Glenn Miller

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To many listeners, jazz and swing were the same, but most fans found swing [easier], more listenable, and more suitable for dancing, which was very important to the young people of the day. Jazz fans tend to think of their music as art meant for listening only. Some bands, like Goodman’s, drove pretty fast and were jazz-oriented, but others (often more successful) played what was known as "sweet" music. In fact, by the 1940s, Big Bands were cleanly separated, like Italian sausage, into two categories–"sweet" and "hot."

But style had to be accompanied by exposure, and one of the reasons that the Big Bands ruled was their accessibility. One could hear the sounds in a range of ways, and few of them involved spending a great deal of money. Radio disk jockeys–"platter spinners"–were few. More common were live radio broadcasts of the bands, either from studios or ballrooms. The major radio networks saturated the air waves with the sound. In 1939, for example, NBC was presenting the music of no less than forty-nine bands, and CBS had twenty-one.

Nor was it necessary to attend a night club to hear these ensembles live (although even that was not unaffordable for middle-class listeners; the weekday cover charge to see Glenn Miller at the Cafe Rouge of [New York's] Hotel Pennsylvania was seventy-five cents). The most prominent Big Bands usually spent the winter at such a big-city hotel, but during the rest of the year, they were on the road night after night, taking their shows to dozens of smaller communities. Occasionally, a Big Band was thrown in for the price of admission between shows at a big-city movie theater; these bands were not an afterthought, but the attraction that brought patrons to see the movie.

Hollywood films also played a role in disseminating the big-band sound. Movie studios rushed to sign up the hot ensembles of the day, as directors churned out a succession of mediocre motion pictures, in which the image of the musicians, characterized in films by phony "jive" talk, bore little resemblance to true life. Despite their generally poor quality, however, these movies offered viewers (and preserved for posterity) the performances of such bands as those of Goodman, the Dorsey brothers, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Sammy Kaye, Woody Herman, and, of course, Glenn Miller.

Although not as [pervasive] [prominent] then as they are today, recordings too boosted the accessibility of the Big Bands. In 1939, record sales totaled $50 million (up from $10 million seven years earlier), and eighty-five percent of these sales were of swing music. By 1940 sales were $70 million, and a year later they soared to $100 million. The jukebox became a fixture in restaurants and saloons around 1934, and by the time the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, there were some three to four hundred thousand machines in the United States, most of them dispensing the music of the Big Bands.

And the most popular of them all was the Glenn Miller band; in the 1940s, poll after poll consistently placed the Miller band first. It set attendance records almost everywhere it went, and by 1943 there were more than five hundred Glenn Miller fan clubs across the United States and Canada. In 1940 alone, Miller recorded forty-five songs that made it onto the top-seller[s] charts–a figure neither Elvis Presley nor the Beatles ever matched–and it was estimated that one out of three nickels put into jukeboxes went to play a Miller record.

Alton Glenn Miller–he detested his first name and quickly dropped it–was born on March 1, 1904 in Clarinda, Iowa. When Glenn was five, the family moved to Tryon, Nebraska, where they lived for five years in a sod house. After a brief stay in North Platte, [Nebraska], the Millers relocated to Grant City, Missouri in 1915, and then, three years later, to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where Glenn attended high school.

Glenn’s mother played the organ, and as soon as their boys were old enough, she and her husband supplied them with musical instruments–a cornet for older brother Deane and a mandolin for Glenn.*[1] Before long Glenn had swapped his instrument for one of the brass variety, and, as his mother once told an interviewer, "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."

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