News from the Great Wide World: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Black Popular Music, 1927–1943

Abstract

In numerous essays Ralph Ellison highlighted the special role that musicians and big swing bands played in defining a new future for black America from the late 1920s through World War II. Led by sophisticated and glamorous Dukes and Counts, big swing bands represented a flowering of black folk culture in the new urban centers of the black migration. With New York City acting as their national capital, moreover, these bands acted as traveling representatives of the modern city as they conducted national tours, produced endless recordings, and performed live on radio for a new mass audience for jazz music. While their travels took them through the indignities of a segregated society, black bands offered release from the Depression and expressed heightened expectations for people whose lives were still bound by racial restraints. As Ellison recognized, they provided ecstasy and communion to their many followers, performed in secular rituals on the dance floor. As such, the most famous bands of the 1930s and 1940s held out an urban model of freedom that climaxed with the renewed mass migrations to Northern cities during World War II. In the big band form, folk culture and modern life were united in new ways to offer optimism tinged by hard reality in the middle of the Depression. In the process, black entertainers stood as heroes.