Welcome to the first episode proper of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs! As this is the first real episode, you may notice a couple of flaws in the production — those will hopefully get ironed out in the coming weeks. In the meantime, sit back and listen to the story of “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet!
Resources
As always, I’ve put together a Mixcloud mix of all the songs talked about in this episode, which you can stream here. That mix has “Rhapsody in Blue” by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, “Memories of You” by Louis Armstrong, “Sing Sing Sing” by Benny Goodman, “Flying Home” by Benny Goodman, and “Flying Home” by Lionel Hampton.
For all the episodes on pre-1954 music, one invaluable source is the book “Before Elvis” by Larry Birnbaum, which goes into these subjects in far more detail than I can.
Lionel Hampton’s autobiography is out of print, but you can find second hand copies very cheap.
This is the MP3 compilation I mention of many different versions of “Flying Home”, and it has the Benny Goodman Sextet version on it as you’d hope. However, it doesn’t have the classic Lionel Hampton version — you can find that on the four-CD box set The Lionel Hampton Story, which is definitely worth getting.
There are various issues of the Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall show — here’s a decent one.
Transcript
We have to start somewhere, of course, and there’s no demarcation line for what is and isn’t rock and roll, so we’re starting well before rock and roll itself, in 1939.
We’re starting, in fact, with swing.
Swing was a form of music that had its roots in 1920s jazz. It’s hard to remember now, but when Dixieland jazz was first popularised, in the early 1920s, the reaction to it from “polite society” was essentially the same as to every other black musical form — it was going to be the end of the world, it was evil “jungle music”, it was causing our children to engage in acts of lewdness and intoxication, it was inciting violence… it was, in short, everything that was later said about rock and roll, about hip-hop, and… you get the idea. This might sound ridiculous to modern ears, as we don’t normally think of the cornet, the trombone, and the banjo as the most lascivious of instruments, but back in the 1920s this kind of music was considered seriously arousing.
And so, as with all of the moral panics around black music, some white people made the music more appetising for other white people, by taking the rough edges off, cleaning it up, and putting it into a suit. In this case, this was done by the aptly-named Paul Whiteman.
Whiteman was a violin player and conductor, and he became known as “the king of jazz” for being the bandleader of an all-white band of musicians. Where most jazz bands consisted of eight to ten musicians, all improvising based on head arrangements and interacting with each other, Whiteman’s band was thirty-five musicians, playing from pre-written charts. It was polite, clean, and massively popular.
Whiteman’s band wasn’t bad, by any means — at various times he had musicians like Bix Beiderbecke and Joe Venuti playing for him — and as you can hear in this performance of “Rhapsody in Blue” they could play some quite exciting jazz. But they were playing something fundamentally different — something tamer, more arranged, and with the individual players subsumed into the unit.
Whiteman still called the music he made jazz, but when other people started playing with similarly big bands, the music became known as “swing”. And so from Whiteman, we move to Goodman.
Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing”, was the leader of the most popular of the pre-war swing bands, as well as being an excellent clarinet player. His band hired arranger Fletcher Henderson (a black musician who led his own excellent band, and who had provided arrangements for Whiteman) to provide their arrangements, and managed to create music that had a lot of the excitement of less-formalised jazz. It was still highly arranged, but it allowed for soloists to show off slightly more than many of the other bands of the time.
This is partly because Goodman himself was a soloist. While Whiteman was a bandleader first and foremost — someone whose talent was in organising a group of other people, a manager rather than a musician (though he was a perfectly serviceable player) — Goodman was a serious player, someone who would later premiere pieces by Bartók; Poulenc, Aaron Copland and others, and who had, before becoming a band leader, been one of the most in-demand players on small group jazz sessions. Goodman’s band was still a big band, but it allowed the soloists far more freedom than many of his competitors did — and many of Goodman’s band members became well known enough individually to go off and form their own big bands.
And because Goodman’s band had a lot of great soloists in, as well as the thirty-plus-person big band he ran, he also had a number of smaller groups which were made up of musicians from the big band. These would play sets during the same shows as the big band, allowing the best soloists to show off while also giving most of the band a rest. Their performances would be proper jazz, rather than swing — they would be three, or four, or six musicians, improvising together the way the old Dixieland players had.
And importantly, Goodman was one of the first band leaders to lead an integrated band during the segregation era. His small groups started with a trio of Goodman himself (white and Jewish) on clarinet, white drummer Gene Krupa, and black pianist Teddy Wilson.
This integration, like the recruitment of Fletcher Henderson for the arrangements, was the idea of John Hammond, Goodman’s brother-in-law. Hammond was an immensely privileged and wealthy man — his mother was a Vanderbilt, and his uncle on his father’s side was the US Ambassador to Spain — who had decided to use his immense wealth in the service of two goals. The first of those was racial integration, and the second of them was to promote what would now be called “roots” or Americana music — pre-bop jazz, folk, blues, and gospel. Hammond is someone we’ll be hearing a lot more of as this story continues, but at this point he was a DJ, music journalist, and record producer, who used his wealth to get records made and aired that otherwise wouldn’t have been made.
Goodman certainly believed in racial equality, by all accounts, but it was Hammond who introduced him to Fletcher Henderson, and Hammond who persuaded him to include black musicians in his band.
Goodman wasn’t the first white bandleader in America to hire black musicians — there had been three in the 1920s — but when he hired Teddy Wilson, no-one had led an integrated group for seven years, and Goodman was hiring him at a time when Goodman was arguably the most popular musician in the USA.
And this was a far more radical thing than it seems in retrospect, because Goodman was pushing in two radically different directions — on the one hand, he was one of the first people to push for mainstream acceptance of jazz music in the classical music world, which would suggest trying to be as conservative as possible, but on the other he was pushing for integration of musicians. Lionel Hampton later quoted him as saying “we need both the black keys and the white keys to play music”, which is the sort of facile comparison well-meaning white liberals make now, in 2018, so Goodman saying it eighty years ago is a genuinely progressive statement for the times.
Lionel Hampton was another black musician, who joined the trio and turned it into a quartet, He was a virtuoso vibraphonist who more or less defined how that instrument was incorporated into jazz. He appears to have been the first person to use the vibraphone on a jazz record, on a recording by Louis Armstrong of the song “Memories of You” from 1930. Before that, the vibraphone had only ever been used as a novelty instrument — it was mostly used for radio intermission signals, playing a couple of chimes.
In fact, the vibraphone was so new as an instrument that its name had never been settled — “vibraphone” was just one of a number of trademarks used by different companies making the instrument. The instrument Hampton played was put out under another brand name — Vibraharp — and that was what he called it for the rest of his life.
Hampton had trained as a drummer before becoming a vibraphone player, and was often billed as “the fastest drummer in the world”, but he had a unique melodic sensibility which allowed him to become the premiere soloist on this new instrument. Indeed, to this day Hampton is probably the most respected musician ever to play the vibes.
By 1938 Goodman actually reached the point where he was able to bring an integrated band, featuring Count Basie, Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, and Lionel Hampton, plus other black musicians along with white musicians such as Goodman and Krupa, on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, at the time the US’ most prestigious music venue. Like many of Goodman’s biggest moments, this was the work of Hammond, who after the success of Goodman’s show put together a series of other concerts at Carnegie, the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts, which are some of the most important concerts ever in bringing black American music to a white audience. We’ll almost certainly talk about those in the future.
But getting back to the Goodman show, that Carnegie Hall concert is still one of the greatest live jazz albums ever recorded, and shows that it was entirely possible to create truly exciting music using the swing band template. One particularly impressive performance was the twelve-minute long version of “Sing Sing Sing”. Obviously we won’t hear that in full here, but here’s a brief excerpt of that staggering performance.
You can hear the full performance, along with all the other songs excerpted in this podcast, at the Mixcloud page linked in the blog post associated with this podcast).
For US cultural context, it would be another nine years before Jackie Robinson was able to break the colour bar in baseball, to give some idea of how extraordinary this actually was. In fact Lionel Hampton would often later claim that it was Goodman hiring him and Wilson (and, later, other black musicians) that paved the way for Robinson’s more well-known achievement.
The original Benny Goodman Quartet were an extraordinary set of musicians, but by 1939 both Wilson and Krupa had departed for other bands. There would be reunions over the years, but the classic lineup of the quartet had stopped performing together. Various other pianists (notably Count Basie and Fletcher Henderson) sat in with the Goodman small groups, but he also realised the need to make up for the loss of two such exceptional musicians by incorporating more, and so the Benny Goodman Sextets were formed.
Those sextets featured a rotating lineup of musicians, sometimes including the great jazz trumpeter Cootie Williams, but revolved around three soloists — Goodman himself on clarinet, Hampton on vibraphone, and a new musician, the guitarist Charlie Christian — a musician who would only have a very short career, but who would come to be better known than any of them.
Christian is sometimes erroneously called the first electric guitarist, or the first person to play electric guitar on record, or even the inventor of the electric guitar. He was none of those things, but he was a pioneer in the instrument, and the first person to really bring it to prominence as a solo instrument. The electric guitar allowed a fundamentally different style of guitar playing — before, the guitar had only really worked either as a solo instrument, as accompaniment for a single vocalist, or at best as a barely-audible rhythm instrument drowned out by the louder pianos and horns of jazz bands. Now the guitar could play single melody lines as loudly as any trumpet or saxophone, and could be used as a solo instrument in an ensemble in the same way as those instruments. This changed the whole approach to the guitar in popular music.
While Goodman claimed responsibility for the head arrangements the small groups used, a lot of people think that Christian was responsible for these, too, and certainly the sextet’s music has a much more exhilirating feel than the early quartet or trio work.
The first song the new Goodman Quintet recorded, on October 2 1939 — exactly seventy-nine years ago on the date this podcast comes out, if its release goes to plan — was a pieve called “Flying Home”.
“Flying Home” is a great example of the early work of the sextet, and quickly became in many ways their signature song. The story of its writing is that the band were on a plane from LA to Atlantic City — the first time many of the band members had flown at all — and Hampton started humming the riff to himself. Goodman asked “what’s that you’re singing”, and Hampton said “I don’t know, we can call it ‘Flying Home’ I guess”.
Goodman and Hampton were credited as the writers, although John Hammond later claimed that he’d heard Christian improvising the riff before it was picked up by the other two men.
Before we start looking at the record, I want to address one problem you find with out-of-copyright jazz recordings, and that’s that if you’re trying to get hold of, or talk about, the right version of a track. Many of the musicians involved recorded multiple versions of songs, those tracks get released on multiple compilations, and tracks get released under different names. For example I have one compilation album — one which says it’s just sixteen different versions of “Flying Home” — which has the Benny Goodman Sextet recording of the track *and* a “Charlie Christian” recording. Except, of course, the Charlie Christian recording is exactly the same one as the Benny Goodman one, although on that compilation it’s taken from a different source as there are different amounts of tape hiss…
So it may be that at some point here I identify a recording wrongly — particularly one of the many, many, Lionel Hampton recordings of the song. I am not pretending to be authoritative here, and I may get things wrong, though I’m trying as best I can to get them right.
But what I do know is what the Benny Goodman Sextet version of this song sounded like, and we can hear that now.
It’s hard to emphasise just how strange this record must have sounded then, nearly eighty years ago, when you consider that electronic amplification was a new thing, that only one electric guitar had ever been recorded before the Sextet sessions, and that the record contained two separate electronically amplified instruments — Christian’s guitar and Hampton’s vibraphone.
Other than the vibraphone and clarinet, though, this small group was almost the prototypical rock band — piano, electric guitar, double bass and drums would be the hallmark instruments of the genre a full twenty years after this record — and the record seems to anticipate many aspects of the rock genre in many details, especially when Charlie Christian starts his soloing — his playing now sounds fairly tame, but at the time it was astonishingly advanced both in technique (he was a huge influence on bop, which wouldn’t come along for many more years) and in just the sound of it — no-one else was making music that was amplified in that way, with that timbre.
The song, in this version, starts with a simple stride piano intro played by Fletcher Henderson, with Artie Bernstein on the bass and Nick Fatool on the drums. This intro is basically just setting out the harmonic structure, of the verses before the introduction of the main riff. It does a common thing where you have the chords at the top end stay as close to being the same as they can while you have a descending bass — and the bass includes a few notes that aren’t in the same key that the melody is in when it comes in, setting up a little bit of harmonic tension.
Once it does come in, the riff sounds *really odd*. This is a vibraphone, a clarinet, and an electric guitar, all playing the same riff in unison. That’s a sound that had never been recorded before
We then have a very straightforward swing-style clarinet solo by Goodman. I like Goodman’s clarinet style a great deal — he is, in fact, one of the musicians who shaped my sense of melodic structure — but there’s nothing particularly notable about this solo, which could be on any record from about 1925 through about 1945. After another run through of the riff, we get Charlie Christian’s solo, which is where things get interesting.
Punctuated by bursts from the clarinet and vibraphone, this longer solo (which includes a whole section that effectively acts as a middle eight for the song) is unlike pretty much anything ever played on guitar in the studio before. Christian’s short bursts of single-note guitar line are, to all intents and purposes, rockabilly — it’s the same kind of guitar playing we’ll hear from Scotty Moore sixteen years later. It doesn’t sound like anything revolutionary now, but remember, up to this point the guitar had essentially only been a rhythm instrument in jazz, with a very small handful of exceptions like Django Reinhardt. You simply couldn’t play single-note lead lines on the guitar and have it heard over saxes or trumpets until the advent of electification.
After Christian’s solo, we have one from Lionel Hampton. This solo is just a typical example of Hampton’s playing — he was a stunning jazz vibraphone player, and at the time was on top of his game — but it’s not as astonishing as the one from Christian.
And then at the end, we get a whole new riff coming in. This kind of riff had been common in Goodman’s work before — you can hear something similar in his hit version of “King Porter Stomp”, for example — but it would become the hallmark of the jump band style a few years later. This call and response, repetitive riffing, would be the sound that would dominate dance music in the next decades.
The song would go on to have a long life after this recording. A couple of years later, Lionel Hampton left Goodman’s band to form his own big band, and “Flyin’ Home” became their signature song. That band would be one of the first bands to perform a new type of music — “jump band” music — which was rooted in swing but had more emphasis on riffs and amplified instruments. That jump band music is the same music that later became known as rhythm and blues, and musicians such as Louis Jordan were clearly inspired by Hampton’s band. We’ll be looking in future episodes of this podcast at the way in which jump bands became one of the biggest influences on rock and roll.
Hampton recorded the song multiple times, starting in 1940, but the most famous example is the version he recorded in 1942 for Decca (with “instrumental foxtrot” on the label. That version features Ilinois Jacquet on saxophone, and like the Benny Goodman version, it would introduce a whole new sound to people.
This time, it’s Jacquet’s tenor sax playing, which has a honk and skronk to it that was unlike anything people had heard before. There are predecessors to it of course — as I said earlier, there’s no “earliest example” of anything in music — but this saxophone solo became the one that defined a whole new genre, a genre called rhythm and blues. Jacquet’s solo was so exceptional that when he left the band, every tenor sax player who replaced him would copy his solo note-for-note rather than improvising their own versions as would usually be the case.
There’s another person involved in that recording of “Flying Home” who probably needs mentioning here — Milt Gabler, the producer. Like John Hammond, he’s someone we’ll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes.
Hampton himself remained a respected and popular musician for many more decades. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the big bands lost a lot of their popularity, and Hampton started playing yet another style of music — he became one of the greats of bebop music, and played in small groups much like the Goodman ones, just playing more harmonically and melodically complex variations of what he had played earlier. But he was also recognised by the rock musicians as a pioneer — you can see him in the 1957 Alan Freed film “Mr. Rock and Roll”, playing his vibraphone as the only jazz musician in a film which otherwise features Little Richard, Clyde McPhatter, and other rock and R&B stars of the time.
Charlie Christian, on the other hand, never even lived to see the influence he had. Even though he was one of the most influential musicians on both jazz and rock music — Chuck Berry later said that Christian was one of the biggest influences on his guitar playing (though he wrongly said that Christian played with Tommy Dorsey’s band, a rival to Goodman’s) while Christian was responsible for the name “bebop” being given to the form of music he helped create in jam sessions after his regular work — he was already suffering from tuberculosis in 1939, when “Flying Home” was recorded. And on March the second, 1941, aged only twenty-five, Charlie Christian died. He was buried in an unmarked grave, which was later concreted over. A memorial was placed for him fifty-three years later, but it was later discovered to be in the wrong place.
Patreon
As always, this podcast only exists because of the donations of my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy it, why not join them?
How can I get straight to the next chapter straight away without having to scroll from the start?
If you look at the bottom of the blog post for each episode, there are links saying “previous” and “next”, which will take you to the next one. However, it’s probably best to listen to the podcast in a podcast app such as Apple Music or GPodder, which will download all the episodes and let you know which ones you’ve already listened to.
(I would like to make this webpage itself more navigable, but for various reasons to do with how the podcast is hosted that’s impracticable at the moment, though I’m working on it.)
I’ve just begun this journey and I’m excited. I’ve learned a great deal from the first two episodes, and been thoroughly entertained and amused and also reminded of how much great music there is left to discover and explore. Charlie Christian is one of my all time favorites so it was great to get a fuller sense of the content in which he lived and played. I feel very much like I’ve stumbled onto a treasure trove here. Andrew, your are truly superlative as a music historian and podcaster. My sincere thanks. I will evangelize on your behalf.
This is a great series. I’m up to Episode 32 & have convinced several muso friends to listen to the series as well. They’re all enjoying it.
Thank you.
Love, love, love your podcast series. And thanks for your work! Through episode 58 or so, so far. Can’t say how much I’ve expanded my knowledge of the many different origins of Rock and Roll music. Though I thought I knew a lot before, it turned out that was wrong, and had so much more to learn. So many unknown names of originators, who never had access to good recording options and/or the benefits of publication and distribution. Whose names are being popularized now, through the work of you and others.
Want to contribute to your awesome effort, in just a small way, for your listeners.
For any who don’t utilize Mixcloud that much, but use Spotify instead, I’m trying to reproduce a very large single, consolidated playlist of all (almost!) the songs that Andrew includes as Excerpts in the transcripts. So far, I’ve gotten through Episode 14. I’ll keep going on adding songs, until Spotify tells me there is a limit. Here is the link to the playlist, if you want to add it into your Spotify library.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/14Hb10aQYv498CZuYQsCF4?si=5d5402a069de4521
Thank you. I thought about using Spotify rather than Mixcloud for the playlists, but decided against it for various reasons, but that’s a useful playlist for someone to have created.
Glad you like the list, Andrew.
So far, after searching through 15 episodes of songs, it seems that Spotify has about 90% or so of them. That’s why there are a few omissions, and a few song substitutions.
Though always another song by the same artist, from the same time frame.
I’m hoping this “find rate” will improve as time marches forward in your anthology.
Hi there! I am up to episode 87 and was just the other day thinking that I should try to create a Spotify playlist – so glad that I found your post while getting a link to the first episode to share it with a friend. I have just gone to spotify and liked your list so will hopefully be able to enjoy it and any additions that you make as you work your way through the episodes. Thanks very much for taking on the project! And of course, thanks to Andrew Hickey for the amazing amount of research that has gone into creating each Episode – cheers 🙂
What is the song you use as the podcast theme music?
It’s a song called “Rock and Roll” by the Boswell Sisters, which may well be the first ever song to use the phrase “rock and roll”.
Coming here on the recommendation of Mr Billy Bragg (courtesy of his interview on Melbourne’s 3RRRFM/ Brian Wise’ “Off the Record” show).
Really looking forward to working my way thru!
Funnily enough, this song was an early, essential component of my musical education. I’d first heard/saw it in the Danny Kaye film “A Song Is Born.” My father had a copy of a Lionel Hampton album with a 10-minute (or so) version of it, which became mine. Even though I quickly became an exclusively rock fan, I continued to listen to the Hampton album for many years.
Great podcast, I’m already hooked!
Andrew, just loved this first episode. My late father played all of these tracks to me when I was a teenager in the 1960s to help me understand where the music I listened to came from. Just started your journey, I am assuming another of my fathers lessons, Big Joe Turner, will be coming in due course. Great stuff.
Thank you, Andrew, for this wonderful work. At the podcast’s outro, you mentioned to recommend this by word of mouth to just one other person. I’m here from Larry Crane’s article in TapeOp. I’m sure there will be others. 🙂
So glad to have discovered this wonderful podcast. I’m looking forward to the journey.
Absolutely brilliant series – the amount of work you must have put into this is phenominal.
I take your point about Lionel Hampton’s solo but it is vastly improved by Charlie Christian’s accompaniment – it sounds like Steve Cropper!
Wish there was an introduction to the songs on the mixtape to identify them.
Many thanks for all you have done.
I just discovered this podcast, yes I know a little late, listened to first 7 episodes today on a long car journey.
Really enjoying the content, and learnt so much already,
What an excellent job you are doing here and can’t wait to get into the music I recognise.
Thanks.
Same – just discovered. Amazing. I want a Spotify playlist of all these songs. Easy enough to do for the headline title tracks, but all the snippets you pulled during each show are incredible. Brilliant work, thank you.
Just noticed a typo. Sorry.
‘The first song the new Goodman Quintet recorded, on October 2 1939 — exactly seventy-nine years ago on the date this podcast comes out, if its release goes to plan — was a pieve (sic) called “Flying Home”’
Should be piece?
I found this through a ‘Recommendo’ post. Right off the bat I’ve found someone who agrees that the ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ Carnegie Hall recording is some of the best rock and roll ever recorded. IMHO it is a top 10 best ever live performance and I’ve often fanaticized what it would be like to go back and hear it live. Thanks for all the information surrounding it.
I just stumbled across this blog/podcast. Is there a listing anywhere of all of the episodes?
Having listened to this episode, I wondered if there was any overlap between Christian and Robert Johnson. It appears that Christian was coming into his own toward the end of Johnson’s life (he also died young, in his late twenties). I couldn’t find any evidence that the two knew of one another, but interestingly John Hammond knew of both and wanted Johnson for his From Spirituals to Swing concert not realizing that Johnson had died.
It’s very, very unlikely that the two had any connection at all. Johnson was a minor, basically unknown, figure until decades after his death, and other than a handful of people like Hammond who made it their business to collect records by obscure artists nobody outside Mississippi knew who he was. Christian grew up in the Midwest, and almost certainly never even heard of Johnson.
Thanks so much for the reply, Andrew, and your wonderful work throughout the podcast. I have one of your books (Beatles in Mono) and plan to add others to my music library. Your efforts are much appreciated.
You read that book? I’m so sorry!
(That was the first book I ever wrote, and I’ve actually taken it out of print now because it’s so badly written compared to my later books. I’m planning on doing a full rewrite of the thing at some point soon, to make it something like actually good…)