A Century Ago: John Hammond Hears Jazz

1923 was a crucial year in the life of young John Henry Hammond II (1910-1987). That was the year the precocious young lad went on a family trip to London and saw the all-black show From Dixie to Broadway featuring Sidney Bechet, and heard the white hot jazz combo The Georgians, a sub-group of The Paul Specht Orchestra. The occasion changed his life, and, subsequently, the course of American music.

Ironic that Hammond heard these distinctly American sounds in another country, but that was how it played out. And there’s a certain logic to it. It’s pretty unlikely that his parents would have taken him to a jazz club or an all-black show at home in the States in 1923. This is a massive digression but a major pet peeve of mine. To my mind, the period detail that Hollywood gets wrong most frequently is the too-liberal and too-early injection of jazz and blues music into white social settings. At these moments producers and directors conveniently forget how racist this country was and is, probably with the natural impulse to be entertaining. They want to indicate an era with a musical shorthand, but the reality is that mainstream white acceptance of black sounds always happened slowly and lagged behind the vanguard. The equivalent of what Hollywood is typically guilty of is depicting the inauguration of George Herbert Walker Bush featuring 2 Live Crew as the entertainment. Jazz itself was only invented in the mid to late teens. Many white people continued to sneer at it and disapprove of it for decades thereafter. That’s the whole point of someone like a John Hammond. He was one of those who brought the music to the mainstream. And I remind you HE only heard it as a young person in 1923.

Hammond was a scion of America’s wealthy elite. His mother was a Vanderbilt, a great granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius himself. His grandfather, also John Henry Hammond, was a Civil War general. His uncle Ogden Hammond was U.S. Ambassador to Spain under Calvin Coolidge and father of Republican congresswoman Millicent Fenwick. His father was a lawyer, banker, and railroad magnate.

So let us speculate that the young John Hammond had disposable income. One of the things he spent his money on was records. His early enthusiasms included classical music and popular singers like Harry Lauder and Enrico Caruso. (Again, THAT’s what white people tended to listen to.) He attended Hotchkiss and Yale, studying violin and viola, and made frequent trips to Harlem to listen to music.

In 1931 Hammond dropped out of school and began his feverish career as a promoter of the music he loved. That year he moved to Greenwich Village, became the first U.S. correspondent for Melody Maker, and underwrote recordings by Garland Wilson (a frequent accompanist of Nina Mae McKinney). In 1932 he worked as a disc jockey at WEVD and began his long relationship with Columbia Records. He recorded Fletcher Henderson,Benny Carter,Joe Venuti, and Benny Goodman (who was to become his brother-in-law). Hammond brought musicians like Charlie Christian, Teddy Wilson, and Lionel Hampton to Goodman’s attention and made the first recording of Billie Holiday, with Goodman’s Orchestra. In 1937, he brought the Count Basie Orchestra to New York.

In 1938 and 1939, Hammond organized the famous From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall which added gospel and the blues to the jazz mix, and featured such artists as Ida Cox, Big Joe Turner,Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Big Bill Broonzy. (Robert Johnson had been invited but was killed prior to the events). During World War Two, Hammond served in uniform organizing entertainments featuring black musicians.

After the war, Hammond returned to Columbia as an executive, scout and producer, and it was though his accomplishments during this era that many of us were first introduced to his legend, for he signed and/or “discovered” such artists as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughn.

I’ve got to assume that the latter was brought to Hammond’s attention through his son, blues musician John Hammond Jr. (1942), a recording artist himself since 1963. My brother once backed John Hammond Jr. on drums! (I put personal references like this here not to brag but to demonstrate how I became interested in these topics in the first place, and to illustrate the ties that bind us all. There is no greater emblem of that principal than John Hammond, a man whose existence constitutes a connection between Cornelius Vanderbilt and sharecropping Delta bluesmen. Think about it, because this age needs more threads, not more scissors.)

For more on show business history,please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; and keep an eye out for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.