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More than half a century after his mysterious wartime disappearance, the big-band leader and composer who gave America "Moonlight Serenade," "String of Pearls," and "In the Mood" endures as the musical symbol of an entire generation.
Spring, 1994: It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, and the air is filled with speeches, prayers, and remembrance. And one thing else. Everywhere, it seems, there is the music of the Glenn Miller Band of the 1940s. On the evening of May 30, 1994, a group of snowy-haired celebrants--some dressed in vintage World War II uniforms--fills the floor of London's Royal Albert Hall to dance to Miller's "In the Mood." On June 5, a crowd of two thousand, which includes Her Majesty The Queen Mother, listens to the very same tune played by a U.S. Air Force contingent in Portsmouth. That same day at a military cemetery near Cambridge, where U.S. President Bill Clinton speaks, the band also plays Miller's tunes. On June 6, aboard the Queen Elizabeth II, celebrities that include Bob Hope, Walter Cronkite, and Sir John Mills are serenaded by Miller's music. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic at Arlington National Cemetery, some four thousand people gather for prayers and speeches--and Miller songs played by an Army band. And in Sainte-Mère-Eglise, the first French town liberated by the Allies, "In the Mood" echoes across the landscape from loudspeakers.
Miller's music was so pervasive at the anniversary observances that one reporter, Louis J. Salome of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, looking over the estimated forty thousand veterans at Normandy, dubbed them "the Glenn Miller generation."
What was it about this music and the band that created it that made the Miller sound the aural symbol of an era? Of all the musical aggregations of the "Big Band Era," how did the group that recorded such hits as "In the Mood," "String of Pearls," "Tuxedo Junction," "Little Brown Jug," "Pennsylvania 6-5000," and "Moonlight Serenade" achieve such lasting recognition?
Big Bands (generally speaking, those comprised of ten or more musicians) had been around for more than a decade before Benny Goodman and his group caught the fancy of Depression-weary America in 1935 and set it swinging.
The Original Glenn Miller Orchestra 1940
One could, perhaps, date the Big-Band Era as far back as 1924, when Paul Whiteman's already well-known orchestra debuted George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" in a concert at New York's Aeolian Hall and gave jazz a respectability that it had not previously enjoyed. With the door now opened, jazz bands such as the great Duke Ellington's began to find their way into the mainstream of the American music scene. Their music--progressive, creative, and exciting--reflected the fast-paced "Roaring Twenties."
The stock market crash of 1929 and the sweeping economic depression that followed changed the nation's mood. Americans, anxious to escape the realities of the Great Depression, turned to slower, more romantic music. "Sweet" bands such as those led by Guy Lombardo, Hal Kemp, and Eddy Duchin became popular. Glen Gray and the Casa Loma orchestra developed a following, especially among college students, with a semi-swing sound that foreshadowed the Big Band band era. And by 1934, the Dorsey brothers--Tommy and Jimmy--and Benny Goodman had assembled their bands.
But the craze that made swing by far America's most popular form of music effectively began with the astonishing breakthrough of Goodman's band at the Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood in August 1935. Suddenly, the youth of the United States had found a new sound, one that contained elements of jazz and yet was different.
To many listeners, jazz and swing were the same, but most fans found swing [easier], more listenable, and more suitable for dancing, which was very important to the young people of the day. Jazz fans tend to think of their music as art meant for listening only. Some bands, like Goodman's, drove pretty fast and were jazz-oriented, but others (often more successful) played what was known as "sweet" music. In fact, by the 1940s, Big Bands were cleanly separated, like Italian sausage, into two categories--"sweet" and "hot."
But style had to be accompanied by exposure, and one of the reasons that the Big Bands ruled was their accessibility. One could hear the sounds in a range of ways, and few of them involved spending a great deal of money. Radio disk jockeys--"platter spinners"--were few. More common were live radio broadcasts of the bands, either from studios or ballrooms. The major radio networks saturated the air waves with the sound. In 1939, for example, NBC was presenting the music of no less than forty-nine bands, and CBS had twenty-one.
Nor was it necessary to attend a night club to hear these ensembles live (although even that was not unaffordable for middle-class listeners; the weekday cover charge to see Glenn Miller at the Cafe Rouge of [New York's] Hotel Pennsylvania was seventy-five cents). The most prominent Big Bands usually spent the winter at such a big-city hotel, but during the rest of the year, they were on the road night after night, taking their shows to dozens of smaller communities. Occasionally, a Big Band was thrown in for the price of admission between shows at a big-city movie theater; these bands were not an afterthought, but the attraction that brought patrons to see the movie.
Hollywood films also played a role in disseminating the big-band sound. Movie studios rushed to sign up the hot ensembles of the day, as directors churned out a succession of mediocre motion pictures, in which the image of the musicians, characterized in films by phony "jive" talk, bore little resemblance to true life. Despite their generally poor quality, however, these movies offered viewers (and preserved for posterity) the performances of such bands as those of Goodman, the Dorsey brothers, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Sammy Kaye, Woody Herman, and, of course, Glenn Miller.
Although not as [pervasive] [prominent] then as they are today, recordings too boosted the accessibility of the Big Bands. In 1939, record sales totaled $50 million (up from $10 million seven years earlier), and eighty-five percent of these sales were of swing music. By 1940 sales were $70 million, and a year later they soared to $100 million. The jukebox became a fixture in restaurants and saloons around 1934, and by the time the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, there were some three to four hundred thousand machines in the United States, most of them dispensing the music of the Big Bands.
Sun Valley Serenade: Glenn rehearsing the band, with John Payne faking it at the piano.
And the most popular of them all was the Glenn Miller band; in the 1940s, poll after poll consistently placed the Miller band first. It set attendance records almost everywhere it went, and by 1943 there were more than five hundred Glenn Miller fan clubs across the United States and Canada. In 1940 alone, Miller recorded forty-five songs that made it onto the top-seller[s] charts--a figure neither Elvis Presley nor the Beatles ever matched--and it was estimated that one out of three nickels put into jukeboxes went to play a Miller record.
Alton Glenn Miller--he detested his first name and quickly dropped it--was born on March 1, 1904 in Clarinda, Iowa. When Glenn was five, the family moved to Tryon, Nebraska, where they lived for five years in a sod house. After a brief stay in North Platte, [Nebraska], the Millers relocated to Grant City, Missouri in 1915, and then, three years later, to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where Glenn attended high school.
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