Tommy Dorsey Killed The Big Band Era

[officermayo]

http://www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis ... y%20nights.

[Macbone1]

Tommy didn't kill it, but he sure did help. It was all about the ratings. Elvis et al were going to break through sooner rather than later anyway. And of course, the economics of 6 pieces or so vs 18-20 holding an audiences' attention and/or keeping them on the dance floor was soon shouted from agents' rooftops. Band fees remained about the same and only had to be cut 6 ways (plus the agent).

[officermayo]

Folks staying home to watch TV had an impact on the ballroom circuit which lead to bands relying on strings of onenighters.
That caused band leaders to cut down the size of their bands. Mainly though the young folks ditching big bands for singers and then rock & roll was the final nail in the coffin. Low ballroom attendance and a decline in record sales did the rest.

[Doug Elliott]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2 ... %27_strike

THIS is what killed the big band era

It totally changed the scene, toward vocal groups.

[officermayo]

Tommy usurped those strikes by reissuing many of his early recordings on RCA and Decca.

[JohnL]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2 ... %27_strike

THIS is what killed the big band era

Agreed. The big bands were clearly on the wane by the end of the WWII, and the strike of '42 was arguable the genesis of that decline. It created the conditions under which economics, changing musical tastes, and emerging technologies combined to end the big band era.

[robcat2075]

In his biography of Buddy Rich, Mel Tormé declares that "1939 was the peak year for Swing."

By that measure, the big band musical complex, having already been around since 1920s Prohibition, was already 10-15 years past its glory days by the post-war-era, in a fickle culture eager for something new.

Of course, "Swing" and "Big Band" are not synonymous,but they had a symbiotic relationship and no compelling new use for the big band emerged as interest in Swing declined.

But you can't say they didn't have their time in the sun. Newspapers closely followed their every move...

The Dorsey-Hall Fight

[officermayo]

So the big bands began to die in the 40s. Like a terminal cancer patient in the hospital hanging on to life, the singers came in and shot the dying patient in the head before he could die of natural causes.

[imsevimse]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2 ... %27_strike

THIS is what killed the big band era

It totally changed the scene, toward vocal groups.

Thanks for that link. I read all of it with great interest. I had heard about that strike but never got the big picture. It seems the ones that lost on that strike was the established jazz musicians and jazz music itself.

/Tom

[officermayo]

I never knew that vocalists weren't music union members. Interesting.

[robcat2075]

I remain skeptical of the musician's union recording strike being the prime mover in this.

It presumes that records were the dominant means of music consumption and taste setting... but were they really?

The recording industry had nearly collapsed from poor sales at the bottom of the depression; the 1930s were a long slog back to modest significance. The 1941 sales of 130 million records equates to about one disc per person per year.

Compare that to 90 million paid movie attendances... per week... during WWII.

Meanwhile, radio was full of music back then. Shows with live bands playing whatever was popular were littered across the broadcast schedule. Records could have disappeared from the Earth and fans still could have heard the music they wanted to hear... for free!.

Typical Monday evening radio schedule during the strike. Numerous music broadcasts of every sort...

Sched.jpg

[Doug Elliott]

The recording industry replaced the striking musicians with vocalists and vocal groups, which changed the entire landscape of recorded music and therefore what was popular.

[AndrewMeronek]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2 ... %27_strike

THIS is what killed the big band era

It totally changed the scene, toward vocal groups.

Yeah, my impression is that it's not just the strike itself, but simply not having top musicians cranking out recordings. That left a vacuum that lasted too long, and it got filled.

[BGuttman]

It seems that Big Bands (as we know them) really date only to the 1930s. In the 1920s the only big band was Paul Whiteman, and his model really never caught on. Typical bands of the early jazz period were anywhere from 5 to 10. In the late 1940s we had the "Dixieland Revival" and the 5 to 10 piece band re-emerged. Also, for Bop and Cool jazz a small ensemble was most common.

The last bastion of the Big Band was Television. I think they lost out there because of cost-cutting -- a 10 piece band was much easier to fund than an 18 piece.

Job vacancies for professional musicians were almost non-existent back when I was graduating High School in the mid 1960s.

[OneTon]

Doug’s link is good. It may fully not express the competition of the recording industry to get new releases to radio station disc jockeys and then get the new release played. Some of the higher flying Youtube artists occasionally comment on how their viewing rates drop if the fail to post new content every week. And how long it takes to rebuild it. It is possible according to Marshal McLuhan that the medium becomes as important as the message. Though the end was most probably inevitable, the strike put a fork in it. A rising tide may raise all boats. An ebb tide will just as surely lower them.

[BGuttman]

One other side effect of the copyright strike was the creation of a lot of Big Band music based on public domain works. Thus we get "Song of the Volga Boatmen", "Song of India", "Stranger in Paradise", "Tonight we Love" (all based on Russian classical music) and "American Patrol" (based on an American march). Lots of others. We still play them to this day.

[robcat2075]

The influence of "the recording industry" on the public taste in that time has been exaggerated because it has left the most easily accessible artifacts for the armchair historians to talk about.

Most commercial recordings from that time survive, but almost none of the commercial radio and live concertizing can be heard anymore, even though their activity was far greater.

Radio was cranking out music all day and often all night into people's homes. There is no way that was less influential than a 78rpm disc that people bought a few times a year. But there is no way to recall it today so people forget how big commercial radio was in people's lives.

I think the reality is that records, in the 30s and 40s, were trailing indicators of public taste not leading indicators. They reflected a narrow segment of consumer taste, they weren't forming national opinion.

That would change in the 50s and 60s as record players became ubiquitous in the home, but in the 30s and 40s they were not so common as to be highly influential.

[Doug Elliott]

I suspect you have the facts right but the interpretation is all wrong.

"Radio was cranking out music all day and often all night into people's homes."

That music was recordings.

[BassBoneFL]

This area of Florida has always been attractive to retired musicians from all fields. When I first moved here there were a LOT of retired big band musicians living here from the major and territory bands. One time I was hanging with a small group of them after a Union membership meeting and listening to them swap stories. Topic got around to the demise of the big band era. One guy said something which all nodded in agreement, "It died when we told the audience they couldn't dance to it anymore and just had to sit there and listen"

[BGuttman]

...the demise of the big band era. One guy said something which all nodded in agreement, "It died when we told the audience they couldn't dance to it anymore and just had to sit there and listen"

This is quite true. Almost since its inception Jazz was used for social dancing. Jazz musicians played dance halls rather than concert venues. Then the promoters figured out that you could cram more paying customers into a theater or concert hall, but there was no nowhere to dance. Like playing a long string of Strauss waltzes and saying people couldn't dance to that either. The music almost commands dancing.

This is not the case for Cool Jazz or Bebop. These were designed for listening. And they contributed to the current state of jazz.

Watch a Lawrence Welk TV show. How many of the folks aren't dancing? Very few. Welk knew this and made sure there was a big dance floor.

[officermayo]

This area of Florida has always been attractive to retired musicians from all fields. When I first moved here there were a LOT of retired big band musicians living here from the major and territory bands. One time I was hanging with a small group of them after a Union membership meeting and listening to them swap stories. Topic got around to the demise of the big band era. One guy said something which all nodded in agreement, "It died when we told the audience they couldn't dance to it anymore and just had to sit there and listen"

The first big band I played with after exiting the Marine band field was a group in Hilton Head, SC called "Big Band Live". At the age of 31 I was "the Kid" as all the other members were retired musicians who'd played with the likes of Artie Shaw, Ray Anthony and other well known big bands. Added to the swing education provided by my trombonist father, the conversations I had with those old timers over the years formed the basis of my love of and understanding of the Big Band Era. The drummer of that group owned the only radio station in the area that played that style of music and he had a daily show on the history of Swing. All the books on the subject I've read and documentaries I've collected pale in comparison to what I gleaned from those guys in Big Band Live.

[spencercarran]

Tommy usurped those strikes by reissuing many of his early recordings on RCA and Decca.

Is there a reputable source on this? Accusing someone of scabbing is not a small thing.

[officermayo]

Tommy usurped those strikes by reissuing many of his early recordings on RCA and Decca.

Is there a reputable source on this? Accusing someone of scabbing is not a small thing.

RCA and Decca reissued many of Dorsey's earlier recordings, so he wasn't "scabbing". The strike kept musicians from making recordings but didn't stop the record companies from rereleasing earlier published or unreleased records.

"For over a year no music was recorded by unionized musicians in America. Record companies recorded as much music as they could in the run up to the strike and released this backlog through, but also resorted to re-releasing old recordings".

https://libcom.org/article/1942-1944-us ... ording-ban


"Several months passed before any effects of the strike were noticed. At first, the record companies hoped to call the union's bluff by releasing new recordings from their unissued stockpiles, but the strike lasted much longer than anticipated and eventually the supply of unissued recordings was exhausted. The companies also reissued long deleted recordings from their back catalogs, including some from as far back as the dawn of the electrical recording era in 1925. One reissue that was especially successful was Columbia’s release of Harry James’ "All or Nothing at All", recorded in August 1939 and released when James' new vocalist, Frank Sinatra, was still largely unknown. The original release carried the usual credit, "Vocal Chorus by Frank Sinatra" in small type. It sold around five thousand copies. When Columbia reissued the record in 1943 with the now famous Sinatra given top billing, and "with Harry James and his Orchestra" in small type below, the record was on the best–selling list for 18 weeks and reached number 2 on June 2, 1943."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%8 ... %27_strike

[spencercarran]

Is there a reputable source on this? Accusing someone of scabbing is not a small thing.

RCA and Decca reissued many of Dorsey's earlier recordings, so he wasn't "scabbing". The strike kept musicians from making recordings but didn't stop the record companies from rereleasing earlier published or unreleased records.

Yeah, so that's very different from saying "Tommy usurped those strikes." Nothing in what you've posted indicates Dorsey had any role in the record companies' decision to reissue older recordings they already had rights to.

[officermayo]

Ok. Let me rephrase for the sake of accuracy - Dorsey benefitted from the sale of his reissues by record companies.

[JohnL]

The influence of "the recording industry" on the public taste in that time has been exaggerated because it has left the most easily accessible artifacts for the armchair historians to talk about.

Ah, but how much influence did the recording industry have on what did (and did not) get programmed? Payola, my friend, was a very real thing back then.

Also, if it didn't get recorded, it didn't get into jukeboxes - and jukeboxes were everywhere.

[spencercarran]

Ok. Let me rephrase for the sake of accuracy - Dorsey benefitted from the sale of his reissues by record companies.

This appears to be incorrect. The major point of contention in the strike was that the record companies weren't paying royalties to musicians, so where did Dorsey benefit from those reissue sales?

It's unclear to me exactly what you're accusing Dorsey of, but it does seem like you're more or less just making it up.

[officermayo]

For Pete's sake, I'm not casting aspersions towards TD nor making up anything. Perhaps you're not aware that Dorsey was RCA's top seller for many years, (286Top 40 Billboard Pop Chart hits), therefore he had a pretty sweet contract and made more from recordings than the rank and file of the union musicians. I'd suggest reading his biography by Peter Levinson for more details.

As to the oft spoken lament that big bands died immediately after WWII, remember in my OP the Dorsey Brithers had a TV show in the late 50s. Seems that broadcasters wouldn't waste expensive airtime on a "dead" art form. And Lawrence Welk was on TV every week from 1951 until 1982. Big bands died in the 60s when rock and roll and country took over the airwaves.

[ithinknot]

... where did Dorsey benefit from those reissue sales?

To be fair, having records marketed with your name on them had some commercial utility if you were running and promoting a touring band (even if the terms of sale/royalties weren't favorable)... and moreso if, at the same time, other bands didn't.