The History of Swing Music

David Stowe explodes myths about swing music in this chapter from his book Swing Changes. These myths include the following: that swing was created by artists but ruined by businessmen; and that it began as a “pure” black form that was colonized by whites. (He acknowledges a grain of truth in these myths, however). He explodes the myths by examining the institutional history of swing music. He doesn’t just analyze the music – in fact, he does very little musical analysis at all-but instead he focuses on the ways in which institutional forces emerged, fought, and came together to create and promote the form of music known as swing.

The chapter begins with the curious phenomenon of “swinging the classics.” Only after a few pages does he back up and show us a bigger picture, explaining why so many bands made swing arrangements of classical music: because they were banned from using ASCAP-owned material and the classics were royalty free.

The question of censorship comes up very quickly in his piece-around the attempt to censor swing versions of the classics (a pseudo-event?) – and it’s worth considering what censorship means. Mostly we think of censorship as a legal injunction against the distribution or exhibition of a work. That characterization of censorship is both accurate and misleading, accurate in the sense that such cases are indeed censorship, but misleading in the sense that censorship is not restricted to such cases alone.

Censorship need not have anything to do with the legal system; can you think of other types of cases? Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, it can be unrelated with distribution and exhibition; censorship can also apply at the level of production. Such is true in cases of “prior restraint,” as occurs in the case Stowe discusses on page 11 where “the networks instituted a ban on ad-libbing, requiring that all solos be transcribed and submitted ahead of time for clearance.” Some theorists, among them many Marxist critics, have argued that censorship can apply prior to the production stage as well; it means one can’t even think certain thoughts, either because they’re forbidden or because the language that would make them thinkable doesn’t exist. We might argue that racial mixing, or “miscegenation,” is an example of such a forbidden thought in much of the country during the swing era.

Back to this notion of institutional form . . . I was discussing how Stowe attends to the ways that institutional forms shaped musical forms. Stowe mentions the obvious, which is the form of the bands themselves: whether they were cooperative or had celebrity bandleaders, etc. But beyond that issue is an array of institutional forces that shaped what the music could be; among them were booking agencies, publishers, broadcasters, Hollywood studios, recording companies, the travel industry, sponsors, etc.

The standard argument is that business corrupts the music. In fact, Stowe argues, it’s more complicated than that. The various industries made music possible at the same time as they limited what it could be. They were, in effect, a variety of gatekeepers, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing, but without which the music would not have reached larger audiences, and therefore, would not have developed the way it did, with large bands, big stars, and high overhead costs.

There were two major tensions in the music that Stowe traces here; tensions between a utopian impulse in swing – embodying the values of “freedom, individualism, ethnic inclusiveness, democratic participation” (100) and the trend in the music industry towards “consolidation, vertical integration, and homogenization,” (100) and racial division. The two were not unrelated, of course. In what ways were they related?