Glenn Miller

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Spring, 1994: It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, and the air is filled with speeches, prayers, and remembrance. And one thing else. Everywhere, it seems, there is the music of the Glenn Miller Band of the 1940s. On the evening of May 30, 1994, a group of snowy-haired celebrants–some dressed in vintage World War II uniforms–fills the floor of London’s Royal Albert Hall to dance to Miller’s ‘In the Mood.’ On June 5, a crowd of two thousand, which includes Her Majesty The Queen Mother, listens to the very same tune played by a U.S. Air Force contingent in Portsmouth. That same day at a military cemetery near Cambridge, where U.S. President Bill Clinton speaks, the band also plays Miller’s tunes. On June 6, aboard the Queen Elizabeth II, celebrities that include Bob Hope, Walter Cronkite, and Sir John Mills are serenaded by Miller’s music. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic at Arlington National Cemetery, some four thousand people gather for prayers and speeches–and Miller songs played by an Army band. And in Sainte-Mère-Eglise, the first French town liberated by the Allies, ‘In the Mood’ echoes across the landscape from loudspeakers.

Miller’s music was so pervasive at the anniversary observances that one reporter, Louis J. Salome of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, looking over the estimated forty thousand veterans at Normandy, dubbed them ‘the Glenn Miller generation.’

What was it about this music and the band that created it that made the Miller sound the aural symbol of an era? Of all the musical aggregations of the ‘Big Band Era,’ how did the group that recorded such hits as ‘In the Mood,’ ‘String of Pearls,’ ‘Tuxedo Junction,’ ‘Little Brown Jug,’ ‘Pennsylvania 6-5000,’ and ‘Moonlight Serenade’ achieve such lasting recognition?

Big Bands (generally speaking, those comprised of ten or more musicians) had been around for more than a decade before Benny Goodman and his group caught the fancy of Depression-weary America in 1935 and set it swinging.

One could, perhaps, date the Big-Band Era as far back as 1924, when Paul Whiteman’s already well-known orchestra debuted George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ in a concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall and gave jazz a respectability that it had not previously enjoyed. With the door now opened, jazz bands such as the great Duke Ellington’s began to find their way into the mainstream of the American music scene. Their music–progressive, creative, and exciting–reflected the fast-paced ‘Roaring Twenties.’

The stock market crash of 1929 and the sweeping economic depression that followed changed the nation’s mood. Americans, anxious to escape the realities of the Great Depression, turned to slower, more romantic music. ‘Sweet’ bands such as those led by Guy Lombardo, Hal Kemp, and Eddy Duchin became popular. Glen Gray and the Casa Loma orchestra developed a following, especially among college students, with a semi-swing sound that foreshadowed the Big Band band era. And by 1934, the Dorsey brothers–Tommy and Jimmy–and Benny Goodman had assembled their bands.

But the craze that made swing by far America’s most popular form of music effectively began with the astonishing breakthrough of Goodman’s band at the Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood in August 1935. Suddenly, the youth of the United States had found a new sound, one that contained elements of jazz and yet was different.

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.’

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Tags: American History, Historical Figures, Music, People