation's cultural style: "the sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace (all jazz-shaped) that serve to remind us that the world is ever unexplored, and that while a complete mastery of life is mere illusion, the real secret of the game is to make life swing."
What would it mean to describe American culture in the decade that ended in 1945 as "swing-shaped"? To begin with, swing's jazz-oriented dance music was the leading (though certainly not the only) form of popular music during those years. Large numbers of teenagers and
young adults listened and danced to it. Swing was part catalyst, part product of the electronic mass culture industry coalescing during those years. At the same time, many others speculated about swing, seeking to explain its popularity and social significance. Swing was widely thought to express, for better or worse, a certain spirit of the age. The ways in which people thought about swing revealed new patterns of thinking about history, about racial and cultural difference, and about the nature of American society. The ideology that accrued to swing was closely related to the ideology of Americanism that appeared in many contexts during the Depression and war years. Its decline paralleled the end of a distinctive moment of self-definition for many Americans.
A few of swing's contemporaries recognized its cultural centrality, or at least ubiquity. "It has been reflected in the nation's literature, and has inspired novels, biographies, mystery stories, scholarly dissertations, countless magazine articles and newspaper features," wrote a reporter in 1938.
That a cultural product could be perceived in 1938 as pervading so many disparate realms of public consciousness, affecting everything from language and mores to scholarship to toys and notions, suggests that swing fed into the new concept of culture that was gaining currency in the 1930s. While swing was a cultural form, a product, it operated within a meaning of culture derived from anthropology: culture as a way of life. But this sort of cultural phenomenon could occur only amid the new technologies and industrial organizations that had emerged in the early decades of the century, particularly the 1920s.
Swing's trajectory, its rise and fall as a phenomenon of mass culture, tells us much about the society that produced it. Consider swing writ large--not just the big bands, but their audiences, the writers who critiqued and promoted them, the media conglomerate that supported them--as a microcosm of American society. The contradictions and tensions within swing--over race, politics, its own cultural status, the role of women--were the same as those played out in the larger culture. Swing's extreme self-consciousness and coupling of populist nationalism with a critical stance toward American society was distinctive to die 1930s. In its simultaneous challenge and acceptance of dominant
racial, sexual, and cultural hierarchies and of large-scale industrial consolidation, swing acted out larger cultural impulses at the same time that it modified them. Swing was widely perceived, and understood itself, as both Other and Self--at once marginal and similar to an "ideal picture of America" the defining of which was a central cultural achievement of the years in which swing flourished.
What exactly was swing? The question was of interest beyond the United States. In 1938 the Académie Française was debating whether to add the word to its dictionary, and, if so, how to define it. Then, as now, the word carried a variety of grammatical functions: verb (to swing) and adjective (a swing band). But in the late 1930s the word generally appeared on its own, as a noun. Part of the fascination of swing as fad was undoubtedly its imperviousness to being pinned down and defined. The music itself may have been ubiquitous--in the airwaves, movies, books, and newspapers--but no one, it appears, was able to define it satisfactorily, or to resist attempting a definition. Swing seemingly had appeared so quickly and mysteriously that it was unclear whom to turn to for an explanation, or even what sort of definition would be appropriate.
Those most directly involved in the music, professional musicians, were of little help. Reporters writing articles with tides like "Swing: What Is It?" discovered that the definitions offered by "professional swingsters" (or their press agents) were hopelessly impressionistic. Benny Goodman was quoted as saying that swing "is as difficult to explain as the Mona Lisa's smile or the nutty hats women wear--but just as stimulating. It remains something you take 5,000 words to explain then leaves you wondering what it is." Chick Webb compared swing to "lovin' a gal, and havin' a fight, and then seein' her again," while Fats Waller offered the formula "two-thirds rhythm and one-third soul." For Louis Armstrong it was simply "my idea of how a tune should go." The difficulty of arriving at a consensus definition, various critics pointed out, was that swing referred not to a type of music, but to the way in which music was performed. "There is no such thing as a swing tune; when Duke Ellington plays 'In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,' it swings. When Wayne King plays 'Riverboat Shuffle' it does not swing." To ask a musician to define swing is like describing the color red to a child who has never seen it, opined Goodman; it cannot be defined, only recognized.
Others were willing to discuss the issue in musical terms. But many of these definitions linked musical properties of rhythm and improvisation to political concepts like "freedom" and "individualism." Perhaps the most widely publicized definition, one to which Goodman acceded, was advanced by critics John Hammond and Marshall Stearns: "A band swings when its collective improvisation is rhythmically integrated." For drummer Gene Krupa, swing was "complete and inspired freedom of rhythmic interpretation." Vibraphonist bandleader Red
Norvo defined swing as "a pulsation of rhythm by individual interpretation of original or written phrases." A drum manufacturer defined swing as "simply a relined and cultured rhythm with clever emphasis on dynamics." Other definitions stressed the subjective responses it generated among listeners. Glenn Miller, for example, described swing as "a solidity and compactness of attack by which the rhythm instruments combine with the others to create within the listeners the desire to dance." Or acceleration: Wingy Mannone likened swing to "feeling an increase in tempo though you're still playing at the same tempo."
In the most ambitious technical attempt to describe swing, the American composer and musicologist Virgil Thomson defined it as "a form of the two-step in which the rhythm is expressed quantitatively by instruments of no fixed intonation, the melodic, harmonic and purely percussive elements being freed thereby to improvise in free polyphonic style." At the core of the definition was a distinction between "beat music," whose rhythm was dominated by accents, and "quantitative music," in which rhythmic intervals were defined by rolls or trills--filled time--rather than by stresses. The former, according to Thomson, created a muscular music conducive to jerky dances and marches; the latter, which he associated with swing, produced a hypnotic response. "Notice the high degree of intellectual and nervous excitement present in any swing-audience," he wrote. "The listeners do not close their eyes and sink into emotional or subjective states. They sit up straight, their eyes flash, they applaud the licks. They occasionally jerk on the absent down-beat, but on the whole they seem to be enjoying one of those states of nervous and muscular equilibrium that render possible rapid intellection."
In all these cases, defining swing required recourse to the social setting in which the music was performed or consumed, or to the political ideas it seemed to express. Swing may have been primarily entertainment, but it struck its contemporaries as a form of entertainment that might help them better understand their times.
A definition that was not given at the onset of the swing craze is the one that has come to be accepted among historians: a stage in the development of jazz characterized by written arrangements and performed by big bands--or small ensembles culled from those bands--during the 1930s and 1940s. One reason this definition was not available is that jazz itself was a term with very little precision during the years during which Swing emerged. The "classic jazz" of 1920s New Orleans and Chicago had seemingly evaporated with the collapse of the recording industry in the years following the Crash. But even in its 1920s bloom, "jazz" had no settled meaning. For most Americans who thought about such things, jazz meant the "symphonic" product of Paul Whiteman or the blackface vaudeville performances of Al Jolson, the success of whose film The Jazz Singer (1927) created the most widely held public image of jazz. The more widely read periodicals of the 1920s likewise used "jazz" as a synonym for any kind of syncopated dance music, or for "symphonic" jazz, as did the two best-known American books on the subject, Osgood's So This Is Jazz? and Whiteman's Jazz. When swing "burst" onto the scene in 1935, then, it understandably appeared to most Americans to come out of nowhere, its historical links to 1920s jazz having been elided.
Musicians, to be sure, were aware of those links and careful to acknowledge them. Responding to the controversies provoked by swing, and decrying the faddism that had come to surround the music by 1939, Ellington reminded readers of Down Beat that swing had already been performed for over a decade. His "Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing" had been recorded in 1932, and the term had appeared in jazz recordings since the 1920s. "To speak of swing as a fad is to define it as something similar to mah-jong or crossword puzzles," said Goodman the same year. It had been "sinking its roots in American music" for 100 years, he said. "Swing certainly wasn't originated by myself or other current bandleaders. We simply helped develop something that has been growing for decades." Whiteman, who claimed that "swing" was first used in the musical sense by critic Olin Downes in a review of a 1924 Whiteman concert, went further. "There's no such thing as swing," he stated flatly. "Swing music doesn't exist, but swing musicians do. It is a verb, not a noun." Some musicians disparaged the swing of the late 1930s, charging that "in spite of all the ballyhoo," the public "gets less genuine swinging than it did ten years ago when most of the swinging was privately done in musicians' hideouts.
The idea of this jazz tradition even appeared in the lyrics to a swing tune recorded by Billie Holiday the week before Benny Goodman's famous Carnegie Hall concert of January 1938. Ragtime had once "had its fling"; "this modern thing" featured "the same old syncopation," but "now they call it swing." The music they had played "jazz-time, to a buck and wing...again sweeps the nation." Singers who had once sung the phrase "hot-cha" now scatted a longer, more fluid melodic line: "Dee dee dee dee, Da da da da, Ree dee dee, Da da da." "Rhythm has its seasons, summer, fall, and spring," the lyrics conclude; "but for seven silly reasons someone pulled the string, and they started dancing; now they call it swing." By 1939 the notion that swing was essentially a new name for jazz was becoming commonplace among nonmusicians as well. "To call present-day jazz swing would be a lot like calling present-day football pass, just because there is more passing now than there was fifteen years ago," wrote John O'Hara, who considered swing a "disgusting fraud." But as late as 1944 the trade press was still soliciting musicians' opinions on the difference between swing and jazz, with most agreeing there was none, other than that the latter had a slightly archaic ring.
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