When young people buy gifts of music for older people they often assume that if it’s from their era, then they’ll like it. My brother bought a Bing Crosby collection for Mum only to be told that she couldn’t stand him. Similarly, I thought that a Glenn Miller album would find favour with her because, like gas masks, ration books, spitfires and doodlebugs - she’d been ‘in the war’. Her response was lukewarm. It didn’t occur to me that by the time the bespectacled band leader became popular in Britain, Mum’s dancing days were well behind her.
Mum insisted that whereas the pop I listened to would be forgotten in a matter of weeks, the music she had danced to would be remembered forever. Time has proven her wrong about the forgetting, but right about the remembering. The most popular songs of any era will survive because they have a value beyond their merit as music. They are part of a soundtrack that helps conjure up whatever era they come from and each triggers thousands of memories. Music is as close to a time machine as we are ever going to get.
My growing enthusiasm for the inter-war period was bound to include an appreciation of the popular music of the time. Whenever there’s a thirties period drama on film or tv, music is used extensively to help set the tone - it takes you back as surely as the clothes, cars and telephones do.
Swing and dance band music always appealed to me, because I enjoy the sound of brass. In the thirties, British Dance Band music broadcast over the wireless, live from West End hotels and restaurants like the May Fair and the Monseigneur enabled ordinary people to share in something lush and luxurious. Like most popular music it was regarded as, at best silly and at worst subversive. The BBC played it reluctantly and for a brief period it would not broadcast anything with vocals. Continental stations like Radio Luxembourg were happier to meet demand, and for those who could afford a gramophone, shellac 78rpm recordings made by the same bands were another option.
I wish I’d developed an enthusiasm for this music sooner so that I could have shared the love of it with my mother, and been able to bring back to her many of the songs she’d danced to as a girl. Six months before she died she revealed that in 1932, at the age of 16, she’d won two dance competitions, for one of them partnered by a woman, because there weren’t enough men to go around. It helped me see as I hadn't before, the rather beautiful young woman who lingered within this 91-year-old lady. My father was a musician with two left feet, so meeting and marrying him put an end to her dancing years. Because he couldn’t dance, she didn’t any more, which I find sad.
It wasn't that Mum and I had never discussed music. When I was in my teens, she used to complain bitterly about the stuff I listened to. “You can’t understand a bloomin’ word that they’re saying” she would moan. I would counter that many of the words in the music of her age, although delivered with clarity, were hardly worth listening to. Inane drivel about k-k-k-Katy in the k-k-k-kitchen in the m-m-m-moonlight - it was as though the music was the thing and the lyrics merely an afterthought. That was actually from 1918 when Mum was two, but to be fair, the words of many popular songs from any era don’t stand up to scrutiny, because they are designed to offer something else.
The overwhelming majority of music broadcast in the 1920s and 1930s, whether up or downbeat, was designed for dancing. At first the big stars were the band leaders, not the singers - in Britain, Ambrose, Geraldo, Ray Noble, Lew Stone. Many dance band tracks were half over before the vocals came in, giving the audience time to find their partners, get on the floor and launch into a foxtrot, or a quickstep or a waltz. The singer was seen as just another musician, the vocals just another sound to bring to the arrangement.
In the United States the fresh face and vulnerable voice of a young Frank Sinatra helped change all that. He appealed to the ears, the eyes, the heart and… need I go on? Listen to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra’s gorgeous 1939 recording of ‘Fools Rush In’ and you’ll hear what I mean.
In Britain we had the incomparable Al Bowlly, who sang as though he earnestly believed every word, no matter how sentimental. It is almost impossible to find a thirties period drama where his warm and sincere voice does not feature at some point. Bowlly seemed quintessentially British - born of Greek and Lebanese parents in Mozambique and raised in South Africa as he was. 'The Very Thought of You' is one of his most famous.
Fondly imagining myself discussing 1930s music with my mother, I realise that actually we would not have had the same taste even in this apparently common ground. She did not like crooners, preferring a ‘classically trained’ voice. While acknowledging their talent and dedication, I can barely tolerate listening to those more formal singers. So perhaps the conversations I dream of us having, would in fact have been further disagreements.
For the music of the 1920s and 1930s I would recommend the online Swing Street Radio which is advert-free. For recorded music, Dutton Vocalion has a wonderful catalogue of remastered British Dance Band music on CD. Memory Lane magazine is a forum of longstanding, dedicated to British Dance Band music of this era.
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