Customer Reviews

Benny Goodman and the Swing Era

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Collier's book on Goodman is barely adequate, though better than the hatchet jobs he did on Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. He has a bad habit of rarely if ever seeking primary sources. Instead he relies on past published materials, acting as an assimilator rather than a true biographer. I've read most of the primary sources that went into this book, and Collier merely requotes them, often altering the words so little that I'm amazed he hasn't been the subject of a plagiarism suit in this litigious day and age. Aside from laziness, this approach leads to the needless perpetration of myths and errors rather than (as a biography should) the clarification and correction of facts. Consequently stories such as the single overhead mic at Carnegie Hall, "dancing at the aisles" at the Paramount, and so forth are repeated. The writer never found out about Helen Ward's near marriage to Benny, or the "horse collar," things that could have been uncovered with a little first-hand research. Instead he speculates on his "sometimes alcoholism" with no proof whatsoever, just a pointed misreading of a few things in Hammond's autobio. I felt like he was scraping his existing sources raw for new data by reading them too closely, when if he'd gotten off his chair and met more people first hand he could have uncovered new and interesting things.

Perhaps this is why the book repeats that Benny was "moody and difficult" about twenty different ways and twenty different times, each time with new stories of his moodiness and selfishness, followed by: "This story is too strange to have been made up." It's well-known and hardly news that Goodman was irritable and got worse as he got older. Unlike Collier, Ross Firestone in his book tries to figure out *why.* Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, but it's better writing than repeating over and over in every other chapter that "Benny was moody and difficult." If you cut those redundant parts, the book would have been a third shorter.

A far better book on BG is Ross Firestone's "Swing Swing Swing," which breaks new ground and sheds some real light on Goodman with original research. Collier seems content with reading liner notes and third-hand sources while sitting in his office.