Dream Lucky: When FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat... [Hardcover]

Roxane Orgill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 2008

The time: 1936-1938. The mood: Hopeful. It wasn't wartime, not yet. The music: The incomparable Count Basie and Benny Goodman, among others. The setting: Living rooms across America and, most of all, New York City.

Dream Lucky covers politics, race, religion, arts, and sports, but the central focus is the period's soundtrack—specifically big band jazz—and the big-hearted piano player William "Count" Basie. His ascent is the narrative thread of the book—how he made it and what made his music different from the rest. But many other stories weave in and out: Amelia Earhart pursues her dream of flying "around the world at its waistline." Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., stages a boycott on 125th Street. And Mae West shocks radio listeners as a naked Eve tempting the snake.

Critic Nat Hentoff praises the "precise originality" with which Roxane Orgill writes about music. In Dream Lucky, she magically lets readers hear the past.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Orgill unleashes verve and rhythmic riffs to capture the mood of the pre-WWII years, when the radio was always on. An ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award winner, Orgill, who has written about music for young readers (Mahalia), recalls radio programs. big band music, comedians, art, sports, the struggle for racial equality and a nod to the Depression and Europe's gathering storm. To recreate radio, she listened to recordings rather than using transcripts because she needed to hear the voices and the music herself. The format is chronological, covering 48 eventful days framed by Joe Louis's loss to Max Schmeling on June 19, 1936, and the June 22, 1938, rematch, which Louis won. In between, we hear Rudy Vallee introducing Edgar Bergen to radio listeners and Count Basie at Roseland, and Amelia Earhart soaring. Langston Hughes opens his theater, Orson Welles is The Shadow and FDR watches Disney cartoons. Orgill concludes this rhapsodic time-travel tour guide with a Suggested Listening list, cueing readers to play Basie as a background for her lilting language. (May)
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From Booklist

In the late 1930s, “the radio was always on” in living rooms across America, enthuses Orgill, bringing the sounds of big bands or news of how the nation was faring in hard times. Orgill focuses on the years 1936–38 and the budding career of William “Count” Basie as he rose from playing piano—without benefit of being able to read sheet music—to world-renowned bandleader living the life in New York. Along the way, Basie crosses paths with Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Billie Holiday. Although the Harlem Renaissance had ended, there was still the magnetic attraction of so many black folks in one place, so much artistic energy. With a jazzy style that evokes the era, Orgill intersperses Basie’s career progress with glimpses of other figures and issues of the day: black prizefighter Joe Louis in two famous bouts with German Max Schmeling, backed by Hitler; Eleanor Roosevelt’s progressive politics, including support for antilynching legislation; Adam Clayton Powell’s push to boycott businesses that wouldn’t hire blacks. A lively look at the late 1930s. --Vanessa Bush

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 242 pages
• Publisher: Smithsonian; 1 edition (April 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060897503
• ISBN-13: 978-0060897505
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,218,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The flavor of an era, June 23, 2008

By 

BeachWriter (Redondo Beach, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dream Lucky: When FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat... (Hardcover)

Billie Holiday performing in blackface, Eleanor Roosevelt sharing a racially stereotyped joke with her newspaper readers, Benny Goodman dropping by a black jazz club to listen to Count Basie play: These sound like scenes from an imaginative historical novel, but they are among the delightful and tantalizing historical events reported in "Dream Lucky: When FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat..."
Author Roxane Orgill, a former music critic who in recent years has written books for children, turned to the period from 1936 and 1938 and the emergence of swing as the dominant American music of the era for her first book for grown-ups. Some of the stories are outrageous: Mrs. Roosevelt, who in later years was reviled by liberals, writing in her daily newspaper column, "Many of us do not appreciate what we owe the colored race for its good humor and its quaint ways of saying and doing things," before reprinting tasteless dialect joke from a book called "Chocolate Drops from the South;" a club manager in Detroit who insisted Billie Holiday wear black greasepaint because she looked white next to the members of Count Basie's orchestra; Adolf Hitler wishing boxer Max Schmeling "every success" in his fight with Joe Louis.
"Dream Lucky" - the name comes from a Jimmy Rushing song - offers a series of well documented historical vignettes and people with names like Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Orson Welles, and Lanston Hughes. It recounts the parts of history too intimate to be recorded in textbooks that flesh out our understanding of a storied era.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Every Tub on its own Bottom, May 27, 2008

By 

Howard J. Herskovitz - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dream Lucky: When FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat... (Hardcover)

I really liked this book. It is a kind of feelgood history. We all know how terrible the Great Depression was but we sometimes forget how exciting those times were. Additionally, we often lose touch with the human element in history. Dream Lucky shows how the unimportant events of history sometimes help capture the feel of past eras.

This book provides glimpses into a highlight of the career of star heavyweight Joe Lewis, the Count Basie Orchestra's defining moment, Benny Goodman as he is usually remembered, FDR at work and play, the joys of radio, and several other moments which lessened somewhat the grimness of the thirties. An advantage of this book is that it allows us to briefly become almost a part of those moments.

The central story in the book is the sudden rise of the Count Basie Orchestra from Kansas City house band to leading status in the jazz world. In its day the Basie band was the exemplar of swing jazz. While it was not as great a dance band as Chick Webb's orchestra, as financially successful as Benny Goodman's bands and small groups, or as creatively potent as Duke Ellington's Orchestra, it outperformed all its competition at one time or other.

If you are interested in how Roosevelt beat the Dpression (if he did) or what the Dustbowl was like, don't bother reading this book. You won't find answers. If, however, you want to know about some of the glittering but fleeting joys of the Thirties, this is the book for you.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great memories and new information, October 24, 2008

By 

Stan Delahoyde - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dream Lucky: When FDR was in the White House, Count Basie was on the radio, and everyone wore a hat... (Hardcover)

A really unusual mix and, I thought, really fun to read. Since I can remember "real radio", FDR and much of the rest, it's a book that I thoroughly enjoyed and one I'd certainly recommend.