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After his own group disbanded, Henderson began writing arrangements for Benny Goodman's band to play on a network radio program called Let's Dance. The Henderson-Goodman collaboration has been variously interpreted as a challenge to the popular music industry and as a formulaic reinforcement of its values. Recognizing merit in both views but accepting neither as entirely apt, this chapter explores several arrangements — including “Blue Skies”, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”, and “King Porter Stomp” — in musical detail in the first effort to identify the elements of the mainstream swing style that has been termed “Hendersonese‘. The analytical method combines examination of Goodman's recordings and the many scores and parts of the arrangements now held in the Goodman collections at the Yale Music Library and the New York Public Library, and it insists on understanding musical style in the context of the structure of a network radio program.

Although famous for its performances at the Roseland Ballroom and on recordings, Fletcher Henderson's band spent a good deal of time playing in other kinds of venues, such as theaters and on the road. Henderson's band was noted for driving cars, instead of riding buses, on its far-flung road trips, and black musicians in cars — sometimes expensive ones — drew attention, and ran into trouble and danger on the road. Meanwhile, a paradigm shift in the music business revealed Henderson's approach of arranging tours as out of step with the new model of agency represented by Duke Ellington's manager, Irving Mills. These experiences shaped the band's music making. Recordings such as “Hop Off” and “King Porter Stomp” show how the band took stock arrangements and streamlined them into solo-riff pieces that were notably suited to a band on the move.

There is a story that during the 1930s when Morton was in the audience when a swing band performed his song “King Porter Stomp” he was disappointed with their rendition and went up to the stage, stopped them, and played the piano to show how it should be done. The “Original Jelly Roll Blues” was Morton's “masterpiece” during his early trips to the North as the “earliest published jazz composition.” “King Porter Stomp” was Morton's most successful single. It was a direct, widespread, and continuing story in the history of jazz music.