Glenn Miller: “In the Mood” (1940)
The sound of the radio was ubiquitous in our house. There was really no competitor for radio back then, especially in a house like ours where no one played a musical instrument.
We had a record player, although I don’t remember when we got it. We had a few, not many, 78 records, black with the occasional red or green vinyl. A 78 rpm record played for two and a half to three minutes maximum on the turnstile. Then there was a pause. The changer would drop the next record onto the turntable. There’d be another pause as the needle worked its way into the groove, then another three minutes max. of music. When my parents had guests over for cards or drinks, they would stack four or five records on the record player spindle. That meant ten to fifteen minutes of music spread across twenty to twenty-five minutes of listening. Then they had to load it up again.
The real problem wasn’t the duration of the music so much as its cost. Records cost money but until the end of the war –even after– my parents didn’t have money to waste on inessentials. My mother only bought a record if she wanted to learn the song so she could sing it herself. Usually it was the latest hit, the kind that for a week or month she couldn’t get enough of, couldn’t get it out of her mind. Then it would vanish from her thoughts and she’d move on to another short term song-she-just-had-to-learn-and-sing.
Record players really didn’t become central in my life until the longer playing formats of the fifties became popular. In the forties, radio was king.
People played cards then. And radio was perfect for that. The radio would be on when guests arrived. My parents handed out drinks. Everyone chatted for a while. Then they’d sit down for an evening of cards and conversation. Most often it was gin or pinochle or for a short while in the very early fifties, that ghastly variation on gin rummy called Canasta. Music played all night. One advantage of radio over records was that you didn’t have to refresh a radio.
I went to to bed long before the guests left but I could hear the music playing and excited talk through the closed door to my bedroom. It was powerful stuff. The presence one room over of my parents’ friends, all of whom I liked, was a turn on. I didn’t want to miss the excitement. This is how impressions are fixed in our psyches.
Music and sociability are still, seventy plus years later, linked in my head.
***
Later, when I was eleven and we’d moved from Lakewood (almost city) to Olmsted Falls (country changing to suburb), we would take jaunts two towns over to Columbia Station to visit the MacArthurs (Bob and Katie) and Crawfords (Bob and Tillie) on weekends. Most often it was the MacArthurs because their house was bigger and there were trees all around it.
Music always played while we were there.
I wrote about it in my memoirs:
We spent frequent weekends at the MacArthurs’ house in Columbia Falls. It was only half an hour’s drive north of us, and the Crawfords, my parents’ other best friends, lived just down the road from them. On weekends, my folks would drive to the MacArthurs’ place around midday. In the afternoon, Mac, Crawf and Dad would wander outside to smoke cigarettes and chat in the shade of the trees. Dad’s brother-in-law from his first marriage, Carl Stechmeyer, lived nearby and Carl and Ginnie joined them sometimes. Tillie and Ginnie stayed in the living room with Katie and my Mom, talking until time for dinner. The children –the Crawford girls, the MacArthurs’ nephews and nieces, and I (Ken was still a baby, too young to run around with us)—ran around the yard and through the trees with no special aim, burning up energy, laughing and shouting and making noise.
Around five, everyone moved inside. The adults sat with drinks and cigarettes and talked. The children got glasses of soda, maybe potato chips, cookies. Music played in the background on the radio. Depending on how many people were being fed, we sat at one table together or the children sat in the kitchen at a separate table from the adults. After dinner, the adults played cards or sat, talk ebbing and flowing, noisy times followed by quiet.
Nothing exceptional ever happened on those days but they were intensely companionable times. A warm glow of good will enveloped us all.
I don’t remember what the music was that was playing there. It wouldn’t have been anything daring because my parents, their friends too, didn’t have daring tastes. But swing –watered down and largely white— was part of the middle-class culture they came from, so I heard a lot of Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Jimmy Dorsey, the Andrews Sisters, early Sinatra, Benny Goodman, and –the rest are black groups– the Nat King Cole Trio, the Ellington and Basie bands and the Ink Spots. The first jazz songs I remember hearing were Miller’s “In the Mood” (which swung but wasn’t really jazz at all), Ellington’s “The Mooche” (which was jazz, and exceptional jazz) and Woody Herman’s “Caledonia” (also pretty cool):
Walkin’ with my baby she’s got great big feet / She’s long, lean, lanky and ain’t had nothin’ to eat / She’s my baby and I love her all the sa-ame / Crazy ‘bout that woman ‘cause Caldonia’s her name….
It didn’t matter whether the music was good or bad. That far back, I wasn’t at all discriminating about what I listened to. I just liked having music playing in the background.
But looking back, even that early in my now long life, I liked the jazz the most.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING Woody Herman, “Caldonia” (1945)
MUSIC & ME 