Benny Goodman facts for swing dancers | by Jamin Jackson
Channel: Street Smart Swing
Date: 2018-12-12

Here are some Benny Goodman facts you need to know. Make sure to get access to my favorite swing dancing playlists highlighting many of Benny Goodman's songs along with my lindy hop approach. 
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1. Humble beginnings 

Benny Goodman had been raised in a Jewish ghetto on Chicago’s West Side, one of twelve children to immigrant parents who had fled Russian-dominated Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century to escape its brutal discrimination against Jews. At the age of ten, Goodman, with two of his brothers, joined a band organized by the neighborhood synagogue. He show immediate promise as a clarinetists, and through a series of serendipitous events Goodman, despite his lack of financial resources, wound up studying with the brilliant clarinetist Franz Schoepp. On nights when Goodman wasn’t playing himself, he and his pals sneaked into famous Chicago nightspots such as Dreamland and the Sunset, where they gazed wide-eyed at King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. 

2. Benny was a big Billie Holiday fan

Benny Goodman had become a fan of Billie Holiday after traveling with music promoter Jon Hammond several times up to Harlem to hear her sing. In fact, in her autobiography Holiday said her first recording sessions with Goodman came at the bandleaders’s, not the promoters insistence. it was said that they briefly dated. Billie Holiday said in her autobiography that Goodman eventually asked me to make my first record with him. I’ll never forget it. Benny came up to me and took me to the studio downtown. When we got there and I saw this big microphone , it scared me half to death. I’d never sung in one and I was afraid of it. Those sessions are now considered significant for reasons other than there being Holiday’s first recording date. They marked the first time Goodman served as leader of an integrated studio band. 



3. Exposed Swing to the Masses

While the roots of swing music clearly lie in earlier forms of African-American jazz performance styles—swing as we know it may just have been born at a specific time and in a specific place, with an electric performance by one particular Big Band for one particularly enthusiastic audience. The time and place was August 21, 1935, at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, California. It was a promising start to an engagement Goodman hoped would salvage a summer tour otherwise judged a failure. But Goodman stuck to relatively staid, stock arrangements during the first part of that night’s show, and he began to lose the young crowd. Before their return from the first intermission, the band’s drummer, Gene Krupa, is said to have urged Goodman, “If we’re gonna die, Benny, let’s die playing our own thing.” It was at that point that Benny Goodman famously pulled out Fletcher Henderson’s arrangements along with all the stops on his talented orchestra, to the crowd’s immense delight. The kids went nuts, jitterbugging wildly.  Because of this exuberant performance witnessed by thousands of young fans in the live audience and millions more tuning in to a live radio broadcast the swing era was born.” 



4. First to play swing in a concert hall. 

Benny Goodman made history on January 16th 1938 when he took the stage for his Carnegie Hall debut. It was not only the first time jazz was performed in the hallowed hall but also an unprecedentedly publicized presentation of Goodman’s groundbreaking, racially integrated ensemble.
This performance was the first time that hard-swinging, uncompromising jazz—took the stage in a concert hall, helping to further legitimize the genre as an art form.
Benny Goodman was worried the show wouldn’t sell because attendees would have to sit instead of dance, as they were so accustomed to doing at his shows. Ultimately, he was proved wrong when the concert sold out weeks in advance!
 In addition to Goodman’s own big band, the evening featured members of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras. 

Benny Goodman didn’t know the concert was recorded. After the performance, Goodman was given one of two copies of the recording, which he put away in his apartment and forgot about. 

Years later, the recordings were rediscovered, at which point Goodman had them released as The Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. It went on to become one of the best-selling live jazz albums of all time.