Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1911-1946
This CD follows the book Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875-1945 (Chatto and Windus UK 2007, Viking US 2007, Campus Verlag Germany 2008) in telling the story of youth culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Many of the songs herein are mentioned within the text, however it is meant to stand alone as a listening experience as well as act as an aural accompaniment.
‘Adolescence is a new birth.’
G. Stanley Hall: Adolescence (1904)
‘I hope and pray for the day when I’ll be sweet sixteen’, sang Judy Garland in the hit film, Love Finds Andy Hardy; ‘then I won’t have to be an in-between’. As a long litany of complaints – “I’m too old for toys and too young for boys’; ‘I can’t do this, I can’t go there: I’m just a circle in a square’ – In-Between was one of the first songs to describe the adolescent experience from within.
In-Between was recorded in the same July 1939 session as Over The Rainbow. Two weeks later, Garland and her co-star in the Andy Hardy series, Mickey Rooney, went to New York for the pre-miere of The Wizard of Oz, and caused a riot. On the 14th of August 1939, Grand Central Station was swamped by a ‘screaming, delirious, roped-in mob’ of 10,000 fans.
When The Wizard of Oz premiered on the 17th, 15,000 fans were thronging the streets around the Capitol Theatre by the time the box-office opened. Reporters noted that 60% of the crowd were ‘minors’. By the end of the day, Garland and Rooney had played to 37,000 people, and this pattern – jammed streets and mobbed stars – continued for the show’s run.
The process had been building since the later 1930’s but this was one of the events that kick-started Teenage marketing in the US: later riots around Frank Sinatra’s appearances at the Paramount Theatre in New York during 1943/4 – involving 30,000 hysterical girl ‘bobbysoxers’ – reinforced the point that here was a large, vola-tile social group of people that had money, visibility, and clout.
The Teenager arrived in the autumn of 1944, thanks in part to the media storm that surrounded Frank Sinatra and in part to the un-expected success of Seventeen – the first magazine to be launched at adolescent girls that talked to them in their own language. The Teenager was a particularly American solution to an age-old problem: what society should do with its youth.
Originally, there had been no intermediate age between childhood and adulthood but after the Romantics, the French and the American Revolution, youth developed an attitude and an aesthetic of its own. By the beginning of the Mass Age in the last quarter of the 19th century – signaled by urbanisation, industrialisation and mass production – the problem of youth had become acute.
Although the earliest mentions of this separate stage of life occur in criminology – the phrase ‘juvenile delinquent’ was coined in the 1810’s – the first person to give a proper definition of this stage of life was an American academic, G.Stanley Hall. In 1904 he pub-lished a mammoth 1500 page book on Adolescence, which paved the way for the 20th century thinking on the topic.
Hall coined the term Adolescence and defined it as lasting between 13 and 25 and as ‘full of storms and stresses’. He advocated that, as this stage of life was full of potential danger, it should be protected and shielded from premature exposure to the strains of adulthood. He thus foreshadowed the rise of what the sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1942 first called ‘youth culture’.
During the fifty years between 1895 (when Hall began researching his book) and 1945 (the end of the Second World War), there was a constant and escalating dialectic between the attempts by various regimes to control and/ or militarise youth, and the attempts by real-time youths themselves to create a culture of their own which contained some degree of autonomy.
This process went hand in hand with the rapid growth of the mass media – first magazines and newspapers, then radio and record players – and with the Western drive towards the democratic ma-terialism that was being developed in America. There youth was seen as being intricately linked with the future of the country, and was often used as the guinea pig for the consumerism to come.
Sometimes youth had the upper hand in the struggle to create their own world – as they did during the American 20’s, when the Flappers, the Sheiks and Shebas got mass media attention. At other times, they were sent off to die in their hundreds of thousands, as they were during the First World War, or brutalised in militaristic organisations from the age of ten – as in the Hitler Youth.
This struggle between the competing visions of youth reached a pitch during the Second World War. Within occupied Europe, there were several youth groups – like the Hamburg Swings and the Zazous – who listened to jazz and tried to adhere to the Swing lifestyle – of clothes, language, and attitude – that had spread like wildfire throughout American in the later 1930’s.
When they came up against the Nazis – who regarded Swing as totally degenerate music – they were arrested, beaten and sent to youth concentration camps, or the Eastern Front where their life expectancy could be marked in days. However Swing, and the American youth culture that it spearheaded, was triumphant at the end of the Second World War.
To the real victor in 1945 came the spoils. Along with its armed forces, American culture and values filled a devastated Europe. Youthfulness was a vital part of this, as the figure of the Teenager had just been created in the US as an exemplar of the new age: living in the now, pleasure-seeking, product-hungry, a harbinger of the new social process of inclusion through purchasing power.
1945 was Year Zero. The mass production of arms and commodities had resulted in an acceleration of life. The A-bomb’s apocalyptic revelation precipitated a new global consciousness and a new psychology. Faced with the prospect of instant vaporisation, many people began to focus totally on the present. The old world was dead, and the future would be Teenage.
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This CD covers the years between 1911 and 1946: from the animal dances that outraged America through hot jazz to the Swing of the 1930’s and the smooth voices that sent the bobbysoxers wild. The final track, Bobby Sox Baby, is outside the time frame of the book but, like In-Between, it is one of the few tracks that specifically deal with aspects of the youth experience.
1: Gottlieb’s Orchestra: The Grizzly Bear Rag (1911)
Ragtime might have been percolating throughout the black ghet-toes since the mid 1890’s, but the style first million-seller was Irving Berlin’s 1911 hit Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Ragtime’s crossover success excited unfavourable comment: it was an ‘addictive drug’ and dangerously exposed white youth to black culture.
This link between music, race and sexuality was confirmed by the ‘animal dances’ that followed Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Beginning with the success of the Turkey Trot, a whole bestiary erupted onto the nation’s dance-floors: the Bunny hug, the Grizzly Bear, the Monkey Glide, the Possum Trot, the Kangaroo Dip.
This track by Gottlieb’s Orchestra is one of the first British ragtime records, and shows how far US culture had percolated over the Atlantic. Despite the limitations of the recording, you can hear some of the excitement of the dances: the Grizzly Bear involved a total body hug that went way beyond previous standards of propriety.
2: Original Dixieland Jass Band: Dixie Jass Band One Step (1917)
Just as the reformers shut down the New Orleans red light district of Storyville, so the music that had originated there spread around the country. In March 1917, The Victor Talking Machine Company – then the largest record company in the world — released the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s Dixie Jass Band One Step.
The white New Orleans group had only moved to New York that January. The city was still the centre of the music industry and, within a month of their arrival, the ODJB were in the studio. Their music was so loud and harsh that the session ended in mutual incomprehension between the group and the sound engineers.
The group were promoted as a radical departure, with quotes from leader Nick LaRocca claiming that they were musical anarchists. Released a few weeks before America entered the Great War, this spirited performance was expressly designed for dancing, and it flew out of the shops. It was the first million selling jazz record.
3: The Wolverine Orchestra: Big Boy (1924)
Despite the moralists, the appeal of negro ‘hot’ jazz to white youth only intensified during the 1920’s. It went hand in hand with a massive expansion in consumerism, as the college market – stimulated by a huge rise in tertiary education – was the first time that youth styles were defined and sold to the US as a whole.
College students had been among the first supporters of hot jazz, and the campuses provided a fertile ground for enthusiasts and practitioners alike. At the University of Indiana, the most popular group was the Wolverine Orchestra, featuring the cornetist Bix Biederbecke.
The twenty-year old had made a prolonged study of jazz in Chicago’s famous negro nightclub, the Lincoln Gardens. He became a fixture on campus with his old blue sweater and jug of bootleg booze as his group serenaded the sorority houses from the back of a truck. Big Boy is a good example of the period’s blithe swing.
4: Ted Weems and His Orchestra: She’s Got “It” (1927)
In 1927, Clara Bow starred in the definitive Flapper film: Paramount’s adaptation of Elinor Glyn’s best-selling novel It. Embodying an elemental sexuality, Bow was, according to Scott Fitzgerald, ‘the real thing’. The public certainly thought so: the film made her ‘the blazing exemplar of the insouciance of Flaming Youth’.
As the embodiment of the new liberated women of the 20’s, Bow was the repository of her audience’s hopes and prejudices: ‘I believe It with Clara Bow is entirely a menace to the community’, wrote one teenager, while another thought it was ‘a wonderful interpretation of alluring young women”.’
The idea of the It Girl spread right across the media, where it is still revived periodically. This song was recorded five months after the film’s first release, when the idea was still hot. Like Bix Beiderbecke, Ted Weems started playing jazz at college: She’s Got “It” is a good mix of lyrics and ‘hot’ solos.
5: Duke Ellington and Cotton Club Orchestra: The Cotton Club Stomp (1929)
The fact that jazz had become the lingua franca of American youth did not go unnoticed. Its popularity had provided a theatre for the meeting of the races. Having seen the popularity of negro music and dancing among young whites, a group of young artists and intellectuals decided to go for some reciprocal emancipation.
The result was the Harlem Renaissance, a brief few years of ‘group self-expression and self-determination’ in music, novels and poetry by Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman and many others. Harlem not only provided a beacon for negroes from all over America, but clubs like the Cotton Club also acted as a magnet for whites.
Duke Ellington had a residency at the Cotton Club between 1927 and 1931, just at the period when the venue was getting national notoriety. Recorded in May 1929, right at the zenith of the 20’s boom, The Cotton Club Stomp has all the sophistication and verve that helped to make Ellington one of the 20th century greats.
6: Luis Russell and his Orchestra: The New Call of the Freaks (1929)
Homosexuality was an open, if scandalous part of the Harlem Renaissance, featured in poems by Bruce Nugent and novels like Blair Niles’ Strange Brother and Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven. As ever, it has been somewhat written out of history, as has the gay influence on this acknowledged, hot jazz classic.
Blessed with an insidious, snake-charmer’s melody, The New Call of the Freaks was, as Jelly Roll Morton stated in his Library of Congress Recordings, adopted by the ‘freaks in the city of New York’: ‘when he’d start to playin’ this thing, why, they would start walking. They all become to know the tune.’
The drive to emancipation on the part of African Americans – and women – spread to other perceived minorities, whether it be gay people or adolescents themselves. During the 1920’s, American youth began to see itself not just as a market, but as a distinct class: they felt entitled to make more demands upon their society.
Here’s more of the Jelly Roll Morton transcript:
All right . . . This is one of the tunes that sounds like a drum. [coughs] Er, this is one of the tunes that, er, Luis Russell played. Luis Russell was a Panamanian. He got his learning in New Orleans.
[inaudible comments]
Er, he came to New Orleans . . . I’m not quite sure, but, I’ll say around nineteen-sixteen. ‘Course these are all New Orleans riffs. We used to make ‘em to the . . . That’s the way you used to make ‘em there.[inaudible comments]
Er, the name of this number is, er, Call of the Freaks. Luis came to New York some years ago after playin’ in King Oliver’s band from The Plantation in Chicago. [clears throat] That whisky’s lovely. They invaded New York with a terrible band, in spite of the fact that they had some, some of the very best musicians in the world in the jazz music. Luis Russell isn’t considered a jazz piano player, because he cannot play jazz. I’m playin’ this in the typical jazz tempo. But he’s a very good musician, and he can knock the bird’s eyes down. He invaded New York with this thing and happened to get a job after King Oliver had failed with these great musicians — had to leave town. He even stole a few of my men when he left to go to Chicago. He didn’t know that it was better to have some, some fellows that could play together, than have a bunch of stars that couldn’t. So he failed in his trip to New York at the Savoy Ballroom — Luis stayed. He finally got a job at a place in New York called The Nest, run by Johnny Carey. He wrote this number as a kind of theme.[inaudible comments]
No. No, Luis Russell is not a sissy. He wrote this number and called it the Call of the Freaks. Findin’ there were so many freaks in the city of New York that was so bold they would do anything for a dollar and a half.
[inaudible comments]
When he’d start to playin’ this thing, why, they would start walking. They all become to know the tune. They’d throw their hands way up high in the air and keep astride with the music — and walking.
[inaudible comments]
And of course, they used to have a little verse in here that goes like this:
Stick out your can, here come the garbage man, [laughs] Stick out your can, here come the garbage man, Yes, stick out your can, here come the garbage man. Yes, stick out your can, and here come the garbage man, The freaks would be marching, I’m telling you. Stick out your can, here come the garbage man, They’d stick their self out in the rear. Yes, stick out your can, here come the garbage man . . .
7: Baron Lee and the Blue Rhythm Band: Reefer Man (1932)
Drugs were another, occluded influence on early youth culture, particularly during the 1920’s as the popularity of Hot Jazz spread. While the New York gangs of the 1890’s had blasted themselves on cocaine, the drug of choice in the early 1930’s was marijuana, or as it was then called, reefer.
The Blue Rhythm Band were based in New York’s Cotton Club. This classic drug song, with suitably surrealistic lyrics, was re-corded just after Louis Armstrong’s arrest for marijuana in 1931 – the first sign of the crackdown on jazz musicians conducted by the new US Commissioner of Narcotic Drugs, Harry Anslinger.
However despite scare films like 1936’s Reefer Madness, marijuana did cross over into the white audience to any great degree. Even Courtney Ryley Cooper’s synoptic, if not hysterical, late 30’s survey of juvenile delinquency, Designs in Scarlet, found very little hard evidence of its use. That would come later.
8: Chick Webb: Stomping At The Savoy (1934)
Opened in 1926 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the Savoy Ballroom was THE uptown venue – much less touristy and more community minded than the Cotton Club. After they secured a residency at the club in 1931, drummer Chick Webb and his orchestra were the kings of the Savoy throughout the 1930’s.
Leading from the back, Webb turned his band into a powerhouse that combined powerful rhythms – aimed directly at the dance-floor – with sophisticated melodies and ‘hot’ improvisations. Stomping at the Savoy is a pivotal early Swing recording, later covered by Benny Goodman and his Orchestera.
The Savoy was the laboratory for many of the innovations that would pass into youth culture with the popularity of Swing: the clothes (like the Zoot Suit), the dances (the Lindy-Hop, the Suzy Q etc) and the music itself. When it was closed in June 1943 under a trumped-up charge, the neighborhood erupted soon afterwards.
9: The Lunceford Orchestra: Rhythm is Our Business (1934)
A classic ‘introducing the band’ number, Rhythm Is Our Business was a breakthrough hit for the Lunceford Orchestra, led by saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford. Resident at the Cotton Club, the band was well known for its humourous showmanship as well as their excellent Sy Oliver arrangements and tight, stylish performances.
Rhythm Is Our Business begins the band countdown with the ‘drummer man’, marking the concentration on beat that marked Swing as it spread from negroes to whites. How far this had perco-lated into the mainstream was shown by LIFE magazine’s survey of the Youth Problem: 1938.
Among its carefully-chosen representative types there was featured an 18-year old ‘white collar boy’ from Maryland, Kenneth Jones, who neither smoked nor drank and wanted to be ‘a Republican politician’. However this everykid spent his free time drumming in a Swing band and playing Jimmie Lunceford records with ‘his girl’.
10: Cab Calloway and his Orchestra: Zaz Zuh Zaz (1935)
This classic highlighted the facility in negro jive talking for the apparently clanging syllables that were used when talking about taboo topics. One of the most successful negro bandleaders of the 1930’s, Calloway also published the very successful Hepster’s Dictionary, a definitive guide to jive.
Like Minnie the Moocher, Zaz Zuh Zaz encoded drug references within its sibilant clanging. This rhythmic repetition soon found greater expression in the later 1930’s and early 1940’s with the spread of the Zoot Suit period, when jive talk spread from the negro underground into the white youth mainstream.
The phrase Zaz Zuh Zaz was also one of the key inspirations for the Zazous, the young jazz fans who outraged collaborators and Nazis alike in Occupied France. Sporting American fashions and listening to forbidden jazz, they eventually went underground after a series of beatings and forced labour deportations.
11: Walter Davis: Sweet Sixteen (1935)
One of the rare age-defined songs during the 1930’s, written and sung by the very popular bluesman who influenced Muddy Waters among others. Like Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen twenty years later, the young woman is an object of barely disguised lust – as Davis repeats the refrain ‘feeling good’.
During the 20th century, Sixteen and Seventeen have been key ages in the iconography of youth culture, marking those years when sexual maturity becomes very evident and when independence from parents and most kinds of authority is actively sought.
Seventeen in particular crops up in novels like Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen (1916), Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938) and Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer (1942), while postwar pop culture would have frequent references in songs by the Beatles and the Sex Pistols – to name but two.
12: Woody Guthrie: Do Re Mi (1936)
The Depression that followed the Great Crash of 1929 hit America’s youth hard. By 1932, it was estimated that there were 200,000 adolescents hoboing around the country – hopping trains, cadging lifts, living out in the open. This existence of the near destitute ‘Children’s Army’ became a national scandal.
The overt reason for leaving was to find work. Seasonal migrations were triggered by the availability of casual labour. In summer, there would be a movement West for the harvest fruit picking jobs. In the autumn, there would be a general movement out of the country into the larger cities.
Thanks to its warm climate, California was a favoured destination – Guthrie’s Garden of Eden — with a thousand adolescents a month pouring into Hollywood at the end of 1933. It became so popular that the city ‘declared war’ on all transients, blockading the border for several weeks in 1936 – hence Guthrie’s Do Re Mi.
13: Benny Goodman & His Orchestra: House Hop (1937)
The popularity of Swing was stimulated by radio, the fastest growing medium of the period. During 1937, Benny Goodman’s Orchestra were regularly showcased on CBS’ Camel Caravan, the weekly programme sponsored by the cigarette firm that plugged Swing straight into homes throughout America.
Listening in their bedrooms or plugging nickels into a jukebox, American adolescents found that access to Swing was easy and quick. For the young fans, these ‘make believe ballrooms’ were a new phenomenon that was ‘immediately and exhilaratingly real, but at the same time part of the fabric of dream world fantasy’.
You can hear the inclusiveness in this 1937 broadcast that captures the breakthrough Swing era band at its zenith. Marked by the massive drums of Gene Krupa and riff-heavy arrangements, the Goodman Orchestra were coming off a wild residency at New York’s Paramount theatre, marked by chaotic crowd scenes.
14: Slim and Slam: Flatfoot Floogie (1938)
This is another example of the verbal gymnastics that marked jive talk as a complex subcultural code, designed to be impenetrable to outsiders. Flatfoot Floogle is a tongue-twisting tour-de-force, as Slim Gaillard sings “Flat Feet Floogee”, “Fat Feet Floogee” and “Fat Fleet Foogee,” almost in the same breath.
This infectious, humorously swinging masterpiece was Slim Gaillard and Slam Stewart’s first recording and a Swing standard – covered by Benny Goodman amongst others. It also helped to cause a riot among the 100,000 fans packed into Chicago’s Soldier Field stadium for the August 1938 Chicago Swing Jamboree.
When the Jimmy Dorsey Band went into their version of Flat Foot Floogie, the already rabid crowd erupted, rushing the dance plat-forms, climbing the stadium stands, sending the band rushing for cover, and breaking stage equipment. The Chicago press was horrified by this mass display of ‘jitterbug ecstasy’.
15: Judy Garland: In-Between (1939)
With lyrics by Roger Edens, In-Between accurately pin-pointed the perennial adolescent dilemma right at the moment when the problem of youth was paramount in American minds: are you a child or an adult? Garland looks forward to the day when she’ll become sixteen: then she’ll stop being ‘an awful in-between’.
Echoing Garland’s own confusion – a young woman of sixteen hopped up on amphetamines and strapped up during The Wizard Of Oz to play a child – In Between remains a haunting document from the very start of teenage culture. Despite the showtune gloss, it is curiously prophetic.
In the distinct signs of irritation – listen to Garland spit the lyric ‘you shouldn’t be heard, you shouldn’t be seen’ – lie the seeds of the generational clashes to come. Certainly, as it percolated over the Atlantic in the early 1940’s, American culture provided British adolescents with dreams of future, postwar possibilities.
16: Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Buddy Ebsen, Bert Lahr: The Jitterbug (1939)
As the Lindy Hop crossed over into the white audience during the 1930’s, the dance morphed into something else: the most popular term for Swing kids, the Jitterbug, came from their nervous, jumpy moves. (After the 1929 Crash, the word jitters replaced heebie-jeebies to mean extreme anxiety).
Benny Goodman clearly remembered seeing his first Jitterbug in 1934, when a male dancer at one of his shows started to go ‘off his conk. His eyes rolled, his limbs began to spin like a windmill in a hurricane—his attention, riveted to the rhythm, transformed him into a whirling dervish’.
This show-stopping tune from The Wizard of Oz – with its Negroid lyric: ‘Listen all you chillun to that voodoo moan, There’s a modern villun worser than that old boogie woogie’ – originally soundtracked a lavish production number that, despite costing $80000, was cut from the finisished film.
17: Harry James and his Orchestra: Back Beat Boogie (1939)
A mainstay of Benny Goodman’s Orchestra between 1937-9, the trumpeter Harry James began recording with his own big band in early 1939. This November 1939 cut betrays the strong influence of famed pianists Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, with whom James had formed an experimental trio.
It’s a good example of James’ flamboyant dance band style that sent fans wild. His April 1943 show at the New York Paramount resembled a Dionysiac rite, as – according to a contemporary report – the young audience ‘wriggled ecstatically in their seats, moved convulsively each time that Harry James “sent them”.’
This was a new level of adolescent assertion: ‘They surged out of their places, bore down grim ushers and danced in the carpeted aisles. Hours later, as they departed, hundreds of girls – Hep Jills – left lipstick imprints on the glass protecting the band leader’s photograph in the lobby’.
18: Glenn Miller and his Orchestra: Perfidia (1941)
As youth marketing gathered pace in the US, its idealised location was the suburb or the small town. The values were middle-class: kids were a bit naughty but in the end upstanding. This was seen in the run of youth movies that began after Love Finds Andy Hardy and in Swing – still America’s most popular music.
After 1939, Glenn Miller replaced Benny Goodman as the top band-leader. The bespectacled and mature-looking Miller epitomised the small town boy made good. Perfidia is an excellent example of his smoother, more pop Swing – ‘sweet’ rather than ‘hot’ with the vocals of Dorothy Clare and the Modernaires.
The lyric of loss and longing made perfect sense during the war, when American culture was exported along with the GI’s. With his American Air Force Orchestra, Major Glenn Miller played to nearly a quarter of a million listeners in the UK during 1944, captivating in the process a whole generation of British adolescents.
19: Hot Club Frankfurt: Stomp (1941)
The honking enthusiasm of this primitive, soulful stomper harks all the way to the Original Dixieland Jass Band, but the circumstances of its recording could hardly be more different. In November 1941 Germany was at war, and Swing was highly forbidden in the Nazi regime, thought of as ‘Jewish’ and ‘nigger’ music.
Formed by Otto Jung, the Hot Club Frankfurt wore blue shirts with white ties and often battled the official Nazi youth organization, the Hitler Youth. They were one of several highly illegal hot clubs dotted around the country: others included the infamous Hamburg Swings, who were rounded up by the Gestapo during 1942.
The Frankfurt clique had their own nemesis, a Gestapo agent nick-named Ganjo, who hounded its more visible members. In the first two years of the war, there were no major arrests – even though the police used speedboats to chase youngsters playing banned Swing records on small vessels in the Main river.
20: Orchestra Swing Jo Rheinhardt: Zazou-Zazou (1942)
After America’s December 1941 entry into the war, Jazz and Swing were heavily censored in the Northern Zone of France occupied by the Nazis. However a new youth cult in Paris sought to defy the occupier: the Zazous were described as dancing ‘on the edge of the volcano, marking out the tempo with a raised index finger’.
The Zazous set themselves apart by their clothing and attitude. With their straight trousers, long hair ‘oiled like a salad’ and huge crepe soled shoes (male) and suede coats, roll-neck sweaters, and bum-freezer jackets (female), the Zazous blended American, Brit-ish and continental fashions into something unique.
Although they avoided direct confrontation with the Germans, they mocked ‘Greta Gestapo’. They also infuriated the collaborators with their love of New Orleans Jazz and Swing and refusal to take the war seriously. This March 1942 recording by Django’s brother Joseph is a salute to their instinctive, sarcastic resistance.
21: Bob Crobsy and his Orchestra: A Zoot Suit (For My Sunday Girl) (1942)
The zoot suit style came from the same root as the Zazous costume: mid thirties’ negro fashions. It seems to have begun around 1935 among urban hipsters in Harlem nightclubs like the Savoy Ballroom and was popularised by Clark Gable’s drape shape jacket in Gone With The Wind, released at the end of 1939.
Like Zazou, the word ‘zoot’ originated in hipster slang: the New Orleans patois for ‘cute’ filtered through the clanging rhymes beloved of Cab Calloway and Slim Gaillard. As Bob Crosby’s hit 1942 song went, ‘I wanna zoot suit with a reet pleat/ With a drape shape and a stuff cuff/ To look sharp enough to see my Sunday girl.’
By the beginning of that year, off-the-peg zoots were available under the trade name of ‘extremes’. They were principally aimed at jitterbugs: the looseness of jacket and trouser perfectly suited the swirling motion of the Lindy Hop. In 1943, they provided the fuel for the serious youth disturbances called the Zoot Suit Riots.
22: Mildred Bailey and the Treasury Ensemble: Since He Traded His Zoot Suit (1943)
In early June 1943, Los Angeles erupted in chaos, as hundreds of servicemen roamed the downtown area looking for Zoot Suiters to attack. This was a race riot, as the Zoot Suit was the chosen costume of Mexican Americans, who were thought to be ‘wild cats’, unpatriotic, the enemy within.
The police stood by as hundreds of young Mexican Americans – pachucos – were beaten and stripped. The riots were the culminations of months of hostile propaganda against Zooters, and there was no sympathy for the victims. On 9th of June, the Los Angeles city council banned the zoot as ‘a badge of hoodlumism’.
Released during the same year, Mildred Bailey’s song illustrates the general view of the Zoot Suiter as unpatriotic, even a joke: ‘but since he traded his zoot suit for a uniform, he certainly looks good to me now’. The propaganda nature of this sweet jazz tune is emphasised by Bailey’s direct spoken appeal to buy War Bonds.
23: Frank Sinatra: Close To You (1943)
Sinatra’s effect on his young, female audience was electrifying. Having served with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, he became a national figure in May 1943. During his second season at New York’s Paramount theatre, the audience erupted in hysterical scenes that were, as his PR remembered, wild, crazy out of control’.
Sinatra filled an emotional need: as he later stated, ‘it was the war years, and there was a great loneliness. I was the boy who had gone off to war.’ In concert, he seduced his young audience by singling out individuals and staring into their eyes. He thus appearing to be singing for them alone, just one in a crowd of thousands.
Recorded shortly after his Paramount triumph, Close To You was a top ten hit. It was also a very good example of his core material: slow ballads, verging on ethereal kitsch that embodied intimacy and enabled ‘The Voice’ – as Sinatra was known – to cast his spell and suspend time.
24: The Mills Brothers: Paper Doll (1943)
Playing on the ambiguity within the word ‘doll’ (also used by Americans as a word for attractive women), this Mills Brothers’ classic caught the wartime mood of male sexual insecurity. The aggressive sexual behaviour of young women – often known as “V Girls” – became a national scandal in the US during 1943.
The Mills Brothers were perhaps the definitive early close harmony group, with a string of hits in the 1930’s. They were on the slide in the new decade, but Paper Doll – which captures the same sense of intimacy as Sinatra’s material – was a huge hit, staying on top of the charts for twelve weeks and selling six million copies.
The song also sponsored a Teenage fad, just when adolescent habits were coming under intense marketing scrutiny. In keeping with the spread of hipster jive through white American youth, many fads were music-based: responding to the Mills Brothers hit, high school boys began to pin paper dolls to their clothing.
25: Louis Jordan: G.I. Jive (1944)
Written by Johnny Mercer with more than a nod to the rhymes of jive talk, G.I. Jive went to number one in the US charts in 1944 – despite the fact that US radio was still in the era of segregation. This was emancipation in action, the true application of democracy: which is what, to some Americans, the war was all about.
Democratic rhetoric – ‘the rights of all free men’ – was frequently invoked as America fought the Second World War. And Negroes wanted a slice of the pie: as the lobbying organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People put it, ‘a jim crow army cannot fight for a free world’.
Louis Jordan cut his teeth in a Swing band before moving in the early 1940’s onto Jump Blues, the faster-paced, small combo style that predicted of Rock’n Roll. Appearing on the Armed Forces Radio, he quickly became the soldiers’ favourite, even more so when they heard the military hassles delineated in G.I. Blues.
26: T-Bone Walker: Bobby Sox Baby (1946)
Written by long-time LA music industry all-rounder Dootsie Williams, Bobby Sox Baby offers an accurate portrait of the new youth world and the generation gap it caused. “Bobby Sox Baby, I’ve got to let you go” moans T-Bone, ‘You’ve got a head full of nothing/ But stage screen and radio’.
This was Girl Power, and T-Bone Walker wasn’t having it: ‘you chase all the bands every night/ You write fan mail through the day/ You keep your big head in a scrapbook/ And you’ve thrown the cookbook away’. Born in 1910, T-Bone was too old for all this fol-de-rol, and this slow blues is his defiant response.
Bobbysoxer was the name given to the young women – notable for their Oxford shoes, long skirts and white socks – who went crazy for Swing bands and torch singers like Sinatra. They were especially visible during the war, with most of their male counterparts away in the services. They were the first Teenagers.