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This chapter looks at the dramatic changes in American culture during the 1930s, when danceable swing jazz played by big bands became the most popular music in the United States. The emergence of a more propulsive dance beat in Kansas City jazz, led by the Count Basie band, set the stage for this shift in the public’s tastes. But the rise to fame of Benny Goodman in the mid-1930s was the transformative event that established jazz as the dominant sound of ballrooms and radio broadcasts throughout the country. This chapter looks at Goodman and his clarinet rival Artie Shaw, and the other leading big bands of the era, as well as the seminal work of Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Django Reinhardt, Coleman Hawkins, Mary Lou Williams, and others. The chapter concludes with an account of Duke Ellington’s mid- and late-career music.

This chapter examines the history of the arrival of big band jazz bands in West Virginia during the period from 1929 to 1933, and discusses the documented performances by bands based in New York who would become icons of big band jazz in the latter part of the 1930s. It suggests that the tours by territory bands from Florida, Chicago, and New York led them to communities in the Mountain State that were large enough to provide both venues for dances and audiences of sufficient size to make their engagements pay off.

This chapter examines the role of local and territory bands in introducing big band jazz and dance music to West Virginia in the 1930s. It discusses the history of the local black dance band of the period called Gilmore’s Midnighters and the dance bands in black colleges. The chapter also describes the work of local and territory bands, and provides evidence that black Mountaineers were closely connected to the larger musical culture of the nation.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the history of big band jazz in West Virginia during the 1930s and early 1940s. The book investigates what brought African Americans to the Mountain State, why they stayed, and how they became part of the national audience for big band jazz. It suggests that the principal reason for the popularity of big band jazz and dance music among African American Mountaineers was that they served as a source of racial identity and pride, and that the music of black dance orchestras was a marker of race, more particularly of racial pride and achievement.

This chapter examines the connection between the jazz bands and their New York-based managers and entrepreneurs in the Mountain State who organized and promoted dances. It discusses the role of booking agent George Edward Morton and black band manager Joe Glaser in the cultivation of big band jazz in the southern coal fields in the second half of the 1930s. The chapter also also highlights the contribution of booking agents and dance promoters to the success of the big bands.

This chapter considers some of Chappie Willet's approaches to instrumental dance music; including the framing of solo or ensemble virtuosity, the setting of new melodies over familiar chord progressions, and the stylized representation of performer identity or “exotic” variety. Following historical narratives on big band jazz icons like Count Basie and Duke Ellington, instrumental dance numbers tend to be the swing genre most closely associated with jazz improvisation. But arrangements designed for dancing audiences at venues like the Roseland or Savoy Ballrooms still drew upon many of the same theatrical music signifiers and variety entertainment strategies that marked classics, concertos, or vocal features. And at the same time, in Swing Era variety entertainment, programmatic themes of geographic or cultural exoticism could be represented by individual arrangements or even entire orchestras.