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Like many genres it didn't suddenly appear on the scene fully-formed. The antecedents of swing include Dixieland jazz, gospel singing with its call-and-response, Broadway musical theatre, klezmer, Tin Pan Alley pop songs, and society dance orchestras.

During the 1920s many small jazz bands toured the country. Their members included such future swing stars as Count Basie, Benny Goodman, the Dorseys, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Bunny Berigan and many others. In addition, there were bandleaders such as Paul Whiteman who performed light dance music as well as jazz-themed classics (he premiered Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, for example) and Glen Gray who lead a jazz-influenced dance orchestra in Canada. Perhaps the first large dance band to fully incorporate jazz in its repertoire was the legendary Duke Ellington band, formed in 1924.

By the early 1930s many of these genres began to coalesce into what soon became Swing. While pure jazz tends to be rather unstructured with much improvisation, Broadway music and society dance orchestras required strictly arranged charts with little room for creativity. The two styles influenced each other greatly, with jazz causing a loosening of the rules for dance music while the need for arrangements imposed a level of structure on jazz. Black bandleaders such as Fletcher Henderson had successfully brought arranging styles to jazz music, with some of the music being tightly written but also with free-form sections where individual musicians could solo. Henderson was particularly successful at carrying the call-and-response style of gospel to his dance band; the melody was handed off from one instrument section to another, mimicking the way singers would echo each other back and forth.

In the early 1930s Benny Goodman heard the Henderson band, and when Henderson faced financial troubles Goodman hired him as his arranger and appropriated much of the Henderson band's material. Goodman added a bit more syncopation from his childhood exposure to klezmer music, performing tunes such as Don't Be That Way, Stealin' Apples, King Porter Stomp, and more. In 1935 he began a nationwide tour with his modified style of jazz. Initially the tour was a flop - most of the hotels and theatres where he played were owned by people who were more rooted in the older society bands, and in that horribly segregated era many whites did not have a lot of exposure to music by black artists. Goodman was limited to playing "safe" music that kept the broadcasters happy but bored his audiences.

But a quirk of fate changed things. Goodman had been making late-night radio broadcasts after his regular performances. They weren't heard by many people on the East Coast due to the late time, but they were heard in prime time on the West Coast as a result of the difference in time zones. (There was no such thing as delayed broadcasting in those days.) He was also able to perform with more freedom because most of the radio executives were asleep on the East Coast and didn't meddle in his musical choices. The result was that the Goodman/Henderson combination of swinging jazz was heard by tens of thousands of high-school and college students who mobbed his band when the tour reached California, sending Swing music on its way to become the dominant style for almost a decade.

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16y ago
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11y ago

Swing didn't suddenly "just start". It developed in the late 1920s and gradually gained popularity until it reached its peak around 1940-41.

Most music historians use 1935 as the beginning of the so-called "swing era". That year Benny Goodman's orchestra developed an almost cult-like following on the West Coast, which led to a much broader popularization of the style nationwide.

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10y ago

Swing Music was most popular during the mid 1930's to the mid 1940's. Starting in 1942, a recording ban by the union that most jazz musicians belonged to caused swing music to be played less frequently on the radio and other types of music took over.

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11y ago

Early forms of swing were popular in the late 1920s but the "swing era" is generally considered to have run from around 1934 to 1945.

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8y ago

It started in the 1920's.

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