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lay claim to the title the King of Swing.
THE GLORY DAYS
    Goodman’s triumph in California was the catalyst for a revolution in music and dance in America. During the late thirties,
     hundreds of new swing bands formed all across the country. In response to the demand, at least five of Goodman’s own sidemen—Krupa,
     Berrigan, Wilson, Lionel Hampton, and Harry James —were able to go out and start their own orchestras. Established bands such as those led by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Jimmie Lunceford, and Charlie Barnet rode the groundswell of enthusiasm, while Bing’s brother Bob Crosby; Woody Herman, with his hit song “Woodchopper’s Ball”; and Artie Shaw, with “Begin the Beguine,” became household names. Swing fans eagerly awaited each issue of
Downbeat
and
Metronome
magazines to see how their favorite band rated in the latest readers poll, or which star soloist had been snatched up by
     another band. As pianist Ralph Burns put it, “If you were a jazz musician playing with Woody Herman, you were almost like
     a movie star.” Ellington, as quoted in David W. Stowe’s
Swing Changes,
noticed a huge increase in attention from fans. “Audiences, today, invariably crowd around the bandstand, eager to grasp
     every solo note and orchestral trick.” Enormous new ballrooms were constructed across the country—breathtaking dance palaces
     like the Hollywood Palladium that could hold thousands of couples. The bandleaders even had the gumption to start a practice
     known as swinging the classics. Tommy Dorsey jazzed up Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India,” while Maxine Sullivan had a hit
     with a tweaked version of the Scottish folk tune “Loch Lomond.” Opponents argued that Ravel, Strauss, Mozart, and Debussy
     were rolling in their graves from receiving similar treatment.
    Swing was boffo business. According to Stowe, the recording industry, which had grossed just $2.5 million in 1932, was hauling
     in $36 million by 1939. Bands fought for lucrative hotel contracts, a slice of the exploding jukebox market, the attention
     of bookers who controlled national tours, and commercially sponsored radio programs. The relatively new radio business, in
     fact, was one of the most important factors in promoting swing. Fans would listen to live recordings from such famous ballrooms
     as the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York and the Meadowbrook Club in New Jersey. Even Hollywood fell hard for swing, producing
     scores of movies featuring bandleaders (see “Swing on Film” in the appendix for a list of great swing flicks). How popular
     was swing? One Saturday in March 1937, the Goodman orchestra played at 8:30 A.M. before the showing of a movie at the Paramount Theater in New York. According to awestruck accounts, hundreds of kids showed
     up before sunrise to wait in line. Three thousand swingers in all turned out, many of them jumping out of their seats and
     dancing in the aisles during the performance. Suddenly jazz was being played everywhere, from the big city to the small town,
     all under the guise of a new name, swing. As blues popularizer W. C. Handy, writer of “St. Louis Blues,” once said: “Swing
     is the latest term for ragtime, jazz, and blues. You white folks just have a new word for our old-fashioned hot music.”
    More than just popular music, swing became an entire lifestyle. Indeed, it was considered the first real youth culture in
     American entertainment, the beginning of a series of musical uprisings that would continue from rock in the fifties through
     grunge in the nineties. “It was like when the Beatles came along. The kids were listening to what they considered their music
     and theirs alone,” says trumpeter Tommy Smith, who played with bandleader Ray Anthony. Swing had its own slang, popularized
     by Calloway in his
Hepster’s Dictionary,
and its own styles of dress—just think of the bobby-soxers and zoot-suiters. (For more on swing’s fashion and lingo, see
     chapter 6.) What