Building the Kingdom of Swing
Building the Kingdom of Swing
After his own group disbanded, Henderson began writing arrangements for Benny Goodman's band to play on a network radio program called Let's Dance. The Henderson-Goodman collaboration has been variously interpreted as a challenge to the popular music industry and as a formulaic reinforcement of its values. Recognizing merit in both views but accepting neither as entirely apt, this chapter explores several arrangements — including “Blue Skies”, “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”, and “King Porter Stomp” — in musical detail in the first effort to identify the elements of the mainstream swing style that has been termed “Hendersonese‘. The analytical method combines examination of Goodman's recordings and the many scores and parts of the arrangements now held in the Goodman collections at the Yale Music Library and the New York Public Library, and it insists on understanding musical style in the context of the structure of a network radio program.
Keywords: Let's Dance, Henderson, Goodman, network radio, arrangements, Blue Skies, King Porter Stomp, Hendersonese
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
