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“Spinnin' the Webb”: Representational Spaces, Mythic Narratives, and the 1937 Webb/Goodman Battle of Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2020

CHRISTOPHER J. WELLS
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Abstract

Benny Goodman and Chick Webb's 1937 battle of music has become a mythic event in jazz historical narratives, enshrined as the unique spectacle that defines Harlem's Savoy Ballroom and its legacy. While this battle has been marked as exceptional and unique, as an event it was a relatively typical instantiation of the “battle of music” format, a presentational genre common in black venues during the 1920s and 1930s. Within African American communities, battles of music re-staged ballrooms as symbolically loaded representational spaces where dueling bands regularly served as oppositional totems that indexed differences of locality (Chicago vs. New York), gender (men vs. women), ethnicity (Anglo- or African American vs. Latin), or race (black vs. white). This article details the ten-year history of battles of music that preceded the Webb/Goodman battle and that made its signifying rhetoric legible within African American communities. It then argues that the disconnect between the battle's relatively typical signifying rhetoric and its subsequent enshrinement as an exceptional event occurred due to a specific confluence of circumstances in the mid-1930s that shaped its immediate reception and subsequent legacy: Goodman's emergence as the “King of Swing” during a new period of massive mainstream popularity for swing music, a coterminous vigilance among both white and black jazz writers to credit black artists as jazz's originators and best practitioners, and the emergence of athletes Jesse Owens and Joe Louis as popular black champions symbolically conquering white supremacy at home and abroad.

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Type
Research Article
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Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 176 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2020

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References

References

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Baltimore Afro-AmericanGoogle Scholar
Chicago DefenderGoogle Scholar
DownbeatGoogle Scholar
Kansas City PlaindealerGoogle Scholar
Melody MakerGoogle Scholar
New York Amsterdam NewsGoogle Scholar
Pittsburgh CourierGoogle Scholar
Bakan, Jonathon. “Jazz and the ‘Popular Front’: ‘Swing Musicians’ and the Left-Wing Movements of the 1930s and 1940s.” Jazz Perspectives 3, no. 1 (April 2009): 35–56.10.1080/17494060902778118CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berish, Andrew. Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ‘40s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.10.7208/chicago/9780226044965.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buni, Andrew. Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Collier, James Lincoln. Benny Goodman and the Swing Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
DeVeaux, Scott, and Giddins, Gary. Jazz. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.Google Scholar
Dunkel, Mario. “Marshall Winslow Stearns and the Politics of Jazz Historiography.” American Music 30, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 468–504.10.5406/americanmusic.30.4.0468CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erenberg, Lewis A.The Greatest Fight of Our Generation: Louis vs. Schmeling. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Erenberg, Lewis A.Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Fauser, Annegret. “Le Sacre du Printemps: A Ballet for Paris.” In The Rite of Spring at 100, edited by Neff, Severine, Carr, Maureen, and Horlacher, Gretchen, 83–97. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.10.2307/j.ctt2005z70.12CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Firestone, Ross. Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life & Times of Benny Goodman. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.Google Scholar
Foy, Anthony. “Joe Louis's Talking Fists: The Auto/Biopolitics of My Life Story.” American Literary History 23, no. 2 (2011): 311–36.10.1093/alh/ajr001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Hess, Mickey. Is Hip Hop Dead?: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Most Wanted Music. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.Google Scholar
Kajikawa, Loren. “Eminem's ‘My Name Is’: Signifying Whiteness, Re-Articulating Race.” Journal of the Society for American Music 3, no. 3 (August 2009): 341–63.10.1017/S1752196309990459CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Smith, Donald Nicholson. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991.Google Scholar
Leite, Werlayne Stuart Soares. “Berlin 1936: The Creation of the ‘Myth’ Jesse Owens.” Acta Facultatis Educationis Physicae Universtatis Comenianae 57, no. 2 (November 2017): 98–110.10.1515/afepuc-2017-0010CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Simon. “What is Spectacle?” Journal of Popular Film and Television 42, no. 4 (October 2014): 214–21.10.1080/01956051.2014.923370CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Mark. Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip Hop DJ. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Magee, Jeffrey. Fletcher Henderson: The Uncrowned King of Swing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195090222.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Magnusson, Bruce, and Zalloua, Zahi, eds. “Introduction: From Events to Spectacles.” In Spectacle, 3–17. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Martin, Henry, and Waters, Keith, Jazz: The First Hundred Years. 2nd ed.Belmont, CA: Schirmer, 2006.Google Scholar
McLeod, Ken. “The Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports.” American Music 27, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 204–26.Google Scholar
Milford, Mike. “The Olympics, Jesse Owens, Burke, and the Implications of Media Framing in Symbolic Boasting.” Mass Communication and Society 15 (2012): 485–505.10.1080/15205436.2012.665119CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raeburn, Bruce Boyd, New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.10.3998/mpub.176136CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Simon, George T.The Big Bands. Rev. ed. New York: MacMillan, 1974.Google Scholar
Tate, Greg. “Nigs R Us, or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects.” Introduction to Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture, edited by Tate, Greg, 1–14. New York: Broadway Books, 2003.Google Scholar
Tick, Judith. “Ella Fitzgerald's Scrapbooks: A New Source for a Revisionist Interpretation of Her Early Career.” Paper presented at the Society for American Music Annual Meeting, Sacramento, CA, March 8, 2015.Google Scholar
Tucker, Mark. Duke Ellington: The Early Years. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Wald, Elijah. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock & Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Welburn, Ronald. “Jazz Magazines of the 1930s: An Overview of Their Provocative Journalism.” American Music 5, no. 3 (Autumn, 1987): 255–270.10.2307/3051735CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, Christopher J. “’The Ace of His Race’: Paul Whiteman's Early Critical Reception in the Black Press.” Jazz & Culture 1 (2018): 77–103.Google Scholar
Wells, Christopher J. “’And I Make My Own’: Class Performance, Black Urban Identity, and Depression-Era Harlem's Physical Culture.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Shay, Anthony and Sellars-Young, Barbara, 17–40. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Burns, Ken, dir. Jazz. Vol. 5. “Swing, Pure Pleasure.” Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2000. DVD, 87 min.Google Scholar