Chicago's Swing Jamboree
Lewis A. Erenberg
Desirous of providing the city's youngsters with a fair opportunity to hear their favorite style of music in a live setting, the New Century Committee of Chicago staged a free Swing Jamboree at Soldier Field on the evening of August 24, 1938. Drawing a racially mixed audience -- a rarity for the time -- the concert presented twenty white and black big-name orchestras, amateur band and dance contests, and "free public truckin'" on three separate dance stages located in the center of the field. Before the gates closed, over 100,000 eager fans streamed into the cavernous football stadium; outside nearly as many people gathered in the hopes of gaining entrance. Suddenly, "with a deafening groan, the gates caved in, and the boys and girls poured in." According to one local newspaper, the result "was a barrelhouse, boogie-woogie, bacchanal worthy of 18-year-old ecstasy, as it seemed the whole younger generation of the city--a generation born since the World War and scarred by the depression--let down its hair, lost its hat and danced wherever there was room to dance to the hot lick rhythms of gutbucket gorillas."
Despite the crush, the Jamboree, noted a local daily paper, turned out to be "the most hysterical orgy of joyous emotions by multitudes ever witnessed on the American continent." As Jimmy Dorsey's band swung into the "Flat Foot Floogie," one of the major musical anthems of the swing era, "men climbed over each other, girls perched on their partners' shoulders, babies were held aloft, the younger generation scrambled up on the stands, car tops and construction work at the north end . . . and swing really broke loose." Surging through police lines, the crowd overran the three dance platforms, "drove the white-coated dance bands to cover," and knocked out the microphones in their mad dash to get to the stage. When an official of the Jamboree finally managed to restore order, no time remained for the amateur contests.
Before the professional bands could resume, however, young black men and women, inspired earlier by the Earl "Fatha" Hines Band, snake-danced through the crowd while other impatient swing fans played their own instruments, beat time on their bodies, and in general went wild over two seventeen-year-old amateur dancers who trucked, shagged, and pecked to "the off beat and wild rhythm of swing. The crowd loved 'em."
Shocked reactions during the following-days greeted this outpouring of "jitterbug ecstasy." Struck by such an unrestrained emotional display, observers pondered this unprecedented crowd behavior. The Daily News, for example, acknowledging that it had viewed "the world's largest crowd . . . for a musical event, " called the concert "the strangest manifestation of youthful exuberance perhaps ever witnessed since the Middle Ages' ill-fated Children's Crusade." Then, as now, newspapers solicited psychological experts for their opinions. Some psychologists warned of "mass hysteria" linked to "unrest, insecurity, repression . . . and sex." Others, however, dismissed this behavior as merely "simple, uncomplicated childishness." Instead of coupling, young people "came out in the circle . . . and danced in a mass."
Whatever their views, all agreed with Metronome, one of the music periodicals with a focus on swing, that "this is a perfect example of the powerful hold that swing has on its followers." Observer after observer became aware of swing after Chicago's own Benny Goodman reached a mass audience in 1935, with a largely African-American based music. After the Jamboree, they noted that swing had become the favorite music of American youth.
Most historians, however, have tended to dismiss the swing audience as passive receivers of musical products rather than active participants in creating a music vital to their own lives. In fact, black and white jitterbugs, like those at the Swing Jamboree, crashed the gates to express themselves through music despite all sorts of parental objections. Moreover, young people hungered for this music in the face of the economic and social restrictions on their lives and dreams created by the worst economic depression in American history. More than ever before, the difficulties of earning a living and gaining independence through social mobility, career advancement, or marriage reduced the differences among young people. Increasingly part of the crowd, young people helped transform the whole concept of mass culture. When new voices of youth appeared in the 1930s, they forced dramatic changes in musical performance, democratized the consumption of music, and helped create what jazz critic Ralph Gleason calls a "whole way of life" centered around swing music.
The Swing Jamboree was only the tip of a much deeper contribution that Chicago made to the swing era. All during the 1920s, as historian William Kenney has pointed out in Chicago Jazz, Chicago served as the jazz capital of the world. Out of that musical ferment, moreover, came black and white musicians who migrated to New York where they achieved national fame during the 1930s. Besides Louis Armstrong, who took New York by storm in the early thirties, the most well-known of the young tyros was Benny Goodman, who grew up in the westside Jewish ghetto of the city, and who, along with the Austin High Gang, began exploring jazz as a young man. Not only did he become the "King of Swing," (a designation he disliked), but it was in Chicago in 1935-1936 at the Urban Room of the Congress Hotel that Goodman made two more notable contributions to swing. Through the efforts of the Chicago Rhythm Club, Goodman unveiled his racially integrated trio for the first time on a public stage. Goodman on clarinet and Gene Krupa (another Chicago boy) on drums were joined by African-American pianist Teddy Wilson in what turned out to be a precedent-setting event for racial integration of the music business.
Equally important, this event turned into one of the first jazz concerts. Although the trio's performance was billed as a dance, the audience, according to Down Beat, "positively preferred to listen and watch." The few brave souls who tried to dance were "instantly booed." A bit surprisingly, perhaps, Chicago thus played an important role in the integration of the swing era, the rise of the jazz concert which the era was known for, and the overwhelming appeal of the music to a national audience of young people.
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