Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller: The Lives and Careers of America’s Most Famous Big Band Leaders

By Charles River Editors

A 1940s picture of Benny Goodman

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Introduction

Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller

A 1942 picture of Glenn Miller

“After you've done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.” – Benny Goodman

Sprightly swing music spills across the dimly lit club. The grayish curtains of cigarette smoke part every once in a while to reveal a sparkling stage and tables upon tables of patrons, some incurably inebriated and others high on the fast-paced nightlife. Fabulous flappers in shimmery cocktail dresses and stylish feather headbands throw their hands up and stomp their feet to the addictive beat on the dance floor. Smartly dressed men, their hair neatly parted and slicked back, toss fistfuls of dice onto the plush green baize of the craps tables. Some hover over roulette wheels, staring intently at the spinning flashes of silver, while others finger their playing cards as they sip on tumblers of whiskey, eyeing both the river and the tower of tokens next to them.

Frisky tunes, chic fashion, and American gambling are nostalgic, rose-tinted images most choose to project when visualizing the Roaring Twenties, but the other side of the coin brought an uninviting, much harsher reality that most would prefer to sweep under the rug. The first real estate bubble was on the brink of bursting, and progress was evident, but painfully slow, which gave way to yet another era of violent riots, lynchings, and other forms of oppression imposed on minorities.

When the phrase “the King” is used in the context of American music, most people think of Elvis Presley, but Presley was just a baby when the title was first conferred upon Benny Goodman as the King of Swing in 1935. The Swing Era was a magical period in American history between the hedonism of the Roaring Twenties and the rebelliousness sparked by rock music beginning in the 1950s.  Swing music was rooted in ragtime, blues, and jazz music that had long been popular in African American enclaves in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans. Swing took the entire nation by storm thanks in large part to Benny Goodman and his bands, earning Goodman the nearly undisputed title of the King of Swing.

Goodman's life was a genuine rags-to-riches story. The son of nearly destitute Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Goodman was a musical prodigy who began playing professionally at the tender age of 13, and he was also among the first mainstream bandleaders to hire black musicians. Referring to music as “a great escape for me from the poverty," Goodman’s lifelong focus was on good music, no matter who it came from. As he put it, “If a guy's got it, let him give it. I'm selling music, not prejudice.” Goodman’s popularity was so instrumental that Lionel Hampton went so far as to claim, "As far as I'm concerned, what he did in those days—and they were hard days, in 1937—made it possible for Negroes to have their chance in baseball and other fields."

Apart from a few hiatuses to tend his health and his growing family, Goodman remained a consistently active musician literally right up until his death in 1986 at the age of 77. Somewhat fittingly, he died in his study with his clarinet next to him and a Brahms sonata on a music stand nearby.

Though it may be hard to fathom in the wake of Elvis Presley and popular rock bands like the Beatles, the early 20th century featured a burgeoning music sales industry that was dominated in ways that nobody would ever reach again, including the Fab 4. While Elvis and the Beatles had a combined 71 Top 10 hits over their lengthy careers, Glenn Miller had 16 records reach #1, and he compiled 69 Top 10 hits, all in the span of four years before he had turned 40. Like any music pioneer, Miller and his band were often criticized for not being true to the roots of the music they performed, even as they perfected a sound that captivated the country. In short order, Miller and his music influenced legends ranging from Benny Goodman to Louis Armstrong.

Miller was the most popular big band leader in the United States when he walked away from his orchestra to enlist in the U.S. Army. World War II was raging, and Miller was determined to fulfill his patriotic duty, so he assembled a military orchestra to give fellow American servicemen a little taste of the homes they were missing. While based in the United Kingdom in 1944, the military orchestra was granted clearance to perform in Paris, which had been liberated from the Nazis just months before.

Miller planned his own trip across the English Channel to prepare for a few days ahead of the orchestra’s arrival. Miller’s trip had already been postponed by cold, foggy and drizzly weather, but on December 15, 1944 the pilot chose not to let similar conditions delay it again. The plane took off at about 2:00 p.m. from the airstrip at Twinwood Farm, but it never made it to Paris. As Miller himself had once prophetically put it, “I don’t know why I spend my time making plans like this…. I have an awful feeling you guys are going to go home without me, and I’m going to get mine in some goddamn beat-up old plane!”

December 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of Miller’s disappearance, which remains among the greatest aviation mysteries of all time. What really happened on that bleak December day, and why do so many people still care?

Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller: The Lives and Careers of America’s Most Famous Big Band Leaders profiles how they rose from obscure beginnings to become some of 20th century music’s most influential figures. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Goodman and Miller like never before.

Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller: The Lives and Careers of America’s Most Famous Big Band Leaders

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

Rags

Midwestern Roots

Back and Forth

Almost, but Not Quite

The King of Swing

Moonlight Serenade

Next to a Letter from Home

Reported Missing

The Ambassador

Online Resources

Further Reading about Miller

Further Reading about Goodman

Free Books by Charles River Editors

Discounted Books by Charles River Editors

Rags

“One way or the other, if you want to find reasons why you shouldn't keep on, you'll find 'em. The obstacles are all there; there are a million of 'em.” – Benny Goodman

At the dawn of the 20th century, Chicago was a burgeoning metropolis of nearly 2 million people, 80% of whom were first-generation or second-generation immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, or Italy. One social welfare advocate at that time described the city's immigrant slums as inexpressibly dirty, noting, "Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer. The older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford it.... The houses of the ward…were originally built for one family and are now occupied by several."[1]

As a result, the city was an ideal breeding ground for trouble. A buzzing circuit board dotted with towering skyscrapers, brick buildings, worker's cottages, and an eclectic collection of greystone manors, the Windy City was further decked out with electric entertainment districts, the theaters, clubs, brothels, restaurants, and niteries that lined its streets. The city was illuminated by dazzling marquees and light-up signage, and enlivened by the muffled medley of midnight chatter and big band music seeping out of the nightspots. Those who ambled along the boardwalks flanking the Chicago River were greeted by moored commercial fishing boats bobbing in the water, as well as bustling stalls stocked with trout, salmon, and rainbow smelt.

The nostalgic factor of this particular era is par for the course. Lower those rose-tinted glasses, however, and the harsh, unvarnished reality of life in Chicago of yesteryear becomes apparent. It was, for starters, as much of a thriving, industrial nirvana as it was a harrowing haven for criminality and corruption. There was indeed a blossoming “mosaic” of cultures, and the city is often referred to as a “latter-day Tower of Babel,” but the various groups of people were heavily segregated and their neighborhoods were both terrorized and defended by homegrown gangs. Justice and morality seemed to be almost foreign concepts at this point in time, for politicians,  judges, and law enforcement of all ranks were widely available for purchase.

Chicago would become notorious for its gangs and Al Capone, and one of the main reasons driving organized crime was the influx of immigrants who teemed into the city in search of promising job opportunities and a better life. The abrupt inundation of permanent citizens rendered the already suffering policeman to civilian ratio out of kilter, and the authorities' control of the city became further unzipped. Moreover, children and impressionable youths were regularly exposed to the overwhelming and unblushing presence of organized crime, meaning that the transitions of petty thieves and minor-league thugs to career crooks and full-time gangsters were only natural segues. The privileged pursued politics, medicine, law, and other respectable professions, but many poor people, set several steps back by their limited resources, turned to crime.

David and Dora Goodman, Jewish immigrants from Russia,[2] settled in Chicago after moving from Baltimore in 1902 with their growing family. The 9th of their 12 children, Benjamin "Benny" David, was born on May 30, 1909.[3] Benny later pointed out, "There were more than twenty-five years between the oldest child, Lena, and the youngest Jerome, so there was a steady succession of Goodmans growing up all the time."[4]

As soon as the Goodman children reached their teenage years, their mother expected them to find work and help support the family. "On the other hand, Pop was always trying to get us to study, so that we could get ahead in the world," Goodman explained. "He always envied people with book-learning and education."[5] Goodman and his siblings closest to him in age attended Sheppard Grammar School, across the alley from their home.[6]

By most accounts, David Goodman was willing to sacrifice selflessly on behalf of his family. He worked at Chicago's stockyards for years, earning wages that couldn't quite support his growing family, and Benny recalled, "I can remember a time when we lived in a basement without heat during the winter, and a couple of times when there wasn't anything to eat. I don't mean much to eat. I mean anything. That isn't an experience you forget in a hurry. I haven't ever forgotten it."[7]

David eventually found work as a tailor and later worked at a newsstand. Dora was fully occupied with raising the children, often not leaving the home for weeks at a time. She never learned to read or write, and she never spoke better than broken English.[8]

David loved music, and with the little time he could spare, he frequently took his children to free Sunday afternoon band concerts at Douglas Park, located near their Maxwell Street neighborhood.[9] He also signed up Benny and his brothers Harry and Freddy for inexpensive music lessons at the nearby Kehelah Jacob Synagogue, which also rented instruments at low cost. Benny explained how he took up music, writing, "There have been stories that I went for the clarinet in a big way because it had shiny keys and looked pretty. There might be something in that, but I know that if I had been twenty pounds heavier and two inches taller, I would probably be blowing a horn now instead of a clarinet."

Benny was 10 when he began playing the clarinet,[10] and a couple years later, his older brother Charlie brought home some gramophone records and an old phonograph with a large horn-shaped speaker on which to play them. Goodman started trying to imitate the tunes on the records by Ted Lewis, "who we figured was a pretty hot clarinet player."[11]

In short order, Charlie began to think that his little brother sounded too good for the family to keep to themselves, so he began seeking venues where Benny could perform. One of those venues was the Central Park Theater, which presented a weekly amateur night. The young Goodman, in short pants and a bow tie, stood on a box in the orchestra pit for his first performance there. When a regular act disbanded soon after, Goodman was invited to substitute. "You can imagine how I looked in short pants up on the platform, weighing about seventy-five pounds, with the clarinet in my hand," Goodman wrote. "The applause was nice, but the five bucks they payed [sic] me was even better, because it was the first money I ever earned playing clarinet." He was just 12 years old.[12]

Music lessons at the synagogue were eventually discontinued, but in 1920, a youth band was organized at Hull House,[13] a nearby settlement house that was concerned with the social welfare of the neighborhood's immigrant residents. "It represents an attempt to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society, to add the social function to democracy," a social welfare advocate wrote of Hull House. "It was opened in the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal."[14], [15] Harry, Freddy, and Benny joined the Hull House band, which performed march tunes at church festivals and holiday parades. Participation in the Hull House band also gave the boys the opportunity to attend a summer camp near Waukegan, about 50 miles north of Chicago.[16]

Around this time, Goodman also began taking lessons from classical clarinet teacher Franz Schoepp, who Benny said "probably did more for me musically than anybody I ever knew."[17] Goodman's lessons with Schoepp may have contributed to Goodman's willingness to hire black musicians to play in his bands, as Schoepp was a native German who was unabashedly proud of his ethnic and cultural heritage. He offered lessons not only to Goodman, a poor Jewish boy from the ghetto, but also to black students. Practicing non-discrimination this boldly was practically unheard of at the time.[18]

Though Goodman was almost single-mindedly focused on his music, he graduated from grammar school and moved on to Harrison High School. During his freshman year, he met a group of older boys from the affluent Austin High School who enjoyed jazz music, despite the fact that the boys were all white. The boys put together a band, "The Austin High Gang," and played for high school dances and fraternity parties.[19] The moment the Gang heard him play, they wanted him to play with them. "He played the clarinet so beautifully—it was not to be believed," Bud Freeman, the band's tenor sax player, later recalled. "He had the technique of a master and a beautiful sound to go with it…He was a very pleasant little guy, who hadn't the faintest idea of the extraordinary talent he possessed."[20] Another band member, cornetist Jimmy McPartland, later said that “the little son of a gun knocked us all out. Benny could play! Gosh almighty, as young as he was he could get all over that horn."[21]

At age 13, Goodman began playing in the band led by pianist Charlie "Murph" Podolsky,[22] who also arranged bookings for other artists and small bands.[23] Murph booked several gigs for Goodman, which required him to join a professional union and to update his wardrobe. Goodman's older sister Ethel had already helped him purchase his own clarinet with her wages from her job as a bookkeeper with a clothing firm, and she subsequently used her garment industry connections to attempt to find a tuxedo for her little brother. Goodman remembered, " I was so small (what she called a 'peanut') that none of the ready-made suits fitted me. Ethel's firm fashioned a custom suit that fit the boy. "That was the first tuxedo in the Goodman family, a very big thrill."[24]

Before long, Goodman was so busy playing night gigs that he was having difficulties keeping up with his schoolwork. In spring 1923, he began attending Lewis Institute, a private school for young professionals, and that summer, he regularly played with bands at area amusement parks,[25] lake resorts, and Chicago-based excursion boats.[26] Those bands included the great New Orleans jazz clarinetist Johnny Dodds and cornetist, pianist and composer Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke.[27]

Dodds

Beiderbecke

As soon as Goodman reached the legal school dropout age of 14, that's just what he did, thereby ending his formal education. This freed him to accept a regular job playing four nights a week at a dance hall near his family's apartment, a gig that paid $48 a week. "Playing with bands like that was all right in several ways, particularly in money and as far as getting ahead was concerned," Goodman wrote. "Still I was only a kid before and after the job, not even old enough to shave. I couldn't pal around much with the fellows in the band, because they were all a lot older than I was."[28]

Despite his young age, his musical skills allowed him to explore the Chicago nightlife with his brothers and some of his younger bandmates. At that time, Chicago was the epicenter of jazz in the United States, and as jazz drummer Zutty Singleton put it, Chicago “was the place to be. Your friends would go there and after a while, they would write back and say what a swell town it was—good jobs, lots more money than there was down South and all that. Then as soon as you could, you'd go there too. Nobody thought about New York at all in those days."[29] Clarinetist and bandleader Jimmie Noone, blues singer Bessie Smith, cornetist Buster Bailey, and future jazz legend Louis Armstrong were among Goodman's favorite artists playing the clubs and cabarets at the time.[30] If his favorites weren't performing, Goodman would listen to their records.[31] Exposure to this music at such an impressionable age irresistibly propelled Goodman and other young musicians to follow in the footsteps of the artists they so admired.[32]

Bessie Smith

Noone

Like many professional performers, Goodman was often torn between the art he wanted to produce and the art he could get paid to produce. In Goodman's case, the choice was between the "hot" improvisation-infused, rhythmically varied jazz he most enjoyed playing and listening to, or the more formalized, commercially lucrative pop, waltz, and polka music that he could most easily get paid to play. His experience playing in the jazz band Art Kassel led at Midway Dancing Gardens[33] fit that pattern perfectly. Other "hot" musicians were also in the band, but they all were forced to restrain themselves and play "dance music with a lilt."[34]

In August 1925, Goodman jumped at the opportunity to join a band in California. When he boarded the train for the trip west, he was already his family's top wage earner, making more money than his father or any of his siblings. He was still just 16, and he had only been playing the clarinet for six years.[35]

Goodman was lured to California by Ben Pollack and Gil Rodin, musicians who were both originally from Chicago. Pollack, the bandleader, was a former member of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings who Goodman knew as one of the first white drummers to play good jazz in Chicago. Pollack later became known as the "Father of Swing."[36] Rodin was a jazz saxophonist in Pollack's band, and he invited Goodman to join the band when he visited Chicago to hear Goodman play.[37] Goodman noted, "I got a thrill out of being asked to play with fellows like Pollack and Rodin and the others, and it suited me fine."[38]

Pollack is credited with inventing "the Chicago beat," a solid, equal rhythm that kept steady time and made it easy for the musicians in the band to improvise. "I discovered the secret of solid drumming, that is, to feed rather than overshadow—to send the other guys rather than play a million different beats," Pollack later remembered.[39]

Pollack's band played the Venice Pier for five months, and "Fud" Livingston and Glenn Miller provided the arrangements.[40] Goodman greatly enjoyed the music he was playing, along with his first taste of real freedom away from home and the $100 weekly salary he was earning. "I came in pretty late [one] night and proceeded to be sick all over the place, and then to pass out cold in bed," Goodman wrote. By the time the maid came to clean the room, his roommate and bandmate Harry Greenberg had already left. The maid called the band manager, both blamed the mess on Greenberg, and the manager threatened to have Pollack kick Greenberg out of the band. "I stood there with a terrific head, nodding very seriously," Goodman remembered.[41]

Miller

Though the band was successful in California, Pollack decided to take it back to Chicago in January 1926, but with no reputation in Chicago, Pollack had difficulties securing bookings, so Goodman joined a stage band at a theater.[42] Pollack's band, now without Goodman, landed a gig at Chicago's Southmoor Hotel that May, and when the band became an unquestionable hit, Goodman was promptly allowed to rejoin the band, despite some prickly feelings over Goodman's departure. Goodman admitted that upon his return, there “wasn't the same closeness between us that there had been before," but he and Pollack, "the two Bennys," began performing extended drum and clarinet duets, and their affinity was soon restored.[43]

It was around this time that the success of a rival band motivated Goodman to expand his instrumental repertoire. He'd already taught himself to play the saxophone at age 13,[44] but he decided to learn how to play the flute and to take oboe lessons from a former member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He explained, "I used to bring the oboe in and play hot choruses on it, driving Ben Pollack nuts.” On the clarinet, he also transitioned from the simpler Albert fingering method to the more technically advanced Boehm system around this time.[45]

That fall, Pollack's band began recording sessions with Victor Records, and Goodman's solos are featured on "'Deed I Do" and "He's the Last Word." Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland, Glenn Miller, and Dorothy and Hannah of the Williams Sisters also performed during these sessions, which represented Goodman's recording debut. The recordings are the earliest known examples of his playing[46] and can now easily be found online.[47]

In the midst of the recording sessions, Goodman's father was hit by a car and died in the hospital the next day. He was just 54. Goodman called it "the saddest thing that ever happened in our family."[48] At the time of his death, his father was running a newsstand despite the fact that Benny, Harry,[49] and several other siblings were financially successful enough that he didn't have to work anymore. When Benny tried to tell his father that, he simply replied, "Benny, you take care of yourself, I'll take care of myself."[50]

Pollack's band played the Southmoor until April 1927, and gigs at the Rendezvous Café (then run by the North Side Gang, Al Capone’s most bitter rival) and at the college hangout Blackhawk Restaurant, both in Chicago, kept the band busy until the beginning of summer. The band's success allowed Goodman to make the first significant personal purchase of his life: a black convertible.[51] The band returned to California to play at the Venice for a month,[52] followed by a short road trip playing six gigs in six different cities.[53]

Also in 1927, Melrose Bros. Music Co., Inc., "The House That Blues Built," published Benny Goodman's 125 Jazz Breaks for Saxophone and Clarinet, a small paperback collection of sheet music based on Goodman's jazz breaks and improvisations. Like other songbooks featuring Glenn Miller and Louis Armstrong, the Goodman book sold for $1 and included sheet music for piano accompaniment in different keys. The editors gushed in a blurb on the back of the songbook, "Goodman is a widely recognized artist. His style is ultra modern. We highly recommend this book."[54]

Armstrong

The band played the Blackhawk Restaurant again that fall, and they also returned to Victor for another recording session. Goodman's solos feature prominently in "Waitin' for Katie" and "Memphis Blues."[55]

Early in 1928, Goodman again left Pollack's band, choosing instead to play in Isham Jones's commercial dance band for $175 a week,[56] but the Chicago music scene was changing. Citizens were weary of the gang wars and were pressuring city leaders to close the nightclubs, so when Pollack's band was offered a gig at the well-known Little Club in New York City, the band headed east. Gil Rodin persuaded Goodman to rejoin the band once again, and the Little Club gig lasted for three months and was followed by a booking at the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City. Jack Teagarden, a 20-something trombonist from Texas, joined the band during the Atlantic City engagement.[57]

Teagarden

After Atlantic City, the band began its next gig at New York City's prestigious Park Central Hotel, and during their engagement, the notorious gangster Arnold Rothstein was shot to death during a poker game at the hotel. The murder prompted area college students to nickname the hotel "the Shooting Gallery," but rather than repel customers, the crime drew more in.[58]

The band closed the year as the pit orchestra for the new musical Hello, Daddy,[59] which ran for nearly 200 performances in the next six months. All the while, the band also continued playing at the Park Central, and these main engagements were punctuated by multiple solo, ensemble, and full-band radio broadcasts and recording sessions. Goodman participated in more than 20 recording sessions with various members of Pollack's band, under countless names such as “Ben Pollack and his Californians," "Ben Pollack and his Orchestra," "The Whoopee Makers," "Ben's Bad Boys," and "Ben Pollack and His Pick-A-Rib Boys."[60] Goodman and Teagarden complemented each other's playing beautifully throughout many of those sessions, as heard during Goodman's melodic and bluesy solo on "Sweetest Melody" and the grittier "My Kinda Love."[61],[62] Goodman also recorded with his own group of musicians, which he chose mostly from Pollack's band, as "Benny Goodman's Boys with Jim and Glenn." The "Jim" was Jimmy McPartland on trumpet, and "Glenn" was Glenn Miller on trombone. Harry Goodman on tuba was another one of the Boys. The famous "Shirt Tail Stomp," which was meant to be a “corny” parody, came out of one of these sessions and went on to become immensely popular.[63]

Near the end of the run of Hello, Daddy, Pollack turned down an offer for the band to play at the Cannon Club at Princeton University. Over Pollack's protests, Goodman took the night off and put together a band of his own, which gave him his first real taste of leading his own band. Goodman described how such a move made him feel: "This was plenty good, much better than blowing notes for somebody else."[64]

Incidents like this, coupled with the grind of working together so much for so long, took a heavy toll not only on the band members' relationships with each other, but also on their relationship with Pollack. When Pollack fired Goodman's friend Jimmy McPartland in a fit of rage over McPartland's dirty shoes, Goodman quit in protest. As Goodman noted, "The incident itself really didn't amount to much, but it seemed to bring matters to a head…Pollack had done a lot for me, and I appreciated every bit of it, but I felt the time had come to go out on my own."

The episode marked a permanent divergence between the two Bennys, both personally and professionally. Pollack's career reached its zenith with his leadership of the band at the Park Central, but Goodman was only 20 years old, and his career was just taking off.[65]

By the late 1920s, the musical entertainment scene was changing. The fledgling technology of radio gained widespread popularity with the establishment of national networks around the middle of the decade, and by 1930, more than 50 million listeners were listening to the radio every evening. However, within weeks of Goodman's parting of ways from Pollack's band, the devastating "Black Tuesday" stock market crash in 1929 plunged the nation into the Great Depression. Subsequently, theater and performance attendance tumbled; record companies collapsed, contracts were canceled, and record sales plummeted from more than $100 million in 1927 to as low as $6 million in 1932.[66]

After a successful but brief stint with Red Nichols' band, Goodman quit to pursue the possibility of leading his own band, but that quickly fell through and Goodman was left unemployed. He soon found freelance work in a radio dance band, playing in 3-6 radio programs every day,[67] but the music was commercial and had to be played as it was written, with no room for improvisation. Goodman kept with it because “the work paid well, and it was fairly steady." To improve his marketability, Goodman began studying music theory with Joseph Schillinger, smoothing out his tone from the rough Chicago style into what one biographer called "the smoother, more readily identifiable 'Benny Goodman style.'"

Schillinger

Nichols

Despite the near collapse of the recording industry, Goodman played in more than 30 recording sessions in 1930 and generated more than 100 sides.[68],[69] He increased his output to nearly 250 in 1931.[70] Many of these sessions were with Nichols’s orchestra or Beiderbecke's orchestra, as well as those of Ben Selvin or Goodman's own.[71]

Goodman rejoined Nichols' band for its engagement as the pit orchestra in George and Ira Gershwin's musical Girl Crazy, which ran at Broadway's Alvin Theater[72] for 34 weeks. The play included the iconic songs "I Got Rhythm" and "Embraceable You," and the original cast featured singer Ethel Merman in her Broadway debut, as well as comedian Willie Howard and actress, singer, and dancer Ginger Rogers.[73] Goodman was earning enough by that fall to relocate his mother and his two youngest brothers from Chicago to the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens.[74]

Early in 1931, Goodman recruited a group of musicians from the Girl Crazy orchestra for a recording session, recalling, "I have always looked back on that record as about the first one in which I put across something like a style of my own." That fall, his first stint as a Broadway bandleader was short-lived, thanks to the 15-performance run of the musical comedy Free for All, but he also found work in the New York film industry. Despite the ongoing Depression, he was earning $350 to $400 a week, an impressive figure for a relatively unknown 21-year-old musician.[75]

Midwestern Roots

“He just played on that horn all the time. It got to where Pop and I used to wonder if he’d ever amount to anything.” - Mattie Lou Miller (Glenn’s mother)[76]

From beginning to end, Glenn Miller’s life was filled with music. Even as a young child on the vast and lonely, Midwestern prairies, he and his family sang and played instruments for entertainment and to distract themselves from their isolation.

When Alton Glenn Miller was born on March 1, 1904, his parents Mattie Lou (Cavender) and Lewis Elmer Miller lived in Clarinda, a small town of about 3,000 residents in the southwestern corner of Iowa. His older brother, Elmer Deane, was born there in 1901, and as their father already had, both boys eventually rejected their first names in favor of their middle names. “I couldn’t stand the name Alton,” Miller later said. “I just hated the sound of that name. That’s why I’ve always used ‘Glenn’ instead.”[77]

The Miller family moved into a sod hut on a homestead near Tryon, Nebraska when Glenn was five years old. Elmer worked in North Platte, about 35 miles to the south, while Mattie Lou and the boys held down the claim. Mattie Lou organized the “Happy Hollow” school and taught there for a year or two, focusing on typical elementary subjects as well as personal ethics and religious instruction. In the hut, the family had an organ which Mattie Lou played while the rest of the family sang along.

After proving up their claim, the Millers sold the homestead and moved together into a small house in North Platte where the Miller brothers attended West End Elementary School. The little family grew again in 1913 with the birth of John Herbert; not surprisingly, he also eventually rejected his first name and chose to be known instead as Herb.

In 1915, when Miller was about 11, the family moved east to Grant City, Missouri. His mother later recalled that around that time she and Elmer bought Glenn a mandolin, but the boy soon traded it for an old trombone. “I didn’t know he wanted a horn, though I expected all boys like horns,” Mattie Lou later said. “Glenn never said so, but he never said much anyway.” Deane played trumpet in the town band, and Glenn enthusiastically tagged along with his old trombone in tow. Miller explained, “That old sliphorn had one foot in trombone heaven, but oh boy, how I loved it. It was my first love.”[78] The town band’s leader was so impressed with Miller’s dedication and talent that he bought the boy a new trombone and put him to work shining shoes to pay him back for the instrument.[79] Miller also played his trombone in his Sunday school orchestra when he was 13.[80]

Elmer and Mattie Lou’s final child, daughter Emma Irene, was born in 1916, and by 1918, the family of six had headed west and settled in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Miller attended Fort Morgan High School, where he played trombone in the school band, failed first-year Latin, acted in the school play, and played left end on the football team, the Maroons. The football team won its conference title in 1920, and Miller was named the best left end in the state.[81] He also enjoyed playing tennis, and he wanted to be a professional baseball player someday.

Miller skipped his May 1921 high school commencement ceremony to pursue a job with a band in Laramie, Wyoming, and he went on to play in several other bands before he enrolled at the University of Colorado and began taking classes in April 1923. His college career, which lasted just three quarters before he dropped out, was mostly unremarkable. The most notable aspect of his time there was that Miller met and courted Helen Burger, a pretty coed from Boulder.

Miller played in several bands over the next couple years, and he also taught himself how to write musical arrangements.[82] Around that time in 1925, Ben Pollack and His Californians were playing a gig at the Venice Ballroom in Los Angeles. Despite the band’s name and the location, Pollack was a jazz bandleader from Chicago, and his band was made up of a combination of musicians from Chicago and the West Coast. Pollack was planning for the band’s return to Chicago at the end of the gig and needed to replace several musicians who did not want to make the move from California.

Pollack had already decided to replace his saxophone player, William Maguiness (later known as “Ted Mack”), with a 16-year-old from Chicago named Benny Goodman, and when Maguiness found out that Pollack also needed a trombonist, he recommended his roommate, who happened to be none other than Glenn Miller. By the time the band opened at the Southmoor Hotel in Chicago in May 1926, Ben Pollack and His Californians also included arranger Fud Livingston, Harry Greenberg on trumpet, and saxophonist Gil Rodin.[83] That December, Pollack’s band had several recording sessions with Victor Records, two of which featured Miller’s arrangements: “When I First Met Mary”[84] and “’Deed I Do.”[85],[86] The band also recorded with Columbia that year.

In Chicago, Miller shared a room with Goodman, who later recalled, “Glenn and I got to be good friends and together with Greenberg we had a lot of fun and plenty of laughs. Just being with that [band] and playing with them was a privilege in itself, and I learned plenty about music—as well as other things—in those first few months.”[87] Goodman wasn’t exaggerating about the company he was in, as Pollack’s sharp eye for talent later earned him the nickname “The Father of Swing.”

It was during the Southmoor gig that Miller first met drummer Ray McKinley, who would become a lifelong friend. McKinley was injured in a gangland shooting at a club where he and his band were playing, and during his time off to recover, McKinley went to the Southmoor a couple of times to hear Pollack’s band play. On one occasion, he even sat in to play, and though he wasn’t invited to join Pollack’s band, McKinley and Miller stayed in contact.

McKinley

In 1927, Pollack’s band set off on a road trip west, playing one-nighters along the way, and that trip was followed by a successful gig at the Blackhawk Restaurant in Chicago, as well as more recording sessions for Victor Records. After a two-month engagement at New York’s Little Club, some of the band members wanted to leave Pollack’s band and form their own. The likely candidates to lead the new band were Miller and Goodman, neither of whom minced words when describing the competition. “Glenn was too much of a stiff to lead a band,” Goodman claimed, referring to Miller’s controlling tendencies. Miller replied, “All Benny would do would be to stand there and pick his nose.”[88] Austerity and disgusting personal habits aside, the time just hadn’t quite yet come for either of them, as Miller was only 24 and Goodman was just 19.

As the band prepared to leave for a summer engagement in Atlantic City, Rodin heard trombonist Jack Teagarden playing in a jam session and was so impressed that he invited Teagarden to sit in with Pollack’s band. “I just had to have Jack in our band,” Rodin recalled. "Jack knocked out everybody, and, of course, that made Glenn feel pretty uncomfortable.” Miller then announced he was leaving Pollack’s band to write arrangements for another bandleader, Paul Ash. Those arrangements were far from the hot jazz Miller longed to write, but the position paid well and allowed Miller to settle in New York City.

Paul Ash

Through all his comings and goings, Miller stayed in touch with Helen Burger. They exchanged letters and telephone calls, and Miller had occasionally visited her in Boulder, but at some point she’d evidently given up hope of a happy ending with Miller. Once, she gave him a photograph of herself and dedicated it, “To Glenn, the meanest man in the world!” Undeterred, he kept the photo on his dresser, and when he heard through the grapevine that she was dating and “practically engaged,” Miller immediately invited Helen to New York. They were married there on October 6, 1928.

By all accounts, the marriage was a match made in heaven. Biographer Dennis M. Spragg, senior consultant of the Glenn Miller Archives, noted, “Helen helped Glenn to develop discipline and to refine his style and essence. [T]heir successful marriage was a true partnership.”[89] Polly Davis Haynes, who may have known the couple better than anyone else,[90] said, “I’ve never known any couple that said so little and felt so much!”[91] Biographer George T. Simon, also a personal friend of Miller’s, wrote in 1974, “During almost two generations I have known many band leaders and musicians and their wives and have seldom been surprised by the tensions that have permeated these marriages. Of those marriages, the one that impressed me as the most endearing and enduring was the one between Helen and Glenn Miller.”

People who knew Miller throughout his lifetime used complimentary words like honest, disciplined, sensitive, wise, confident, and ethical to describe him, as well as less-flattering terms like controlling, reserved, stubborn, intolerant, driven, curt, and dispassionate. Simon noted that one reason the marriage worked was because Helen “was a master of tact and diplomacy, and especially good at explaining Glenn and his actions to others—but without ever demeaning her husband.”[92]

The couple settled in an apartment in New York, and Glenn worked as an arranger and a freelance trombonist for three years. He played in recording sessions with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Benny Goodman, and Red Nichols and His Five Pennies. In November 1929, Miller was the only trombonist Nichols included in the band Red McKenzie and the Mound City Blue Blowers for a recording session with RCA Victor (formerly Victor Records). Two songs from that session, “Hello, Lola”[93] and “One Hour,”[94] eventually became known as jazz classics. Miller subsequently called those two sides[95] the best trombone performances he ever recorded.[96]

Nichols

Miller also played in Nichols’ pit bands for the successful George and Ira Gershwin Broadway musicals Strike Up the Band and Girl Crazy. Strike Up the Band opened at the Times Square Theater on January 14, 1930, and after a 191-performance run, it closed on June 28, 1930. Girl Crazy opened at the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon Theater) on October 14, 1930 and closed June 6, 1931 after a run of 272 performances. The cast included actress, singer, and dancer Ginger Rogers and comedian Willie Howard, as well as musical comedy legend Ethel Merman in her Broadway debut. The score featured eventual jazz standards “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm.”[97]

Despite the onset of the Great Depression after the stock market crash of October 1929, Miller and his wife were fairly prosperous until the close of Girl Crazy. After that, however, recording and radio opportunities dwindled as the entertainment industry nearly collapsed due to financial constraints. Headlines in the January 5, 1932 issue of Variety magazine bemoaned salary cuts, pending lawsuits, and business reorganizations, with one little blurb on page 5 noting that the unemployment situation was “[t]oo dreadful even to dream of.”[98]

Thus, when singer and bandleader Smith Ballew invited Miller to form a band and go on the road, Miller accepted. Ballew may have been repaying a favor Miller had earlier paid him because back in 1927, Ballew was stranded in Chicago without cash or a band. Miller bought Ballew dinner and introduced him to Pollack, who immediately hired him.

Ballew

Ballew’s band found engagement opportunities to be sporadic. The band played gigs in New Orleans, Pittsburgh, New York, and St. Paul, Minnesota. Pianist Chummy MacGregor joined the band in November, and he and Miller went on to become lifelong friends.

Between engagements, Miller freelanced in studio sessions with the Dorsey brothers, and the road band broke up after Miller got into a physical brawl with a bandmate right on stage during a New Year’s Eve performance at a Kansas City hotel in 1933. Biographer Simon, in pointing out that the altercation went unnoticed by the partygoers, called the episode “a pithy commentary on the state of Kansas City’s New Year’s Eve celebrants.”[99]

Back and Forth

“I remember Glenn Miller coming to me once, before he had his own band, saying, How do you do it? How do you get started? It's so difficult. I told him, I don't know but whatever you do don't stop. Just keep on going.” – Benny Goodman

By 1932, Goodman was in a bit of a rut. He was weary of constantly playing the "commercial" music that drew paychecks far more reliably than the "hot" music he still longed to play. He later wrote, "I guess I was in kind of a bad groove mentally at the time, with not much desire other than to make money. I was doing something that really didn't satisfy me, and that's where a lot of the trouble came in."

Making matters worse, Goodman had forged an unflattering reputation by joining and quitting so many bands. Directors and bandmates alike found him aloof and often difficult to work with, often because of his individualistic ways. "I had a way of playing the instrument that was my own, and I wanted to stick to that way. Then, too, some of these conductors just didn't know their stuff. The upshot of this was that I got to be known as a difficult guy in some circles, which cut me out of jobs." His income dropped to about $200 a week, still a respectable Depression-era amount, but only about half of what he'd been earning the year before.[100]

It was around this time that Goodman would make the acquaintance of John H. Hammond II, who would eventually become one of the most significant figures in the history of popular music.[101] Hammond was a young, wealthy,[102] and passionate fan of hot music who "wanted to hear more of it than he could at the time, and happened to be in a position where he was able to do something about it," as Goodman put it.[103] Hammond also had a passion for social reform and racial equality, and he made it his personal mission to secure recording sessions for underappreciated jazz musicians, especially black ones.[104] By 1933, Hammond was writing as a music reviewer and critic for any publication that would accept his columns. While visiting his sister Alice in London, Hammond met with the head of Columbia Gramophone Company and worked out a deal to provide 60 jazz sides with American musicians for the British market.

Hammond had first heard Goodman play the previous spring, and he had written a scathing review of the performance in Melody Maker. "Mr. Goodman, I fear, has forgotten all about the fact that there are actually individual human beings in the band," Hammond's review read. "The result is painful, and the band is merely another smooth and soporific dance combination." Despite this disdain, Hammond wanted Goodman to play on the records.[105] Goodman was reluctant initially, but he eventually agreed to participate, and though the records did not turn out quite as Hammond had planned, he was pleased with the results. He was able to convince Columbia to release two of the songs, "Ain'tcha Glad" and "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," as the A and B sides on a record in the United States, where it sold a respectable 5,000 copies.[106]

Up until the 1930s, music fans were often unconnected from the musicians who were actually playing the music. They may have known the names of their favorite bands, but Goodman noted that "nobody put the names of musicians on the labels of records…or featured them outside of a theatre. The leader was the top man, and that's all there was to it." However, that was about to change.[107] When Goodman visited Milt Gabler's Commodore Music Shop, he was thrilled to see one of the records he played on for sale, with a sign on the rack that read "Benny Goodman and his Orchestra." Gabler also had a list of the names of the musicians that played on them next to the records. "I never realized that you could sell records to the public on the strength of the names of the men who played in the orchestras," Goodman wrote. Gestures like this, along with Gabler's requests to record companies to list musicians' names on the record labels, "made the public much more conscious of the individual musicians than they had been before."[108]

Hammond eventually persuaded Goodman to begin recording with black musicians, an undertaking Goodman had previously resisted due to record companies' marketing concerns. These recordings included sessions with Bessie Smith, nicknamed the "Empress of the Blues," for her last known recordings, and Billie Holiday, then just 17, for her first. After Hammond heard Holiday sing for the first time, he called her "the best jazz singer I had ever heard."[109]

Billie Holiday

Goodman also continued working as a freelance musician. He played in three sessions with bandleader Adrian Rollini, and he even recorded with his childhood idol Ted Lewis on 19 cuts.[110] Jazz expert and Goodman biographer James Lincoln Collier noted that "Tappin' the Barrel," a song made in December 1933, is arranged like Goodman's signature swing-era songs, with a call-and-response format among soloists and sections in the band.[111]

In early 1934, Goodman was excited to hear that a new music hall was going to open in New York and auditions were going to be held for a house dance band. With that, he set to work forming a band. "My idea was to get good musicians, work on intonation, a blend of tone and uniform phrasing in rehearsals, and then depend on them to take care of themselves pretty much on the stand…if I did any conducting, I wouldn't be able to play as much as I wanted." Goodman used his freelance connections to recruit fellow "hot" musicians, and after two auditions, his band was chosen. "It was a kick to clinch the job…I was pretty much steamed up on the subject of having a band." The band played nightly from 7 p.m. until 3 a.m., with the first part of the set broadcast on a local radio station several times each week. Just three months later, though, Goodman suffered what he called "the toughest blow I ever received" when the band was fired immediately after a change in management at the music hall.[112] The band's last night at the music hall was October 17, 1934. On top of that, Hammond's plans for a European tour had to be scrapped after he could not obtain labor permits for the band members.[113]

Luckily for Goodman and the music hall band, they landed an audition to appear as one of the three regular bands on Let's Dance, a new "dance party" radio show. Let's Dance was created to promote Ritz snack crackers, the National Baking Company's newest product, and the bands would play in front of a live studio audience for the show, which would be broadcast nationally on 53 radio stations on Saturday nights. Goodman's band was chosen, and the first Let's Dance show aired on December 1, 1934.[114] Helen Ward, a singer with a voice like the proverbial girl next door, joined the band during the rehearsals between the band's audition and the show's broadcast debut. "I liked her style of singing right from the start," Goodman wrote. Drummer Gene Krupa was added in time for the fourth broadcast. Goodman called Krupa the only drummer that could have provided the steady background tempo and the proper rhythm embellishments that the band needed to swing.[115]

Goodman relied heavily on arrangements by Lyle "Spud" Murphy, "Fud" Livingston, and Fletcher "Smack" Henderson.[116] Biographer Ross Firestone praised Henderson's arrangements for giving musicians the leeway to perform in a style that was "tight but also loose, controlled yet also free, precise and predictable yet also open to individual inspiration," which became known as Goodman's signature sound.[117] Goodman had high praise for Henderson as well, saying, "Fletcher's ideas were far ahead of anybody else's at the time…the art of making an arrangement a band can play with swing—and I am convinced it is an art—one that really helps a solo player to get off, and gives him the right background to work against—that's something that very few musicians can do."[118]

Before the band was fired from the music hall, they'd recorded four sides for Columbia, adding to their national exposure. These sides sold briskly when released, and "Bugle Call Rag" became Columbia's top title in Chicago and Los Angeles, as well as number three in New York City.[119]

The band also continued playing dances and one-nighters. Willard Alexander, a fan of Goodman's music, was a former bandleader who began working as an agent for the Music Corporation of America in 1935, and when Alexander approached Goodman asking to work as his agent, Goodman agreed. Alexander subsequently began handling the band's bookings and signed Goodman with Victor Records. Several of the early sessions with Victor produced hits that would become Goodman standards for decades.

In spring 1935, Hammond asked if Goodman ever played any "legitimate clarinet music." Hammond was playing viola in a string quartet at the time, and he invited Goodman to join in to see how they'd sound together on Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. Goodman recounted that the music “did appeal to me. There were such marvelous melodies in it, and the way it all worked out, with one instrument changing parts with the others, and the wonderful way in which the composer gives you a terrific climax when some simple idea works out into a different thing altogether—that was an experience I never had in music before." After several months of practicing together, the quintet must have sounded pretty good, because Hammond's mother invited them to play for 200 party guests at her Upper East Side mansion. The performance marked Goodman's first classical performance in front of a live audience. "It went well enough, and I really enjoyed playing."[120]

That same spring, the union workers at the National Baking Company went on strike, which left the Let's Dance show with no products to advertise, so its 26th show, broadcast on May 25, was its last.[121] Somewhat desperate to keep Goodman's band together, Alexander hastily booked the band at New York City's Roosevelt Hotel,[122] which was most recently the home of Guy Lombardo and his orchestra, billed as the "Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven." The orchestra had been the Roosevelt's house band for the past five years, but Goodman's band proved to be too big, too loud, and too hot to play for the Roosevelt's target audience of middle-aged tourists. Goodman admitted that his band, “on its first booking in a hotel, laid an egg."[123] The hotel manager served the band its two-week notice during its first intermission on opening night.

After one of the few nights spent at the Roosevelt, Goodman attended a party at the Queens home of Red Norvo, a jazz xylophonist, and his wife, jazz singer Mildred Bailey. When the hosts requested music, pianist Teddy Wilson began playing and Goodman soon joined in on his clarinet. Mildred's cousin Carl Bellinger was an amateur drummer whose set was already assembled, so he picked up his sticks and rounded out the trio. By all accounts, the result was electrifying. Goodman wrote that in some ways, the jam session reminded him of the quartet's performance of the Mozart piece. Playing with just two other musicians was a striking contrast to playing with the full band, because "here everything was close and intimate, with one fellow's ideas blending right in with the other's, and each of us getting a lift from what the other one was doing."[124]

Hammond, who was at the party, wrote in Melody Maker magazine that the trio's impromptu concert was "about the most exciting evening musically that I can ever remember." The trio immediately booked sessions with both Goodman's and Wilson's record companies, and the resulting sides rank among jazz's most enduring records.[125] That summer, Goodman continued freelancing for radio shows and solo recording sessions, and he also recorded 16 sides with the full band. Meanwhile, after the Roosevelt Hotel fiasco, Alexander spent the early part of summer booking the band for a cross-country tour with mostly one-night stops in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Toledo, Chicago, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Oakland, and others. The one-nighter grind was broken up by a three-week stint at Elitch's Gardens in Denver before the tour wrapped up at the Palomar, a new dance hall in Los Angeles.

That Denver stint nearly ended the tour, which likely would have permanently broken up the band. As with the Roosevelt Hotel, management at Elitch's Gardens was expecting a quieter, more low-key dance band, and only an hour-long phone call from Alexander could convince Goodman to adapt to management's expectations so the tour could go on.[126] The band received a heartier welcome in Oakland, but the musicians were so sore about their experience in Denver that they didn't recognize it as such at first. As Bunny Berigan played the four bars of the trumpet solo of the first song, Goodman remembered that "there was such a yelling and stomping and carrying on in the hall that I thought a riot had broken out. When I went into my solo, the noise was even louder. Finally the truth got through to me: We were causing the riot. What was even more amazing, the fans seemed to get wilder and wilder as the night wore on."[127]

Almost, but Not Quite

“Finally he decided to do unto himself what he had done unto others: He organized his own band.” - George T. Simon[128]

After Smith Ballew’s band broke up, Miller returned to New York and continued recording with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and when they decided to form a band to take on the road, Miller signed on to play trombone and write arrangements. He also invited his friend Ray McKinley to join. The band toured New England in the spring, and they had a summer engagement on Long Island. The Dorseys’ band also recorded nearly 60 sides with Decca Records in 1934.

Tommy Dorsey

Jimmy Dorsey

The Dorsey brothers were notorious squabblers, and McKinley remembered them screaming at each other during just their second rehearsal. “I remember Jimmy yelled, ‘I suppose you think that means you’re the boss,’ and Tommy yelled right back, ‘You know damn well I’m the boss, because I can talk louder than you!’”[129]

Weary of the tension, Miller left the brothers to recruit musicians for a new band. English bandleader Ray Noble’s records were gaining popularity in the United States and attracted the attention of U.S. record company executives who wanted to bring him and his band overseas. However, Noble mainly recorded with freelance musicians, so Miller was enlisted to gather a band of American musicians for him to lead. Noble’s clearance to work in the U.S. was delayed by union issues, leaving Miller free to tailor the band’s sound to his own tastes and preferences.

In April 1935, Miller assembled an ensemble for a recording session with Columbia Records. This session was the first time Miller recorded under his own name, as the labels for “Solo Hop”[130] and three other sides read “Glenn Miller & His Orchestra.” Of course, the lineup of musicians on these records was not the same lineup as his later big bands, but “Solo Hop” peaked at number seven on Billboard magazine’s singles charts.

Noble’s band began playing publicly that same month, and in May it began its own recording sessions with RCA Victor. Two of Miller’s jazz arrangements were included in the first Victor session. Miller’s arrangements for Noble featured what would later become known as Miller’s signature sound, a lead clarinet over four saxophones, punctuated with other brass. It was during Miller’s time with Noble’s band that he studied musical composition with Dr. Joseph Schillinger, a music theorist, arranger, and teacher who incorporated mathematics into his method.[131]

Schillinger

On June 1, 1935, Ray Noble and His Orchestra opened a long-term gig playing nightly at the swanky Rainbow Room atop New York City’s Rockefeller Center. The engagement included “Refreshment Time,” remote radio broadcasts sponsored by Coca-Cola three nights a week, and advertisements touted the show as “a brand new, grand new show on the air.” It was a successful engagement, but Miller was feeling restless and soon confided in his friend George T. Simon that he wanted to lead his own band. Simon was a jazz writer and critic for Metronome music magazine at the time, and Miller asked for his help.

Simon later wrote that Miller knew the venture would be a gamble. Leading a band meant Miller would be leaving behind the security of a settled lifestyle and a regular paycheck, but he’d also be able to move away from the constraints and tedium of commercial, vanilla music “that would never offend anyone, or excite anyone, including the musicians themselves,” as Simon put it. “Some of his friends had been able to compromise; they had learned how to stomach such a bland and, for a creative musician, gigolo-like existence without throwing up.”[132]

Miller’s motivation may have been increased after the death of his father in August 1936 at age 69. Biographer Dennis M. Spragg explained that Elmer had fought “a challenging lifelong struggle with depression, alcohol, and intermittent employment, which his son was painfully aware of and tried to redeem with a motivated work ethic.”[133]

By the end of 1936, Simon and Miller were recruiting musicians. Clarinetist Hal McIntyre was among the first ones hired. Overall, the search was a short one, and the band was rehearsing together by early 1937. Miller had high standards and high expectations for his musicians, later writing, “Too many bands take rehearsals lightly. This attitude results in bad phrasing, unobserved expression marks and lack of sectional ensemble precision. Too much care cannot be exercised in rehearsing arrangements.”[134]

That March, Simon announced in Metronome that Miller’s band would be recording six sides for Decca the following month. Simon wrote of his friend, “Miller, besides great talents as an arranger, possesses other attributes which should help him nicely in what already looks like a pretty easy climb to the top for him. He’s a thorough, as well as thoroughly hep, musician; knows what he wants, and…knows how to get what he wants.” Simon, who was also an amateur drummer, knew of what he wrote. Miller invited Simon to play drums in that Decca recording session. After the immense stress he felt in that session, Simon chose to stick with his writing career.[135]

The band’s first gig was a one-night stand filling in for another band at the Hotel New Yorker. It next played a two-week engagement at Boston’s Raymor Ballroom, then two months at the Blue Room at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. At the Roosevelt, the band played a 7-1/2 to 8-1/2 hour set every evening, along with a three-hour set each weekend afternoon. After paying his musicians at the Roosevelt, Miller was left with less than $6 a week to pay himself.

Two days after closing at the Roosevelt, the band opened at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. It then moved on to Minneapolis and it played three daily sets at the Hotel Nicollet. Miller actually lost money on the Nicollet gig. The last gig was three more weeks at the Raymor Ballroom in Boston. This grueling schedule was interspersed by daytime theater dates, personnel changes and issues, a national radio broadcast, and strings of one-nighters.

Amidst all of the comings and goings, Helen became very ill and required surgery that left her and Glenn unable to have children of their own. They took some solace in the company of “Pops,” their beloved black and white Boston terrier.

Miller’s band also completed multiple recording sessions. Most of the records from this configuration of the band were mediocre at best, but Simon considered Kathleen “Kitty” Lane’s vocals on “Sweet Stranger”[136] to be the best vocals on any recordings by any of Miller’s civilian bands.

From 1928-1938, Miller was a sideman or sideman and arranger on a total of 22 sides that made the record charts for orchestras led by Ben Pollack, Red Nichols, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, and Ray Noble. He also charted two more with bands he led—the aforementioned “Solo Hop” in 1935, along with “Every Day’s A Holiday”[137] which was recorded December 13, 1937.

Throughout the year, Miller had worked to improve and refine his own sound, using what Simon called “Glenn’s arranging tricks, like the repetition of riffs, the ‘ooh-wah’ sound, created by the brass waving metal derby hats in front of the bells of their horns, and those sly diminuendos broken by bursting, blasting brass barrages that built up to rousing climaxes—tricks he was to keep for the rest of the band’s history.”[138] Another component of Miller’s signature sound was the result of one of his clarinetist’s lack of expertise on the saxophone. Irving “Faz” Prestopnik wasn’t able to join the rest of the clarinetists when they switched over to saxophones for the warmer tone Miller preferred on ballads, so Faz would just sit and wait it out. But during one performance, Miller suggested that Faz play the saxophone part on his clarinet. Miller was pleased with the result.

Though Miller didn’t use that newly discovered sound very much, things were clearly coming together for the band. Nonetheless, as 1937 came to a close, Miller chose to break it up,  exhausted from the trials and tribulations of life on the road. He was worried about Helen, and he saw no financially lucrative opportunities ahead for the band which was battling internally with egotism and substance abuse issues.

His first year as a bandleader had cost him nearly $30,000, and he felt it was time to give up.[139]

The King of Swing

“As soon as it was understood that we could handle things in our own way, it was the thrill of my life to walk out on that stage with people just hemming the band in.” – Benny Goodman

While Miller was struggling to gain traction, most music historians date the birth of the Swing Era as August 21, 1935, the first night that Goodman's band took the stage at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. A university professor had used the word "swing" to describe jazz rhythms as early as 1917, and Duke Ellington had already prophesied that "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing" in his musical manifesto in 1932.[140] The previous summer, the word "swing" first appeared as part of a band's name on a record label in "Red Norvo and his Swing Septet."[141] Nevertheless, the Swing Era truly dawned when the widespread popularity of the music style was finally acknowledged and confirmed on that legendary night at the Palomar.[142]

In 1935, the nation was certainly ripe for the Swing Era. The Let's Dance radio show had aired at least an hour earlier in California than it did in time zones to the east, so the earliest segments of the show, when the band was less warmed up in comparison to later segments, were not aired for Western audiences. Moreover, a Los Angeles disc jockey was a fan of Goodman and frequently played his records on his show "Make Believe Ballroom." This exposure likely boosted record sales, which may have played a role in the Palomar booking.

Thus, when Goodman’s band arrived, the crowd was “ready for us."[143] "They ate it up!" pianist Jess Stacy later recalled. "There must have been ten thousand people there. Every musician in L.A. was there. They loved it; they all stood in front of the bandstand. They were a little more dignified than the rest of the crowd, but they were really listening."[144] Actor Steve Allen, who later played Goodman in a movie, summed it up like this: "Goodman had started the swing craze by taking the music the [African American] bands had been playing for years, adding a touch of clarinet magic, and turning it into a national obsession. "It may be obvious to say Benny was the Pied Piper of the teen-agers," Allen wrote. "But it's true. He could have run for president. He played the clarinet better than anyone since the instrument was invented."[145]

Music critic and historian Irving Kolodin, who coauthored Goodman's autobiography, explained how swing is elementally distinct from jazz. "[Swing] can be listened to as well as heard…[T]here is some element of fresh and changing interest which challenges the attention of the listener, whereas the unchanging formulae of ordinary stereotyped jazz are designed merely as a soporific to his senses."[146]

The band's opening night success at the Palomar was followed by what must have felt like a whirlwind. The size of the crowds kept growing, so the band's booking at the Palomar was extended by three weeks. The band played every night, forgoing the customary Monday nights off. Fans danced, but they also swarmed the platform to listen. Radio stations broadcast remotely from the ballroom, and the band performed at football rallies at nearby colleges on Saturday afternoons. A Down Beat magazine headline trumpeted, "Goodman Wakes Up West Coast with 'Swing' Style."[147]

The Palomar engagement ended in October, after which the band headed back east on a month-long string of one-nighters, but the momentum that was built at the Palomar generated excitement all the way back to Chicago and the band began an extended engagement at the Urban Room at the Congress Hotel that November. It was during this engagement that the band began using the name "Benny Goodman and his Swing Band." Record sales remained brisk, and WGN radio locally broadcast from the Congress every weekday evening. National networks picked up some of them for wider airings, and with Variety magazine's debut of its new weekly column "Swing Stuff," the commercial potential and the mainstream acceptance of the genre could no longer be denied.[148]

Even at this point, fans and critics alike still struggled to define "swing." When one Variety magazine reporter asked fans what swing is, he got several different answers. "It's jam, but arranged." "It's the difference between the old and the new music." “It's a livelier tempo; you know, swingy like." The reporter tried to explain, "The appeal is all ear; it may inspire to hoof, or sway, or syncopate, or hotcha—as it consistently does—but there isn't room for any hoofing. Therefore, the ear appeal is paramount."[149],[150] Goodman called it "something that is genuinely American, because it's the expression of an individual—a kind of free speech in music."[151] Whatever the definition, listeners recognized good swing when they heard it, and its popularity continued to grow.

Goodman's initial booking was extended to six months, and NBC initiated weekly broadcasts from the hotel.[152] In December, at the urging of the Rhythm Club, Goodman staged a Sunday afternoon concert. The Rhythm Club was a group of wealthy Chicago socialites who were swing and jazz fans with the connections and cash to secure bookings that suited their musical tastes. The Goodman concert was the first event of its kind as it was designed exclusively for listening to the music, as opposed to dancing and drinking to it. Goodman was initially resistant to the idea, but Rhythm Club members talked him into it, and the event was a major success. He later recalled that "the few people who tried to dance were booed off the floor."

At the end of the year, Goodman was officially crowned the King of Swing when the jazz magazine Metronome named his band "The Best Swing Band of 1935."[153] Goodman hired Jimmy Mundy and David Rose to help meet the increasing demand for new arrangements. Goodman was still using arrangements by Fletcher Henderson, but by then Henderson was leading a band of his own, and the Rhythm Club arranged for Henderson's band to play the second Urban Room concert in March 1936.[154] During that concert, Goodman and drummer Gene Krupa joined a small group of Henderson's musicians on stage to jam. The Rhythm Club subsequently booked Goodman's trio, which included black pianist Teddy Wilson, for its third concert a month later. These two performances likely represent the first times that racially mixed bands performed in such a venue for paying audiences.[155]

Around that time, Goodman's band was signed for the NBC radio series "The Elgin Review," sponsored by the Elgin Watch Company. The band recorded more than 20 new sides with Victor, including "Stompin' at the Savoy" and "Goody-Goody."[156] When production of the radio series shifted to New York, Goodman and the band headed east and stayed until the end of June.[157] Then their plans sent them back west for three months in Los Angeles. The band was booked for a return engagement at the Palomar, weekly appearances on the CBS radio show Camel Caravan, and a spot in the Paramount movie The Big Broadcast of 1937. The movie was the third in a series featuring popular radio performers, and the 1937 edition also included Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Martha Raye.[158]

When several band members chose not to leave New York, Goodman needed to find replacements. Saxophonist Vido Musso was a passionate improviser who was added despite the fact that he couldn't read music, and Lionel Hampton, whose career began as a flashy, flamboyant percussionist, was added after Goodman went to the seedy Paradise Club one night to hear Hampton play.[159] When Hampton found out who he was, Hampton invited Goodman on stage to jam, a session that lasted two hours past the club's closing time. Goodman returned the next night with Wilson, Krupa, and several other musicians, and that night's jam lasted even longer. Goodman was so pleased with Hampton's finesse and flair on the vibraphone that he quickly scheduled several recording sessions and invited Hampton along. "[W]hat he got out of that instrument was unlike anything I had ever heard in my life before," Goodman wrote.[160] The first of these sessions yielded the classic "Moonglow."[161] At the time of the recording, the musicians had only known each other for a few days. Goodman called the quartet "one of those natural things that was just meant to be."[162]

Hampton

Keeping up with all of these engagements required long, busy days with few breaks, but by all accounts, the band's return to the Palomar was triumphant, especially the interludes that showcased the trio and the quartet. One band member recalled, "When they performed, the people would be stacked in front of the bandstand." Later that year, the movie broke opening-week attendance records at the Paramount Theatre near New York City's Times Square.[163]

After three months in Los Angeles, the band headed back east, albeit without Hampton. It played one-nighters in New England, including a stop at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, and settled in for a long-term engagement at the Madhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. Trumpeters Harry James and Ziggy Elman were added, joining Chris Griffin to round out what was widely hailed as the best trumpet section of the swing era. Hampton rejoined the band in November.

Besides the regular performances at the Hotel Pennsylvania, the band was still rehearsing and playing once a week for the Camel Caravan radio show, as well as returning to studios every few weeks to cut more records, which continued to sell well.[164]

Shortly after, Willard Alexander booked the band to play five sets a day for two weeks at the Paramount Theatre, between showings of the Claudette Colbert film Maid of Salem.[165] Nobody associated with the band expected much from the Paramount shows, but when the band arrived at the theater for a 7 a.m. practice on opening day, hundreds of fans were already lined up at the box office. 10 mounted police arrived 30 minutes later to help control the crowd. Goodman likened the roar from the audience in response to the band's appearance on the theater's rising bandstand to the New Year's Eve pandemonium of Times Square: "That reception topped anything we had known up to that time, and because we felt it was spontaneous and genuine, we got a tremendous kick out of it."[166]

The performance marked the first opportunity for younger fans who became familiar with the music through records and radio play to see the band live. Tickets cost just 25 cents, which was far cheaper than the admission price for performances at swankier venues like the Hotel Pennsylvania.[167] Goodman biographer James Lincoln Collier described the experience from the perspective of an audience member: “One of the most spine-chilling of experiences for swing band fans over the next decade would be to sit in the Paramount audience, begin to hear the faint first notes of a band's theme…and then as the music grew louder, watch the band rise slowly and majestically into sight. It was an event that jerked fans from their seats with the roar, and the first to pull them to their feet was the Benny Goodman band on that March 3, 1937, at 8:30 in the morning.”[168]

Attendance at the five shows on the Goodman band's opening day totaled 21,000. The engagement was thus extended to a third week, and it continued breaking attendance records. "While attendance at the Paramount rose to new heights," a biographer noted, "attendance at local schools fell alarmingly."[169]

During the Paramount gig, the band's first show started at 10:30 a.m., and their shows at the Pennsylvania didn't end until 2 a.m. "Just how we managed to stand up under that grind, I don't know—except that once you get into that groove, you just keep on going," Goodman remembered. But he was sympathetic to the reasoning behind the busy schedule: "[W]hen the public wants you, they want you all the time; and when they don't they don't want you even a little bit."[170]

For the time being, the public clearly wanted Goodman and the band. After the Paramount engagement, a similar event was booked at a theater in Boston.[171] They returned to New York to play for one night in the "Music Battle of the Century" against Chick Webb at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. When the 4,000 available tickets quickly sold out, 5,000 more fans had to be turned away. Though Webb's band won that battle, Goodman's band returned to its true form for a similar event against Roy Eldridge's band in Chicago in June.[172]

The band then set off on a month-long one-nighter road trip. One audience in a small farm town in Iowa demanded no less than eight encores. Other stops were just as successful, culminating in the June 29, 1937 opening of the band's third Palomar Ballroom engagement, when 7,000 fans broke the venue's attendance record.

While in California, Goodman and the band recorded scenes for the musical romantic comedy film Hollywood Hotel.[173] Producers wanted the band to record the soundtrack first, then shoot the video with simulated action, but because of the improvisational style of his band’s music, Goodman insisted that live performances be recorded. As a result, those performances, which included "Sing, Sing, Sing" and "I've Got a Heartful of Music,"[174] were nothing short of electrifying.

Just before leaving California, Goodman hired singer Martha Tilton and recorded two sides with her. Other recording sessions included the full orchestra and the quartet.[175] When the band returned to New York in October, it settled in once again at the Madhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania for a three-month engagement, and resumed weekly radio broadcasts from there. It also opened the new season of Camel Caravan, and mainstream magazines from Life to The New Yorker to The Saturday Evening Post featured articles on the popularity of swing music and the success of Benny Goodman and His Orchestra.[176]

Eventually, a publicist suggested Goodman and the band perform at New York City's venerated Carnegie Hall. Goodman reportedly replied, "Are you out of your mind? What the hell would we do there?"[177] Nonetheless, Goodman eventually agreed to the concert: "[A]s soon as it was understood that we could handle the thing in our own way, and let the people listen to it as they would any other kind of music, the proposition really began to mean something. Certainly if the stuff is worth playing at all, it's worth playing in any hall that presents itself."[178]

Impresario Sol Hurok was persuaded to act as presenter for the event, and Irving Kolodin, then the classical music critic for The New York Sun, was commissioned to write detailed notes about the performance for inclusion in its printed program. Once all 2,760 tickets quickly sold out, 100 more seats were added on the sides of the stage.[179]

If the Swing Era was born the very first time Benny Goodman and His Orchestra played the Palomar on August 21, 1935, it reached its pinnacle on January 16, 1938, when the band first played at Carnegie Hall. That date was chosen because the band was set to finish its engagement at the Hotel Pennsylvania on the 15th. The movie Hollywood Hotel had just opened at the Strand Theater in Times Square on the 12th, with a reception similar to what greeted the live band at its theater performances. This prompted The New York Times reviewer to caution, “[N]ext to Mr. Goodman’s swing band, the noisiest thing in the world is an audience of Goodman admirers. Since the maestro is going to give a recital at Carnegie Hall this Sunday, we feel the management should be informed and advised to take whatever cover is available. For Mr. Goodman could not so much as poke his clarinet into camera range yesterday without producing an ovation.”[180]

Though they’d been practicing for days in the hall, the musicians were still nervous as the 8:45 p.m. showtime approached. Trumpeter Harry James muttered to himself, "I feel like a whore in a church."[181] Indeed, the performance started out far less than perfect, and according to many critics, the opening number sounded tense. The program included a tribute to "Twenty Years of Jazz," and some of those honored songs sounded forced or awkward. However, the band soon found its groove, and the trio and quartet performances were undisputed triumphs. Following the intermission, the entire orchestra’s performance of the hot number "Swingtime in the Rockies" prompted reviewer George T. Simon to write that "by the time the boys had wended their way out of the Rockies they had created a ruckus that must have been heard way out there." The trio and quartet returned for unplanned additional numbers, and Goodman closed the show with "Sing, Sing, Sing." Also unplanned was the inclusion of Jess Stacy's improvised piano solo at the end of the song, which Goodman biographer Ross Firestone called "the most miraculous solo of his career, an elegant, wistful, deeply moving meditation that was part blues, part some kind of almost classical music…and wholly unlike anything anyone ever heard him play before."[182]

The appearance of Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and other black musicians in Goodman's orchestra onstage at Carnegie Hall marked the first time a racially integrated musical group performed at a major American music hall.[183] For his part, Goodman asserted that “when we go out to play, nobody cares much what colors or races are represented just so long as we play good music. That’s the way it should be, and I certainly hope that the time will come when any band can play anyplace, as long as it delivers what the public comes to hear—music.”[184] John Hammond concurred, writing in his memoirs, “I heard no color line in the music. To bring recognition to the [African American's] supremacy in jazz was the most effective and constructive form of social protest I could think of.”[185]

Immediate reviews of the concert were mixed. Down Beat magazine raved, in part, that the concert had been "written into the annals of swingology," and Kolodin wrote in his review in The Sun the next day, "Whether the local seismographs recorded it or not, an earthquake of violent intensity racked a small corner of Manhattan last night as swing took Carnegie Hall in its stride." Either way, the concert served to validate the popularity and mainstream acceptance of swing, and it further crowned Goodman as swing’s undisputed king.[186]

The entire concert was recorded, and generations of swing and jazz fans are forever indebted to Albert Marx for that. Marx, who was married to former Goodman vocalist Helen Ward at the time, planned the recording as a gift to her.[187] He piped the audio via a single overhead microphone through equipment in a van parked outside, then over telephone lines into a nearby studio, where it was finally transcribed onto acetate records.[188] Goodman received a set of the records, but the tangled web of all of the musicians’ varied contracts with different record companies prevented its immediate release. Goodman packed his set away in his closet and promptly forgot about them. When they were rediscovered in 1950, his records served as the source material for the concert’s release on a set of two long-playing vinyl record albums.[189] The album set was the first double album ever released, and it was among the first live concert albums ever. It quickly became one of the first albums to sell a million copies, further affirming the 1938 concert’s eternal status as the zenith of swing in music history.[190]

Benny Goodman and His Orchestra had every right to rest on their Carnegie Hall laurels, but just 10 days later they went back to play theater shows at the Paramount, which sold 26,000 tickets for the opening day performances. Extra shows were added to the planned schedule, boosting the tally for the engagement to an unprecedented 39 shows per week for three weeks.[191] A concert at Boston’s Symphony Hall in April drew a crowd so boisterous that the music was drowned out, leading Down Beat reviewer George Frasier to report, “Musically, the affair failed to maintain the standard set at Carnegie in January, but that, as I say, was largely attributable to the differences between the two audiences. Where the people at Carnegie were enthusiastic, those at Symphony were downright icky…”[192]

Other signs of trouble were brewing. Whether fueled by personal ambitions, stress, travel fatigue, egoistic clashes, personality conflicts, or other issues, significant personnel changes were in the works. Most notably, drummer Gene Krupa, trumpeter Harry James, and pianist Teddy Wilson left to form their own bands,[193] to the point that by fall of 1939, just four band members remained from the Carnegie Hall lineup.[194] Changes continued at a rapid pace thanks to the initiation of the Selective Service draft in 1940, which encompassed the same young male demographic that encompassed many jazz and swing musicians.[195] Inevitably Goodman was facing far more competition - he was just about the only fish in the pond when he was crowned king in 1935, but by 1940, at least seven other successful swing bands formed under the leadership of Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and others.[196]

Through it all, Goodman was still at the top of the swing heap.[197] He continued touring, recording, and performing for radio shows as a soloist, with ensembles of 3-7 musicians, and with his full orchestra.[198] He also delved deeper into classical music, which included performing and recording with the Budapest String Quartet and the New York Philharmonic Symphony Ensemble.[199] He returned to Carnegie Hall to play a chamber piece by Béla Bartók in 1939, and as a soloist with the full Philharmonic Symphony in 1940 playing Mozart and Debussy pieces.[200] In the midst of all the personnel changes and his divided focus on swing and classical music, Goodman’s autobiography, The Kingdom of Swing, was published in spring 1939, just before he turned 30. He dedicated it to the memory of his father.

Goodman was forced to take two breaks from his frenetic schedule in spring and summer 1940 due to severe lower back pain that required surgery. The months he spent resting and recovering forced the orchestra to disband, and the surgery offered only temporary relief. Goodman suffered intense back pain for the rest of his life,[201] but even this couldn’t keep Goodman down for long. By fall, he’d gathered a new orchestra and was recording again, including the song “Benny Rides Again.”[202],[203]

A 1940 picture of a crowd of Goodman fans in Oakland

Goodman married John Hammond’s sister Alice in March 1942. John and Alice were great-great-grandchildren of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Alice was a divorced mother of three girls whose ex-husband was a member of the British Parliament.[204] She and Goodman became acquainted during her visits to New York. Goodman treated Alice’s daughters as his own, and the couple soon had two daughters together, Rachel and Benjie.[205]

Of course, Alice was not Goodman’s first or only female love interest. Fellow members of Goodman’s generation and social class were commonly far more open about sex than the more prudish higher classes were at the time. "In his youth, certainly, he sought feminine companionship, to understate the case," Goodman friend, confidant and discographer D. Russell Connor wrote. "But he was always discreet."[206]

Years earlier, Goodman and singer Helen Ward were in love. In fact, he had proposed to her in the summer of 1936, but he broke off the engagement soon afterward because he wanted to focus on his music. Helen ultimately left the Goodman orchestra to marry a childhood sweetheart.[207]

Moonlight Serenade

“Boy the way Glenn Miller played…. Those were the days.” - Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton as Archie and Edith Bunker on “All in the Family”[208]

Through everything that Glenn and Helen Miller faced throughout 1937, she never lost faith in him. With no band to lead in the new year, Glenn wrote some arrangements for Benny Goodman and played on a radio show sponsored by a cigarette company to pay the bills. He tried to give up his dreams of leading a band, but Helen wouldn’t give up, and at her urging, Helen’s parents took out a second mortgage on their home to provide funding for Glenn to form a new band. By spring 1938, he was recruiting musicians again.[209]

Miller decided that his new band wasn’t going to try to swing like the bands Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and the Dorsey brothers were leading so successfully; instead, he continued to build on the distinctive reed section sound he first started developing the year before. The sound was loose and rhythmic enough to reach a reasonable degree of hot, yet smooth and sweet enough to remain unoffensive to commercial interests. Perhaps Bing Crosby described it best when he wrote in 1974, “Glenn employed a harmonization that was new and vastly different. And when you heard the sound, it was recognizable and memorable. It was just Glenn Miller. I don’t suppose there was a single listener in the United States, unless he was tin-eared and tone-deaf, who didn’t love and appreciate the music of the Miller band.”[210]

In his arrangements, Miller sought to achieve a full, broad sound. He split sections of musicians into high and low voices which maximized each section’s harmonizing. He wrote the arrangements in an “open position,” with notes that spanned a range greater than a single octave. All these details and methods required discipline on the part of the musicians. When played correctly, the band just sounded bigger.[211] Miller’s musicians played with “a very broad, seemingly breathless way of phrasing, a sweeping legato style that no other dance band was then using.”[212]

Among Miller’s musicians were Chummy MacGregor, Hal McIntyre, Gordon “Tex” Beneke on saxophone, Willie Schwartz on clarinet, Paul Tanner on trombone, and vocalists Ray Eberle and Marion Hutton. Arranger Bill Finegan was soon added, and the new band, which was younger, more disciplined, and far less familiar with alcohol and other mind-altering substances than his first band, debuted as a dance band April 16 at the familiar Raymor Ballroom in Boston. This was followed in June by a gig at the Paradise Restaurant in New York which included several weekly national radio broadcasts.[213] The band was required to play loud, carnival-style music for a floor show that featured production numbers with showgirls in sleazy costumes. Miller’s band received second billing behind Freddie Fisher and his Schnickelfritzers.[214]

It was during that Paradise gig that press agent Howard Richmond first heard Miller’s band play. He immediately asked to represent it, even though Miller could only afford to pay him $50 a month. Like Miller’s first band, this band was losing money, and Miller was forced to ask his friend and fellow bandleader Tommy Dorsey for a loan.

As it turned out, Miller’s fortunes were about to change. That fall, through his agent, Miller met Cy Shribman, who with his brother and business partner Charlie managed ballrooms and invested in bands for a share of the profits. Cy paid all of Miller’s debts in a deal that entitled the Shribman brothers to 25% of the band’s profits. Dorsey did not appreciate the payback - he felt he deserved a share of the band instead of the Shribman brothers and ended his personal relationship with Miller. He also directed his manager to recruit a new band around Bob Chester to mimic Miller’s sound, and then he landed Chester’s band a lucrative record deal.[215]

The Shribman brothers booked Miller’s band for a series of one-nighters and college dates, as well as two nights a week at their Roseland State Ballroom in Boston. George T. Simon noted that “it was the zealous support of the younger generation that established the overall trend and individual popularities among the newer, swingier outfits. Everywhere the bands played, the kids followed. In ballrooms and hotel rooms they’d line up dozens deep in front of bandstands, sometimes dancing but mostly listening and cheering and yelling when their favorites would let loose with a swinging solo. The same sort of responses greeted musicians in theaters, in front of which the kids would line up for hours to make sure of getting choice seats.”[216]

All this exposure finally led to a gig with some prestige, a four-week engagement at Cedar Grove, New Jersey’s Meadowbrook Ballroom which included several weekly national radio broadcasts. The March 5, 1939 opening was such a hit that the engagement was immediately extended to seven weeks.[217] In the wake of the newfound and growing success, Miller hired David Mackay to assume the band’s legal affairs, and Mackay eventually took over most of Miller’s business matters as well.

As grassroots interest in the band grew, RCA Victor took notice and offered Miller a new one-year contract with multiple recording sessions, a guaranteed number of releases, and $175 per side, a $25 increase from his previous rate. The contract did not include royalties. Recording sessions in April 1939 resulted in 12 sides, including the hits “Little Brown Jug,”[218] “Pavanne,”[219] “Runnin’ Wild,”[220] and “Moonlight Serenade,”[221] Miller’s instrumental theme song that soon became legendary. Miller originally wrote the tune in 1935 as “Wind in the Trees” for a composition exercise when studying with Dr. Schillinger. Eddie Heyman wrote a touching set of lyrics for the tune, titled “Now I Lay Me Down to Weep,”[222] but they were deemed “too melancholy” and were never recorded.[223] During that spring 1939 recording session, the tune’s title was changed to “Moonlight Serenade” when a “B” side was needed for “Sunrise Serenade.”[224]

On his 35th birthday, Miller received news as delicious as the proverbial icing on the cake. Glenn Miller and His Orchestra had landed the gig coveted by every band at the time: the summer engagement at Long Island’s Glen Island Casino, the quintessential big band ballroom, the “mecca of music for moderns.” Glenn Miller and His Orchestra opened there May 17, 1939.[225] The show included the first incarnation of Miller’s song-selection method, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,” a medley device he later incorporated into every broadcast.[226] Biographer John Flower called it “the big break that the band needed to launch it on its way and Miller delivered his music to a highly enthusiastic opening night crowd of eighteen hundred people, which broke all existing day records for the Casino.”[227]

Since the gig was so highly sought, the ballroom operators weren’t forced to pay very well, so they didn’t, but the financial strain was worth it. That summer, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra jumped from unranked in 1938 to number four in 1939 in one radio station’s favorite bands poll, and they finished no lower than fifth in three separate Metronome magazine polls in 1939. Metronome editors noted, “It was a magnificent showing for the group that finished far out of the running last year.”[228]

“In the Mood,”[229] arguably the most popular Miller instrumental of all, was recorded August 1, 1939. Based on “Tar Paper Stomp” by Wingy Manone, its medium tempo was perfect for dancing, and Louis Armstrong slyly used to call it “not too slow, not too fast, just half-fast.”[230] The song went on to top the charts for 13 straight weeks in 1940. In all, the band recorded 36 sides during its Glen Island engagement.

The late August night that Miller and his band closed at Glen Island, 1,200 fans threw them a party, the first time the casino’s patrons ever did so. By that time, big bands were a huge business - the front page of the August 1939 issue of Variety magazine reported that dance bands were a $100 million annual business. Bands employed 30,000-40,000 musicians and auxiliary entertainers, as well as an additional 8,000 who were involved in the commercial aspects as bookers, managers, promoters, and transporters.[231]

Glenn Miller and His Orchestra spent the fall of 1939 capitalizing on the success they achieved that summer. Miller earned nearly $12,000 for performances in just the first week after Glen Island, and the band went on to break attendance records at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre, Syracuse’s New York State Fair, and the Hershey Park Ballroom in Hershey, Pennsylvania. In mid-September at the Paramount Theater in Times Square, the band grossed $150,000 in three weeks. Out of that sum, Miller earned about $5,400 each week. That September Paramount gig led to an advance booking for 1940 that guaranteed Miller at least $6,500 a week, and in October 1939, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra was the closing band of a Carnegie Hall celebration concert[232] that also featured bands led by Benny Goodman, Fred Waring, and Paul Whiteman. On top of it all, RCA Victor offered Miller a new contract that included royalties. Joe Cohen wrote in Variety magazine of one Pittsburgh theater show that “it’s not hard to understand the current enthusiasm for Miller. He has a corking outfit, equally at home in swing or sweet and excelling in both. Current Cinderella Man of the band biz is a modest, self-effacing fellow with a shy, engaging manner and a trombone that speaks volumes for him.”[233]

In November, Miller hired Mike Nidorf to be his personal manager, and he hired Helen’s best friend, Polly Davis, as his secretary. Polly soon married Don Haynes, who was working as Miller’s liaison with the entertainment industry’s General Artists Corporation. Haynes eventually served as Miller’s personal manager, and the two couples became close friends.

Miller also hired arranger Jerry Gray, formerly with Artie Shaw’s band. Gray wrote “A String of Pearls”[234] and “Pennsylvania 6-5000.”[235] “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” or 736-5000, is still the phone number of the Hotel Pennsylvania, which has since been renamed the Hotel Penn New York. The midtown Manhattan hotel between Penn Station and the Empire State Building opened in 1919, and it was in that hotel’s lobby that Miller’s musicians presented him with a gift on Christmas Eve 1939 that nearly brought him to tears: a brand-new Buick outfitted with a custom horn that played the first four notes of “Moonlight Serenade.”[236]

The band opened the hotel’s Café Rouge in January 1940 for a three-month engagement, and also new for 1940 was a three-night-a-week nationally broadcast radio program sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes. For the broadcasts, the band was required to perform at large auditoriums for nonpaying, invited guests.[237] The rehearsals and performances for those Chesterfield broadcasts and the 12 daily shows at Café Rouge, plus the first week of a 36-show-a-week engagement back at the Paramount Theater that overlapped the Café Rouge engagement, added up to 54 performances in one week, a schedule that landed an exhausted Miller in the hospital. Gene Krupa and Tommy Dorsey were among the bandleaders who filled in while Miller spent a few days recuperating.

In spring 1940, Glenn and Helen relocated from the city to an apartment in Tenafly, New Jersey, 20 minutes away. Glenn didn’t want to leave the city and likely made the move for tax purposes, but the new home overlooked a golf course which served his obsession with the game just fine.[238]

That summer, the band shifted its home base to Chicago, where it continued the Chesterfield shows and played one-nighters throughout the Midwest. The band broke attendance records at shows in Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, but Miller took every opportunity possible to play golf, once playing 102 holes in less than four days. His competitive and perfectionist nature stayed with him even during his leisure time.

The band remained mostly intact, with a few personnel changes. At year’s end, it cut loose and played hot in a battle of the bands with 27 other groups at New York City’s Manhattan Center, placing second only to Jimmie Lunceford.

As the storm clouds of a war churned on the horizon in 1941, the music industry was embroiled in a battle of its own. The performers’ rights organization American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers attempted to double the licensing fees that radio networks were charged for broadcast rights of copyrighted songs. In protest, the NBC and CBS radio networks boycotted all ASCAP songs, affecting more than a million titles, including Miller’s biggest hits. The strike lasted for 10 months, but the shows went on with non-ASCAP songs. In February 1941, when Chesterfield extended its deal with Miller’s band, the new agreement allowed the band to air its shows remotely from its scheduled theater engagements.

After a series of one-week theater engagements in cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra headed to Hollywood to film Sun Valley Serenade in March 1941. Miller demanded that the band play an important role in the film’s story. The resulting movie was a hit and the soundtrack was spectacular despite the fact that like most musical films at the time, the video was recorded separately from the audio that was used. The movie’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo”[239] became the first record to sell a million copies in nearly 15 years, despite the fact it could not be played on the radio due to the ASCAP boycott.

While in Hollywood, the band also played a three-week engagement at the Palladium Ballroom. This was followed by a series of one-nighters up the coast. After attempted swindles by fraudulent and dishonest promoters, Miller vowed he’d never do one-nighters on the West Coast again.

After the movie was completed, the patriotic Miller debuted his Sunset Serenade radio show. Like many Americans at the time, he was increasingly concerned with world affairs in general, and with the welfare of United States servicemen in particular. For each show, Sunset Serenade polled servicemen at five different training camps regarding which songs should be played during the broadcasts. Each week, the outfit that nominated the songs that won a listeners’ poll received a radio-phonograph console and a set of 50 records. Miller bought these rewards at Macy’s with money from his personal account, and not all of the records he bought had his name on the label.

After the ASCAP boycott ended in October 1941 and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” could finally be aired, all five camps on the Sunset Serenade show nominated it, so naturally the song won that week’s listeners’ polls. Therefore, Miller rewarded each of that week’s five camps with its own console and set of records. Obviously, money was no longer tight for Miller. He earned more than $41,000 for his third gig at the Café Rouge, and the band’s weekly grosses at New York’s Paramount reached as high as $73,000.[240] The band’s Chesterfield radio show contract was renewed and records continued to sell. On one financial statement a few months later, he listed his net worth at $344,000.[241]

In the midst of it all, Glenn and Helen filed an adoption application with an Illinois agency. It had already been four years since Helen’s surgery, and after a series of interviews, all the couple could do was to wait some more.[242]

The United States was drawn into World War II after Japan’s surprise attack on U.S. military installations in the Pacific on December 7, 1941. The most devastating strike was at the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s declaration of the war the following day required immediate sacrifices. Young men signed up for the military in droves, and the effects of wartime production, rationing, and restrictions were soon felt across the nation. On the other hand, some aspects of life went on as before. Glenn Miller and His Orchestra still had recording sessions, performances, and radio shows, though their December 9 Chesterfield show from Café Rouge was canceled due to Roosevelt’s fireside chat that evening.

In March 1942, Miller and the band headed back to Hollywood to shoot their second movie, Orchestra Wives. Miller and his musicians kept to a lighter schedule on this trip, committing only to its Chesterfield and Sunset Serenade radio shows, two recording sessions at RCA Victor’s Hollywood studios, and three one-nighters. One of these, true to Miller’s growing patriotism, was a military ball to benefit an Army hospital.[243]

Next to a Letter from Home

Miller

“I’ve got a date with Uncle Sam coming up…[T]here’s a lot of swell guys in the outfit I’m going in, and maybe all of us can get together again after this thing’s over. In the meantime, I’ll see you all in the army, and we’ll say goodbye the best way we know how.” - Glenn Miller, from his farewell address on his “Moonlight Serenade” radio program[244]

Like the nation at large, entertainers’ participation in support of the war effort ramped up throughout 1941 and 1942. Along with other big bands, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra performed and recorded commercial spots to promote Defense Bonds and Stamps sales, and to raise money for organizations like the Elks War Fund.[245] But the patriotic Miller knew he could do more.

Though he was 38 and married, he applied for a commission in the U.S. Naval Reserve on June 20, 1942, and after he was rejected by the Navy, he wrote a letter to Brigadier General Charles D. Young offering his services where they may best be used, whether that meant performing and broadcasting to boost morale, fundraising for the USO or the Army Relief Fund, or modernizing the U.S. Army band. “I hope you will feel that there is a job I can do for the army,” he wrote. Nearly immediately, the Army replied with an assignment for him to the Army Specialist Corps. Captain Glenn Miller was given orders to report in early October 1942.

Glenn Miller and his civilian band played together for the last time on September 27 at the Central Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, for the Chesterfield radio program. To say it was an emotional night would be an understatement. Some of the musicians attempted to raise their spirits with spirits, and vocalist Marion Hutton had to leave the stage mid-song after she broke down in tears. The brass section choked up too, and when Miller turned away from the band, the teens in the audience were also bawling their eyes out. “I could stand everything, all the heartache of breaking up things that had taken us years to build—but I just couldn’t face those kids,” Miller said. Mercifully, the curtain was lowered before the band finished playing “Moonlight Serenade” for the last time.[246] All in all, it was “a pretty wet night—bleary, beery, and teary.”[247]

Upon completion of officers’ training, Miller was assigned as an Assistant Special Services Officer with the Army Air Forces, which pilfered him from the Army when an AAF officer requested the transfer of one Alton G. Miller. The famous bandleader had enlisted under his relatively unknown real first name.

Miller reported to the AAF Technical Training Command in North Carolina and formed bands of professional musicians who’d been recruited, including Herman “Trigger” Alpert, Jerry Gray, Jimmy Priddy, and Rubin “Zeke” Zarchy, who’d played for him as civilians. He also recruited friends George T. Simon and Ray McKinley on drums and, occasionally, cowbells. Don Haynes was drafted later and eventually served as Miller’s administrative officer.[248]

By spring, Miller’s headquarters had been transferred to New Haven, Connecticut at Yale University, which had virtually been converted into an Air Force cadet training center. Miller was thrilled to be closer to his Tenafly, New Jersey home. His and Helen’s adoption was finalized, and on May 10 they finally welcomed home their son, Steven Davis Miller. Glenn went home to visit Helen and Stevie as often as he could. By Stevie’s first birthday, the couple had applied to adopt again, this time for a daughter.

Back in New Haven, in the face of much official resistance, Miller set to work updating the traditional, rigid sound of military music. To build morale, Miller wanted the bands to play dance-band music as well as inspired marching music. He added syncopation and imaginative beats to the drum parts, and a swinging jazz flavor to the horns.[249] Miller was also assembling a full orchestra, complete with a strings section, for a radio show. I Sustain the Wings began airing nationally in July 1943. Besides the radio show, the bands also played marches for cadets in their morning and evening formations, as well as less militant songs in the mess hall.

Miller’s innovative swinging military marching band had its flashy debut at a war-bond rally in the Yale Bowl the same month as the debut of I Sustain the Wings. The string bass players and the percussionists with their full drum kits couldn’t march along with the rest of the band, so they rode on top of jeeps that drove alongside to provide their contributions to the band’s “hot licks and modern dance hall harmonies.”[250]

On the flip side, pop music was also fair game for militarization. McKinley and arranger Perry Burgett transformed the song “St. Louis Blues,” which was first written in 1914, into “The St. Louis Blues March.”[251] The march version mimicked the tone of a trumpet call set to the staccato cadence of a military-style drum. Captain Glenn Miller and the Army Air Forces Training Command Orchestra recorded the song in October 1943, and it was released as a V-Disc[252] that December. The song became both the AAF band’s most famous arrangement and its most famous recording. By war’s end, Miller and the AAF band charted 25 songs that were released as V-Discs, including “G. I. Jive”[253] and a new pressing of “In the Mood.”

Predictably, military higher-ups were not pleased with Miller’s newfangled sound, defending the staid old Sousa marches for pulling them through the previous war just fine. This prompted Miller to retort, “Are you still flying the same planes you flew in the last war, too?”[254]

Despite the friction, Miller remained a faithful patriot and a creative innovator. The band helped raise millions of dollars at war-bond drives, and it also played in propaganda pieces that were broadcast over enemy airwaves. In one of these pieces, Miller succinctly stated, “America means freedom, and there’s no expression of freedom quite so sincere as music.”[255] In others, Miller used scripts broken down into syllables that allowed him to read statements in German. Overall, Miller and the Army Air Forces Training Command Orchestra charted 25 V-Disc records, and its I Sustain the Wings radio program aired for nearly a year. That program ended when Miller and the orchestra relocated to England to perform for British Broadcasting Company radio programs and for live concerts for the troops stationed in Europe.

Miller traveled to England ahead of his musicians, and his temporary quarters were in a bomb shelter in the basement of the BBC studios. The men arrived in early July, about a month after the Allies’ D-Day invasion on the beaches of Normandy. They moved into a house on Sloane Court in an area that had been nicknamed “Buzz Bomb Alley” thanks to the frequent Nazi bomber traffic overhead. Miller was uncomfortable with those accommodations for his men and quickly relocated them to a flat on the outskirts of London. The very next day, Buzz Bomb Alley lived up to its name, as nearly 100 people were killed when Sloane Court took a direct hit.[256]

The Buzz Bomb Alley shelling was not Miller’s only close call. On one flight between engagements, his pilot was forced to abort a landing attempt after an error on the part of the air traffic controllers. Soon after, a bomber flew overhead during a performance at a military hospital. Incidents like these left an already homesick Miller feeling increasingly fatalistic. During one intimate conversation with his radio show director about his plans after the war, Miller suddenly became emotional and exclaimed, “I don’t know why I spend my time making plans like this. I have an awful feeling you guys are going to go home without me, and I’m going to get mine in some goddamn beat-up old plane!”[257] For the time being, though, the “Miller luck” held.[258]

The bands’ broadcasts over the BBC and the Allied Expeditionary Forces Network began on July 9, 1944. The bands included a full concert orchestra, a 17-piece dance band, a seven-piece jazz ensemble, and a strings ensemble. Miller pulled the plug on the BBC broadcasts less than a week later after BBC executives insisted that the band’s volume needed to be held precisely constant for the entirety of its on-air performances! The AEF broadcasts continued unaffected, which allowed Queen Elizabeth and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret to tune in and become fans.[259]

The first concert appearance of a Miller-led band in Britain was on July 14, after which Miller reportedly commented, “We gave them a ‘hunk o’ home.’”[260] General James Doolittle concurred; at the end of the band’s July 29 concert at an airbase near London, Doolittle announced over the public address system, “Next to a letter from home, Captain Miller, your organization is the greatest morale builder in the ETO [European Theater of Operations].” A week later, on August 4, the band played a one-hour concert for 1,000 staff members of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was sitting in the front row, congratulated Miller after the performance for providing the troops with such a great morale boost.[261]

Around this time, Miller was promoted to Major, and the manager of the Queensberry All Services Club in London invited him and his band to perform weekly concerts there. Miller noted in a letter to George T. Simon back in the states that in August 1944, the band had played at 35 different bases and performed for 44 radio broadcasts. Miller wrote a letter to defend his musicians against a harsh review that was printed in Metronome magazine, and while Simon didn’t write the review, he bore the brunt of Miller’s ire against the critic who “missed the boat completely on the conditions and the purpose for our being here. While he listened for things which he opined were musically ‘wrong,’ he failed to hear the most important sound that can possibly come out of such concerts—the sound of thousands of G.I.’s reacting with an ear-splitting, almost hysterical happy yell after each number. That’s for us, Brother, even if it doesn’t happen to be for Metronome.”[262]

As summer dampened and chilled into fall, Dinah Shore and Bing Crosby performed with Miller’s band while they toured Europe with the United Service Organizations. In mid-November, Miller received the happy news that his and Helen’s second adoption was approved, and their daughter was ready for them. Helen traveled with Stevie, Polly Haynes, and Glenn’s mother to bring the baby home. The adoption of Jonnie Dee Miller was announced in London’s December 5 issue of Stars and Stripes.[263]

While Helen started adjusting to life with the baby, Glenn and his band were preparing for a six-week trip to newly liberated Paris to perform for the troops there. The length of the trip meant that the band needed to pre-record 85 half-hour radio programs, a feat they accomplished in just 18 days. The band also remained faithful to its regular schedule of live shows during this stretch, which ended December 12, 1944. That night, after the band’s final Queensberry performance, a farewell dinner was held at the club.

Don Haynes had spent a week in Paris in late November to make lodging, transportation, and other arrangements for Miller and his band’s planned mid-December arrival. Haynes was scheduled to return several days before the band’s arrival, but plans changed and Miller was slated to go instead. While preparing his travel authorization, a clerk mistakenly typed her own service number on a form where Miller’s should have been listed.[264]

Miller was booked for a flight on Thursday, December 14, but he went to the airfield the day before to try to catch an earlier flight as a standby. Forecasted fog and thick clouds grounded all scheduled flights through Saturday, December 16, so Miller was rescheduled to a December 17 flight.

Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Norman Baessell offered Miller a seat on a casual flight he set up for December 15 on a UC-64A Norseman.[265],[266] Baessell had privately arranged for the flight outside of proper military channels, and Miller was apprehensive about flying in poor weather on the small plane, but he was eager to get to Paris ahead of his band and pilot Stuart Morgan had been flying Baessell to and from France for several months. Thus, he accepted Baessell’s offer.

A UC-64A Norseman during the war

Friday, December 15 dawned frosty, misty, and foggy at Baessell and Miller’s planned departure point at Twinwood Farm, the small Royal Air Force station on a farm in Bedfordshire. By noon, the temperature was just 34°F, and visibility was limited, but Morgan flew in from Alconbury airfield and landed the Norseman, USAAF tail number 44-70285, at Twinwood at 1:45 p.m. Likely in an effort to avoid the 30 minutes worth of paperwork that would be required to request clearance to take off after a landing, Morgan did not disembark or even cut the plane’s engine. Don Haynes accompanied Miller and Baessell to the cabin door and watched as they tossed their garment bags and briefcases aboard. Then Miller peered into the cabin and asked where the parachutes were. Baessell replied, “What’s the matter, Miller, do you want to live forever?”[267] Haynes told Miller, “Happy landing, good luck, and I’ll see you in Paris tomorrow.” Miller said, “Thanks, Haynsie, I think we’ll need it.”

Morgan’s Norseman was on the ground at Twinwood for just four minutes. Morgan left behind no paper trail there and took off for Villacoublay without requesting or receiving official clearance.

Morgan couldn’t fly above the fog, because at that altitude the temperature would be too cold for the small plane, which lacked de-icing equipment.[268] Furthermore, he couldn’t fly in the fog because flying there would have prevented him from navigating by sight, so the plan was to fly below the fog, at a low altitude of 1,500-2,000 feet. An airspeed of 145 mph would land them in Paris around sunset, at about 5:00 p.m.

At 2:20 p.m., near Reading, 17-year-old planespotter Richard Anderton logged his sighting of a Norseman that passed far off to his east. The plane was headed southeast toward Beachy Head on the southern coast of Britain.[269]

Reported Missing

“How the hell did we lose Glenn Miller?” - General Ray Barker, U.S. Army[270]

In the chilly predawn of Saturday, December 16, 1944, German forces took advantage of the limitations that the foggy, cloudy weather imposed on Allied air reconnaissance and launched an offensive blitzkrieg in the heavily wooded Ardennes region of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg. More than 200,000 German troops attacked a 75-mile stretch of the Allied front with an artillery barrage from 1,000 tanks. The attack caught the Allies completely by surprise, and the initial skirmish quickly turned into the Battle of the Bulge. By the time it ended in January 1945, it was the Americans’ bloodiest battle in World War II, and the second deadliest battle in the nation’s history.

In its early days, Allied generals scrambled to rush or redirect ground troops to mount a defense,[271] and it was amidst the commotion and upheaval of the early days of the Battle of the Bulge, on Monday, December 18, that the men in the American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force boarded two C-47 transports at Twinwood and flew across the English Channel. Like Miller, the band had two attempts aborted by the weather on the two previous days.

The men were expecting Miller to receive them at Bovingdon with transportation to Paris, but when they arrived, the tarmac was empty. Don Haynes called the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force to report that Miller wasn’t at Bovingdon as expected, so he was understandably surprised to discover that this was the first time SHAEF heard of Miller’s Friday flight. Upon further investigation, records showed that no such flight had landed in Paris.

By Tuesday, Haynes still hadn’t found anyone in Paris who’d seen either Miller or Lt. Col. Baessell, and nobody at Villacoublay knew anything about the flight. The plane had then been missing for four days, and as it became clearer that Miller was not in Paris, gossip swirled. Did the Germans capture him? Had he met a scandalous end in a Paris brothel? Was he a spy? Though they persist to this day, none of these rumors could ever be substantiated.[272],[273]

An air search of the Norseman’s supposed route came up empty, and no wreckage had been reported anywhere nearby. Inquiries at hospitals in and around Paris found nothing. No emergency landings were reported along or near the route. The only traces of the flight came from the teenage planespotter Richard Anderton’s December 15 logbook entry and an incomplete Missing Air Crew Report, dated December 16, that lay unsigned and forgotten on a captain’s desk near Alconbury airfield.[274] Meanwhile, Glenn’s surprise Christmas gift to Helen arrived at their Tenafly home. He’d sent her a console radio-phonograph.[275]

Officers at SHAEF, with their attention focused on the continuing battle in the Ardennes, were forced to conclude that Miller’s plane had gone down in the English Channel and that Miller was dead. On December 21, Major General Ray Barker summoned Haynes and two other officers involved with band logistics to share the news with them. Barker instructed them not to pass the information along to the press, as no official announcement had been released. That night, the band performed at the Palais de Glace in Paris, and Miller’s absence was excused with the explanation that he was “busy with other duties.”[276]

On December 22, a full week after the fateful flight, the incomplete MACR was finally filled out, and while it contained errors, it at least recorded Miller’s and Baessell’s names. The next day, two Army Air Forces officers paid Helen a grim visit at their Tenafly home. Official and personal phone calls, telegrams, and condolence letters soon followed.[277] Glenn Miller never met his new baby daughter.[278]

On Christmas Eve, after the AEF band concert at Paris’ legendary Olympia Theater, the official statement announcing Miller’s death was released to the press: “Major Alton Glenn Miller, director of the famous United States Army Air Forces Band, which has been playing in Paris, is reported missing while on a flight from England to Paris. The plane in which he was a passenger left England on December 15 and no trace of it has been found since its takeoff. Major Miller, one of the outstanding orchestra leaders in the United States, lived at Tenafly, New Jersey, where his wife presently resides. No members of Major Miller’s band were with him on the missing plane.”[279]

The statement was carried on all American networks and on the BBC, and Haynes shared the somber news with the musicians in the band on Christmas morning. Later that day, Haynes received a hopeful note from Helen about news she had received from the War Department: “It was such a horrible shock to me but after I thought it all over it will take more than a ‘missing flight’ message to get me down. Believe Glenn will turn up sometime, maybe not for months, maybe real soon, but if you hear from him tell him I’m fine and just waiting for him.”

Christmas Day in 1944 was a somber holiday for the men in Glenn Miller’s American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force, but after they received official word of their leader’s demise, they chose to remain together and to continue performing, including that evening’s planned AEF Christmas Show. The men chose Ray McKinley as the new bandleader and Jerry Gray as the head of music production.

On January 19, 1945, an Army Air Force inquiry was held to officially investigate what happened to Miller and to determine who, if anyone, was at fault. After sworn testimony from nine witnesses, the inquiry determined that the pilot, Stuart Morgan, was qualified to operate the airplane, which was in working order. It determined Miller traveled casually, against orders, on the flight that Baessell authorized on his own authority; and that the most likely explanation for the plane’s disappearance was pilot disorientation, mechanical failure, weather, or a combination of those factors. Fault was found with all three men: Morgan, for negligence; Baessell, for failing to obtain or verify clearance; and Miller, for violating his travel orders. Flight procedures were soon tightened to prevent similar infractions in the future, and documents related to the official inquiry were classified per military protocol. Anderton’s planespotter logbook remained in his family’s private possession, where it languished for decades.

The AEF band continued performing in France in 1945, including a concert in Paris on V-E Day. The band returned to the United States after V-J Day in August. President Harry Truman and General Dwight D. Eisenhower were among the audience members who gave the band a standing ovation after its performance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on November 13, 1945. After the show, the president personally thanked the men for their service and officially discharged them.[280] Armed forces radio programming was phased out by the end of that year.

In March 1945, Helen Miller accepted her husband’s Bronze Star award for meritorious service, and about three years later, Miller’s military records were amended to indicate that he “died (non-battle) on December 15, 1944, when his plane crashed into the English Channel while on a mission from Twinwood Field, England, to Paris, France.”[281] But in the absence of physical evidence, gossip, rumors, and innuendos persisted. Glenn’s younger brother Herb never believed the official explanation, and initially he maintained that Glenn succumbed to lung cancer.[282] Herb reiterated in a 1980 television documentary, “I feel that we were fed a story and that we were completely misled.”[283]

In 1984, veteran Royal Air Force flight navigator Fred Shaw contacted the media claiming that he’d seen a C-64 Norseman plane plunge into the English Channel when his squadron jettisoned a surplus load of bombs after an aborted mission 40 years earlier, on the afternoon of December 15, 1944. He’d originally recalled what he said he saw after watching the 1953 movie The Glenn Miller Story and attempted to tell his story then, but the media wasn’t interested.

In 1984, Shaw’s account quickly became the generally accepted version of the events of that fateful day,[284] but in 2017, Miller expert and archivist Dennis M. Spragg released his book, Glenn Miller Declassified, in which he upheld the military’s original explanation of Miller’s fate. Spragg methodically researched and reconstructed the events that led up to Miller’s disappearance, and his research was supported and endorsed by Miller’s estate, giving him unprecedented access to Miller’s personal and military documents. He also had access to Anderton’s planespotter logbook, which resurfaced in 2011 on a BBC episode of the television show “Antiques Roadshow.”[285] Spragg’s nearly 400-page tome ultimately validated the original military explanation, proving in the process that the Norseman was not in the area of Shaw’s squadron at the time of the jettison.[286]

News surfaced in early 2019 of an anonymous trawler which in 1987 snagged aircraft wreckage in its nets while fishing in the English Channel and pulled it to the surface. The trawler ultimately decided to free the wreckage from nets and let it return to the Channel floor, but not before he sketched the wreckage and carefully made notes of its appearance and location. The fisherman forgot about the incident until he recently saw a photo of Miller’s plane and became convinced that the wreckage he’d documented in the late 1980s was actually Miller’s downed Norseman.[287]

As of December 2018, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a non-profit foundation, was raising funds to cover a possible physical search of the English Channel for the wreckage documented by the trawler.[288] That said, TIGHAR’s Richard Gillespie acknowledges that after 75 years, there won’t be much left of the downed craft: “[I]t’s not going to look like an airplane. It’s just going to look a mess.” Still, if the wreckage is from the Norseman, there likely would be enough of the plane’s frame and engine remaining to make a positive identification, so he and Spragg agree that the effort would be worthwhile. “The task is a long shot and we all know it,” Spragg said. “I look forward to TIGHAR’s findings and fully support their effort to find Glenn Miller’s plane.”[289] In his book, Spragg explained, “He deserves to rest in peace with honor, and his true story should be understood beyond any doubt for all time.”[290]

Helen died in 1966, but she never gave up hope that her husband would return to her, alive and well. Glenn and Helen’s kids have no firsthand memories of their father, but Steven Davis Miller worked to preserve his father’s legacy. “What I’m very anxious to do is to establish some sort of a repository where we can gather everything about Dad,” Steven told George T. Simon in 1973. “A couple of universities have already called me about doing just that.”[291] Throughout his adult life, Steven encouraged biographers, authors, organizations, and the Glenn Miller Society to pursue the truth related to his father’s disappearance in order to put conspiracy theories to rest. He remained active in that pursuit until his death at age 69 in May 2012.

Glenn and Helen’s daughter Jonnie Dee Miller Hoffman is a benefactor of the Glenn Miller Archives. “For much of my life I have had the privilege to be part of events honoring my father, Glenn Miller, and his legacy,” she wrote around 2013.[292]

Though December 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of Glenn Miller’s death, his music will live on as long as there are ears to hear it.

“You went away, and the break in my heart isn’t mending.

You went away, and I know there is no happy ending.

Though you are gone, I still pray that the sun shines above you,

Time marches on, yet I know that I always will love you,

I’ll keep dreaming of you,

As I lay me down to weep.”[293]

The Ambassador

“Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments.” – Benny Goodman

Though Goodman intently focused on his music, he was far from being one-dimensional. "He appreciated painting and sculpture, frequented galleries and museums, collected worthwhile examples of each," Connor wrote. "[H]e was a fair golfer, a good fisherman. He read eclectically on a wide range of topics, retained what he read. He knew good food and its preparation…. He dressed well, if modestly."[294]

The end of World War II also signaled the end of the swing era. Due to evolutionary changes in the recording and radio industries, as well as the aging of the swing fans’ generation and the dawn of the television age, vocalists like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como became the stars of the shows. But Goodman was not one to fade quietly into the background. Swing still had fans, so Goodman continued recording albums and performing for radio shows. He also added television performances to his repertoire.[295] Besides swing and jazz, Goodman continued studying and performing classical music as well. Goodman performed multiple classical concerts with his daughter Rachel, who grew up to become an accomplished pianist.[296]

In 1956, the biopic The Benny Goodman Story was released. Though the film was historically inaccurate and nearly universally disdained by critics, it should come as no surprise that the soundtrack was fabulous.[297]

A 1952 picture of Goodman and bandmates

From the 1950s through the 1980s, various concert tours took Goodman to all corners of the world, including Europe, Scandinavia, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Brazil, and the Soviet Union.[298] President John F. Kennedy was so delighted with Goodman’s Soviet Union tour in 1962 that he called Goodman “our ‘International Ambassador With Clarinet.’”[299] Goodman also returned to perform at Carnegie Hall more than two dozen times.[300]

Bob Altshuler, a CBS Records executive who was also a jazz fan, visited Goodman in summer 1986 to discuss which of his recordings Goodman would like to release on compact discs. Goodman referred Altshuler back to the first recordings he made with Hammond's input in 1933. "He had apparently been listening to them again in recent days and was convinced they were some of the best recordings he had ever done," Altshuler remembered. "He professed tremendous admiration for all the musicians on the dates and kept playing the records over and over. There was such an expression of joy on his face. Of all the things he did during this period, they were obviously closest to his heart."[301]

Goodman died a month later, on June 13, 1986, at the age of 77.

Two years after Goodman’s death, his friend and biographer D. Russell Connor published what he called his “new testament,” his second and most comprehensive Goodman discography.[302] The labor of love yielded Benny Goodman: Listen to His Legacy, a 357-page tome that chronologically listed each of the 1,900 Goodman recordings known at the time, cross-referenced in three indices and interspersed with personal biographical tidbits. Both the figurative and the literal weight[303] of the book serve as perhaps the most tangible evidence of Goodman’s impact on musical history.

Obviously, Goodman’s influence is indisputable, and his status as the King of Swing will forever stand. As Connor put it, "Facts alone are all that are needed to assure Benny Goodman's unique niche in history."[304]

Of course, Goodman himself recognized that swing music would transcend the limits of fads and fame to attain immortality. He may have put it best when he said, "After all, musicians have played in this style since jazz started and…will continue as long as bands play music…Swing will never 'die out.’”[305]

Hans Bernhard’s pictures of Goodman performing in 1971

Online Resources

Other books about music by Charles River Editors

Other books about Benny Goodman on Amazon

Other books about Glenn Miller on Amazon

Further Reading about Miller

“$100,000,000 Band Biz Czar." Variety, Aug. 16, 1939, p. 1. archive.org, accessed May 8, 2019.

“About Glenn Miller,” cityoffortmorgan.com, accessed May 6, 2019.

“All In The Family” television show theme song, youtube.com, accessed May 15, 2019.

“The Battle of the Bulge,” army.mil, accessed May 30, 2019.

Boucher, Phil. “Glenn Miller’s Airplane Possibly Found Decades After Famed Bandleader Vanished During WWII.” people.com, January 14, 2019. Accessed June 4, 2019.

Cohen, Joe. “Heifetz 2d Fiddle to Glenn Miller’s Jive, Arty ‘Music, Takes Pitt Mauling,” Variety, Nov. 1, 1939, p. 37. archive.org, accessed May 17, 2019.

Firestone, Ross. Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life & Times of Benny Goodman. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993.

Flower, John. Moonlight Serenade: A Bio-discography of the Glenn Miller Civilian Band. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972.

Goodman, Benny and Kolodin, Irving. The Kingdom of Swing. 1939. Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Sons, 1961.

“In Search Of” syndicated television program, season 4, episode 23. Originally aired March 7, 1980. youtube.com, accessed June 4, 2019.

Miller, Glenn. Glenn Miller’s Method for Orchestral Arranging. New York: Mutual Music Society, Inc., 1943.

Miller Hoffman, Jonnie. A Father’s Legacy, smhs1962.org, accessed May 15, 2019.

Nolasco, Stephanie. “Glenn Miller’s estate responds to claims of bandleader’s doomed plane possibly uncovered.” foxnews.com, March 27, 2019. Accessed June 4, 2019.

Serck, Linda. “Glenn Miller clue found in Reading plane-spotter’s log.” bbc.com, Jan. 11, 2012. Accessed June 4, 2019.

Simon, George T. The Big Bands. New York: Schirmer Books, a Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981.

Simon, George T. Glenn Miller & His Orchestra. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1974.

Simon, George T. and Friends. The Best of the Music Makers: From Acuff to Ellington to Presley to Sinatra to Zappa & 279 of the Most Popular Performers of the Last 50 Years. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979.

Spragg, Dennis M. Glenn Miller Declassified. Lincoln, Neb.: Potomac Books, an Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2017.

Star Spangled Radio Hour podcast by KEZW-AM 1430 AM Denver and radio.com, May 17, 2019. Accessed May 18, 2019.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, tighar.org, accessed June 4, 2019.

Tumpak, John R. When Swing Was the Thing: Personality Profiles of the Big Band Era. Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2009.

Variety, Jan. 5, 1932. archive.org, accessed May 9, 2019.

Weiss, David A. “The Glenn Miller Story.” Coronet, May 1954, p. 34-38. OldMagazineArticles.com, accessed May 6, 2019.

Further Reading about Goodman

The A to Z of Carnegie Hall: G is for Goodman, accessed March 22, 2019.

Addams, Jane. "Hull House, Chicago: An Effort toward Social Democracy." The Forum, Vol. XIV. New York: The Forum Publishing Co., 1891, 1892.

Allen, Steve. "Here's the Real Goodman—As Seen by the Film Goodman." Collier's Weekly. Jan. 20, 1956: 29. Accessed March 14, 2019.

Associated Press in New York. “George Avakian, jazz producer of Miles Davis and more, dies at 98.” The Guardian. Nov. 23, 2017. Accessed March 21, 2019.

Collier, James Lincoln. Benny Goodman and the Swing Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Connor, D. Russell. Benny Goodman: Listen to His Legacy. Metuchen, N.J. and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. and the Institute of Jazz Studies, 1988.

Dupuis, Robert. Bunny Berigan: Elusive Legend of Jazz. Baton Rouge, La.: LSU Press, 2005.

Firestone, Ross. Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life & Times of Benny Goodman. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993.

Goodman, Benny with Gehman, Richard. "That Old Gang of Mine." Collier's Weekly. Jan. 20, 1956: 26-31. Accessed March 13, 2019.

Goodman, Benny and Kolodin, Irving. The Kingdom of Swing. 1939. Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Sons, 1961.

Goodman, Benny. Benny, King of Swing: A pictorial biography based on Benny Goodman's own archives with an introduction by Stanley Baron. New York: W. Morrow, 1979.

Green, Abel. "Swing It!" Variety. Jan. 1, 1936: 188. Accessed March 14, 2019.

Hammond, John. John Hammond On Record: An Autobiography with Irving Townsend. New York: Ridge Press, 1977.

"Festival to Hold Goodman Show." Newport Daily News: Aug. 20, 1962: 2. Accessed March 22, 2019.

Nugent, Frank S. The Screen: Benny Goodman Starts a Jam Session at the Strand in the New Warner Musical, ‘Hollywood Hotel’. The New York Times: Jan. 13, 1938. Accessed March 21, 2019.

The Red Hot Jazz Archive, accessed March 11, 2019.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, accessed March 12, 2019.

Sidran, Ben. There Was A Fire: Jews, Music and The American Dream. New York: Unlimited Media, Ltd., 2012.

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[1]          Jane Addams. "Hull House, Chicago: An Effort toward Social Democracy." The Forum, Vol. XIV (New York: The Forum Publishing Co., 1891, 1892), 227-228.

[2]          David Goodman was from Warsaw, which is in modern-day Poland. Dora was from Kovno, which in modern-day Lithuania. Both countries were part of Russia until they declared independence in 1918.

[3]          Collier, 8.

[4]          Benny Goodman and Irving Kolodin, The Kingdom of Swing (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Sons, 1939, 1961), 16.

[5]          Ibid., 19.

[6]          Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life & Times of Benny Goodman (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 22.

[7]          Goodman and Kolodin, 16.

[8]          Collier, 7.

[9]          Firestone, 21.

[10]        Goodman and Kolodin, 20.

[11]        Ibid., 23.

[12]        Ibid., 24.

[13]        Firestone, 23.

[14]        Addams, 229.

[15]        The revival of the Hull House band may have been part of a larger effort to heal the racial division that erupted in Chicago in the Red Summer riots of 1919.

[16]        Firestone, 24.

[17]        Goodman and Kolodin, 25.

[18]        Firestone, 26.

[19]        Ibid., 28-29.

[20]        Collier, 22.

[21]        Firestone, 29.

[22]        "Murph" was a common nickname at the time for Jewish people. Though Podolsky was not Jewish, he looked like he was.

[23]        Firestone, 31.

[24]        Goodman and Kolodin, 34-35.

[25]        Ibid., 37.

[26]        Collier, 26.

[27]        Firestone, 32.

[28]        Goodman and Kolodin, 43.

[29]        Ibid., 50.

[30]        Firestone, 32-33.

[31]        Collier, 24.

[32]        Goodman and Kolodin, 58.

[33]        Midway Gardens was a European-style entertainment venue in the Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's south side. It was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, constructed in 1914, and demolished in 1929.

[34]        Firestone, 34-35.

[35]        Collier, 27.

[36]        Sidran, 110.

[37]        Firestone, 38.

[38]        Goodman and Kolodin, 45.

[39]        Sidran, 111.

[40]        Benny Goodman, King of Swing: A pictorial biography based on Benny Goodman's own archives with an introduction by Stanley Baron (New York: W. Morrow), 15.

[41]        Goodman and Kolodin, 64.

[42]        Firestone, 39.

[43]        Firestone, 39.

[44]        Goodman and Kolodin, 36.

[45]        Firestone, 41.

[46]        D. Russell Connor, Benny Goodman: Listen to His Legacy (Metuchen, N.J. and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. and the Institute of Jazz Studies, 1988), 1.

[47]                               "'Deed I Do" and "He's the Last Word", accessed March 7, 2019.

[48]        Goodman and Kolodin, 70.

[49]        Harry Goodman joined Pollack's band when it returned to Chicago from California. He later played in Benny’s bands for many years.

[50]        Collier, 48.

[51]        Goodman and Baron, 17.

[52]        Firestone, 45.

[53]        Goodman and Kolodin, 82.

[54]                               Benny Goodman's 125 Jazz Breaks for Saxophone and Clarinet, accessed March 7, 2019.

[55]                               "Waitin' for Katie" and "Memphis Blues", accessed March 7, 2019

[56]        Firestone, 46.

[57]        Collier, 49-50.

[58]        Goodman and Baron, 19.

[59]        Collier, 51.

[60]        The Red Hot Jazz Archive, accessed March 11, 2019.

[61]        Firestone, 53.

[62]        "Sweetest Melody" and "My Kinda Love", accessed March 9, 2019.

[63]        "Shirt Tail Stomp", accessed March 11, 2019.

[64]        Goodman and Kolodin, 98-99.

[65]        Firestone, 55-58.

[66]        Ibid., 64-65.

[67]        Collier, 87.

[68]        Firestone, 65.

[69]        Until vinyl long-playing record albums debuted in 1948, most records contained just one song or track on each side. Each song or track was thus referred to as a "side."

[70]        Firestone, 73.

[71]        Connor, 13-34,

[72]        The Alvin Theater was renamed the Neil Simon Theatre in 1983 and is still in operation.

[73]        Firestone, 68.

[74]        Goodman and Kolodin, 110.

[75]        Firestone, 69-70.

[76] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 24.

[77] Ibid., 20.

[78] Dennis M. Spragg. Glenn Miller Declassified (Lincoln, Neb.: Potomac Books, an Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 2.

[79] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 24.

[80] Spragg, 2.

[81] “About Glenn Miller,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[82] Simon, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, 36.

[83] Ibid., 39-40.

[84] “When I First Met Mary,” accessed May 8, 2019.

[85] “’Deed I Do,” accessed May 8, 2019.

[86] Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life & Times of Benny Goodman (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993), 22.

[87] Benny Goodman and Irving Kolodin, The Kingdom of Swing (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Sons, 1939, 1961), 64-65.

[88] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 44-45.

[89] Spragg, 5.

[90] Polly was Glenn’s office manager; Polly and Helen were best friends, and Polly’s husband Don was Glenn’s personal manager.

[91] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 49.

[92] Ibid., 49.

[93] “Hello, Lola,” accessed May 9, 2019.

[94] “One Hour,” accessed May 9, 2019.

[95] Until long-playing vinyl record albums debuted in 1948, most records contained just one song per side. Each song was therefore called a "side."

[96] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 54-55.

[97] Firestone, 68.

[98] Variety, Jan. 5, 1932. archive.org, accessed May 9, 2019.

[99] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 62.

[100]              Ibid., 122.

[101]              Collier, 95.

[102]              Hammond's mother was a great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who CNN Business ranks as the second-richest American ever. CNN's Anderson Cooper is one of Cornelius Vanderbilt's great-great-great grandsons.

[103]              Goodman and Kolodin, 123.

[104]              Collier, 97.

[105]              Firestone, 77-78.

[106]              Collier, 105-107.

[107]              Goodman and Kolodin, 100.

[108]              Ibid., 126.

[109]              Firestone, 86-87.

[110]              Collier, 110-118.

[111]              Ibid., 119-120.

[112]              Goodman and Kolodin, 140-142.

[113]              Firestone, 99-101.

[114]              Ibid., 107-109.

[115]              Goodman and Kolodin, 155, 163.

[116]              Collier, 133.

[117]              Firestone, 115.

[118]              Goodman and Kolodin, 161-162.

[119]              Firestone, 97.

[120]              Goodman and Kolodin, 166-169.

[121]              Collier, 137.

[122]              Firestone, 129-130.

[123]              Goodman and Kolodin, 184.

[124]              Ibid., 186.

[125]              Firestone, 134-137.

[126]              Ibid., 147.

[127]              Benny Goodman with Richard Gehman: "That Old Gang of Mine." Collier's Weekly. Jan. 20, 1956: 30. Accessed March 14, 2019.

[128] George T. Simon and Friends. The Best of the Music Makers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1979), 400.

[129] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 63-65.

[130] “Solo Hop,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[131] George T. Simon, The Big Bands (New York: Schirmer Books, a Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1981), 200.

[132] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 80.

[133] Spragg, 2.

[134] Glenn Miller, Glenn Miller’s Method for Orchestral Arranging (New York: Mutual Music Society, Inc., 1943), 70.

[135] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 85-87.

[136] “Sweet Stranger,” accessed May 14, 2019.

[137] “Every Day’s A Holiday,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[138] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 100.

[139] Spragg, 7.

[140]              Firestone, 149-150.

[141]              Goodman and Kolodin, 142-143.

[142]              Firestone, 149-150.

[143]              Goodman and Gehman, 30.

[144]              Robert Dupuis, Bunny Berigan: Elusive Legend of Jazz (Baton Rouge, Louisiana: LSU Press, 2005), 113-114.

[145]              Steve Allen: "Here's the Real Goodman—As Seen by the Film Goodman." Collier's Weekly. Jan. 20, 1956: 29. Accessed March 14, 2019.

[146]              Goodman and Kolodin, 176.

[147]              Firestone, 150.

[148]              Ibid., 154-155.

[149]              Abel Green: "Swing It!" Variety. Jan. 1, 1936: 188. Accessed March 14, 2019.

[150]              A postscript to "Swing It!" was published on p. 48 of the following week's issue as an update: "no one has yet been able to define it"!

[151]              Goodman and Kolodin, 238.

[152]              Firestone, 159.

[153]              Goodman and Baron, 31.

[154]              Fletcher Henderson was African American.

[155]              Collier, 171-172.

[156]              Firestone, 158-159.

[157]              Ibid., 178.

[158]              Firestone, 178-179.

[159]              Collier, 181-184.

[160]              Goodman and Kolodin, 247.

[161]              "Moonglow", accessed March 15, 2019.

[162]              Firestone, 181.

[163]              Ibid., 179.

[164]              Ibid., 193.

[165]              Collier, 184-186.

[166]              Goodman and Kolodin, 218.

[167]              Firestone, 199.

[168]              Collier, 187.

[169]              Connor, 66.

[170]              Goodman and Kolodin, 220-221.

[171]              Firestone, 200.

[172]              Ibid., 203.

[173]              The satirical song "Hooray for Hollywood," now an awards show staple, debuted in the opening scene of Hollywood Hotel. Goodman and his orchestra were featured prominently in the scene. Accessed March 22, 2019.

[174]              "Sing, Sing, Sing" and "I've Got a Heartful of Music" from Hollywood Hotel, accessed March 15, 2019.

[175]              Firestone, 204-205.

[176]              Collier, 206.

[177]              Ibid., 215.

[178]              Goodman and Kolodin, 232-233.

[179]              Firestone, 208-211.

[180]              Frank S. Nugent: The Screen: Benny Goodman Starts a Jam Session at the Strand in the New Warner Musical, ‘Hollywood Hotel’. The New York Times: Jan. 13, 1938. Accessed March 21, 2019.

[181]              Collier, 215.

[182]              Firestone, 212-215.

[183]              Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, accessed March 12, 2019.

[184]              Goodman and Kolodin, 231.

[185]              John Hammond, John Hammond On Record: An Autobiography with Irving Townsend (New York: Ridge Press, 1977), 68.

[186]              Firestone, 216.

[187]              Ibid., 212.

[188]              Evidence later surfaced that there may have been multiple microphones, as well as recordings made at other studios.

[189]                    Benny Goodman: The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, accessed March 15, 2019.

[190]              Associated Press in New York: “George Avakian, jazz producer of Miles Davis and more, dies at 98.” The Guardian. Nov. 23, 2017. Accessed March 21, 2019.

[191]              Firestone, 217.

[192]              Goodman and Baron, 101.

[193]              Collier, 222.

[194]              Ibid., 259.

[195]              Ibid., 276.

[196]              Firestone, 230-231.

[197]              Firestone, 238.

[198]              Collier, 288

[199]              Firestone, 247-250

[200]              Ibid., 248-249.

[201]              Collier, 266.

[202]              Firestone, 291.

[203]              "Benny Rides Again", accessed March 22, 2019.

[204]              Collier, 298-303.

[205]              Ibid., 295-296.

[206]              Connor, xi.

[207]              Firestone, 184-186.

[208] “All In The Family” television show theme song, youtube.com, accessed May 15, 2019.

[209]John R. Tumpak, When Swing Was the Thing: Personality Profiles of the Big Band Era (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2009), 59.

[210] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, vii.

[211] Miller, 110-111.

[212] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 120.

[213] Tumpak, 60.

[214] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 134.

[215] Ibid., 146-147.

[216] Ibid., 16.

[217] Portions of some 1939 broadcasts from the Meadowbrook Ballroom can be heard on the March 2, 2019 Star Spangled Radio Hour podcast on ez1430.radio.com, accessed May 17, 2019.

[218] “Little Brown Jug,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[219] “Pavanne,” accessed May 17, 2019.

[220] “Runnin’ Wild,” accessed May 17, 2019.

[221] “Moonlight Serenade,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[222] Lyrics to “Now I Lay Me Down to Weep” accessed May 15, 2019.

[223] Simon, The Big Bands, 356.

[224] “Sunrise Serenade,” accessed May 17, 2019.

[225] Full recordings of many of Miller’s radio shows, including opening night at the Glen Island Casino, can be heard on the Star Spangled Radio Hour podcast, accessed May 18, 2019.

[226] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 171.

[227] John Flower, Moonlight Serenade: A Bio-discography of the Glenn Miller Civilian Band (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972), 64.

[228] Ibid., 489.

[229] “In the Mood,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[230] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 177.

[231] “$100,000,000 Band Biz Czar." Variety, Aug. 15, 1939. archive.org, accessed May 16, 2019.

[232] The Glenn Miller Carnegie Hall Concert, accessed May 21, 2019.

[233] Joe Cohen, “Heifetz 2d Fiddle to Glenn Miller’s Jive, Arty ‘Music, Takes Pitt Mauling.” Variety, Nov. 1, 1939. archive.org, accessed May 17, 2019.

[234] “A String of Pearls,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[235] “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[236] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 195-196.

[237] Ibid., 252-253.

[238] Ibid., 211.

[239] “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[240] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 289.

[241] Ibid., 302.

[242] Ibid., 354.

[243] Flower, 425-448.

[244] Glenn Miller’s farewell address, accessed May 6, 2019.

[245] Flower, 416-421.

[246] Down Beat magazine, Oct. 15, 1942, cited in Flower, 485.

[247] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 317.

[248] Ibid., 224.

[249] Ibid., 321-324, 337.

[250] Spragg, 54.

[251] “The St. Louis Blues March,” accessed May 23, 2019.

[252] V-Disc Records (the “V” was for “victory”) was a U.S. government-run record company that distributed free records to overseas military personnel via the War Department from 1942 until May 1949. The company was formed during several years of union strikes in the recording industry. The records were never intended for commercial distribution, and the company stipulated that the records were to be destroyed after use. In later years, servicemen who smuggled the records home had them confiscated and destroyed by the FBI and the Provost Marshal’s Office. One record company employee was jailed for illegally having 2,500 V-Discs in his possession. The Library of Congress has a complete set of the recordings, some of which have since become commercially available in various formats.

[253] “G. I. Jive,” accessed May 6, 2019.

[254] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 337-339.

[255] Recording of 1944 radio program “Wehrmacht Hour” (quote at 23:03-23:08), accessed May 6, 2019.

[256] Spragg, 116-117.

[257] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 376.

[258] Spragg, 131.

[259] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 369, 372.

[260] Spragg, 120.

[261] Ibid., 127, 131.

[262] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 373, 384.

[263] Spragg, 206.

[264] Ibid., 208.

[265] Ibid., 214.

[266] The C-64B Noorduyn Norseman was a single-engine 10-seat Canadian bush plane used for utility transport.

[267] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 410.

[268] Spragg, 329.

[269] Ibid., 236.

[270] Spragg, 278.

[271] “The Battle of the Bulge,” army.mil. Accessed May 30, 2019.

[272] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 415.

[273] Spragg, 296-297.

[274] Ibid., 276-279.

[275] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 416.

[276] Spragg, 283.

[277] Ibid., 285.

[278] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 435.

[279] Spragg, 287.

[280] Simon, Glenn Miller & His Orchestra, 427.

[281] Ibid., 321.

[282] Ibid., 321.

[283] “In Search Of” syndicated television program, season 4, episode 23, originally aired March 7, 1980. youtube.com, accessed June 4, 2019.

[284] Spragg, 259-260, 262.

[285] Linda Serck, “Glenn Miller clue found in Reading plane-spotter’s log.” bbc.com, Jan. 11, 2012. Accessed June 4, 2019.

[286] Spragg, 268.

[287] Phil Boucher, “Glenn Miller’s Airplane Possibly Found Decades After Famed Bandleader Vanished During WWII.” people.com, January 14, 2019. Accessed June 4, 2019.

[288] The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, accessed June 4, 2019.

[289] Stephanie Nolasco, “Glenn Miller’s estate responds to claims of bandleader’s doomed plane possibly uncovered.” foxnews.com, March 27, 2019. Accessed June 4, 2019.

[290] Spragg, 337.

[291] Ibid., 437.

[292] Jonnie Miller Hoffman, A Father’s Legacy, accessed May 15, 2019.

[293] Simon, The Big Bands, 356-357.

[294]              Connor, xi.

[295]              Collier, 318-320.

[296]              Connor, between 144 and 145.

[297]              Collier, 350.

[298]              Connor, between 170 and 171.

[299]              "Festival to Hold Goodman Show." Newport Daily News: Aug. 20, 1962: 2. Accessed March 22, 2019.

[300]              The A to Z of Carnegie Hall: G is for Goodman, accessed March 22, 2019.

[301]              Firestone, 83.

[302]              Connor, vii.

[303]              Nearly four pounds!

[304]              Connor, xii.

[305]              Goodman and Kolodin, 250.

Table of Contents

Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller: The Lives and Careers of America’s Most Famous Big Band Leaders

About Charles River Editors

Introduction

Rags

Midwestern Roots

Back and Forth

Almost, but Not Quite

The King of Swing

Moonlight Serenade

Next to a Letter from Home

Reported Missing

The Ambassador

Online Resources

Further Reading about Miller

Further Reading about Goodman

Free Books by Charles River Editors

Discounted Books by Charles River Editors