You're going to start seeing how one era of music basically blends with and was heavily influenced by music of the previous eras... aside from the fact that the great bandleaders of the Swing Era regularly played modernized swing versions of stuff they played as sidemen with the likes of Ben Selvin, Paul Whiteman, Irving Mills, Roger Wolfe Kahn, etc., you have tunes like "Dream A Little Dream Of Me" popularized by the Mamas and the Papas in the '60s that was written in 1931 and first recorded by Ozzie Nelson and his Orchestra (yes,
that Ozzie Nelson!) and also by the Dorsey Brothers as 'The Travelers' that same year.
Then you have "Blue Moon", that "50s" Doo Wop hit that was actually recorded in July 1961 and became a big hit for the Marcels. It is a Rogers and Hart tune that was penned in 1934 and recorded by Benny Goodman's pre- fame Columbia band that year with an early Helen Ward vocal, among others.
"Blueberry Hill"? The huge Fats Domino hit? It was first #1 in 1940 by Glenn Miller's orchestra with Ray Eberle vocals.
Sinatra? Sinatra owed
everything to Tommy Dorsey... his phrasing, his breath control. He even had to buy the same brand of tooth powder Tommy used. Till the end of his singing career he kept modernizing the same tunes he first sang with Dorsey- and a few of
those go back to what Dorsey played with the likes of Goldkette, Whiteman, and Selvin, as well as the California Ramblers in the Twenties.
And so on.
You want rap? Try Ted Lewis from the early 1920s. If those fingernail on chalkboard annoying "incidental singing" passages aren't a rap prototype I don't have ears.
Then there's boogie woogie "rockabilly" in big band form. We're back to Tommy Dorsey's "Boogie Woogie" recording of 1938 which to my ear has formative riffs and rhythms of rockabilly.
Bop? Look not only to the guys like Gillespie and Parker who were working with this idiom in the mid 40s but back beyond that- to Benny Goodman who hired Charlie Christian in the early 40s... but if you want the first bop records as a developed idiom look to Artie Shaw's Gramercy 5 records of the 1940-41 era... specifically the two sider "Summit Ridge Drive" / "Cross Your Heart". Incidentally, "Summit" was a Shaw composition- he was one of the first rather prolific musician- songwriters in an era when writing was considered its own profession. Incidentally, his compositions were quite big hits for him, but hardly any other bands of the era put out contemporaneous "covers" of them. Shaw was also the first to incorporate string
sections into serious jazz... and the only guy to my knowledge who ever incorporated a harpsichord into the jazz idiom.
I want to interject a thought here- I'm not talking so much about who originated these styles, rather, who brought them into the mainstream. I don't think there is REALLY any single 'idiom' of music that just happened that was totally delivered as an adult by one person (Jelly Roll Morton's claims notwithstanding). I also don't buy totally into all the great 'jazz' idioms being only Black inventions. The music biz was integrated a hundred years before everyone else- for all participants it was about the music. Hell, there's a HUGE Klezmer influence in jazz, and especially swing, too. It really is, as Ken Burns put it, "America's music". You could say a lot of it came from Russian Jews, too- because it did... in Jean Goldkette, Benny Goodman, Arthur Arshawsky (aka Artie Shaw), Ted Lewis...
Another aside- Goldkette was a classically trained musician turned band promoter. There were many Goldkette bands touring the country in the 20s. One of them was an outfit called McKinney's Cotton Pickers, fronted by a little guy named Donald Redman. These guys rubbed elbows directly with Beiderbecke and Trumbauer in the Goldkette organization, in fact, when Bix and Tram left to join Whiteman, Redman and the boys from McKinney's got put in with the Goldkette orchestra on later recording sessions. You can hear the Redman/ McKinney's sound on Goldkette's "My Blackbirds Are Bluebirds Now" and "Bermingham Berta" both of which have that "punch".
One other little piece of Goldkette trivia... a fellow by the name of Steve Brown was the first verifiable person to use a string bass in place of a tuba- by plucking or "slapping" it. This is important because, in my opinion, this is what allowed real Swing to break free from tubas and bass saxes and become its own idiom. Often musical historians credit Fletcher Henderson with first developing Swing, and Redman- McKinney's with bringing it to maturity... but to do so is to completely ignore Goldkette's "Clementine" from 1927, the last recording of the Bix and Tram era. There it is... the Swing idiom, not as a baby or adolescent but as an adult- and Steve Brown is swinging the whole thing on that bass. Who influenced who? Arguably it could go either way but "Clementine" predates the McKinney's records by nearly a year.
It's funny, but when I was in my heyday of buying and selling records on eBay in the early 00s my best repeat customers were modern day musicians and celebrities... quite a few rock and rollers, too. A huge collector was Bowie's producer. I had a (sad but glad) opportunity to buy back a whole bunch of my records from Jeff Healy's ("Angel Eyes") estate after he passed that I sold when I was in a de- cluttering phase and didn't really understand what I was selling.
I guess the biggest piece of advice I can give a beginning collector is to keep an open mind. Stuff that I would just pass by out of hand years ago is stuff I am actively seeking out now. The names Glenn Miller, Kay Kyser, and Guy Lombardo may provoke a gut reaction "yuck" but that's because you just heard the stuff they were famous for. When they were finding their way and experimenting they did some cool sides. Try to find "Solo Hop" or King Porter or any of the Brunswick sides by Glenn Miller, or "Collegiate Fanny" and "Just A Haven" by Kay Kyser from 1929 on Victor. Guy Lombardo? "Waitin' For Katy", "Under The Moon", "The Cannon Ball", I'm More Than Satisfied" on mid 1920s Columbia are good hot ones.
Ted Weems is best remembered for "Oh! Monah!" and spawning Perry Como today but a lot of his 1923-32 Victors are red freakin' hot. Mal Hallett isn't one you'd think of collecting but the mid/ late '20s Columbias are great.
A weird aside about Lombardo- it's not really well known that Guy and Louis Armstrong really admired each other's bands and styles. Listen to Louis' band on "I'm In the Market For You", for example. It's a straight Bogart of Lombardo's!
Ah well, enough rambling. I guess I'd better get some work done!
